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cent.46 Army appropriations totalled 709 million roubles in 1913, and by that point Russia was spending more on her army than any other state in Europe.

Yet it is important to put these developments in context. Russia’s plans for military modernisation may have been impressive, but they were not designed to be complete until 1917 at the earliest and were overtaken by the premature commencement of the general European war. Indeed, there is evidence that one reason Germany chose war in 1914 was the awareness that it would be easier to defeat Russia before her military reforms had taken full effect. Moreover, although the increase in army spending in the last few years of peace was dramatic, it was not ample enough to fund all of the War Ministry’s initiatives, including some regarded as urgent. For example, while in 1909 Sukhomlinov made a persuasive case that Russia needed to double the number of heavy artillery pieces in her inventory, he did not succeed in obtaining the 110 million roubles this would have cost. The problem here was the army’s resource competition with the navy. Beginning in 1907, the imperial government adopted one expensive and unnecessary naval construction programme after another. The state lavished millions on its fleet primarily for considerations of international prestige, but as subsequent events were to prove, ocean-going dreadnoughts were luxuries that Russia could ill afford.47

Conclusion: the World War

The First World War confronted Russia with the full implications of her backwardness. To begin with, her Central Power opponents outclassed her both in transportation infrastructure and in military technology. Germany’s railway network was twelve times as dense as Russia’s, while even Austria-Hungary’s was seven times as dense.48 Then, too, Russian artillery was inferior to German, and Germany held a crucial advantage over Russia in heavy artillery. By the end of 1914, the unanticipated tempo of combat operations had nearly depleted Russia’s pre-war stockpile of artillery shells. This happened in other belligerent countries as well, but most of them were positioned to reorganise their industrial sectors for war production more quickly than Russia could. To be sure, Russia had the fifth largest industrial economy in the world in 1914, but that economy was unevenly developed and not self-sufficient. The chemical

46Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1 900–1 91 4: The Last Argument of Tsarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 129–34.

47K. F. Shatsillo, Ot portsmutskogo mira k pervoi mirovoi voine. Generaly i politika (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), pp. 102, 139, 146, 159, 344.

48Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament, p. 305.

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industry was in its infancy, and German imports supplied most of Russia’s machine tools prior to the outbreak of the war. Russia did eventually manage to achieve an extraordinary expansion in the military output of her factories, so great in fact that by November of 1917 the provisional government had amassed a reserve of 18 million artillery shells.49 Most of these, however, were rounds for the army’s 3 field piece, whose utility in trench warfare was severely limited. Russia was never able to manufacture heavy mortars, howitzers and high explosive shell in adequate enough quantities. Despite the growth in war production, the Russian army remained poorly supplied by comparison with its enemies. Germany fired 272 million artillery rounds of all calibre during the war, Austria, 70 million and Russia, only 50 million.50 For much of the war, the Russian army suffered from a deficiency in materiel.

The war also occasioned a military manpower crisis, for the army’s losses were unprecedented. Germany virtually destroyed five entire Russian army corps during the battles of August and September 1914. In the same period the forces of the Russian south-west front experienced a casualty rate of 40 per cent. By early 1915, in addition to the dead, there were 1 million Russian troops in enemy captivity or missing in action, and another 4 million who were hors de combat owing to sickness or wounds. In the end at least 1.3 million of Russia’s soldiers would die in the war; some estimates put the figure at twice that.51

Military attrition ground down the officer corps, too. Over 90,000 officers had become casualties by the end of 1916, including a very high proportion of those who had earned their commissions before the war. The War Ministry improvised special short-term training courses to fill officer vacancies, whose graduates streamed to the army in such quantities that the character of military leadership was altered permanently. By 1917 the typical Russian junior officer was a commoner who had completed no more than four years of formal education.52

All of this had implications for Russia’s military performance. So too did transportation bottlenecks, the excessive independence of front commanders, political turmoil back in Petrograd and sheer command error. The list of Russian defeats in the First World War is a long one and includes Tannenberg

49 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1 91 4–1 91 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), p. 211.

50Shatsillo, Ot portsmutskogo mira, p. 340.

51William C. Fuller, Jr, ‘The Eastern Front’, in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R. Habeck, (eds.), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 32.

52Alan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April, 1 91 7 ) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 96–7.

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(1914), the winter battle of Masuria (1915), Gorlice-Tarnow (1915) and Naroch (1916) among other disasters. Yet the operational picture was not unrelievedly bleak, for from 1914 to 1916 the army chalked up some remarkable successes, particularly against the Ottomans and Austrians. The most significant of these was the summer 1916 offensive conducted by General A. A. Brusilov, which inflicted a million casualties on the Austrians and Germans, and overran 576,000 square kilometres of territory before its impetus was spent.

Despite everything, Russia’s loss of the First World War was not preordained. It was, after all, the Revolution, not hostile military action that took Russia out of the war. But although Russia’s backwardness did not guarantee her defeat in the great war, it nonetheless severely reduced her chances of achieving victory. At the dawn of the imperial era Russia was able to devise a military system that capitalised on backwardness to give rise to military power. By the time of the Crimean War, backwardness was no longer a military blessing, but a curse. The imperial government then endeavoured to reshape the military system and bring it into conformity with the demands of modern war. Success was only partial, for enough vestiges of the old system remained to stymie progress. The Russian army in the late imperial period was therefore something like a butterfly, struggling in vain to free itself completely from its chrysalis. Tsarist military reformers had envisioned an army suitable for an industrial age of mass politics, but it would be up to the Soviets to translate that vision into reality.

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