The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (28 page)

The Russian government itself was unable to work a system of planned foreign trade, and this too prevented British finance from being as effective in launching a great Russian war-effort. The various ministries bid against each other, the banks, and industrialists. The possibility of getting some piece of foreign machinery often made the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy for many smaller firms, banded together in
Zemgor
or the War-Industries Committees, and there was a desperate fight for foreign currency on their part, which the government, with the interests of its main suppliers, usually resisted.
²⁰
The banks earned impotent
lapalissades
from finance ministers because of their refusal to let the State even know what they were about in matters of foreign trade; and it was only when the fall of the rouble imposed foreign exchange-control from without that the centralised system of ordering promoted by the British really began to work. Throughout 1916, government agencies and business wrestled with each other, the War-Industries Committes and the rest; there was a prolonged fight to see whether the War-Industries Committees would even have the right to maintain a representative on the New York Committee. It was a measure of the confusion that no Russian Ministry of Supply came into existence, since the whole field became much too complex. The British lifted a corner of the confusion in December 1916, when they sent a high-level delegation to Petrograd to confer with the Russians and other high-level delegations on the needs of the Russian war-machine. Pokrovski, who was supposed to be chairman of the conference, did not learn of his appointment until just before it began, by gossip in
Stavka
. Because the Russians had not been able to centralise their affairs, they had to maintain their full delegation, in plenary sessions, in order to have the right information. They separately sorted out their needs, pronouncing them to amount to over ten million tons’ worth of goods; and it took the British to point out that Russian railways, from the points of entry, could
manage at most a third of these in a year. By the turn of 1916–17, there were heartfelt British complaints to the effect that ‘our work has resembled swimming in glue’.
²¹

When in 1916 some kind of order was imposed on supply-questions, the problem of transporting goods to Russia occurred as a final complication of the whole matter. In 1914, the ordinary trade-routes through Odessa or Petrograd were closed; and the remaining routes were weak. The Trans-Siberian railway, from Vladivostok, could take only 280 railway-waggons daily, of which 100 were reserved for railway-material and 140 for government stores, leaving 40 for all other purposes (as a standard of comparison, the Putilov factory alone required 900 waggons of supply every month). This line could not take more than a tenth of the ten million tons wanted by Russia in 1917.

There remained the ports of northern Russia, particularly Archangel, at the mouth of the river Dvina. It had been used as an entry-port for British coal, which could be shipped by canal to the south, but its great drawback for other purposes was that the navigation-season was only seven months, because ice prevented movement of ships between December and May. There was a narrow-gauge railway but it had been built very cheaply: when the concession for exploitation of the Moscow-Vologda line was running out at the end of the nineteenth century, the government had insisted, as a price for renewal, that the company involved should build a railway to Archangel, and this was done in the cheapest possible way. The railway did not even have a bridge across the Dvina to Archangel: the terminus was at Bakaritsa, but, in the spring thaws, the station itself became flooded, and the terminus had to be moved eight miles back, to Isakagorka. Goods would be unloaded at one or other of the wharves—‘Ekonomiya’, a saw-mill at the mouth of the Dvina, Bakaritsa, opposite Archangel, ‘Birzhevaya’, a further small wharf on the Archangel side, from where goods would be taken by barge to the railway. In winter, goods could be moved by horse over the ice, as happened with automobiles in the winter of 1914–15: unloaded directly onto the ice and dragged by horses over it, to the railway. As millions of tons of goods arrived in Archangel, the port became a scene of chaos. There were not enough wharves, warehouses, electric facilities, or even rails along which the boxes could be wheeled through the rudimentary streets of the town. The railway itself, with its capacity of twelve small trains daily, could manage only a fifth of the minimum requirement, 500 waggons.

It was typical of financial management of this period that neither the ministry of transport nor the Council of Ministers developed a plan for
Archangel, but simply met its needs with one ‘extraordinary’ grant after another as the needs appeared. In the course of the first year of war, a series of demands reached the Council of Ministers: in October 1914, 1,500,000 roubles for two Canadian ice-breakers, in November 272,000 for iron barges, in December three million for the wharves, in January 20,000,000 to extend the railway-gauge, in February 800,000 for more ice-breakers, in April one million for a floating dock, in July 12,000,000 for more gauge-broadening. Lack of foresight distinguished the whole matter. It was not until July, for instance, that any effort was made to carry out what was a very obvious step—using the now redundant rails of the old narrow-gauge railway to form lines along which goods at the wharves could be transferred to the railway-terminus. It was not until October—after 7,000 tons of saltpetre had blown up—that a grant was asked for fire-fighting equipment. The whole business went through endless delay, and was treated in the most rudimentary of empirical styles. Just the same, a new Archangel railway functioned by spring 1916, and was capable of taking 2,700,000 tons per annum.

This was still not enough—the more so as the blockage of Archangel was such that ‘mountains of goods already existed to be transferred by rail at the turn of 1915—16. The government thought of developing an ice-free port: the Catherine Harbour at Alexandrovsk, subsequently known as Murmansk, offered reasonable possibilities for navigation all the year round, and the government picked up pre-war plans for construction of a railway between it and Petrozavodsk, on the way to the capital. But to construct this railway was difficult. It had to pass through the Kola peninsula and along the shores of the White Sea, and the frozen rock splintered when drilled. To ship the material, a provisional line had to be built across the ice of the White Sea, but the tides caused even very thick ice to shift its position, and the provisional line buckled. Labour gave immense problems. Austrian prisoners-of-war were used for some time and the British company given the task of building the difficult northern section suggested bringing back Russian emigrants from Canada. But the war ministry said they would be at once conscripted, if they returned to Russia. The British company (Paulings) gave up the job, after much mutual recrimination with the ministry, and the government then went ahead with the line. By March 1917 it was theoretically open, and its theoretical capacity for 1917 would be 1,300,000 tons per annum. But the line did not function properly until 1923. Meanwhile, huge quantities of material built up both at Murmansk and Archangel: at Murmansk alone, 100,000 tons by March 1917, which could be shifted at perhaps 3,000 tons per day. Altogether, about 3,500,000 tons per annum. could now be shifted by various routes, Archangel, Murmansk, Trans-Siberian in par
ticular.
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However, just as the system began to work, German submarines interfered with it. Allied transport became centralised, and Russian requirements came low on the list of priorities. In 1917, control of Russia’s supply from outside became rigorous, and in the Russians’ view, petty. By March 1917, Russians were even using the postal services, in an effort to evade controls—American suppliers of boots for the Russian army were reduced, for instance, to sending their boots, in packets of three, via the parcel-post.
²²

Allied help was, in the long run, of vital assistance to the Russian war-economy, despite all of the dislocations with which it arrived. British and, particularly, American machinery was essential for development of Russian production;
²⁴
so, too, were certain vital raw-materials, even copper, of which Russia herself at the time produced little. The Russian railway-system almost depended, for a time, on imports of American locomotives and rolling-stock, and a whole range of modern industries—automobiles, aircraft, wireless among them—could not have been developed in Russia without the plant and skills that arrived from the west. This was not a token of Russia’s economic backwardness. The share of Russian economic growth in the First World War that was directly attributable to western help was not, probably, very much greater than the share of British economic growth brought about by imports of American goods and skills. It was the economy’s capacity to adapt to imports, and not the imports themselves, that revealed whether it was still ‘backward’ or not; and the story of Russia’s development of her own resources shows that the country had—despite much legendry to the contrary—become capable of sustaining modern war, at least in very narrowly economic terms. Of course, the shell- and rifle-shortages of 1915 were an unmistakable fact. But it was a whole range of non-economic factors that had led to them: lack of foresight, before the war; mistrust between General Staff and war ministry; mistrust between
infantrymen and artillerymen; mistrust between businessmen and government; exaggerated reliance on allied assistance in the form of finished war-goods; transport-problems; the vast incalculable of allied war-finance. All of these contributed to the Russian army’s suffering from material shortages from early 1915, and of course the clumsy handling of the army in the field resulted in these shortages’ acquiring a greater importance than need, in defensive warfare, have been the case.

The greatest problem, in the long run, was that the Russian people were saddled with a huge international debt incurred for war-material that did not arrive when it was needed, despite contractual obligations on the suppliers’ part, but that did arrive when much of it was redundant. More serious, in the short run, was the government’s initial failure to develop Russian resources for war, because of reliance on foreign suppliers. The war ministry behaved as if Russian industry would be quite incapable of producing war-material, although already Russia was producing more coal, steel, iron than France, where, in 1915, four million shells per month were produced, and although Russia had already begun to develop sophisticated electrical and chemical industries. Three State rifle-factories (Tulski, Izhevski and Sestroretski) and three Arsenals, with trivial contributions from private business, were supposed to supply the war-material, and it was only later that the government discovered how ludicrous was the disproportion between needs on the one side, and the 50,000 rifles per month or half-million shells per month that came from these sources. To meet the gap, recourse was had to foreign suppliers who proved to be inefficient and untrustworthy, and it was not until the failure of this recourse had been shown by events over the next seven months that the government were forced to consider how Russian industry might be developed.

In August 1914, the war ministry knew only a small section of Russian industry, and relied on a smaller section still—a handful of factories, mainly in the Petrograd region.
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Two main factors dictated the government’s behaviour: an overwhelming cost-consciousness, and a desire for the highest quality of war-material. Neither the Council of Ministers nor the War Council were prepared for lavish expenditure. For instance, the Council of Ministers were told in mid-August that the preparatory period for mobilisation had cost 5,600,000 roubles and were also asked to give the war ministry a credit of 1,000 million roubles for the war-fund.
²⁵
The Council queried the figure for the preparatory period, and agreed to assign at once only 200 million roubles, to which the rest might be added when ‘details’ were given by the ministry. Even in 1915, 200 million roubles would not have paid for ten days of the war. But the officers of the Artillery Department in particular—Grand Duke Sergey, Inspector-General of the Artillery, Kuzmin-Karavayev and Smyslovski—had been trained in a very hard school, and could not get used to the idea that money must be spent. Before the war, each gun had been allowed to use only forty rounds of shell per annum, in order for money to be saved, and even in 1916 the Artillery Department had not rid itself of its passion for preposterous economies. A flavour of its attitude came when it announced that a programme for construction of 37 State factories would cost ‘607,126,083 roubles and 15 kopecks’.
²⁷
Russian business could clearly not be converted to produce for the war unless it got money to pay for equipment; difficulties of transport, finance made the acquisition of such equipment from abroad difficult enough, and the sudden switch of suppliers from Germans, who were known, to Englishmen or Americans who were not, made the problem all the greater. Yet, by law, the State was forbidden from giving more than ten per cent of the value of a contract in advance; and all contracting had to go through a comlicated set of legalistic and traditional rituals before anything could be concluded with a particular company.
²⁸
Grand Duke Sergey and Sukhomlinov could only see an endless process stretching ahead of them, by which endless State money would be poured into firms inside Russia, who would merely produce more expensively and less reliably than foreign firms already known to them.