The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (35 page)

But the political movement was supported by powerful figures within the régime, and it was this support that gave it such success as it obtained in the summer. The army generals also groused at Sukhomlinov’s regime, and were determined to replace it with one of their own. This was a fundamental quarrel, almost on class-lines, that went back to the clash of patrician and praetorian before 1914. The army generals pursued their vendetta against Sukhomlinov, and exploited the army’s material weakness to suggest that Sukhomlinov should be removed, along with his partisans. This led the generals into an informal alliance with the Duma men. It was an alliance that also received powerful support from industrialists. They resented the war ministry’s unbending attitude in war-contracts. Businesses were going idle because of wartime circumstances
but were not getting war-contracts to make up, because the war ministry relied only on foreigners and its own tiny set of Petrograd protégés. The magnates of Moscow industry, in particular, resented this exclusion, on which they blamed the crisis of materiel; and their resentment was matched lower down the industrial scale, where thousands of the country’s smaller businesses grumbled that they were on the edge of bankruptcy because of the war ministry’s attitude. The industrial opposition promoted a scheme for ‘War-Industries Committees’ in the spring of 1915, which would bring private enterprise into the war-effort. The elected town and county councils of Russia joined this agitation, and set up a union,
Zemgor
, to show that they too could provide sinews of war. The alliance gained support from within the government: Sazonov, the foreign minister, recognised that some reform must come within Russia, if only to show that the Entente’s declarations to the effect that it was fighting ‘for Democracy’ meant something; Bark, the finance minister, also thought that the placing of foreign and internal loans would depend on men’s confidence in the régime, and he too supported demands for moderate reform.

The shell-crisis triggered off political as well as economic explosion in Russia. Politicians, generals, ministers of the Tsar, businessmen great and small demanded change, and blamed Sukhomlinov’s régime as Russian soldiers abandoned Poland and the frontier districts of the empire. Besides, the economic crisis of revolutionary Russia had already appeared. Inflation was already a severe problem; and some essential commodities, among them sugar, had increased in price, in the capital, by fifty per cent in a few months of war. Wages had gone into a bewildering pattern as well. Fuel supply became irregular, and there were cases in southern Russia of factories not working full-time because they had run out of coal. Transport bottle-necks occurred, particularly with the events of September 1915, when the last and most confused stage of retreat at the front coincided with evacuation and establishment within Russia, not only of millions of roubles’ worth of industrial plant, but of hundreds of thousands of refugees. At this stage, labour-agitation had not become uncontrollable—there were a few strikes, but, as Goremykin told the Council of Ministers, ‘our labouring population has so far shown the utmost willingness to prosecute the war’
¹
—but businessmen were already worried by the pattern of wage-increases, and the government’s apparent unwillingness somehow to ‘control’ the workers. Shell-shortage, for politicians and businessmen, was as much a short-hand version of economic and social crisis as a grievance in itself. It all produced an economic-military-political alliance of ‘respectable’ Russia that foreshadowed the Provisional Government.

Since the end of 1914, there had been signs that such an alliance would
develop. The visit to
Stavka
²
of politicians such as Rodzyanko and Varun-Sekret, President and Vice-President of the Duma, the industrialist Putilov, the banker Vyshnegradski and the ‘technocrat’ Litvinov-Falinski had occurred at the end of December; it was followed by a memorandum of the great banks’, urging ‘collaboration’ of business in the war-effort and, by extension, appointment of ministers sympathetic to this programme. In February and March, these themes were taken up lower down the scale: lesser businessmen, under great economic pressure, lobbied Guchkov and the Moscow industrialists, and hoped to see something similar to the German system of local war-industries committees established in Russia. Duma politicians began a campaign of agitation for constitutional change : the Octobrists, party of big industry, came together with the Constitutional Democrats, a left-liberal party that supported small business, to form an opposition coalition, later known as Progressive Bloc; and, gradually, it acquired the sympathies of allied diplomats,
Stavka
generals, ‘even the Imperial Yacht Club on Morskaya’.

The government might have resisted Duma ‘chatter’ if the times had been normal. But they were not. Now, powerful figures whose rôle in 1905 had been counter-revolutionary, were prepared to enforce reform:
Stavka
, on the one side, and big industrialists, on the other. Both had their reasons for resenting Sukhomlinov. The peculiarly obstinate refusal of the war ministry and the artillery department to recognise that there might be angels in the marble of Russian private enterprise was hardly affected until the end of 1914. They continued to believe that Russian businessmen would be inefficient and expensive. They were not prepared to spend money, and therefore would not pay more than ten roubles per shell—a price at which most Russian firms could not make a profit, since they lacked the experience and tools. Moreover, they would not pay substantial advances on the contract: not more than ten per cent, for which there was legal justification. They felt that, if money had to be spent, it would be much better-spent on State factories, and developed something of a programme for building these.
³
If private enterprise were involved as well, it could only mean wasteful competition for scarce stocks of skills and raw-materials, and of course for the machinery that had to be imported. In fairness to Sukhomlinov, Russian businessmen behaved more or less as predicted, once they were involved in war-work. Their advances were considerable, and their prices rose far beyond what the State was used to paying. Three-inch shell rose in price to at least fourteen roubles and twenty-five kopecks, where the State could turn them out for 6.40; field cannon cost, from State suppliers, between 3,000 and 6,000 roubles each, whereas private suppliers charged from 7,000 to 12,000.
⁴
In England, by contrast, the price of eighteen-pounder shell
declined from £1. 12s. od. early in 1915 (c. 16 roubles) to £1. o. od. in June 1915, and 12s.6d. (c. 6. 50 roubles)
⁵
at the end of the year, as private producers learnt how to mass-produce it; and Russian expensiveness was quite often matched by inefficiency and even corruption.
^*
Of course, many of these difficulties were simply the price of economic progress; but that was not how Grand Duke Sergey saw things at the time. He cold-shouldered both Vankov and Pyot, for their standard shell-price would be 18.50; and the most he would do was to form a ‘special executive committee’
⁷
in January 1915, that did little more than remove some of the more indefensible pieces of ritual in contracting, with slight increases in the advances that the State was prepared to pay on its contracts with already-established firms.

But defeat at the front, and non-delivery of foreign goods, provoked crisis.
Stavka’s
power extended, with every reverse at the front, since these reverses were ‘explained’ with reference to the limitation of
Stavka’s
powers. Highly-placed generals slipped to
Stavka’s
side—among them, Polivanov, who had been refused the appointment of governor of Warsaw by the Grand Duke, but who subsequently made his peace with
Stavka
, serving first as assistant to the head of the Red Cross, Prince Oldenburg, and then becoming the Grand Duke’s candidate for Sukhomlinov’s succession. Even Sukhomlinov’s regiment of journalistic house-carls slipped off: Prince Andronikov writing winsomely patriotic articles in praise of the Grand Duke.
Stavka
, in any case, wrested control of the army’s promotions-machinery from Sukhomlinov, and now played this instrument with much virtuosity. In February, there was a considerable political scandal that destroyed Sukhomlinov: the Myasoyedov affair.
Stavka
(with Polivanov in a prominent rôle) controlled justice in the army area, and it arranged to have Myasoyedov arrested as a spy. The charge was trumpery. A Russian, who had been allowed to leave Germany after agreeing to spy for the Germans, was allegedly conscience-stricken when he returned to Russia, and revealed that there was a highly-placed spy in the north-western front. After prodding, he identified the spy as Myasoyedov. Myasoyedov was certainly unpleasant and corrupt. He had served Sukhomlinov
^†
before 1914 by spying on the officers’ corps, and had been
provoked to a duel by Guchkov. His corruption led to his dismissal, but—whether out of blackmail or loyalty—Sukhomlinov found him other employment, in the gendarmerie on the German border. In this capacity, he was attached to the north-western front, which of course was commanded by Sukhomlinov’s protégés, Ruzski and Bonch-Bruyevitch. The decline of Ruzski coincided with Myasoyedov’s arrest by
Stavka
, and both Ruzski and Bonch-Bruyevitch were shifted to lesser posts in the aftermath. In March, with full-scale publicity, Myasoyedov was condemned and executed, after trial before a
Stavka
-staged court in Warsaw. The affair was, as Polivanov subsequently confessed, judicial murder.
⁸
But for the time being, it discredited Sukhomlinov whose incompetence now received the lining of treachery. Duma politicians rode off against him, and colleagues within the government came to regard him and three other ‘reactionary’ ministers, as simple liabilities. The Tsar held on to him until early in June. But against demands from
Stavka
, the government, Allied envoys and the big industrialists, he could not prevail for ever. The degree to which the Tsar’s own power had waned was shown when, almost immediately, Sukhomlinov was arrested, and made subject of a ‘High Commission of Investigation’. The wishes of the big industrialists were now met. In May, there assembled a ‘Special Council for Examination and Harmonisation of Measures required for the Defence of the Country’.
⁹
It included Duma politicians and representatives of industry; it was supposed to take control of all ordering for the war-effort. In June, it was extended to include further business and political representatives, and it seemed as if the body would promote political reform and economic progress at the same time.

But the alliance of politicians,
Stavka
and Special Council was short-lived. The politicians lacked mass-support, and some of them would have repudiated it if they had had it. Their talk remained no more than talk, so long as they had neither military nor industrial allies to influence the government. The military ally, never in any event staunch for constitutional change, was appeased by the old régime when Sukhomlinov fell, and Polivanov took his place. In any case,
Stavka
was discredited by the great retreat, the chaos of refugee-evacuation, the German threats to Riga, Moscow, Kiev. Late in August, the Tsar knocked the
Stavka
card from the Duma politicians’ hands, when he sent Grand Duke Nicholas off to the Caucasus, and himself took charge of the army. Grand Duke Nicholas was too remote and powerless in Tiflis, and although his old associates of spring 1915 sometimes travelled there to find out his attitude to a military or palace coup, there was not much that he could do. There would be no ‘officers’ plot’ against the Tsar—at least, not until the revolution had actually been started by someone else.

Of greater importance in home affairs was the failure of the Special Council to act as agent for constitutional reform. This occurred because the Council itself split, and essential elements in it, which had hitherto favoured the cause of reform, now swung back to adopt a waiting attitude. The first Special Council, in May, had been dominated by representatives of business that the war ministry already knew and favoured: mainly the great bosses of Petrograd, Putilov, Vyshnegradski, Meshcherski, Plotnikov, Davydov. They were quickly attacked by their Moscow rivals, who did not wish to see defence becoming a Petrograd monopoly; and the Moscow men—Ryabushinski, Guchkov, Tretyakov, Tereshchenko and other magnates—denounced the new system, and promoted attacks upon it by thousands of lesser businessmen throughout the country, who formed War-Industries Committees to assert their willingness to furnish war-material. The industrialists’ newspaper,
Commerce and Industry
, and the 9th Congress of Representatives of Commerce and Industry, in May, were loud with complaint at a system that permitted businessmen from a rival region to award contracts to each other, more or less naming their prices.
Zemgor
; the Octobrists who were in league with the large Moscow firms; and the Constitutional Democrats, who supported the lesser firms of the War-Industries Committees, added their voices to these protests.

The Moscow magnates apart, this was essentially a quarrel between big industry and the rest—a quarrel that did more and more to divide the businessmen, and to drive the more important of them to take the government’s side. The industrial ‘outs’, in this case, had very good arguments. Moscow was not being properly-used for the war-effort; the Petrograd men, on the other hand, used the Council to favour themselves. The first two orders given by it went to Putilov and Vyshnegradski.
¹⁰
Putilov and his factory group were ordered 113,250,000 roubles worth of shell, with an advance of thirty-four millions; each shell was to cost thirty-three roubles and seventy kopecks, which gave a profit of 5.70—itself not far from the standard State price for shell. Vyshnegradski’s
RAOAZ
company similarly took an order for guns—to be made in a non-existent works—that would cost forty per cent more than usual; and the banks behind them both took eighteen per cent of the profit, as well as the State’s advance-payment, which was deposited at a low rate of interest. It later turned out that Putilov used shell-contracts to subsidise other parts of his factories. Before 1914, he had laid in too much ship-building machinery, much of which he could not now use. The works were converted to shell-work, and even then did not perform very well. The affairs of his firm became more and more complicated; he took on loans to the value of more than five times his capital. Attempts were made to cut costs. Workers’ wages in the Putilov
works stayed almost exactly the same as in pre-war days—3.16 per day, on average—although the cost of living had risen by fifty per cent by the middle of 1915. There were strikes. The firm also neglected its less profitable contracts of pre-war, pre-inflationary days, and in 1916 was, after a long wrangle, placed under sequestration. When the government managers moved in, they found 1.50 roubles in the till, and 137 in the current account. Meanwhile, Putilov and his co-director Dreyer went off to the south of the country, with the million roubles which they had been given as ‘bounties’.