The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (38 page)

The overall growth-rate of the Russian economy during the war-years has been estimated by Sidorov:
²⁸

Excluding the special circumstances of 1917, the output of coal rose by almost thirty per cent, although some of the mines were occupied by the Central Powers; the output of petroleum similarly rose, in Sidorov’s words, ‘to save the country’s economic life’. There was a vast expansion of engineering and chemical industries. Vorobiev,
²⁹
who examined 123 factories, reckoned that the output of the engineering industry rose, in gold roubles, from 200,200,000 in 1913 to 709,900,000 in 1915,954,160,000 in 1916. In 1913 there had been, including Poland, 2,420 companies in Russia involved in metal-working, and they employed 386,000 workers. By 1917, not including Poland and other occupied territories, there were 2,332 such companies, employing 546,000 workers.
³⁰
A substantial part of this was simply response to the government’s demands for war-material. But a growing, and impressive, part was creation of new machinery; and Russia’s capacity to substitute her own for imported machinery showed how far her backwardness was a thing of the past. Imports of foreign machinery declined almost at once, as trade with Germany was curtailed; and thereafter the expensiveness of British or American machinery made it profitable for Russian industry to pioneer its own machine-tool industry. Imports of machinery of all types showed the following pattern (m. Gold roubles):

Russian output of machinery of all types rose from 308,200,000 roubles’ worth in 1913 to 757,000,000 in 1915 and 978,200,000 in 1916, of which industrial plant, 69,300,000 roubles’ worth in 1913, took 163,200,000 in 1915 and 218,500,000 in 1916.
³¹
In chemicals, there was, overall, a doubling of output. The work-force rose from 36,000 to 58,400, and
output per man rose from 5,729 roubles’ worth to 7,590. A survey conducted in 1918–19 concluded that industrial output had risen during the war on lines indicated in the following table: (gold roubles, rounded)
³²

It is not surprising to find, in 1916 as distinct from 1917, many well-informed voices being raised with much optimism. Ryabushinski produced a plan for future collaboration of State and great industry, with a view to freeing Russia from dependence on foreigners; Litvinov—Falinski sketched a similar plan for great import-substitution, and ended, ‘It is with cheerful anticipation that we await the very near future.’
³³

The expansion of engineering and chemical industries permitted the Russian army to receive increasing quantities of war-goods. There was 2,000 per cent growth in out-put of shell, 1,000 per cent in artillery, 1,100 per cent in rifles.
³⁴
Four Russian factories—Shetinin and Lebedev in Petrograd, Dux in Moscow, Anatra in Odessa—produced 80 per cent of the monthly 222 aircraft Russia was said to need in 1915–16; five large automobile factories produced not only lorries, but in the end also tanks for the Red Army; similarly, the army’s 10,000 telephones became 50,000 in 1916.
³⁵
Artillery showed the advance best:
³⁶

The Russian figure for 1917 (1st January) is actually higher than the French one for August 1916 (10,330) and is well over double the British one for that month (4,290). A certain amount of Russia’s artillery was foreign
in origin. In light calibres, Russia herself produced 20,000 guns, and foreigners sent 5,625. But of the modern howitzers, production was 100 per cent Russian, and was still three-quarters Russian in the heavier varieties. By 1917, the economy could provide 900 guns per month.

Shell-production provides a similar story. Once the State and the large firms co-operated, shell could be produced in respectable quantities. Of 54,000,000 light shells sent to the army, foreigners provided 15,000,000; nine State factories 8,300,000; eleven large private factories 26,500,000—mainly, the Vankov
³⁷
and Putilov organizations—and seventeen others, 5,200,000 (mainly the War-Industries Committees and
Zemgor
). Of 11,700,000 medium-calibre shells, nine million came from Russian factories; and even in the heavy category, over half of the shell came from within Russia, mainly from Vankov’s collaborator, Vtorov, whose factory near Moscow could fill 12,000 of them in a day. Manikovski,
³⁸
the Artillery Department’s principal expert, gives the following table for Russian shell-output: 1915:11,230,000 three-inch shells, production rising from 358,000 in January to 440,000 in May, 852,000 in July, 1,197,000 in September and 1,512,000 in November:

1916: 28,300,000, production rising from 1,740,000 in May to 1,980,000 in June, and 2,900,000 in September.

In September 1916, 320,000 light mortar shells were produced; and if all categories of shell—including gas-shells—are counted, the country could produce four million rounds of light shell, and 500,000 heavy shells, by the autumn of 1916. By January 1917, there was a reserve of shell, at the front alone, of 3,000 rounds per gun; in November 1917, the Bolsheviks inherited a Tsarist shell-reserve of eighteen million. Of course, there were continual gumbles from the front. The generals went on overrating what artillery could achieve, and when in 1916 they still failed to break through, they discovered a shortage of heavy artillery, which they had not talked about before. But, by 1916, the Russian army had achieved considerable superiority, not only in men, but also in materiel. The superiority was achieved at the cost of a gigantic industrial effort, which brought its own social consequences in 1917. But over the facts of the industrial effort itself, there could be little dispute.

CHAPTER TEN
The Second War-Winter, 1915–1916

By the winter of 1915–16, the basis for a successful war-effort had been laid—at least, in narrow terms of war-material. In January 1916 Alexeyev informed the French, through Zhilinski, that his front-line strength was now 1,693,000, of whom 1,243,000 had rifles; a few weeks later, the Russian front-line strength became two million, virtually all of them with rifles. The main armies against Germany—I, II, X, IV, and III—had over a million men in February, and of these, only 110,000 lacked rifles; most of the 110,000 were in any case supernumerary. With shell, too, confidence grew, as the correct amount for an offensive operation—1,000 rounds per field-gun—seemed to be secured. Other essential items, from aeroplanes to wireless-sets, gas-masks, barbed-wire, bandages, were now arriving in quantities that led to universal hope that the Russian army could soon take the offensive again.
¹

But all of this weight needed muscle; and the characteristic feature of the pre-war army, the growing dichotomy between its ostensible strength and its efficiency of organisation, became, now, still more clearly evident. Legend has a picture of countless millions of peasant soldiers being thrust into battle, armed with long-handled axes, against overpowering German artillery and machine-guns. It is a legend that owes almost nothing to reality; indeed, reality was the very reverse of legend. The army, by the beginning of the 1916 campaign, was not suffering from material shortages of any significance, any more than other armies; it did, however, experience remarkable difficulties in using the countless millions of peasant soldiers alleged to be available for conscription. The front-line strength was less than that of France, with less than a quarter of Russia’s population, until mid-1916.

The pre-war system of conscription lasted until the end of 1915, and in effect even longer. It had been introduced in 1874, at a time when European armies reckoned, following the example of Prussia, that a large trained reserve had become essential. Theoretically, all physically-fit young Russians then became liable for conscription. But it is tempting to
add that they were then exempted from it. The army authorities would have had to take in, annually, about 600,000 men—and, later on, even three times as many—if conscription had been genuinely universal, for these figures represented the number of fit Russians reaching the military age in any one year between 1874 and 1914. But to take in this many was unthinkable. The army did not have offcers and N.C.O.s to train them; it lacked barracks. Above all, it lacked the money to supply them. Supply (‘intendantstvo’) took up over 100 million roubles out of the army’s total revenue, 172 millions, in the 1870s, and ‘administration’, at nineteen millions, took more than all matters of artillery put together. Later on, the demands of supply grew: in 1913–14, they took 450 million roubles out of 580 millions spent by the army.
²
To take in many hundreds of thousands of conscripts every year would be to consume in food, blankets, fodder money that was desperately needed for guns (and of course also for pensions and promotions). Consequently, the army authorities found ways of cutting down their recruit-contingents. On the one side, they generously exempted minorities—Finns, Menonites, Central Asian peoples and, usually, Jews. On the other side, they proclaimed a generous system of exemptions for family-status. Only sons, men with a close relative already in the ranks, men who had lost a father or an uncle in the Polish revolt, only grandsons were all exempted. Finally, in the grandest exemption of all, ‘bread-winners’ were not taken in to serve, i.e. married men. Thus, in 1914–15, one million new peasant households came into existence—a circumstance still bewildering to agricultural economists, but one wholly comprehensible to students of the Draft.
³
Together with exemptions for educational reasons these exemption-classes proved to be so numerous that the authorities had difficulty in finding even the small recruit-contingent on which they had decided (150,000 in 1874), and seem to have taken in men whose physical standard was not high. The 150,000 produced among them 76,000 appeals, most of which turned out to be justified.
⁴
In later years, the recruit-contingent rose—320,000 in 1900, 450,000 in 1906 and 585,000, under the terms of the ‘Great Programme’ in 1914—but it did not represent much more than a third of the available man-power.