The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (5 page)

The officers’ corps split between
Sukhomlinovtsy
and their enemies; and it was this that accounted for the peculiar pattern of wartime Russian command-posts. When war broke out, power slipped from the administrators to the commanders, in other words from Sukhomlinov’s war ministry to Grand Duke Nicholas’s General Headquarters (
Stavka
). The two machines then fought as to which of their nominees should be appointed; and, quite often, appointment of one side’s nominee to one command would be cancelled out by the appointment of the other side’s nominee to be his chief of staff, and then reinforced by appointment of the first side’s man to the third most senior post, that of Quarter-Master-General. It was common for commanders not to talk either to their own chiefs of staff, or to a neighbouring army commander, but to have excellent relations with their Quarter-Master-General. Rennenkampf in East Prussia was an aristocratic cavalryman, who refused to have any dealings with his chief of staff, Mileant, but developed good relations with his Quarter-Master-General, Bayov; Ruzski, commanding III Army against the Austrians, was a stout Sukhomlinovite, who quarrelled with his chief of staff, Dragomirov, but greatly favoured his Quarter-Master-General,
Bonch-Bruyevitch.
Stavka
, or the war ministry, seized any opportunity to discredit the other side’s men, but, if dismissed, they would then usually be caught in the safety-net of their own side, and appointed to some other command. Quite often, men would be dismissed from a divisional command for supposed incompetence, and would then be appointed to command an army corps; or they would be dismissed from a post of chief of staff, and reappear commanding a division, even an army. The careers of Bezobrazov, Tsurikov, Zuyev, Kurlov, Dragomirov and even Ruzski illustrated this process, and it was not one that helped the army towards a coherent strategy.
¹⁴

It was also a split that went beyond 1917. Of course the pattern was never simple, and there were changes of side as even stout
Sukhomlinovtsy
tacked to join the powerful
Stavka
group. But study of those Tsarist officers who went into the Red Army shows a remarkable connection with the old
Sukhomlinovtsy
. Unpretentious technicians of modest origins, younger officers impatient with the trumpetings of the cavalry—General Staff establishment, found their way into the Red Army, while cavalrymen and the more old-fashioned type of artillerists made for the White Army. Ushakov and Rattel, transport-officers in
Stavka
itself, went Red, while their senior, Ronzhin, emigrated; the Red Army’s artillery was run by technicians promoted by Sukhomlinov in the teeth of Artillery Department resistance–Barsukov, Kirey, Ipatiev; and the list even of army and corps commanders of Tsarist days who went into the Red Army is surprisingly long, including Bonch-Bruyevitch, Gutor, Balanin, Kamenev, all of them Sukhomlinovite rather than Grand Ducal appointments.

The impression that Sukhomlinov, and not his enemies, was the real promoter of a modern cause is strongly confirmed by the story of his army reforms. Despite their technocratic trumpetings, Sukhomlinov’s enemies were deeply traditionalist, and their obstruction of reform—in cavalry, artillery, reserve-formations, fortresses and, in the end, planning as well —had much to do with the army’s failure to develop its organisation as, increasingly, its economic means would have permitted. The increase in government revenue left a financial latitude for reform that had not been known before. Between 1909 and 1913, some 3,000 million roubles were found for the army, 1,000 million for the navy–together, a third of government revenue. Ordinary defence-expenditure rose as follows:

T
ABLE
I: O
RDINARY
D
EFBNCE
-E
XPENDITURE
, 1909–1913: (million roubles, rounded)
¹⁵

At the same time, a series of capital grants (‘extraordinary expenditure’) were made to both army and navy, in three stages: the ‘little programme’ of 1908–9, the ‘reorganisation’ of 1910, and the ‘Great programme’ of 1914. The first two supplied defence with 700 million roubles before 1914, of which army and navy took roughly half each. The third programme catered for an increase in recurrent expenditure of 140 million roubles p.a. for the army, and a capital grant of 432 millions, payable over three years; the navy had had its equivalent in 1913, 800 million roubles being earmarked for naval expenditure, mainly for the Black Sea Fleet. By 1913–14, the Russian army was receiving more money than the German: by the German official historians’ calculation, 1,577 million marks to 1,496 million, though no doubt it remained true that the Germans got more for each mark they spent. The pointers for the future were unmistakable.

Sukhomlinov was widely accused of mismanaging his resources. It happened quite frequently that both the army and the navy would ask the Duma for large sums, only to explain, to investigating members, that a substantial part of previous credits had remained unused. There was, of course, a good deal of mismanagement. The naval authorities blundered between the Baltic and the Black Sea, ending up with two half-navies; and the army leaders, as befitted the confused relations of war ministry, Artillery Department, General Staff and the rest, also failed to plan their spending properly. But these confusions concealed what was really a basic problem of development-economics. Guns and ships could not be constructed until a great deal of primary investment had been made, and money devoted by the Duma to ship-building would often end up in endless projects for dredgers, ice-breakers, navigational-schools, light-houses and site-surveying. In 1906 even the Kronstadt naval base was lit by kerosine-lamp, and water-supplies arrived in horse-carts.
¹⁶
Similarly, again a reflection of Russian backwardness, simple matters of supply cost the Russian army more than other armies. A Russian sack cost sixty-five kopecks; a British one, thirty-five; Russian boots cost eight roubles and forty kopecks the pair, American ones, even in the depreciating currency of 1915, six roubles.
¹⁷
Finally, there was a severe difficulty, in so far as Russian factories were often new, of untried capacity, such that the placing of army and navy contracts was sometimes a lengthy business. In finance, Sukhomlinov’s administration fell victim to development-economics rather than to corruption, or mismanagement.

It was the obstacles to reform, rather than financial mismanagement, that counted for more in holding the army back. In 1909, following Russia’s humiliation in the Bosnian crisis—and, no doubt, also as a response
to the victory of the naval leaders a few months before—Sukhomlinov produced a list of desirable reforms. They were intended to strengthen the infantry, the field army as a whole, and the fate of these reforms showed how far the supposed ‘technocrats’, the Palitsyns and Golovins, Shcherbachevs and Alexeyevs, were prepared to resist change. Sukhomlinov proposed the creation, for instance, of real reserve-divisions, so as to increase the number of field-divisions in wartime. As in France or Germany, peacetime units would have a special group attached to them (‘secret cadre’) which would, in wartime, be detached, and used to form the nucleus of a further unit, the numbers of which would mainly come from reservists. A peacetime battery consisted of eight officers, 201 men, and in wartime, two officers and forty-six men would be detached from it to form another battery, the bulk of the personnel of which would be made up of reservists called up for wartime service. In infantry divisions, much the same would happen. Each German regular peacetime division contained a supernumerary nucleus of a further wartime brigade, such that the twenty-six German regular corps could form twenty-six reserve divisions in wartime. The drawback was of course that the bulk of the personnel of these reserve-divisions was of lesser quality, since only ten per cent of the force would be made up of serving soldiers, the rest of reservists who might have forgotten a good part of their training. But, if the army was to be able to field a large number of divisions in wartime, without having the expense of maintaining them in peacetime, the system was a good one. Sukhomlinov introduced it into Russia, creating thirty-five second-line divisions for the seventy first-line ones. The generals in the field responded by failing to use these divisions, and the artillerists did their best to see that guns were not ‘wasted’ on them.
¹⁸

Sukhomlinov also ran into trouble for suggesting that the bulk of Russia’s fortresses should be scrapped. In the later nineteenth century, a system of fortresses had been created, to offset the likelihood of speedier German mobilisation. Novogeorgievsk and Ivangorod stood on the Vistula; Osowiec, Grodno and Kovno on the river-barriers of northern Poland. The war-plan developed around these fortresses, the one conditioning the other. But development of artillery and railways made them redundant. Even the stoutest places could be reduced by heavy artillery, as 1914 showed. But in any case, it did not need very heavy artillery to reduce Russia’s fortresses, for they were already out-of-date in 1900. The Novogeorgievsk forts had been built to keep the artillery of the 1880s out of range of the central part of the fortress, i.e. were usually eight kilometres distant from it. Now, even a field gun could fire that distance. The forts were usually of brick, not concrete. Kovno had
become little more than a museum, its central place d’armes’ being, as Palitsyn said, ‘a sort of yard through which people drive their cattle to market’. Ivangorod’s foundations had been continually weakened by the Vistula floodings, and even the vegetation had not been cleared, so that an attacker could move up unseen. Schwarz, who commanded it in 1914, said: ‘standing on the parapet, I could not even see the glacis.’ There were ostensibly good arguments for building these places up, rather than letting them run down. But it was Sukhomlinov, who said that they should be scrapped, whose judgment was borne out by events. All fortresses in the First World War, unless in special circumstances, collapsed in a matter of days. The French defence of Verdun was, sensibly, conducted from trenches, and not from concrete traps such as Douaumont or Vaux. But Sukhomlinov’s opponents were aghast, and said that the fortresses should be built up, not razed. They presented huge bills for this—in 1908, 800 million roubles, or roughly what the Black Sea Fleet was to get six years later; and the artillerists indulged their mania for fortress artillery at the expense of heavy field artillery, since they demanded nearly 5,000 modern heavy guns for the fortresses, while leaving the field army with less than 500. Sukhomlinov’s proposal to raze fortresses encountered heavy, and in the end successful, resistance. Local engineer-officers simply disregarded their instructions—even, in the case of Ivangorod, finding the engaging pretext that to raze the fortress would cost as much as to build it up. Chieftains in the military districts, particularly Alexeyev in Kiev and Klyuev in Warsaw, protested; Duma opinion was stirred up, and government ministers were also lobbied; the cause of fortresses was taken up by Sukhomlinov’s own deputy, Polivanov, no doubt as a way of discrediting Sukhomlinov. By 1912, the programme of fortress-razing had to be abandoned.
¹⁹

The retention of these fortresses gave a decisive, and fatal, twist to the development of Russian artillery. Its resources were swallowed, partly by the navy, but particularly by the demands of fortresses, in which investment was a largely self-generating affair since, once the first step had been taken, the rest had to follow. Russia’s lack of heavy field guns was later read as a sign of economic backwardness. In reality, it only showed that Russia lacked artillerists prepared to cater for infantry needs, and a General Staff capable of dictating to technique-proud specialists. Slavering at the mouth, the Artillery Department chased after larger and larger calibres for their fortresses, and subjected all the rest to this insatiable ‘manie du grandiose’. In the plans for extra expenditure in 1908, they were prepared to spend over 700 million roubles on fortress artillery, 112 million on the rest. In 1910, they planned for 620 extra fortress-guns, 240 heavy field guns; with the ‘Great Programme’ of
1913–14, fortresses were supposed to have a further 516 heavy howitzers, while the heavy field artillery took only 228 more guns. In 1914, the fortresses contained 2,813 modern guns, and were due to have, by 1920, 4,998 to supplement the 3,000 older ones; but the field army had only 240 heavy howitzers and cannon. When the time came for these fortress-guns to prove their worth—in the summer of 1915—Sukhomlinov, who had been laughed at for his ignorance, was proved overwhelmingly right. Warsaw, Novogeorgievsk, Kovno, Grodno, Osowiec, Brest-Litovsk collapsed in a matter of days, or were voluntarily evacuated. In most of them, the Germans captured thousands of guns and millions of shells. On the other hand, the field army, suffering from lack of mobile heavy field artillery, could only retreat. The Department’s concern for heavy fortress-guns affected ordinary artillery adversely, because of the resources that it swallowed. In the ‘Great Programme’, for instance, the Department proposed to spend 209 million roubles of the 400 million it was due to receive on fortress artillery. Not enough was left, therefore, for development of high-trajectory field artillery—the light howitzer, of which the German army made impressive use, and which was particularly useful in trench warfare. Similarly, there was still not enough money to convert Russian batteries to the more flexible six-gun type, and most batteries continued to waste their fire-power in eight-gun batteries until the summer of 1915. The shell-reserve, too, suffered from the artillerists’ concern elsewhere. It was built up to 1,000 rounds per gun, where the French reserve was 2,000 and the German, 3,000; besides, nothing of significance was undertaken to provide for increased shell-output once war came. There was talk, correspondence. But none of it had the slightest urgency. Sukhomlinov, himself knew, of course, that much more shell would be needed. He also suspected that high-trajectory field artillery and six-gun batteries would be more important than fortress artillery. But he could not dictate to the powerful men in the Artillery Department, among them Grand Duke Sergey Mikhailovitch, and his reforms stopped short there.
²⁰