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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.57: Great War, Great Offensive

I hope you all noticed and enjoyed the preview chapter of Hero of Two Worlds I released last Thursday night. It is me reading chapter four, about Lafayette’s first arrival in America after running away from home at the age of 19 to join the Continental Army in 1777. Um, I hope you enjoyed it, and please think of it as an opportunity to pre-order the book, and attached to the show notes to this episode is a link to the webpage for the book, which has the map that we are keeping track of all the places that people have pre-ordered the book from, so please go enter the store that you bought the book from, and then hopefully, eventually we’ll have a pin in literally every single bookstore in the world. That would be, that would be the dream anyway. Stretch goals. And just to make it clear, that preview chapter is a rough cut of the audio version of the book, which I am currently in the midst of narrating. Um, I’ve gotten a lot of people asking if there’s going to be an audio book and if I’m going to narrate the audio book, and the answer is yes, there will be an audio book and yes, I am narrating it. I think we can all agree my publisher would be making a catastrophic blunder if their history podcast guy author didn’t narrate his own book. I mean, can you imagine how much of a disaster it would be? If just, we got some random dude to read it. That would be pitchforks and torches time.

I’ve also been asked if audio books count toward the bestseller list and the answer is no and yes. Audio book sales don’t count towards the fancy hardcover list, but there is a whole separate list for audio books that we’d also love to top. So by all means, if you want to just listen to me read you Hero of Two Worlds like you’ve always listened to me narrate other historical events, I will happily insert myself into your ears on August 24th, when the audio book simultaneously comes out. Or you can pre-order both. You know, that would work too.

So obviously we avoided making an obvious, catastrophic blunder by not having me read the audio book. But today we are going to talk about some people who did not avoid making catastrophic blunders: we’re talking about the tsar, his wife, and their advisors. Now I’m going to pause for just a moment and bask in the glory of that segueway.

And now we can move on.

For Russia, the first year of the Great War was marked by disasters and missed opportunities. It all culminated with the Great Retreat in the spring and early summer of 1915, when they fell way back and had to restabilize the lines much deeper and much closer to home than they had been the year before. And we ended last week with the tsar responding to this crisis by taking personal command of the army, as if the big problem was that Russia’s supreme commander wasn’t inexperienced and weak willed enough. When he departed for the front, the tsar left behind a precarious political situation. A precarious political situation made more precarious thanks to the conduct of his wife, who now assumed an active role in government. Nicholas practically gave Alexandra carte blanche to mind the shop while he was away. Nicholas trusted Alexandra implicitly, but he was probably the only person in the world who thought she possessed sound judgment. They exchanged letters frequently, and she ran everything by him, but mostly he would write back and say things like, oh yes, I approve, or, oh yes, you do what you think is best. These letters from Alexandra invariably say things like, so I was talking to Rasputin and he recommends because Rasputin was now more than ever her emotional rock. Rasputin became her most trusted advisor on all things personal and public, and this was not a great development for anyone outside the tiny little cliques surrounding the empress and her holy man. We’ve got the huge growing network of zemstvos organized under the national Zemstvo Union, headed by Prince Lvov, the progressive block inside the Duma, organized and led by Pavel Milyukov, all the business leaders who were outside the close knit network of well-connected cronies in Petrograd, who were getting all the government contracts. All of these people were talking to each other and working with each other in a parallel and almost independent effort to win the war abroad and prevent social and economic collapse at home.

They found themselves constantly stymied by the incompetence and hostility of the present government. Even in the midst of the Great Retreat, ministers, obstructed and sabotaged the work of Prince Lvov and the Zemstvo Union. Inside the halls of the imperial palaces, the Zemstvo Union was not treated as a patriotic competent pillar of the war effort, but as a dangerous exercise in liberal constitutionalism. When the Zemstvo Union proposed organizing a labor brigade of about 80,000 people to dig trenches and graves in the rear of the lines, the minister of the interior stepped in and canceled the project because he feared this labor brigade might become the foot soldiers of liberal revolution. So instead of seeing it for what it was — unarmed ditchdiggers digging ditches — the government saw it as a dire threat to tsarist autocracy.

As we ended last week, incidents like this, and the disaster of the Great Retreat, led to moderate, liberal, and progressive leaders believing political change at the top was necessary to the point of inevitability. That they needed to stop operating parallel to an independent of the government. They needed to become the government. The batch of clowns currently running the show were just screwing everything up. And as I’ve said elsewhere, there’s nothing a liberal nationalist hates more than a poorly run war. It is offensive, deep down in their very bones. In the late summer of 1915, they attempted to use the emergency atmosphere of the Great Retreat as an opportunity to force the tsar to form a new government made up of them, or at least people they trusted, to win the war.

But winning the war was only half of it. As I mentioned last week, their two big motivating factors were win the war abroad, but also prevent revolution at home. These guys feared revolution as much as the arch-Romanov loyalists did that. That if they — that is all the liberals and moderates and business leaders — were not the beneficiaries of political change, that things would continue to slide in a more radical direction towards socialist revolution. That the beneficiaries would instead become socialists and anarchists and Narodists, workers and peasants and common soldiers and sailors. And we can’t have that, now can we?

After the tsar left for the front in August 1915, the leaders of the Duma’s progressive block managed to secure the support and signatures of eight prominent members of the Council of Ministers. They drafted a declaration on August 28th, recommending the tsar work with the Duma. And this incident is somewhat melodramatically dubbed the Revolt of the Ministers. It wasn’t really a revolt by the ministers, but it won’t surprise you to learn that’s how Empress Alexandra saw it. She saw in this movement not the answer to Russia’s problems, but a threat to everything she held dear. These people were trying to bully her husband and push him off his god given throne. Nicholas himself was more than willing to go along with Alexandra’s framing of this as an attempt to undermine his authority and reduce him to being a mere figurehead.

The irony of all this is that both sides believed they were doing what was necessary to prevent domestic revolution. In the wake of the frustrating humiliations of 1905, nicholas personally concluded that his biggest mistake had been giving into the reformists at all. That once he started giving reform an inch, revolution tried to take a mile. His read on what happened was that as soon as he re-embraced autocracy and started undoing and undermining the promises of 1905, things got much better for him.

Meanwhile, the moderate and liberal and progressive leaders pushing for him to work with the progressive block and form a new government also believed they were trying to avoid revolution. That if the tsar didn’t accept them, the war would be lost, which would inevitably lead to massive social upheaval.

Now, Nicholas believed he was personally the dam holding back revolution and these liberal civic leaders also believed they were the damn personally holding back revolution. So the tsar’s response to this little Revolt of the Ministers, which was just them recommending he work with the Duma, was to suspend the Duma on September the second, 1915, and reaffirm his commitment to his present government. The closure of the Duma sparked a two day strike in Petrograd, which seemed to confirm to Nicholas that he was right, and these Duma leaders were trying to stage a revolution, and also seem to confirm that the Duma leaders were right, and that unless the tsar embraced them, Russia was going to explode. Prince Lvov personally led a delegation to the tsar to beg him to reconsider, to emphasize that they represented the material and economic strength of Russia, and that the tsar was making a huge mistake fighting them instead of embracing them. That they were happy to bear the heavy burden of winning the war, if only the tsar would let them. This is what Lvov wanted to say, anyway; the tsar are refused to meet with him or the delegation he led. Then on September 16th, the tsar called all his ministers to attend to him personally, and angrily dressed them down and reminded them who was in charge around here. They meekly submitted, and that was the end of the so-called Revolt of the Ministers.

At a congress of the Zemstvo Union held in the midst of all this, a distressed but resolute Prince Lvov told his colleagues, we can no longer allow ourselves to remain merely governed. But like I say, these moderates and progressives and liberals faced a huge dilemma. By the late fall of 1915, they were coming to the conclusion that the tsar was never going to simply listen to reason, that to change the government would probably require a revolution. And it left the civic minded patriots in a bind: they didn’t want a revolution. Encouraging popular protests, strikes, and demonstrations to force the tsar to back down meant activating forces they feared would form an uncontrollable hurricane that would, among other things, shut down the factories and dockyards and mines and railroads and create so much chaos that it would pave the way for military defeat, which they also feared.

Meanwhile, the tsar dug in his heels. He reneged on a promise to recall the Duma in November, 1915. Their next setting was now postponed indefinitely. The war industries committees in Moscow, which had started to get a bit of a toehold and make some positive contributions to the war effort, found their recently tapped supply of government contracts drying up. The loyalist cronies who never failed in their prostrate supplications to Nicholas and Alexandra reasserted their control over the wartime economy.

So heading into the winter of 1915, we were back to a tiny clique of devoutly loyal toadies running Russia, surrounded by a mass of civic business and national leaders feeling disrespected, ignored, and incredibly frustrated.

At the center of the tiny loyal bubble in Petrograd were Alexandra and Rasputin who were now more firmly in charge than ever, and who believed they were waging a holy war, defending God against the minions of Satan. And by minions of Satan, they meant all these disrespectful and blasphemous challenges to the tsar’s authority. Alexandra’s period of defacto rule at home between September 1915 and February 1917 was defined by filling offices with people hyper-loyal to her family, and firing anyone who showed the slightest disloyalty to her family. Rasputin was right there helping the emperess choose who to hire and who to fire, which by sheer coincidence happened to involve a lot of hiring of Rasputin’s friends, and firing of his critics and enemies. Rasputin was now a major point of contention even inside the ranks of the conservative supporters of the tsar. Proud members of the aristocracy were not interested in cowtowing to some psychopathic rapist from Siberia who now seemed to be calling the shots.

As Alexandra now deemed working productively with the Zemstvo Union or the war industries committee to be a clear mark of disloyalty, whatever ties existed between the official government and these still only quasi-legal civic organizations were severed one by one. A new minister of war was appointed in the midst of the Great Retreat, and he won plaudits for salvaging the situation and helping reform a solid front against the Germans, but he was dismissed by Alexandra for being too willing to work with outside public organizations. And again, let’s just emphasize here that the cause of the dismissal was that he was willing to work with the civic organizations in Russia efficiently and capably supplying the army. That kind of practical and realistic leadership was now a fireable offense.

The problem with these personnel decisions was not just Alexandra removing competent ministers and putting incompetent sychophants in charge — although she was, and that was a big problem — it was also how often she was changing her mind. She would elevate a minister, then suddenly replace them a few months or even a few weeks later. In A People’s Tragedy, which is probably the best single volume take on the Russian Revolution currently available in English, Orlando Figes points out that during this period between September 1915 and February 1917, there were four prime ministers, three ministers of war, three ministers of transportation, and four ministers of agriculture. This is crazy. This is chaos. More than anything else it led to systematic, bureaucratic dysfunction. This amount of turnover would cause major problems in the best of times. In a time of war and national crisis, to have key leadership positions filled by people who stayed on the job for like three months, then handed it off to somebody else who kept the job for four months before handing it off to someone else? That’s a straight up existential threat to the empire.

Now the point I’m hammering here, which is echoed in nearly every book I’ve read about Russia in World War I, is that even here, heading into the spring of 1916, it’s not like Russia had to lose the war and descend into revolutionary chaos. If you crack a book about France in World War I or Britain in World War I, or Austria-Hungary in World War I or Germany in World War I, or the Turks in World War I — whoever — you get to the middle of the war around 1916, it’s not like anybody is saying, wow, the war is going great for us, everything is smooth sailing. And it clearly wasn’t smooth sailing for Russia either, but they were just in the same boat as everybody else. And things were far from irretrievably lost. There was nothing about what was happening in Russia that meant they had to lose the war. And this was demonstrated quite ably by Aleksei Brusilov in the spring of 1916.

Aleksei Brusilov was probably Russia’s best general. Certainly he was the most capable and most successful. He was a career soldier, and at heart, just a run of the mill conservative — loyal to the tsar, loyal to the army, and loyal to Russia. But he was also especially loyal to his men. He was one of the few generals in the service who engendered real positive love from his troops, because he worked tirelessly to keep them fed and supplied. Brusilov was only too happy and ready to work productively with zemstvo leaders and all these other organizations I’ve been talking about to make sure the supply trains kept running… which of course made him a bit suspect in the Romanov’s eyes, but his track record and results were undeniable. He served down in the southwestern front against Austria-Hungary and had been a critical cog in the successful invasion of Galicia in the first year of the war. He was the one who pushed up through the Carpathian mountains, and would have plunged down into the Hungarian plane, but for want of food, arms, boots, and reinforcements. And after two years of successfully leading his army, in the early spring of 1916, he was promoted to become the overall front commander down in the southwest.

So, as I just said, even though Russia, wasn’t doing so hot in 1916, nobody was doing so hot in 1916. And when Brusilov took over as front commander, he pitched headquarters on the idea of staging a general offensive. He had studied the course of the war and concluded that the big mistake they kept making was concentrating all their forces on a single point in the enemy line when they wanted to go on the attack. It made sense — you want to break through a line, you throw everything you’ve got at that single point, right? But it kept not working. This was because Russia was just not capable of mobilizing quickly enough or quietly enough to launch an attack before the enemy had plenty of time to notice what was going to happen and move reinforcements into position to block the attempt to break through at that single point. In World War I, the balance of force was all on the defensive side anyway, so these attempts to concentrate and attack inevitably turned into bloody and futile debacles. Brusilov argued that what they should do instead is launch an attack on the widest line they possibly could. Don’t put everyone somewhere, put everyone everywhere. Brusilov calculated the enemy would not be expecting this, nor know exactly how to respond. They wouldn’t know where to send reinforcements or where to concentrate their own defenses, because they would be getting swarmed everywhere. Brusilov also now had better intelligence than the Russians did at the beginning of the war, because aerial photography was becoming a thing, and he was able to sit and look at photographs of the Austrian fortifications and know exactly where artillery positions were and machine gun nests were, so units could be instructed exactly where to go and how to approach up and down this long, thin and fanned out line.

The front commanders in the northwest were very skeptical of this, especially as Brusilov pushed his plan for a southwestern offensive, that would ultimately be a flanking distraction, to a similar huge push in the north against the Germans. Now Brusilov got permission to launch his attack, and he was allowed to go forward, and he went forward in the hope and expectation that the guys in the north would also be ordered to go out on the march. And so, on June the fourth, 1916, he got started. His armies launched a huge, wide, general offensive, and within 48 hours, they had punched through a 50 mile long stretch, and were freely advancing. After a week and a half, the Russians had taken 200,000 prisoners. It sent the Austro-Hungarians into complete panic, and they thought, maybe this is it, we’re going to have to sue for peace.

As Brusilov conducted this incredibly successful offensive — what we now call, creatively, the Brusilov Offensive — he made headlines all over the world. But unfortunately, the commanders in the north refuse to budge. And as they were all friends of the tsar and indulged by the tsar, when they said, we don’t really want to do it, he said, okay, don’t do it. Plus, Nicholas had Alexandra in his ear, saying things like, oh, Rasputin was praying the other night, and he says there’s bad vibes around an offensive against Germany, so don’t do it. And without any pressure in the north against the Germans, the Germans were able to send reinforcements down south and save the Austro-Hungarian line and halt the Brusilov offensive, snatching stalemate from the jaws of initiative.

But it was still a huge success story. After eight weeks of fighting through July 1916, Brusilov’s armies captured 425,000 prisoners and were deep back inside Galicia. They forced the Central Powers to move troops from the western front, which took a considerable amount of pressure off of France and Italy. It also induced the Romanians to join the war and open yet another front against the Central Powers. Brusilov was now something of a national hero and an international celebrity, and all the allied countries were like, damn man, good work! This is all proof that Russia was not inevitably doomed by circumstance to lose the war. And so we’re going to go back to the tsar and his advisors being the authors of their own downfall, because their response to pursue life’s victories was to actually limit the amount of public praise and press coverage of his victories in Russia, because it might make Brusilov more popular than the tsar. This is what they were focused on. By the fall of 1916, even an entirely conventional conservative monarch[ist], like Brusilov, could only shake his head with frustration and say, Russia could not win the war with its present system of government.

Now it occurs to me that this is essentially where we left things off last week: an array of political, economic, and military leaders concluding that the biggest obstacle to winning the war was the Romanovs. Now, last time they drew this conclusion after a great retreat. This time, it is after a great offensive. So whether they were up, or down, advancing or retreating, all real hope of victory seemed smothered under a blanket of corrupt incompetence. The tsar was often in dreamland, playing commander-general, Alexandra and Rasputin ruled Petrograd about as badly as you could imagine, the war was becoming endless. Demoralization, unrest, and frustration sank deeper and deeper into every social class. And the fixation of all that deep and bitter frustration was the Romanovs.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us in the fall of 1916, with everyone beginning to roll downhill towards the February revolution of 1917, now just a few months away. And next time, we are going to get that ball rolling.

Now I am taking next week off, which is a prescheduled break — it’s not another medical emergency, I promise — but we will come back in two weeks for the beginning of the beginning of the Revolution of 1917.