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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.56: Great War, Great Retreat

Before we get going this week, I feel like I should take some executive notice of the fact that we are at episode 10.56 of the Russian Revolutionses series. So, despite several confident claims I have made in the past about how there being no possible way any series could ever surpass the 55 episode length of the French Revolution series, well, here we are at episode 10.56. We are now beyond the last outpost and plunging ahead into the unknown abyss. And at least we can all take some comfort in the fact that while this series is the last series of the Revolutions podcast, it is now, also, officially the longest.

We have so far successfully carried the story in the longest podcast series to date to August 1914, and the beginning of World War I. Now of course, nobody knew at the time that it would be called World War I, nor even that in the immediate aftermath of this conflict, it would be referred to as the Great War. And indeed, the first and most important thing to understand about the nature of World War I is that everybody walked into the conflict in August 1914 believing that it would all surely be over by Christmas.

In the hundred odd years since the Congress of Vienna finally put 23 years of nonstop great power conflict to bed, wars were typically single season affairs, and rarely lasted longer than a single calendar year. Armies marched out, waged a campaign, fought a battle or two, and then hammered out a treaty based on the result. And there were exceptions to this, but this was generally the style of warfare that had rained inside the living memory of all the leaders of Europe, and it naturally colored their assumptions in the summer of 1914. Now of course there were plenty of prominent voices inside every republic and monarchy and empire saying, ah, I think this one might be a little different and in a very bad way, but in the main, planning, preparations, expectations revolved around the assumption that 20th century warfare would just be more of the same: mobilize fast, strike first, knock out your opponent, then drive a hard bargain in the peace talks. Everyone will be home by Christmas.

Now in the interest of massively oversimplifying this, the principal axis upon which the whole insane apparatus of World War I hinged was Germany on one side, and France and Russia on the other. Ever since France and Russia aligned in 1794, they had been planning how to wage a two front war against Germany. And during that same period, Germany had been trying to figure out how to avoid a two front war at all costs. And this is how we get to the famous Schlieffen Plan. The basic assumption of German war planners was that they could not sustain or win a two front war. So they concluded that the best thing to do would be to mobilize rapidly on their western front, invade France, and knock them out of the war before the slow moving Russians even got their boots on. So by the time the Russians were actually ready to fight, the French would be neutralized, and the Germans could turn and focus entirely on their eastern front. And so this is what they tried to do. And if you know even a little bit about the origins of World War I, you know that the Schlieffen Plan involved Germany invading France through Belgium, even though Belgian neutrality had been on the books since 1839. When the Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan, that is what gave the British the official diplomatic reason they needed to join the war on the side of France and Russia.

But while Germany versus France and Russia was the principle axis of World War I. It was far from the only axis, far, far, far from the only axis. The Russians themselves faced a multi-front war: a northwest front against Germany, a southwestern front against Austria-Hungary, and a southern front against the Ottoman Turks, who joined the central powers in August 1914. Now if the Russians acted in a strictly self-interested way, their best plan was to launch a strong offensive against the weaker Austria-Hungary on their southwestern front, while being satisfied to merely hold the defensive line in the northwest against the Germans. Then once they knocked Austria- Hungary out, they would be free to close in on a now isolated Germany from both the east and the south. But the French, not incorrectly, told their Russian allies, look, we need you to exert heavy pressure on the Germans right from the start, or they will throw everything at us and we will lose. So the Russians agreed that it was in the best interest of the entire allied effort for the Russians to advance both in the northwest and southwest simultaneously. And that is what they did at the beginning of the war.

Now sometimes you see the Russians portrayed as being backwards and inept at the beginning of World War I, but they had been working very hard to reform and overhaul their military in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, and especially since the Bosnian crisis of 1908. And though the Russian timeline aimed for them to be really totally ready for a great power war in 1917, it’s not like they were hopelessly third rate blunderers who were in over their heads in 1914. Now I’m following here Norman Stone’s classic account of the eastern front, but he makes a very good case that Russia was ready for war. In the seven or eight years leading up to 1914, they had been outspending Germany on their military; they had been stockpiling weapons and ammunition; they had reorganized their active duty troops and their reserve army; they built out their railroads and dramatically improve their mobilization speed and efficiency; and when they marched out to war, they could be confident that they would command numerically superior forces on every front. Now the Russians may not have been at maximum readiness, but they were certainly more ready than most people then or now gave them credit for.

Then when things did get going in August 1914, all this planning and preparation paid off. The Russians did not fumble, stumble, or face plant out of the gate. Mobilization actually went faster and smoother than expected. They got all their men called up and moving to their assigned armies, they successfully gathered and transported the weapons and ammunition and cavalry horses and food and supplies and everything else that they were going to need to fight a war and all of it according to plan. There was a checklist, and there were timetables, and they were hitting their marks. They certainly moved with much more competent swiftness than the central powers expected, and it was about to throw the Germans completely off balance and nearly knock Austria-Hungary out of the war.

So I’m not going to do a play-by-play of the opening campaigns of World War I here, they are incredibly complicated. And if you want that, there’s a very nice podcast out there — it’s it’s finished now, but you can still get it, called The Great War, that will walk you through all of this in detail. But for the Russians, the first phase of World War I was defined by victories against Austria-Hungary in the southwest and defeat to Germany in the northwest. Now down south, they invaded a region of the Austro-Hungarian empire called Galicia, which is now Western Ukraine-ish, Southern Poland-ish. Meanwhile, up in the Northwest, two Russian armies invaded East Prussia and advanced parallel to each other, aiming to link up and advance on Berlin.

In a strategic sense, the invasion of East Prussia was a success. It did in fact tie the Germans down in the east, and give the French the breathing room they needed to fend off the German invasion. But after being initially pushed back, the Germans refound their footing in the east and launched a brutal counter attack against the Russians. They isolated, surrounded, and destroyed the Russian Second Army at the Tannenberg Forest, and then they drove the Russian First Army back a few weeks later in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. So by September, the Russian line looked a lot like a yin yang symbol, pulled back in the north and bulging out in the south.

But the story of the opening round of World War I, for all sides, was not so much this or that battlefield victory or defeat, but the appalling costs to victors and vanquished alike. The casualty numbers of World War I are stomach churning, and this is when the true nature of the war reveals itself, where 19th century mentalities were meeting 20th century industrial technology. All the combatants had the technological ability to efficiently mobilize millions of men, and the technological ability — like artillery and machine guns — to efficiently mow those millions of men down. So for the Russians, the battle of the Tannenberg Forest, which lasted for just a couple of days, cost them 78,000 killed or wounded, and another 92,000 captured. Only 10,000 troops from the Russian Second Army managed to escape this. At the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September, it was 70,000 killed or wounded with 30 or 40,000 taken prisoner. The successful Russian invasion of Galicia cost them 250,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action. These are almost unfathomably large numbers. And again, we are talking about just the opening weeks of the war, and just for one of the belligerents. When the French attacked the Germans at the Marne in this same September of 1914, it led to half a million battlefield casualties and losses on both sides over just a few days.

These shocking casualty rates were typically the result of either infantry and cavalry charges heading into defensive lines protected by heavy machine guns, or people being blasted to smithereens thanks to the increased range and accuracy of modern artillery. It led everyone to rethink their tactics. Mostly. Kind of. Eventually. But at least for starters, the idea that they could continue to wage a campaign of speed and nobility gave way to the tactical superiority of fortified defenses. So trenches were dug to absorb the impact of artillery, lines were solidified and became calcified. As Christmas 1914 approached, it was very clear to all sides that they were literally entrenching themselves for a long war of attrition, and nobody was coming home anytime soon.

The reality of this was especially hard on Russia. They were simply not equipped to fight a long war of attrition. They may have laid in huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, but now those stockpiles had been all used up, and they did not have a plan for how to make more. They didn’t think they would ever need to make more. And that was true of practically everything: shells and ammunition and rifles and boots and coats. They couldn’t produce or deliver the food they needed. In late 1914, the Russian Army in the southwest had advanced up into the Carpathian Mountains and they were plenty ready to descend down onto the Hungarian plane, but they had to stop short for a variety of logistical reasons, not the least that they were up in the mountains in the middle of winter, and they did not have boots or coats or ammunition.

This is when the heavy load, the heavy burden of abject leadership failures, starts to sink Russia. Despite successfully executing their pre-war plans, they did not adapt once the war itself blew up all the assumptions that those prewar plans were based on. Senior officers continued to be obsessively focused with cavalry operations, which required using the railroads to transport tons of horses, and the necessary food to feed those horses, which used up critical rail car space that could have been used for more important things — like practically anything, because cavalry charges were now just suicide missions by another name. They also continued to obsess about defending a string of defensive fortresses on their western frontier. These fortresses continued to be manned by huge garrisons, who were then not out on the front lines trying to win the war, and they were jam packed with artillery, ammunition, and supplies that could have been used at the front, but the Russian senior officers wanted to use them to defend these fortresses. Now just weeks into World War I, the reality of 20th century warfare had revealed these fortresses to be completely obsolete. They revealed cavalry to be completely obsolete. But the Russian senior commanders would not give up their fixation with cavalry and fortresses until long after the disastrous results of this fixation, were plain to see.

The other huge leadership problem was that there was no clear unified leadership. There were divisions, fault lines, and rivalries all over the senior command. The Ministry of War and the Supreme Army Headquarters were almost reflexively at odds with each other and had been for years. The tsar appointed senior commanders based on little more than personal favor or personal loyalty. The supreme commander of the whole war, for example, was the tsar’s cousin. Grand Duke Nikolai, who had never fought a battle in his life. The grand duke’s chief of staff was an imperial guard who Nicholas happened to quite like, and so that’s why he got the job. And then, thanks to both personal rivalries and terrible communications, the various front commanders out there just seem to do their own thing when and how they wanted, often clutching a handful of contradictory orders and plans coming from the several different chains of command floating around out there.

One general said out on the front that everything was order, counter-order, and disorder. And through all of this, only a few senior commanders even grasp the reality of the war they were supposedly leading. Most of them stayed back in the rear in comfortable lodgings with their wives and families, out of danger, plenty warm, and very well fed. They did not know and they did not care about the hardships endured by the rank and file, and the general consensus, especially among the officers coming out of the old nobility, was that all these defeats were simply the results of the troops being too soft and too cowardly.

Now, as you can imagine, morale in the Russian army plummeted among the rank and file. `The first levy of soldiers called up to fight in the initial battles were mostly peasants who could barely articulate why they were fighting a war in the first place. The pan-Slavic commitment to the Serbs turned out to be an obsession mostly centered among the intellectuals and journalists. The vast majority of Russians did not know who the Serbs were, let alone why they had to risk their lives on behalf of the Serbs. Then, they would get sent off to get killed or maimed in these great industrial slaughterhouses that we fancifully called battlefields, and then, when only a handful of them managed to actually make it back safely, they would be dressed down by their officers for being cowards. The trauma of the early battles was insane, mass death and dismemberment doled out by the enemy, utter disdain and cruel indifference doled out by their own officers.

All of the casualties and losses and August and September 1914 necessitated calling up additional reserves that had never really been factored into the war planning, and whose training had been eliminated as a cost cutting measure. These troops entered the war completely unprepared, and now bearing the brunt of the massive supply shortages. They found themselves hungry, freezing, and unarmed, and feeling abandoned, abused, and tortured by their leaders. Over the winter of 1914-1915 morale was horrible. Desertions skyrocketed, and all the while the senior officers responded by imposing strict discipline and corporal punishment, literally embracing the old joke line about how beatings will continue until morale improves. Meanwhile, operating in between the rank and file and the senior leadership were a new batch of middle ranking officers who were promoted up from below to replace the tens of thousands of lieutenants and captains who had been blown to pieces back in August and September. These newly promoted officers not only had way more troops to keep in line than anyone could have reasonably expected them to manage, but also their sympathies were entirely with the men and against the aristocratic officer class. And small spoiler alert, this new cohort of officers will be the leaders of the mutinies that will help overthrow the tsar.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, frustration mounted. When the war began in August 1914, nearly everyone did the whole rally ’round the flag routine. Just like in the Russo-Japanese War, civic leaders, business leaders, and professionals of every shape and size wanted to contribute however they could. The zemstvos once again became self-organizing engines, mobilizing doctors and nurses and setting up hospitals. They formed committees to coordinate and produce the supplies the military needed. Everyone was happily pitching in and doing their part. Then roundabout September and October, their efforts took on a more desperate and vital energy. It became clear the official state apparatus did not have a plan for how to meet the ongoing needs of either of the soldiers or the civilian population. Meeting those needs was going to come down to voluntary, private, and unofficial efforts. The zemstvos became clearinghouses for nearly all wartime logistical operations, and they once again unified at the national level into a new zemstvo union, chaired by the old liberal noble, Prince Lvov.

These people worked around the clock with a patriotic and tireless zeal to do the work the government did not seem capable of doing or interested in doing. They would soon be begging the government to recognize them in some kind of official capacity, for the tsar to toss out his incompetent government and rely on them instead. These people were not unpatriotic or disloyal; far from it. They were in fact super patriotic and driven by a sense of national civic spirit. But instead of embracing them, Nicholas kept them at arms length. The fear that was shared by Nicholas and Alexandra and their inner circle of advisors, including Rasputin, was that the zemstvo men were trying to use the war to revive constitutional government, and bind the tsar to their vision of a liberal Russia, where they ruled, and the tsar merely reigned. By focusing on the threat he felt these people pose to him, and Nicholas’s fears of making liberal concessions, the tsar did not co-op them into his government, which turned potentially valuable allies into some of his harshest and most powerful critics, especially as it became obvious that they were doing far more to win the war than he was.

The hard and demoralizing winter of 1914-1915 then rolled seamlessly into the utterly disastrous spring of 1915. The German high command concluded that their western front against the French and British was an unbreakable stalemate, and that a major offensive campaign in the east was probably their only clear path to victory. In May 1915, they began a massive offensive, which caught the Russians off guard. The Russians were under-supplied, underequipped, and totally unprepared for this. There was practically not any real fighting to speak of here, because the Russians were basically out of ammunition. And for example, of the 220,000 troops in the Russian Third Army, only about 40,000 remained intact and days later. And there are stories from these battles about how the second wave of troops that would be sent out into a battle would be sent out unarmed. They were simply instructed to pick up the rifle of somebody else who had died already. This is insane. This is horrifying stuff. The Russian army was driven back with heavy casualties.

In response to this potentially fatal breakthrough, the Russian high command ordered a general retreat. They told all their forces to fall back, and they would collectively attempt to redraw a line and make a new stand. They hoped and prayed that maybe they would be able to recreate the great patriotic effort of 1812, where a scorched earth retreat and the steadfast resolve of the men and the officers had eventually defeated Napoleon. But there was no real plan to make another 1812 happen, it was just kind of a hope they had. The general retreat, which history has now dubbed the Great Retreat, was all confusion and panic and disorder. There was mass looting and desertion and destruction. Buildings, depots, bridges, and crops were destroyed haphazardly and in seemingly random uncoordinated and pointless waste. Hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees were set in motion, with no provisions made to help or handle them, which would turn into another task for the leaders of the zemstvo. A s they all retreated, they had to abandon that string of fortresses the senior officers had deemed so important just a couple of months earlier. All of them were packed full of vital supplies and guns and ammunition that had to be abandoned or destroyed.

The human cost of the Great Retreat was enormous. In military terms alone, it cost the Russians something like 2 million men. 500,000 dead, another 500,000 wounded, and a cool million surrendering at various points between May and August 1915. Desertions of course skyrocketed as men retreated, and then just disappeared. Now, just to look ahead a little bit, the Russians do regroup, and they do form a new defensive line, and the German advance does get bogged down on the eastern front and resettle along lines that will remain basically static until 1917. But it was in the midst of the Great Retreat that everyone started looking at the tsar, his ministers, his lackeys, his cronies, and thinking, my god, these guys are screwing this all up.

Now the thing that was really driving people nuts was that it didn’t have to be this way. One of the big things causing the critical shortage of shells, for example, was not that Russian industry did not have the capacity to produce the shells, but that contracts were going exclusively to friends and cronies of the Romanovs or government ministers. In June of 1915, as the debacle of the Great Retreat unfolded, the government formed a special council for artillery supply, but it was composed almost entirely of friends in the government in Petrograd. Which, as soon as I say that, I realize, I forgot to mention that in a fit of acute war fever, the tsar decided to officially rename St. Petersburg Petrograd to make it sound less German and more Russian. Because, you know, that’s the kind of thing you do when you get into a war — sauerkraut becomes liberty cabbage, french fries become freedom fries. So yeah, we’re going to start calling it Petrograd, now just FYI. Anyway, the famous Putilov Ironworks, which you’ll recall were the epicenter of the revolution of 1905, received more than a hundred million rubles worth of orders for shells, while charging the government six times the normal rate.

Now here’s the thing: the Putilov Ironworks did not have the capacity to meet this order, and in the end they did not meet the order. And in fact, Putilov, the owner of the Putilov Ironworks, used the money he got from the government to prop up his other failing enterprises, until the whole thing collapsed into a heap of bankruptcy in 1916. Meanwhile, other factory owners, less well connected factory owners, especially in Moscow, complained that their factories were sitting idle in the midst of wartime emergency. With massive shortages of nearly everything, they were struggling to keep their doors open because they were not getting any orders or any contracts. In July of 1915, some of these Moscow leaders got together and organized something called the War Industries Committee, and it was made up of a lot of liberal critics of the autocratic regime, who believed that the economic health of Russia and the national war effort were being stymied by the current tsarist leadership and frankly, the whole system. And another little spoiler alert: when a provisional government is formed in the wake of the February revolution, something like half its members come from the War Industries Committee.

Now the tsar’s response to this was first to placate his critics, and then make arguably the biggest mistake of his life. In June 1915, he sacked some of the most conservative and reactionary ministers he had, and then in July of 1915, under heavy public pressure, he recalled the Duma to session. And when the Duma came back into session, about two thirds of the delegates promptly formed a patriotic progressive block, ranging from the moderate right to the moderate left, under the guidance of the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov, whose goal here would be twofold: first, win the war and two, prevent a revolution. The delegates of the recalled Duma were very concerned that military defeats, strikes, demoralization and social unrest were all on the upswing, and that if they didn’t get a handle on things, the whole empire was going to blow up. They begged the tsar to appoint a new slate of ministers that they approved of, competent ministers who could win the war, and by extension, prevent a revolution.

But instead of leaning on this patriotic bloc who were trying to win the war and prevent a revolution, Nicholas got spooked and ran in the other direction. Encouraged by Alexandra, who was already becoming a massive political liability, Nicholas decided to go all in on autocracy. With the war effort failing, he would take over as supreme commander of the war. He would go to the front and he would personally lead his people to victory. Now was not the time to sit back and let these ambitious liberals and business leaders take over, but to prove that the system worked. That God was right, and that he, Nicholas, was still the man for the job.

The tsar’s decision to take over a supreme commander of the war turned out to be a huge mistake. Nicholas was not a soldier, and could provide nothing in the way of strategic vision or leadership or advice, and no matter what, he was just going to have to defer to whatever the generals told him. But okay, maybe he could be a morale boosting figurehead. Everyone likes it when the boss is out there sharing hardships, you know, meeting and encouraging people face to face, showing that he’s with them. With morale plummeting, this would have been a not inconsequential contribution Nicholas could have made to the war effort. But the tsar had spent his life in a bubble. He had only rarely met with, like, real people. The tsar was visibly uneasy around the soldiers that he met, he was a weak and nervous public speaker, and he certainly never even pretended to share their hardships.

But that was only half the problem with Nicholas becoming supreme commander. The other half, which we will talk a lot more about next week, was that when Nicholas went to the front, Alexandra was left alone in Petrograd, and she became the defacto political leader of Russia on the homefront. Now in deeper than ever with Rasputin, Alexandra would turn out to be a terrible leader, who made terrible decisions. Now, out in the streets, whispers were that her German-ness made her sympathetic to Germany and possibly even treasonous, but I don’t think that bit is fair. I don’t think she was actively trying to help Germany when the war. It’s just that when she started making personnel decisions, naming and removing government ministers — with Nicholas’s blessing of course — her sole criteria was how loyal they were to her family. Her response to the War Industries Committee in Moscow was to gripe that they were trying to take over the empire, and she wrote to Nicholas saying things like, ah, I just wish we could hang these people. Alexandra is going to turn out to be a disaster for Russia and a disaster for her family, there’s just no way to sugarcoat that.

Next week, we will talk all about this, as the conflicts and tensions, both at home on the war front grow and grow. Now Russia was not knocked out of the war by the Great Retreat — they did regroup, they did hold the line — and in 1916 would launch a massive and successful counter-attack their own. The truth that was now dawning across Russia was that Russian society, the Russian economy, the Russian military were capable of winning the war. It’s just that the biggest obstacle to victory was the tsar, his wife, and their friends.