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Russia in World War I: Was Russia a viable combatant in World War I?

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188907509


Viewpoint: Yes. Russia dealt effectively with the requirements of waging a major war; the actions of the tsar's army on the Eastern Front prevented Germany from focusing all its energies on fighting Russia's allies in the West.

Viewpoint: No. The underdevelopment of Russian industry and transportation placed severe limitations on its military effectiveness.

_________________________

Russia was one of the biggest losers in World War I. Its victories were few and fleeting, while its defeats were tremendous and lasting. Germany occupied much of the most productive Russian territory. During the first year of the war alone, Russia suffered four million casualties. In 1917 social, political, and economic strains associated with the conflict caused the collapse of two systems of government in succession and ushered in a massive social revolution. A third system of government, the Bolshevik regime, took power in November 1917 and extricated the nation from the war, but with massive territorial losses, by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918.
Given these facts, it would seem that Russia was not a viable World War I combatant. After all, it lost the war while its government and society crumbled, to be replaced with a communist dictatorship. Comparative perspectives suggest that there was much more to the story, however. Russia was not the only empire that fell during the period. The war also caused the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires and created serious social and political strains in France, Italy, Serbia, Greece, and other combatant powers, while discontent grew in the British Empire. Recent revisionist scholarship suggests that Russia and its developing civil institutions--such as local government, industrial organizations, and charitable enterprises--may have played a noteworthy and laudable role in supporting the Russian war effort. This chapter assesses their strengths and shortcomings.



Viewpoint: Yes. Russia dealt effectively with the requirements of waging a major war; the actions of the tsar's army on the Eastern Front prevented Germany from focusing all its energies on fighting Russia's allies in the West.

Modern wars have been not only harbingers of social, political, and economic change, but often instruments of modernization. Norman Stone, for example, has described World War I not "as a vast rundown of most accounts, but as a crisis of growth, a modernization crisis in thin disguise." The experience of Russia during the conflict serves as proof of this observation; its increasingly civic-minded entrepreneurial and professional class responded to the opportunities presented by the conflict and assumed many burdens that normally would have been the responsibility of the state in time of war. More important, the prewar breaking down of the peasantry's isolation from the broader national community was given new impetus during the war years. Thus, instead of derailing Russia's evolution toward a liberal constitutional order, World War I accelerated that trend. Only the unexpected duration of the conflict and the dismal failure of the Provisional Government facilitated the social disintegration and anarchy that made the Bolshevik coup possible.

Many historical studies tend to focus only on the developments that led to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. All too often, positive accounts of Russian contribution to the Allies' cause are glossed over, perhaps because in so many ways the fighting was directly and decisively related to the collapse of the monarchy in 1917. The reader should keep in mind, however, that three other empires--the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires--were also unable to survive World War I, while two other imperial powers--Britain and France--emerged victorious but found themselves on a downward trajectory that ended with the loss of colonies after World War II. It might be better to examine how a supposedly polarized Russia stood up so well to the stresses and strains of total warfare for nearly three years. To be sure, the increasing irrelevance of the tsarist regime was laid bare during World War I, but the Russian public responded heroically to the crises that the conflict engendered and demonstrated its viability by taking over the responsibilities of providing medical services for the tsar's soldiers and even supplying munitions, food, and clothing to the army. A civilian medical corps was organized virtually overnight, and doctors, nurses, and paramedics were sent to the front. These organizations evacuated the sick and wounded to fully equipped hospitals in the rear and operated fifty-one railroad trains that moved more than four million soldiers away from the front lines.

Voluntary organizations--which included the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, the All-Russian Union of Towns, and the War Industries Committee--assumed government functions and instituted a wide range of welfare programs, including rehabilitation for disabled veterans and job training and employment for refugees. They also staffed laboratories, dispatched vaccination and disinfection units to fight epidemics, and established laundries and bathhouses. The unions operated a small fleet of river barges, started factories to produce tannin for making shoes of leather from their own cattle farms, and set up garages and machine shops to outfit and repair their motor pools. Altogether, there were several hundred thousand men and women working heroically to aid in the war effort, a response that equaled patriotic home-front mobilization throughout Europe. This phenomenon has been a seriously neglected aspect of the Russian wartime experience.

Although refugees accounted for 5 percent of Russia's total wartime population and thus outnumbered the industrial working class by a margin of two to one, a comprehensive study of the phenomenon was not undertaken until 1999. The significance of the crucial cohort of professionals that tended to the needs of refugees and accomplished many other tasks cannot be underestimated. Until 1906 national professional associations had been proscribed by law, and even after that time the government was wary about allowing them to become too powerful. During World War I, however, in order to conduct business--whether staffing hospitals, outfitting trains, or organizing evacuations from front to rear--the associations met in ad hoc congresses with thousands of other technical experts to explore issues of mutual concern. These meetings paralleled those that took place in the countryside in prewar Russia. The government was understandably alarmed and well aware that this practical wartime work would lead inevitably to the postwar modernization of Russian social and political relations. Minister of the Interior Nikolai Maklakov warned that, unless constrained, the many voluntary organizations in Russia were "preparing themselves for work on the reconstruction of public life which must come, they feel, at the conclusion of the war." Historian Richard Pipes has described these activities as "the symptoms of a silent revolution" and observed that "in the midst of the war a new Russia was taking shape." Historian Orlando Figes has rightly noted that by 1916 the Russian public's war effort had "grown into a huge national infrastructure, a state within a state," and that "the revolution had its roots in the wartime activities of the voluntary organizations." The government could not have shut down these organizations without an inexcusable increase in human misery.

Educated Russians responded as they did to the problems engendered by the war because they believed that the power of Russia rested on the mobilization of all Russian society. Like the other major combatants in World War I, Russia had to become a "nation at arms," requiring a deep commitment on the part of all Russians. Many scholars have posited that Russian peasants, unlike their urban counterparts, were unfamiliar with the concept of the nation and thus lacked a commitment to the war effort. A recent study of patriotic culture has asserted that the use of "external motifs" (such as stereotypical depictions of the kaiser and the Germans) in propaganda geared for peasant audiences demonstrate the chasm between town and country because the urbanized and educated portions of Russian society were propagandized with "internal motifs" such as the ideas of the Russian nation or fighting alongside the Western democracies against German militarism. This theory is overstated; the consistent and conscientious efforts of educated society to implement universal schooling (and thus acculturation of peasants to the concept of citizenship)--efforts that were clearly accelerating prior to the war--held important implications for peasant integration with the rest of Russian society and the development of a civic identity within the peasant class. Until recently this aspect of peasant education has been little explored.

To be sure, the development of mass education had only just begun to take hold in Russia when it entered World War I. But as Scott Seregny has shown, the peasantry was intensely interested in the conflict from its beginning, and the war piqued its interest in the outside world. Simple geography lessons made the peasant village more aware of the outside world and reinforced the concept of nation to them. The spread of newspapers, as well as maps throughout rural Russia, fed the peasantry's immense hunger for information about the history behind the conflict and the fascinating new technology of modern warfare, such as airplanes, dirigibles, machine guns, and submarines. This demand led to a pronounced growth in rural public libraries, lectures, and adult-literacy classes. Peasant soldiers at the front wrote letters urging their wives to send their children to school. As a result, by the fall of 1916, schools run by the zemstvo (rural local self-government) were besieged with applicants. The impetus of the war for peasant education and the concomitant expansion of available programs and information suggests that the war accelerated the development of a national consciousness, a crucial factor on which all major combatants relied.

One must also bear in mind that the Russian military contributions to the conflict were not negligible. Its army's operations tied down large numbers of German troops who would otherwise have been sent to the Western Front (and were sent there after the Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace settlement at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918). The unexpectedly rapid mobilization of Russian troops and their sudden advance into East Prussia in August 1914--both achievements of a viable, modern military--forced the Germans to divert two full army corps from the West to contain the challenge. This action probably saved Paris from quick capture and France from speedy defeat, the fundamental goal of the German strategy for winning a two-front war, and helped to prevent a decisive German breakthrough on the Western Front for most of the war. Indeed, the Germans were not able to achieve this goal until their spring 1918 offensive, mounted with the legions of troops available after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. On other fronts, Russian armies inflicted regular defeats on the forces of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the two principal allies of Germany, and forced the Germans to make substantial commitments of troops and supplies to shore up their defensive efforts. Even after two and a half years of brutal conflict, the Russian army held together for another six months after the fall of the Romanov dynasty in March 1917.

Ultimately, the gap between the wish of the peasantry for peace and that of the patriotic middle and elite classes for victory resulted in a stalemate over the single most important issue facing the Provisional Government that replaced the monarchy: war or peace. The Provisional Government saw itself as an interim, temporary government that lacked the legitimacy to make any far-reaching decisions about Russia's future. The long delays in holding national elections for an effective government (largely because Russian liberals thought the masses were not ready for democracy and would make the wrong decisions on the important issues of the day), however, paved the way for the Bolshevik takeover. This lack of faith in the political maturity of the people led to anarchy, chaos, and ruin.

Further evidence that the basic elements of a democratic society were, in fact, beginning to flower can be seen in the zemstvo elections held in fall 1917--before the Bolshevik coup (and six months after the collapse of the tsarist regime)--and those for the Constituent Assembly in November of the same year. Some scholars have asserted that the turnouts for the zemstvo elections were low and thus show the intransigence and isolation of the peasantry from the political life of the nation. But considering that the zemstvo elections were held at harvesttime and that women (who were eligible to vote for the first time) generally stayed away from the polls, turnouts were remarkably high, ranging from 40 to 50 percent. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, nearly forty-five million citizens expressed their will through the ballot box. Great multitudes of free people were taking an interest in the leadership of their country and in its political future.

The evidence clearly suggests that Russian social and political development during World War I should be reassessed. One should also not overlook the fact that Russian military actions on the Eastern Front made a substantial contribution to Allied victory in the conflict.

-- Thomas Earl Porter, North Carolina A&T State University


Viewpoint: No. The underdevelopment of Russian industry and transportation placed severe limitations on its military effectiveness.

World War I was the first total war of the industrial era. Fielding huge conscript armies, combatant nations were driven to produce tremendous quantities of munitions and armaments, as well as commodities such as food, clothing, and paper. Germany held off its many enemies for more than four years not because of military brilliance or because it had the largest army but because it was thoroughly industrialized and well managed. At the other end of the spectrum, Russia collapsed because it was poorly managed and much less industrialized.

The collapse of Russia was surprising to some Europeans. Yet, on the eve of World War I, other observers had been uncertain about how Russia would perform in the event of a general war. Since the Napoleonic wars, Europe had been fascinated with the size of Russian armies. After their success against Napoleon in 1812, however, the Russians' larger wars in the intervening years were not nearly so impressive. The Crimean War (1853-1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) tarnished the reputation of the tsar's armies. After the Crimean War, Russia turned inward and focused on catching up with the West. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, centrally directed efforts at industrialization, modernization, and reform made some inroads into traditional Russian society.

The war revealed that pessimistic forecasts about Russian performance were accurate. The Russian army was relatively well led on the operational and tactical levels. Nevertheless, none of Russia's important successes were against Germany, its most powerful adversary. Rather they were against the notoriously inept Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman armies. The successes in the field also carried a price. Russia sent large peasant armies of some 12 million men to the field in the war; 1,700,000 of them were killed, and a huge number of the others were wounded and captured.

Russia failed on the matériel level. It was unable to equip many of its troops at all, much less equip and supply them well. In 1915 one-third of the infantry force had no rifles. This rate ran even lower in some individual units. One general commanding a corps of seven divisions reported that only 12,000 of his men were armed. Shortages in shells were such that German artillery could--at least on one reported occasion--outfire the Russians by a factor of thirty to one. Russian gunners were ordered to fire no more than three artillery shells per day. Nor did Russian output compare favorably to that of its allies, despite a boom in Russian armaments production in 1915. For most of the war, Russia's output of munitions was merely a fraction of theirs. As Louise Erwin Heenan has documented, in 1916 Russia produced 7 heavy and 45 light artillery shells per one thousand soldiers, while France manufactured 38 and 137, and Britain made 83 and 170.

Russia was also unable to produce the same quantities of equipment as its Western allies. The French and the British were able to field, per kilometer of front, 6 times the heavy artillery, 5 times the field artillery, and 4.5 times the number of machine guns. While the Russian ordnance corps was ill supplied, the quartermasters were hardly better off. Soldiers lacked boots and winter clothes, and many died from exposure and disease.

That Russia should not have been able to produce as much military hardware as its allies should not be surprising if one considers its general level of economic development. In the words of the standard economic history of World War I, Russian industry was "a foreign body in a gigantic agrarian economy." Direct comparison of overall industrial output is not easy, but it has been possible for Brian R. Mitchell to compare outputs of key industrial goods in 1913:

Total metric tons/tons per capita (in millions) Country Coal Iron Ore Pig Iron
Russia 36.0/0.29 9.5/0.08 4.6/0.04
Britain 292.0/7.17 16.2/0.4 10.4/0.26
Germany 177.2/2.73 28.6/0.44 16.7/0.26
France 40.8/1.04 21.9/0.56 5.2/0.13


Country Steel Total Population (m)
Russia 4.9/0.04 126.3 (1897)
Britain 7.7/0.19 40.7 (1911)
Germany 17.6/0.27 64.9 (1910)
France 4.6/0.12 39.1 (1910)


Even before the outbreak of war, Russia was far behind its European allies in the production of coal, iron, and steel, not only on a per capita basis but even on an absolute basis. In a war that required sustained industrial effort, the situation was not promising for Russia.

Russia's industrial capacity was hardly helped by the dismantling of its industrial facilities in the western areas of the country for relocation eastward, beyond the reach of the approaching German and Austrian armies. Many of these plants were damaged, abandoned, or never efficiently reassembled. Much of what was left behind was permanently lost as the industrial western borderlands of the Russian Empire fell to the Germans by late 1915.

Despite such inauspicious circumstances, the Russian economy did make some gains in output in specific industrial categories, most visibly in the production of military goods. The number of workers in the Petrograd armaments industry doubled to approximately 400,000, while the output of weapons and armaments increased by 923 percent, to 397,000 tons, between 1913 and 1916. These increases, however, did not even come close to covering the Russians' military needs. Peter Gatrell and Mark Harrison have charted the general trend in Russian industrial production during World War I as a percentage of the prewar output:

All Military Goods Civilian Goods
1913 100 100
1914 115 101
1915 225 102
1916 229 88
1917 (Jan.-Sept.) 222 61


Like all the other belligerents, Russia made progress in production of armaments while experiencing a drop in the output of consumer goods. Though Russia was an agrarian giant, its food supply was especially affected, largely because its underdeveloped transportation networks were grievously strained by military needs. Wartime harvests were only 10 percent lower than prewar levels, a drop more than adequately covered by newly available food that would have been exported before the war. Yet, domestic transportation problems eventually led to chronic and critical shortages of foodstuffs in the cities. In February and March 1917 this problem triggered strikes in Petrograd, which became the birthplace of the two revolutions that occurred in that year.

Once the war started, Russia was largely cut off from the outside world. Limited imports and exports were able to pass through the remote ports of Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Vladivostok, but their overstretched facilities were dominated by wartime matériel, especially from Britain and France. These shipments, however, were never of the quality and quantity necessary to overcome Russia's deficiencies. Overall, Russian foreign trade dropped by more than 90 percent after the declaration of war.

That the "breadbasket of Europe" should have faltered in delivering adequate food supplies to its own people was indicative of its general condition in the war. The Russians' failure to manage food transportation and distribution was another side of its inability to manage industrial production and transportation. Germany, Britain, France, and the United States deliberately and quickly established government rationalization of economic activity, but Russia failed to produce a comparable system. Although Russia could grow the food it needed to feed its armies and its cities, the mismanagement of its war economy resulted in chronic and worsening food shortages in the cities and in the fielding of armies without adequate armaments, supplies, or ammunition.

Although Russia had the raw materials to develop into the munitions, equipment, and supplies it needed to field a large army, in 1914 it was not able to meet the challenges of a modern industrial war. It is hardly surprising that Russia failed to demonstrate the managerial and administrative expertise needed to convert its tremendous resources into battlefield effectiveness. This lack of organization had not proved especially crucial in early-nineteenth-century wars against the Ottomans, but when faced with industrialized enemies in 1914--or for that matter in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)--the gaps were too large to cover. In its wars of the nineteenth century--the century in which Europe became industrialized--Russia did well against underdeveloped nations and indigenous peoples on its frontiers, but it fared poorly against countries that were more industrialized. Industrialization includes more than the ability to produce steel; it requires sound management as well. In 1914 Russia was still unable to manage its war effort. Although some of its troops fought with valor, the country was unable to support the army well enough to ensure that it would survive or, as the Provisional Government found out, even remain loyal. In the end the strains of the war proved too hard--not on the battlefield but behind the front lines.

-- Phil Giltner, Albany Academy


LENIN'S CALL FOR PEACE

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin spoke before the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, calling for immediate negotiations to end World War I. Part of Lenin's speech is included below. Although Lenin called for concluding a peace agreement without annexations or indemnities, in its Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany (March 1918), Russia lost Ukraine, its Polish and Baltic territories, and Finland.

The Workers' and Peasants' Government, created by the revolution of October 24-25, and drawing its strength from the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, proposes to all warring peoples and their governments to begin at once negotiations leading to a just democratic peace.

A just and democratic peace for which the great majority of wearied, tormented and war-exhausted toilers and labouring classes of all belligerent countries are thirsting, a peace which the Russian workers and peasants have so loudly and insistently demanded since the overthrow of the Tsar's monarchy, such a peace the government considers to be an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign territory and the forcible annexation of foreign nationalities) and without indemnities.

The Russian Government proposes to all warring peoples that this kind of peace be concluded at once; it also expresses its readiness to take immediately, without the least delay, all decisive steps pending the final confirmation of all the terms of such a peace by the plenipotentiary assemblies of all countries and all nations.

By annexation or seizure of foreign territory the government, in accordance with the legal concepts of democracy in general and of the working class in particular, understands any incorporation of a small and weak nationality by a large and powerful state without a clear, definite and voluntary expression of agreement and desire by the weak nationality, regardless of the time when such forcible incorporation took place, regardless also of how developed or how backward is the nation forcibly attached or forcibly detained within the frontiers of the [larger] state, and, finally, regardless of whether or not this large nation is located in Europe or in distant lands beyond the seas.

If any nation whatsoever is detained by force within the boundaries of a certain state, and if [that nation], contrary to its expressed desire whether such desire is made manifest in the press, national assemblies, party relations, or in protests and uprisings against national oppression, is not given the right to determine the form of its state life by free voting and completely free from the presence of the troops of the annexing or stronger state and without the least desire, then the dominance of that nation by the stronger state is annexation, i.e., seizure by force and violence.

The government considers that to continue this war simply to decide how to divide the weak nationalities among the powerful and rich nations which had seized them would be the greatest crime against humanity, and it solemnly announces its readiness to sign at once the terms of peace which will end this war on the indicated conditions, equally just for all nationalities without exception.

At the same time the government declares that it does not regard the conditions of peace mentioned above as an ultimatum; that is, it is ready to consider any other conditions, insisting, however, that such be proposed by any of the belligerents as soon as possible, and that they be expressed in the clearest terms, without ambiguity or secrecy. . . .

In making these peace proposals to the government and peoples of all warring countries, the Provisional Government of Workers and Peasants of Russia appeals particularly to the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind, who are also the largest states participating in the present war--England, France and Germany.

The workers of these countries have rendered the greatest possible service to the cause of progress and socialism by the great example of the Chartist movement in England, several revolutions of universal historic significance accomplished by the French proletariat, and, finally, the heroic struggle against the Law of Exceptions in Germany, a struggle which was prolonged, dogged and disciplined, which could be held up as an example for the workers of the whole world, and which aimed at the creation of proletarian mass organisations in Germany.

All these examples of proletarian heroism and historic achievement serve us as a guarantee that the workers of these three countries will understand the tasks which lie before them by way of liberating humanity from the horrors of war and its consequences, and that by their resolute, unselfishly energetic efforts in various directions these workers will help us to bring to a successful end the cause of peace, and, together with this, the cause of the liberation of the toiling and exploited masses from all forms of slavery and all exploitation.

The Workers' and Peasants' Government created by the revolution of November 6-7 and drawing its strength from the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies must begin peace negotiations at once. Our appeal must be directed to the governments as well as to the peoples. . . .

Source: The World War I Document Archive http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/index.html.

_________________________

FURTHER READINGS


References


Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1997).

Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russian During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Gatrell and Mark Harrison, "The Russian and Soviet Economies in Two World Wars: A Comparative View," Economic History Review, new series 46, no. 3 (1993): 425-452.

Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987).

Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y. & London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750-2000, fifth edition (Houndmills, U.K. & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990).

Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44.

Seregny, "Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I," Slavic Review, 59, no. 2 (2000): 290-315.

Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (London: Macmillan, 1975).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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