The First World War, 1914-1918
MARK VON HAGEN
The Russian Empire entered what became known as the First World War in the summer of 1914 as a Great Power on the Eurasian continent; four years later, the Russian Empire was no more. In its place was a Bolshevik rump state surrounded by a ring of hostile powers who shared some loyalty to the values of the Old Regime, or a conservative version of the Provisional Government. The notable exception to this was Menshevik-dominated Georgia in Transcaucasia, which pursued a moderate but socialist transformation of its society. Although all the Central European dynastic empires (Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, Germany and Russia) failed to survive the suicidal war, what succeeded the Russian Empire, namely, the Soviet socialist state, was unlike any other successor regime. Many of the origins of that Soviet state, and the civil war that did so much to shape it, can be traced to the preceding world war: new political techniques and practices, the polarisation of mass politics, the militarisation of society and a social revolution that brought to power a new set of elites determined to transform society even further while in the midst of mobilising for its own war of self-defence against domestic and foreign enemies. The war demanded unprecedented mobilisation of society and economy against formidable enemies to the west and south. The industrial mobilisation alone triggered 'a crisis in growth - a modernisation crisis in thin disguise'.1 But the economic crisis, with its attendant dislocations and disruptions, unfolded against the backdrop of an impressive societal recruitment; the involvement of millions of subjects in the war effort raised demands for political reform and exacerbated the crisis of the Old Regime.
The outbreak of war
The outbreak of war followed from the absence of any effective international mechanisms for resolving interstate conflicts on the European continent
1 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 14.
after the decline of the system of 'balance of power'. The previous diplomatic arrangements were predicated on no single power gaining overwhelming influence over the affairs of Europe. That balance was disrupted by the rise of a powerful German Reich in Central Europe that was committed to a position of world power under its aggressive emperor, Wilhelm II. Faced with new threats on its western borders, Russia abandoned its traditional nineteenth-century royalist alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary for a new set of relationships, the Triple Entente, with the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain and republican France, in the 1890s. The immediate casus belli was an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia after the assassination of the Habsburg heir, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; Russia and Austria-Hungary were divided over other issues of growing contention as well, particularly the fate of Austrian eastern Galicia (today's western Ukraine), where pre-war tensions involved several sensational espionage trials and fears of annexation. Influential German elites, for their part, developed plans to detach the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and reduce their eastern rival to a medium-sized and non-threatening power.
It was these western borderlands (today's Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) which witnessed the war's most devastating violence and whose social structures were unintentionally and dramatically transformed even before the revolutions of 1917 proper. This set of battlegrounds became known as the eastern front ofthe First World War and remains much less well known in English-language literature than the western front that pitted Germany against France and Britain. Transcaucasia (today's Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) also became another important front in the war after the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in late October 1914. Here, too, the war strained local resources, destroyed moderate, nascent civil societies and pitted ethnic and social groups against one another in violent struggles for survival.
Although most elites in Russia (as was true for the other belligerent powers) dreaded the outcome of a major continental war, the proclamation of war in July 1914 was greeted in educated society with a wave of patriotism and some willingness to suspend the opposition to the obstreperous regime ofEmperor Nicholas II. Russian elites naively shared the certainty of their counterparts across the continent that the war would be over by Christmas. The call-up of soldiers to military service was less of a patriotic manifestation, with draft riots and other violence providing the first foretaste of the war's challenge to social cohesion.[47] The standing army of the tsar, 1,423,000, was augmented by 5 million new troops by the end of the year. From 1914 to 1916, the last year soldiers were conscripted for the imperial army, 14.4 million men were called to service; by 1917, 37 per cent of the male population of working age was serving in the army. (The Central Powers' numbers, including the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, reached 25,100,000, but were fighting on the two major fronts.) Despite the numerical advantages the Russian army enjoyed, its troops faced several disadvantages against the German forces; these included technical matters, such as relatively inadequate railroad lines to transport troops around the fronts, organisational problems caused by political conflicts at the top of the army (particularly between the supreme commander Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich and the minister of war, General Sukhomlinov), and the general inefficiency and corruption of much of the Russian state apparatus. Still, the Germans' Schlieffen Plan called for initially concentrating the major military efforts on the western front, affording some small measure of respite to the Russians in the east.
Military campaigns: 1914-16
During the first months of the war, the eastern front formed north-south from the East Prussian marshes to the Carpathian Mountains. The Russian (First and Second) armies first confronted the Germans in East Prussia and defeated them at Gumbinnen. They were not allowed to savour their victory long before the Germans turned the tables on them at the Battle of Tannenberg, which ended in disaster for the Russians, who lost 90,000 prisoners and 122,000 casualties. The first battles revealed the scandalous shortage of rifles in the Russian army (one for every three soldiers). In a subsequent defeat, the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Russians lost another 45,000 prisoners and 100,000 men killed and wounded. The pain of these defeats was partly allayed when the Russians defeated their Austrian counterparts in Galicia and occupied Lemberg (Lwow/L'viv/L'vov) and other important fortress cities for nearly eight months. Austria lost 300,000 men, including 100,000 prisoners, in a blow from which it never quite recovered. The Germans provided the new momentum on the side of the Central Powers with a successful push towards Russian Poland in October.
With a stalemate quickly developing on the western front, the German leadership was persuaded to make the eastern front a higher priority in 1915, a policy which bore fruit in the first major Russian retreat of the war. (It was also during the campaign against Warsaw that the Germans first used poison gas in the war.) The Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes in February ended in the Russians' retreat from East Prussia. After the fall of the fortress of Przemysl, the Russians lost 126,000 prisoners. Lemberg fell in June, Warsaw and Brest- Litovskin August and the German advance was halted only in November. In the meantime, Emperor Nicholas II, against the advice of most of his counsellors, dismissed his great-uncle in August and insisted on taking personal command ofhis armies. The army's admission that 500,000 soldiers had deserted during the first year of war, most of them into German and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, effectively surrendering to the enemy, raised alarm among the military and political elite.
47
In the opinion of Vladimir Gurko, 'the war excited neither patriotism nor indignation among the peasants and factory workers'.