6
Russia at War
Judging by the result of the war with Japan, which was defeat followed by revolution, it can hardly be disputed that for the men who in 1914 ruled Russia prudence dictated neutrality. The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1917 would be the collapse of Russia’s fragile political and economic structure under the strains of war. It can be argued, of course, that the deteriorating ability of tsarism to govern and the presence of a militant intelligentsia made revolution likely, war or no war. But even if this point is conceded, a revolution under peacetime conditions, without the mutiny of millions of conscripts, would likely have been less violent and would have offered moderate elements a better chance to pick up the reins of power. As will be shown below, some of Russia’s most perceptive statesmen realized this and desperately tried to keep their country out of the war.
Why, then, did Russia intervene? Russian opinion then and later has been prone to seek the answer in external influences—namely, Russia’s economic and moral commitments to her allies. Socialist writers attribute tsarism’s involvement to the pressures of Western democracies whom Russia owed vast amounts of money. For Russian conservatives, Russia acted out of a selfless devotion to the alliance: to fulfill her pledges to France and England and save them from defeat, she risked her own destruction. This sacrifice, however, is said to have earned her no gratitude, for when Russia subsequently found herself hard pressed by the Germans and fell prey to extremists supported and financed by them, the Allies failed to come to her assistance.
Such explanations are unconvincing. Imperial Russia entered into defensive alliances and honored her commitments neither in response to Allied pressures nor from altruistic motives, but from soundly perceived self-interest. Long before 1914 Russian statesmen had a good notion of the designs Germany had on her. These called for the dismemberment of the Empire and German economic mastery over Russia and her borderlands. Post-World War II archival research has confirmed that German political, military, and business circles regarded the breakup of Russia and control of her resources as essential to Germany’s global aspirations. Berlin assigned high priority to neutralizing the Russian military threat and the related prospect of a two-front war as well as to gaining access to Russia’s human and material wealth with which to match that of France and Britain.1
Given Germany’s Russlandpolitik after the dismissal of Bismarck, the choice before the rulers of Russia was not whether to withdraw into isolation or to join in great-power politics, with all the risks that this entailed: that had been decided for her by Germany. Her choice lay between facing Germany alone or acting in partnership with France and possibly England. Posed in this manner, the question answered itself. Unless Russia was prepared to give up her empire, shrink to the territory of seventeenth-century Muscovy, and acquiesce to the status of a German colony, she had to coordinate her military plans with the Western democracies. The alternative was to stand by while Germany smashed France, as she was certain to do if her eastern flank was secure, and then transferred her armies east to dispose of Russia. This was well understood in Russia long before the outbreak of the war. In 1892, as the two countries were moving toward an alliance, Alexander III had observed:
We must, indeed, come to terms with the French, and, in the event of a war between France and Germany, at once attack the Germans so as not to give them the time first to beat France and then turn against us.2
A Russian historian summarizes his country’s position before 1914 as follows:
One must not forget that tsarist Russia prepared for the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in alliance with France, which, it was expected, would in the initial period of the war bear the more difficult task of repelling the pressure of nearly the entire German army. France experienced a certain degree of dependence on the conduct of Russia, on the level of her effort in the fight against Germany [and] the distribution of her forces. The tsarist government, for its part, was no less interested than France in her armies surviving the first trial. This is the reason why the Russian command paid so much attention to the operations on the German front. One must also not leave out of account Russia’s striving to take advantage of the diversion of the main forces of the German army to the West to deal Germany a decisive defeat in the very first months of the war.… For this reason, characterizing the relations between Russia and France at the beginning of the war, it is more correct to speak of the mutual dependence of the Allies.3
After the crushing defeat which its forces had inflicted on France in 1870, Berlin had every reason to expect that France would sooner or later attempt to regain her traditional hegemony on the Continent. In itself, this prospect posed no fatal threat, since the war potential of France at the end of the nineteenth century was only one-half of Germany’s. But the matter looked differently if France had on her side Russia, which by virtue of her geographic location and large standing army was ideally suited to counterbalance German might. Immediately after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, when Russia and Germany were still on friendly terms, Helmuth von Moltke, the German chief of staff, warned his government of the prospect of a two-front war.4 This danger became near-certainty in 1894, when France and Russia signed an accord of mutual defense committing them to come to each other’s aid if attacked by Germany or one of her allies. After 1894, the General Staffs of Germany, France, and Russia concentrated on devising strategies that would turn the prospect of a two-front war to their best advantage.
Germany faced the more serious problem by far, since a general continental war would compel her to fight simultaneously in the west and east. To win such a contest Germany had to desynchronize, as it were, the expected enemy offensives and dispose of them one at a time. Should France and Russia (and, after 1907, England) succeed in coordinating their strategies, Germany faced a bleak prospect, for even her superb army could not cope with the combined forces of the other two great land armies and the world’s leading naval power. This consideration lay behind the Schlieffen Plan, on which the German military set to work in 1895 and which it kept on perfecting down to the smallest detail until the outbreak of World War I. The Schlieffen Plan required that Germany crush France before Russia fully mobilized, and then rapidly shift the bulk of her armies to the east. Its essential feature, its very precondition, was speed: speed of mobilization, speed of offensive operations, and speed of troop transfers. The plan posited a slow pace of Russian mobilization, expected to require 105–110 days, compared with the 15 days estimated for the mobilization of German and Austrian armies.5 This disparity—on paper, as much as three months—offered the opportunity to defeat the French before the Russians were able to come to their assistance.
The Schlieffen Plan provided for up to nine-tenths of the German effectives being allocated to the Western Front. Outflanking the short, heavily fortified, and topographically difficult Franco-German border, the right wing was to execute a wheeling movement across Belgium, encircle and capture Paris, and trap the main French forces. While this decisive campaign was in progress, the Russians were to be held at bay by the main mass of the Austro-Hungarians, reinforced with one-eighth or one-ninth of the German army, deployed along the northeastern frontier and in East Prussia. The Schlieffen Plan called for the French campaign to be completed within forty days of mobilization, by which time the Russian army would have less than half of its manpower under arms. Mobilization was the critical factor: the instant the Russians began to mobilize, the Germans had to follow suit or risk the collapse of their entire war plan.