How well prepared was Russia for war? The answer depends on the kind of war one has in mind: a short one, measured in months, or a long one, measured in years.
The General Staffs of all the major belligerents prepared for the kind of quick war that Germany had waged with such impressive success in 1866 against the Austrians and in 1870–71 against the French. The 1866 campaign lasted seven weeks; and while the war with France dragged on for half a year due to the resistance of beleaguered Paris, it was decided in six weeks. Each conflict culminated in a major battle. The expectation before 1914 was that a general war would also be settled in a matter of months, if not weeks, if only because the highly interdependent economies of the industrial powers were believed to be unable to withstand a conflict of longer duration. In the coming war, the decisive factor was expected to be the size and quality of the armed forces, both those on active service and those held in reserve. In fact, however, to everyone’s surprise, World War I came to resemble the American Civil War, turning into a protracted war of attrition in the course of which the determining factors proved to be the ability of the rear to supply the front with the human and material resources needed to replace staggering losses, as well as to maintain morale in the face of casualties and deprivations. By blurring the lines between the front and the rear, such a war called for the mobilization of national life and intimate cooperation among the belligerent countries’ military, political, and economic sectors. In that sense, it provided the supreme test of a nation’s vitality and cohesion. World War I lasted so long and proved so destructive precisely because the great industrial nations passed this test with flying colors.
Russia was reasonably well prepared for the short war that everyone expected. Her standing army of 1,400,000 men was the largest in the world, exceeding the combined peacetime forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Fully mobilized, she could field over 5 million soldiers; and behind these stood many more millions of able-bodied men who, if necessary, could be quickly trained and thrown into battle. Russian soldiers enjoyed a good reputation for courage and endurance, which made them formidable fighters when well led. The war with Japan had humiliated the Russian army, but it also benefited it in that alone of the European powers it had cadres of officers and noncommissioned officers with recent combat experience. Matters looked less promising in regard to weapons and other equipment. The Russians were very short of artillery, especially in comparison with the Germans. Transport was poor. The Russian navy, rebuilt after the debacle of Tsushima, in terms of tonnage the third largest in the world, was mediocre in quality and hopelessly deployed, with the bulk of the ships assigned to the Baltic to defend the capital, where they were certain to be bottled up by the Germans. Even so, for all its deficiencies, some of which the French sought to correct, judged in battle-ready terms Imperial Russia was a power to be reckoned with, and the French General Staff had good reason to rely on its support.
Russia’s military power, however, appeared in a very different light when assessed in terms of a protracted conflict. From this standpoint her prospects looked unpromising, owing to the weaknesses of her political system as well as her economy. The longer the war lasted, the more these weaknesses were bound to make themselves felt.
Russia’s single greatest asset, her seemingly inexhaustible manpower, loomed large in the eyes of her allies, who fantasized about hordes of barefoot muzhiki driving in a dense, unstoppable “steamroller” on Berlin. Russia, indeed, had the largest population of any European country and the highest rate of natural increase. But the implications of these demographic facts were misconstrued. It was precisely because Russia had such a high birthrate that an exceptionally large proportion of her population was below draft age: the 1897 census showed 47 percent of the male inhabitants to be twenty or younger.13 Second, a number of ethnic groups were exempt from military service: the inhabitants of Finland, the Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and, for all practical purposes, subjects of the Jewish faith.*
Even so, Russia had an impressive pool of manpower. If, nevertheless, during the war she would experience manpower shortages the cause lay in shortcomings of her military reserve system. These affected adversely not only the army’s combat performance but also the political situation, because the peasants hurriedly pressed into service in 1915–16 were the mutinous element that would spark the February Revolution.
Like the other continental powers, Russia adopted in the 1870s the German reserve system, under which young males, after active service, were placed in the reserve, subject to recall in the event of war. The Russian reserve system, however, left much to be desired. Professional officers, contemptuous of civilians, assigned low priority to reserve training. Even more compelling were fiscal considerations. Training eligible men for combat duty and then recalling them for periodic retraining was a costly operation that siphoned off funds from the regular army. As a result, the government favored the professional cadres and granted generous exemptions from military service: among those exempted were only sons and university students. This practice explains why such a large proportion of Russian manpower was not available when required during the war: the number of trained reserves was low compared with the potential manpower.
The procedures adopted by the infantry called for three years of active duty beginning at the age of twenty-one, followed by seven years of reserve status in the so-called First Levy and eight more in the Second Levy. After this, the reservist, now in his late thirties, spent five years in the National Militia (Opolchenie), following which all his military obligations ceased. But because refresher courses were given to reservists in a desultory manner, if at all, for all practical purposes the only reservists on whom the army could count were those in the First Levy: the remainder, men in their thirties and early forties, many years out of uniform, were of no more use than civilians without any military training. In the first six months of the war, Russia would field 6.5 million men: 1.4 million on active duty, 4.4 million trained reservists of the First Levy, and 700,000 fresh recruits. Between January and September 1915, the army would induct another 1.4 million reservists of the First Levy.14 Once this pool of trained manpower was exhausted—and this would happen one year after the outbreak of the war—Russia had at her disposal (apart from 350,000 reservists of the First Levy) only the Second Levy, the Militia, and newly inducted, untrained recruits: an impressive mass of millions, but neither in motivation nor in skill a match for the Germans.
Thus, subjected to closer scrutiny, the Russian “steamroller” appeared quite unimpressive. In the course of the war, Russia managed to mobilize a considerably smaller proportion of her population for active military duty than either France or Germany: 5 percent compared with Germany’s 12 and France’s 16 percent.15 To everyone’s surprise, in 1916 Russia ran out of manpower for her armed forces.16