Russia’s industries and transport fell in nearly every respect short of the task that lay ahead of them.
Russia traditionally depended for the production of military equipment on government factories, a practice motivated by an unwillingness to entrust national security to civilians.* How poorly Russian state industries were prepared to cope with the demands of modern warfare may be illustrated by the following figures. At the end of 1914, with the initial mobilization completed, Russia had under arms 6.5 million men, but only 4.6 million rifles. To meet these shortages and compensate for combat losses, the army required each month a minimum of 100,000 to 150,000 new rifles, but Russian industry could at best provide only 27,000.23 In the first months of the war, therefore, some Russian soldiers had to wait for their comrades to fall in order to arm themselves. Serious proposals were then advanced to equip the troops with hatchets mounted on poles.24 Even after energetic measures had been adopted in 1915 and 1916 to involve civilian industry in war production, Russia lacked the capacity to manufacture all the needed rifles and had to import from the United States and Japan; even so, there were never enough of them.25
Another serious shortcoming occurred in artillery ammunition, especially 76mm shells, the standard caliber of Russian field artillery, which the armed forces would expend at a much higher rate than the General Staff had anticipated. At the beginning of the war, Russian artillery was allotted 1,000 shells per gun. The actual consumption proved many times higher, with the result that after four months of combat the ordnance depots were depleted.26 The most that existing manufacturers could provide in 1914 was some 9,000 shells a month.27 The result was an acute shortage, which had the most adverse effect on Russian performance in the campaigns of 1915.
Transport was arguably the weakest link in Russia’s war preparedness: Alexander Guchkov, who would serve as Minister of War in the First Provisional Government, told Knox in early 1917 that the disorganization of transport had dealt the Russian cause a worse blow than any military defeats.28 It was also the most difficult one to rectify under war conditions because of the time required to lay down railroad beds, especially in the cold northern regions. In relation to her territory, Russia fell far behind the other major belligerents: whereas for each 100 square kilometers, Germany had 10.6 kilometers of railways, France 8.8, and Austria-Hungary 6.4, Russia had a mere 1.1.29 This was one of the major reasons for the slowness of her mobilization. According to a German expert, in Western countries a mobilized soldier had to travel 200–300 kilometers from his home to the induction point; in Russia the distance was 900–1,000 kilometers.* But even these dismal comparisons do not tell the whole story, because three-quarters of Russian railways had only one track. As soon as the war broke out, the army requisitioned one-third of the rolling stock, which left too little for industrial and consumer needs, eventually causing shortages of food and raw materials in areas remote from their sources of production.
Nothing better reveals the lack of foresight on the part of Russia’s leaders than their failure during peacetime to prepare transportation outlets to the West. It should have been evident for some time before hostilities that the Germans would seal off the Baltic and the Turks the Black Sea, leaving Russia effectively blockaded. Wartime Russia has been compared to a house to which entry could be gained only by way of the chimney.30 Alas, even that chimney was clogged. Aside from Vladivostok, thousands of miles away and linked to central Russia by the single-track Trans-Siberian Railroad, Russia had only two naval outlets to the external world. One, Archangel, frozen six months of the year, was linked to the center by a one-track narrow-gauge railroad. Murmansk, far and away the most important port under wartime conditions because it was permanently ice-free, had no railway in 1914: a line to connect it with Petrograd was begun only in 1915 with the help of English engineers and completed in January 1917, on the eve of the Revolution.† This incredible situation is explainable in part by the unwillingness of the tsarist government to rely on foreign suppliers of military equipment and in part the incompetence of the Minister of Transport from 1909 to 1915, S. V. Rukhlov, a dyed-in-the-wool, anti-Semitic reactionary. In consequence, the Russian Empire, a great Eurasian power, found itself as effectively blockaded during the war as Germany and Austria. Much of the raw materials and equipment sent to Russia by the Allies in 1915–17 ended up stockpiled at Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok for lack of transport.‡ Inadequacies of railroad transport also bore heavy responsibility for the food shortages which afflicted the cities of Russia’s north in 1916 and 1917. Here, as in so many other respects, the mistaken expectation that the war would be short accounted for the initial shortcomings; but it was political and managerial failures that prevented Russia from overcoming these deficiencies once they had become apparent.
The Russian performance in a protracted war would also be hampered by flaws in the military command as well as in the relationship between the military and civilian authorities.
Although Russia had, in theory, a Commander in Chief of all armed forces, in practice the conduct of military operations was decentralized. The combat zone was divided into several “fronts,” each with its own commander and its own strategic plan. Such an arrangement precluded a comprehensive strategy. According to one authority, the function of headquarters was in large measure limited to registering the plans of operations of the commanders of the separate fronts.31
A statute of field administration, adopted at the outbreak of the war, vested the army command with full authority over territories in the zone of combat as well as military installations in the rear. In these areas, the command administered both the civilian population and the military personnel without even being required to communicate with the civilian authorities. The Commander in Chief was empowered here to dismiss any and all officials, including governors, mayors, and chairmen of zemstvo boards. In consequence of this procedure, designed for a brief war, vast regions of the Empire—Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces, Archangel, Vladivostok, and even Petrograd itself—were withdrawn from civilian control.32 Russia found herself administratively bifurcated. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Commander in Chief, said that Prime Minister Goremykin felt quite comfortable with this arrangement, believing it was none of his business to interfere with the areas in or near the theater of operations.33
Paradoxically, some of Russia’s leading figures saw her economic backwardness as a source of strength. It was said that the advanced industrial countries had become so dependent on the supply from abroad of raw materials and foodstuffs, on the cooperation of the various sectors of their economies, and on the availability of skilled labor that they could not withstand the rigors of war. With her more primitive economy, Russia was less vulnerable to disruption: abundant foodstuffs and inexhaustible manpower enabled her to fight indefinitely.* The optimism did not go unchallenged. In 1909 Struve warned:
Let us say frankly: compared to Germany and Austria, which, realistically viewed, are our potential enemies, Russia’s weakness lies in her insufficient economic power, her economic immaturity, and the resulting financial dependence on other countries. Under modern conditions of military conflict, all the imaginary advantages of Russia’s natural or semi-natural economy will turn into a source of military weakness.… Theoretically, no idea is more perverse and none more dangerous in practice than the one which holds that the economic backwardness of Russia can bring some sort of military advantages.34