Of the three other Special Councils—Transport, Food Supply, and Fuel Supply—the first ranked as the most important. Its accomplishments included improving the railroad line from Archangel to Vologda by converting it from a narrow to a normal gauge, which tripled the freight it could carry from this port of entry for Allied supplies.111 The council also initiated the construction of the railroad line to Murmansk.
While the immediate importance of the Special Councils lay in their contribution to the war effort, they also had a major political significance. In the words of the historian Maxim Kovalevskii, they were a “complete innovation”112—the first institutions in Russia in which private persons sat side by side on terms of equality with government functionaries. This went a long way toward the dissolution of one of the last vestiges of patrimonialism still embedded in the Russian state structure, which held that the administration of the realm was the exclusive domain of officials appointed by the Tsar and in possession of “rank.” It was a development perhaps less dramatic than granting the parliament the right to choose ministers would have been, but one scarcely less important in the country’s constitutional evolution.
A third organization created at this time to assist the government in running the war effort was the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils, known as Zemgor. The government, which in the past had forbidden national associations of self-government organs, now finally relented, and in August 1915 permitted the zemstva and Municipal Councils to form their own national unions to help take care of invalids and refugees. As if to emphasize its humanitarian mission, the Zemstvo Union (Zemskii Soiuz) adopted the Red Cross as its emblem. The chairmanship of this organization was assumed by Prince George Evgenevich Lvov, a prominent zemstvo figure who had directed a like effort during the war with Japan. Similar authorization was given concurrently to the Municipal Councils. In November 1915, the two groups combined into the Zemgor, which, with the help of many thousands of volunteers as well as salaried employees, assisted the civilian population to cope with the hardships of war. When masses of refugees fled into the interior of Russia from the combat zone (among them Jews forcefully evicted on suspicion of pro-German sympathies), it was Zemgor that took care of them. Bureaucrats and army officers dismissed these civilian busybodies as “zemstvo hussars.” Nevertheless, as in so many other areas of activity, the authorities had no choice but to rely on private bodies for lack of adequate resources of their own.113
In addition to these quasi-public private bodies, volunteer organizations of all kinds sprang up in Russia at the time, notably producer and consumer cooperatives.114
Thus, in the midst of the war, a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the formal structure of what on the war’s eve had been a semi-patrimonial, semi-constitutional state: its development resembled the vigorous growth of saplings in the shade of an old and decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank alongside rank holders in governmental institutions and the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptoms of a silent revolution, the more effective in that it was accomplished to meet actual needs rather than to realize Utopian visions. Conservative bureaucrats were dismayed by the rise of this “second” or shadow government.115 For the very same reason, the opposition brimmed with confidence. Kadet leaders boasted that the mixed and civic organizations created during the war would demonstrate so convincingly their superiority over the bureaucracy that once peace was restored nothing would be able to prevent them from taking charge of the country.116
*The Russians gained additional confidence in their ability to crush the Austrians from access to Austrian operational plans provided by their agent, Colonel Alfred Redl, who worked for them between 1905 and 1913. See William C. Fuller, Jr., in E. R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 115–16.
*This procedure followed the one adopted in the war with Japan, when Russia had also carried out a partial mobilization: L. G. Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot Rossii v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1986), 11.
*Russian Jews were, in theory, liable to military service. But because there were more men available for the annual draft than the services required, Jews had little difficulty buying their way out of conscription by bribing the examining doctors or the clerks in charge of birth certificates. In 1914–17, however, they were drafted en masse: it is estimated that some half a million Jews served in the Russian army during World War I.
*Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot, 70. After the Japanese war, Russia also adopted the policy of not ordering abroad any military equipment that could be produced at home: A. A. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii v mirovuiu voinu, I, 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), 363.
*N. N. Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossiia v mirovoi wine, I (Paris, 1939), 56–57. A. L. Sidorov in Ekonomicheskoepolozhenie Rossii vgody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1973), 567, calculates that in terms of territorial coverage, Russia’s railroad network was one-eleventh of Germany’s and one-seventh of Austria-Hungary’s.
†St. Petersburg, which sounded Germanic, was renamed Petrograd on the outbreak of the war.
‡In early 1915, the British attempted, without success, at Gallipoli to break through this blockade. See W. S. Churchill, The Unknown War: The Eastern Front (New York, 1931), 304, and John Buchan, A History of the Great War, II, (Boston, 1922), 12. Had the Gallipoli campaign met the expectations of Churchill, its main protagonist, the course of Russian history may have been very different.
*A leading proponent of this theory was I. S. Bliokh, whose six-volume study appeared in an English condensation as The Future of War (New York, 1899).
*Rennenkampf was captured in early 1918 by the Bolsheviks near Taganrog while helping General Lavr Kornilov. According to a contemporary newspaper, he was frightfully tortured and then shot: NZh, No. 83/298, May 4, 1918, p. 3.
*E. von Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, 1914–1916 (Berlin, 1920), 17. In evaluating Falkenhayn’s assessment, however, it must be borne in mind that, convinced that Germany could gain victory only in the west, he had strenuously opposed offensive operations against the Russians. In his memoirs he could have hardly been expected to show impartiality toward Hindenburg, who in August 1916 replaced him as chief of staff.
†It must also be remembered that Hindenburg and Ludendorff destroyed the Russian Second Army without the help of reinforcements from the west. The latter arrived in time to help expel the Russian First Army from East Prussia.
*Sources on the Progressive Bloc have been published in KA, No. 1–2/50–51 (1932), 117–60, No. 3/52 (1932), 143–96, and No. 1/56 (1933), 80–135, as well as in B. B. Grave, ed., Burzhuaziia nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 19–32. See further V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), passim.