Artículo científico

The Russian army that marched to war in 1914 reflected Russian society.

Russia’s population of 170 million was twice as large as Germany’s, but had less than half its per capita gross domestic product. Its railroads, war production, and educational level all reflected that basic fact. Eco-nomic backwardness meant Russia could not use its manpower effec-tively. It mobilized less of its population than the other major powers. In 1914, Russia called up 4.5 million men to supplement the 1.4 million already serving, and over the course of the war, Russia mobilized some 15 million men, slightly more than Germany did with half the population.

Russia’s low levels of education meant that it had a shortage of officers and noncommissioned officers. This was, indeed, one reason for its rela-tively low conscription. The army, though aiming at universal service, could not induct and train more than a quarter or third of the annual cohort of men reaching the service age of 21. During the war, the Russian government was slow to extend conscription to the majority of men who had escaped service earlier in life, fearing its political repercussions and the greater training they needed.

Russia’s relative poverty also affected its soldiers’ equipment. All powers wrestled with poor preparedness to some degree. Russian offi-cials, like all others in Europe, assumed the next war would be short and

planned accordingly. No state was ready for a long war, and all had to improvise. That said, Russian policies worsened matters. Nicholas’s pre-war insistence on rebuilding a navy starved the army of resources. Vladi-mir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov had tried and failed to reduce Russia’s dependence on Polish fortresses, leaving thousands of artillery pieces and millions of shells in useless installations. Russia had only 4.5 million rifles at the outbreak of war, not enough to equip the initial contingents, and the problem worsened as the war lengthened. The country had stockpiled a thousand rounds per artillery piece, but that proved woefully insufficient.

The Russian aristocracy’s distaste for businessmen meant domestic pro-duction was concentrated in state armories. Russia’s booming private industry thus lacked experience and expertise in military orders. The assumption had been that foreign purchases would make up any short-falls, but this neglected the time lag for such deliveries, and, more impor-tantly, the simultaneous rush of orders from other belligerents.

Though World War I is often regarded as destroying tsarist Russia, it initially improved the tsar’s domestic standing. In a strong but brief out-burst of patriotism, a strike wave building since 1912 dissipated. Russian educated society, alienated from the tsar’s government, rallied around national defense. Even Russia’s revolutionary left regarded war in defense of Russia as legitimate, and, importantly, the Duma’s socialist parties abstained from voting for war credits, rather than opposing those credits altogether. After voting, the Duma dissolved, granting its govern-ment a free hand in the conduct of the war. Mobilization went remarkably smoothly, with draft resistance acceptably low. Even St. Petersburg’s German-sounding name was changed to the more Russian Petrograd.

Russia’s war plan in summer 1914 was Schedule 19(A). Unlike any oth-er state, Russia envisaged simultaneous offensives against two great powers. In the north, the Northwestern Front’s two armies (9 corps) would drive into East Prussia from the east and the south. In the south, the Southwestern Front’s four armies (16 corps) would invade Galicia from the north and the east. In this division of effort, however, neither attack enjoyed overwhelming predominance. In the Russo-Japanese War, War Minister Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin had taken over field com-mand against the Japanese. In 1914, though, overall comcom-mand went not to Sukhomlinov, who stayed at the War Ministry as a glorified supply offi-cer, but instead to the Grand Duke Nicholas, Tsar Nicholas’s first cousin once removed, who hated Sukhomlinov. He operated through a new high command, Stavka, created from the Main Directorate of the General Staff and based in a central location at Baranovichi. His chief of staff was Niko-lai Nikolaevich Yanushkevich, a thoroughgoing mediocrity distinguished by high-placed friends, an addiction to pornography, and pathological anti-Semitism. The Main Directorate of the General Staff remained to han-dle mobilization, manning, training, and administration, leaving war

planning and operations to Stavka. Government of extensive territory behind the front lines was handed to the two Fronts.

The first campaigns of the war illustrated Russia’s awkward position.

Against Germany, high-level incompetence brought disaster, but against Austria-Hungary, hard fighting won impressive successes. In East Prussia, the Northwestern Front attacked with two armies: the 1st Army pushing west, while the 2nd Army moved from Poland in the south.

Geography worked against them. The invading Russian armies were sep-arated by the Masurian Lakes and fighting essentially independently. The Russians had few radios for communication. Those they did possess, lack-ing trained operators, broadcast without codes. Iakov Grigor ’evich Zhilinskii, the Northwestern Front’s commander, made no effort to coor-dinate his suborcoor-dinates. Still, Germany defended East Prussia with only a tenth of its available manpower, sending everyone possible against France. That left Germany’s 8th Army defending East Prussia with 14 divi-sions against more than double that number.

The Germans first blunted the Russian eastern pincer by moving against the 1st Army. The Russians crossed the border to East Prussia on 4/17 August, and after initial skirmishing, the Germans struck back in force on 7/20 August. The Russians proved remarkably resilient, sending their German attackers retreating in disarray. The 8th Army’s commander lost his nerve and was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, who later used his successes to take control of the German war effort. Fatally, the 1st Army failed to exploit its success, halting instead. This gave the German 8th Army a free hand to turn from the 1st Army’s eastern invasion to the 2nd Army’s southern invasion. The 2nd Army had crossed the border on 7/20 August, pushing north into a vacuum. The German divisions then shifted, either marching southwest behind the screen of the Masur-ian Lakes to attack the 2nd Army’s right flank or circling by rail to attack its left flank. The 2nd Army marched forward blindly into a trap. German units linked up behind it on 16/29 August, cutting off communications, supplies, and reinforcements. More vigorous action might have permitted a breakout—there were more Russians in the pocket than Germans sur-rounding it. Instead, devoid of leadership, 100,000 Russians surrendered.

The 2nd Army’s commander shot himself.

After the disastrous end of the 2nd Army (labeled the Battle of Tannen-berg by the Germans), the German 8th Army returned east to expel the stalled Russian 1st Army from East Prussia. Without the Russians walking into a trap, however, they did not move quickly or decisively enough to encircle and destroy the 2nd Army wholesale. The front stabilized along the prewar frontier. Zhilinskii, the Northwestern Front’s commander, was removed and later posted as liaison to France.

At terrible cost, the Russians had achieved precisely what they prom-ised the French. They drew the attention of the German high command,

and more importantly German troops, east to the defense of the frontier, away from Paris. On 12/25 August, the German high command had ordered three corps to the Eastern Front, where they arrived too late to make any difference. This critically weakened the German sweep through Belgium and south to Paris, which just failed to take the French capital and end the war.

While much attention, then and now, has been devoted to the defeat in East Prussia, Russia devoted more men and resources to its initial cam-paign against Galicia, an Austrian-ruled arc of Ukraine extending north-east from the Carpathian Mountains. Austria-Hungary’s war began with traditional Habsburg incompetence. Austrian military planners under-stood the need to prepare for three contingencies: war against Russia, against Serbia, or against both. Accordingly, the Austrian army was split into three groups for mobilization. Minimal-group Balkan was intended for Serbia, Group A for Russia, and Group B, delaying its deployment, for whichever sector the high command directed. When Austria declared war on Serbia, Franz Conrad von Ho¨tzendorf, chief of the Austrian Gener-al Staff, sent Group B south. After Russian intervention, Conrad needed those troops in Galicia. Reversing them en route would have thrown the Austrian railway system into chaos, so instead seven Austrian corps trav-eled south to Serbia, got back on their trains, and rolled back north to Galicia. As a result, despite Austria’s superior speed of mobilization, the Galician campaign was fought on Austrian soil.

The battles for Galicia involved 1.5 million soldiers on a 250-mile front.

In an epic clash, an Austrian invasion north into Russia’s Polish salient collided with a two-pronged Russian invasion of Galicia in August and September 1914. The commander of Russia’s Southwestern Front, Nikolai Iudovich Ivanov, was not particularly talented, but not the manifest incompetent Zhilinskii was. Austria had four armies in Galicia, totaling around 40 infantry and 10 cavalry divisions. The 1st and 4th Armies, to the west, planned to move northeast toward Lublin and the southern flank of the Polish salient. The 3rd and 2nd Armies, farther east, were tasked with limited advances to protect Lvov and shield the right flank of the first two armies as they moved north. Russia’s Southwestern Front ultimately had five armies, with over 50 infantry and 18 cavalry divisions.

The Russian plan for Galicia, like East Prussia, was a pincer attack. The 4th and 5th Armies (and later the 9th) were to push south into western Galicia, putting them on a collision course with the Austrian offensive.

The 3rd and 8th Armies planned to move west into eastern Galicia along the north slopes of the Carpathians, threatening a double envelopment of the entire Austrian force.

The campaign opened with meeting engagements as Russian and Aus-trian divisions collided in eastern and in western Galicia. The Russian armies moving south had the worst of it, and withdrew back north. The

Russian advance from the east, however, smashed the Austrian armies moving to stop it and took Lvov on 21 August/3 September. Conrad decided to retreat his eastern armies directly west, bringing them under the shelter of his western armies. As the exhausted 4th Army turned to stop the Russian advance from the east, it was likewise defeated. Worse, by weakening his northern push, Conrad enabled a renewed Russian offensive that erased Austria’s previous gains. With his armies collapsing under the Russian onslaught, Conrad ordered a retreat west on the night of 29–30 August/11–12 September 1914, abandoning Galicia and leaving the fortress of Przemysl with its garrison of 120,000 to Russian encircle-ment. The Austrians lost 400,000 killed, wounded, or captured, compared to the Russians’ 250,000.

After the Austrian retreat, the Russians were in a position to force the Carpathian Mountain passes into the Hungarian plain. Instead, the Rus-sian command attacked west out of central Poland. Massing the 5th, 4th, and 9th Armies on the Vistula River southeast of Warsaw, the Russians crossing the river met a German offensive aimed at breaking through to Warsaw from the south. The Germans made some progress, but failed to cross the Vistula in force and had to withdraw back southwest. Following this German failure, the Russians prepared an offensive from the northern side of the Polish salient. The German 9th Army, operating from north-west of Warsaw, preempted that attack on 29 October/11 November, wedging itself between the 1st and 2nd Armies and threatening to turn south behind the 2nd Army and cut off its retreat. Only a hasty with-drawal toward its supply base at Lodz, Poland, saved the 2nd Army from a second encirclement and destruction. Growing Russian pressure on the buckling Austrian army in the Carpathians led to German assistance in limited counteroffensives and a seesaw struggle for western Galicia.

The vast bloody campaigns of 1914 took a terrible toll on Russia, inflict-ing 1.2 million casualties. The six months had been even harder on Aus-tria. Little was left of the army with which Austria began the war. It had called up 3.5 million men at the outbreak of war, and (discounting rear echelon troops) had only 250,000 left by December 1914. It had suffered as many casualties as Russia from a much smaller population, and those losses exacerbated its ethnic tensions. Austria-Hungary’s dual structure, split between Austrian and Hungarian halves, made it impossible to cen-tralize government and rationalize the economy for total war. Already over the winter of 1914–1915, it was clear only massive German assis-tance, including the growing integration of German officers into the Aus-trian army, could sustain Austria’s war effort

The 1914 fighting illustrates key characteristics of World War I on the Eastern Front. The first battles of World War I, on both the Eastern and the Western Front, were far more mobile and more deadly than later

western campaigns. Soldiers moved and fought as their doctrine taught:

in groups, in the open. They were killed by the hundreds of thousands before bitter experience taught them to spread out, go to ground, and dig trenches to survive. Unlike the west, though, the Eastern Front never stagnated into immobile trench warfare. First, the front was twice as long as in the west. The Eastern Front stretched 600 miles from the Romanian border to the Baltic Sea, farther after Romania’s entry in 1916, compared to 300 miles from Switzerland to the English Channel. Unit densities were much lower, making defenses fragile. A dearth of roads and railways made it difficult to shift reserves and halt breakthroughs.

Late 1914 and early 1915 clarified Russian war aims. In September 1914, Russia had agreed with Britain and France to make no separate peace with Germany and Austria. What Russia wanted out of the war, and demanded from its alliance partners, was the Turkish Straits. There were other goals, including the unification of German- and Austrian-controlled Poland with Russian Poland. Poland’s precise future status was a touchy subject. No power wished to alienate Polish soldiers (fighting for all three powers in eastern Europe) by denying a sovereign Polish state, and Russia shifted toward endorsing Polish autonomy over the course of the war.

Though the Ottoman Empire had not initially been part of the war, it tipped into the German camp. A German officer, Liman von Sanders, had rebuilt the Ottoman army after the Balkan Wars, and two German cruisers took refuge in Ottoman waters in the first days of the war. After those cruisers passed into the Black Sea and shelled Odessa, the Allies declared war on the Turks in October 1914. Once the Ottoman Empire was in the war, neither Britain, France, nor Russia had any qualms about partitioning it. They apportioned Ottoman territory among themselves, and in March 1915 Britain and France explicitly endorsed Russian posses-sion of the Turkish Straits after the war. Russia in return accepted that sub-stantial sections of the Ottoman Empire would fall to Britain and France.

As part of the negotiations to bring Italy into the war on the Allied side, in April 1915 Russia acquiesced in Italian possession of Austrian territory populated by South Slavs. This payment was sufficient to produce Italian participation. On 10/23 May 1915, Italy joined the war against Austria-Hungary.

Russia’s war against the Ottoman Empire provided it with its only unqualified success of the war. In late 1914, an Ottoman invasion of Trans-caucasia was annihilated by outnumbered Russian troops, who by early 1915 pushed into Ottoman territory. Through 1915 and 1916, the Russians pressed farther, even moving south into Iran, through Tehran, to link up with the British in Mesopotamia. Difficult terrain prevented further exploitation into the Ottoman heartland, but Russia’s Caucasus frontier was secure.