The Eastern Front 1914-1917
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE EASTERN FRONT 1914–1917
Norman Stone lives in Oxford and Istanbul. He is the author of Hitler, Europe Transformed and World War One: A Short History. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bilkent, where he is now Director of the Turkish-Russian Centre.
NORMAN STONE
THE EASTERN FRONT 1914–1917
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Hodder & Stoughton 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1998
13
Copyright © Norman Stone, 1975
Introduction to the Penguin edition copyright © Norman Stone, 1998
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193885-1
For J. H. Plumb
Contents
List of Maps
Author’s Note
Introduction to the Penguin Edition
Introduction to the 1975 Edition
1 The Army and the State in Tsarist Russia
2 The Military Imperative, July 1914
3 The Opening Round: East Prussia
4 The Opening Round: Galicia
5 The First War-Winter, 1914–1915.
6 The Austro-Hungarian Emergency
7 The Shell-Shortage, 1915
8 The Retreat, 1915
9 The Political War-Economy, 1916–1917
10 The Second War-Winter, 1915–1916
11 Summer, 1916
12 The Romanian Campaign, 1916–1917
13 War and Revolution, 1917
Notes
Index
Maps
The line-up for war, 1914
Tannenberg
Lwów—the first clash in Galicia, August 1914
Lódz, 1914
Galicia, 1914–15
The Carpathian battle, early 1915
Winter battle in Masuria, early 1915
The Central Powers’ triple offensive of 1915 and the Russian retreat
The Brusilov campaign
The Romanian campaigns, end of 1916
The maps are based on those reproduced in The History of the First World War published by Purnell for B.P.C. Publishing Ltd.
Author’s Note
A ‘common-sense’ system of transliteration from Cyrillic script has been used throughout. I have used the English ‘y’ as a consonant, and left ‘i’ to cover both Russian vowels approximating to it. I have omitted apostrophes signifying soft or hard signs. ‘Kh’ and ‘zh’ signify, as usual, ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ and ‘j’ in ‘jardin.
I have tried to be consistent as regards place-names that have changed several times in the course of this century, but it is difficult. My own inclination is to call every town by its modern name, but sometimes this becomes strikingly anachronistic (e.g. ‘Olsztyn’ for ‘Allenstein’ in East Prussia) and I have sometimes made concessions from my own rule.
Introduction to the Penguin Edition
When it came out in 1975, this book was something of a pioneer. In the West, there had been, in the sixties, a huge wave of interest in the First World War (my own interest in it was sparked off partly when I found Churchill’s World Crisis in the school library, and particularly when, in 1958, I read Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields). But from the Soviet Union, not much came out. Every belligerent country, including shattered Turkey, produced lengthy official histories and the archives were remarkably well-ordered to produce them. However, there was nothing comparable from the Soviet Union, the military archives of which remained, mainly, sealed. Of course the whole subject was vast and very difficult–even the Germans had not completed their official history by the end of the Second World War-and it cannot have helped that some qualified military historians were purged by Stalin in the thirties. Whatever you said about the Tsarist Russian army might give you trouble. If you wrote in a positive, patriotic way about it, you might offend against the Communist orthodoxy, by which everything Tsarist was condemned. If, on the other hand, you concentrated on the negative side, you could offend against the nationalist line which emerged with Stalin and which flourished under Brezhnev. Even the obvious sources were quite difficult to obtain; I was told, some years later, that The Eastern Front was listed in an East German catalogue, but could not be read without permission. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn had great difficulty in assembling various books and articles for the enormous, semi-demi-fictional account of the First World War and the Revolution, The Red Wheel, that he was planning, because the subject was still, in the seventies, taboo. Nowadays, we might of course expect a proper history of the First World War from Russia’s new historians, but in present circumstances they all have other things to do. So, for the moment, my own book is still a filler of the gap.
When I wrote it, in the later sixties and early seventies, I could not have obtained access to Russian archives. However, there was a great deal in the West. The Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, collected documents from the Russian emigration; its founder, the later President Hoover, had been in Russia after the Civil War to organize famine-relief and he collected documents in return for food-some of the documents very revealing indeed. In Paris, the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine had a vast amount, and at home in England I found a remarkable number of books, whether in Cambridge University Library, where Professor Elizabeth Hill had built up astonishing reserves, or the British Museum and that enduringly splendid institution, the Imperial War Museum. I could also use the records of British and French observers, some of whom wrote with great talent, and of course there were the archives of the Austro-Hungarian army, in Vienna, where I had spent three years. These archives survived remarkably well, and like other British historians, I had been given a privileged run of them by a very friendly and helpful staff. The German side of things could be studied from printed sources only, although, as it turns out, quite a number of the documents on which the German official history was to be based were taken to Moscow after capture in 1945. I shall be interested to see whether my accounts of some of the battles-sometimes ‘hunches’-stand up. I was flattered to discover that the most up-to-date account on the side of the Central Powers, Manfred Rauchensteiner’s Der
Tod des Doppeladlers (1993), bears out what I said about the calamitous miscalculations made over mobilization in 1914.
As The Easten Front moved on, it became much more of a Russian than an Austro-Hungarian or German book. Its focus had originally been on the battlefields, and reconstructing events there was laborious enough, but quite quickly I became interested in the functioning of the army as an institution, and especially in the Russian economy at war. In the sixties, historians were interested in ‘modernization and so, disastrously, were English and Scottish local authorities and architects, who tore apart our Victorian cities in order to create what they hoped would be little Chicagos. The American, Walt Rostow, had produced the fashionable optimistic American book of the decade when he published his book about industrial ‘take-off saying that places became modern when they were able to save ten per cent of their national incomes, and as an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, taught by the legendary Neil McKendrick, I had become aware of the importance of industrial revolutions in general. There was a Russian equivalent, of a lurid kind.
Moving into the history of Russia, I had inevitably become involved in the business of Stalin’s alleged modernization of a backward country. After all, he defeated the Germans, whereas the last Tsar had been defeated by them. In the early days of working on The Easten Front, I had come under the influence of E. H. Carr, the historian of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he had no time at all for Tsarist Russia, a backward place, he said, filled with feckless peasants. Stalin imposed Five Year Plans, dragooned the peasants into industry, starving or imprisoning millions of them in the process. ‘Was Stalin necessary?’ was a question that, in those days, historians seriously asked. Carr clearly thought so.
How backward was Tsarist Russia in 1914? There could be no better test of this than the First World War itself—as Orwell said, war is a try-your-strength machine, and only muscles get the jack-pot. Early on, on the basis of Tsarist generals’ memoirs, or even just of Stalinist economic histories, I had picked up the standard version, that the Russian economy was too feeble to produce war-material in adequate quantities. This view of things was quite widespread, and it had been taken up by both Lloyd George and Churchill, who wanted to divert British troops from the charnel-house of the western front into more promising campaigns elsewhere to help the Russians.
In fact, when I reached the Hoover Institution, I discovered accounts there of what had really happened as to the supply of war-material, and it was not what I had expected at all. The wherewithal for a proper war-economy was in fact there, and, by September 1915, war-goods were being produced in quantities that were at least respectable. In the mean time, there had been what I now recognize as a very Russian story-of mistrust, of the wrong people in charge, of bizarre rivalries, of paralyzing secretiveness. Especially, the bureaucrats did not trust the industrialists, and supposed that, given state money, they would just make a mess of things and levant with the proceeds. Then, when matters did improve, artillerists did not co-operate with each other or with the infantry. Of course, in terms of the figures for the condition of the Russian economy in 1914, we have known, now, for generations that, in the years before 1914, it was booming. That, in my opinion, was really what made the German government ready for war in 1914: if it had waited until 1917, then Russia would indeed have been too strong to be overthrown by a German army that also had France to deal with. Converting the new industrial strength into a war-effort was very difficult, but the industrial strength was there. E. H. Carr did not like this, and I escaped from his influence, which was not in any event a benign one.
The ‘backwardness’ had less to do with economic power than with its utilization, and, here, the nature of the Tsarist military organization was of the greatest importance. William Fuller’s Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881–1914 (Princeton 1985) covers this in much greater detail than I could command, and bears out much of what my ‘hunch’ told me.
My account of the Russian shell-crisis seems to be on the right lines, but in an important matter I may have erred. Soviet historians were a great deal more prolific on economic and social matters than on military ones, and they were no friends to the private industrialists who were engaged on war-work. Until we have studies properly based on the archives of the War Ministry, or, if they survive, those of the factories themselves, we shall not know how effective private producers were. My own account needs correction through two books—Lewis H. Siegelbaum’s The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia 1914–1917. A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London 1983) and Peter Gatrell’s Tsarist Russian Economy 1851–1917 (London 1986) which is partly based on his own studies of archives in the Soviet Union on precisely this subject. The Institute of History in Moscow also published a four-volume record of the Osoboye Coveshchaniye po oborone gosudarstva 1915–1918 gg. (Moscow 1975–1980) and the British dimension of the whole story is ably described in Keith Neilson’s Strategy and Supply (London, 1984).
By the end of 1916, the military events of the Eastern Front had petered out, and I should have needed a whole new book to do justice to the Revolution that followed. My final chapter was therefore just an essay on 1917, where I suggested that ‘modernization’ was going on, under war-time disguise, and that our old friend, the Russian peasant, had got in the way, preventing adequate supplies of food from reaching the cities and thereby provoking revolution. Part of this is fair enough, I think: it is right to call attention to inflation as a factor in the Revolution, and it is right to show how the Tsarist government lost control of its finances. However, it now seems clear that the Russian peasantry were not at all as backward as legend has it. On this, there are some important books. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe’s Die Lage der Bauern in Russland (Munich 1983) shows that, in point of fact, they ate rather better than the West German population of 1952, and Lars T. Lih’s Bread and Authority in Russia 1914–1921 (Berkeley, California 1990) has a far more knowledgeable story than my own, which was still quite heavily based on the prejudices of E. H. Carr, not a respecter of peasants. Under the benign influence of Teodor Shanin, whose Awkward Class, about the peasants, had come out in 1972, I had begun to understand something of Russian agriculture, but the tendency to blame ‘the peasants’ nevertheless makes too much of a showing in this book. Solzhenitsyn in The Red Wheel approaches the problem of food-shortages in a quite different way, showing how they generated anti-Tsarist myths and legendry. Saint Petersburg faced far, far worse shortages in 1942, but never rebelled. Why?
There is one great omission in this book, which, I hope, later generations will make good: the common soldier. Apart from an aside or two, this was not a subject with which I felt at all familiar. Nowadays, partly because of the great wave of sixties interest in the First World War, the study of soldiers’ letters, and of military morale in general, is rather well-advanced, and my old Cambridge colleague, Hew Strachan, is shortly to produce a two-volume history of the First World War which promises to deal with this question at serious length. How did the ordinary soldiers and the junior officers stand the horrors of the Western or Italian fronts? How did their Russian equivalents respond to those of the Eastern front, and what exactly occurred in the summer and autumn of 1917, when the force, somehow, just seized up? Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy (1997) and Richard Pipes’s Russian Revolution (1990) have dealt with this, in different ways, but until we have a proper investigation of the archives, assuming that they still have the material, we cannot be sure as to what happened. Armies do not usually mutiny, and junior officers usually have close relations with their men, as was shown when, in defeat, the German army had to evacuate France and Belgium. Why, and in what sense, the Russian army mutinied as it did in 1917 is still something of a mystery. I hope that, at some stage, we are going to have a proper, authoritative history of it all from Moscow.
I should like to record some debts of gratitude. Michael Sissons gave me an enormous boost, both when he suggested this book thirty-three ye
ars ago, when I was still a student, and put up with its decade-long gestation. I was delighted to take up the offer, from him and from Simon Winder, of Penguin, that we should reissue the book. I have also had much support from Dr Ali Dogramaci, the Rector of Bilkent University at Ankara, who invited me to help establish a Turkish–Russian Institute, for which we have high hopes. I should like to thank Bahadir Koc, a virtuoso of the Internet, for finding out new publications, and to Mr Alkan Kizildel, an amateur military historian of that old and admirable school, for identifying questionable assertions as to weaponry, and misprints which had escaped my own scrutiny.
Bilkent University, Ankara
April 1997
Introduction
Winston Churchill wrote a book about the eastern front of the First World War. He dedicated it to the Tsarist army, and titled it ‘The Unknown War’. His book is a brilliant piece of narrative, bringing out the drama of this front to the full. But the events of this front are still ‘unknown’, for this part of the First World War received much less coverage in English or French than even the Balkan or Mesopotamian fronts. It did receive coverage in German, but very often these works present a purely German view of the Russo-German war, and the bias has been transferred to well-known English works, such as those of Liddell Hart. Churchill’s own book was based on a very narrow range of sources, most of them German, even though his ‘feel’ for the subject allowed him to make much more of these sources than a lesser writer would have done. There has been little in western languages since then, although Soviet and émigré writers produced a substantial number of studies of the front that might have permitted more authoritative western-language presentation of the battles of this front. There is no official Soviet history of the army’s performance in the First World War; and until there is, much that happened must remain unclear. None the less, it is possible to arrive at a basic narrative of events, and to make some effort at explaining them, especially when comparison can be made of the various Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian sources.