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Accounting for Russian military failure, 1854–1917

If it was military success that built up the Russian Empire, it was military defeat that helped to bring the empire down. Russia’s great victory over Napoleon seemingly validated the military system as it was and had closed the eyes of many to its defects. Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) was personally devoted to the army, desired to impose military order and discipline on his country as a whole, and frequently turned to military officers to fill the most important posts in the civil administration. Yet the army suffered from his neurotic obsession with petty details and his penchant for staging massive parades and reviews, which, though impressive, did little to enhance combat readiness. Nicholas did manage to beat the Persians in 1828, the Ottomans in 1829 and the Poles in 1831. Then, too, his Caucasian Corps fought credibly if unimaginatively and indecisively in its interminable campaigns against the Muslim guerrillas in Chechnia and Daghestan.23 But when Russia had to battle Britain, France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War of 1853–6 the upshot was a military and political debacle. In its struggle with this powerful coalition, the imperial government fell back on the methods of 1812 and by means of extraordinary levies inundated the 980,000-man regular army with over a million newly mobilised Cossacks, militia and raw recruits. But Russia found it hard to bring more than a fraction of this strength to bear against the enemy since hundreds of thousands of troops were pinned down in Poland, campaigning in the Caucasus, guarding the Baltic frontier or garrisoning the vast expanses of the empire. For much of the time, allied forces on the Crimea peninsula were actually numerically superior to Russia’s. Russia’s principal Black Sea Fortress, Sebastopol, fell in large measure due to the unremitting pressure of the allies’ technologically superior siege artillery. During the conflict, which was the empire’s most sanguinary war of the nineteenth century, that of 1812 excepted, 450,000 Russian soldiers and sailors lost their lives.24 The terms of the Peace of Paris of 1856, with their ban on Russian warships in the Black Sea, were a humiliating infringement of Russia’s sovereignty, and left her southern ports and trade perpetual hostages to the French and British fleets. The Crimean War exploded one of the principle justifications for autocracy – its ability to beget military power and security. The Crimean defeat not only discredited the Russian military system but also destroyed confidence in the empire’s entire panoply of political, social and economic structures.

23See Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).

24John Shelton Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), pp. 455, 471.

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Under the new emperor Alexander II (r. 1855–81) fundamental domestic reform was complemented by a policy of recueillement in foreign affairs. Russia’s military leadership took advantage of the respite from major war to attempt an overhaul of the entire military system. However, the army still did have to cope with ‘small wars’ on the empire’s periphery. Although the capture of imam Shamil in 1859 facilitated the eventual pacification of the Caucasus, in 1863 the Poles rose in a serious rebellion that could only be suppressed by brute force. There were also several campaigns in central Asia during the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. These solidified the military reputations of such prominent generals as M. G. Cherniaev and M. D. Skobelev and effected the submission to St Petersburg of Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva, Transcaspia and Merv. The motivations behind this central Asian imperialism were complex and confused, and ranged from a desire for more defensible frontiers, to a concern for enlarging Russian trade, to a perceived need to concoct a paper threat against Britain in India.25 But a great deal of the impetus behind the advance came from Russia’s ambitious military commanders there, who often sparked off armed clashes with the Muslims in contravention of their orders.

When Russia’s next large-scale war erupted in 1877 against the Ottomans, her military reforms had not yet come to fruition. Yet the protracted eastern crisis that preceded its outbreak did permit the Russian military leadership to develop its mobilisation, concentration and campaign plans with greater than usual care.26 Although Russia won the war, its military performance was mixed. In the hands of excellent commanders, Russian forces were capable of such magnificent actions as the seizure and defence of Shipka Pass and the astounding Balkan winter offensive that brought the Russian army within fifteen kilometres of Constantinople by January 1879.27 But these triumphs were to some extent counterbalanced by the failure of the three bloody attempts to storm Plevna, the epidemic of typhus and cholera on the Caucasus front, the total breakdown in army logistics and the appalling dimensions of the butcher’s bill. Still worse, the other European powers, led by Germany, colluded to prevent Russia from realising her entire set of war aims.

Germany was already the power that Russia feared the most. Since the establishment of Bismarck’s Reich at the close of the Franco-Prussian War,

25Seymour Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia. Bukhara and Khiva, 1 865 –1 924 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 23; Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 211.

26David Alan Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 157–8.

27Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1 861 –1 91 4

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 77–8.

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Russia had been alarmed by the growth in Germany’s power and worried that Berlin had designs for European hegemony. How best to defend the empire from an attack by Germany, perhaps supported by Austria, swiftly became the chief preoccupation of Russia’s military leadership, and was to remain so until 1914. This was the reason that Russia’s venture into east Asian imperialism at the turn of the century so disquieted senior generals. Russia’s acquisition of Port Arthur, its lodgement in Manchuria and its intrigues in Korea were attended by the risk of war with Japan. In the view of such influential figures as War Minister A. N. Kuropatkin, Russia did not have either the military budget or the manpower to protect her new acquisitions in the Far East, confronted as she was by a much more dangerous threat to her security in Europe.

When in February 1904 Japan opened hostilities against Russia by launching a surprise attack on Russia’s Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, the Russian armed forces in the Far East were caught unprepared. Initially outnumbered, her troops dependent for their reinforcement and supply on the attenuated umbilical cord of the Trans-Siberian railway, Russia endured one military reverse after another in the land war. Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese in January 1905 after a seven-month siege, and in central Manchuria Russia suffered serious defeats at Liaoyang, the Sha-Ho, Sandepu and Mukden. Nor did the war at sea produce any news more welcome. Dispatched to the Pacific to engage the Japanese in their home waters, Russia’s Baltic fleet was spectacularly annihilated in the battle of Tsushima Straits (May 1905). Negotiations resulted in the Peace of Portsmouth, which stripped Russia of Port Arthur, her position in Manchuria and half of Sakhalin island.

Russia’s loss of the Japanese war of 1904–5 was not preordained, for she might have won it had she made better operational and strategic decisions during the ground war and had made more offensive use of her naval assets in the Pacific.28 Indeed, despite all of her flagrant military blunders, arguably Russia would have won the war if the revolution of 1905 had not intervened to cripple the military effort. By the time the peace treaty was signed, Russia’s forces outnumbered Japan’s in Manchuria, while Tokyo had run out of reserves and was precariously close to fiscal collapse besides.

The revolution of 1905–7 brought two dire consequences for the Russian army in its train. First, the contagion of rebellion not only blanketed the towns and villages of the empire but also penetrated into the ranks of the army itself. In late 1905 and throughout 1906 (particularly after April) there occurred over

28Julian S. Corbett, Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War 1 904–1 905 , 2 vols. (Annapolis, Md. and Newport, RI: Naval Institute Press and Naval War College Press, 1994), vol. II, pp. 396–7.

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400 military mutinies, in which soldiers defied the orders of their officers and issued economic and political demands.29 Second, the government answered the mass strikes, protests and agrarian disorders with an unprecedented application of military force: on more than 8,000 occasions between 1905–7 military units were called upon to assist in the restoration of order.30 Failed war, revolution and repressive service demoralised the army, disrupted its training and made a shambles of the empire’s external defence posture. It would take the Russian army considerable time, money and intellectual energy to recover. Military defeat engendered introspection and reform, just as it had after 1856, and although by 1914 the reform process still had some years to run, the Russian army was in good enough condition to wage what most assumed would be a short, general conflict in Europe. But neither the Russian army nor Russian society was up to the strain of the protracted, total, industrial conflict that the First World War quickly became. The War offered conclusive proof that neither the army nor the empire as a whole had adequately modernised since the middle of the nineteenth century.

With respect to the army, one source of inertia was the inherent difficulty of commanding, supplying and managing military units so numerous and so widely dispersed. Centralisation and decentralisation both had administrative advantages and disadvantages, and Russia’s military leadership was never able to reconcile the tension among them. One figure who tried to do so was D. A. Miliutin, Russia’s most eminent and energetic nineteenth-century military reformer. As war minister for almost the entire reign of Alexander II, Miliutin was responsible for substantive innovation in the army’s force structure, schools, hospitals and courts, and presided over the introduction of the breechloading rifle and other up-to-date weapons.31 But he also sought to streamline the operations of his ministry by creating eight glavnye upravleniia (or main administrations), with functional supervision over artillery, cavalry, engineering, intendence (supply and logistics), medicine, law, staff work and so forth. At the same time he divided the empire into fourteen (later fifteen) military districts, each with its own headquarters and staff and sub-departments, that mirrored the organisation of the War Ministry back in St Petersburg. Miliutin’s administrative restructuring thus combined the principles of centralisation and decentralisation, for while the various military agencies and

29 John Bushnell, Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1 905 –08

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 76–7, 173.

30William C. Fuller, Jr, Civil–Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1 881 –1 91 4 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 129–30.

31Joseph Bradley, Guns for the Tsar: American Technology and the Small Arms Industry in Nineteenth-Century Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 126–7.

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bureaux at the centre were brought firmly under his thumb, the military district commanders were invested with considerable autonomy. No one denied that this new organisation represented a considerable improvement over its predecessor, for it reduced red tape and permitted the elimination of 1,000 redundant jobs in St Petersburg alone.32 Yet it had its drawbacks notwithstanding. It has, for example, been argued that perhaps the most important of the main administrations – the Main Staff – was statutorily burdened with so many secondary responsibilities that authentic general staff work suffered in consequence.33 And the military district system, although a salutary antidote to the rigidity and paralysis of the military administration of the previous decades, led in the end to the fragmentation of intelligence collection and strategic planning.

A second impediment to military progress in the late imperial period was that vital reforms were often inconsistent, incomplete or distorted in implementation. The military conscription reform provides a good illustration. Miliutin clearly saw that Russia’s traditional approach to military recruitment had become dangerously obsolete in an era of mass politics and mass armies and had to be scrapped. By dint of arduous political struggle Miliutin and his supporters were able to secure the promulgation in 1874 of a law that instituted a universal military service obligation in Russia. Henceforth the majority of the empire’s young men would be eligible to be drafted into the army as private soldiers, regardless of the estate or social class to which they belonged. Miliutin was intent on accomplishing three goals with the statute of 1874. First, since it involved simultaneously widening the pool of prospective draftees and cutting the term of active service, it would give the army the modern system of military reserves that Miliutin regarded as an indispensable precondition for victory in any future European war. Second, Miliutin anticipated that the act would indirectly promote literacy and an elevation in the cultural level of the empire’s population, for it also decreased the term of service required of any draftee in accordance with his education. Although the standard period of service was set at seven years, a man with a university degree had to spend only six months with the colours, and a secondary school graduate only a year and a half. Even the most rudimentary primary education shaved three years off the term of active duty. Third, because the law proclaimed military service to be a universal obligation, Miliutin hoped that the new system would

32Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, p. 14.

33P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Voennye reformy 1 860–1 87 0 godov v Rossii (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1952), p. 106. O. R. Airapetov, Zabytaia kar’era ‘russkogo Moltke’. Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev (1 83 0–1 904) (St Petersburg: Izd. ‘Aleteiia’, 1998), p. 98.

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eventually produce a culture of citizenship in Russia. The common experience of service was supposed to break down the distinctions of estate, class and rank, thus stimulating dynastic loyalty, unity and patriotism. He strongly believed that an army that evinced those traits would be immeasurably superior to one remarkable chiefly for its bovine obedience.

The statute of 1874, and its subsequent modifications, clearly did ameliorate the Russian Empire’s military manpower problem. In 1881 the active army comprised 844,000 troops and in 1904 in excess of a million.34 By 1914 the active army numbered 1.4 million men and the active reserve 2.6 million, while over 6 million more were enrolled in the various classes of the territorial ‘militia’ (opolchenie). But it nonetheless deserves emphasis that the overwhelming majority of young men in the empire never received military training at all under the 1874 conscription system. The 1874 law had introduced a universal obligation to serve, not universal military service, and contained articles granting exemptions for nationality, profession and family circumstances that were more liberal than those that obtained in any other major European country. There were several reasons for this, but as a partial upshot, while in late- nineteenth-century France four-fifths of those draft eligible passed through the army’s ranks, and in Germany, over half, in Russia barely 25 per cent– 30 per cent of any given age cohort of 21-year-old males received military training.35 This meant that in Russia it was impossible for the army to act as a ‘school for the nation’ in the same way as armies are said to have done elsewhere in Europe. Nor was the concept of equal citizenship well served by the radically reduced length of service awarded to men with educational qualifications. Moreover, when the casualties started to mount in the First World War the empire experienced an authentic military manpower crisis.

It was true that the post-reform army was more heterogeneous than the army of the eighteenth century had ever been, and not just from the standpoint of social class or ‘estate’. Despite the 1874 law’s grant of exemptions to a variety of national minorities, as time passed the army increasingly became a multiethnic force. In addition to Russians, Jews, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Georgians, Baskhirs and Tatars were all represented in its ranks, as were men from the Northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia after 1887. The government tried to mitigate the effects of ethnic dilution by decreeing that

34P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX–XX stoletii (Moscow: Izd. Mysl’, 1973), p. 123.

35David R. Jones, ‘Imperial Russia’s Forces at War’, in Alan R. Millet and Murray Williamson (eds.), Military Effectiveness, vol. I: The First World War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988), p. 278.

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75 per cent of the personnel in the combat unit had to be Great Russians, but that target could not have been met without counting Ukrainians and Belorussians as such.36 In any event, it is clear that military service in the post-reform era did not build unity across ethnic lines any more successfully than it did across the boundaries of juridical class. Ethnic minorities met with considerable discrimination within the army, and it did not help much when in the 1890s the state adopted a policy of Russification in the borderlands, particularly Poland and Finland.37 Given the temporary nature of military service, as well as the heterogeneity within the ranks, the soldier’s artel could no longer perform the integrative function as well as it had prior to the Crimean War.

A third obstacle to the modernisation of the army in the post-reform era had to do with its leadership. The Russian army consistently experienced more difficulty in attracting and retaining capable non-commissioned officers than did any other first-class army in Europe. In 1882 the army had only 25 per cent of the senior NCOs it needed, and in 1903 there was still a deficit of 54 per cent.38 With respect to the officer corps, the problem was not so much quantity as quality. Nobles continued to dominate the highest echelons of command, and at the turn of the century over 90 per cent of the empire’s generals came from hereditary noble families. Yet of the 42,777 officers then on duty almost half had been born commoners.39 While this statistic may reveal something about social mobility in late Imperial Russia, it also reflects a much more ominous trend: the relative deterioration in the officer corps’ pay, perquisites and status that occurred over the last decades of the ancien regime´. The salary schedule for regular Russian army officers was set by law in 1859 and changed little over the next forty years, with two unpleasant results. First, the purchasing power of an officer’s compensation tended to erode with the passage of time. But second, by the 1890s Russian army officers not only found themselves underpaid by comparison with their counterparts abroad, but also lagging behind civilian bureaucrats at home. In these circumstances, and given the opportunities available in the growing private sector, is it any wonder that the army began to lose out in the competition to recruit the most

36Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, p. 119.

37One aspect of that policy was the state’s effort to dissolve the separate Finnish army, and draft Finns under the same regulations that applied to other groups. This initiative was met with stiff resistance. P. Luntinen, The Imperial Russian Army and Navy in Finland

1 808–1 91 8 (Helsinki: SHS, 1997), pp. 159–70.

38Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, pp. 121–3.

39A. I. Panov, Ofitsery v russkoi revoliutsii 1905 –07 gg. (Moscow: Regional’naia obshchestvennaia organizatsiia ofitserov ‘Demos’, 1996), p. 19.

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talented, and best-educated young men for its officer corps? Of course, there still remained wealthy aristocrats for whom a posting to one of the prestigious guard regiments was socially de rigueur. Yet in the non-exclusive regiments, especially those of the army infantry, the proportion of officers who were both humbly born and poorly schooled rose steeply. Of the 1,072 men holding commissions in 1895 whose fathers had been peasants, 997 or over 93 per cent were clustered in the army infantry.40

A decline in the prestige of the officer corps accompanied its social dilution and economic distress. But this development was also in part attributable to the burgeoning hostility of the intelligentsia towards the regime and its organs of coercion, the army and the police. Certainly a decay in the image of the officer is observable in the pages of Russian literature. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, novels, essays and stories by such popular writers as Garshin, Kuprin, Andreev and Korolenko disseminated negative stereotypes of army officers, depicting them as lazy, ignorant, uncouth, homicidal and frequently drunk.41

Compounding these woes was the inner factiousness of the officer corps. Imperial army officers were united by their antipathy towards the outer civilian world but by not much else. Officers in one branch of the service typically disdained those who belonged to the others, while the graduates of the most prestigious and specialised military academies were inclined to sneer at all who lacked their educational attainments. This deficiency in cohesion meant that the officer corps as a whole was poorly situated to develop a strong corporate spirit or articulate its collective interests. Naturally enough, the government did make attempts to heal the divisions within the corps by legislation. But such laws as the statute of May 1894 that required officers to duel over points of honour or be cashiered were wrongheaded and ineffective remedies.

Nonetheless, the imperial officer corps did contain a thin stratum of military professionals, of whom the majority were so-called ‘general staff officers’ (GSOs). To gain entry into this prestigious fraternity, an officer had to win admission to the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, and complete its full academic programme with distinction. Thereafter he was entitled to be known for the rest of his career as an ‘officer of the general staff’ regardless of actual military assignment. A true intellectual elite, the GSOs occupied the most important staff billets and had a monopoly on intelligence work.

40Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, pp. 204, 225.

41Fuller, Civil–Military Conflict, pp. 143–4.

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But they also received a disproportionate share of army commands. Although they constituted no more than 2 per cent of the entire officer corps, in 1913 the GSOs were in command of over a third of the army’s infantry regiments and over three-quarters of its infantry divisions.42

In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Russia’s military professionals, including many GSOs, agonised over the declining quality of the officer corps, advocated the raising of standards and tirelessly preached that a young officer’s best use of free time was education, rather than dissipation. After the icy shock of the Japanese defeat there were military professionals who concluded that the entire military system had to be regenerated, and that the empire’s population had to be militarised and readied for total war. Such people, whom their opponents sometimes labelled ‘young turks’, argued that the ultimate pledge of future victory would be Russia’s transformation into a true ‘nation in arms’. Some, like A. A. Neznamov, demanded that Russian adopt a unified military doctrine, that is, a set of binding principles to govern military preparations in peace and the conduct of operations in war. In 1912, however, Emperor Nicholas II announced that ‘military doctrine consists in doing everything that I order’ and thereby stifled any further discussion.43

Nicholas’s interference on this occasion may have stemmed from awareness that the vision of a Russian ‘nation in arms’ profoundly contradicted the political idea of autocracy. Russia was not a nation, but a multinational empire, and the glue that held it together was supposed to be allegiance to the Romanov dynasty, not veneration of some national abstraction. But what this episode also highlights is another chronic problem besetting higher military leadership in the twilight of the old regime: that of imperial meddling. This came in several forms. There were, for example, grand dukes whose positions as heads of army inspectorates permitted them to exert enormous influence on military decision-making, whether they were qualified to do so or not. Yet the most noisome way in which the court retarded military progress had to do with the distribution of promotions and appointments. Russia’s last autocrats, and Nicholas II in particular, were often prone to select (and remove) military bureaucrats and field commanders more on the basis of personal loyalty than competence. This lamentable practice occurred even during times of military

42E. Iu. Sergeev, ‘Inaia zemlia, inoe nebo’. Zapad i voennaia elita Rossii 1 900–1 91 4 (Moscow: Institut vseobshchei istorii RAN, 2001), pp. 45–6.

43Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets, pp. 211–16; Fuller, Civil–Military Conflict, pp. 241–2; Sergeev, ‘Inaia zemlia’, p. 43; J. Sanborn, ‘Military Reform, Moral Reform and the End of the Old Regime’, in Lohr and Poe, The Military and Society, pp. 514, 524.

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emergency, such as the First World War. General A. A. Polivanov may have been a ruthless, vindictive opportunist but he was also a masterly administrator who, after taking charge of the War Ministry in the summer of 1915, made immeasurable contributions to the revival of the army after the catastrophic defeats it suffered in Poland that spring. Yet despite this outstanding performance, when Nicholas II became displeased at Polivanov’s co-operation with such ‘social’ organisations as the War Industries Committees, he abruptly dismissed his war minister after barely nine months in office. Polivanov’s successor, although honest and straightforward, was considerably his inferior in ability.

A fourth and final drag on the Russian army’s capability to adapt to change was financial. Traditionally, the majority of the army’s budget had gone to ‘subsistence costs’ – the expenses of feeding, clothing and housing its troops.44 But in the second half of the nineteenth century the rapid pace of militarytechnological change demanded heavy investments in new armaments. Still worse, by the late 1860s it grew apparent to Russia’s military elite that a country’s transportation infrastructure was indisputably crucial to military power. It was widely believed that Prussia had won the three wars of German unification in large measure owing to her skilful exploitation of railways to mobilise and concentrate her forces. Indeed, victory in future war might hinge entirely on the speed with which an army mobilised, for the war might be decided in its early battles, and the outcome of those would depend on the quantity of troops committed. Russia, however, was a poor country disadvantaged by its enormous size and its relatively sparse railway network.

The Russian Ministry of War consistently applied for extra appropriations to fund both upgrades in weaponry and strategic railway construction, but just as consistently met stiff opposition from the Ministry of Finance, where it was held that solvency and economic growth were only possible if military spending was restrained. Although Miliutin and his brilliant assistant N. N. Obruchev did pry loose enough money to pay for some rearmament, in 1873 Finance Minister Reutern blocked their plan for the development of Russia’s western defences on fiscal grounds. Since the Russo-Turkish War left the empire 4.9 billion roubles in debt, there was little sunshine for the army in the state budgets of the 1880s and 1890s. The government did authorise the War Ministry’s purchase of magazine rifles in 1888, but the army’s share of state expenditures fell below 20 per cent by the mid-1890s and was to remain there for

44 David R. Jones, ‘The Soviet Defence Burden through the Prism of History’, in Carl Jakobson (ed.), The Soviet Defence Enigma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 161.

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almost a decade. The boom in state-subsidised railway construction during this period did not profit the army very much either, because commercial considerations usually trumped strategic ones in decisions about where to lay down track.45

Deprived of the wherewithal to build railroads and fortresses to check a German or Austrian attack, the War Ministry redeployed the army so as to concentrate a higher proportion of its active strength close to the western frontiers. By 1892, 45 per cent of the army was billeted in the empire’s westernmost military districts. This measure was, however, an inadequate substitute for a thorough technological preparation of the likely theatre of war. The signing of the alliance with France that same year did bring the army some breathing space and rescued the military leadership from the nightmarish prospect of having to fight the Germans solo. Yet new fiscal woes cropped up at the turn of the century, for reckless imperialism in East Asia gave the army new territories to defend and sorely taxed the military budget. Underfunding and overextension produced a situation in which Russia was fully ready for war neither in the East nor in the West. When the Russo-Japanese War began, six of the forts that were supposed to guard Port Arthur from the landward side were still under construction, and none of them boasted any heavy ordnance.

The Japanese war and repressive service in the revolution had drained the strength of the Russian army, and it was imperative that it be reconstituted. The first signs of military recovery manifested themselves in the summer of 1908 when the general staff issued a comprehensive report that detailed ten years’ worth of essential reforms and improvements. Some of this plan was actually implemented under the supervision of the controversial V. A. Sukhomlinov (war minister 1909–15). Sukhomlinov reorganised the army, shifted the centre of gravity of its deployment back to the east, introduced a territorial cadre reserve system, augmented Russia’s stocks of machine guns and artillery, and purchased the empire’s first military aircraft. He was able to pay for these innovations in part because of the enthusiasm of influential Duma politicians for the cause of national security, in part because of the support of the emperor, and in part because of the upsurge in Russian economic growth that began in 1910. The empire’s revenues increased by a billion roubles between 1910 and 1914, and the army was a principal beneficiary. In October 1913 Nicholas II approved the ‘Big Programme’ of extraordinary defence expenditure, which mandated an increase in the size of the peacetime army by nearly 40 per

45 Fuller, Civil–Military Conflict, pp. 49, 63–4.

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