27

The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war

nikolai afonin

At the turn of the twentieth century the Russian navy was in a difficult position. Traditionally, its main theatre of operations was the Baltic Sea. Since the first half of the nineteenth century Russia had been the leading naval power among the countries bordering on this sea. Its main enemy had been the British. The Royal Navy could easily block Russian access to the open ocean by patrolling the Sound, in other words the passage between Denmark and Sweden. As was shown in both the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, not only could it also blockade Russian ports and thereby stop Russia’s seaborne trade, it could also mount a realistic threat against Kronstadt and the security of St Petersburg, the imperial capital.1

From the early 1880s a new threat emerged on the Baltic Sea as newly united Germany began to build its High Seas Fleet. To some extent this was a worse danger than the British navy had been, since a German fleet enjoying superiority over Russia in the Baltic theatre would be able to operate in conjunction with Europe’s most formidable land forces – in other words the German army. Given the right circumstances, joint operations by the German army and fleet could pose a major threat to the security of Russia’s capital and her Baltic provinces.2

Meanwhile the situation in Russia’s second theatre of maritime operations, namely the Black Sea, was also difficult. In the early twentieth century 37 per cent of all Russian exports and the overwhelming majority of her crucially important grain exports went through the Straits at Constantinople. On these exports depended Russia’s trade balance, the stability of the rouble, and therefore Russia’s credit-worthiness and her ability to attract foreign capital. The Ottoman government could block this trade at any time by closing the Straits.

1See e.g. on the Crimean War: Andrew Lambert, The Crimean War: British Naval Grand Strategy 1 85 3 –1 85 6 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

2On the early growth of the German navy, see L. Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997).

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As was shown in the Crimean War, in alliance with a major naval power the Ottomans could also allow in foreign fleets which could blockade and capture Russia’s Black Sea ports. So long as the weak Ottoman regime controlled Constantinople and the Straits it was unlikely to use its geopolitical advantage against Russia except in wartime. But the Ottoman Empire was in steep decline. In the decades before the First World War it was a recurring nightmare for the Russians that a rival great power might come to dominate the Straits either directly or by exercising a dominant influence over the Ottoman government. Should there arise any immediate threat of Ottoman collapse, the Russians were determined at least to seize and fortify the eastern end of the Straits in order to deny access to the Black Sea to the navies of rival great powers.3

Faced with these threats, in 1881 the Russian government stated in the prologue to its twenty-year naval construction programme that Russia ‘must be able to challenge the enemy beyond the limits of Russian coastal waters both in the Baltic and Black seas’.4 The financial implications of this decision to build major fleets in both seas to meet possible British or German challenges were daunting. Partly for that reason, in 1885 the twenty-year programme was somewhat reduced. Nevertheless by 1896, fourteen modern battleships and many other vessels were in service or nearing completion in the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Meanwhile the new 1895–1902 construction programme envisaged the building of still more units. The additional cost just of the ships designated for the Baltic fleet would be almost 149 million roubles. One gains some sense of the enormous pressure of military budgets on Russia’s economic development when one compares this sum (devoted to just one fleet of Russia’s junior military service) to the 33.6 million roubles which comprised the budget of the Russian Ministry of Education in 1900.

By 1896, however, a new threat and a new potential theatre of naval operations had emerged in the Pacific. In this period competition for empire was reaching its peak. Between 1876 and 1915 roughly one-quarter of the world’s land surface was annexed by the European imperialist powers and the United States. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ was completed in 1899–1902 by the British conquest of the Boer republics. Meanwhile the centre of imperialist competition had moved to East Asia, where the Ching Empire’s days seemed clearly

3 On the broader context, see M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question (London: Macmillan, 1966). On Russian plans, see O. R. Airapetov, ‘Na Vostochnom napravlenii: Sud’ba Bosforskoi ekspeditsii v pravlenie imperatora Nikolaia II’, in O. Airapetov (ed.), Posledniaia voina imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2002), pp. 158–261.

4 V. P. Kostenko, Na ‘Orle’ v Tsusime (Leningrad: Sudpromgiz, 1955), pp. 14–22.

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numbered. In 1898 the Americans annexed the Philippines. In 1900 the Boxer rebellion threatened the Ching dynasty’s survival and resulted in Great Power military intervention in China.

Russia had a long border with China and was a near neighbour too of Japan, whose military and economic power was growing rapidly. Saint Petersburg neither could nor wished to stand outside imperialist competition in East Asia, on which the whole future global balance of power seemed likely to depend. However, by taking the lead first in 1895 in blocking Japanese annexation of Port Arthur and then three years later in taking the port herself, Russia made herself Japan’s potential enemy. The large-scale Japanese 1895 naval programme, funded partly by the proceeds of victory over China in 1894, made clear the potential threat to Russian security. A conference summoned to consider this threat by Nicholas II noted that ‘in comparison to 1881 circumstances in the Far East have changed radically and not at all in our favour’. The emperor himself correctly commented that ‘our misfortune is that Russia has to build and maintain three independent fleets’.5

The main reason why this was the case was the enormous distances between the three theatres in which the Russian navy operated. In addition, however, until the Montreux agreement of 1936 warships had no right of passage through the Straits at Constantinople. The Black Sea fleet was therefore entirely isolated. When Russia wished to send ships even to the Mediterranean they had to come from the Baltic fleet. Russia’s Pacific squadron was also made up of ships built in and despatched from the Baltic. Not merely was the voyage to the Far East very long but Russia had no bases between Libau and Port Arthur. This caused difficulties even in peacetime. In wartime, with neutral ports closed, it was a huge problem. Meanwhile the need to create a new infrastructure to sustain the Pacific fleet in Vladivostok and Port Arthur was extremely difficult and expensive, given their geographical remoteness from industrial centres and their dependence on the carrying capacity of the single-track Siberian and East-Chinese railways. Though finances were the main problem surrounding the creation of three independent fleets they were not, however, the only one. The types of ships suitable for war against Germany in the confined coastal waters of the Baltic were wholly unsuitable for long-distance raids against British commerce in the Atlantic or Pacific. A battleship squadron capable of contesting Japanese domination of the Yellow Sea had still other requirements.

The Russian government attempted to prioritise the East Asian theatre. In December 1897 it was decided to limit the Baltic fleet to a purely defensive

5 RGAVMF, Fond 417, op. 1, d. 1728, 13-ob.

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role. Though the build-up of the Black Sea fleet was to continue, most of the available naval forces were to be concentrated in the Far East. For this purpose a new construction programme (‘For the Requirements of the Far East’) was agreed in 1898 in addition to the existing 1895 programme. It aimed to add a further five battleships and numerous smaller ships to the Pacific fleet by 1905.6

The new programme was very expensive. In total the navy was allocated 732 million roubles between 1895 and 1903. This was more than three times the Japanese naval budget and it also shifted the share of the navy in overall Russian military expenditure from 17 per cent in 1895 to 25 per cent in

1902.7

The Russian Ministry of Finance insisted that the new naval construction programme should be completed in 1905, although the rival Japanese programme was intended to reach fruition significantly earlier. Finance Minister Witte claimed both that it was impossible for Russia to afford such vast sums for shipbuilding in a shorter period and that the Japanese would never be able to finance the completion of their naval programme before 1908. The finance minister proved mistaken. The Japanese programme was completed by 1903.8 Moreover, awareness that Japan possessed a window of opportunity before the completion of the Russian shipbuilding programme was a major incentive for the Japanese to go to war in 1904. Meanwhile, however, the Russian government was convinced that its build-up of naval forces in the Pacific had checkmated the Japanese. Its attention was returning to Europe and particularly to the Straits, where crisis loomed and the Ottoman regime’s survival seemed ever more doubtful. In 1903 a vast new twenty-year naval construction programme was agreed for the Baltic and Black seas. Russia’s unexpected involvement in war with Japan changed all these plans.

Within the Naval Ministry responsibility for the design, construction, operation and repair of ships lay with the Naval Technical Committee (MTK), whose basic job was to ensure that the fleet was fully up-to-date in technical terms. However, in the 1890s the committee was too understaffed to do its job properly, which caused much delay and many mismatched and unco-ordinated requirements for new ships. As regards the 1898 programme the MTK only

6V. Iu. Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii flot Tikhogo okeana. Istoriia sozdaniia i gibeli 1898–1905’, Briz (2001), no 3: 2. R. M. Melnikov, Kreiser Variag (Leningrad: Sudostroenie, 1975), pp. 17–19.

7Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii flot Tikhogo okeana’, Briz (2001), no. 4: 3.

8On Japanese preparations for the war, see D. C. Evans and M. R. Peattie, Kaigun. Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1 887 –1 941 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997).

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defined requirements for the draught, speed, cruising range and armament of the new ships. This resulted in ships supposedly of the same class which were built in different factories having significantly different features, which complicated future operations.

The MTK in any case had no control over money: the realisation of all its plans depended on the release of funds by the so-called Chief Administration of Shipbuilding and Supply (GUKiC). Even department chiefs in the GUKiC had no engineering background and little grasp of shipbuilding, however. In the light of spiralling naval budgets, the GUKiC put much effort into enforcing economies in many aspects of naval life. Areas hardest hit included provision of effective modern shells instead of the existing poor explosives; adequate shooting practice; training at sea in order to practise squadron manoeuvres and bring ships and their companies up to a high state of readiness. These economies were a key cause of Russia’s defeat in the war against Japan.

Inevitably, the overall economic and technological backwardness of Russia had an impact on the shipbuilding industry. Matters were worsened by the government’s reliance on state-owned works (Baltic, Admiralty, Obukhov, Izhorsk, etc.) to build most of its ships. Management of these works at that time was usually very bureaucratic, with little conception of profit, costs or productivity. The naval officers who ran these works also frequently had limited engineering knowledge. As a result, ship-construction in Russia was expensive by international standards and slow.9 At a time when naval technology was improving rapidly slow construction times were particularly dangerous, since even new ships risked being obsolescent on completion. The MTK itself often introduced changes while construction was already under way. This caused further delay and confusion, and could result in errors in design. One solution to Russia’s problems would have been greater reliance on private industry, as occurred after 1906, when the government privatised some works and gave many orders to private firms (especially for non-capital ships), thus attracting large-scale private injection of capital into the Russian shipbuilding industry. Before 1905, however, Russia had only five private works even partially engaged

9 Russian completion rates were very slow by British or German standards, less so by French or Italian ones. See eg. chapter 5 of P. Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1 87 1 –1 91 4 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987) and the statistics on individual ships in Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1 860–1 905 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1979). In 1911 the Naval General Staff reckoned that it cost 1,532 roubles per ton to build a battleship in Russia, 913 in Britain, 846 in Germany, 876 in the United States and 1,090 in Italy: M. A. Petrov, Podgotovka Rossii k mirovoi voine na more (Moscow: Gos. voennoe izd., 1926) p. 143. Admittedly, this was at a time when Russia was spending heavily to upgrade construction facilities in order to build dreadnoughts.

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in shipbuilding: these firms operated at a loss, partly because when forced to give orders to private firms the naval ministry preferred to place them abroad.10 As a result of the naval construction programmes, by the first years of the twentieth century Russia had moved into third place among the world’s navies, with 229 ships as against Britain’s 460 and France’s 391.11 Many new types of ships were built, including Russia’s first submarine, Delfin, which was launched in 1903. Among the classes of ships built were armoured coastal defence ships (Admiral Ushakov class of 4,127 tons) whose obvious theatre was the Baltic Sea; Poltava class battleships (10,960 tons) which followed the normal European model and the three faster battleships of the Peresvet class (12,674 tons), designed to operate for long periods at sea. A few battleships were ordered abroad but their design was closely supervised by the MTK and in the case of the Tsesarevich (12,912 tons), built in France, served as a model for a class of five battleships subsequently built in Russia (Borodino class of 13,516

tons).12

During these years a major shift occurred in the design and proposed deployment of armoured cruisers. The earlier cruisers (Rurik, Rossiia and Gromoboi) were designed as long-distance commerce raiders, with British trade as their obvious target. Equal in size to battleships and incorporating many new technologies, they initially aroused exaggerated fears in Britain which resulted in a very expensive class of British armoured cruisers being built to match them.13 The armoured cruisers of the Bayan class (the Bayan itself was launched in 1900) were, however, designed to operate in more limited waters and to fight alongside battleships if necessary.14 Their likeliest enemy was seen as Japan, which had already built a number of similar armoured cruisers. For this reason, in comparison to the earlier commerce-raiders the new cruisers sacrificed long-range cruising capability in order to maximise armour and guns for fleet actions. A similar evolution was evident among Russia’s lighter (‘protected’) cruisers with earlier ships (e.g. the Diana class of the 1895 programme) being seen primarily as commerce-raiders and later ships (e.g.

10K. F. Shatsillo, Russkii imperialism i razvitie flota (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 217, 228–9.

11L. G. Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot Rossii v nachale XXv: Ocherki voenno-ekonomicheskogo potentsiala (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), p. 187.

12For good coverage of these ships in English, see S. McLaughlin, Russian and Soviet Battleships (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

13R. M. Melnikov, Istoriia otechestvennogo sudostroeniia, 3 vols. General ed., B. N. Malakhov (St Petersburg: Sudostroenie, 1996), vol. II, p. 533. On British fears, see e.g. V. E. Egorev,

Operatsiia vladivostokskikh kreiserov v Russko-iaponskuiu voinu 1 904–1 905 gg. (Moscow and Leningrad: V-Morskoe izd., 1939), p. 9; Conway’s, p. 67.

14RGAVMF, Fond 421, op. 8, d. 6, l. 356.

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Variag, Askold, Bogatyr and Novik) being designed to operate together with the battle-fleet.

The structure and governance of the fleet and the Naval Ministry were defined by the laws of 1885 and 1888. The ministry was comprised of a number of chief administrations (e.g. medical: hydrographic) and committees (e.g. the MTK) but its most important core institution was the Main Naval Staff, which was responsible for the navy’s preparedness for war. The Main Naval Staff, however, was swamped in various day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Like many other navies at the time, Russia lacked a true naval general staff, responsible for pre-war strategic planning and overall control of wartime operations. A proposal to establish such a staff was rejected at the end of the nineteenth century and the small (twelve-man) strategic unit established within the Main Naval Staff on the eve of the Japanese war had no chance of seriously affecting wartime operations. The annual war games at the Nicholas Naval Academy had some impact on strategic thinking but although Admiral Makarov had intelligent and aggressive ideas about strategy, the dominant tendency among Russia’s senior admirals was defensive – stressing the defence of key positions (e.g. Port Arthur during the war with Japan) and seeing naval assistance to the army largely in terms of the secondment of personnel and weapons. The staffs of the individual fleets saw themselves as mere advisory bodies and showed little initiative.15

The prevailing view of tactics was to fight in line ahead or in surprise encounter battles. The squadron’s commander was supposed to control movements by flag, semaphore and telegraph from his flagship. The ‘two-flag’ system was spreading slowly at the turn of the century. S. O. Makarov, N. L. Klado and N. N. Kholodovskii all published useful work on tactics but the point to stress is that the Russian navy had no single and official tactical doctrine which could have provided a common guide for senior officers. The fighting instructions which did exist were either uselessly general (e.g. ship captains should obey the signals of the commanding admiral as much as possible), extremely narrow (e.g. where to keep tubs of sand) or absurdly pedantic (e.g. the requirement for officers to wear swords in combat). Not until the war with Japan had already begun was the first true battle

15Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot, p. 221. On the question of a naval general staff, see the key publication of A. N. Shcheglov, Znachenie i rabota shtaba na osnovanii opyta russko-iaponskoi voiny (St Petersburg: no publ. given, 1905) and the articles by N. Kazimirov entitled ‘Morskoi General’nyi Shtab’, Morskoi Sbornik 372, 9 (Sept. 1912): 55–82; 10 (Oct. 1912):

57–80.

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manual for an armoured fleet issued. This was The Instructions for Campaigns and Battles written by the new commander of the Pacific fleet, Admiral Makarov.16

Peacetime training was organised in accordance with the Instructions for Preparing Ships for Combat and with the schedules of individual naval units. It was in general carried out in port and in training sessions devoted to individual, specific tasks. Mine-warfare training units existed in the Baltic and Black sea fleets: the former also trained radio experts. The first wireless stations were set up on ships in the autumn of 1900 and in the course of 1901–2 almost all major ships received them. As the Far Eastern fleet grew in size, the first training schools (for quartermasters – in 1898) and training ships were set up there too. The largest training unit in the Baltic fleet was devoted to gunnery. But the training concentrated on shooting at much shorter ranges than was to be the practice during the Japanese war and was therefore of limited benefit. In 1901 the Technical Commission of gunnery officers in Kronstadt embarked on drawing up new rules for combat. These were completed in 1903, too late to be influential in training gunnery officers and sailors for the Japanese war. On the other hand, the annual training cruises in the Atlantic were of real use in raising preparedness for combat.17

Sailors were conscripted on the same basis as soldiers though with longer terms of active service and shorter periods in the first-line reserve (five years in each category). As the fleet grew in the first years of the twentieth century, so did the number of conscripts: between 1900 and 1905 the number of conscripts in the fleet grew from 46,700 to 61,400. There were roughly 15,000 first-line reserves and 40,000 much less well-trained so-called ‘naval militia’. In 1905–7 roughly 30 per cent of sailors were said to be of ‘working class’ background, a far higher proportion than in the army.18 Given the complexities of warships in the age of steam it made excellent sense to conscript many skilled and literate men into the navy. But with the rapid growth of worker radicalism in the 1890s this carried obvious political dangers.

Men entering the fleet who were inclined to political radicalism were likely to be encouraged in that direction by conditions of service. The five-year term was one source of grievance, as was very low pay and the need to act as ‘batmen’ for officers. Food was often poor, the most recent Anglophone study of the Potemkin mutiny stating that this was yet one more area in which the navy’s

16N. B. Pavlovich, Razvitie taktiki voenno-morskogo flota (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1979).

17Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii flot’, p. 7.

18Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot, p. 209.

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leadership had tried to cut costs in the early twentieth century.19 Conditions aboard were very cramped. Moreover, partly for reasons of economy but above all because almost all ports were iced up in winter, crews spent the long winter months in barracks ashore. Often ships’ crews were split up or diluted, under the command of barracks’ commanders and officers whom they barely knew. Under these conditions no sense of solidarity or esprit de corps was possible and even supervision was difficult. Even the ships’ own officers and priests, however, usually showed little awareness that the increasingly literate, skilled and independent men who were now often being conscripted needed to be trained, led and stimulated in different ways to old-time peasant recruits.20

All these factors fed into the wave of mutinies that devastated the navy in the early twentieth century. So too did the impact of defeat by Japan and the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Russian seamen. The first mass protests occurred in 1902. If the June 1905 Potemkin affair is the most famous event in this period, the mutinies in the Black Sea in autumn 1905 and in the Baltic in spring 1906 were larger in scale. In 1907 it was the turn for mass mutinies in the Pacific squadron. Although on the surface calm reigned in subsequent years, discontent and revolutionary propaganda was still very real. In 1912 the police pre-empted mass mutiny by large-scale and arbitrary arrests of revolutionary activists among the sailors.

Analysing the reasons for the dramatic conflicts between officers and sailors in 1905–7, one senior admiral saw their basic cause as the deep cultural and mental gulf between Russia’s educated elites and the bulk of the population. In a short-service, conscript navy this chasm was bound to be transferred from society as a whole into the armed forces. Traditional suspicion and mutual incomprehension between the two groups had often recently been transformed into strong antagonism by the growth of class conflict and revolutionary agitation. Sailors often saw their officer as a ‘lord’ and an ‘oppressor’. Of course such deep-rooted social and political problems could not be solved by the navy alone but a number of key weaknesses did exacerbate the fleet’s difficulties in managing its sailors and winning their allegiance. Of these, the

19R. Zebrowski, ‘The Battleship Potemkin and its Discontents’, chapter 1 in C. M. Bell and B. A. Elleman (eds.), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 9–31.

20The devastating report of Captain Brusilov, the chief of the Naval General Staff, to Nicholas II in October 1906 implicitly acknowledged this and recommended drafting a new law to define sailors’ rights and duties: ‘At the basis of this law must be humane principles in accordance with the spirit of the times and the striving to defend the rights of the individual, to the extent of course that this is compatible with the basic principles of military discipline and special circumstances of the naval service’ (RGAVMF, Fond 418, op. 1, d. 238, pp. 24–48; the quote is from pp. 42–3).

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greatest was the failure to create a strong and numerous group of long-service petty officers, who would be drawn from the ranks and understand the sailors’ mentality and needs, while being wholly loyal to the navy and inculcated into its values. Creating such a corps in Russian conditions was difficult, however. In the era before the introduction of short-service conscription there had been few difficulties. Sailors were bound to lifetime service in the fleet and had every incentive to become petty officers. The contemporary conscript in the steam navy, however, had often acquired very marketable skills by the time he finished his term of service in the fleet. Private industry offered pay, conditions and freedom to potential petty officers which the navy could not match.21

Naval officers were drawn from a totally different milieu from that of the sailors. The great majority of deck officers were graduates of the Naval Cadet Corps. All the cadets were from the nobility. Though few were aristocrats and very few owned sizeable estates, a great many of these men came from families with strong traditions of service in the fleet. To meet the needs of a rapidly growing fleet, the annual number of midshipmen graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps more than doubled between 1898 and 1911–13, from 52 to 119. Cadets spent one year ashore and then three years mostly at sea on training ships. Meanwhile the Naval Engineering School trained young men drawn from all social backgrounds to be ship engineers. It had two branches – engineering and shipbuilding – which together in 1900 graduated only twentyeight young men into the navy, though again the numbers increased substantially in subsequent years.

As in many other navies of that time, tensions existed between the traditional caste of deck officers and the new engineer officers, whom they often perceived as their social inferiors. This tension, together with the exclusively noble makeup of the Naval Cadet Corps made it even more difficult to find a sufficient number of young officers to fill the ranks of the growing fleet, though the more attractive pay and conditions often available in civilian employment were an even greater problem. Shortage of officers was an issue during the war with Japan. Even in the war’s first month the battleships and cruisers of the Pacific squadron on average were short of four to five officers each. The squadron sent round the world in 1905 to reinforce the Pacific fleet left its Baltic ports with many insufficiently trained younger officers who were promoted

21Vice-Admiral Prince A. A. Liven, Dukh i ditsiplina nashego flota (St Petersburg: Voennaia tip. Ekat. Velikoi, 1914), pp. 86–90. Lieven was at the centre of a group of bright young officers who had done well in the Japanese war and dominated the new Naval General Staff. On the NCO issue and German comparisons, see also P. Burachek, ‘Zametki o flote’, Morskoi Sbornik 365, 7 (1911): 19–50.

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to midshipmen without finishing their education, or were drawn from the reserve or in the case of engineers from civilian technical institutes.22

The Japanese war revealed a number of defects in the officer corps. Above all, the Naval Cadet Corps had given them little understanding of naval tactics. Nor was this defect corrected even for the minority of officers who subsequently received a higher naval education at the Nicholas Naval Academy. The latter was geared to educating narrow technical specialists in its three core sections – hydrographic, shipbuilding and mechanical. After 1896, alongside these twoyear courses, a one-year course in naval tactics was at last established. Only after the war and in the light of its lessons was education in tactics and strategy put on a proper footing. Before 1904 the Naval Academy was unable to fulfil the role of training future staff officers. Similarly, though radio-telegraphy was taught in the officers’ mine-warfare class from 1900, no attention was paid to its tactical applications. In fact, though six to seven officers were attached to the army’s artillery academy every year, the officers’ training even in gunnery was inadequate, in large part because the limited number of instructors were swamped by the sheer scale of gunnery training required by the growing navy.

The regulations introduced in 1885 to govern promotions and appointments had a vicious effect on the navy. They were designed to combat nepotism and to ensure that officers had adequate experience – above all at sea – before being promoted. However, by rigidly requiring specific terms of service at sea before promotion and linking promotion in rank to the availability of specific posts in ships the regulations totally backfired on the navy. To fulfil these requirements officers jumped from ship to ship, in the process weakening the efficient command structures and the sense of solidarity which ought to reign in a ship’s crew. This sense of solidarity was already at risk because not just other ranks but also officers spent the long winter months when the ships were ice-bound ashore in barracks. The so-called ‘naval regiments’ (ekipazhi) which were the basic units for shore-time service did not even correspond to the individual ships’ companies. Moreover months spent ashore often distracted officers from truly naval training and encouraged attention to drill and other extraneous concerns.23

22Russko-iaponskaia voina: 1904–1905 gg, 4 vols. (St Petersburg: 1912), vol. I, pp. 150–5.

23V. Iu. Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii flot’, Briz 6 (2001): 9–11. N. Kallistov, ‘Petrovskaia, Menshikovskaia i tsenzovaia ideia v voprose o proiskhozhdenii sluzhby ofitserov flota’, Morskoi sbornik, 369, 3 (1912): 105–18. This issue is usefully seen within the context of the long debate that raged in the Delianov and Peretts special commissions in the 1880s and 1890s on promotions and appointments, the chin, and other aspects of Russian civil and military service. The papers are in RGIA, Fond 1200, op. 16ii, ed. khr. 1 and 2. For a discussion of this debate and of the regulations in English, see D. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers under the Old Regime (London: Yale University Press, 1989), chapter 4.

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At the top of the naval hierarchy stood the emperor Nicholas II, who was far from being a mere figurehead where naval matters were concerned. Like his peers, King George V of Britain, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, the Russian monarch took a close personal interest in the fleet. This was after all the era of Mahan, when navies were seen as crucial to the struggle for global influence and an essential mark of a great power able to survive in an era of Darwinian imperialist competition. Nicholas II’s support was vital for the expansion of the fleet before 1904 and even more crucial in overriding opposition from the army and from civilian ministers to the re-creation of a large high-seas fleet after

1906.

The emperor bore a heavy personal responsibility for Russia’s involvement in the war with Japan. Only he could weigh the risks, costs and benefits of Russia’s Far Eastern policy in 1895–1904 against the empire’s overall needs: this he failed to do. He also failed to co-ordinate Russia’s military, naval, diplomatic and financial policy in East Asia, or indeed to ensure co-ordination between the Far Eastern viceroy and the government in Petersburg. Like many of his senior naval advisors, he also overestimated Russian naval power in the theatre and underestimated Japanese strength and determination. Of course, all these failures are more easily revealed in retrospect than at the time. Nor was the emperor mostly responsible for the fleet’s sometimes poor performance in the war. Where senior appointments and overall naval preparation for war were concerned, the emperor relied heavily on the advice of his uncle, Grand Duke Alexei, who bears great responsibility for the navy’s inadequate performance in 1904–5. So too to a lesser extent did the naval minister until 1903, P. P. Tyrtov, who played the key role in deciding what ships were to be built and where Russian naval forces should be deployed. Though Admiral Alekseev, the Far Eastern viceroy, was subsequently widely blamed for Russia’s defeat, he was at least a fine seaman and before the war had stressed the need to strike first rather than leave initiative and surprise to the Japanese.

As regards the actual fleet commanders during the war, many showed inadequate enterprise and offensive spirit.24 Among them the two outstanding personalities were Admiral S. O. Makarov and Admiral Z. P. Rozhestvenskii. The former commanded the Pacific fleet for only a few weeks from early February 1904 until his death in late March when his flagship hit a mine.

24Much the best English-language work on the war remains J. S. Corbett, Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War: 1 904–1 905 , 2 vols. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,

1994).

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Makarov was Russia’s most brilliant admiral, who had climbed the promotion ladder rapidly and solely on merit. As a young officer in the 1877–8 war with Turkey, he had organised and led torpedo attacks on Ottoman ships, showing great courage and skill. Subsequently he had acquired a worldwide reputation as an expert on strategy, tactics and oceanography. His arrival at Port Arthur to take over command of the Pacific squadron after the surprise Japanese attack galvanised his subordinates. Makarov’s death at a moment when he was preparing the fleet for offensive action was a huge loss which possibly had a decisive influence on the outcome of the war. By contrast, Rozhestvenskii was a more equivocal figure. As commander of the Second Pacific Squadron he showed great organisational skill in bringing his ships round the world but at the Battle of Tsushima his passivity contributed to the destruction of his fleet. His rigidly authoritarian and centralised system of command also discouraged his subordinates from showing initiative.

There are very few examples in naval history of defeat more total than that experienced by Russia in the war against Japan. Sixty-nine ships were lost, including almost the entire Pacific fleet and most of the Baltic fleet as well. In October 1908 the Naval General Staff reported to Nicholas II as regards the Baltic fleet that ‘our battleships are not a serious force in terms of either their individual quality or their organisation’.25

The reasons for Russia’s defeat were many. Most basically, having adopted an aggressive policy in the Far East which risked war with Japan, she proved unwilling and unable to deploy the necessary naval and military forces to secure victory. Russian resources were badly overstretched by her Far Eastern policy: this included not just financial resources but also the navy’s ability to take on major new strategic commitments and manage the big increase in ships and personnel this required. In addition, never previously had Russia engaged in a war where naval rather than military power was the key to victory. In building and then deploying its naval forces the Russian government failed fully to understand the implications of this fact. Moreover, ships were built in a number of construction programmes with contradictory roles and different enemies in mind. Slow construction times and delays in adopting the latest technology played a role too in an era when naval technology was developing at bewildering and unprecedented speed. Lacking any recent wartime experience, the navy also often failed to appreciate the operational and tactical implications of this new technology.

25 Cited on pp. 223–4 of Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot.

587

Foreign policy and the armed forces

Despite the shattering defeat by Japan and the mutinies which followed, the Russian navy was rebuilt after 1906. Four years after Tsushima the first Russian Dreadnoughts were launched in St Petersburg. The naval minister, Admiral I. M. Dikov wrote that ‘as a Great Power Russia needs a fleet and must be able to send her ships wherever state interests demand’.26 The foreign minister, A. P. Izvol’skii, was equally committed to the re-creation of an imposing high-seas fleet, capable of operating across the globe and not tied to the role as a mere coastal defence force.

The need to regain international prestige and credibility was an important factor in the fleet’s rebirth. This was by no means an illegitimate consideration in an era of Darwinian international competition when not just governments but also European public opinion attached huge significance to naval power and when any sign of weakness might well attract the attention of potential bullies and predators. There were also, however, clear strategic reasons to rebuild the fleet. For example, the Ottoman-Italian War of 1911 and the Balkan wars of 1912–13 seemed clear evidence that the longpredicted demise of the Ottoman Empire was nigh. Modernising the Black Sea fleet while sending Baltic fleet squadrons into the Mediterranean in order to deploy maximum Russian power at the Straits seemed vital in these circumstances.

The Naval Ministry achieved a great deal between 1906 and 1914. Many excellent and sometimes genuinely innovative new ships were built or planned. The Russian shipbuilding industry was transformed. A Naval General Staff was created and became the core of a large group of able, younger officers determined to expunge the humiliation of defeat by Japan. The Naval Ministry worked in intelligent co-operation with the Duma (Parliament) and public opinion by 1914, showing political sensitivity and openness to new political currents. Nevertheless, many of the old doubts about Russian naval power remained relevant. The very ambitious plans of the navy’s leadership were hugely expensive. The twenty-year construction plan devised by the Naval General Staff was to cost 2.2 billion roubles, more than total state revenue in that year.27 In the last year of peace Russia spent more on the navy than Germany. Was this the best use of Russia’s limited resources? Even these vast sums might not be able to compensate for the poor hand that geography had dealt Russia: for example, even if by some miracle Russia acquired the Straits would it not then simply graduate to the position of Italy, whose admirals

26Cited by Beskrovnyi, Armii i flot, pp. 223–4.

27On this plan and the covering memo sent to the Duma to justify it, see ‘U nashikh protivnikov shirokie plany’, Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal (1996), no. 4: 42–50.

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The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war

complained that their navy and trade were confined to the Mediterranean and at the mercy of the British fleet, which dominated the Mediterranean Sea and controlled all exits from it to the open oceans? Moreover the arrests of revolutionary sailors in 1912 were a reminder that the Russian state was spending great sums on a weapon which might turn on its creator.

589

p a r t vii

*

REFORM, WAR AND

REVOLUTION