The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (61 page)

Geography also gave Russia a rich choice of potential enemies. In the east, Russian territories remained under threat from Japan while in Europe Russia had a particular vulnerability in its Polish lands. While the dismemberment of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century had brought Russia a rich prize with good natural resources including coal and, by the twentieth century, with strong industries and a population of some 16 million Poles, it also created an exposed salient 200 miles from north to south which stretched 230 miles westward with German territory in the north and west and Austrian-Hungarian territory to the south. ‘Our sore spot’, a Russian military report called it.
⁷⁶
Moreover, Russia had more potential enemies than even Austria-Hungary and its vast size created particular challenges when it came to situating its forces or moving them about. In Europe Sweden had been a threat on and off since the seventeenth century and the Russian general staff continued to count it as an enemy right up to 1914. Rumania, with its German king and its continuing resentment that Russia had taken part of Bessarabia in 1878, was potentially hostile. Russia had fought two wars with the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and the two powers remained rivals in the Caucasus and the Black Sea.

Lecturers at the Russian War Academy had been stressing since 1891 that it was impossible to avoid a conflict with the Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany and the Russian military increasingly focussed on this as their main challenge in the west. As a consequence they tended to interpret developments in those other countries in the most pessimistic fashion. When the military in Austria-Hungary failed to get the budget increases it wanted from parliament in 1912, the
Russians immediately assumed this was mere window-dressing designed to conceal a real increase in spending. The Russian military also believed, quite wrongly, that Franz Ferdinand was the leader of the war party in Austria-Hungary. The views of Russian diplomats who understood other countries better frequently did not reach the military and the tsar made little attempt to co-ordinate the different branches of his government.
⁷⁷
What was generally accepted among the Russian leadership, however, was that any conflict in the Balkans could turn into general war.
⁷⁸

The Russian general staff, which tended to take the gloomiest possible view, saw as its worst case the Dual Alliance along with Sweden and Rumania attacking in the west while Japan and, improbably, China attacked in the east.
⁷⁹
Then, so the military feared, the Ottoman Empire would probably join in as well and the Poles would take the opportunity to rise up. Even if the worst did not happen, its geography presented Russia, as it had done for centuries, with a strategic choice of whether to focus on Europe or the south and east. Although both Izvolsky, the Foreign Minister after the Russo-Japanese War, and Stolypin, Prime Minister until 1911, looked westwards, there were still influential voices among the Russian leadership arguing that Russia had a mission in the east and that Japan remained its chief enemy. In 1909 one of their number, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, became Minister of War.

Sukhomlinov remains, not without reason, a highly controversial figure but he did undertake a series of much-needed reforms in Russia’s armed forces and thanks to him, Russia entered the Great War relatively well prepared. He improved training and equipment, updating armaments and creating dedicated units for such things as field artillery. In the five years before the Great War Russia also increased the number of men it was recruiting and training by 10 per cent so that in time of war it would be able to mobilise over 3 million men. Sukhomlinov reorganised the army’s structure and command system and set up a new and more efficient system for mobilisation. In addition he pulled troops back from the western part of Poland to the interior of Russia, where they would be both safer from attack and more readily available to be sent eastwards if Russia’s relations with Japan deteriorated again.
⁸⁰
He tried as well to get rid of Russia’s line of forts in the western part of Poland, which, as he pointed out, sucked up money and resources which
could be better used elsewhere. This last caused a huge outcry. The tsar’s cousin, the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, who had conceived a passionate hatred for Sukhomlinov, opposed any destruction of the forts and he had many supporters in the military. The War Minister was obliged to back down.
⁸¹

He had many enemies by this point and was going to accumulate more, partly because he was upsetting established traditions and vested interests, partly because of his own personality. He was devious, ruthless, and charming. Although he was short and bald, many women found him irresistible. His many detractors at the time and since accused him of everything from senility to corruption to high treason and a Russian diplomat described him as the evil genius of Russia. His own colleagues complained that he was lazy and incapable of sustained application to the many challenges facing him. General Aleksei Brusilov, one of Russia’s most competent generals, said: ‘Undoubtedly a man of intelligence, a man who could grasp a situation and decide upon his course very rapidly, but of a superficial and flippant mentality. His chief fault was that he would not probe things to the bottom and was content if his orders and arrangements made a show of success.’
⁸²
Sukhomlinov was, however, as even his enemies recognised, a master of Russia’s bureaucratic politics. He built networks of supporters throughout the army and the Ministry of War through the clever use of patronage and, as important, flattered the tsar on whom his continuation in office depended.
⁸³

Sukhomlinov, who was born in 1848 to a minor gentry family, had enjoyed an outstanding career as a soldier. He graduated near the top of his class from the Staff College and gained a reputation for bravery in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. By 1904 he was a lieutenant general and in command of the important Kiev military district. When disturbances broke out in Kiev in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War Sukhomlinov was made governor-general of a larger area which includes much of today’s Ukraine. He restored law and order and put an end to the disgraceful and brutal treatment of the local Jews, something for which many conservatives never forgave him. He also fell in love with a much younger and beautiful married woman who was going to become his third wife. Their affair and her subsequent divorce caused a considerable scandal, and her insatiable demands for luxuries were
going to lead to the whiff of corruption that always surrounded Sukhomlinov. ‘There is something about General Sukhomlinov that makes one uneasy,’ said Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador in St Petersburg. ‘Sixty-two years of age, the slave of a rather pretty wife thirty-two years younger than himself, intelligent, clever and cunning, obsequious towards the tsar and a friend of Rasputin, surrounded by a rabble who serve as intermediaries in his intrigues and duplicities, he is a man who has lost the habit of work and keeps all his strength for conjugal joys. With his sly look, his eyes always gleaming watchfully under the heavy folds of his eyelids, I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.’
⁸⁴

Sukhomlinov survived in his position until 1915 because he had the tsar’s support, but that was a mixed blessing. Nicholas was not an easy master and in his anxiety to guard his own power he played his ministers off against each other. Although he was an amateur in military affairs, he felt obliged as the supreme authority to intervene. In 1912 he ended a debate over tactics and strategy by saying, ‘Military doctrine consists of doing everything which I order.’
⁸⁵
Although Sukhomlinov tried to co-ordinate the advice the tsar received even he failed to reform the chaotic and incoherent nature of Russian decision-making and the military continued to keep crucial information from the civilian leaders. In 1912, for example, the Russian and French military agreed they would not pass on the details of their military understandings to the Russian Prime Minister.
⁸⁶

In the years immediately before the Great War Sukhomlinov was rethinking his earlier assumption that Russia needed to count Japan as its main enemy. Moreover, turbulence in the Balkans was turning Russian attention westwards and the French, not surprisingly, were encouraging this. What France needed if a general war broke out was an early Russian attack on Germany in the east to take the pressure off French forces in the west. Over the years the French used their financial hold over Russia, which badly needed foreign loans, to persuade their ally to make a commitment to such an attack. The French also did their best to ensure that their loans to Russia for railways produced lines that would take Russian forces swiftly to the German frontier. While the Russian leadership frequently resented French demands, by 1911 the Russian chief of staff had given way and promised France that Russia
would attack Germany in East Prussia fifteen days after the start of a war. The promise was reiterated right up to the outbreak of war even though there were those in the Russian leadership who felt that it was a mistake and that Russia’s interests lay in avoiding a war with Germany if at all possible and, in any case, concentrating on its chief enemy, Austria-Hungary.
⁸⁷

Russia had several strategic options on its western frontiers: to fight a defensive war until such time as it was ready to counter-attack, to focus its main attack on one of Austria-Hungary or Germany, or to take them both on at once. In retrospect a strong defence and retreat into Russia’s vast spaces as a first stage, with a counter-attack in strength against one enemy at a time, made the most sense for Russia. By 1912 the military, though, had ruled out an entirely defensive war and had accepted the general European enthusiasm for offensive war. Russia’s own most recent war, against Japan, seemed to show that the Russian forces had lost because they had sat waiting for the Japanese to attack. Russian military instruction, regulations and orders now stressed the power of the offence and paid little attention to the defence.
⁸⁸
In the Black Sea too Russia was planning amphibious attacks on the upper part of the Bosphorus to gain control of the all-important Straits out of the Black Sea, this in spite of the fact that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was weak and it did not possess adequate troop transports.
⁸⁹

Between 1910 and 1912 there was an intense high-level debate within the Russian military about strategy. One group felt that it had a moral obligation to France to strike first and in strength against Germany. Sukhomlinov himself increasingly saw Germany as Russia’s main enemy.
⁹⁰
Their opponents wanted to concentrate on Austria-Hungary partly because it was Russia’s main rival in the Balkans and partly because the Russian military felt confident that they could defeat its armies, something they did not consider possible with Germany. The Russian military had a healthy, perhaps obsessive, respect for German military strength and efficiency. They tended to compare themselves unfavourably in all respects against the Germans, something the Russian ruling classes had done for centuries.
⁹¹
A French officer was struck by how little hatred of Germany there was among his Russian colleagues.
⁹²
Furthermore, in spite of Redl’s spying, the Russians underestimated how many forces Austria-Hungary would put on the border
in Galicia and assumed that Russia would have a significant advantage. The Russians also expected that Austria-Hungary’s nationalities problem would finally become too much for it and that the Slavs and Hungarians within the empire would rebel when war broke out.
⁹³
Finally, and this weighed heavily with the Russians, if the Austrians, who were expected to attack fifteen days after the start of a war, had initial successes, Russia’s unhappy Polish subjects might well take heart and rise up themselves. As the Russian chief of staff said to his French counterpart in 1912: ‘Russia cannot expose herself to defeat at the hands of Austria. The moral effect would be disastrous.’
⁹⁴

At a meeting in February 1912, presided over by Sukhomlinov, the military hammered out a compromise ‘to direct the main forces against Austria, while not generally rejecting an offensive into East Prussia’.
⁹⁵
As a Russian general later said, it was ‘the worst decision of all’.
⁹⁶
Russia’s new military plan, 19A, provided for mobilisation and an early attack against both Austria-Hungary and Germany and divided up Russian forces so that in neither theatre would Russia have a decisive advantage. In addition, while its enemies would be fully ready by the sixteenth day after the start of war, Russia would have only 50 per cent of its forces in place. By attacking in the north, Russia created a further and, as it turned out, dangerous problem for itself since its two northernmost armies would have to go on either side of the fortified German positions at the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia.
⁹⁷
Although there was meant to be a variant, Plan 19G, where Russia remained on the defensive against Germany and sent most of its forces to attack Austria-Hungary, that plan was never worked out in detail. Nor did the military have plans for mobilising against just one enemy. In the crisis of 1914 Russia’s leaders were to find that they were committed to an attack on both Germany and Austria-Hungary.