The Eastern Front 1914-1917 Read Free Page A

economic weight that began to interest me, rather than the backwardness of which many writers had spoken. I began to examine the army’s structure, and again discovered some surprises. The army, as it grew before 1914, split, roughly between a patrician wing, of which Grand Duke Nicholas, Inspector-General of Cavalry, and commander-in-chief in wartime, was the head, and a praetorian one, dominated by the war minister Sukhomlinov. I had always read accounts that made out Sukhomlinov to be bungling, corrupt: he was detested by ‘liberal’ Russia on both counts, and was imprisoned after the March Revolution. But, much to my surprise, the evidence as I saw it showed that Sukhomlinov, and not his enemies, was the real reformer. His enemies, though eventually coming to power in the war-years, were much less ‘technocratic’ in their approach than they claimed to be. They resisted essential reforms before 1914 and their old-fashioned attitudes did much to reduce the army’s effectiveness in the war-years. No system of tactics emerged to combat the shell-shortageof 1915; and the disasters of that year also owed much to the commanders’ wholly mistaken belief in fortresses. Moreover, the division of the army between patricians and praetorians even affected strategy, for it added a dimension to the usual rivalries and battles of competence that prevented emergence of coherent plans, with corresponding movement of reserves. The structure of the army, as shown in tactics, conscription, transport-organisation, strategy, relationship of infantry to artillery and the rest, all of which I have tried to investigate, displayed that the country’s great weak point was not, properly-speaking, economic, but more administrative. I have tried to account for this, as far as evidence allows, at least in the armed forces’ case.
    This book proved difficult to conclude. The fighting stopped in January 1917, except for a few episodes; and yet it was in 1917 that all of the problems that I had seen came to a head. To narrate the year 1917 would have made this book intolerably long, and I should have gone far beyond my original strategic brief. What particularly interested me was why the country, the war-economy of which was successful as never before, should have gone through vast social change even though, with the German enemy at the gates, there was ostensibly every argument for retaining an unbroken front at home, at least for the duration. My last chapter is an effort to explain this. I have seen the First World War, not as the vast run-down of most accounts, but as a crisis of growth: a modernisation crisis in thin disguise. It was much more successful than is generally allowed. It failed, I think, against the bottle-neck of peasant agriculture. Inflation had accompanied the country’s economic growth in the First World War; and it was inflation that, in the end, caused Russia’s food-suppliers to withhold their produce at a critical time. A book that began with battle-fields thus ends with discussion of war-economy, inflation, revolution in the towns and the countryside. This was the pattern of the First World War itself, and I have tried to record its course in eastern Europe as best I can.
    In the course of writing this book, I have had a great deal of support and encouragement. I should particularly like to thank the staffs of the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Paris, and of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, where the bulk of my work on Russia was done. The Kriegsarchiv in Vienna has also been, for many years, a second home for me, and I am always grateful, particularly to Dr: Kurt Peball, Herr Leopold Moser and Frau Professor Christina von Fabrizii, to whose interest and support I owe so much. Academic colleagues have given me stimulation and encouragement. Professors Marc Ferro and Teodor Shanin have taught me a dimension of Russian history that I should not have found by myself: they