The Eastern Front 1914-1917 Read Free Page B

bear some of theresponsibility for my last chapter, however much they might wish to repudiate it. I am also grateful to Mr. Raymond Carr, Mr. Peter Gatrell, Professor Israel Getzler, Professor F. H. Hinsley, Professor Michael Howard, Mr. Dominic Lieven, Mr. Donald Tyerman, Mr. David Warnes, Mr. Andrew Wheatcroft, Mr. H. T. Willett—to whom I owe two very stimulating discussions in St. Antony’s, Oxford—and Professor S. R. Williamson for their willingness to submit to bombardment. It is, finally, a pleasure for me to record my debt of gratitude, collectively to the Faculty of History at Cambridge, to my colleagues—and particularly Mr. D. J. V. Fisher—in Jesus College, to whose kindness and tolerance I owe so much, and to Madame Andrée Aubry, for her generous hospitality throughout the writing of this book.
    Norman Stone
    Jesus College, Cambridge
    4th October 197

CHAPTER NINE
The Political War-Economy, 1914–1917
    The great retreat of 1915 coincided with a great political crisis inside Russia. It had been imminent since the turn of 1914–15, and broke, over the question of shell-shortage, in the spring of 1915. To start with, patriotic euphoria had led to something of a ‘civil truce’ in Russia, as elsewhere. But the strain of months of war began to tell, and provoked many problems for Tsarist Russia. In the Duma, Russia’s parliament, there were many politicians who wished to limit drastically the powers of the Tsar, and the Constitutional Democratic Party was self-confessedly Republican. These men had always feared that they might be engulfed in waves of populist nationalism, set in motion by the Tsar; it was therefore their best course to put themselves at the head of a rival patriotic movement. Such a movement, which materialised later on in the shape of a ‘Progressive Bloc’ in the Duma, which included 235 of its 422 members, would demand reform: cabinet government, with ministers appointed from the Duma and responsible to it; the Tsar’s power restricted to narrowly constitutional functions, and possibly even abolished altogether. Shell-shortage gave these men a wonderful chance to show that the existing régime was corrupt and incompetent. There were attacks, particularly on Sukhomlinov and the detested minister of the interior, Maklakov.
    But the political movement was supported by powerful figures within the régime, and it was this support that gave it such success as it obtained in the summer. The army generals also groused at Sukhomlinov’s regime, and were determined to replace it with one of their own. This was a fundamental quarrel, almost on class-lines, that went back to the clash of patrician and praetorian before 1914. The army generals pursued their vendetta against Sukhomlinov, and exploited the army’s material weakness to suggest that Sukhomlinov should be removed, along with his partisans. This led the generals into an informal alliance with the Duma men. It was an alliance that also received powerful support from industrialists. They resented the war ministry’s unbending attitude in war-contracts. Businesses were going idle because of wartime circumstancesbut were not getting war-contracts to make up, because the war ministry relied only on foreigners and its own tiny set of Petrograd protégés. The magnates of Moscow industry, in particular, resented this exclusion, on which they blamed the crisis of materiel; and their resentment was matched lower down the industrial scale, where thousands of the country’s smaller businesses grumbled that they were on the edge of bankruptcy because of the war ministry’s attitude. The industrial opposition promoted a scheme for ‘War-Industries Committees’ in the spring of 1915, which would bring private enterprise into the war-effort. The elected town and county councils of Russia joined this agitation, and set up a union, Zemgor , to show that they too could provide sinews of war. The alliance gained support from within the government: