Question

Discuss the impact of the First World War on the Russian empire

Answer 1

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The Great War was the great destroyer of European empires. The mighty Russian Empire, the conservative anchor of the East for centuries, was the first to collapse. Why? Observers over the past hundred years have offered a number of explanations. Some ventured the proposition that the revolution that toppled the throne and eventually resulted in a communist dictatorship was due to Russian backwardness. In this view, Russia’s attempts to come to terms with modern political and economic systems were late and only superficially successful. Parliamentsemerged, but only alongside an unrepentant autocracy. Industry developed, but it was excessively dependent on foreigners and coexisted uncomfortably with a barely transformed Russian countryside. As a result, the entire structure of Russian social and political life was fragile and broke down under the pressure of the war.[1] There is something to this argument, but it is easy to overstate. We certainly should not equate backwardness with weakness. The rapid expansion of Russian power prior to the war was so alarming to German military planners that they pressed their political leadership to find a casus belli with the Romanovs as soon as possible.[2] Neither did “backwardness” mean a lack of adaptability, even resilience. Russia’s industrial infrastructure did shudder at the start of the war, leading to debilitating weaponsshortages in 1915, but by the end of 1916 it had recovered so quickly that Russia was out-producing German munitions makers.[3]

Nor was Russia undone by conspiratorial Marxists. Given the long history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the eventual success of the Bolsheviks, it made sense to connect the dots and to see revolutionaries as authors of the Revolution. Nevertheless, few scholars give much credence to a straightforward thesis of subversion. In the first place, no serious analyst either at the time or later attributed the February Revolution of 1917 (which forced the abdication of the Tsar) to successful intrigue on the part of Russia’s beleaguered Social Democrats. Indeed, to the extent that there was coup plotting in early 1917, it was being conducted by conservatives in the military and the royal family.[4] None of those plots had anything to do with the roiling rebellion that actually occurred. Secondly, as we shall see below, by the time that the communists did successfully launch a revolution, in October of the same year, the war effort was already in free fall. Left wing political activism played a role in the revolutionary year of 1917, of course, but it was only one of many factors.

Finally, we can dismiss the idea that Russia lost the war due to military failures, for the Russian army fought badly really only at a few moments. At the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 and at the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów in 1915, the Russians did lose entire armies and suffered serious strategic reverses. For long stretches of the war, however, Russian arms were quite successful, taking and recapturing Eastern Galicia and occupying Eastern Anatolia and Northern Persia. More to the point, even the large battlefield setbacks did not spell defeat. As the German Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn (1861-1922), complained, the “East gives nothing back.”[5] German military victories did not translate into political gains. Russia, in his view, was not only undefeated, but was perhaps undefeatable in operational terms. How, then, did the empire collapse? That is the question that the following brief narrative of military campaigns, and political and social change seeks to answer.

Entry into the War↑

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este (1863-1914) on 28 June 1914 by a band of extremist Serbian nationalists caught the Russian political elite by surprise. In truth, Russian foreign policy makers had been wrong-footed quite often by events in the Balkans in recent years. In 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria had created a “Balkan Alliance” to pursue their mutual interests on the peninsula. It dawned on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather late that the main mutual interest of these states would be to launch an offensive war against the Ottoman Empire. When Russia tried to act the role of benevolent patron and attempted to forestall military action, it was ignored. The Balkan Alliance won its war in 1912, then its members fought among themselves for the spoils in 1913 in a Second Balkan War that left Russia impotently wringing its hands on the sidelines.