Catastrophe at the Front¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the myth of the Russian army as a mindless, obedient mass—a quasi-racist caricature supposedly explaining Russian history from Tolstoy to the present—is demolished by the material reality of 1914–17. The chapter’s core argument is that the Tsarist military machine was not a formidable instrument but a catastrophe in slow motion, whose disintegration reflected the rottenness of the regime itself and, crucially, generated the revolutionary consciousness that would destroy it.
The Russian army was gravely under-equipped: in 1914, only 679 motor cars and two motorised ambulances for the entire force. More decisive than material shortage was the strategic subordination of Russian lives to Allied war aims. The original plan to concentrate on the weaker Austrian front was scrapped under French pressure, forcing a disastrous all-out offensive that ended in the bloodbath of Tannenberg: 70,000 Russians killed or wounded, 100,000 taken prisoner, against German losses of 15,000. The Grand Duke Nikolai’s casual remark—“We are happy to make such sacrifices for our allies”—epitomised the callous indifference that corroded morale.
The chapter draws heavily on Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy to demonstrate that the peasant soldier was a stranger to patriotism. Soldiers’ letters and Brusilov’s own complaints reveal men who had no idea why they were fighting, who asked whether it mattered which Tsar they lived under, and who threatened to “settle accounts” with their own officers. The class divisions of Tsarist society were mirrored in the army: aristocratic generals who had never commanded a battalion, a Supreme Commander who was a mere figurehead, and a staff so rotten it shocked even the Allied commanders. The rot seeped from the top down, with generals ordering artillery to fire on their own trenches.
The chapter’s most pointed polemic is against the myth of the passive, obedient Russian peasant. The real historical experience of 1914–17 “blew sky-high” this unscientific notion. The evidence shows that the war was a great democratiser, creating a radical cohort of NCOs—peasants in their early twenties, literate, upwardly mobile, brutalised by war—who would lead the February mutiny, the soldiers’ committees, and ultimately the drive to Soviet power. The chapter cites Sergeant Dmitry Os’kin, who recorded in his diary the dawning realisation that the task of the platoon commander was to stop the soldier thinking freely—but that these were precisely the things they must think about. “Out of such stuff are revolutions made.”
The Great Retreat of May–September 1915 completed the disintegration: the army was pushed back 300 miles, surrendering territory larger than France, with losses of 45–53 per cent of all men mobilised. A million men surrendered. The Minister of War admitted the army was “no longer retreating but simply fleeing”. The Minister of Agriculture warned the Council of Ministers that the “second great migration of peoples” would bring Russia to “the abyss, to revolution and to ruin”. The chapter ends with that prophecy, its fulfilment already implicit in every line.