CHAPTER 1
Background
During the century leading up to 1914 Russia’s military experience had been mixed. Having effectively destroyed Napoleon’s Grand Army during the winter of 1812–13, the army of Tsar Alexander I emerged as the most powerful in Europe. However, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) the fear of a revolution led by army officers tainted with western-style liberalism created an atmosphere that discouraged innovation and initiative. This stifling of independent, creative thought produced an army that was plagued by a determination to perform well on the parade ground and translate this precision onto the battlefield. Consequently the army that faced the Turkish-British-French alliance during the Crimean War was defeated by generals whose performance was only marginally less inept than their Russian opponents.
Alexander II, who succeeded his father in 1855, recognised that military reform was vital when informed by his War Minister that it would take up to six months to assemble four army corps on the border with Austria. Yet things moved slowly in imperial Russia and it was only with the appointment of General D. A. Miliutin as War Minister in 1862 that things began to improve.
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s the army was engaged in a series of campaigns in the Caucasus and Central Asia which impeded the reform process and consumed the military budget. Furthermore in 1861 Alexander II had emancipated the serfs and this colossal piece of social engineering, involving over ninety per cent of the population, was more than enough to deal with, certainly in economic terms. Nevertheless, by 1865 the empire was divided into fifteen military districts. Each of these areas was, in effect, a small state answerable to the Tsar and the War Ministry in St Petersburg. The War Minister was chief military adviser to the Tsar and controlled the Imperial Headquarters, the Military Council, the High Military Council, the War Ministry Staff and the Main Staff. Despite this profusion of bureaucrats there was no General Staff and all decisions remained the prerogative of the Tsar. In 1868 a new Field Regulations Manual was issued. It noted that the army (in this was included the navy) was to be led by a Supreme Commander in Chief who, “represented the person of the Tsar and was invested with Imperial authority”. It was assumed that, in time of war, the War Minister would lead the armies in the field regardless of his command experience. This situation was to remain unchanged until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.
Following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) General N. N. Obruchev reported that Austria and the newly united Germany would be the most likely enemies of Russia in any future conflict. And due to the excellent railway networks at their disposal they could mobilise their forces in half the time it took the Russians and that they would outnumber the Russian army by a considerable margin. The area under immediate
