Brusilov’s disaffection with the monarchy was to conclude in 1917 when he threw in his lot with the revolution. But the roots of this conversion went back to the 1900s, when, like many of the new professionals, he came to see the court’s domination of the military as a major obstacle to its reform and modernization in readiness for the European war that, with every passing year, seemed more likely to break out on Russia’s western borders. The critical turning point was the failure of the General Staff to learn the lessons of the disastrous defeat in the Japanese war of 1904–5. Like many officers, he bitterly resented the way the military had been forced into this campaign, 6,000 miles away and virtually without preparation, by a small clique at court. The war in the Far East had led to the run-down of the country’s defences in the west. When, in 1909, he assumed the command of the Fourteenth Army in the crucial Warsaw border region, Brusilov found a state of ‘utter chaos and disorganization in all our forces’:
In the event of mobilization there would have been no clothes or boots for the men called up, and the lorries would have broken down as soon as they were put on the roads. We had machine-guns, but only eight per regiment, and they had no carriages, so that in case of war they would have had to be mounted on country carts. There were no howitzer batteries, and we knew that we were very short of ammunition, whether for field artillery or for rifles. I [later] learnt that the state of affairs was everywhere the same as with the XIV Army. At that moment it would have been utterly impossible to make war, even if Germany had thought of seizing Poland or the Baltic provinces.33
Very few Russian soldiers received training for trench warfare. The senior generals continued to believe that the cavalry was destined to play the key role in any forthcoming war, just as it had done in the eighteenth century. They dismissed Brusilov’s attempts to involve the soldiers in mock artillery battles as a waste of ammunition. Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever. Brusilov believed that such archaic practices were due to the domination of the General Staff by the court and the aristocracy. These people even seemed to think that whole divisions of the infantry could be commanded by dullards and fools so long as they had gone through one of the élite military schools reserved for noblemen. Attitudes like these alienated the new career soldiers from the Junker schools, who, unlike the prodigal sons of the General Staff, had often made it through the ranks by competence alone. It was not coincidental that, like Brusilov, more than a few of them would later join the Reds.
The grievances of the military professionals gradually forced them into politics. The emergence of the Duma after 1905 gave them an organ through which to express their opposition to the court’s leadership of the military. Many of the more progressive among them, like A. A. Polivanov, the Assistant Minister of War, joined forces with liberal politicians in the Duma, such as Alexander Guchkov, who, whilst arguing for increased spending on the army and especially the navy, wanted this connected with military reforms, including the transfer of certain controls from the court to the Duma and the government. Slowly but surely, the Tsar was losing his authority over the most talented elements of the military élite. Nicholas tried to reassert his influence by appointing the elegant and eminently loyal courtier, V. A. Sukhomlinov, to the post of War Minister in 1908. In the naval staff crisis of the following year he made a great show of forcing the Duma and the government to recognize his exclusive control of the military command (see here). Yet it was almost certainly too late for the Tsar to win back the hearts and minds of the military professionals like Brusilov. They were already looking to the Duma and its broader vision of reform to restore the strength of their beloved army. Here were the roots of the wartime coalition which helped to bring about the downfall of the Tsar.
iv Not-So-Holy Russia
God grant health to the Orthodox Tsar
Grand Prince Mikhail Fedorovich
May he hold the Muscovite tsardom
And all the Holyrussian land.
According to popular song, Mikhail Romanov had been blessed by his father, the Metropolitan Filaret, in 1619 with this prayer, six years after ascending the Russian throne. The myth of the ‘Holyrussian land’ was the founding idea of the Muscovite tsardom as it was developed by the Romanovs from the start of the seventeenth century. The foundation of their dynasty, as it was presented in the propaganda of the 1913 jubilee, symbolized the awakening of a new Russian national consciousness based on the defence of Orthodoxy. Mikhail Romanov, so the legend went, had been elected by the entire Russian people following the civil war and Polish intervention during the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). The ‘Holyrussian land’ was thus reunited behind the Romanov dynasty, and Mikhail saved Orthodox Russia from the Catholics. From this point on, the idea of ‘Holy Russia’, of a stronghold for the defence of Orthodoxy, became the fundamental legitimizing myth of the dynasty.
Not that the idea of Holy Russia lacked a popular base. Folksongs and Cossack epics had talked of the Holy Russian land since at least the seventeenth century. It was only natural that Christianity should become a symbol of popular self-identification for the Slavs on this flat Eurasian landmass so regularly threatened by Mongol and Tatar invasion. To be a Russian was to be Christian and a member of the Orthodox faith. Indeed it was telling that the phrase ‘Holy Russia’ (Sviataia Rus’) could only be applied to this older term for Russia, from which the very word for a Russian (russkii) derived; it was impossible to say Sviataia Rossiia, since Rossiia, the newer term for Russia, was connected only with the imperial state.fn3 Even more suggestive is the fact that the word in Russian for a peasant (krest’ianin), which in all other European languages stemmed from the idea of the country or the land, was coupled with the word for a Christian (khrist’ianin).
But where the popular myth of Holy Russia had sanctified the people and their customs, the official one sanctified the state in the person of the Tsar. Moscow became the ‘Third Rome’, heir to the legacy of Byzantium, the last capital of Orthodoxy; and Russia became a ‘holy land’ singled out by God for humanity’s salvation. This messianic mission gave the tsars a unique religious role: to preach the True Word and fight heresies across the world. The image of the tsar was not just of a king, mortal as a man but ruling with a divine right, as in the Western medieval tradition; he was fabricated as a God on earth, divinely ordained as a ruler and saintly as a man. There was a long tradition in Russia of canonizing princes who had laid down their lives pro patria et fides, as Michael Cherniavsky has shown in his superb study of Russian myths. The tsars used Church laws, as no Western rulers did, to persecute their political opponents. The whole of Russia became transformed into a sort of vast monastery, under the rule of a tsar-archimandrite, where all heresies were rooted out.34