Meanwhile, in mid-July, the Germans also launched an offensive in East Prussia. They pushed north towards Riga, east towards Vilnius and south to join the other German forces advancing through Poland. The ‘impregnable’ fortresses of Kovno, Grodno, Osowiec, Novogeorgievsk and Ivangorod, which the Russians had placed at the centre of their defensive strategy, filling them up with precious supplies of munitions, were abandoned one by one as the Germans advanced with their heavy artillery. It was yet another example of the Russian military élite trying to fight a twentieth-century conflict with tactics more appropriate to the Crimean War. The huge stone bastions turned out to be useless museums, concrete traps for men and supplies, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had made their names on the Western Front by storming the fortress of Liège, had little difficulty repeating their success in the east. The fortifications at Kovno (Kaunas) were so poor that the Grand Duke Nikolai said the fortress ought to be renamed ‘Govno’ (the Russian word for ‘shit’). Its aged commander, to make matters even worse, had secretly fled the fortress on the eve of its capture. He was finally tracked down to the bar of the Bristol Hotel in Wilno (Vilnius) and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour.24
With all its armies pushed back by the force of German steel, the Russian command had little choice but to order a general retreat. No real plans were made. There were vague romantic notions of repeating the scorched-earth tactics of General Kutuzov which, in Tolstoy’s version at least, had so brilliantly entrapped Napoleon’s troops in the winter wastelands of Russia. ‘The retreat will continue as far — and for as long — as necessary,’ the Tsar told Maurice Paléologue at the end of July. ‘The Russian people are as unanimous in their will to conquer as they were in 1812.’ But in all other respects — the sequence of evacuation, the selection of things to destroy and the planning of strategic positions at which to make a new stand — there were only confusion and panic. Troops destroyed buildings, bridges, animals and crops in a totally random way. This often broke down into pillaging, especially of Jewish property. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their homes and farms demolished, trudged east along the railway lines with their few belongings piled on to carts, while trains sped past carrying senior officers, their mistresses, and, in the words of one officer, ‘all sorts of useless junk, including cages with canaries’. No provision was made for the care of the refugees, most of whom ended up living on station floors and the streets of Russia’s cities. ‘Sickness, misery and poverty are speading across the whole of Russia,’ Krivoshein, the Minister of Agriculture, warned the Council of Ministers in August. ‘Starving and ragged masses are sowing panic everywhere. Surely no country ever saved itself by its own destruction.’25
The summer months of unending retreat dealt another crippling blow to the troops’ morale. It was hard for them to see territory which they had fought and died for so easily sacrificed to the enemy. The destruction of military stores in the rear, full of the clothing and food they had so badly needed, was especially hard to bear. ‘Every day’, wrote Os’kin, ‘we would come across another store of food and munitions in some village or other. They were all just left there and destroyed.’ Here was the final damning proof of the military leaders’ incompetence. ‘They’ve screwed it all up,’ Brusilov overheard one of his soldiers mutter, ‘and we’ve been landed with cleaning up the mess.’ Demoralization in the rear was even more advanced. Nadezhda Brusilova wrote to her husband:
You are so naive, if you still believe in victory. We in the rear have a much better idea of what is going on and we are already convinced that the Germans will win the war. They will be in Moscow by 1916. This is the catastrophe and collapse of Russia.
There were widespread rumours in the rear about treason in high places, which soon spread to the Front. The German background of the Tsarina and other government figures, and the execution in March 1915 of Colonel Miasoyedov, one of Sukhomlinov’s protégés, for spying for Germany seemed to confirm such conspiracy theories. A Bolshevik soldier recalls the efforts of one NCO, for example, to explain to his soldiers the reason for the retreat: ‘There are many traitors and spies in the high command of our army, like the War Minister Sukhomlinov, whose fault it is that we don’t have any shell, and Miasoyedov, who betrayed the fortresses to the enemy.’ When he had finished a soldier-cook drew the conclusion: ‘A fish begins to stink from the head. What kind of a Tsar would surround himself with thieves and cheats? It’s as clear as day that we’re going to lose the war.’26
For many soldiers this was the vital psychological moment of the revolution — the moment when their loyalty to the monarchy finally snapped. A government which had dragged them into a war which they could not hope to win, had failed to provide them with adequate weapons and supplies, and now was in league with the enemy was certainly not worthy of further sacrifices. A million men surrendered to the German and Austrian forces during the Great Retreat, most of them preferring to spend the rest of the war in the enemies’ prisoner-of-war camps than vainly trying to fight their superior armies. An unknown number, but certainly tens of thousands, deserted to the rear, where many of them put their guns to a different use and lived from banditry. Even Sergeant Os’kin, who was wounded in the knee and eventually (after being forced to march on his wounded leg) evacuated to a Moscow hospital, felt so humiliated by the Great Retreat that, after his leg had been amputated, he deserted from his regiment and went to a friend’s farm in Siberia. But the farm had been burned down by the Cossacks, who had also requisitioned all its cattle for the government and had raped his friend’s wife and mother. This was the last straw for Os’kin, who now joined the SR Party underground in Siberia and watched with growing interest the political crisis unfolding as a result of the Great Retreat. In a final desperate effort to raise the morale of the troops, the Chief of Staff General Yanushkevich urged the Tsar to promise that in the event of a Russian victory every loyal soldier would be given 16 desyatiny (43 acres) of land. But it was too late for such measures and even Yanushkevich called it ‘clutching at straws’. The army was falling apart. By September, when the enemy’s advance was finally bogged down in the Russian mud, its front-line forces had been reduced to one-third of their strength at the start of the war.27
*
‘It cannot go on like this,’ Nicholas wrote in his diary on hearing the news of Warsaw’s fall. Three weeks later he took what many people believed at the time was the most fateful decision of his entire reign. On 22 August he dismissed the Grand Duke Nikolai and assumed the supreme command of the army himself. Stavka was moved 200 miles eastward to Mogilev, a dirty and dreary provincial town whose name derives from the word in Russian for a ‘grave’. Here the Tsar’s regime buried itself.
It seems there were two reasons (both equally flawed) for Nicholas’s decision — and it was his decision — to assume the command of the army. First, that at this critical moment the supreme ruler should stand at the head of the armed forces. There was a certain logic to this. Since the war began there had been in effect a dual power system — one led by the Grand Duke and the other by the Tsar — without any real co-ordination between them. However by moving to the Front, Nicholas merely undermined his own authority in the rear, where, in his absence, a sort of bureaucratic anarchy developed with the Tsarina, the ministers and the representatives of the Duma, the zemstvos and the war industries all at loggerheads. Second, the Tsar had hoped that by placing himself at the head of the army, he might help to restore its morale: if the soldiers would not fight for ‘Russia’, then perhaps they would fight for him. But Nicholas had no experience of military command and, although the important decisions were all taken by his new Chief of Staff, General M. V. Alexeev, who was a gifted strategist, the Tsar’s presence had a bad effect overall on morale. For, in the words of Brusilov, ‘Everyone knew that Nicholas understood next to nothing about military matters and, although the word “Tsar” still had a magical power over the troops, he utterly lacked the charisma to bring that magic to life. Faced with a group of soldiers, he was nervous and did not know what to say.’28