A new army Chief of Staff, General Mikhail Alekseev, was able to rebuild much of the shattered Russian forces and 1916 brought short-lived victory to the Russian side with the successful June-July offensive of General Aleksei Brusilov, one of the best generals in the Russian camp. Another set of devastating Austrian defeats nearly took the Habsburg monarchy out of the war, but the Germans came to the rescue and Brusilov's advances had outrun his supply lines. Once again, casualties were staggering on both sides (1,412,000 Russian casualties, including 212,000 POWs; 750,000 Austro-Hungarian casualties, 380,000 of them POWs) and contributed to broad demoralisation among both military and civilian populations. Though the war would drag on for another two murderous years, the Russian army, after the defeat of the Brusilov offensive, never again threatened the Germans' domination of Eastern Europe. It was the Germans' own defeat in 1918, combined with revolution at home and international pressure, that forced them to abandon the borderlands between Russia and the Reich, and even then they stayed on in various arrangements until Allied High Commissions could organise a transfer of power, for example, in the Baltic states.
The martial law regime and its consequences
On 16 July 1914, wide swaths of the Russian Empire were placed under martial law; this included not only the front-line regions and a broad band of territory behind the lines. It also included the two capitals, Moscow and Petrograd (recently renamed to reflect a more patriotic Slavic identity against the German enemy and its culture). Military authorities had virtually unlimited authority to overturn the decisions of local civilian governments; Russia's tenuous achievements in establishing some autonomy for civilian self-rule in the empire were effectively reversed in a matter of months.[48] The army set up a 'Chancellery for Civilian Administration' to co-ordinate its rule over the population, and the expansion of the power and authority of the army proceeded with little effective resistance. The Duma, which had already had its powers trimmed in Nicholas's determination to roll back the concessions he had made under pressure in 1905, suffered further limitations with the war and had virtually no power to influence the course of the war. Several wartime finance measures, especially the imposition of taxes, were passed by special enactments of the government, without consulting the Duma. Duma deputies at best could use the parliament as a tribune to voice their opposition criticism of the regime, but they had no power over the military budget, war aims or the conduct of the war. Interior Minister Nikolai Maklakov led the government's assault on the Duma; the government declared its intention to extend use of the Clause 87 of the Fundamental Laws, banned press coverage of meetings of the Council of Ministers and effectively abandoned the principle of parliamentary immunity. After a largely ceremonial session on 26 July the government refused to reconvene the parliament until it needed a state budget passed. The Fourth Duma met for three days (27-9 January 1915) and was dismissed again until November. And, thanks to the Stolypin coup d'etat of June 1907, the electoral franchise shaped a conservative, Russian nationalist majority in the Fourth Duma (which convened from 1912 to 1917) with virtually no representation from the non-Russian populations or the non-propertied classes. The war, far from saving the Duma as it was hoped by the moderate parties who declared the union sacree, instead offered the government an opportunity to reduce the Fourth Duma from a legislative to a consultative assembly.[49]
The military managed to free itself, however, even from the Petrograd bureaucracies, the Council of Ministers, and wilfully disregarded decisions passed by the State Council, the conservative upper house of the relatively new Russian parliament. For example, in 1915 Chief of Staff Nikolai Ianushkevich, in the name of national security or military strategic interests and evoking the war against Napoleon in 1812, ordered a scorched-earth policy to deny the Germans and Austrians any advantage from the reoccupied territories in Poland and Galicia, over the clear objections of the State Council. The scorched-earth policy made conditions much less tolerable for any future Russian reoccupation, but short-term considerations appeared to win out over longer-term rationale. That policy was also one more illustration of the increasing brutalisation of the war and its devastating impact on the civilian population that fell in its wake.
Occupation policy in the first months of the war was another site for the exercise of the military's new powers. Lemberg's military governor-general, Georgii Bobrinskii, oversaw the expulsion of enemy aliens (German and Austrian citizens) and the arrest and deportation of thousands of Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian community leaders whose loyalty was suspect to the interior of the empire, thereby giving rise to radical emigre circles in nearly every major European Russian city. Martial law authorities confiscated personal and communal property, particularly that of religious, educational and cultural institutions, and transferred them to new owners in violation of any due process or judicial norms. To staff the occupation administration, the Russian military authorities deployed hundreds of local bureaucrats and notables from the south-west provinces, a stronghold of Russian nationalist parties and movements shaped by a largely anti-Polish and anti-Jewish politics of Old Regime elite self-defence. And, under the cover of the Russian occupation, several politically engaged hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, notably Archbishop Evlogii, launched a new campaign for the reconversion of the Galician population to its 'traditional' Orthodox faith from its Greek-Catholic apostasy.
Most Russian subjects in the interior provinces were provisionally spared these massive new intrusions into local social life, but when the retreat of 1915 threw the front lines and the martial law regime far to the east, they too got their first taste of the redrawn borders between civilian and military authority. Moreover, the retreat of the Russian army also brought into the imperial heartland millions of refugees (2.7 million in 1915, which grew to 3.3 million by May 1916) for whom little or no provision had been made by the imperial government. These refugees, not surprisingly, quickly overwhelmed local resources and their alien presence provoked pogroms.
Finally, the military authorities began experimenting with modern techniques of political control over the populations under their expanding authority, particularly in the area of surveillance. A 'Temporary Statute on Military Censorship' introduced a regime of press and postal controls after the outbreak of war. For the first time, the army began monitoring its soldiers' correspondence for signs of discontent or disloyalty to the dynasty and empire; the expansion of surveillance marked both a quantitative and qualitative change over any previous efforts ofthe tsarist bureaucracy. And after the Great Retreat of1915 and the re-emergence ofa vocal opposition in the Duma, the Ministry of Internal Affairs extended the surveillance practices to civilian society. The army also began to invest the first substantial resources in wartime propaganda to persuade the largely conscript army of the righteousness of the Russian cause. Russian conscripts were sent to the front with a vague message of pan-Slavic liberation of their suffering brothers under Habsburg rule overlaid with an insistence on Teutonic barbarism, illustrated, for example, by the atrocities committed by the retreating Hungarian (sic) forces in 1914. The war was cast as a fight for survival between German militarism and Slavic, Orthodox civilisation. The rhetoric of titanic struggle contributed to the totalisation of the war and the sense that no sacrifice was too great for the cause.
48
For a description of the martial law regime, see Daniel Graf,'The Reign of the Generals: Military Government in Western Russia, 1914-1915', Ph. D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1972.
49
See Raymond Pearson,