23 See Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).
24 John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979),
pp. 455, 471.
Under the new emperor Alexander II (r. 1855-81) fundamental domestic reform was complemented by a policy of recueillement in foreign affairs. Russia's military leadership took advantage of the respite from major war to attempt an overhaul of the entire military system. However, the army still did have to cope with 'small wars' on the empire's periphery. Although the capture of imam Shamil in 1859 facilitated the eventual pacification of the Caucasus, in 1863 the Poles rose in a serious rebellion that could only be suppressed by brute force. There were also several campaigns in central Asia during the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. These solidified the military reputations of such prominent generals as M. G. Cherniaev and M. D. Skobelev and effected the submission to St Petersburg of Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva, Transcaspia and Merv. The motivations behind this central Asian imperialism were complex and confused, and ranged from a desire for more defensible frontiers, to a concern for enlarging Russian trade, to a perceived need to concoct a paper threat against Britain in India.[145] But a great deal of the impetus behind the advance came from Russia's ambitious military commanders there, who often sparked off armed clashes with the Muslims in contravention of their orders.
When Russia's next large-scale war erupted in 1877 against the Ottomans, her military reforms had not yet come to fruition. Yet the protracted eastern crisis that preceded its outbreak did permit the Russian military leadership to develop its mobilisation, concentration and campaign plans with greater than usual care.[146] Although Russia won the war, its military performance was mixed. In the hands of excellent commanders, Russian forces were capable of such magnificent actions as the seizure and defence of Shipka Pass and the astounding Balkan winter offensive that brought the Russian army within fifteen kilometres of Constantinople by January 1879.[147] But these triumphs were to some extent counterbalanced by the failure of the three bloody attempts to storm Plevna, the epidemic of typhus and cholera on the Caucasus front, the total breakdown in army logistics and the appalling dimensions of the butcher's bill. Still worse, the other European powers, led by Germany, colluded to prevent Russia from realising her entire set of war aims.
Germany was already the power that Russia feared the most. Since the establishment of Bismarck's Reich at the close of the Franco-Prussian War,
Russia had been alarmed by the growth in Germany's power and worried that Berlin had designs for European hegemony. How best to defend the empire from an attack by Germany, perhaps supported by Austria, swiftly became the chief preoccupation of Russia's military leadership, and was to remain so until 1914. This was the reason that Russia's venture into east Asian imperialism at the turn of the century so disquieted senior generals. Russia's acquisition of Port Arthur, its lodgement in Manchuria and its intrigues in Korea were attended by the risk of war with Japan. In the view of such influential figures as War Minister A. N. Kuropatkin, Russia did not have either the military budget or the manpower to protect her new acquisitions in the Far East, confronted as she was by a much more dangerous threat to her security in Europe.
When in February 1904 Japan opened hostilities against Russia by launching a surprise attack on Russia's Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, the Russian armed forces in the Far East were caught unprepared. Initially outnumbered, her troops dependent for their reinforcement and supply on the attenuated umbilical cord of the Trans-Siberian railway, Russia endured one military reverse after another in the land war. Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese in January 1905 after a seven-month siege, and in central Manchuria Russia suffered serious defeats at Liaoyang, the Sha-Ho, Sandepu and Mukden. Nor did the war at sea produce any news more welcome. Dispatched to the Pacific to engage the Japanese in their home waters, Russia's Baltic fleet was spectacularly annihilated in the battle of Tsushima Straits (May 1905). Negotiations resulted in the Peace of Portsmouth, which stripped Russia of Port Arthur, her position in Manchuria and half of Sakhalin island.
Russia's loss of the Japanese war of 1904-5 was not preordained, for she might have won it had she made better operational and strategic decisions during the ground war and had made more offensive use of her naval assets in the Pacific.[148] Indeed, despite all of her flagrant military blunders, arguably Russia would have won the war if the revolution of 1905 had not intervened to cripple the military effort. By the time the peace treaty was signed, Russia's forces outnumbered Japan's in Manchuria, while Tokyo had run out of reserves and was precariously close to fiscal collapse besides.
The revolution of 1905-7 brought two dire consequences for the Russian army in its train. First, the contagion of rebellion not only blanketed the towns and villages of the empire but also penetrated into the ranks of the army itself. In late 1905 and throughout 1906 (particularly after April) there occurred over 400 military mutinies, in which soldiers defied the orders of their officers and issued economic and political demands.[149] Second, the government answered the mass strikes, protests and agrarian disorders with an unprecedented application of military force: on more than 8,000 occasions between 1905-7 military units were called upon to assist in the restoration of order.[150] Failed war, revolution and repressive service demoralised the army, disrupted its training and made a shambles of the empire's external defence posture. It would take the Russian army considerable time, money and intellectual energy to recover. Military defeat engendered introspection and reform, just as it had after 1856, and although by 1914 the reform process still had some years to run, the Russian army was in good enough condition to wage what most assumed would be a short, general conflict in Europe. But neither the Russian army nor Russian society was up to the strain of the protracted, total, industrial conflict that the First World War quickly became. The War offered conclusive proof that neither the army nor the empire as a whole had adequately modernised since the middle of the nineteenth century.
With respect to the army, one source of inertia was the inherent difficulty of commanding, supplying and managing military units so numerous and so widely dispersed. Centralisation and decentralisation both had administrative advantages and disadvantages, and Russia's military leadership was never able to reconcile the tension among them. One figure who tried to do so was D. A. Miliutin, Russia's most eminent and energetic nineteenth-century military reformer. As war minister for almost the entire reign of Alexander II, Miliutin was responsible for substantive innovation in the army's force structure, schools, hospitals and courts, and presided over the introduction of the breechloading rifle and other up-to-date weapons.[151] But he also sought to streamline the operations of his ministry by creating eight glavnye upravleniia (or main administrations), with functional supervision over artillery, cavalry, engineering, intendence (supply and logistics), medicine, law, staff work and so forth. At the same time he divided the empire into fourteen (later fifteen) military districts, each with its own headquarters and staff and sub-departments, that mirrored the organisation of the War Ministry back in St Petersburg. Miliutin's administrative restructuring thus combined the principles of centralisation and decentralisation, for while the various military agencies and bureaux at the centre were brought firmly under his thumb, the military district commanders were invested with considerable autonomy. No one denied that this new organisation represented a considerable improvement over its predecessor, for it reduced red tape and permitted the elimination of 1,000 redundant jobs in St Petersburg alone.[152] Yet it had its drawbacks notwithstanding. It has, for example, been argued that perhaps the most important of the main administrations - the Main Staff - was statutorily burdened with so many secondary responsibilities that authentic general staff work suffered in consequence.[153] And the military district system, although a salutary antidote to the rigidity and paralysis of the military administration of the previous decades, led in the end to the fragmentation of intelligence collection and strategic planning.
145
Seymour Becker,
146
David Alan Rich,
147
Bruce W Menning,
148
Julian S. Corbett,
149
John Bushnell,
150
William C. Fuller, Jr,
151
Joseph Bradley,
153
P. A. Zaionchkovskii,