A decline in the prestige of the officer corps accompanied its social dilution and economic distress. But this development was also in part attributable to the burgeoning hostility of the intelligentsia towards the regime and its organs of coercion, the army and the police. Certainly a decay in the image ofthe officer is observable in the pages of Russian literature. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, novels, essays and stories by such popular writers as Garshin, Kuprin, Andreev and Korolenko disseminated negative stereotypes of army officers, depicting them as lazy, ignorant, uncouth, homicidal and frequently drunk. [161]
Compounding these woes was the inner factiousness of the officer corps. Imperial army officers were united by their antipathy towards the outer civilian world but by not much else. Officers in one branch of the service typically disdained those who belonged to the others, while the graduates of the most prestigious and specialised military academies were inclined to sneer at all who lacked their educational attainments. This deficiency in cohesion meant that the officer corps as a whole was poorly situated to develop a strong corporate spirit or articulate its collective interests. Naturally enough, the government did make attempts to heal the divisions within the corps by legislation. But such laws as the statute of May 1894 that required officers to duel over points of honour or be cashiered were wrongheaded and ineffective remedies.
Nonetheless, the imperial officer corps did contain a thin stratum of military professionals, of whom the majority were so-called 'general staff officers' (GSOs). To gain entry into this prestigious fraternity, an officer had to win admission to the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, and complete its full academic programme with distinction. Thereafter he was entitled to be known for the rest of his career as an 'officer of the general staff regardless of actual military assignment. A true intellectual elite, the GSOs occupied the most important staff billets and had a monopoly on intelligence work.
But they also received a disproportionate share of army commands. Although they constituted no more than 2 per cent of the entire officer corps, in 1913 the GSOs were in command of over a third of the army's infantry regiments and over three-quarters of its infantry divisions.[162]
In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Russia's military professionals, including many GSOs, agonised over the declining quality of the officer corps, advocated the raising of standards and tirelessly preached that a young officer's best use of free time was education, rather than dissipation. After the icy shock of the Japanese defeat there were military professionals who concluded that the entire military system had to be regenerated, and that the empire's population had to be militarised and readied for total war. Such people, whom their opponents sometimes labelled 'young turks', argued that the ultimate pledge of future victory would be Russia's transformation into a true 'nation in arms'. Some, like A. A. Neznamov, demanded that Russian adopt a unified military doctrine, that is, a set of binding principles to govern military preparations in peace and the conduct of operations in war. In 1912, however, Emperor Nicholas II announced that 'military doctrine consists in doing everything that I order' and thereby stifled any further discussion.[163]
Nicholas's interference on this occasion may have stemmed from awareness that the vision of a Russian 'nation in arms' profoundly contradicted the political idea of autocracy. Russia was not a nation, but a multinational empire, and the glue that held it together was supposed to be allegiance to the Romanov dynasty, not veneration of some national abstraction. But what this episode also highlights is another chronic problem besetting higher military leadership in the twilight of the old regime: that of imperial meddling. This came in several forms. There were, for example, grand dukes whose positions as heads of army inspectorates permitted them to exert enormous influence on military decision-making, whether they were qualified to do so or not. Yet the most noisome way in which the court retarded military progress had to do with the distribution ofpromotions and appointments. Russia's last autocrats, and Nicholas II in particular, were often prone to select (and remove) military bureaucrats and field commanders more on the basis of personal loyalty than competence. This lamentable practice occurred even during times of military emergency, such as the First World War. General A. A. Polivanov may have been a ruthless, vindictive opportunist but he was also a masterly administrator who, after taking charge of the War Ministry in the summer of 1915, made immeasurable contributions to the revival of the army after the catastrophic defeats it suffered in Poland that spring. Yet despite this outstanding performance, when Nicholas II became displeased at Polivanov's co-operation with such 'social' organisations as the War Industries Committees, he abruptly dismissed his war minister after barely nine months in office. Polivanov's successor, although honest and straightforward, was considerably his inferior in ability.
A fourth and final drag on the Russian army's capability to adapt to change was financial. Traditionally, the majority of the army's budget had gone to 'subsistence costs' - the expenses of feeding, clothing and housing its troops.[164]But in the second half of the nineteenth century the rapid pace of military- technological change demanded heavy investments in new armaments. Still worse, by the late 1860s it grew apparent to Russia's military elite that a country's transportation infrastructure was indisputably crucial to military power. It was widely believed that Prussia had won the three wars of German unification in large measure owing to her skilful exploitation of railways to mobilise and concentrate her forces. Indeed, victory in future war might hinge entirely on the speed with which an army mobilised, for the war might be decided in its early battles, and the outcome of those would depend on the quantity of troops committed. Russia, however, was a poor country disadvantaged by its enormous size and its relatively sparse railway network.
The Russian Ministry of War consistently applied for extra appropriations to fund both upgrades in weaponry and strategic railway construction, but just as consistently met stiff opposition from the Ministry of Finance, where it was held that solvency and economic growth were only possible if military spending was restrained. Although Miliutin and his brilliant assistant N. N. Obruchev did pry loose enough money to pay for some rearmament, in 1873 Finance Minister Reutern blocked their plan for the development of Russia's western defences on fiscal grounds. Since the Russo-Turkish War left the empire 4.9 billion roubles in debt, there was little sunshine for the army in the state budgets of the 1880s and 1890s. The government did authorise the War Ministry's purchase of magazine rifles in 1888, but the army's share of state expenditures fell below 20 per cent by the mid-1890s and was to remain there for almost a decade. The boom in state-subsidised railway construction during this period did not profit the army very much either, because commercial considerations usually trumped strategic ones in decisions about where to lay down track.[165]
Deprived of the wherewithal to build railroads and fortresses to check a German or Austrian attack, the War Ministry redeployed the army so as to concentrate a higher proportion of its active strength close to the western frontiers. By 1892,45 per cent of the army was billeted in the empire's westernmost military districts. This measure was, however, an inadequate substitute for a thorough technological preparation of the likely theatre of war. The signing of the alliance with France that same year did bring the army some breathing space and rescued the military leadership from the nightmarish prospect of having to fight the Germans solo. Yet new fiscal woes cropped up at the turn of the century, for reckless imperialism in East Asia gave the army new territories to defend and sorely taxed the military budget. Underfunding and overextension produced a situation in which Russia was fully ready for war neither in the East nor in the West. When the Russo-Japanese War began, six of the forts that were supposed to guard Port Arthur from the landward side were still under construction, and none of them boasted any heavy ordnance.
162
E. Iu. Sergeev,
163
Menning,
164
David R. Jones, 'The Soviet Defence Burden through the Prism of History', in Carl Jakobson (ed.),