Men entering the fleet who were inclined to political radicalism were likely to be encouraged in that direction by conditions of service. The five-year term was one source of grievance, as was very low pay and the need to act as 'batmen' for officers. Food was often poor, the most recent Anglophone study of the Potemkin mutiny stating that this was yet one more area in which the navy's leadership had tried to cut costs in the early twentieth century.[206] Conditions aboard were very cramped. Moreover, partly for reasons of economy but above all because almost all ports were iced up in winter, crews spent the long winter months in barracks ashore. Often ships' crews were split up or diluted, under the command of barracks' commanders and officers whom they barely knew. Under these conditions no sense of solidarity or esprit de corps was possible and even supervision was difficult. Even the ships' own officers and priests, however, usually showed little awareness that the increasingly literate, skilled and independent men who were now often being conscripted needed to be trained, led and stimulated in different ways to old-time peasant recruits.[207]
All these factors fed into the wave of mutinies that devastated the navy in the early twentieth century. So too did the impact of defeat by Japan and the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Russian seamen. The first mass protests occurred in 1902. If the June 1905 Potemkin affair is the most famous event in this period, the mutinies in the Black Sea in autumn 1905 and in the Baltic in spring 1906 were larger in scale. In 1907 it was the turn for mass mutinies in the Pacific squadron. Although on the surface calm reigned in subsequent years, discontent and revolutionary propaganda was still very real. In 1912 the police pre-empted mass mutiny by large-scale and arbitrary arrests of revolutionary activists among the sailors.
Analysing the reasons for the dramatic conflicts between officers and sailors in 1905-7, one senior admiral saw their basic cause as the deep cultural and mental gulf between Russia's educated elites and the bulk of the population. In a short-service, conscript navy this chasm was bound to be transferred from society as a whole into the armed forces. Traditional suspicion and mutual incomprehension between the two groups had often recently been transformed into strong antagonism by the growth of class conflict and revolutionary agitation. Sailors often saw their officer as a 'lord' and an 'oppressor'. Of course such deep-rooted social and political problems could not be solved by the navy alone but a number of key weaknesses did exacerbate the fleet's difficulties in managing its sailors and winning their allegiance. Of these, the greatest was the failure to create a strong and numerous group of long-service petty officers, who would be drawn from the ranks and understand the sailors' mentality and needs, while being wholly loyal to the navy and inculcated into its values. Creating such a corps in Russian conditions was difficult, however. In the era before the introduction of short-service conscription there had been few difficulties. Sailors were bound to lifetime service in the fleet and had every incentive to become petty officers. The contemporary conscript in the steam navy, however, had often acquired very marketable skills by the time he finished his term of service in the fleet. Private industry offered pay, conditions and freedom to potential petty officers which the navy could not match.[208]
Naval officers were drawn from a totally different milieu from that of the sailors. The great majority of deck officers were graduates of the Naval Cadet Corps. All the cadets were from the nobility. Though few were aristocrats and very few owned sizeable estates, a great many of these men came from families with strong traditions of service in the fleet. To meet the needs of a rapidly growing fleet, the annual number of midshipmen graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps more than doubled between 1898 and 1911-13, from 52 to 119. Cadets spent one year ashore and then three years mostly at sea on training ships. Meanwhile the Naval Engineering School trained young men drawn from all social backgrounds to be ship engineers. It had two branches - engineering and shipbuilding - which together in 1900 graduated only twenty- eight young men into the navy, though again the numbers increased substantially in subsequent years.
As in many other navies of that time, tensions existed between the traditional caste of deck officers and the new engineer officers, whom they often perceived as their social inferiors. This tension, together with the exclusively noble makeup of the Naval Cadet Corps made it even more difficult to find a sufficient number of young officers to fill the ranks ofthe growing fleet, though the more attractive pay and conditions often available in civilian employment were an even greater problem. Shortage of officers was an issue during the war with Japan. Even in the war's first month the battleships and cruisers of the Pacific squadron on average were short of four to five officers each. The squadron sent round the world in 1905 to reinforce the Pacific fleet left its Baltic ports with many insufficiently trained younger officers who were promoted to midshipmen without finishing their education, or were drawn from the reserve or in the case of engineers from civilian technical institutes.22
The Japanese war revealed a number of defects in the officer corps. Above all, the Naval Cadet Corps had given them little understanding of naval tactics. Nor was this defect corrected even for the minority of officers who subsequently received a higher naval education at the Nicholas Naval Academy. The latter was geared to educating narrow technical specialists in its three core sections - hydrographic, shipbuilding and mechanical. After 1896, alongside these two- year courses, a one-year course in naval tactics was at last established. Only after the war and in the light ofits lessons was education in tactics and strategy put on a proper footing. Before 1904 the Naval Academy was unable to fulfil the role of training future staff officers. Similarly, though radio-telegraphy was taught in the officers' mine-warfare class from 1900, no attention was paid to its tactical applications. In fact, though six to seven officers were attached to the army's artillery academy every year, the officers' training even in gunnery was inadequate, in large part because the limited number of instructors were swamped by the sheer scale of gunnery training required by the growing navy.
The regulations introduced in 1885 to govern promotions and appointments had a vicious effect on the navy. They were designed to combat nepotism and to ensure that officers had adequate experience - above all at sea - before being promoted. However, by rigidly requiring specific terms of service at sea before promotion and linking promotion in rank to the availability of specific posts in ships the regulations totally backfired on the navy. To fulfil these requirements officers jumped from ship to ship, in the process weakening the efficient command structures and the sense of solidarity which ought to reign in a ship's crew. This sense of solidarity was already at risk because not just other ranks but also officers spent the long winter months when the ships were ice-bound ashore in barracks. The so-called 'naval regiments' (ekipazhi) which were the basic units for shore-time service did not even correspond to the individual ships' companies. Moreover months spent ashore often distracted officers from truly naval training and encouraged attention to drill and other extraneous concerns.23
206
R. Zebrowski, 'The Battleship
207
The devastating report of Captain Brusilov, the chief of the Naval General Staff, to Nicholas II in October 1906 implicitly acknowledged this and recommended drafting a new law to define sailors' rights and duties: At the basis of this law must be humane principles in accordance with the spirit of the times and the striving to defend the rights of the individual, to the extent of course that this is compatible with the basic principles of military discipline and special circumstances of the naval service' (RGAVMF, Fond 418, op. 1, d. 238, pp. 24-48; the quote is from pp. 42-3).
208
Vice-Admiral Prince A. A. Liven,