Zhilinski’s assignment in 1914 to command the Warsaw military district was not a routine transfer, but neither was it a demotion. Given the chronically disturbed state of Russo-Polish relations, the Warsaw assignment had a significant domestic political dimension. The previous incumbent, appointed during the revolution of 1905, had been reasonably effective in conciliating the Poles but was not highly regarded as a soldier. His sudden death cleared the way for a new emphasis. Rumor in St. Petersburg even had Sukhomlinov taking that post, with Zhilinski succeeding him as war minister—a miscalculation of the balance of power between the two men that nevertheless indicated Warsaw’s importance.
Mobilization plans designated the Warsaw district’s commander as commander of the Northwest Front, Russia’s main effort against Germany. Zhilinski’s appointment made excellent sense in terms of coalition politics. As chief of staff he had repeatedly promised the French that Russia would undertake a prompt offensive against Germany. His presence in Warsaw was a reassurance that Russia would in fact turn words to deeds should war break out. In professional terms Zhilinski was clearly identified as a soldier, as opposed to an administrator in uniform. His extensive staff experience was expected to be vital in coordinating the movements of his two armies in executing a complex plan. It was true that he had shown no signs of possessing a great commander’s talents. On the other hand, neither did his career indicate that he did not possess such talents. It did reflect a reasonable capacity for rising to occasions, and this was about as much as any army making the transition to a general war could expect from its senior leaders.
Zhilinski’s principal subordinates were slightly better-known quantities. Pavel Rennenkampf became chief of the 1st Army when his Vilna Military District mobilized. A Baltic German by birth, he was a staff academy graduate who had made his reputation in the cavalry, seeing action in China in 1900, commanding a division in Manchuria in 1904–05, and most recently suppressing revolutionaries in Russia itself. Rennenkampf was socially well-connected and a known figure at court, but he did not owe his command entirely to favoritism. His performance in Manchuria had been steady rather than brilliant, but he had established himself as a man with at least some sense of how to conduct mobile operations under modern conditions. He was acquainted personally with many of his prospective opponents, having represented his government at official functions in East Prussia—most recently, ironically, at celebrations of the Russo-German Convention of Tauroggen against Napoleon in 1812.
Rennenkampf’s counterpart with the Russian 2nd Army was also a cavalryman. Like Rennenkampf, Alexander Vasilevich Samsonov was a staff academy graduate who had done reasonably well in the field—notably commanding a cavalry division during the Russo-Japanese War. Since 1909 he had been governor-general of Turkestan and commander of the Turkestan military district. The distance, physical and mental, between this post and Samsonov’s assignment on mobilization, has been described as symbolizing the insouciance with which Russia went to war in 1914. In fact Samsonov was by no means an unconsidered choice. The 2nd Army’s logical commander would have been the peacetime head of the Warsaw military district, but that officer, as we have seen, was designated for front command. Samsonov, for his part, had also been chief of staff of the Warsaw district, from 1905 to 1907. In difficult revolutionary and postre-volutionary circumstances he had been calm and successful—so successful, indeed, that in early 1914 he too was considered a viable candidate for the district command that eventually went to Zhilinski. As a soldier, the German military attaché had declared, Samsonov certainly appeared to be well qualified for the post. There is no indication that the Germans believed he had gone into a decline in the intervening six months. There is, indeed, no indication that the Germans regarded any of their principal Russian adversaries as obvious military lightweights.44
A persistent legend of 1914 is that of bitter personal enmity between Rennenkampf and Samsonov—a feud beginning during the Russo-Japanese War and culminating in a physical altercation between the two generals in a Mukden railway station. The anecdote’s viability reflects its usefulness as a symbol of prewar Russia’s structural inefficiency. What other system could entrust to two men who hated each other a campaign depending upon close cooperation for its success? The only flaw in the scenario is that the incident never occurred. Rennenkampf’s principal biographer takes pains to demonstrate that his protagonist was hospitalized with a wound at the time of the alleged scuffle. To reach the railway station, he would need to have been carried on a stretcher. Alternative possibilities for encounters generating personal antagonism between the generals are even more far-fetched. In any case, Jean Savant asks, why should Rennenkampf, with his brilliant prospects and his network of connections in high places, under any provocation engage in undignified fisticuffs with a relative nobody like Samsonov?45
Savant’s common sense question highlights the fact, mentioned earlier in this text, that the Russian army was clique- and faction-ridden. On August 9, the French ambassador described the rivalries of court and drawing room over command appointments as resembling a chapter of War and Peace.46 Senior command and staff assignments to the Northwest Front did reflect a balance among interests and viewpoints. Thus Samsonov was considered Sukhomlinov’s man, while Rennenkampf was identified with the opposition to the war ministry headed by the Grand Duke Nicholas. In turn Samsonov’s own chief of staff was an anti-Sukhomlinov-ite, while Rennenkampf’s supported the war minister.47
Taken at face value, this becomes a recipe for disaster before the first shots were fired. Yet no peacetime officer corps ever remotely resembles a band of brothers. Personal and professional antagonisms, networks of sponsorship and protection, patterns of political influence, are norms, not exceptions. The Royal Navy’s “Fishpond,” George C. Marshall’s lists of promising officers, the interlocking directorate of paratroop generals in the U.S. army of the 1950s and 1960s—examples can be multiplied indefinitely. Victory tends to soften, or at least to blur, the existence of these divisions. And the Russian army expected to win.
The image of the Russian soldier of World War I as a uniformed primitive is so strongly established that challenging it seems an act of perversity. Yet the army which took the field in 1914 was by no means ignorant of reading and writing. This in large part reflected collective wisdom that “among the soldiers the illiterate is a doomed man.” Until 1906, a school certificate had meant four instead of five years’ active service. Literacy remained of obvious and increasing value in learning regulations, performing ordinary duties, and, last but hardly least, competing for soft assignments in orderly rooms and offices. Sixty-eight percent of the conscript class of 1913 met government standards of literacy. A significant number of the rest were likely to acquire at least its rudiments during their first months of service, if for no better reason than to avoid being victimized by the system and their fellow soldiers.
These points hardly suggest the Russian private took the field with a copy of Dostoyevsky in his knapsack. Official definitions of literacy were generous; recruits able to do more than sign their names and spell their way through a chapbook were likely to be assigned to one of the technical arms rather than the infantry. But it is worth noting that when the United States raised a conscript army from scratch during World War II, its manpower allocation programs also sent a disproportionate number of men in the lowest two categories of “usable” intelligence to the infantry. An infantry division was held to require fewer leaders and specialists than other, more technically oriented formations, and many of those they did receive were eventually transferred to special programs.48