THE ARMY AND NAVY OF NICHOLAS II
Under Russia’s last tsar, the army went from defeat to disaster and despair. Initially overcommitted and split by a new dichotomy between the Far East and the European military frontier, the army fared poorly in the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-1905. Poor strategic vision and even worse battlefield execution in a Far Eastern littoral war brought defeat because Russia failed to bring its overwhelming resources to bear. While the navy early ceded the initiative and command of the sea to the Japanese, Russian ground force buildups across vast distances were slow. General Adjutant Alexei Nikolayevich Kuropatkin and his subordinates lacked the capacity either to fight expert delaying actions or to master the complexities of meeting engagements that evolved into main battles and operations. Tethered to an 8-thousand-kilometer-long line of communications, the army marched through a series of reverses from the banks of the Yalu (May 1904) to the environs of Mukden (February-March 1905). Although the garrison at Port Arthur retained the capacity to resist, premature surrender of the fortress in early 1905 merely added to Russian humiliation.
The Imperial Russian Navy fared even worse. Except for Stepan Osipovich Makarov, who was killed early, Russian admirals in the Far East presented a picture of indolence and incompetence. The Russian Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur made several half-hearted sorties, then was bottled up at its base by Admiral Togo, until late in 1904 when Japanese siege artillery pounded the Squadron to pieces. When the tsar sent his Baltic Fleet (re-christened the Second Pacific Squadron) to the Far East, it fell prey to the Japanese at Tsushima (May 1905) in a naval battle of annihilation. In all, the tsar lost fifteen capital ships in the Far East, the backbone of two battle fleets.
The years between 1905 and 1914 witnessed renewal and reconstruction, neither of which sufficed to prepare the tsar’s army and navy for World
Nicholas II presents an icon to his troops as they depart for World War I. © SOVFOTO War I. Far Eastern defeat fueled the fires of the Revolution of 1905, and both services witnessed mutinies within their ranks. Once the dissidents were weeded out, standing army troops were employed liberally until 1907 to suppress popular disorder. By 1910, stability and improved economic conditions permitted General Adjutant Vladimir Alexan-drovich Sukhomlinov’s War Ministry to undertake limited reforms in the army’s recruitment, organization, deployment, armament, and supply structure. More could have been done, but the navy siphoned off precious funds for ambitious shipbuilding programs to restore the second arm’s power and prestige. The overall objective was to prepare Russia for war with the Triple Alliance. Obsession with the threat opposite the western military frontier gradually eliminated earlier dichotomies and subsumed all other strategic priorities.
The outbreak of hostilities in 1914 came too soon for various reform and reconstruction projects to bear full fruit. Again, the Russians suffered from strategic overreach and stretched their military and naval resources too thin. Moreover, military leaders failed to build sound linkages between design and application, between means and objectives, and between troops and their command instances. These and other shortcomings, including
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an inadequate logistics system and the regime’s inability fully to mobilize the home front to support the fighting front, proved disastrous. Thus, the Russians successfully mobilized 3.9 million troops for a short war of military annihilation, but early disasters in East Prussia at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, along with a stalled offensive in Gali-cia, inexorably led to a protracted war of attrition and exhaustion. In 1915, when German offensive pressure caused the Russian Supreme Command to shorten its front in Russian Poland, withdrawal turned into a costly rout. One of the few positive notes came in 1916, when the Russian Southwest Front under General Alexei Alexeyevich Brusilov launched perhaps the most successful offensive of the entire war on all its fronts. Meanwhile, a navy still not fully recovered from 1904-1905 generally discharged its required supporting functions. In the Baltic, it laid mine fields and protected approaches to Petrograd. In the Black Sea, after initial difficulties with German units serving under Turkish colors, the fleet performed well in a series of support and amphibious operations.
Ultimately, a combination of seemingly endless bloodletting, war-weariness, governmental inefficiency, and the regime’s political ineptness facilitated the spread of pacifist and revolutionary sentiment in both the army and navy. By the beginning of 1917, sufficient malaise had set in to render both services incapable either of consistent loyalty or of sustained and effective combat operations. In the end, neither the army nor the navy offered proof against the tsar’s internal and external enemies. Fuller, William C., Jr. (1992). Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600- 1914. New York: The Free Press. Kagan, Frederick W. (1999). The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kagan, Frederick W., and Higham, Robin, eds. (2002). The Military History of Tsarist Russia. New York: Pal-grave. Keep, John L.H. (1985). Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874. Oxford: Clarendon Press. LeDonne, John P. (2003). The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650-1831. New York: Oxford University Press. Menning, Bruce W. (2000). Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Donald W. (1974). A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power. New York: Macmillan. Reddel, Carl F., ed. (1990). Transformation in Russian and Soviet Military History. Washington, DC: U. S. Air Force Academy and Office of Air Force History. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David, and Menning, Bruce W., eds. (2003). Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Norman. (1975). The Eastern Front 1914-1917. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Westwood, J.N. (1986). Russia against Japan, 1904- 1905. Albany: State University of New York Press. Woodward, David. (1965). The Russians at Sea: A History of the Russian Navy. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.
BRUCE W. MENNING
See also: ADMINISTRATION, MILITARY; BALKAN WARS; BALTIC FLEET; CAUCASIAN WARS; COSSACKS; CRIMEAN WAR; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; GREAT REFORMS; NAPOLEON I; NORTHERN FLEET; PACIFIC FLEET; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; SEVEN YEARS’ WAR; STRELTSY; WORLD WAR I
Baumann, Robert F. (1993). Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute. Curtiss, John S. (1965). The Russian Army of Nicholas I, 1825-1855. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Duffy, Christopher. (1981). Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power 1700-1800. London: Routledge amp; Kegan Paul.
The Russian military industrial complex (voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks, or VPK), recently renamed the defense industrial complex (oboronno-promysh-lennyi kompleks, or OPK), encompasses the panoply of activities overseen by the Genshtab (General Staff), including the Ministry of Defense, uniformed military personnel, FSB (Federal Security Bureau) troops, border and paramilitary troops, the space program, defense research and regulatory agencies, infrastructural support affiliates, defense industrial organizations and production facilities, strategic material reserves, and an array of troop reserve, civil defense, espionage, and paramilitary activities. The complex is not a loose coalition
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
of vested interests like the American military-industrial complex; it has a formal legal status, a well- developed administrative mechanism, and its own Web site. The Genshtab and the VPK have far more power than the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, or the patchwork of other defense-related organizations.
The OPK consists of seventeen hundred enterprises and organizations located in seventy-two regions, officially employing more than 2 million workers (more nearly 3.5 million), producing 27 percent of the nation’s machinery, and absorbing 25 percent of its imports. Nineteen of these entities are “city building enterprises,” defense industrial towns where the OPK is the sole employer. The total number of OPK enterprises and organizations has been constant for a decade, but some liberalization has been achieved in ownership and managerial autonomy. At the start of the post-communist epoch, the VPK was wholly state-owned. As of 2003, 43 percent of its holdings remains government-owned, 29 percent comprises mixed state-private stock companies, and 29 percent is fully privately owned. All serve the market in varying degrees, but retain a collective interest in promoting government patronage and can be quickly commandeered if state procurement orders revive.
Boris Yeltsin’s government tried repeatedly to reform the VPK, as has Vladimir Putin’s. The most recent
