Although Nicholas II intended to command his troops in person, he was pressured into appointing instead his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Niko-layevich the Younger. Whatever its merits, this decision split the front administratively from the rear thanks to a new law that assigned the army control of the front zone. This caused few problems when the battle line moved forward in 1914 and early 1915. However, without the tsar as a civil- military lynchpin, it led to chaos during the later Great Retreat.
The Grand Duke established his skeleton Stavka (Supreme Commander-in-Chief’s General Headquarters) at Baranovichi to provide strategic direction to the Galician and East Prussian offensives. These were to open on August 18-19 under the direct supervision of the separate operational headquarters of the Northwest and Southwest Fronts. Yet on August 6 Austria-Hungary declared war and on the next day invaded Russian Poland. This forestalled the Southwest Front (Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Armies, with 52% of Russia’s strength) and it opened its own Galician offensive on August 18. Despite early enemy successes, the Front’s armies trounced the Austrians and captured the Galician capital of Lvov (Lemberg) on September 3. A week later the Russians won decisively at Rava Ruska, and by September 12 they had foiled an Austrian attempt to retake Lvov. By September
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
16 they had besieged the major fortress of Prze-mysl and reached the San River. Resuming their offensive, they then pushed another 100 miles to the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Over seventeen days the Austrians lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, and 216 guns, or one-third of their effective strength.
The Northwest Front (First and Second Armies, with 33% of Russia’s forces) was less successful. Ordered forward to aid the desperate French on August 13, Pavel Rennenkampf’s First Army advanced slowly into East Prussia, was checked at Stallupo-nen, then defeated the Germans at Gumbinnen on August 20, and turned against Konigsberg. To the south, Alexander Samsonov’s Second Army occupied Neidenburg on August 22, and all East Prussia seemed open to the Russians. But by August 23, when the new German commander Paul von Hin-denburg arrived with Erich von Ludendorff as chief of staff, General Max von Hoffmann had implemented plans to defeat the Russians piecemeal. Accordingly, on August 23-24 the Germans checked Samsonov and, learning his deployments through radio intercepts, withdrew to concentrate on Tan-nenberg. When the Second Army again advanced on August 26, it was trapped, virtually surrounded, and then crushed. Samsonov shot himself, and by August 30 the Germans claimed more than 100,000 prisoners.
This forced Rennenkampf’s withdrawal, and during September 9-14, he too suffered defeat in the First Battle of the Mansurian Lakes. Despite German claims of a second Tannenberg and 125,000 prisoners, the First Army escaped and lost only 30,000 prisoners, as well as 70,000 dead and wounded. The Germans then advanced to the Niemen River before the front stabilized in mid-September. Again alerted by radio intercepts, they forestalled a Russian thrust at Silesia by a spoiling attack on September 30. Counterattacking in Gali-cia, the Austrians then cleared the Carpathian approaches and relieved Przemysl before being halted on the San in mid-October.
The Russians, repulsing a secondary attack in the north, finally held the Germans before Warsaw. As the latter withdrew, devastating the countryside, the Russians again drove the Austrians back to Kracow and reinvested Przemysl. This set the pattern for months of seesaw fighting all along the front. In the north, despite German use of poison gas in January 1915, the Russian Tenth Army withstood the bloody Winter Battles of Mansuria and held firm until April. In the south, by December they again were deep into the Carpathians, threatening Hungary, and holding positions 30 miles from Kracow. When relief efforts failed, Przemysl finally fell (with 117,000 men) in March 1915, leaving the Russians free to force the Carpathians.
Meanwhile, on October 29-30, 1914, two German-Turkish cruisers had raided Russia’s Black Sea coast. On declaring war, the tsar set up an autonomous Caucasian Front in which the talented chief of staff Nikolai Yudenich exercised real command. As he prepared the Caucasian Army to meet a Turkish invasion, the Turkish Sultan- Khalifa’s call for jihad (holy war) fueled pro-Turkish uprisings in the borderlands. Then on December 17 En-ver Pasha launched his Third Army, still in summer uniforms, on a crusade to recover lands ceded to Russia in 1878. By December 25 the Russians were fully engaged in the confused battles known as the Sarykamysh Operation. In twelve days of bitter winter combat Yudenich’s troops, despite heavy losses, decisively crushed the Turks, and in January 1915 they invaded Ottoman Turkey.
During this period, the Russians held their own against three enemies in two separate war zones and showed that they had capable generals by routing two enemies and fighting a third, the Germans, to a draw. For most, the heavy losses at Tannenberg and other locations were overshadowed by the stunning victories elsewhere. Like other combatants, Russia was slow to recognize that it faced a long war, but it had avoided the trench warfare that gripped the French front. Yet Grand Duke Nikolai already had complained of shell shortages in September 1914. The government responded by reorganizing the Main Artillery Administration, and a special chief assumed responsibility for completely guaranteeing the army’s needs for arms and munitions by both state and private production. If this promise was illusory, and other ad hoc agencies proved equally ineffective, for the moment the Russian command remained confident of victory.
THE GREAT RETREAT: MAY-SEPTEMBER 1915
On May 2 the seesaw struggle in the East ended when the Austro-Germans, after a four-hour “hurricane of fire,” broke through the shallow Russian trenches at Gorlice-Tarnow. This local success quickly sparked the disastrous Great Retreat. As the Galician armies fell back, a secondary German strike in the north endangered the whole Russian
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The Russian 10th Army, February 1915. Fighting in heavy snow, one Russian corps is defeated at Masuria while the others stood firm until April. © SEF/ART RESOURCE, NY front. Hampered by increasing munitions shortages, rumors of spies and treason, a panicked Stavka’s ineffective leadership, administrative chaos, and masses of fleeing refugees, the Russians soon lost their earlier conquests. Despite Italy’s intervention on the Allied side, Austro-German offensives continued unabated, and in midsummer the Russians evacuated Warsaw to give up Russian Poland. Some units could still fight, but their successes were local, and overall, the tsar’s armies seemed overwhelmed by the general disaster. The only bright spot was the Caucasus, where Yudenich advanced to aid the Armenians at Van and held his own against the Turks.
The munitions shortages, both real and exaggerated, forced a full industrial mobilization that by August was directed by a Special Conference for Defense and subordinate conferences for transport, fuel, provisioning, and refugees. Their creation necessitated the State Duma’s recall, which provided a platform for the opposition deputies who united as the Progressive Bloc. Seeking to control the conferences, these Duma liberals renewed attacks on the regime and demanded a Government of Public
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Russian soldiers lie in wait ahead of their final assault on the Turkish stronghold Erzurum, April 1916. © BETTMANN/CORBIS Confidence (i.e., responsible to the Duma). Yet by autumn Nicholas II had weathered the storm, assumed the Supreme Command to reunite front and rear, and prorogued the Duma. As the German offensives petered out, the front stabilized, and a frustrated opposition regrouped. With the nonofficial voluntary societies and new War Industries Committees, it now launched its campaign against the Dark Forces whom it blamed for its recent defeats. RUSSIA’S RECOVERY:
In early December 1915, Stavka delegates met the allies at Chantilly, near Paris, to coordinate their 1916 offensives. Allied doubts about Russian capabilities were somewhat allayed by a local assault on the Strypa River and operations in support of Britain in Persia. Still more impressive was Yu-denich’s renewed offensive in the Caucasus. He opened a major operation in Armenia in January 1916, and on February 16 his men stormed the strategic fortress of Erzurum. Retreating, the Turks abandoned Mush, and by July, the Russians had captured
