charismatic radical lawyer, Alexander Keren-sky, War and Naval Minister. Finally, on July 1, the Southwest Front’s four armies, using Brusilov’s tactics, opened Russia’s last offensive. Initially successful, it collapsed after only three days, and the Russians again retreated. In two weeks they lost most of Galicia and more than 58,000 officers and men, while a pro-Bolshevik uprising in the capital (the July Days) threatened the government.
Kerensky survived the crisis to become premier, while Lavr Kornilov, who advocated harsh measures to restore order, replaced Brusilov. The Bolshevik leaders were now imprisoned, underground, or in exile in Finland, but their antiwar message won further soldier-converts on all fronts. The Germans tested their own Brusilov-like tactics by capturing Riga during September 1-6, but otherwise remained passive as the revolutionary virus did its work. Riga’s fall revealed Russia’s inability to fight even defensively and helped provoke the much-debated Kornilov Affair. When Stavka ordered units to disperse the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky (whatever his initial intentions) branded Kornilov a traitor and used the left to foil this Bonapartist adventure.
Bolshevik influence now made the officers’ position impossible. Desertion was massive, and units on all fronts dissolved. After Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky took power on November 7, the army became so disorganized that a party of Baltic sailors easily seized Stavka and murdered General Nikolai Dukhonin, the last real commander-in- chief. The army no longer existed as an effective fighting force and, with peace talks underway at Brest-Litovsk, the so-called demobilization congress of December sanctioned the harsh reality. In February 1918 the army’s remnants mounted only token resistance when the Austro-Germans attacked and, despite desperate attempts to create a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, forced the Soviet government to accept the diktat (dictated or imposed peace) of Brest-Litovsk on March 3.
CONCLUSION
Western accounts of Russia’s war are dominated by the Tannenberg defeat of 1914, the Great Retreat of 1915, and the debacle of 1917. Yet the Imperial Army’s record compares favorably with those of its allies and its German opponent, and surpassed those of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Despite many real problems, the same is true of efforts to organize the war economy. But the regime’s failures were exaggerated, and its successes often obscured, by a domestic political struggle that undercut the war effort and helped bring the final collapse. See also: BREST-LITOVSK PEACE; JULY DAYS OF 1917; KERENSKY, ALEXANDER FYODOROVICH, KORNILOV AFFAIR; NICHOLAS II; STAVKA; TANNENBERG, BATTLE OF; YUDENICH, NIKOLAI NIKOLAYEVICH
Allen, W. E. D., and Muratoff, Paul. (1953). Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Cau- casian Border, 1828-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brusilov, Aleksei A. (1930). A Soldier’s Note-Book, 1914-1918. London: Macmillan. Florinsky, Michael T. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gatrell, Peter. (1986). The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917. London: Batsford. Golder, Frank A. [1927] (1964). Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917. New York: Appleton-Century; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Golovin, Nicholas N. (1931). The Russian Army in the World War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heenan, Louise Erwin. (1987). Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917. New York. Praeger. Jones, David R. (1988). “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War.” In Military Effectiveness, 3 vols., ed. A. R. Millet and W. Murray. London: Allen and Unwin. Jones, David R. (2002). “The Imperial Army in World War I, 1914-1917.” In The Military History of Tsarist Russia, ed. F.W. Hagan and R. Higham. New York: Palgrave. Katkov, George. (1967). Russia 1917: The February Revolution. London: Longmans. Kerensky, Alexander F. (1967). Russia and History’s Turning Point. New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce. Knox, Alfred W. F. (1921). With the Russian Army, 1914-1917, 2 vols. London: Hutchinson. Lincoln, Bruce W. (1986). Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pares, Bernard. (1939). The Fall of the Russian Monarchy. New York: Knopf. Showalter, Dennis E. (1991). Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, CT: Archon.
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Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (1983). The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-17: A Study of the War Industries Committees. London: Macmillan. Stone, Norman. (1975). The Eastern Front, 1914-1917. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Wildman, Allan K. (1980, 1987). The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
World War II began in the Far East where Japan, having invaded China in 1931, became involved in full-scale hostilities in 1937. In Europe the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, brought Britain and France into the war two days later. Italy declared war on Britain on June 10, 1940, shortly before the French surrender on June 21. Having defeated France but not Britain, Germany attacked the Soviet Union a year later on June 22, 1941. Then the Japanese attacked United States naval forces in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and British colonies in Hong Kong and Malaya the following day. The subsequent German and Italian declarations of war on the United States completed the lineup: Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis powers of the Anti-Comintern Treaty of 1936, against the Allies: the United States of America, the British Empire and Dominions, and the Soviet Union. Only the Soviet Union and Japan remained at peace with each other until the Soviet declaration of war on August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The pattern of the war resembled a tidal flow. Until the end of 1942 the armies and navies of the Axis continually extended their power through Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Toward the end of 1942 the tide turned. The Allies won decisive victories in each theater: the Americans over the Japanese fleet at Midway and over the Japanese army on the island of Guadalcanal; the British over the German army in North Africa at el Alamein; and the Soviet army over the German army at Stalingrad. From 1943 onward the tide reversed, and the powers of the Axis shrank continually. Italy surrendered to an Anglo-American invasion on September 3, 1943; Germany to the Anglo-American forces on May 7, 1945, and to the Red Army the following day; and Japan to the Americans on September 7, 1945. The war was over.
EVENTS LEADING TO THE WAR
Why did the Soviet Union become entangled in this war? German preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1940, following the French surrender, for three reasons. First, the German leader Adolf Hitler believed that the presence of the Red Army to his rear was the main reason that Britain, isolated since the fall of France, had not come to terms. He expected that a knockout blow in the east would finish the war in the west. Second, if the war in the west continued, Hitler believed that Britain would use its naval superiority to blockade Germany; he planned to ensure Germany’s food and oil supplies by means of overland expansion to the east. Third, Hitler had become entangled in the west only because of his aggression against Poland, but Poland was also a means to an end: a gateway to Ukraine and Russia where he sought Germany’s “living space.” Thus an immediate attack on the Soviet Union promised to overcome all the obstacles barring his way in foreign affairs.
At the same time the Soviet Union was not a passive victim of the war. Soviet preparations for a coming war began in the 1920s. They were stepped up following the war scare of 1927, which strengthened Josef Stalin’s determination to accelerate military and industrial modernization. At this stage Soviet leaders understood that an immediate war was unlikely. They did not fear Germany- which was still a democracy and a relatively friendly power-but Poland, Finland, France, or Japan. They feared for the relatively distant future, and this is one reason why Soviet rearmament, although determined, was slow at first; they understood that the first task was to build a Soviet industrial base.
In the early 1930s Stalin became sharply aware of new real threats from Japan under military rule in the Far East and from Germany under the Nazis in the west. In the years that followed he gave growing economic priority to the needs of external security. However, for much of the decade Stalin was much more concerned with domestic threats; he believed his external opponents to be working against him by plotting secretly with his internal enemies rather than openly by conventional military and diplomatic means. In 1937-1938 he directed a savage purge of the Red Army general staff and officer corps that gravely weakened the armed forces in which he was simultaneously investing billions of rubles. The same purges damaged his own credibility on the world stage; as a result those
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
