THE FALL OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

How military errors and a failure to modernise helped to bring down the tsars

- Mark Galeotti

Did the catastrophe that was the First World War destroy the Tsarist Empire? One might think so, considering that it led to not one but two revolutions in 1917, toppling the three-centuries-old dynasty in February and bringing the Bolsheviks to power in October (March and November in our calendar). Yet once, while walking through Moscow and coming across one of the military re-enactment festivals that had become so popular in Russia, this author inadvertently started a heated debate when this was put to a quartet decked out in the brass-buttoned black splendour of the 1st Life Grenadier Yekaterinoslav Regiment. The eventual consensus was that despite – what else could they say? – the valour of the Russian army, the country was unprepared for and unequal to the challenges of the first truly industrial war.

It’s hard to disagree, as a 19th-century army was fed into the meatgrinder of a 20th-century war, resulting in carnage that made even the trenches of the Western Front look sedate. By 1917, 34,000 Russian soldiers were deserting every month, and the total casualties of the war would number 5.5 million wounded and dead.

The tragic irony is that there were many in Russia clear-eyed enough to have understood the lessons of the past hundred years of conflict. Napoleon had been defeated in Russia in 1812, but only after he had overreached. Nonetheless, it was still possible for all too many Russian generals and ministers – and Tsar Nicholas I – to cling to the belief that it had proven the continued validity of their antiquated methods and dependence on spit and polish. Future Minister of War Dmitry Milyutin would lament that this combined “a brilliant appearance at parades” with a “pedantic observance of countless petty formalities” that would “kill the true military spirit”.