Measured by large outcomes, the Imperial Russian military
establishment evolved through two distinct stages. From the era of Peter the
Great through the reign of Alexander III, the Russian army and navy fought,
borrowed, and innovated their way to more successes than failures. With the
major exception of the Crimean War, Russian ground and naval forces largely
overcame the challenges and contradictions inherent in diverse circumstances
and multiple foes to extend and defend the limits of empire. However, by the
time of Nicholas II, significant lapses in leadership and adaptation spawned
the kinds of repetitive disaster and fundamental disaffection that exceeded the
military's ability to recuperate.
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ARMY
The Imperial Russian Army and Navy owed their origins to
Peter I, although less so for the army than the navy. The army's deeper roots
clearly lay with Muscovite precedent, especially with Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich's European-inspired new regiments of foreign formation. The Great
Reformer breathed transforming energy and intensity into these and other
precedents to fashion a standing regular army that by 1725 counted 112,000
troops in two guards, two grenadier, forty-two infantry, and thirty-three
dragoon regiments, with supporting artillery and auxiliaries. To serve this
establishment, he also fashioned administrative, financial, and logistical
mechanisms, along with a rational rank structure and systematic officer and
soldier recruitment. With an admixture of foreigners, the officer corps came
primarily from the Russian nobility, while soldiers came from recruit levies
against the peasant population.
Fleet of Peter the Great (1909) by Eugene Lanceray.
Although Peter's standing force owed much to European
precedent, his military diverged from conventional patterns to incorporate
irregular cavalry levies, especially Cossacks, and to evolve a military art
that emphasized flexibility and practicality for combating both conventional
northern European foes and less conventional steppe adversaries. After mixed
success against the Tatars and Turks at Azov in 1695-1696, and after a severe
reverse at Narva (1700) against the Swedes at the outset of the Great Northern
War, Peter's army notched important victories at Dorpat (1704), Lesnaya (1708),
and Poltava (1709). After an abrupt loss in 1711 to the Turks on the Pruth
River, Peter dogged his Swedish adversaries until they came to terms at Nystadt
in 1721. Subsequently, Peter took to the Caspian basin, where during the early
1720s his Lower (or Southern) Corps campaigned as far south as Persia.
After Peter's death, the army's fortunes waned and waxed,
with much of its development characterized by which aspect of the Petrine
legacy seemed most politic and appropriate for time and circumstance. Under
Empress Anna Ioannovna, the army came to reflect a strong European, especially
Prussian, bias in organization and tactics, a bias that during the 1730s
contributed to defeat and indecision against the Tatars and Turks. Under
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, the army reverted partially to Petrine precedent,
but retained a sufficiently strong European character to give good account for
itself in the Seven Years' War. Although in 1761 the military- organizational
pendulum under Peter III again swung briefly and decisively in favor of
Prussianinspired models, a palace coup in favor of his wife, who became Empress
Catherine II, ushered in a lengthy period of renewed military development.
During Catherine's reign, the army fought two major wars against Turkey and its
steppe allies to emerge as the largest ground force in Europe. Three commanders
were especially responsible for bringing Russian military power to bear against
elusive southern adversaries. Two, Peter Alexandrovich Rumyantsev and Alexander
Vasilievich Suvorov, were veterans of the Seven Years War, while the third,
Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, was a commander and administrator of great
intellect, influence, and organizational talent.
Equestrian portrait of Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796) - Catherine II of Russia in Life Guard Uniform on the Horse Brillante, by Vigilius Eriksen
During Catherine's First Turkish War (1768-1774), Rumyantsev
successfully employed flexible tactics and simplified Russian military
organization to win significant victories at Larga and Kagul (both 1770).
Suvorov, meanwhile, defeated the Polish Confederation of Bar, then after 1774
campaigned in the Crimea and the Nogai steppe. At the same time, regular army
formations played an important role in suppressing the Pugachev rebellion
(1773-1775). During Catherine's Second Turkish War (1787-1792), Potemkin
emerged as the impresario of final victory over the Porte for hegemony over the
northern Black Sea littoral, while Suvorov emerged as perhaps the most talented
Russian field commander of all time. Potemkin inherently understood the value
of irregular cavalry forces in the south, and he took measures to regularize
Cossack service and bring them more fully under Russian military authority, or
failing that, to abolish recalcitrant Cossack hosts. Following Rumyantsev's
precedent, he also lightened and multiplied the number of light infantry and
light cavalry formations, while emphasizing utility and practicality in drill
and items of equipment. In the field, Suvorov further refined Rumyantsev's
tactical innovations to emphasize "speed, assessment, attack."
Suvorov's battlefield successes, together with the conquest of Ochakov (1788)
and Izmail (1790) and important sallies across the Danube, brought Russia
favorable terms at Jassy (1792). Even as war raged in the south, the army in
the north once again defeated Sweden (1788-1790), then in 1793-1794 overran a
rebellious Poland, setting the stage for its third partition.
Vasily Surikov. Russian Troops under Suvorov Crossing the Alps. 1899. Oil on canvas. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Under Paul I, the army chaffed under the imposition of
direct monarchical authority, the more so because it brought another brief
dalliance with Prussian military models. Suvorov was temporarily banished, but
was later recalled to lead Russian forces in northern Italy as part of the
Second Coalition against revolutionary France. In 1799, despite Austrian
interference, Suvorov drove the French from the field, then brilliantly
extricated his forces from Italy across the Alps. The eighteenth century closed
with the army a strongly entrenched feature of Russian imperial might, a force
to be reckoned with on both the plains of Europe and the steppes of Eurasia.
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NAVY
In contrast with the army, Muscovite precedent afforded
scant inspiration for the Imperial Russian Navy, the origins of which clearly
lay with Peter the Great. Enamored with the sea and sailing ships, Peter
borrowed from foreign technology and expertise initially to create naval forces
on both the Azov and Baltic Seas. Although the Russian navy would always remain
"the second arm" for an essentially continental power, sea-going
forces figured prominently in Peter's military successes. In both the south and
north, his galley fleets supported the army in riverine and coastal operations,
then went on to win important Baltic victories over the Swedes, most notably at
Gangut/Hanko (1714). Peter also developed an open-water sailing capability, so
that by 1724 his Baltic Fleet numbered 34 ships-of-the-line, in addition to
numerous galleys and auxiliaries. Smaller flotillas sailed the White and
Caspian Seas.
Battle of the Chios Straits (Prelude to the Battle of Chesma) July 5th (June 24th) 1770 By Ivan Aivazovsky. 1848
More dependent than the army on rigorous and regular
sustenance and maintenance, the Imperial Russian Navy after Peter languished
until the era of Catherine II. She appointed her son general admiral,
revitalized the Baltic Fleet, and later established Sevastopol as a base for
the emerging Black Sea Fleet. In 1770, during the Empress' First Turkish War, a
squadron under Admiral Alexei Grigorievich Orlov defeated the Turks decisively
at Chesme. During the Second Turkish War, a rudimentary Black Sea Fleet under
Admiral Fyedor Fyedorovich Ushakov frequently operated both independently and
in direct support of ground forces. The same ground-sea cooperation held true
in the Baltic, where Vasily Yakovlevich Chichagov's fleet also ended Swedish
naval pretensions. Meanwhile, in 1799 Admiral Ushakov scored a series of
Mediterranean victories over the French, before the Russians withdrew from the
Second Coalition.
THE ARMY AND NAVY IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
At the outset of the century, Alexander I inherited a
sizeable and unaffordable army, many of whose commanders were seasoned
veterans. After instituting a series of modest administrative reforms for
efficiency and economy, including the creation of a true War Ministry, the Tsar
in 1805 plunged into the wars of the Third Coalition. For all their experience
and flexibility, the Russians with or without the benefit of allies against
Napoleon suffered a series of reverses or stalemates, including Austerlitz (1805),
Eylau (1807), and Friedland (1807). After the ensuing Tilsit Peace granted five
years' respite, Napoleon's Grand Armée invaded Russia in 1812. Following a
fighting Russian withdrawal into the interior, Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov in
September gave indecisive battle at Borodino, followed by another withdrawal to
the southeast that uncovered Moscow. When the French quit Moscow in October,
Kutuzov pursued, reinforced by swarms of partisans and Cossacks, who, together
with starvation and severe cold, harassed the Grand Armée to destruction. In
1813, the Russian army fought in Germany, and in 1814 participated in the
coalition victory at Leipzig, followed by a fighting entry into France and the
occupation of Paris.
The successful termination of the Napoleonic wars still left
Alexander I with an outsized and unaffordable military establishment, but now
with the addition of disaffected elements within the officer corps. While some
gentry officers formed secret societies to espouse revolutionary causes, the
tsar experimented with the establishment of settled troops, or military
colonies, to reduce maintenance costs. Although these colonies were in many
ways only an extension of the previous century's experience with military
settlers on the frontier, their widespread application spawned much discontent.
After Alexander I's death, unrest and conspiracy led to an attempted military
coup in December 1825.
Russian Black Sea Fleet on a Parade
Tsar Nicholas I energetically suppressed the socalled
Decembrist rebellion, then imposed parade ground order. His standing army grew
to number one million troops, but its outdated recruitment system and
traditional support infrastructure eventually proved incapable of meeting the
challenges of military modernization. Superficially, the army was a model of
predictable routine and harsh discipline, but its inherent shortcomings,
including outmoded weaponry, incapacity for rapid expansion, and lack of
strategic mobility, led inexorably to Crimean defeat. The army was able to
subdue Polish military insurrectionists (1830-1831) and Hungarian
revolutionaries (1848), and successfully fight Persians and Turks (1826-1828,
1828-1829), but in the field it lagged behind its more modern European
counterparts. Fighting from 1854 to 1856 against an allied coalition in the
Crimea, the Russians suffered defeat at Alma, heavy losses at Balaklava and
Inkerman, and the humiliation of surrender at Sevastopol. Only the experience
of extended warfare in the Caucasus (1801-1864) afforded unconventional
antidote to the conventional "paradomania" of St. Petersburg that had
so thoroughly inspired Crimean defeat. Thus, the mountains replaced the steppe
as the southern pole in an updated version of the previous century's northsouth
dialectic.
Defend Sevastopol - Vasily Igorevich Nesterenko (1967, Russia, Pavlograd)
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the navy,
too, experienced its own version of the same dialectic. For a brief period, the
Russian navy under Admiral Dmity Nikolayevich Senyavin harassed Turkish forces
in the Aegean, but following Tilsit, the British Royal Navy ruled in both the
Baltic and the Mediterranean. In 1827, the Russians joined with the British and
French to pound the Turks at Navarino, but in the north, the Baltic Fleet, like
the St. Petersburg military establishment, soon degenerated into an imperial
parading force. Only on the Black Sea, where units regularly supported Russian
ground forces in the Caucasus, did the Navy reveal any sustained tactical and
operational acumen. However, this attainment soon proved counterproductive, for
Russian naval victory in 1853 over the Turks at Sinope drew the British and
French to the Turkish cause, thus setting the stage for allied intervention in
the Crimea. During the Crimean War, steam and screw-driven allied vessels
attacked at will in both the north and south, thereby revealing the essentially
backwardness of Russia's sailing navy.
THE ARMY AND NAVY DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
Alexander II's era of the Great Reforms marked an important
watershed for both services. In a series of reforms between 1861 and 1874, War
Minister Dmitry Alexeyevich Milyutin created the foundations for a genuine
cadre- and reserve-based ground force. He facilitated introduction of a
universal service obligation, and he rearmed, reequipped, and redeployed the
army to contend with the gradually emerging German and Austro-Hungarian threat
along the Empire's western frontier. In 1863-1864 the army once again suppressed
a Polish rebellion, while in the 1860s and 1870s small mobile forces figured in
extensive military conquests in Central Asia. War also flared with Turkey in
1877-1878, during which the army, despite a ragged beginning, inconsistent
field leadership, and inadequacies in logistics and medical support, acquitted
itself well, especially in a decisive campaign in the European theater south of
the Balkan ridge. Similar circumstances governed in the Transcausus theater,
where the army overcame initial setbacks to seize Kars and carry the campaign
into Asia Minor.
Following the war of 1877-1878, planning and deployment
priorities wedded the army more closely to the western military frontier and
especially to peacetime deployments in Russian Poland. With considerable
difficulty, Alexander III presided over a limited force modernization that
witnessed the adoption of smokeless powder weaponry and changes in size and
force structure that kept the army on nearly equal terms with its two more
significant potential adversaries, Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary. At the
same time, the end of the century brought extensive new military commitments to
the Far East, both to protect expanding imperial interests and to participate
in suppression of the Boxer Rebellion (1900).
Russian Army and Navy 1904-1905
The same challenges of force modernization and diverse
responsibilities bedeviled the navy, perhaps more so than the army. During the
1860s and 1870s, the navy made the difficult transition from sail to steam, but
thereafter had to deal with increasingly diverse geostrategic requirements that
mandated retention of naval forces in at least four theaters (Baltic, Northern,
Black Sea, and Pacific), none of which were mutually supporting.
Simultaneously, the Russian Admiralty grappled with issues of role and identity,
pondering whether the navy's primary mission in war lay either with coastal
defense and commerce raiding or with attainment of true "blue water"
supremacy in the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan and his Russian navalist
disciples. Rationale notwithstanding, by 1898 Russia possessed Europe's third
largest navy (nineteen capital ships and more than fifty cruisers), thanks
primarily to the ship-building programs of Alexander III.
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
(rechristened 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 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 Alexandrovich 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 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 Galicia, 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.
The WWI-era Sikorsky Il'ya Muromets, the first 4-engined heavy bomber
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.
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