With all its armies pushed back by the force of German steel, the Russian command had little choice but to order a general retreat. No real plans were made. There were vague romantic notions of repeating the scorched-earth tactics of General Kutuzov which, in Tolstoy’s version at least, had so brilliantly entrapped Napoleon’s troops in the winter wastelands of Russia. ‘The retreat will continue as far — and for as long — as necessary,’ the Tsar told Maurice Paléologue at the end of July. ‘The Russian people are as unanimous in their will to conquer as they were in 1812.’ But in all other respects — the sequence of evacuation, the selection of things to destroy and the planning of strategic positions at which to make a new stand — there were only confusion and panic. Troops destroyed buildings, bridges, animals and crops in a totally random way. This often broke down into pillaging, especially of Jewish property. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their homes and farms demolished, trudged east along the railway lines with their few belongings piled on to carts, while trains sped past carrying senior officers, their mistresses, and, in the words of one officer, ‘all sorts of useless junk, including cages with canaries’. No provision was made for the care of the refugees, most of whom ended up living on station floors and the streets of Russia’s cities. ‘Sickness, misery and poverty are speading across the whole of Russia,’ Krivoshein, the Minister of Agriculture, warned the Council of Ministers in August. ‘Starving and ragged masses are sowing panic everywhere. Surely no country ever saved itself by its own destruction.’25
The summer months of unending retreat dealt another crippling blow to the troops’ morale. It was hard for them to see territory which they had fought and died for so easily sacrificed to the enemy. The destruction of military stores in the rear, full of the clothing and food they had so badly needed, was especially hard to bear. ‘Every day’, wrote Os’kin, ‘we would come across another store of food and munitions in some village or other. They were all just left there and destroyed.’ Here was the final damning proof of the military leaders’ incompetence. ‘They’ve screwed it all up,’ Brusilov overheard one of his soldiers mutter, ‘and we’ve been landed with cleaning up the mess.’ Demoralization in the rear was even more advanced. Nadezhda Brusilova wrote to her husband:
You are so naive, if you still believe in victory. We in the rear have a much better idea of what is going on and we are already convinced that the Germans will win the war. They will be in Moscow by 1916. This is the catastrophe and collapse of Russia.
There were widespread rumours in the rear about treason in high places, which soon spread to the Front. The German background of the Tsarina and other government figures, and the execution in March 1915 of Colonel Miasoyedov, one of Sukhomlinov’s protégés, for spying for Germany seemed to confirm such conspiracy theories. A Bolshevik soldier recalls the efforts of one NCO, for example, to explain to his soldiers the reason for the retreat: ‘There are many traitors and spies in the high command of our army, like the War Minister Sukhomlinov, whose fault it is that we don’t have any shell, and Miasoyedov, who betrayed the fortresses to the enemy.’ When he had finished a soldier-cook drew the conclusion: ‘A fish begins to stink from the head. What kind of a Tsar would surround himself with thieves and cheats? It’s as clear as day that we’re going to lose the war.’26
