It was a terrible gamble. There was no guarantee that the risks of attack would be less than those of defence; and even less reason to suppose, as Alexeev and Brusilov had done, that the fighting spirit of the troops could be galvanized by launching an offensive. With hindsight it is clear that the military and political leaders of the Provisional Government were deluded by their own optimism. They grossly underestimated the likely costs of a new offensive. Alexeev, for one, predicted that the Russian losses would be in the region of 6,000 men; but the actual number turned out to be just short of 400,000, and the number of deserters perhaps even greater. This was a huge human price to pay for a piece of wishful thinking. Politically, the costs were even higher. For there is no doubt that the launching — let alone the failure — of the offensive led directly to the summer crisis which culminated in the downfall of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. No doubt the military leaders had assumed that by launching an early offensive they could preempt a German attack, which their intelligence had misinformed them was set to take place in the summer. But the Germans had in fact been committed for some time to a ‘peace offensive’ in the east so that they could release troops for transfer to the west. A defensive strategy thus made much more sense, given the weakness of Russia’s army and its rear. But by June, when the offensive was launched, the Russian leaders had become obsessed with the idea of attack — the offensive had come to symbolize the ‘national spirit’ of the revolution — and they were blind to the possibility that it might end in catastrophe.
More than anything else, the summer offensive swung the soldiers to the Bolsheviks, the only major party which stood uncompromisingly for an immediate end to the war. Had the Provisional Government adopted a similar policy and opened negotiations with the Germans, no doubt the Bolsheviks would never have come to power. Why was this crucial step never taken? The patriotism of the democratic leaders — which for them was virtually synonymous with a commitment to the Allied Powers as democracies — provides part of the answer. Kerensky considered briefly the option of a separate peace, when he took over as Prime Minister after the July Days and the collapse of the offensive; but he rejected it on the grounds, or so he later claimed, that this would make him responsible for Russia’s national humiliation. Perhaps one may accuse him and other politicians of a lack of foresight in their rejection of the separate peace option. Five days before the Bolshevik seizure of power, on 20 October, General Verkhovsky, the Minister of War, declared the army unfit to fight. He recommended that the only way to counteract the growing threat of the Bolsheviks was ‘by cutting the ground from under them — in other words by raising at once the question of concluding peace’. Yet Kerensky failed to see the Bolshevik danger and once again refused to act. Fourteen years later, Lord Beaverbrook, whilst lunching with Kerensky in London, asked him whether the Provisional Government could have stopped the Bolsheviks by signing a separate peace with Germany. ‘Of course,’ Kerensky replied, ‘we should be in Moscow now.’ Astonished by this response, Beaverbrook asked why they had not done this. ‘We were too naive,’ Kerensky replied.6
Hindsight is the luxury of historians. Given the pressures and doctrines of the time it is not hard to understand why the offensive was launched. The leaders of the Provisional Government took Russia’s commitments to the Allies in earnest. They would have liked to negotiate a general peace without annexations or indemnities as the saying went; but Russia’s military weakness made their bargaining position extremely weak. The Allies were coming round to the view that the war could be won with or without Russia, especially after the entry of the United States in April. They blocked the Stockholm Peace Conference, organized by the Soviet leaders to bring together all the socialist parties in Europe, and dragged their heels on Russian proposals for a revision of the Allied war aims. In this sense, by scotching the international peace campaign, the Allies did their bit to help the Bolsheviks come to power, although this leaves open the question as to whether a general peace could have been achieved.
