This rivalry is illustrated by an incident which occurred in the summer of 1915, at the height of the crisis caused by the debacle in Poland. As will be detailed below, in response to these reverses, believed caused by shortages of artillery ammunition and other matériel, the business community launched, with the government’s approval, an effort to organize private industry for war production. The leader of this effort was Guchkov. Though no stranger to political ambitions, Guchkov proved more than once that he was a devoted patriot. In August 1915 he received an invitation—as it turned out, the first and only one—to join the cabinet in a discussion of the role of private enterprise in the war. A participant described the scene that ensued as follows:
Everyone felt tense and uneasy. Guchkov looked as if he had wandered into the den of a band of robbers, and stood in danger of some frightful punishment.… As a result, the discussion was short, everyone seeming to be in a hurry to finish this not very agreeable encounter.37
In the forefront of the forces determined to resist the attempts of the Duma and the business community to become involved in the war effort stood the Court, dominated by the Empress, and its most devoted servitors, led by Prime Minister Goremykin and General Sukhomlinov. When, in April 1915, at the start of the German offensive, Guchkov, accompanied by some Duma deputies, went to Army Headquarters at Mogilev to familiarize himself with the situation at the front, Sukhomlinov noted in his diary:
A. I. Guchkov is really sticking his paws into the army. At headquarters they cannot be unaware of this and yet they do nothing, apparently attaching no importance to the visit of Guchkov and some members of the State Duma. In my opinion, this may produce a very difficult situation for our existing state system.38
Some bureaucratic diehards went so far as to regard the “enemy on the home front”—that is, opposition politicians—as more of a threat than the enemy on the battlefield. This “war on two fronts” proved more than the country could bear.
Few intellectuals realized Russia’s political unfitness for a war which most of them enthusiastically endorsed. At its outbreak, Russia’s literary establishment was seized with patriotic frenzy: virtually to a man they supported the war effort and exhorted the nation to victory.39 Only some of the more experienced bureaucrats seem to have been aware of the immense dangers which war posed because of the fragility of the country’s political structure, its vulnerability to external humiliations, and the need for a strong army to preserve domestic order. One of them was Sergei Witte, who argued that Russia could not afford to risk defeat in battle because the army was the mainstay of the regime. He so eagerly pursued a Russo-German accord even after leaving office that his loyalties came under suspicion.40 Stolypin, too, had urged an isolationist course to give Russia time to carry out his reform program; so did Kokovtsov.41
No one articulated more eloquently the foreboding of the high officialdom than the onetime Minister of the Interior and director of the Police Department, Peter Durnovo. In February 1914, Durnovo submitted a memorandum to Nicholas II on the dangers of war for Russia. This document, discovered and published after the Revolution, so accurately foretold the course of events that if its credentials were not impeccable one might well suspect it to be a post-1917 forgery. In Durnovo’s estimate, if the war went badly “a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable in Russia.” It will begin, he predicted, with all strata of society blaming the government for the reverses. Duma politicians will take advantage of the government’s predicament to incite the masses. The army’s loyalty will weaken after the loss in combat of professional officers: their replacements, freshly commissioned civilians, will have neither the authority nor the will to restrain the yearning of the peasants in uniform to head for home to take part in land seizures. In the ensuing turmoil, the opposition parties, which, according to Durnovo, enjoyed no mass support, will be unable to assert power, and Russia “will be thrown into total anarchy, the consequences of which cannot even be foreseen.”42
From the first day of hostilities, the French bombarded the Russians with appeals to move against the Germans. The German assault on Belgium turned out to be conducted on a broader front and with larger forces than they had anticipated. France now found herself in great jeopardy, the more so because the assault on the German center, the key to Plan XVII, made little headway.
