And yet it can be argued that the splendid German victory of 1915 led to the German defeat of 1918. The 1915 offensive on the Eastern Front had had a double objective: to destroy the enemy’s armies in Poland and force Russia to make peace. It attained neither goal. The Russians managed to extricate their forces from Poland and they did not sue for peace. The German High Command, summing up the lessons of the 1915 campaign, concluded that given the willingness of the Russians to sacrifice lives and territory without limit, they could not be decisively defeated.58 This conclusion led Germany to put out peace feelers to Petrograd.59 Second, the 1915 campaigns gave the British the breathing spell they needed to assemble a citizen army and place their industrial establishment on a war footing. When, in early 1916, the Germans resumed operations in the west, they found their opponents well prepared. For all its brilliant battlefield successes, therefore, the German campaign of 1915 must ultimately be classified as a strategic defeat, both because it failed to attain its military purpose and because it lost precious time. The debacle of 1915 may well have been Russia’s greatest, if unintended, contribution to Allied victory.
Civilians, however, rarely think in strategic terms. The Russian population knew only that its armies had suffered a humiliating defeat, one of the worst, if not the very worst, in their modern history. They were fed by the press an unremitting diet of disaster stories. From the moment the Germans launched their April offensive until they suspended operations half a year later, the country was in a state of mounting outrage. This at first found outlets in a quest for scapegoats; but as the extent of the debacle became known, clamor arose for a change in the country’s political leadership. By June 1915, the spirit of common purpose that had united the government and opposition in the early months of the war vanished, yielding to recriminations and hostility even more intense than the mood of 1904–5 when the Russians were reeling from Japanese blows.
Military historians have observed that in war demoralization and panic usually begin, not at the front, but in the rear, among civilians who are prone to exaggerate both defeats and victories.60 So it was in Russia. Measures were taken to evacuate Riga and Kiev, and the government discussed the possible evacuation of Petrograd itself.61 In May 1915, a Moscow mob carried out a vicious anti-German pogrom, demolishing stores and business firms bearing German names. Anyone overheard speaking German risked lynching.
The public clamored for heads. The prime target of popular wrath and the obvious scapegoat was Sukhomlinov, who was blamed for the shortages of weapons and ammunition with which the military explained their reverses. Recent historical studies indicate that he was not to blame for these shortages62 and that the lack of artillery shells had been blown out of proportion to cover up more deep-seated shortcomings of Russia’s military establishment.63 The Imperial couple were very fond of the War Minister, but demands for his dismissal became irresistible and on June 11 he was let go with a warm letter of thanks.64 He was imprisoned a year later on charges of treason and peculation. Freed in October 1916, he was rearrested by the Provisional Government and sentenced to lifelong hard labor. He managed to escape to Paris, where he died in 1926.65
The man who replaced him, General Alexis Polivanov, was cut from different cloth, a leading member of the Young Turks, who before the war had urged a more modern approach to warfare, with greater emphasis on military technology and the mobilization of domestic resources.66 Sukhomlinov, whose deputy he had been, had kept him at arm’s length, suspecting him of conspiring with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Guchkov against the Court and himself. Polivanov’s appointment suggested that the government had at last come to embrace the concept of a “nation in arms” and that Russia, like the other belligerent powers, was ready to proceed in earnest with the mobilization of the home front. But this prospect, of course, automatically incurred the enmity of the Empress, who could not bear Imperial officials “politicking” and viewed efforts to rally the nation as directed against the Crown. Rasputin also did not approve of him and busied himself looking for his successor.67 On June 24, after she had met the new minister, Alexandra wrote:
saw
26. General A. Polivanov.
