To help implement the decisions of the Defense Council, the government authorized the creation of a Central Military-Industrial Committee (Tsentral’nyi Voenno-Promyshlennyi Komitet). Based in Moscow and chaired by Guchkov, it had the mission of bringing medium and small plants into war production. The committee opened some 250 branch offices throughout the country and through them placed orders for the production of artillery shells, hand grenades, cartridges, and other hardware. As a result of its efforts, around 1,300 small and medium-sized industrial establishments went over to war production.106 Just as the government felt it necessary to invite the participation of private enterprise, so private enterprise found it desirable to secure the cooperation of industrial labor. To this end, the Military-Industrial Committee took the unusual step of inviting factories working for the military and employing 500 or more people to send worker representatives. Bolshevik agitators opposed this proposal and for a while discouraged worker participation,107 but the Mensheviks, who enjoyed greater labor following, managed to overcome the boycott. In November 1915 there came into being the Central Workers’ Group (Tsentral’naia Rabochaia Gruppa), chaired by the Menshevik worker K. A. Gvozdev, which helped the Central Military-Industrial Committee maintain labor discipline, prevent strikes, and resolve worker grievances.108 The participation of workers in industrial management and, indirectly, in the management of the war economy was without precedent in Russia, serving as yet another indicator of the social and political changes that the pressures of war had helped to bring about.
The leaders of the Military-Industrial Committees tended to exaggerate their contribution to the war effort: recent studies indicate that they accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of the defense procurements.109 Even so, they played an important part in helping to break bottlenecks in certain sectors of the war economy, and it is unfair to describe them as “unnecessary,” let alone a “nuisance.”110
The achievement of the Defense Council and the Military-Industrial Committee can be demonstrated on the example of artillery ammunition. Whereas in 1914 Russian industries were capable of turning out only 100,000–150,000 shells a year, in 1915 they produced 950,000 and in 1916, 1,850,000. By then, shell shortages were a thing of the past. On the eve of the February Revolution, the Russian army Jiad more than enough artillery ammunition for its needs, estimated at 3,000 shells for each light gun and 3,500 for each heavy gun.* To speed production, the Defense Council in early 1916 nationalized two of the largest defense manufacturers, the Putilov and Obukhov plants in Petrograd, which had been plagued by poor management and strikes.
Of the three other Special Councils—Transport, Food Supply, and Fuel Supply—the first ranked as the most important. Its accomplishments included improving the railroad line from Archangel to Vologda by converting it from a narrow to a normal gauge, which tripled the freight it could carry from this port of entry for Allied supplies.111 The council also initiated the construction of the railroad line to Murmansk.
While the immediate importance of the Special Councils lay in their contribution to the war effort, they also had a major political significance. In the words of the historian Maxim Kovalevskii, they were a “complete innovation”112—the first institutions in Russia in which private persons sat side by side on terms of equality with government functionaries. This went a long way toward the dissolution of one of the last vestiges of patrimonialism still embedded in the Russian state structure, which held that the administration of the realm was the exclusive domain of officials appointed by the Tsar and in possession of “rank.” It was a development perhaps less dramatic than granting the parliament the right to choose ministers would have been, but one scarcely less important in the country’s constitutional evolution.
