This excellent history would be my first recommendation for anyone who would like to understand the Russian experience during this period; it is solid, packed with information, excellent profiles of the key people and makes one wonder how the Russian army held out and together for such as long time in the face of command stupidity, poor planning, lack of food, weapons, and munitions. The key to any positive found in the book, is due primarily due to the Russian peasant who made up over 90% of the population as well as the army. Largely illiterate and use to generations of abuse and misuse, millions of men lived in conditions that were primitive and faced death with a steel determination that few modern armies could copy.
From the start of the war, Russia’s logistical incompetence was clear; her armies started the war with only one machine gun per one-thousand men, while over two of every three artillery shells had to be imported from Canada, France, the U.S., England, or Japan; a supply line over 6,500 kilometers long, only to beheld up by a lack of rail transport from the receiving ports. The Czarist regime could not even supply the army with boots as the entire nation only produced about fifty million pairs a year with the result that during the first winter, much of the army lacked adequate footwear.
Unlike previous times, when discharged soldiers were often not allowed to return to their native villages, now millions of wounded and crippled men were allowed to return “home”, bringing with them tales from the front lines, and describing how they were mishandled and slaughtered at the front. That coupled with the lack of food in the big cities (the Russian rail system did not have the capacity to provide service both to the army and to the civilians with the result that grain was left to rot in the countryside) and inflation led to a rapid decline in the enthusiasm for the war.
Lincoln offers a vivid view of a weak Czar, dominated by his wife who was in turn dominated by her concern for her crippled son and by the power of Grigorii Rasputin. When the Czar took over command of the armies, his ignorance and lack of attention to work doomed the army. More engrossed in his light reading (he loved Westerns), his wife in the Capital dismissed competent Ministers who disagreed with Rasputin and replaced them with lackeys. If there was a crisis in the family of the Czar, he would retreat to his favorite palace with his wife leaving no one in charge of the armies.
One cannot but feel pity for the Russian peoples to have had such a weak, ignorant (if I am generous) at such a time. The throne was doomed by having Czar Nicholas II, so the war only sped up the process but at a terrible cost.
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