An army that was tired before February
By the beginning of 1917, Russia had put more men under arms than any other belligerent power. And yet, this army proved the least capable of continuing the war. The disintegration had been brewing long before the first soldiers' committee.
В historical In literature, the disintegration of the Russian army in 1917 is often linked to Order No. 1, the revolution, and Bolshevik agitation. These factors are important, and each will be discussed further in subsequent articles in this series. But they didn't operate in a vacuum. By the time of the February Revolution, the army was already entering its third winter of the war, having lost millions of men and almost completely exhausted its pre-war personnel. The Revolution found the army already three years into a period of exhaustion.
The Legacy of Three Campaigns
The army suffered its first blow in the summer of 1914. The offensive in East Prussia, launched at the insistence of the Allies and without proper preparation, ended in disaster for A. V. Samsonov's 2nd Army and a difficult retreat for P. K. Rennenkampf's 1st Army. Success against the Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia at the same time partially offset the impact. But even in these first battles, both in Prussia and Galicia, career officers and non-commissioned officers perished: the best were lost from the very beginning.
The year 1915 brought the greatest military upheaval. The German command shifted its main efforts to the East, and the Russian army, experiencing a severe shortage of shells, rifles, and heavy equipment, artillery, was unable to hold the front. The "great retreat" began, during which Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Belarus and Galicia were abandoned. The troops withdrew in an orderly manner, but the price was high: enormous losses, loss of territory, and a collapse of confidence in the command.
For the ordinary soldier, retreat became a familiar backdrop. He saw burned villages, streams of refugees, abandoned hospitals—and all of this was at odds with the promises of a quick victory. After 1915, the feeling that the war was being poorly conducted had become firmly ingrained in the trenches. Revolutionary sentiments were still a long way off, but it was precisely this underlying mistrust that, year after year, eroded the willingness to endure "to the end."
Breakout price
The Brusilov Offensive of 1916 was a notable exception to the overall severity of the war. The Southwestern Front, under the command of A. A. Brusilov, broke through the Austro-Hungarian defenses over a wide area, inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, and recaptured some of the lost territory. It was one of the most successful operations of the Russian army during the entire war, although historians have differing assessments of its strategic impact.
The success had its downside. The breakthrough failed to be exploited: reinforcements were insufficient, and the Germans quickly redeployed reserves and stabilized the front. Losses were enormous: hundreds of thousands killed, wounded, and captured, with historians' estimates varying wildly depending on their methods. The Brusilov Offensive consumed the last of the more or less trained reserves—those noncommissioned officers and junior officers who had managed to be trained during the two years of war. There was no one left to replace them.
After 1916, fewer and fewer men remained in the ranks who remembered the pre-war army. Non-commissioned officers, sergeants, and experienced company commanders (the backbone of discipline and training) melted away faster than they could be trained. They were replaced by soldiers from the latest drafts and hastily trained officers. Outwardly, the army retained its former size. Internally, it was a different army: less trained, less cohesive, less experienced.
The officer corps has been bled dry
By early 1917, a career officer on the front lines was the exception. Most company and platoon commanders were so-called wartime officers: graduates of accelerated courses, ensigns called up from the reserves, or volunteers (volunteers with educational qualifications who entered service with the right to accelerated promotion to officer). Many of them had been students, teachers, low-level clerks, and engineers before the war. The state of this new officer corps was later bitterly lamented by A. I. Denikin in his "Essays on the Russian Time of Troubles."
This changed the very nature of command relationships. A career officer in the pre-war army relied on decades of tradition, corporate honor, and a clear social distance. A wartime ensign was often the same age as his soldiers and came from the same background. He had neither the authority of tradition, nor long years of shared service, nor the confidence in his own right to command.
In defense, this still worked: the shared danger and familiar routine held the structure together. In an offensive or crisis, a different connection between commander and soldiers was needed, and here the weakened officer corps began to falter. When soldiers' committees began to emerge in the army after February 1917, many of these officers would prove unprepared to resist these committees, nor to integrate into them and lead the soldiers in their new role.
Firing at an airplane with a 3-inch field gun
A peasant in an overcoat
By 1917, the social face of the army was determined by peasants: conscripts from later waves of mobilization, older ages, and from provinces that had been largely spared at the start of the war. According to various estimates, Russia drafted approximately 15 million people during the war; by early 1917, over 10 million had served in the active army. Among them were many older men, fathers of families, and key workers on the farms.
For such a soldier, war became increasingly alien. Lofty goals (the Straits, the Slavic question, allied obligations) never truly entered into his worldview. But land, home, family, the price of bread, mobilized horses, and household chores with no one to do them all did. A letter from the village about his family's needs meant more to him than any army order.
Added to this was the agrarian question. Land shortages in the central provinces had existed even before the war, and the peasant soldier clearly understood that after the war, the land issue would arise one way or another. The longer he sat in the trenches, the more he feared being late for the land distribution, which he sensed would begin immediately after the war. And in the company, men like him constituted the majority, and this anxiety spread naturally through the trenches.
Russian soldiers writing letters home from the Eastern Front during World War I
Politicization and trench fatigue
By the winter of 1916/17, the front had ceased to be an isolated space. Newspapers, proclamations, rumors, conversations with new arrivals, leave, and returns from hospitals—all brought political ideas into the trenches. They fed on ready-made irritations: poor supplies, shortages of essentials, rumors of unrest in the rear, talk of "higher-ups" profiting from the war.
Purely physical fatigue was also growing: a third winter in the trenches, illness, a shortage of warm clothing, shoes, and tobacco, and, according to memoirists, in some units people were fainting from hunger. Where supplies were better, they held on more confidently. Where rear services failed, decay spread faster than any agitators.
Under these conditions, a mindset that would later shape the army's behavior spontaneously developed: soldiers were still willing to sit on the defensive, but they were no longer willing to attack, and increasingly did not. There was no program behind this. Three years in the trenches simply teaches this. Historians of frontline consciousness (among them E. S. Senyavskaya) demonstrate how this experience fostered a refusal to fight "for someone else's." When the first committees and leaflets appeared in the trenches after February, they found the soldier already half-ready to break with the old discipline.
Fraternizations also occurred, mostly in quiet areas, in isolated episodes. The exchange of tobacco and bread with German and Austrian soldiers wasn't widespread until February; its peak would come in the spring and summer of 1917. But the symptom was telling: soldiers from both armies discovered they had more in common with the enemy in the other's greatcoat than with their own command in the rear. At least, that's how the frontline soldiers later recalled it.
What did the revolution witness?
By February 1917, the Russian army was in a state of smoldering crisis. The officer corps had been wiped out. The rank and file were weary peasants with their own scores to settle with the war and the government. Trust in the command had been undermined by three years of defeats. Physical and moral fatigue were at breaking point. The front line stood, divisions were operational, headquarters were functioning, but all of this was now sustained by inertia, not by the people.
None of this predetermined the revolution that would occur in February or in that particular form. But it does explain why the army responded so quickly and why discipline and habitual obedience collapsed so easily. Order No. 1, the June offensive, the Tarnopol breakthrough, Kornilov's uprising, the surrender of Riga—each of these events fell on prepared ground. Each merely laid bare what had been pent up in the trenches for years.
The next article in the series is about Order No. 1 and what it actually did to the army, which was already tired of fighting without it.
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