WWI_Bosnian_Crisis

WORLD WAR I
Unit Two, Lecture Three: The Bolshevik Revolution

The Battle of Tannenberg (1915)

Vladimir Lenin

Although the war on the Western front had settled into a stalemate after the initial attack, things on the eastern front had progressed very differently than expected. On paper, the Russian army outnumered their opponents three-to-one, but the tsar's army suffered from a number of problems. Most of the soldiers were peasant conscripts with little training. Their officers were nobles who achieved their rank through connections at court rather than for their military talent. The Russian army, unlike that of Britain, France, or Germany, had no professional officer corps with a general staff to plan and direct war. Finally, the Russians lacked the technology to conduct modern war, which depended utterly on railroads to move troops and supplies. The Russian railraods operated on a different gauge than those of the Western railroads (which had adopted a standard gauge), so when the Russian army advanced to the end of their lines, they had to either move forward by foot or by horse. Thus, although the Russians initially gained a great deal of territory, the Germans allowed the two Russian armies advancing towards Berlin to expend their energies by advancing into the marshlands of what is now modern Poland, where the Russian armies had to then separate. The Germans then attacked. The Russians fought bravely, but without direction. Their generals hated one another and so withheld vital information from the other. The Russian telephone lines (the only means of communication, other than human couriers) provided easy intelligence for the Germans, who listened in on everything because the Russians did not use any code. In the end, the Russians were forced to surrender.

The Russian surrender provided a major setback to the allies. The Tsar, convinced that his army's commander (his own uncle, the Grand Duke Nicholas) was to blame, he fired him, taking personal charge of the war from then on. Unfortunately, the Tsar, while a kind man, was weak and vaciallting as a leader. Soon, Russian desertions crippled his army as Nicholas fatalistically wrote to his wife that all of this was perhaps God's will. Left behind in St. Petersberg, his wife Alexandra, whose German ancestry made her suspect in the eyes of many at court, urged her husband to indugle in his fantasies of military glory and absolute power even as the Tsar's government crumbled around her.

The Germans, aware of the fragulity of the Russian situation, did what they could to make it worse. A Russian revolutionary, a member of the now-banned Bolshevik (Communist) Party, named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, had been living in exile in Germany, having barely escaped Russian with his own life ahead of the tsar's dreaded secret police. The Germans now put Lenin on a train for Finland, where he easily crossed the border back into Russia. There, Lenin stirred up the fires of revolution among Russian peasants (many of whom had been conscripted into the army and navy). General strikes of workers broke out and workers protested in the street. There was mutiny in the army and navy. In October 1917, the Russian battleship Aurora, anchored outside St. Petersberg, fired its cannon in support of a workers' protest. This action is regarded as the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. As mobs closed in on the Tsar's Winter Palace, the weak Nicholas Romanov, off at the front, signed a document surrendering his throne, and became a prisoner of the Bolshevik revolutionaries.

A new government under the direction of Lenin had no interest in pursuing the war against Germany. Lenin, convinced that Germany would also fall soon to a communist revolution, agreed to sign a peace treaty with Germany. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk inflicted harsh terms on Russia, including the surrender of a huge chunk of Eastern Europe, but Lenin accepted it as a temporary expedient that would allow him the time to consolidate his revolution at home (which had not gone unopposed).

Thus, in the spring of 1918, the Germans could afford to move all of their troops from the eastern front to the West to paricipate in a final massive offensive that spring. The Allies waited helplessly, knowing what was coming but unable to stop it. Their only hope was that American forces would arrive in time to help beat back the Hun invasion.

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Other sources: John Keegan, The First World War (New York, 2000).