‘hunch’ told me.
My account of the Russian shell-crisis seems to be on the right lines, but in an important matter I may have erred. Soviet historians were a great deal more prolific on economic and social matters than on military ones, and they were no friends to the private industrialists who were engaged on war-work. Until we have studies properly based on the archives of the War Ministry, or, if they survive, those of the factories themselves, we shall not know how effective private producers were. My own account needs correction through two books—Lewis H. Siegelbaum’s The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia 1914–1917. A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London 1983) and Peter Gatrell’s Tsarist Russian Economy 1851–1917 (London 1986) which is partly based on his own studies of archives in the Soviet Union on precisely this subject. The Institute of History in Moscow also published a four-volume record of the Osoboye Coveshchaniye po oborone gosudarstva 1915–1918 gg . (Moscow 1975–1980) and the British dimension of the whole story is ably described in Keith Neilson’s Strategy and Supply (London, 1984).
By the end of 1916, the military events of the Eastern Front had petered out, and I should have needed a whole new book to do justice to the Revolution that followed. My final chapter was therefore just an essay on 1917, where I suggested that ‘modernization’ was going on, under war-time disguise, and that our old friend, the Russian peasant, had got in the way, preventing adequate supplies of food from reaching the cities and thereby provoking revolution. Part of this is fair enough, I think: it is right to call attention to inflation as a factor in the Revolution, and it is right to show how the Tsarist government lost control of its finances. However, it now seems clear that the Russian peasantry were not at all as backward as legend has it. On this, there are some important books. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe’s Die Lage der Bauern in Russland (Munich 1983) shows that, in point of fact, they ate rather better than the West German population of 1952, and Lars T. Lih’s Bread and Authority in Russia 1914–1921 (Berkeley, California 1990) has a far more knowledgeable story than my own, which was still quite heavily based on the prejudices of E. H. Carr, not a respecter of peasants. Under the benign influence of Teodor Shanin, whose Awkward Class, about the peasants, had come out in 1972, I had begun to understand something of Russian agriculture, but the tendency toblame ‘the peasants’ nevertheless makes too much of a showing in this book. Solzhenitsyn in The Red Wheel approaches the problem of food-shortages in a quite different way, showing how they generated anti-Tsarist myths and legendry. Saint Petersburg faced far, far worse shortages in 1942, but never rebelled. Why?
There is one great omission in this book, which, I hope, later generations will make good: the common soldier. Apart from an aside or two, this was not a subject with which I felt at all familiar. Nowadays, partly because of the great wave of sixties interest in the First World War, the study of soldiers’ letters, and of military morale in general, is rather well-advanced, and my old Cambridge colleague, Hew Strachan, is shortly to produce a two-volume history of the First World War which promises to deal with this question at serious length. How did the ordinary soldiers and the junior officers stand the horrors of the Western or Italian fronts? How did their Russian equivalents respond to those of the Eastern front, and what exactly occurred in the summer and autumn of 1917, when the force, somehow, just seized up? Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy (1997) and Richard Pipes’s Russian Revolution (1990) have dealt with this, in different ways, but until we have a proper investigation of the archives, assuming that they still have the material, we cannot be sure as to what happened. Armies do not usually
My account of the Russian shell-crisis seems to be on the right lines, but in an important matter I may have erred. Soviet historians were a great deal more prolific on economic and social matters than on military ones, and they were no friends to the private industrialists who were engaged on war-work. Until we have studies properly based on the archives of the War Ministry, or, if they survive, those of the factories themselves, we shall not know how effective private producers were. My own account needs correction through two books—Lewis H. Siegelbaum’s The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia 1914–1917. A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London 1983) and Peter Gatrell’s Tsarist Russian Economy 1851–1917 (London 1986) which is partly based on his own studies of archives in the Soviet Union on precisely this subject. The Institute of History in Moscow also published a four-volume record of the Osoboye Coveshchaniye po oborone gosudarstva 1915–1918 gg . (Moscow 1975–1980) and the British dimension of the whole story is ably described in Keith Neilson’s Strategy and Supply (London, 1984).
By the end of 1916, the military events of the Eastern Front had petered out, and I should have needed a whole new book to do justice to the Revolution that followed. My final chapter was therefore just an essay on 1917, where I suggested that ‘modernization’ was going on, under war-time disguise, and that our old friend, the Russian peasant, had got in the way, preventing adequate supplies of food from reaching the cities and thereby provoking revolution. Part of this is fair enough, I think: it is right to call attention to inflation as a factor in the Revolution, and it is right to show how the Tsarist government lost control of its finances. However, it now seems clear that the Russian peasantry were not at all as backward as legend has it. On this, there are some important books. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe’s Die Lage der Bauern in Russland (Munich 1983) shows that, in point of fact, they ate rather better than the West German population of 1952, and Lars T. Lih’s Bread and Authority in Russia 1914–1921 (Berkeley, California 1990) has a far more knowledgeable story than my own, which was still quite heavily based on the prejudices of E. H. Carr, not a respecter of peasants. Under the benign influence of Teodor Shanin, whose Awkward Class, about the peasants, had come out in 1972, I had begun to understand something of Russian agriculture, but the tendency toblame ‘the peasants’ nevertheless makes too much of a showing in this book. Solzhenitsyn in The Red Wheel approaches the problem of food-shortages in a quite different way, showing how they generated anti-Tsarist myths and legendry. Saint Petersburg faced far, far worse shortages in 1942, but never rebelled. Why?
There is one great omission in this book, which, I hope, later generations will make good: the common soldier. Apart from an aside or two, this was not a subject with which I felt at all familiar. Nowadays, partly because of the great wave of sixties interest in the First World War, the study of soldiers’ letters, and of military morale in general, is rather well-advanced, and my old Cambridge colleague, Hew Strachan, is shortly to produce a two-volume history of the First World War which promises to deal with this question at serious length. How did the ordinary soldiers and the junior officers stand the horrors of the Western or Italian fronts? How did their Russian equivalents respond to those of the Eastern front, and what exactly occurred in the summer and autumn of 1917, when the force, somehow, just seized up? Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy (1997) and Richard Pipes’s Russian Revolution (1990) have dealt with this, in different ways, but until we have a proper investigation of the archives, assuming that they still have the material, we cannot be sure as to what happened. Armies do not usually
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