Dan Snow's History Hit - Russia Falters in Ukraine: Parallels with WW1

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Russia's current conflict in Ukraine was supposed to be a showcase of military prowess, a quick war that solidified her status as a great power. Instead, it has laid bare issues in leadership, training, supply and morale, all of which have crippled the military's operational capabilities. Although separated by a century, this conflict and Russia's handling of it bear a striking resemblance to Russia's involvement in the First World War. Dan speaks to Alexander Watson, acclaimed historian and author of the award-winning book The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl, to find out exactly what comparisons we can draw between that conflict and the current war in Ukraine.This episode was produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the Eastern Front that we rarely hear about. The invasion of Russia far less talked about and memorialised than the invasion of Russia in 1812 by Napoleon or 1941 by Hitler. It's the Eastern Front in the First World War, when Russia, allied with Britain and France, took on the Central Powers. Contrary to the clichés about invading Russia in Russian winters, it was a catastrophic defeat for Russia. The Central Powers won. Germany carved out a brief but vast empire,

stretching across much of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltics today. Russia fell into a revolution, civil war, genocide, one of the great catastrophes of modern history. It was not meant to be like that. It was never part of the plan. Autocratic rulers, beware. It was meant to be a quick war. It was meant to be a war to bolster Russia, to prove that she was indeed a great power,

to prove that her army could compete with the industrialised armies of Central and Western Europe. The Russian Empire in 1914 took the opportunity offered by Austria-Hungary's aggression towards Serbia to put its foot down. To fight a war to strengthen its claim to being the dominant force of Eurasia, to bring its satellite provinces and ethnicities, like Ukraine and the Ukrainians, further under its central control, and to push its frontier ever further into Europe. Much of the fighting would take place on what is now Ukrainian soil. So this was a quick military operation in Ukraine

to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime at home and the might of Russia abroad and the theory it inspired. Sounds familiar. Well, it is very familiar. I know we keep saying history isn't repeating itself, but it's coming pretty darn close, to be absolutely honest with you. I've got to say, this is really one of the best I've recorded recently. Nothing to do with me, all because of the guest, Alexander Watson. Alex Watson, he's a professor of history at Goldsmiths University of London. He is an expert on Central and Eastern Europe in the First World War. He wrote a multi-award winning book called The Fortress about the great siege on the Eastern Front in 1914 and 15. You'll have seen that when

it came out in 2019. And now he's on the podcast. We're talking about Russia in the First World War, but every sentence of this podcast, every sentence has powerful modern echoes. You're not going to believe your ears. Enjoy. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I think in Britain, we're guilty of talking a lot about Russia in the days leading up to mobilisation, the decision to mobilise, the fear that causes in Germany, and then the Germans' decision to launch the Schlieffen Plan. And at that stage, a lot of us kind of lose touch with Russia and the Russian front until 1917. But what was the state of the Russian army in 1914? Because the Germans have been worried about Russian industrialisation, they've been worried about the railway network,

the Russians kind of improving and becoming ever more of a threat, hadn't they? Yeah, so there's actually quite a lot of parallels with 1914 and with today. The image of the Russian army before 1914 is one of this massive colossus. I mean, it was often said before the current invasion that the Russian army, Putin's army, was the second army in the world after the US. It was the same in 1914. People weren't quite sure, you know, the Germans, technological edge, command edge, but the Russian army was just simply enormous. It was the largest army in the world in 1914. It was 1.4 million men in peacetime. And then when it mobilised, it added another 3 million, so 4. in 1914. It was 1.4 million men in peacetime. And then when it

mobilised, it added another 3 million, so 4.5 million. It was just simply colossus. And the decade before the First World War, the Tsar had invested a huge amount of resources in terms of per capita income. Russia was investing more of its money than the Germans, than the French, than the Austro-Hungarians. It's just a huge investment to modernise the army. Modern artillery, changes of doctrine. So by 1914, there were a lot of people who thought this was just going to be an amazing force. The British talk about the Russian steamroller. And that was the idea. You know, once the Russian army gets going, it takes a while to mobilise, but it's just going to crush everything,

just like we were talking about in February. And of course, as you know, as you listeners know, it didn't exactly work out like that. They get absolutely destroyed famously at the Battle of Tannenberg in slightly later 1914. Did the Tsar see any benefit for all that investment and all that modernisation? What was wrong with the Russian army? There were lots of things wrong with the Russian army. And in fairness, there were lots of things wrong with all armies in 1914. You know, that's one of the things about war, you never really quite know how it's going to turn out until it actually begins. And the war in 1914 starts after a big technological revolution in military. You know, in the last few decades before the war, artillery has radically changed. It's able to fire further.

It's able to fire heavier projectiles. It's able to fire quicker. Small arms as well have changed too. And through every army, there's this debate of how do we deal with this firepower? How do we keep moving when firepower is so strong? And every army has different answers to that. And every army is struggling with that in 1914. But the Russian

army has a set of problems, which actually sound very familiar, again, in the light of what we've seen in Ukraine now. There are problems of coordination. There are problems stemming from the pre-war period of corruption. So the big guy who is in charge of military contracting before the First World War is the war minister, a guy called Sukhomlinov. By 1916, he ends up on trial for corruption, because all of this money that's been invested in, lots of it has gone to places which, let's say, it shouldn't have gone to. You've got problems with leadership, particularly with a small and weak non-commissioned officer corps. And all of these things, once the Russian army actually goes on to the Ba'al Fiyah, they raise huge problems with command and control and equipment and leadership and movement

and result in huge casualties and lost battles. What is Russia's aim in the First World War? Because it comes into the war to protect Serbia from Austro-Hungarian aggression. What does Russia want to achieve? So that's the story. It comes in to protect Serbia. But really what it wants to achieve is it wants to reinforce its great power status. It wants everybody to know that Russia is still a great power. Got to bear in mind that less than 10 years before the First World War starts, Russia had already been fighting. And this army is actually more experienced than most of the other armies in the First World War at the outset, because it had fought a war against Japan in 1904-5,

and it had lost that war badly and embarrassingly. On top of that as well, that had resulted in a revolution, and the revolution had massively damaged its foreign power influence in the years afterwards. So 1914, I mean, for Russian elites, the story is it's about protecting weak Serbia, pan-Slavism, they're Slavs, we're Slavs, we need to protect them. But a lot of it is really actually about saying, hey, we're back, we're powerful, we're a great power, and we're going to deal with the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians who are really annoying us. And that's really the message of 1914.

We could be talking about 2022, couldn't we? But you have to believe, everybody, that Alex has been saying the same thing since before the start of this war. Do not worry. Absolutely, yeah. The thing is, is that Ukraine is so fundamental to modern Russian and then later Soviet

and now Russian again history because Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union and now Putin's Russia, it can't be a great power without the resources of Ukraine. It can't be. It's simply not powerful enough. It wasn't powerful enough in 1914. It's not powerful enough today. There's a great book by Dominic Levin called Toward the Flame. And he wrote this even before 2014, before the current cycle of violence starts. But you can trace the great power politics, Russian elite's interest in Ukraine, the way the Russian army behaves, extreme Russian nationalism.

In some ways, what we're seeing now in 2022 didn't start in 2014. It started in 1914 or even earlier. And so if this sounds familiar, what I'm saying, it's really not that I'm making this up. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. But to understand what's going on today, actually, you look back 100 years and you realise that all of this is deep. It goes really, really, really deep. And we're seeing lots of repeats. There are differences too. We're seeing lots of repeats of ideas, ideologies, ways of behaving, great power, interests that we saw in 1914. And it's really, really, really depressing.

So if there's one thing that I want you guys to take from this, it's not that I'm super clever and I know everything. It's actually that we're seeing stuff that it would have been great if had been sorted out earlier in the 20th century. And to be honest, I thought had been sorted out, but it hasn't. And we're seeing repeats of stuff that is really, really miserable. The echoes of geography alone are so terrifying. You've written a hugely popular book, The Fortress, The Great Siege of, how do we pronounce that place? The Great Siege of Pszczelny Schere. Which is just, just, just, just inside the modern Polish border, but could be seen as being sort of Western Ukrainians. And that was just one example of the gigantic battles that

were taking place. Was Ukraine as a battlefield just where the fighting happened to end up, because that was the boundary between Russia and Austria-Hungary? Or was there something hugely important about that ground itself? So the geography is different in 1914 from today, very, very different. And one of the things that's worth bearing in mind is just how much further east the Russian borders lie today compared with 1914. I mean, one of the reasons Putin is so worried about Russian great power status is that Russia's borders haven't been this far East since the early modern period. You have to go back 300 years. If you've got some sort of historical sense and Putin from his writings does seem to have a rather bizarre, but nonetheless sort of pseudo-historical sense, then Russia is at its

weakest ebb for centuries. And in 1914, imperial Russia, the Tsar's Russia, controls much of what today is modern Ukraine. It's the western part of today's Ukraine that it doesn't control, that at that time is in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it's that part that it's determined to get. So what today is Western Ukraine is a key Russian war aim right from the onset of war. Very important for the Russians to get hold of it. And not such as its natural resources, but in 1914, imperial Russian elites don't consider the Ukrainian people as a separate nation. When Russians go into Ukraine, the word Ukrainian is actually banned. You're not allowed to use it in print.

Ukrainians in Russian elite parlance in 1914 are known as little Russians. And that's actually a term that Putin has resurrected and used himself. It says this idea that Ukraine doesn't really exist. Putin has said this, and this is straight out of the 19th century. Ukraine as a nation doesn't really exist. Ukrainians don't have a right to exist. They're actually Russians with funny accents. That's the attitude. And they therefore should be subordinated to Russia. That is their natural place. And that's what's seen in 1914.

And the idea of going and taking Western Ukraine, the part of Ukraine that they don't have, is very much akin to that. The Russian Tsar talks about creating a great Russia to the Carpathian Mountains, which is very much like the Novorossiya that Russian nationalists are talking about today. It's very difficult to talk about today without going back to 1914, and that's not just because I'm a First World War historian. Let's talk about the effect of the war on Russian internal politics, the stability of the Tsar's regime. In the last week or two, we have seen Russian mobilisation cause unease, discontent, outright opposition within Russia. Can you trace anything similar during the First World War? Yeah, you can. There's been some great work done on this by various Russian

historians and also by Joshua Sanborn in the US and Melissa Stockdale. They've done some really interesting work on Russian reactions in 1914. And there was patriotism. I think when nations go to war, especially if it's a big war at the outset, there is often a sense of people kind of coming together against an external enemy, that sense of, OK, you know, we've got to come together on this.

And you do get some of that in Russia in 1914, especially in the big cities. So in St. Petersburg, which at that time was the capital, it's the Bolsheviks who change Russia's capital to Moscow. And there's a big pro-war demonstration when the Russians mobilise, when the Tsar calls mobilisation of about a quarter of a million people, which really makes an impact. And of course, because it's in the capital city, all the newspapers report on it, all the foreign newspapers report on it. And that then spreads this idea, which of course is favorable to the Russian government as well, but Russian people on matter behind this war. But one of the things that's true then and true now

is that Russia is a very, very diverse country. And especially in 1914, it was not a predominantly urbanised country. And the other thing that happens in 1914, which you don't get reported on widely, is there's a mass of draft riots, lots of draft riots, and fighting as well. I mean, there's when reservists are called up, lots of them go and raid liquor stores, as well. I mean, there's when reservists are called up, lots of them go and raid liquor stores, alcohol stores, there's drunken rampages, there's fighting between police and reservists who don't want to go. And the casualties are pretty high. I mean, I think around 50, 60 officials or police are wounded, about 10 are killed. And for the rioters, it's about 250 are wounded and 250 are killed in 1914. Some of this writing is really very serious. And it shows that there's a good deal of anti-war

sentiment. And I mean, in the end, most Russian reservists do go. But Joshua Sanborn has written that the dominant emotion in Russia was people crying. It's very much time of tears. So it's mixed. I mean, you get some fascism in the cities, but overall people are very anxious about what's to come and there is resistance. And when those soldiers arrive at the front, there's quite a lot of examples of mutiny, of officer killing. I mean, does those accelerate as we get towards 1917 or are they visible at the beginning? You really get them from 1916 onward. I mean, one of the things today is just, it's quite surprising how rapidly in some ways

we're getting these reports of really deep demoralisation in the Russian army so quickly, so relatively quickly. In the First World War, you really get widespread indiscipline and what we've called since Vietnam, fragging, officer killing from 1916. There's a big wave of it in the second half of 1916. It's not saying that you see so much in 1914. The thing is, once men are in the army, armies are very effective at controlling what soldiers do. Basic training is very effective at emphasising to soldiers, you are now in the army's control. There are NCOs watching. The punishments for any sort of disobedience are much more severe than for civilians. So as a result, discipline certainly

to a great extent holds in 1914. There's certainly no challenge to the command system. There's lots of Russians who are retreating quickly. Russian armies disintegrate quickly, as we saw at Tannenberg, the battle against the Germans that you mentioned earlier. But there's not so much, as far as we know, officer killing or group indiscipline. That starts a couple of years after, in 1916. You listen to Dan Snow's History here. We're talking about Russia's war in the Ukraine in the First World War. More coming up. Over on the Warfare podcast by History Hit,

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about 1916. Let's talk about the Brusilov offensive which although it ended in well defeat slash stalemate it was at one stage that like a very successful Russian assault in the kind of place we've mentioned before um western Ukraine in the midst of that supposed success do you see the beginnings of the full disintegration of the Russian military system? I think so. Insofar as the problem with it,

if it had been a total success, you wouldn't have done. But in the end, the Brussels Offensive fails. And that's really important to keep hold of. It does fail. It inflicts massive damage on the Austro-Hungarian army. So maybe we should just roll back. The Brussels Offensive starts in June 1916. And it's launched because a bunch of other Russian offensives earlier on have failed. That's really important to bear in mind. The Western allies, the British

and the French, are fighting very heavily on the Western front. The Battle of the Somme is scheduled to take place. The French are pushing the Russians to do something in cooperation on the Eastern front to really stretch German reserves. The Russians try that and they fail. And there's a conference convened by the Hawaii Command and no one volunteers to launch another offensive other than this General Alexander Brusilov. And he launches this offensive in an entirely different way from the other generals. He emphasises surprise, careful preparation. He trains his troops much better than his other colleague generals have done. And initially, they go forward very, very fast. The Austro-Hungarian army just collapses.

It loses 200,000 men in the space of, I think, about a week and a half. It's just phenomenal. But then the Germans come in. The Austro-Hungarians get themselves together to some degree. And although the advance continues through the summer, it gets slower and slower and slower. And, of course, any advance is costly. Any time you leave your trenches and move forward, you lose men, and the Russians lose a lot. And although they take a lot of territory, they don't knock the Austro-Hungarians out of the war. In the end, it doesn't have a

strategic impact on Russia's enemies. And that's incredibly demoralising after all the failed battles of 1914, of 1915 and then in the first half of 1916 too and yeah Russian troops are exhausted and they're fed up and we've got to bear in mind as well that imperial Russia ultimately doesn't have a lot of legitimacy by this point among his people. This is a state which had revolution in 1905. To some extent, the First World War is supposed to be, and this might sound familiar too, quick, very successful, and underpinning the autocratic elites who lead Russia in 1914. Then if that sounds familiar, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. That's what it's supposed to be. And it doesn't turn out like that. It turns into a gruelling war of attrition. And ultimately, the Brussels Offensive, although it's supposed to be and it doesn't turn out like that it turns into a grueling war of attrition and ultimately the brussel of offensive alerts initially very successful

doesn't have a strategic impact and yet by the end russian soldiers have had enough on top of that as well the russian army is getting short of manpower it always seems bizarre to talk about this huge country being short of manpower but it is short of manpower in 1916 the russian army even in desperation goes and starts attempting to recruit in the Central Asian parts of the empire, which had previously not been subject to conscription. And that results in huge riots and revolts in that part of Russia, too, which then military units have to be diverted to put down. So Russia is in real trouble both materially and in terms of morale in 1960. And part of that is the lack of legitimacy in its ruling elite. That's why Russia collapses before anybody else. A reason given for the revolution in St. Petersburg, the famous February Revolution in 1917, is that the Tsarist troops simply weren't of the quality that you might expect.

The Tsar's Imperial Guards Divisions, the elite of the Russian army, which traditionally would hover probably quite close to the seat of power and the person of the Tsar. Is that a fair contention to make, that these elite units, to try and give this Bruslov offensive every chance of success, that the Tsar deployed some of his best units that might otherwise have protected the seat of his domestic power. Is that a fair contention? Yeah, that is a fair contention. I mean, in war, and especially what becomes an existential war for all of these empires, you do put your best units in.

And there is a garrison in St. Petersburg. By that time, they've changed the name because St. Petersburg sounds too German, so they've started calling the capital city Petrograd. There is a garrison there, and there are Cossacks there who in the pre-war period are used for kind of policing, internal policing. But quite a lot of the Petrograd garrison is actually quite older men. I always feel slightly offended when history books talk about these guys as older men

because they're actually in their 40s, often their early 40s. They're prime of life, guys, to be honest. You've got experience, you've got wisdom. i think the wisdom's an important point here yeah maybe the wisdom is an important point here and maybe these men who were old i mean continental armies all of them this is different from the british army in the first world war all continental armies organized their soldiers by age so you've got some units who, and they're generally the elite ones, who are the younger guys, 18 to 25, 18 to 29, something like that. Then you've got second line units who are men in their 30s. There's some mixing during the war, but this is the pattern the armies go to war with. And then you've got the guys in their 40s. So before the war,

eligibility for military service in an emergency, you could be called up to the age of 43. And it's these older guys in their 40s. And I mean, during the war, that's extended right through the 40s, because the belligerents desperately need manpower. But it's these guys in the 40s who end up as home garrisons, doing things like internal policing. And they're living at home, they're close to the civilian population, their families are at home as well, and ultimately they're not willing by 1917 to fight for the Tsar, to defend the Tsar, and if they're threatened to go to the front if they don't obey, then that's the point at which they start turning around their guns and joining the protesters. And so there comes a point in these wars when you have to decide whether you want to continue your military effort in distant Ukraine or shore up your regime at home?

You do, but one of the things that the First World War teaches us, and that's so scary about the First World War, is just how difficult it is for states to extricate themselves from a losing war. Ultimately, the Germans don't really have much of a chance. Well, it doesn't look like they've got much of a chance really from 1916. The Russian revolution gives them a second life, you know, but nonetheless, they keep on going. The Austro-Hungarians even less. They're in huge problems already by 1916, but they still keep on going. It takes total military defeats and revolutions to force powers out. So once wars get going, a whole different type of logic takes off. And it's the fear of not just losing, but of the domestic consequences of defeat,

of revolution, really prompt leaders and especially autocratic leaders to keep on going to the bitter end and to keep ramping up the violence and exacerbating things. So the First World War shows that very, very clearly. Happy thought. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about that recently. How do you make peace in an age of mass literacy and, if not democracy, but a sort of public engagement with things? Louis XV can just make peace after the catastrophic war with Britain, the Seven Years' War. The aristocrats get together and bash out a peace in Paris. And that doesn't feel possible anymore. This is it. I mean, you go back to that time, who gives the king his power? Well, in ideological terms, authority comes from God, who is really very difficult to argue with. Whereas once you get to the 20th century and you get relatively educated populations,

and there's still a lot of illiteracy in Russia, but even so, you know, there is what you might call a civic society, a society which discusses politics. Popular legitimacy of some sort is crucial. You think about the referenda, or the so-called referenda, that autocrats launch, you know, there are elections in Russia, because it's important for Putin and others to have the appearance of a democracy, a pseudo-democracy, in order to justify their power. That appearance is really important. And the difficulty with war is when you start getting overt resistance, that pseudo-democratic facade drops away very, very quickly. And in 1917, the idea that the Russian people were supporting the Tsar, were supporting the war, it dropped away incredibly quickly, with catastrophic results for the Tsar. And autocrats beware. Speaking of the Tsar, he tied himself very

personally. He took the position of commander-in-chief. He fired his cousin, didn't he? I mean, to what extent was the Tsar's inept handling of the military campaigns, to what extent did that bleed over into political opposition to him or resistance to his rule? Well, it undermined him hugely. I mean, you think about aristocrats and royalty through the ages and dictators today, you know, ultimately, it's a strongman ideology. The thing that kings justified their rule by was, of course, being appointed by God, but also having command of armies, being war leaders. Even when in the early modern period, they stopped actually leading armies mostly, you know, that idea of themselves as supreme commanders is really important. So if they end up getting associated

very tightly with defeat, then it's completely disastrous. It knocks off a pillar of their support, of their legitimacy. So yeah, it's very, very dangerous to do. And how much commanding Tsar Nicholas actually did, I think, is debatable. Of course, you're right, he's commander-in-chief and he has some say. But I think his big mistake is simply to associate himself with defeats by making very clear that he's commanding. And that damages him severely. The worst of both worlds. Responsibility without any power. As the winter of 1916 rumbles along, as we get towards 1917, are you seeing dissolution in the Russian armies? Are you seeing the inability of the Tsarist state to actually hold the front lines to continue this war?

From the end of 1916, as we've talked about, there's increasing group discipline and mutinies in the army. By 1917, I mean, it's maybe not so much that they're having trouble holding the lines because the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians haven't got a huge number of troops to attack with. They're surrounded on all sides. They're still outnumbered. But there's certainly a reluctance to go forward. And on top of that, there's a great disillusionment with the Tsar. One of the myths, I think, of the First World War is the idea that the front was somehow separate from home and that ordinary people at home didn't know really what was happening at the front and there's this huge divide. You get it in war novels like Au Quart on the Western Front

where you've got disillusionment at the front because the soldiers are fed up with the war, the war seems pointless, whereas home is all gung-ho. But it's not true. There's a really close relationship between home and front right through the war. Men do go on leave, there are letters being passed backwards and forwards, And the discontents at home are also mirrored by discontents in the army. And it's not surprising that once revolt happens in February 1917 at home, it happens very, very quickly. And the Tsar is toppled extremely quickly. And there's no military resistance against that at all. The Western allies initially welcomed this. They think having a more legitimate government will actually strengthen the Russian soldiers' willingness to fight.

And in fact, in 1917, the Russians do attack again. There's the Kerensky Offensive. And they do go forward. But that results in a disaster, and that then discredits the nascent, wannabe democratic government and leads into the October Revolution and something much, much, much darker. What a place to end it. Thank you very much, Alex. That's a great place to end it. Everyone

will have heard about your brilliant book, but just tell everyone the title again, and I would advise everyone to go and buy it immediately. Okay, so the title is The Fortress, The Great Siege of Przemysl. It's about the longest siege of the First World War on the eastern front. It was a major fortress in 1914. And today, it's been the major refugee centre through which refugees from Ukraine fleeing the war passed through. There were all sorts of incredibly distressing pictures in February and March, which very much mirrored what was happening in 1914. And in 1914, when the Austro-Hungarian army is briefly, disastrously defeated by the Russians,

the fortress of Przemysl was the last thing holding the Russians at bay and stopping a Russian invasion of Central Europe. If it hadn't held, we'd be talking about the Great War of 1914-15 quite probably, not the Great War of 1914-18. So it's a really important episode in the war. And it also features lots of atrocities and ethnic reorganisation programmes of the Russian army against Jews and Ukrainians, which really shed light on what's going on today as well. So it's an amazing story and it has really eerie and frightening connotations with what's happening in our current time too. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. That was brilliant. Long overdue. Thank you so much for saying yes. Thank you very much for having me.

It's been a real pleasure, Dan. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone. you