Government, Industry, and Re-Armament in Russia: 1900-1914, The Last Argument of Tsarism.

Neilson, Keith

Peter Gatrell, Senior Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Manchester, will be best known to many for his fine examination of late imperial Russian economic history, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917 (London, 1986). However, for specialists interested in Russian defence policy, Gatrell has a solid reputation as one of the most insightful writers about the nature of Russian defence industries before the First World War. For them, this book has been awaited with interest.

The wait has been well worthwhile. Gatrell's new monograph is, in my view, perhaps the most important book written in the last twenty years about the interactions between late imperial defence, economics, high polities, and the origins of the First World War. This is a heady claim, and requires some contextual amplification. Prior to 1975, the Russian armed forces (both before and during the First World War) were largely dismissed as a colossus with feet of clay, supported by a backwards economy. In that year, Norman Stone (under whom Gatrell did his Ph.D. at Cambridge) challenged this view in his Eastern Front (London, 1975), showing that the Tsarist army was a capable force, that the Tsarist economy was up to the demands of the war (narrowly defined) and that, far from being an irremediably backward state whose backwardness led inevitably to her defeat and dissolution, Russia was suffering instead from a crisis of modernization. Since that time, studies of the Russian armed forces have flourished. William C. Fuller, Jr., in his Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881-1914 (Princeton, 1985) demonstrated that the officer corps of the Russian army itself was undergoing a transformation from a premodern to a modern, professional force, a process that, as John Bushnell illustrated in Mutiny amid Repression (Bloomington, IN, 1985), was complicated by the stresses induced by the Russo-Japanese War. Recently, Bruce Menning -- in his Bullets before Boyonets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1992) -- has shown that the Russian army was engaged in the same sort of professional debate as was its European counterparts. Finally, in a book that goes against the flow of the above, Fuller has produced a second book -- Strategy and Power in Russia 1600-1914 (New York, 1992) -- that argues for the existence of a peculiarly Russian style of warfare, one that failed to come to terms with Russia's military and economic inferiority before 1914.

Such debate about modernity (or the lack thereof) is also reflected in works dealing with the functioning of the Tsarist government. The traditional view of a Russian autocracy populated by faceless bureaucrats directed by an incompetent Tsar has been replaced by much more nuanced works. In two books, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime (new Haven, 1989) and, more broadly and comparatively, in The Aristocracy in Europe 1815-1914 (London, 1992), Dominic Lieven has brought to life the personalities behind the titles and shown the efforts made to create a more modern and efficient state. David MacLaren McDonald has demonstrated that the formulation of Russian foreign policy was done in an arena where various ministers struggled for supremacy. Andrew Verner, in his The Crisis of Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton, 1990) has added to this, although his view of Nicholas II is more traditional than is that found in the best modern account, Lieven's superb, Nicholas II: Emperor of all the Russias (London, 1993). Finally, and in a linked fashion, there is the debate about the role of foreigners in Russia's economic development, in which the work of Clive Trebilcock and J.P. McKay has figured prominently.

Such a lengthy introduction is necessary to appreciate Gatrell's achievement. By looking at the efforts of the Russian government to maintain its military status as a great power in the period from 1900 to 1914, Gatrell speaks to all the issues mentioned above. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with the period from 1900 to 1907 (and not, as the table of contents rather confusingly has it, "1911-1904"), that is, with the periods both before and after the Russo-Japanese War, as well as with the conflict itself. On the eve of that war, Gatrell argues, the Russian military economy was well placed to provide the equipment necessary for the Russian army. Arguments as to who should manufacture this equipment -- private or state enterprises -- were the same as could be found in other European countries, although for ideological reasons the Tsarist state preferred to assert its own primacy in such matters, as part of the justification of its mandate to rule. The war, the defeats in which Gatrell attributes largely to the inadequacies of the Russian army's training and higher command rather than to any inferiority in materiel, resulted both in Russia's virtual bankruptcy and in revolution. But how to reconcile dealing with these two problems and maintaining Russia's status as a Great Power?

The exploration of this question forms the substance of part two. What Gatrell shows convincingly is that the tsarist re-armament policy provided a stimulus to the Russian economy battered by the turn-of-the-century depression and that it was he engine of growth in the period from 1908 to 1914. However, the tsarist government was not the pawn of the industrialists, for it continued to maintain a state sector in defence, while co-opting a willing bourgeoisie into supporting re-armament. Gatrell, following in the footsteps of such Soviet writers as K.F. Shatsillo, demonstrates that re-armament was pursued in a lopsided fashion, with the navy receiving a disproportionate amount of funds, this reflecting a failure by the government to create a unified defence policy. He is excellent on the complicated infighting between the various ministers, where men like V.A. Sukhomlinov, the minister of war, struggled with fiscal conservatives like V.N. Kokovtsov, the minister of finance. In the period from 1907 to 1914, Gatrell shows that Russia was spending much more on defence (as a percentage of national income) than any other great power.

Gatrell argues that, by 1914, the Russian ability to wage war had improved out of all recognition from its level of 1905. Able too much money had been spent on a navy whose purpose was in any case badly defined, the army was larger and better equipped, the defence industries stronger and more sophisticated, the transportation system expanded and more efficient (Although plans for moving large numbers of troops over an extended period of time were simply not made), and finances repaired. The First World War produced pressures on the Russian ability to sustain a military effort, but such pressures (the result of a failure to anticipate the kind of war that occurred) were common to all the belligerents.

The above sketch does not do full justice to Gatrell's achievement. The book is based on a wide range of primary material (from Russian, British, and American archives), exhaustive reading in the secondary literature, and is informed by Gatrell's sophistication with respect to economic matters. Fortunately, and unlike many economic historians, Gatrell never stoops to mind-numbing and essentially sterile mathematical analysis; instead, he sees economic activity in Russia as essentially a political activity. And, as he is fully conversant with the political and military realities of imperial Russia, Gatrell's interpretation is both satisfying and convincing. In short, this magnificent book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the nature of Russia in the generation before 1917.