Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

manual for an armoured ﬂeet issued. This was The Instructions for Campaigns

and Battles written by the new commander of the Paciﬁc ﬂeet, Admiral

Makarov.

Peacetime training was organised in accordance with the Instructions for

Preparing Ships for Combat and with the schedules of individual naval units. It

was in general carried out in port and in training sessions devoted to individual,

speciﬁc tasks. Mine-warfare training units existed in the Baltic and Black sea

ﬂeets: the former also trained radio experts. The ﬁrst wireless stations were set

up on ships in the autumn of 1900 and in the course of 1901–2 almost all major

ships received them. As the Far Eastern ﬂeet grew in size, the ﬁrst training

schools (for quartermasters – in 1898) and training ships were set up there

too. The largest training unit in the Baltic ﬂeet was devoted to gunnery. But

the training concentrated on shooting at much shorter ranges than was to be

the practice during the Japanese war and was therefore of limited beneﬁt. In

1901 the Technical Commission of gunnery ofﬁcers in Kronstadt embarked on

drawing up new rules for combat. These were completed in 1903, too late to

be inﬂuential in training gunnery ofﬁcers and sailors for the Japanese war. On

the other hand, the annual training cruises in the Atlantic were of real use in

raising preparedness for combat.

Sailors were conscripted on the same basis as soldiers though with longer

terms of active service and shorter periods in the ﬁrst-line reserve (ﬁve years in

each category). As the ﬂeet grew in the ﬁrst years of the twentieth century, so

did the number of conscripts: between 1900 and 1905 the number of conscripts

in the ﬂeet grew from 46,700 to 61,400. There were roughly 15,000 ﬁrst-line

reserves and 40,000 much less well-trained so-called ‘naval militia’. In 1905–7

roughly 30 per cent of sailors were said to be of ‘working class’ background, a

far higher proportion than in the army.

Given the complexities of warships in

the age of steam it made excellent sense to conscript many skilled and literate

men into the navy. But with the rapid growth of worker radicalism in the 1890s

this carried obvious political dangers.

Men entering the ﬂeet who were inclined to political radicalism were likely

to be encouraged in that direction by conditions of service. The ﬁve-year term

wasone source of grievance,as was very low payand the need to act as ‘batmen’

for ofﬁcers. Food was often poor, the most recent Anglophone study of the

Potemkin mutiny stating that this was yet one more area in which the navy’s

16 N. B. Pavlovich, Razvitie taktiki voenno-morskogo ﬂota (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1979).

17 Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii ﬂot’, p. 7.

18 Beskrovnyi, Armiia i ﬂot,p.209.

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leadership had tried to cut costs in the early twentieth century.

Conditions

aboard were very cramped. Moreover, partly for reasons of economy but above

all because almost all ports were iced up in winter, crews spent the long winter

months in barracks ashore. Often ships’ crews were split up or diluted, under

the command of barracks’ commanders and ofﬁcers whom they barely knew.

Under these conditions no sense of solidarity or esprit de corps was possible

and even supervision was difﬁcult. Even the ships’ own ofﬁcers and priests,

however, usually showed little awareness that the increasingly literate, skilled

and independent men who were now often being conscripted needed to be

trained, led and stimulated in different ways to old-time peasant recruits.

All these factors fed into the wave of mutinies that devastated the navy in

the early twentieth century. So too did the impact of defeat by Japan and the

unnecessary deaths of thousands of Russian seamen. The ﬁrst mass protests

occurred in 1902. If the June 1905 Potemkin affair is the most famous event in

this period, the mutinies in the Black Sea in autumn 1905 and in the Baltic in

spring 1906 were larger in scale. In 1907 it was the turn for mass mutinies in the

Paciﬁc squadron. Although on the surface calm reigned in subsequent years,

discontent and revolutionary propaganda was still very real. In 1912 the police

pre-empted mass mutiny by large-scale and arbitrary arrests of revolutionary

activists among the sailors.

Analysing the reasons for the dramatic conﬂicts between ofﬁcers and sailors

in 1905–7, one senior admiral saw their basic cause as the deep cultural and

mental gulf between Russia’s educated elites and the bulk of the population.

In a short-service, conscript navy this chasm was bound to be transferred

from society as a whole into the armed forces. Traditional suspicion and

mutual incomprehension between the two groups had often recently been

transformed into strong antagonism by the growth of class conﬂict and revo-

lutionary agitation. Sailors often saw their ofﬁcer as a ‘lord’ and an ‘oppressor’.

Of course such deep-rooted social and political problems could not be solved

by the navy alone but a number of key weaknesses did exacerbate the ﬂeet’s

difﬁculties in managing its sailors and winning their allegiance. Of these, the

19 R. Zebrowski, ‘The Battleship Potemkin and its Discontents’, chapter 1 in C. M. Bell and

B. A. Elleman (eds.), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 2003),

pp. 9–31.

20 The devastating report of Captain Brusilov, the chief of the Naval General Staff, to

Nicholas II in October 1906 implicitly acknowledged this and recommended drafting a

new law to deﬁne sailors’ rights and duties: ‘At the basis of this law must be humane

principles in accordance with the spirit of the times and the striving to defend the rights

of the individual, to the extent of course that this is compatible with the basic principles

of military discipline and special circumstances of the naval service’ (RGAVMF, Fond

418,op.1,d.238,pp.24–48; the quote is from pp. 42–3).

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greatest was the failure to create a strong and numerous group of long-service

petty ofﬁcers, who would be drawn from the ranks and understand the sailors’

mentality and needs, while being wholly loyal to the navy and inculcated into

its values. Creating such a corps in Russian conditions was difﬁcult, however.

In the era before the introduction of short-service conscription there had been

few difﬁculties. Sailors were bound to lifetime service in the ﬂeet and had

every incentive to become petty ofﬁcers. The contemporary conscript in the

steam navy, however, had often acquired very marketable skills by the time he

ﬁnished his term of service in the ﬂeet. Private industry offered pay, conditions

and freedom to potential petty ofﬁcers which the navy could not match.

Naval ofﬁcers were drawn from a totally different milieu from that of the

sailors. The great majority of deck ofﬁcers were graduates of the Naval Cadet

Corps. All the cadets were from the nobility. Though few were aristocrats

and very few owned sizeable estates, a great many of these men came from

families with strong traditions of service in the ﬂeet. To meet the needs of

a rapidly growing ﬂeet, the annual number of midshipmen graduating from

the Naval Cadet Corps more than doubled between 1898 and 1911–13, from

52 to 119. Cadets spent one year ashore and then three years mostly at sea on

training ships. Meanwhile the Naval Engineering School trained young men

drawn from all social backgrounds to be ship engineers. It had two branches –

engineering and shipbuilding – which together in 1900 graduated only twenty-

eight young men into the navy, though again the numbers increased substan-

tially in subsequent years.

As in many other navies of that time, tensions existed between the tradi-

tional caste of deck ofﬁcers and the new engineer ofﬁcers, whom they often

perceived as their social inferiors. This tension, together with the exclusively

noble makeup of the Naval Cadet Corps made it even more difﬁcult to ﬁnd a

sufﬁcient number of youngofﬁcers to ﬁll the ranks of the growing ﬂeet, though

the more attractive pay and conditions often available in civilian employment

were an even greater problem. Shortage of ofﬁcers was an issue during the

war with Japan. Even in the war’s ﬁrst month the battleships and cruisers of

the Paciﬁc squadron on average were short of four to ﬁve ofﬁcers each. The

squadron sent round the world in 1905 to reinforce the Paciﬁc ﬂeet left its Baltic

ports with many insufﬁciently trained younger ofﬁcers who were promoted

21 Vice-Admiral Prince A. A. Liven, Dukh i ditsiplina nashego ﬂota (St Petersburg: Voennaia

tip. Ekat. Velikoi, 1914), pp. 86–90. Lieven was at the centre of a group of bright young

ofﬁcers who had done well in the Japanese war and dominated the new Naval General

Staff. On the NCO issue and German comparisons, see also P. Burachek, ‘Zametki o

ﬂote’, Morskoi Sbornik 365, 7 (1911): 19–50.

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to midshipmen without ﬁnishing their education, or were drawn from the

reserve or in the case of engineers from civilian technical institutes.

The Japanese war revealed a numberof defectsin the ofﬁcer corps. Above all,

the Naval Cadet Corps had given them little understanding of naval tactics. Nor

was this defect corrected even for the minority of ofﬁcers who subsequently

received a higher naval education at the Nicholas Naval Academy. The latter

was geared to educating narrow technical specialists in its three core sections –

hydrographic, shipbuilding and mechanical. After 1896, alongside these two-

year courses, a one-year course in naval tactics was at last established. Only

after the war and in the light of its lessons was education in tactics and strategy

put on a proper footing. Before 1904 the Naval Academy was unable to fulﬁl

the role of training future staff ofﬁcers. Similarly, though radio-telegraphy was

taught in the ofﬁcers’ mine-warfare class from 1900, no attention was paid to

its tactical applications. In fact, though six to seven ofﬁcers were attached to

the army’s artillery academy every year, the ofﬁcers’ training even in gunnery

was inadequate, in large part because the limited number of instructors were

swamped by the sheer scale of gunnery training required by the growing navy.

The regulations introduced in 1885 to govern promotions and appointments

had a vicious effect on the navy. They were designed to combat nepotism and

to ensure that ofﬁcers had adequate experience – above all at sea – before

being promoted. However, by rigidly requiring speciﬁc terms of service at sea

before promotion and linking promotion in rank to the availability of speciﬁc

posts in ships the regulations totally backﬁred on the navy. To fulﬁl these

requirements ofﬁcers jumped from ship to ship, in the process weakening the

efﬁcient command structures and the sense of solidarity which ought to reign

in a ship’s crew. This sense of solidarity was already at risk because not just

other ranks but also ofﬁcers spent the long winter months when the ships were

ice-bound ashore in barracks. The so-called ‘naval regiments’ (ekipazhi) which

were the basic units for shore-time service did not even correspond to the

individual ships’ companies. Moreover months spent ashore often distracted

ofﬁcers from truly naval training and encouraged attention to drill and other

extraneous concerns.

22 Russko-iaponskaia voina: 1904–1905 gg, 4 vols. (St Petersburg: 1912), vol. I, pp. 150–5.

23 V. Iu. Griboevskii, ‘Rossiiskii ﬂot’, Briz 6 (2001): 9–11. N. Kallistov, ‘Petrovskaia, Men-

shikovskaia i tsenzovaia ideia v voprose o proiskhozhdenii sluzhby oﬁtserov ﬂota’,

Morskoi sbornik, 369, 3 (1912): 105–18. This issue is usefully seen within the context of

the long debate that raged in the Delianov and Peretts special commissions in the 1880s

and 1890s on promotions and appointments, the chin, and other aspects of Russian civil

and military service. The papers are in RGIA, Fond 1200,op.16ii, ed. khr. 1 and 2. For a

discussion of this debate and of the regulations in English, see D. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers

under the Old Regime (London: Yale University Press, 1989), chapter 4.

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At the top of the naval hierarchy stood the emperor Nicholas II, who was

far from being a mere ﬁgurehead where naval matters were concerned. Like

his peers, King George V of Britain, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and

Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, the Russian monarch took a close per-

sonal interest in the ﬂeet. This was after all the era of Mahan, when navies

were seen as crucial to the struggle for global inﬂuence and an essential

mark of a great power able to survive in an era of Darwinian imperialist

competition. Nicholas II’s support was vital for the expansion of the ﬂeet

before 1904 and even more crucial in overriding opposition from the army

and from civilian ministers to the re-creation of a large high-seas ﬂeet after

1906.

The emperor bore a heavy personal responsibility for Russia’s involvement

in the war with Japan. Only he could weigh the risks, costs and beneﬁts of

Russia’s Far Eastern policy in 1895–1904 against the empire’s overall needs: this

he failed to do. He also failed to co-ordinate Russia’s military, naval, diplomatic

and ﬁnancial policy in East Asia, or indeed to ensure co-ordination between

the Far Eastern viceroy and the government in Petersburg. Like many of his

senior naval advisors, he also overestimated Russian naval power in the the-

atre and underestimated Japanese strength and determination. Of course, all

these failures are more easily revealed in retrospect than at the time. Nor was

the emperor mostly responsible for the ﬂeet’s sometimes poor performance

in the war. Where senior appointments and overall naval preparation for

war were concerned, the emperor relied heavily on the advice of his uncle,

Grand Duke Alexei, who bears great responsibility for the navy’s inade-

quate performance in 1904–5. So too to a lesser extent did the naval minis-

ter until 1903, P. P. Tyrtov, who played the key role in deciding what ships

were to be built and where Russian naval forces should be deployed. Though

Admiral Alekseev, the Far Eastern viceroy, was subsequently widely blamed

for Russia’s defeat, he was at least a ﬁne seaman and before the war had

stressed the need to strike ﬁrst rather than leave initiative and surprise to the

Japanese.

As regards the actual ﬂeet commanders during the war, many showed inad-

equate enterprise and offensive spirit.

Among them the two outstanding

personalities were Admiral S. O. Makarov and Admiral Z. P. Rozhestvenskii.

The former commanded the Paciﬁc ﬂeet for only a few weeks from early

February 1904 until his death in late March when his ﬂagship hit a mine.

24 Much the best English-language work on the war remains J. S. Corbett, Maritime Oper-

ations in the Russo-Japanese War: 1904–1905, 2 vols. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,

1994).

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Makarov was Russia’s most brilliant admiral, who had climbed the promo-

tion ladder rapidly and solely on merit. As a young ofﬁcer in the 1877–8 war

with Turkey, he had organised and led torpedo attacks on Ottoman ships,

showing great courage and skill. Subsequently he had acquired a worldwide

reputation as an expert on strategy, tactics and oceanography. His arrival

at Port Arthur to take over command of the Paciﬁc squadron after the

surprise Japanese attack galvanised his subordinates. Makarov’s death at a

moment when he was preparing the ﬂeet for offensive action was a huge

loss which possibly had a decisive inﬂuence on the outcome of the war.

By contrast, Rozhestvenskii was a more equivocal ﬁgure. As commander of

the Second Paciﬁc Squadron he showed great organisational skill in bring-

ing his ships round the world but at the Battle of Tsushima his passivity

contributed to the destruction of his ﬂeet. His rigidly authoritarian and cen-

tralised system of command also discouraged his subordinates from showing

initiative.

There are very few examples in naval history of defeat more total than that

experienced by Russia in the war against Japan. Sixty-nine ships were lost,

including almost the entire Paciﬁc ﬂeet and most of the Baltic ﬂeet as well. In

October 1908 the Naval General Staff reported to Nicholas II as regards the

Baltic ﬂeet that ‘our battleships are not a serious force in terms of either their

individual quality or their organisation’.

The reasons for Russia’s defeat were many. Most basically, having adopted

an aggressive policy in the Far East which risked war with Japan, she proved

unwilling and unable to deploy the necessary naval and military forces to

secure victory. Russian resources were badly overstretched by her Far Eastern

policy: this included not just ﬁnancial resources but also the navy’s ability to

take on major new strategic commitments and manage the big increase in

ships and personnel this required. In addition, never previously had Russia

engaged in a war where naval rather than military power was the key to vic-

tory. In building and then deploying its naval forces the Russian government

failed fully to understand the implications of this fact. Moreover, ships were

built in a number of construction programmes with contradictory roles and

different enemies in mind. Slow construction times and delays in adopting the

latest technology played a role too in an era when naval technology was devel-

oping at bewildering and unprecedented speed. Lacking any recent wartime

experience, the navy also often failed to appreciate the operational and tactical

implications of this new technology.

25 Cited on pp. 223–4 of Beskrovnyi, Armiia i ﬂot.

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Foreign policy and the armed forces

Despite the shattering defeat by Japan and the mutinies which followed, the

Russian navy was rebuilt after 1906. Four years after Tsushima the ﬁrst Russian

Dreadnoughts were launched in St Petersburg. The naval minister, Admiral I.

M. Dikov wrote that ‘as a Great Power Russia needs a ﬂeet and must be able to

send her ships wherever state interests demand’.

The foreign minister, A. P.

Izvol’skii, was equally committed to the re-creation of an imposing high-seas

ﬂeet, capable of operating across the globe and not tied to the role as a mere

coastal defence force.

The need to regain international prestige and credibility was an impor-

tant factor in the ﬂeet’s rebirth. This was by no means an illegitimate con-

sideration in an era of Darwinian international competition when not just

governments but also European public opinion attached huge signiﬁcance to

naval power and when any sign of weakness might well attract the attention

of potential bullies and predators. There were also, however, clear strate-

gic reasons to rebuild the ﬂeet. For example, the Ottoman-Italian War of

1911 and the Balkan wars of 1912–13 seemed clear evidence that the long-

predicted demise of the Ottoman Empire was nigh. Modernising the Black

Sea ﬂeet while sending Baltic ﬂeet squadrons into the Mediterranean in

order to deploy maximum Russian power at the Straits seemed vital in these

circumstances.

The Naval Ministry achieved a great deal between 1906 and 1914. Many

excellentand sometimes genuinelyinnovative new ships were built or planned.

The Russian shipbuilding industry was transformed. A Naval General Staff

was created and became the core of a large group of able, younger ofﬁcers

determined to expunge the humiliation of defeat by Japan. The Naval Ministry

worked in intelligent co-operation with the Duma (Parliament) and public

opinion by 1914, showing political sensitivity and openness to new political

currents. Nevertheless, many of the old doubts about Russian naval power

remained relevant. The very ambitious plans of the navy’s leadership were

hugely expensive. The twenty-year construction plan devised by the Naval

General Staff was to cost 2.2 billion roubles, more than total state revenue

in that year.

In the last year of peace Russia spent more on the navy than

Germany. Was this the best use of Russia’s limited resources? Even these vast

sums might not be able to compensate for the poor hand that geography had

dealt Russia: for example, even if by some miracle Russia acquired the Straits

would it not then simply graduate to the position of Italy, whose admirals

26 Cited by Beskrovnyi, Armii i ﬂot,pp.223–4.

27 On this plan and the covering memo sent to the Duma to justify it, see ‘U nashikh

protivnikov shirokie plany’, Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal (1996), no. 4: 42–50.

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The navy in 1900: imperialism, technology and class war

complained that their navy and trade were conﬁned to the Mediterranean

and at the mercy of the British ﬂeet, which dominated the Mediterranean

Sea and controlled all exits from it to the open oceans? Moreover the arrests

of revolutionary sailors in 1912 were a reminder that the Russian state was

spending great sums on a weapon which might turn on its creator.

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part vii

REFORM, WAR AND

REVOLUTION