August 1914 by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 5 of 5 starsRussia’s disastrous performance in World War I was one of the primary causes of the Russian October Revolution of 1917, which swept aside the Romanov dynasty and installed a Bolshevik government following events that unfolded from the autumn of 1916 through the autumn of 1917 bending the arc of history in unfathomable ways and continues to influence world politics till today. This book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn covers that panoramic saga, its heroism and its tragic bearing on the destiny of Russia.

The book details the most spectacular and complete German victory of the First World War, the encirclement and destruction of the Russian Second Army in late August 1914 that virtually ended Russia’s invasion of East Prussia before it had really started. Allied with France and Britain, Grand Duke Nicholas, the Russian commander, agreed to help relieve the French, under attack from Germany, with an offensive in East Prussia. This required mobility and nimbleness; unfortunately the Russians had neither.

Two Russian armies invaded German East Prussia in August 1914. Rennenkampf’s First Army was to converge with the Samsonov’s Second Army to give a two-to-one numerical superiority over the German 8th Army, which they would attack from the east and south respectively, some 80km apart.

The plan began well at Gumbinnen on 20 August 1914, when Rennenkampf’s First Army secured scrappy victory on eight divisions of the German 8th Army on its eastern front. By this time Samsonov’s forces had crossed the southern frontier of East Prussia to threaten the German rear, defended by only three divisions.

On 22 August the bulk of Samsonov’s forces reached the extremities of the German line, fighting (and winning) small actions as it continued to advance into the German trap of encirclement.

German General Prittwitz, shaken by the action at Gumbinnen and fearful of encirclement, ordered a retreat to the River Vistula. Upon receipt of this news Helmuth von Moltke, the German Army Chief of Staff, recalled Prittwitz and his deputy von Waldersee to Berlin – an effective dismissal and installed as their replacement the markedly more aggressive combination of Paul von Hindenburg – brought out of retirement at the age of 66 – and Erich Ludendorff as his Chief of Staff (having earlier distinguished himself at Liege).

Upon his arrival in East Prussia on 23 August Hindenburg immediately reversed Prittwitz’s decision to withdraw, choosing instead to authorise a plan of action prepared by Colonel Maximilian Hoffmann, Prittwitz’s deputy chief of operations. While Hindenburg and Ludendorff received much credit for the subsequent action at Tannenberg, the actual plan of attack was devised in detail by Hoffmann.

Hoffmann proposed a ploy whereby cavalry troops would be employed as a screen at Vistula, the intention being to confuse Rennenkampf who, he knew, held a deep personal vendetta with Samsonov (who had complained of Rennenkampf’s conduct at the Battle of Mukden in 1905) and so would be disinclined to come to his aid if he had justifiable cause not to.

The Germans then got lucky when they intercepted an uncoded Russian message indicating that Rennenkampf was in no hurry to advance. Developing Hoffman’s original plan, Ludendorff concentrated six divisions against Samsonov’s left flank and took a calculated risk to withdraw the rest of the German troops from Gumbinnen and move them to face Samsonov’s right flank, leaving only a cavalry screen against Rennenkampf. This move was helped by the lack of communication between the two Russian commanders, who disliked each other.

Meanwhile, General Hermann von Francois’s I Corps were transported by rail to the far southwest to meet the left wing of Samsonov’s Second Army. Hindenburg’s remaining two corps, under Mackensen and Below, were to await orders to move south by foot so as to confront Samsonov’s opposite right wing. Finally, a fourth corps was ordered to remain at Vistula to meet Samsonov as his army moved north. The trap was being set.

Samsonov meanwhile, bedevilled by supply and communication problems, was entirely unaware that Rennenkampf had chosen to pause and lick his wounds at Gumbinnen, instead assuming that his forces were continuing their movement south-west.

Samsonov was similarly unaware of Hoffmann’s plan or of its execution. Assured that his Second Army was en route to pursue and destroy the supposedly retreating Eighth Army (and supported in doing so by overall commander General Yakov Zhilinski, who was subsequently dismissed for his part in the following debacle), he continued to direct his army of twelve divisions – three corps – in a north-westerly direction towards the Vistula. The remaining VI Corps he directed north towards his original objective, Seeburg-Rastenburg.

Having engaged – unsuccessfully – the heavily entrenched German XX Corps the previous day, 24 August, at the Battle of Orlau-Frankenau, Samsonov had noted what he took to be a general German withdrawal to Tannenberg and beyond. Consequently, his message provided detailed plans for his intended route of pursuit of the German forces.

Samsonov’s forces were spread out along a 60 mile front and advancing gradually against the Germans when, Ludendorff issued an order to General Francois to initiate the attack on Samsonov’s left wing at Usdau on 25 August. Remarkably, Francois rejected what was clearly a direct order, choosing instead to wait until his artillery support was in readiness on 27 August. Ludendorff – along with Hoffmann – travelled to see Francois and to repeat the order. Reluctantly, Francois agreed to commence the attack, but complained of a lack of shells.

Ignoring warnings of a massed German advance moving south, Zhilinksi directed Rennenkampf’s First Army to the west to Konigsberg on 26 August, a considerable distance from Samsonov’s plight. Given the degree of personal enmity between Rennenkampf and Samsonov – they had physically come to blows on at least one occasion – the former had no particular inclination to come to Samsonov’s assistance. Disastrously for Samsonov, Hoffmann and Ludendorff intercepted Zhilinksi’s unciphered order to Rennenkampf. He promptly dispatched Below from Bischofsburg to rejoin the German centre, and sent Mackensen south to meet up with General Francois, where they joined in Willenberg, south of Bischofsburg, on 29 August. Samsonov was by now surrounded.

At last, on 28 August, Samsonov finally became aware of the peril he faced. Critically short of supplies and with his communications system in tatters, his forces were dispersed, and VI corps had already been defeated. Consequently he ordered a general withdrawal on the evening of 28 August. It was a crushing defeat for the Russians. In total, they lost around 250,000 men – an entire army – as well as vast amounts of military equipment. 95,000 Russians troops were captured in the action; an estimated 30,000 were killed or wounded, and of his original 150,000 total, only around 10,000 of Samsonov’s men escaped. The Germans suffered fewer than 20,000 casualties and, in addition to prisoners captured over 500 guns. Sixty trains were required to transport captured equipment to Germany.

Samsonov, lost in the surrounding forests with his aides, shot himself, unable to face reporting the scale of the disaster to the Tsar, Nicholas II. His body was subsequently found by German search parties and accorded a military burial. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were feted as heroes at home in Germany. Such was the lustre of the victory – combined with later albeit lesser successes at the First and Second Battles of the Masurian Lakes, that Hindenburg later replaced Erich von Falkenhayn as German Chief of Staff, bringing with him to Berlin Ludendorff as his quartermaster general.

Russian counter-attack from Soldau enabled two Russian army corps to escape south east before the German pursuit continued. By nightfall on 29 August the Russian centre, amounting to three army corps, was surrounded by Germans and stuck in a forest with no means of escape. The Russians disintegrated and were taken prisoner by the thousands. Faced with total defeat, Samsonov shot himself. By the end of the month, the Germans had taken 92,000 prisoners and annihilated half of the Russian 2nd Army. Rennenkampf’s army had not moved at all during this battle, vindicating Ludendorff’s calculated risk.

After being reinforced, the Germans turned on Rennenkampf’s slowly advancing Army, attacking it in the first half of September and driving it from East Prussia.

The climax of the book covers the postmartem conference that was conducted by Commander In Chief of Russian Forces Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich in which Colonel Vorotyntsev who was there at the front during the debacle castigated the role of General Head Quarters particularly General Zhilinsky & General Danilov at great expense on his career. But it showed the strength of his character and how incompetence of few can cause loss of life for so many young soldiers at the front.

The book stops at the military debate but these staggering losses played a definite role in the mutinies and revolts that began to occur. Soldiers went hungry, lacked shoes, munitions, and even weapons. Rampant discontent lowered morale, which was further undermined by a series of military defeats. Casualty rates were the most vivid sign of this disaster. By the end of 1914, only five months into the war, around 390,000 Russian men had lost their lives and nearly 1,000,000 were injured. Far sooner than expected, inadequately trained recruits were called for active duty, a process repeated throughout the war as staggering losses continued to mount. The officer class also saw remarkable changes, especially within the lower echelons, which were quickly filled with soldiers rising up through the ranks.

The war did not only devastate soldiers. By the end of 1915, there were manifold signs that the economy was breaking down under the heightened strain of wartime demand. The main problems were food shortages and rising prices. Inflation dragged incomes down at an alarmingly rapid rate, and shortages made it difficult for an individual to sustain oneself. These shortages were a problem especially in the capital, St. Petersburg, where distance from supplies and poor transportation networks made matters particularly worse. Shops closed early or entirely for lack of bread, sugar, meat, and other provisions, and lines lengthened massively for what remained. Conditions became increasingly difficult to afford food and physically obtain it.

Tsar Nicholas was blamed for all of these crises, and what little support he had left began to crumble. As discontent grew, the State Duma issued a warning to Nicholas in November 1916, stating that, inevitably, a terrible disaster would grip the country unless a constitutional form of government was put in place. Nicholas ignored these warnings and Russia’s Tsarist regime collapsed a few months later during the February Revolution of 1917. One year later, the Tsar and his entire family were executed.

A series of political crises in the relationship between population and government and between the Provisional Government and the Soviets (which developed into a nationwide movement with a national leadership). The All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) undermined the authority of the Provisional Government but also of the moderate socialist leaders of the Soviets. Although the Soviet leadership initially refused to participate in the “bourgeois” Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, a young, popular lawyer and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP), agreed to join the new cabinet, and became an increasingly central figure in the government, eventually taking leadership of the Provisional Government. As minister of war and later Prime Minister, Kerensky promoted freedom of speech, released thousands of political prisoners, continued the war effort, even organising another offensive (which, however, was no more successful than its predecessors). Nevertheless, Kerensky still faced several great challenges, highlighted by the soldiers, urban workers, and peasants, who claimed that they had gained nothing by the revolution.

The political group that proved most troublesome for Kerensky, and would eventually overthrow him, was the Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin had been living in exile in neutral Switzerland and, due to democratization of politics after the February Revolution, which legalized formerly banned political parties, he perceived the opportunity for his Marxist revolution. Although return to Russia had become a possibility, the war made it logistically difficult. Eventually, German officials arranged for Lenin to pass through their territory, hoping that his activities would weaken Russia or even – if the Bolsheviks came to power – lead to Russia’s withdrawal from the war. Lenin and his associates, however, had to agree to travel to Russia in a sealed train: Germany would not take the chance that he would foment revolution in Germany. After passing through the front, he arrived in Petrograd in April 1917.

On the way to Russia, Lenin prepared the April Theses, which outlined central Bolshevik policies. These included that the Soviets take power (as seen in the slogan “all power to the Soviets”) and denouncing the liberals and social revolutionaries in the Provisional Government, forbidding co-operation with it. Many Bolsheviks, however, had supported the Provisional Government, including Lev Kamenev.

With Lenin’s arrival, the popularity of the Bolsheviks increased steadily. Over the course of the spring, public dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and the war, in particular among workers, soldiers and peasants, pushed these groups to radical parties.

The October Revolution, which unfolded on Wednesday 25 October according to the Julian calendar in use under tsarist Russia, was organised by the Bolshevik party. Lenin did not have any direct role in the revolution and he was hiding for his personal safety. However, in late October, Lenin secretly and at great personal risk entered Petrograd and attended a private gathering of the Bolshevik Central Committee on the evening of October 23. The Revolutionary Military Committee established by the Bolshevik party was organising the insurrection and Leon Trotsky was the chairman. 50,000 workers had passed a resolution in favour of Bolshevik demand for transfer of power to the soviets. However, Lenin played a crucial role in the debate in the leadership of the Bolshevik party for a revolutionary insurrection as the party in the autumn of 1917 received a majority in the soviets. An ally in the left fraction of the Revolutionary-Socialist Party, with huge support among the peasants who opposed Russia’s participation in the war, supported the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’. The initial stage of the October Revolution which involved the assault on Petrograd occurred largely without any human casualties.

Liberal and monarchist forces, loosely organized into the White Army, immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks’ Red Army, in a series of battles that would become known as the Russian Civil War. The Civil War began in early 1918 with domestic anti-Bolshevik forces confronting the nascent Red Army. In autumn of 1918 Allied countries needed to block German access to Russian supplies. They sent troops to support the “Whites” with supplies of weapons, ammunition and logistic equipment being sent from the main Western countries but this was not at all coordinated. Germany did not participate in the civil war as it surrendered to the Allied. The result of Red Army winning that civil war had consequences in the rise of communism across the world and in leading to WW2 and Cold War.

The book shows that incompetence at top can have disastrous consequences on the future destiny of a nation. The fact that mistakes made by few caused suffering for millions on Russians for almost a century shows that a nation’s future can only be safeguarded by system where merit takes precedence over everything else. A system that breeds incompetence will ultimately lead to a disaster with untold suffering for the populace.

View all my reviews