• The Russians had the largest army and gained some early success in the against the Austro-Hungarians
• Different story against the Germans
• In august 1914, at the battle of Tannenberg, and in September at the Masurian lakes, the Russians took heavy losses and were driven back
• By the autumn of 1915 day being forced out of Poland Lithuania and Latvia
• Between Maine December of that year 1 million Russians were killed in a somewhere number we taken prisoner
• The Russians recovered during the winter of 19 1516 and in the summer of 1916 General Brusilov launched a brilliant offensive which brought the Austrians to their knees
• Wheel from for Russians was at the top: the quality of leadership was poor, with notable exceptions like Brusilov
• They had no experience of fighting and little military expertise
• No clear command structure
• No war plan was developed
• The performance of the war ministry was dire, compounded by the breakdown of the distribution system
• Often the war materials were available but they were not where they needed to be
• When Mikhail Rodzianko president of the Duma, went on a special fact-finding tour he received a lots of complaints about poor administration and the lack of basic supplies
• Russian war effort was not a total disaster
• Norman stone: by 1916 the Russians were matching the Germans in Shell production and had success against the Austrians and contributed significantly to the Allied war effort
• In 1916 they save the French at Verdun when the Germans had to pull out 35 divisions to Cantor the Brusilov offensive
The home front
• The strain of equipping in feeding millions of soldiers proved to be much for the Russian economy and reveal that structural weaknesses
• Military needs had priority in the railways which were barely able to cope with free traffic in peace time we're now overloaded
• Early in the war goods and supplies were available but trust ended up in sidings waiting for engines or lines to be unblocked
• The loss of land in Portland in the West knocked out the more important of the two main lines from Northern to Southern Russia
• As a result there were major problems moving grain from the south to lose the cities, in St. Petersburg suffered particular
• Peasants were not selling the green as there was little incentive for them to do so
• Government would not pay higher prices in the conversion of factories to military work meant there was little for peasants to Buy
• Inflation compounded these problems. Russia abandoned the gold standard and started printing money to pay wages, and so government spending rose
• With people desperately seeking goods in short supply, inflation kick in
• The expansion of the workforce in factories in mind servicing military needs and the influx of refugees from German occupied areas like to very serious overcrowding in the towns
• Petrograd suffered more than other places because it was remote from food producing area
• By 1916 it was receiving barely a third of the food and fuel it required, the food shortage was a major source of anger, matched only by the band of vodka
• Strikes broke out in 1915 and increased in number frequency and militancy turn 1916
• He wore also took a toll on a more personal way as the list of casualties noted there was hardly a family that had not been affected by son killed or captured
The role of the Tsar in the war
• The support that bizarre enjoyed it the beginning of the war faded as the military defeats Continued
• Like 1905 confidence in the government evaporated as it's incompetence and inability to effectively organize supplies for the military at the front and the people missing you became apparent
• The Zemstva and municipalities started forming their own bodies to provide medical care
• Their own bodies to provide medical care, hospitals and hospital transfer the thousands of wounded soldiers
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