In 1914, Russia got involved in a completely unnecessary war
1805 year. Moscow. House of Count Ilya Rostov:
“At the male end of the table, the conversation became more and more lively. The colonel said that the manifesto on the declaration of war had already been published in St. Petersburg and that the copy he had seen himself had now been delivered by courier to the commander-in-chief.
- And why is it difficult for us to fight Bonaparte? - said Shinshin.
The colonel was a stout, tall and sanguine German, evidently a campaigner and a patriot. He was offended by Shinshin's words.
- And zatam, soapy sovereign, - he said, pronouncing "e" instead of "e" and "b" instead of "b". - Zatam that the imperator knows it. He said in the manifesto that he could not look indifferently at the dangers threatening Russia, and that the empire's safety, its dignity and the sanctity of alliances."
The rest is well known. At Austerlitz, Napoleon smashed the Russian and Austrian armies. The Austrians once again betrayed their ally Russia. Well, then the defeat at Fridland, burned out Moscow and the ruined provinces of Russia. This is what the "sanctity of alliances" has cost us.
But in one of the recent issues of "NVO" I was surprised to find speeches about the "sanctity of alliances" in the article by Alexei Oleinikov "For what the Russian soldier fought in the First World War." And if grandfather Tolstoy writes with humor, then our professor asserts in all seriousness:
Promotional video:
“Implementing the strategy of the coalition war, the Russian Empire carried out military operations, often designed to alleviate the position of the allies, including, guided by the interests of the bloc as a whole.
Thus, the Russian soldier fought primarily for the victory of the entire coalition, which entailed the implementation of national tasks …
Ideological guidelines and guidelines (loyalty to the allied duty, the need to drive the enemy out of the homeland) were also recorded in orders for the army and navy …
… Russia's misfortune was the lack of a capable repressive and ideological apparatus - they were necessary during a difficult war."
At least stand, at least fall! The Russian Empire had the most powerful police apparatus. Russia had the most cruel laws against dissidents and the most ferocious censorship in comparison with England, France, the USA and other countries.
In August 1914, all state and private media were thrown into propaganda for the war. All political parties supported the war. Well, the small Duma faction of the Bolsheviks in full force went to hard labor.
You can argue as much as you like about the "doctrine of the coalition war", but only on one condition - the presence of honest allies. But Russia has never had honest allies over the past thousand years.
NEED ONLY A PROFITABLE WORLD
According to the classic formula of General Karl Clausewitz, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." So a war can be considered won only if it ends in a profitable peace. Otherwise, an offensive war would be a crime against its own people.
The volume of the article allows us to give only a few examples of betrayal by the allies of Russia. So, Peter I entered the war with the Swedes in alliance with the Commonwealth and Denmark. But Denmark made peace with Charles XII a few weeks later, and the brave Poles almost did not fight the Swedes, but they fed the Swedish army. For some reason, none of the domestic historians has ever calculated how many Poles participated in the battle of Poltava. On the side of Charles XII, of course.
Peter the Great won the Northern War, not least due to the fact that there was a big fight in Western Europe - from 1701 to 1714, the great powers shared the "Spanish heritage", and there was simply no one to help the Swedes.
When Prussia, Austria, Piedmont and Spain went on a campaign against revolutionary France, Catherine the Great entered the anti-French coalition with great pleasure. After the execution of the king, Catherine cried publicly, later she said: "… all the French must be exterminated so that the name of this people disappeared."
And what did such an aggressive empress do after such words? Nothing at all. Unless in 1795 she sent a squadron of Vice Admiral Khanykov, consisting of 12 ships and 8 frigates, to the North Sea. This squadron escorted merchants, led the blockade of the Dutch coast, etc. She had no combat losses. In fact, it was conventional combat training, with the difference that it was financed entirely by England.
Well, Catherine took up solving her own problems with Turkey and the Commonwealth. Alas, death prevented the great empress from occupying the Bosphorus.
The unlucky son Paul in 1799 entered into a coalition with England, Austria, Turkey and the Kingdom of Naples against Republican France. Suvorov occupied Italy, Admiral Ushakov took Corfu. But the allies betrayed Russia again, and Suvorov retired from Italy, and eventually the British flag flew over Corfu.
In 1854-1855, England and France already attacked Russia and organized an economic blockade on it. The only state that supported Russia in both arms sales and diplomatic activity was Prussia. Thanks to her, the blockade was reduced to a minimum.
It is strange why not a single Russian historian wondered why the Poles rebelled against Russia in 1830-1831 and in 1863-1864, and in 1854-1855, when Russia was defeated in all theaters of military operations, the lords sat with their ears pressed.
Because in 1830 and 1863 in Paris the Poles were commanded "face!", And in 1854 - "sit!"
Prussia would never have allowed the re-creation of the Commonwealth. And the response to the rebellion of the gentry would be a campaign of the Prussian and Russian troops against Paris.
By the way, in 1863-1864, the Prussian troops smashed the violent gentlemen both on their own and on the adjacent territory, crossing the border with the permission of the Russian authorities. Later, the beaten lords were crying in Paris: "We were defeated not by the Muscovites, but by the Prussian grenadiers."
When Emperor Napoleon III declared war on Germany in 1870, Alexander II ordered the Russian corps on the western border to be brought to full combat readiness. In St. Petersburg, they feared that the impudent nephew decided to repeat his uncle's exploits and, having defeated Prussia, would move further east. Fate wanted the Prussians to enter Paris, and only then did Prince Gorchakov issue his famous circular, which destroyed the articles of the Paris Peace of 1856 that were humiliating for Russia.
KRUPP IS HURRYING TO HELP
In 1877-1878, during the Russo-Turkish War, England prepared itself for an attack on Russia. And then hundreds of heavy Krupp guns of 229-356 mm caliber were sent from Germany through the Verzhbolovo railway station and by sea to Revel and Kronstadt. Russia bought several ocean liners from Germany to convert them into cruisers for operations on British communications.
In 1891-1892, Tsar Alexander III entered into a military alliance with France. However, the goal of the Russian government was not an attack on Germany, but, on the contrary, an attempt to stabilize the situation in Europe, appealing to both sides. Another equally important goal was to curb the expansion of England in the Mediterranean Sea, Africa and Asia.
The French willingly agreed to an alliance with Russia. However, their goal was just a new European war to the last soldier, of course, Russian and German. The whole country dreamed of revenge and the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine - the disputed lands that repeatedly passed from hand to hand. For this, Paris slowly came to an agreement with London, and the entire anti-British thrust of the treaty was reduced to zero.
The decisive leadership and courage of the people, and not some allies, led the country to victory in the Great Patriotic War. Photo from the official website of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
During the Russo-Japanese War, England actually fought on the side of Japan. And after the Gul incident, the English fleet prepared to attack the 2nd Pacific squadron of Admiral Rozhdestvensky off the coast of Spain. And only a sharp shout from Berlin stopped the "enlightened sailors".
The 2nd and 3rd Pacific squadrons passed dozens of French ports in Europe, Africa and Asia. But our brave allies did not let our ships into any of them. Russian squadrons managed to reach the Far East exclusively with the help of German supply vessels, primarily coal miners. Few people know that the German rescue ship Roland was sunk by Japanese ships in Tsushima together with our squadrons while rescuing Russian sailors.
In the meantime, echelons with the latest cannons, 15-cm howitzers, shells of all calibers, torpedoes, etc. were continuously going through Verzhbolovo. Destroyers and submarines for the Russian fleet were built at German shipyards under the guise of yachts. The first submarine to arrive in Vladivostok in 1904 was the Krupp boat Trout.
It should be noted that Nicholas II correctly assessed the positions of England and France in the Russo-Japanese War. On October 15, 1904, the tsar sent a secret telegram to William II: “I can’t find words to express my indignation at the behavior of England … It is certainly time to put an end to this. The only way to achieve this, as you say, is for Germany, Russia and France to come to an agreement to abolish Anglo-Japanese arrogance and insolence. Please draw up and sketch out a draft of such an agreement and communicate it to me. As soon as we accept it, France will have to join its ally. This plan often occurs to me. He will bring peace and tranquility to the whole world."
On October 30, Wilhelm's reply came: “I immediately turned to the chancellor, and we both secretly, without informing anyone, drew up, according to your desire, three articles of the treaty. Let it be as you say. We shall be together. Of course, the alliance should be purely defensive, directed exclusively against the attacker or attackers in Europe, something like a mutual insurance company against fire against arson."
And on July 11, 1905, on the yacht "Polar Star" near the island of Bjerke, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II signed an alliance agreement. If the Treaty of Bjerk had entered into force, the First World War would not have been guaranteed, and the entire history of mankind would have gone on a different course. However, agents of influence from France and England ruled in Russia. At the very top, deeply conspiratorial "brothers-Masons" acted, but in the provinces slobbering intellectuals and anxious young ladies, forgetting about the ruins of Sevastopol, were reading Maupassant's "Pyshka".
As a result, upon returning to St. Petersburg, the tsar was literally attacked by his ministers, including Premier Witte, Foreign Minister Lamsdorf and others. The king was forced to ask "cousin Willie" to denounce this treaty.
For the second time, Nicholas II wanted to come to an agreement with Wilhelm during a meeting in Potsdam on October 22, 1910. However, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sazonov, accompanying the tsar, refused to sign the treaty. In the end, in 1911, already in St. Petersburg, a truncated fragment of an agreement was signed, concerning exclusively the construction of railways in Turkey and Persia.
I will note that there were no economic reasons for the war with Germany either. The share of Germany in Russia's imports was 50%, France - 4.6%, England - 13.3%.
THE SECRET REMAINS UNSOLVED
It is still not known exactly how Russia entered the war. In his correspondence with Wilhelm Nicholas II on July 15, 1914 (old style) he writes with bitterness: "I foresee that very soon, yielding to the pressure being exerted on me, I will be forced to take extreme measures that will lead to war."
Nicholas II was forced to enter the world war. Note that he had no shortage of warnings.
Back in February 1914, a prominent statesman, former Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Nikolaevich Durnovo submitted an extensive report to Nicholas II. Durnovo wrote that a purely defensive Franco-Russian alliance was useful: “France, by an alliance with Russia, was secured against an attack by Germany, this latter - with Russia's proven peace and friendship against the desire for revenge on the part of France, Russia with the need for Germany to maintain good-neighborly relations with her - from excessive intrigues of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans”.
Durnovo pointed out that even a victory over Germany would not have given Russia anything valuable: “Poznan? East Prussia? But why do we need these areas, densely populated by Poles, when it is not so easy for us to cope with Russian Poles?..”Galicia? This is a hotbed of dangerous "Little Russian separatism".
Pyotr Durnovo further predicts such a course of events if it came to war: “The main burden of the war will fall on our lot. The role of the battering ram, piercing the thickness of the German defense, will fall to us … This war is fraught with enormous difficulties for us and cannot turn out to be a triumphal march to Berlin. Military failures are also inevitable - let's hope, partial ones - one or another shortcoming in our supplies will be inevitable … With the exceptional nervousness of our society, these circumstances will be exaggerated … It will start with the fact that all failures will be attributed to the government. A fierce campaign against him will begin in the legislative institutions … Revolutionary actions will begin in the country … The army, having lost the most reliable cadre, for the most part spontaneously common peasant striving for land,too demoralized to be a bulwark of law and order. Legislative institutions and oppositional-intellectual parties, deprived of authority in the eyes of the population, will be unable to restrain the diverging popular waves, which they themselves raised, and Russia will be plunged into a hopeless anarchy, the outcome of which cannot even be foreseen."
An opponent who is little familiar with the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries can conclude that Shirokorad considers Kaiser Wilhelm II to be a white and fluffy Russophile. Not at all. He cared exclusively about the interests of Germany. Another issue is that the interests of both empires coincided on most issues.
WAR WITHOUT GOALS
Having started the war, neither the tsar nor his ministers and generals determined the goals of the war. We are not talking about the fact that these goals were reactionary or obviously unrealizable. They themselves did not know what they wanted. Thus, neither the tsar nor the ministers were able to formulate the future of the "united" Poland after the victory over Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were enough options, including the official statements of Nicholas II, the commander of the Russian army, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, as well as the foreign ministers, but they were all contradictory and vague.
In 1916-1917, Russian troops seized a large chunk of Turkish territory, including the cities of Trebizond, Erzurum, Erzidjan, Bitlis, etc. And again the tsar, ministers and generals did not know what to do with them.
They temporarily seized Galicia from Austria, and again the question is whether to annex it to the future Poland, or to make it a Russian province, or to give Little Russia autonomy and include Galicia in this? As the saying goes, "extraordinary lightness of thought."
Since 1915, the tsar, ministers and the media exaggerated the thesis - to expel the enemy from the territory of Russia. And who is to blame that the enemy invaded Russia?
Having ascended the throne in 1825, Nicholas I decided to cover the western border of the empire, building there a number of new fortresses, which, in combination with the old ones, were supposed to form three lines of defense.
The first line included fortresses located in the Kingdom of Poland: Modlin, Warsaw, Ivangorod and Zamosc. All the large fortresses of the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the 19th century were connected by highways and railways. In addition, telegraph and telephone (cable) communications were established between the fortresses.
The second line of western fortresses included (from north to south): fortress II class Dinamünde (since 1893 - Ust-Dvinsk, in 1959 entered the city of Riga), fortress II class Kovno, fortress II class Osovets and fortress I class Brest -Litovsk.
In the rear there was a third line of fortresses, the main of which were Kiev, Bobruisk and Dinaburg.
A number of officers of the Main Artillery Directorate and the Main Military Engineering Directorate suggested that the Minister of War and Nicholas II connect the fortresses with fortified areas (UR). There was a large population there, which could be voluntarily and compulsorily attracted to the construction of URs without any problems. Russian artillery factories could produce the most powerful guns in calibers 305, 356 and 406 mm. The stocks of heavy weapons on obsolete ships and in coastal fortresses were enormous. Thus, the plans to strengthen the fortresses and build the URs were quite realistic. Nevertheless, the generals who demanded a march on Berlin won.
By placing its armies behind three lines of fortresses, Russia could become that monkey who climbed the mountain and watched the tiger fight in the valley with pleasure. And then, when the "tigers" would pretty much patted each other, Russia could start a large landing operation in the Bosphorus. The only chance for us to take the straits could arise only at the height of the war.
What if the Kaiser would have defeated England and France on the Western Front, and then moved east? The likelihood of this is negligible. To begin with, the Kaiser never planned an invasion into the interior of Russia and the annexation of some primordially Russian territories.
Well, the main thing is that the allies had huge reserves in manpower, weapons and industrial production. So, for example, France had the third largest fleet in the world. But the British "Grand Fleet" would be enough to counter the German fleet. Accordingly, the French fleet could be 95% disarmed, and the guns and personnel could be sent to the land front.
England and France could mobilize in the colonies or recruit mercenaries among several million people - all kinds of Sikhs, Moroccans, Senegalese, etc. By the way, this was done in the First and Second World Wars, although not on such a large scale.
England could press on the dominions (Canada, New Zealand) and force them to carry out a total mobilization.
Finally, the US oligarchs would never have allowed the capture of France and England by Germany. Accordingly, total mobilization would have been carried out in the United States, and the United States would have entered the war not in 1917, but three years earlier.
By the way, if the Russian army took up a deep defense on the first line of fortresses, then the Kaiser would have to keep 40-50 divisions in the east just in case.
And, having seized the straits - the only goal worthy of Russia in the war, Nicholas II could have played the role of a peacemaker, becoming a mediator between the belligerent powers. Even if the Entente refused to negotiate and achieved the surrender of Germany, an exhausted France would never go to war with Russia, even for the sake of Constantinople.
I repeat once again, Russia did not have and does not have honest allies, but only occasional allies who were ready to stab Russia in the back at any moment. It is not for nothing that Emperor Alexander III wisely said: "Russia has two allies - her army and her navy."
In 1941-1945, the USSR made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Germany and its allies and saved the Western powers from defeat. And they began to threaten us with a nuclear strike on a hundred large cities.
And in 1942-1945, that is, even during the war, the allies did us a million small and big dirty tricks. And if the USSR did not have an army that in May 1945 could drop the allied divisions into the Atlantic in three or four weeks, and a wise leader who was absolutely trusted by the overwhelming majority of the population, then the Soviet Union in 1945 would have, at best, faced the fate Yugoslavia.
Alexander Borisovich Shirokorad writer, historian