Private Alexe Vulov of the 189th Ismile Infantry Regiment had been in the line for 11 months when he went on his first raid in the autumn of 1915. He was 22 years old, the son of a blacksmith from Tula, and he had arrived at the front in the autumn of 1914, carrying a rifle that had been issued to him at the depot in Moscow.
By the spring of 1915, that rifle was gone. Lost when his section was overrun during the great retreat, left in a shell crater near Breast Letovsk when the order came to fall back. And for 6 weeks, he had carried nothing but the bayonet he had kept in his boot. He had waited in the trench behind men who were armed, and when they fell, he had picked up their weapons and used them until those were gone, too.
By the time the line stabilized in Galacia in the late autumn of 1915, Vulov had been issued a new rifle, a shortened bayonet, and a grenade of the type the army called the Lemon, the oval cast iron fragmentation grenade modeled on French and British designs that the Russian Ordinance Factories were beginning to produce in useful numbers.
He had also by this point a specific kind of knowledge about what the war on the Eastern Front actually was, distinct from anything he had been told at the depot in Moscow or had read in the newspapers that reached the trench occasionally and were passed from man to man until they fell apart. The knowledge was this, that the war was larger than anything the newspaper suggested, that the front stretched for 12,200 km from the Baltic to the Carpathians, and that somewhere along those 12,200 km, men were dying every day in numbers that no
official communicate would accurately report, and that the specific quality of what happened in a raid, the close quarters violence in the dark, the specific sounds and the specific smells, and the specific decisions that had to be made in the space of a few seconds was something that could not be transmitted in language and had to be learned by being there.
He went on his first raid in October 1915. He came back. He went out again in November and again in December and four times in the first half of 1916 before the Grenad.i.er platoon were formally organized and he was selected for one. He carried a carbine rather than a full-length rifle, a revolver he had taken from an Austrian officer he would not describe in detail and the lemon grenades in a canvas bag across his chest.
He sharpened his shortened bayonet every evening. He went out in the dark and came back and did not talk about what happened in the German Austrian positions he entered. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the men who asked the questions had not been there, and the men who had been there did not need to ask. The rifle shortage that shaped his first year at the front was one of the defining catastrophes of the Russian war.
And it is necessary to understand it clearly before anything else because it shaped the entire character of how Russian sold.i.ers fought and raided and survived or did not survive from 1914 through 1916. Russia mobilized approximately 6 million men in the first months of the war. Its ordinance factories could produce approximately 525,000 rifles per year.
The arithmetic was not workable. By the spring of 1915, Russian infantry divisions were going into battle with battalions at half strength, and those battalions equipped with approximately one rifle per two men. The orders that were issued to deal with this situation are among the most brutal administrative documents of the war on any front.
Divisional orders stated in plain language that the men without rifles should follow behind the men with rifles, and when the men with rifles fell, the men behind should pick up the rifles and continue advancing. This is not a metaphor. This is the literal operational reality of the Russian army. In 1915, men followed other men into artillery and machine gun fire with the specific intention of retrieving their weapons from their bod.i.es.
Arthur Ransom, the British journalist who visited the Eastern Front and later wrote about it, described what he saw in terms that have not lost their force. He found men holding the front without enough weapons to go round, brave and willing and dying at the rate the war demanded for a command structure that was consuming them faster than the ordinance factories could arm their replacements.
Hamilton Fe of the Daily News reported that the Russian troops were magnificent material being wasted because of the incompetence, intrigues and corruption of the men who governed the country. Both of them were right and both of them understood only part of it because neither of them was in the trench waiting for the man in front to be shot.
The shortage of rifles produced by a logic that was specific and terrible. A culture of improvisation in the Russian army that shaped how its sold.i.ers fought at close quarters for the entire war. Men who had no rifles and had to fight anyway fought with what they had. What they had in the trenches of the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915 was whatever was available.
Bayonets, entrenching tools, the heavy wooden stocks of rifles that had fired their last round and could not be reloaded because there was no ammunition for them. Rocks. The specific resourcefulness that the rifle shortage forced on Russian sold.i.ers was not unique to the Russian army. The same improvisation was happening on the Western front driven by the same logic of a specific tactical environment, but the scale of it in the Russian case was qualitatively different because the shortage itself was qualitatively different. The British sold.i.er who left
his Leenfield in the trench when he went on a raid made a tactical choice. The Russian sold.i.er who carried nothing but a bayonet into a fight in the summer of 1915 was making the best of a situation that his government had produced by failing to arm him. The Eastern Front was a different kind of war from the Western Front.
The Western Front ran 700 km and barely moved from late 1914 to 1918. The Eastern Front ran 1,200 km from the Baltic to the Black Sea and moved constantly. Russian forces advanced into East Prussia and Galacia in 1914 and were driven back, advanced again and were driven back again and then during the great retreat of 1915 were pushed hundreds of miles backward as Germany and AustriaHungary applied combined pressure.
The underarmmed Russian army could not resist. Between May and September 1915, the Russian army fell back along the entire front. Warsaw fell, Breast Letosk fell, VNA fell. The Baltic provinces were lost. The sold.i.ers who made that retreat had been fighting for 11 months without adequate ammunition, food, or artillery support. They were not defeated in the conventional sense.
They were exhausted out of the line at a rate that consumed the army’s best men faster than they could be replaced. By late 1915, the army holding the stabilized front bore almost no resemblance in personnel to the army that had mobilized in 1914. What remained were the ablest, the luckiest, and the most ruthless stripped of the inhibitions that prevent a man from doing what the situation requires without deliberation.
It was out of this army, the rebuilt, rearmed, fundamentally changed formation that had come through the great retreat and was holding the stabilized eastern front in Galysia and the Baltic provinces and the endless flat terrain between that. The Russian raiding program emerged. The Rasvajiki were the scouts. Every Russian division had them and they were the closest equivalent in the Imperial Russian army to the trench raiders of the Western Front.
Though the comparison is only partly accurate because the Eastern Front’s fluid geography gave the Razvichi a broader operational role than the purely trenchbound raiders of France and Belgium. The Rasvajiki operated in no man’s land, which on the Eastern front was sometimes measured in miles rather than yards, gathering intelligence about enemy positions, intercepting German and Austrian patrols, identifying defensive arrangements in advance of planned attacks.
They were recruited from the best sold.i.ers available in each division. The physically able, the quick, the calm, under pressure. The men who could navigate in darkness and silence and judge distances by sound and remain motionless for extended periods when remaining motionless was what survival required. They were also, by the nature of the work, the men who most frequently encountered the enemy at arms length in conditions that did not permit the use of a rifle.
A patrol meeting in no man’s land in the dark with positions on both sides close enough to hear a shot had the same tactical problem that the western front trench raiders had. The rifle was too loud, too long, too slow to bring to bear in the space between two men in the dark. The Rasvajiki solved this the same way the raiders of the Western Front solved it, with knives, with shortened bayonets, with whatever they had made or acquired or adapted that could be used silently at close quarters.
And they solved it by the same process of learning from experience that produced the knob carry of the British trench and the stiletto of the French nettoer. Trial and error. Surviving the trial learning from the error. The formal grenad.i.er platoon, the assault specialization that the Russian army began developing systematically from late 1915 were the institutional expression of the same logic.
The 9th Army Order of December 13th, 1915, which established the Grenad.i.er platoon structure, specified that each infantry battalion would form a Grenad.i.er platoon consisting of one officer, four non-commissioned officers, and 48 other ranks. Each man would be armed with a carbine, a revolver, a dagger or saber, a small shovel or axe, 8 to 10 hand grenades, a gas mask, and a steel helmet.
They would train specifically for assault operations, the breaking of defensive positions at close quarters, the clearing of trench systems, the neutralization of machine gun imp placements. They would go first. The weapons list is striking because it is almost identical to what the Canadian corps, the French assault sections, and the German storin had independently arrived at through the same process of operational learning.
Short weapons, throwing weapons, edged weapons, protective equipment. Every army that had thought carefully about close quarters combat had reached the same conclusion. The grenades available to the Russian Grenad.i.er platoon by 1916 included Russian designs from 1912 and 1914 and the Nitzky system. French grenades of the 1915 pattern.
German stick grenades captured in earlier fighting. Japanese grenades acquired through the supply arrangements that brought Japanese weapons to the Russian army during the rifle shortage. and British Mills bombs obtained through allied supply channels. An army that was using six different national grenades simultaneously tells you something about the supply situation.
It also tells you something about the specific competence of the grenaders who used them, who had to know the fusing and detonation characteristics of six different designs well enough to use them correctly in the dark under fire, and who learned this by handling them until the knowledge was automatic.
The fighting knife for the Russian grenad.i.er was typically either a shortened bayonet, the same improvised solution that British sold.i.ers had arrived at, or one of the commercial daggers that appeared in the Russian market once it became clear that the army was not going to issue purpose-built fighting knives quickly enough to meet the need.
The Kinsel, the long-bladed Caucasian dagger with his distinctive double curved hilt, was widely available in Russia and widely purchased by sold.i.ers who wanted a fighting knife that actually worked. The sold.i.ers from the Caucuses, the Georgian and Armenian and Azabaijani and mountain people who served in the Russian army in large numbers had grown up with the Kal as a cultural object and understood it as a weapon in a way that the ordinance bureaucracy in Petrorad did not.
They carried them, their comrades copied them. The sharpened entrenching tool needs no special explanation in the Russian context because the Russian entrenching tool was the same object as the British and German and French entrenching tool. A short-handled spade issued to every sold.i.er sharpened by the men who understood what it was for.
The Russian sold.i.ers of the Eastern Front had, if anything, more occasion to use it as a weapon than their Western Front equivalents because the fluid nature of the fighting produced close quarter situations in the open rather than exclusively in trenches. And the sharpened shorthandled spade was as useful in a shell crater or a forest clearing as it was in a trench bay.
Now we come to the offensive that changed everything. Not just for Russia, but for the conduct of the war on the Eastern Front and for the understanding of what a systematic assault program could achieve when it was built on the accumulated lessons of two years of fighting rather than the assumptions of a peaceime staff college.
General Alexe Brusselof was the ablest operational commander the Russian army produced in the First World War. His achievement in June 1916 was the product of a specific approach to attacking a prepared defensive position that was different from anything any other army had tried at that scale. The other Russian commanders ordered to attack that summer use the conventional method.
Mass your forces at one point bombard for days. Send the infantry forward. This was the method that had produced the SO disaster on July 1st, 1916. Brusselof rejected it. He attacked on a front 550 km wide, not at a single point, but at multiple points simultaneously, with each of his four army commanders planning his assault independently.
He limited his artillery preparation to less than 5 hours. Not the 7-day bombardment that the British used at the SO, not the prolonged preparation that told the defenders exactly where and when the assault was coming. He had his troops trained on full-scale replicas of the Austrian positions they were going to attack, cited with the help of aerial reconnaissance photographs.
He maintained secrecy so completely that the Austrian defenders, who had been told repeatedly by their own intelligence that the Russian army was incapable of a major offensive, did not believe the evidence in front of them until it was too late. On June 4th, 1916, the Brusselov offensive began.
The Grenad.i.er platoon went first. The description of the opening phase at the Leica near Lutk, where the Russian Eighth Army struck the Austrohungarian Fourth Army on its right wing, captures what the Grenad.i.er platoon actually did when they were used correctly. The Austrian position at Oolica was a layered defensive system. Three lines of heavily fortified trenches, the kind of defensive arrangement that the Western Front had developed over 18 months into something that could resist artillery and machine guns and massed infantry assault. The
Russian Grenad.i.er platoon, armed with their carbines and revolvers and daggers and grenades and sharpened tools, moved through the gap that the short sharp artillery preparation had opened and went into the Austrian trench system at close quarters. The second Austrian Infantry Division was swamped.
The defending 82nd Infantry Regiment lost more than 4,500 of its 5,000 men in a matter of minutes. In the first week of the offensive, Russian forces took approximately 200,000 Austrian prisoners. The Austrian army, the report that reached German headquarters stated, had effectively ceased to exist as a coherent fighting force on the southwestern front.
The company commander of one of the leading Russian units left an account of the opening phase that was preserved in the regimental history. He wrote that when the artillery stopped and the advance began, the men who went first were the grenaders. And what distinguished the grenad.i.er advance from the mass infantry advance that followed was the specific quality of individual initiative.
The grenaders did not wait for the men beside them. They identified their objectives. The machine gun in placement, the barbed wire gap, the trench bay, and they moved toward them. And when something blocked the approach, they found another approach. And they did this without instruction because they had been trained to do it.
And because the men who had been trained and had not been able to do it were dead. He noted with the detachment of a man describing what he had observed rather than what he had felt that the sight of the grenaders advancing through the Austrian wire was one of the most remarkable things he had seen in two years of the war.
Not because of the scale of it, but because of the control. Each man exactly where he was supposed to be, doing exactly what the situation required without hesitation. The Brusseloff offensive was the greatest Russian triumph of the First World War. It was also the offensive that exhausted the Russian army.
By the time ended in late August 1916, Russian forces had advanced between 60 and 150 km along a 550 km front, had inflicted over 1 million casualties on AustriaHungary, and forced Germany to transfer divisions from the Western Front at a moment when those divisions were needed at Verdun and the Som. The cost was approximately 1 million Russian casualties.
The reserve formations that Brusselov needed to exploit his breakthroughs were committed by other Russian commanders in other sectors using conventional methods bogged down immediately and did not come. The offensive achieved everything it set out to achieve tactically and nothing it needed to achieve strategically.
And the Russian army that came out of it was not the same army that had gone in. Now the men, the specific individuals whose stories carry the Russian raiding experience out of the abstract and into the human. Lava Gyorgic Cornelof was born on August 18th, 1870 in Karolinsk in western Siberia in what is now Kazakhstan. His father was a Ksak Korazi, a junior officer of Ksak lineage.
And his mother was of mixed Polish and Kelmic descent. The Kalmic component coming from the Buddhist Mongol people who had migrated to the lower vulgar in the 17th century and become part of the Ksac military culture of the southern step. This background and the margins of empire, the mixing of cosac and central Asian military traditions, the specific hardness of a childhood on the Siberian step, produced a man who was small in physical stature and enormous in personal authority, who drove himself with a relentlessness that his
subordinates found inspiring and his peers found uncomfortable, and who was regarded by the sold.i.ers under him with the specific devotion that men reserve for commanders who understand both the war they are in and the men they are asking to fight it. He graduated from the Mikkovski Artillery School in 1892.
Was posted to Turkiststan. Learned Persian, Usuzbck and Pashto, served as military atache in China from 1907 to 1911. Learned Chinese and was commanding the 48th Infantry Division in Galysia when the war began. He led from the front in a way unusual for a divisional general. In April 1915, in the fighting in the Carpathian Mountains, the 48th Division became isolated.
The Great Retreat was beginning and the units around Cornelof had already fallen back, leaving his division without flanking cover. He held the position until holding it was no longer possible and then tried to break through the encircling Austrian forces. The breakthrough failed. Cornelov was wounded and captured.
His aid to camp was killed beside him. He was taken to an Austrian prisoner of war camp as a general officer, which meant comfortable captivity, but also meant that his escape would be a personal embarrassment to the Austrian military establishment that would prefer he remain where he was. He spent over a year in captivity.
He learned something of Czech from a Czech orderly who worked in the camp. In July 1916, in the confusion of the Brusselof offensive, the Austrian rear areas were in varying degrees of chaos as the offensive drove into the Austrian positions. Cornelof walked out of the camp dressed in an Austrian uniform.
He traveled west and then south, moving through Austrian controlled territory, using the check he had learned to explain himself. When challenged, he crossed the Romanian border. He reached Russian lines. He came back with a cosac saber he had acquired somewhere along the way and an expression on his face according to the officer who met him at the Russian line that suggested he had been on a very long patrol and had been required to use a variety of skills.
The press coverage of his escape was extensive, and the coverage was warranted because what Cornelof had done was exactly what an army in the state of the Russian army in 1916 needed a senior officer to be seen doing, demonstrating by personal example that initiative and individual courage could extract a man from a situation that the institutional expectation said was impossible.
He was given command of the 25th Army Corps on the southwestern front and eventually in July 1917 appointed supreme commander of the Russian army. This was a role that the state of Russia in 1917 made impossible to perform. He was arrested after the Cornelof affair in September 1917, the failed attempt to stabilize the provisional government by military force and escaped from detention in November when the Bolevik coup made the choice between remaining a prisoner and leading an armed resistance against the new government, a straightforward one.
He d.i.ed on April 13th, 1918, killed by a Soviet artillery shell during the siege of Yakatinodar. He was 47 years old. The Cornelof Shock Regiment, which began as the first shock detachment Cornelof formed on the southwestern front in 1917, was one of the most decorated assault units the Russian army produced.
It carried a skull and crossbones insignia and kept fighting after the men around it had stopped. German and Austrian intelligence assessments noted that the Cornelov detachment fought with a quality of personal violence distinct from what they encountered in other Russian formations. Maria Leonte Evvna Bosskarva was born in 1889 in the Nogarod province, the daughter of a former surf.
Her family moved to Siberia. She worked in a butcher shop in Tomsk, married an abusive alcoholic, left him for a criminal named Yakov Book, who was exiled to Yakutia, taking her with him. When the war began in 1914, she decided the war was preferable to Yakutia. The local military commander refused her enlistment petition.
She sent a telegram directly to Zar Nicholas II. The Zar agreed. She was assigned to the 25th Reserve Battalion, 28th Pelotsk Infantry Regiment, wounded twice in 1915, her right leg shattered in March 1916, recovered and returned. In July 1917, she stood in a trench near Smorggan as the commander of the first Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, ranked as a captain, holding a revolver with gold handled grips presented to her by the Minister of War.
The specific context of the women’s battalion of d.e.a.t.h requires the specific context of the Russian army in May and June 1917 because without that context the battalion makes no sense and its achievement at smorgan is incomprehensible. The February revolution had been followed almost immediately by order number one from the Petrorad Soviet prescribing that sold.i.er committees be formed in all military units with effective control over weapons and orders.
By the spring of 1917, Russian units were fratonizing with the enemy, refusing to advance, electing committees that overrode their officers, and in some cases walking away from the front. Brusselof, now Supreme Commander, called on June 5th, 1917 for volunteers to form revolutionary shock battalions.
Between March and November 1917, these grew to over 600,000 men carrying skull and crossbones insignia and organized on storin principles, the same doctrine the Grenad.i.er platoon had been developing since 1915. The difference was that by mid 1917, these men were fighting in an army that was disintegrating around them. Boschkar’s petition was approved by Kinsky within days.
The rationale, a formation of women willing to fight would shame the male sold.i.ers who were refusing. Of 2,000 volunteers, 1,700 were rejected by her selection process. The 300 who remained trained for a month. 6 hours of drill daily bayonet practice, grenade throwing, root marches. Emiline Pankers came from Britain to inspect them.
American women journalists followed the battalion to the front. It was international news. On July 1st, 1917, the first Russian women’s battalion of d.e.a.t.h was assigned to positions near Smorggan in Bellarus, assigned to the 525th Curuk Darinsky Regiment. The men of the battalions on their flanks had been voting in their committees and had reached the decision that they would defend their current positions, but would not advance from them.
This was the tactical situation on the day of the assault. The barrage lifted. The order was given. The men in the adjacent trenches looked at each other and their committees conferred, and the result of the conference was that they were not going over. She took approximately 170 of her women into no man’s land. The German and Austrian positions on this sector of the front had been in place for months, fortified and wired and covered by the same overlapping machine gun positions that similar positions on the Western Front had. The women’s battalion crossed
no man’s land under fire, reached the German Austrian positions, entered them, and took three German trench lines in succession. They held the captured ground. The men on their flanks, watching women do what they had refused to do, eventually came forward, some of them, not all, and followed up. The women were eventually ordered to withdraw when the flanking support failed to materialize in the quantity required to hold the position against the German counterattack.
Boskar Evva was knocked unconscious by the concussion from an artillery shell during the withdrawal. She regained consciousness in a field hospital. She was told that at least 50 of her women were among the dead and wounded. She had held three German trench lines with approximately 170 women against a position defended by sold.i.ers who had been there for months.
She had done this on a day when the male sold.i.ers on her flanks had voted not to advance. The battalion brought back approximately 200 prisoners. The British liaison officer wrote that the women had fought with distinction and showed discipline and bravery that compared favorably with the best units he had observed on the front.
The Russian 9th Corps commander wrote that their conduct was an example to the army. He had, the same officer noted, very little army left to set examples to. Smorggan deserves specific attention. The town in what is now Bellarus was partially occupied by German forces in September 1915 with the northern part remaining in Russian hands for 810 consecutive days.
From September 1915 to November 1917, Russian forces held their positions there against continuous German pressure, including a large-scale fosgene gas attack in July 1916 that Russian aerial observers had detected in advance. To have been at Smorggon became a credential in the Russian army like Epra or Verdun, the mark of a sold.i.er who had been in a specific kind of hell and had not broken.
The Rasvichi who operated in no man’s land at Smorggan knew every wire position and sentry routine on their stretch of the front. They had been there long enough. The Fedorov aftermat is worth a brief mention because it connects directly to the 189th Ismile Regiment. Vladimir Fodorov’s automatic rifle, the world’s first in a strict technical sense, fired an intermediate power Japanese 6.
5 mm Arisaka cartridge from a 25 round magazine in both semi-automatic and automatic modes. In the summer of 1916, a company from the 189th Ismile Regiment was equipped with eight of them and deployed to the Romanian front in early 1917. 25,000 were ordered. Approximately 3,200 were manufactured before the revolution ended the program.
The men who carried those eight rifles to Romania were doing something that had never been done before. The army that had sent them there ceased to exist before anyone could work out what to do with it. The Razvichi who operated throughout this period used a specific approach to prisoner taking that reflects the quality of training, the best Russian units had achieved by 1916 and 1917.
The objective of a Rasveetic raid was typically one of two things. Intelligence about the enemy position or a prisoner who could provide that intelligence. Killing in the Razvetic’s operational doctrine was incidental to the mission rather than its purpose. The opposite of the British no quarter raids and the French Nettoyear operations which were explicitly strike missions.
The Rasveetic wanted prisoners. A dead enemy sold.i.er told you nothing beyond his unit designation from the paybook in his pocket. A live enemy sold.i.er properly interrogated told you the relief schedule, the artillery coordinates, the location of the headquarters, the morale of the garrison. The technique for taking a prisoner silently in a forward trench, as described in Russian training documents of the period, was as specific and as merciless as the British technique for removing a sentry.
Two men would approach the target from different angles using whatever cover the terrain offered. One man would take the target from behind, left arm around the throat, cutting off the air supply, right hand ready, while the second man prevented the target from signaling or reaching his weapon.
The prisoner was then moved backward through the wire and across no man’s land in a way that prevented him from making noise. The specific skill required was not violence, but control. the ability to take a man who was physically opposing you and move him where you needed him to go without killing him and without allowing him to alert anyone.
This skill was practiced the same way the British practice the silent removal of centuries until it was automatic. The Austrian and German interrogation records that survive contained consistent references to the speed and silence of the Russians who had taken them. One Austrian NCO taken by Razvichi from the 11th Army sector in Galysia in 1916 described the experience in his post interrogation statement.
He had been standing his watch in the forward sap heard nothing and the next thing he was aware of was being held from behind with something at his throat and a quiet voice telling him in German not to make a sound. He was at a Russian divisional headquarters being questioned within 3 hours.
He noted that the Russians knew things about his sector that suggested they had taken prisoners there before. They had the sadness of the Russian raiding program is that the instrument so carefully built, the Grenad.i.er platoon, the Razviki, the shock battalions, the Cornelof Regiment, Boschkarva’s women, was broken not by the enemy, but by the failure of the state that had created it.
What dissolved the army was not German artillery, but order number one and the committees and the exhaustion of a people who had been at war for 3 years and wanted to stop. The shock battalions kept fighting after the men around them stopped. The Cornelof Regiment kept its discipline and willingness to advance while flanking formations voted to stay in their trenches.
Boschare’s women went over the top when the male sold.i.ers would not. The Razvichi continued going out and coming back because the work was what it was and stopping it was not something the men doing it were able to simply decide to do. The Treaty of Breast Lovsk signed on March 3rd, 1918 ended Russia’s participation in the war. The terms were severe.
Russia seeded Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and parts of the Caucuses. But the Russian delegation signed them anyway because the Russian state had ceased to be capable of continuing the war and Lenin had promised the Russian people peace and this was the peace that was available. The Eastern Front was over.
The men of the Grenad.i.er platoon scattered into the Russian civil war. Some fought for the whites. The volunteer army Cornelof co-ounded before his d.e.a.t.h . Some fought for the Reds. Some went home. The Razviki were recruited by both sides. Their skills being exactly what every army in a civil war needs. The Cornelivites became the Cornelof Division of the White Volunteer Army and fought until the White Cause collapsed in 1920.
Maria Botchkarva’s story after the war is the story of Russia in miniature. She was arrested by the Bolevixs and released arrested again. Traveled to England and the United States to seek support for the antibbolic cause. Was interviewed by President Woodro Wilson. returned to Russia, was arrested by the Czecher, the Bolevik secret police, and executed on May 16th, 1920.
She was 31 years old. The record of her execution is in the Czecher archives. The women’s battalion of d.e.a.t.h that she raised and commanded and led over the top at Smoron on July 1st, 1917, when the men on her flanks would not go. The formation that captured 200 prisoners and held three German trench lines and lost 50 women doing it.
That formation has no memorial in Russia. It has a paragraph in the history books. It has a a paragraph in the history books. It has a photograph taken in Petroretrad before they went to the front. The women in their army fatigue standing in ranks. Boschkareva on the far right looking directly at the camera with the expression of a woman who had already decided what she was going to do and was not particularly interested in anyone’s opinion of it.
Alexi Vulkoff went on his last raid on the night of March 14th, 1917. The same week Zar Nicholas II abdicated in Petetrorad. He crossed the wire, came back, heard about the abdication from a corporal who had heard it from an officer. He sat in the trench with his knife and his grenades, and thought about what it meant. He did not know.
He cleaned his weapons and went to sleep. The next morning the war was still there and so was he and the committees were forming in the regiments around him and the army was still for the moment an army. It was not an army for much longer. The men who built the Russian raiding program. The Grenaders and the Razviki and the Cornelivites and Boskarva’s women built it in the teeth of a supply crisis that would have destroyed any other army’s offensive capacity using captured enemy weapons and improvised fighting knives and grenades of six different national
origins and a shortened bayonet that the blacksmith in the next trench had made from a fulllength blade on a wetstone. They built it in an army that was being consumed by a war its government had not prepared it to fight, and they rebuilt it after each consumption. and they kept going out in the dark because going out in the dark was what the situation required and they were the men the situation had produced.
Before we reach the collapse, there is one more formation that demands its own account because it represents the specific combination of territorial loyalty, tactical excellence, and ultimate betrayal by the state they served that runs through the whole of the Russian war in its purest form. The Latvian riflemen were created in the summer of 1915 when German forces advanced into the Kland region of Latvia and the Russian military command authorized the formation of territorial rifle battalions from Latvian volunteers.
Eight battalions were formed by the end of 1915, reorganized into regiments in 1916 and combined into two Latvian rifle brigades on the northern front north of Ria. The specific quality that distinguished the Latvian riflemen from most of the formations around them was a territorial motivation that the Russian army as a whole increasingly lacked.
The men of the Latvian battalions were fighting on or near their own land for their own homes in the specific knowledge that the German advance they were opposing would, if it succeeded, obliterate the Latvian communities behind the front. This gave them a quality of fight that territorial sold.i.ers fighting for their own ground often have.
and that conscript armies drawn from far away often do not. It also gave them Latvian officers who understood their men in ways that Russian officers commanding conscripts from distant provinces rarely achieved. And the combination of motivated sold.i.ers and competent officers who shared their language produced formations of consistent excellence.
In the Christmas battles of December 1916 and January 1917, the Latvian calendar names them the Zimasvetu cowas. The Latvian riflemen were given a mission that was one of the more extraordinary of the Eastern Front. The German defensive line in the Terellis swamp southwest of Ria was a fortified wall of sand and timber 30 km long, held since October 1915.
The swamp made conventional assault impossible in the warmer months. The mid December frost of 1916 changed this. The swamp froze. The attack was ordered for Christmas on the calculation that the German garrison would be celebrating and their vigilance would be reduced. On December 23rd, 1916, the Latvian riflemen advanced across the frozen swamp in the pre-dawn dark with the third and seventh Latvian rifleman regiments and the 53rd Siberian regiment leading. They achieved surprise.
They broke through the first German line. The second Latvian brigade attacked from the rear of the position and broke the German resistance at the fortified sand dunes. The position later named Loss Machine Gun Hill. Around a thousand German prisoners were taken. A gap more than 7 km wide was opened in the German line.
The Russian 12th Army commander had no reserves ready to exploit it. The gap closed. The Germans counteratt attacked with fresh divisions. The Latvian riflemen fighting in temperatures of minus 35° C held their ground for 2 days. The Christmas battles cost the Russian Imperial Army over 26,000 sold.i.ers. Of those, 9,000 were Latvian riflemen.
Approximately a third of total Latvian riflemen strength. They had broken the German line with insufficient support to exploit the breakthrough exactly as Brusselof’s Grenad.i.er platoon had broken Austrian lines in June 1916 with insufficient reserves to convert tactical success into strategic advance. Colonel Yukum’s Vakayetis who commanded the fifth Zale Latvian rifle battalion wrote afterwards that the riflemen had been ordered to break through the German positions without the artillery support that such an operation required. They succeeded,
incurred enormous losses, and the 12th Army had no reserves to take advantage. The Latvian riflemen had done what was asked of them. What was asked of them was impossible, and they had done it anyway and paid the price of the doing. After the February Revolution, Vaketis publicly expressed his belief that Latvia had the right to its independence from Russian control.
He sided with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and became the first commander-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces. The man who led the Latvian riflemen through the Christmas battles and watched his men d.i.e in a frozen swamp for a breakthrough that was not exploited ended up running the Red Army.
The specific path from that experience to that outcome says something about what the war did to the men who survived it. The Latvian riflemen demonstrate what the Russian raiding program could achieve when the men conducting it had a reason that was their own. They fought with the intensity of men defending their own land, broke German lines that other formations could not, and paid for it repeatedly at a cost that was not sustainable.
When the state collapsed, they made choices shaped by what they had been through. This is the story of the entire Russian raiding program. men from the Baltic to the Carpathians, who had been asked to fight a war their state had not prepared them for, who developed from their own experience the tools and techniques the situation required, and who did what was asked of them to the last point at which the asking was still possible.
The asking stopped being possible in 1917. The army dissolved, the men scattered, the weapons they had made, the shortened bayonets, the Kal knives, the lemon grenades, the Austrian revolvers from dead officers in Galia, most are gone. Some are in museums.
