Russian military industrial policy in 1914 Polikarpov. State tasks and private interests

Vladimir Polikarpov

RUSSIAN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

1914-1917

State tasks and private interests

The state of military-industrial production in Russia in 1914-1917. is of interest not only because of the importance of this economic and political sphere for the outcome of the struggle on the Eastern, or Russian, front of the First World War and for the fate of the empire, but also more generally. Military production, being the focus of the highest technical achievements, reflects the level of development and capabilities of society as a whole. The final tension of this resource of the viability of the regime is indicative of an objectively significant, diverse assessment of the entire path traveled by the state. But this also creates difficulties in clarifying the relationship between economic, political, and socio-structural factors of the impending crisis.

The development of military equipment, the production of weapons, the activities of the specialists and workers employed in it, as well as the relationship of state bodies with private initiative and public forces under the most difficult conditions - all this is studied by Russian (and formerly Soviet) and foreign historiography, having accumulated over the past hundred years a considerable stock of factual information and experience in researching sources. Some of the complex issues that have emerged traditionally give rise to controversy, indicating the relevance of the topics covered.

As one such controversial issue, the overall assessment of the ability of domestic production to meet the needs of the armed forces remains important.

Existing ideas sometimes diverge sharply, which makes it necessary to attract additional materials that clarify the picture, and here it is still far from a complete, final result. The same can be said about the correlation between the production of military equipment within Russia and foreign supplies. Despite the considerable attention that has long been given to this side of the issue, many quantitative, statistical characteristics are not convincing due to the lack of completely reliable sources and due to the influence of ideological biases on the interpretation of the available data.

Sharply debatable is the coverage of cooperation with the authorities of "public" organizations and business circles, as well as a comparison of the efficiency of management of state and private military factories. These aspects also have their own ideological background, and this influences the use of extremely complex, largely falsified sources.

The military situation produced an accelerated, revolutionary in essence, revision of the attitude of both the highest authorities and the lower classes of society to one of the main foundations of the state order - the principle of the inviolability of property rights. In official ideology, this principle has long been opposed by an even more immutable faith in the originality of the archaic tradition, which recognized private ownership of military enterprises not as a right, but as a conditional privilege. Contrary to popular belief in recent times, there were no signs of a departure from this faith and tradition, no signs of any modernization of the legal regime. On the contrary, the autocracy during the war years cast aside the last bourgeois "prejudices" and energetically took advantage of the emergency situation to appropriate military enterprises by means of expropriation. The authorities, realizing the incendiary nature of such an example for the poor, could not resist the dangerous temptation and created visible precedents for the arbitrary reshaping of property rights. Her actions caused a powerful response in different parts of the empire in the form of a movement of workers demanding that military factories be taken away from the knights of profit.

The receptacle and result of the contradictions that have accumulated in the literature is the theme of the crisis that befell the Russian economy under military conditions. Even in Soviet times, forty years ago, this topic began to seem "hackneyed", that. provoked to assert the opposite: the country experienced rapid, "explosive" growth, hence the painful phenomena in its development, mistaken for decline. There was a prevailing opinion that in the third year of the war the Russian army not only possessed numerical strength, but also almost surpassed other armies in technical equipment - the result of an extraordinary economic upsurge. This point of view is widely represented in the latest Russian literature. In it, “the question is more and more actively raised that the causes of the Russian revolutions of 1917 should be sought not in the failure, but in the successes of modernization, in the difficulties of transition from a traditional society to a modern one, which, for a number of reasons, turned out to be insurmountable” (1). Many historians abroad solve this issue in the same direction: “Russia did not collapse economically. The autocracy suffered rather a political collapse”; moreover, the economic crisis at that time "was not a crisis of decline", "it was more a crisis of growth" (2).

In foreign literature, the version of the "creative" side of the war goes back to the old works of the Berlin professor Werner Sombart; she answered the tasks of the Third Reich in its preparation for the Second World War. In the 1940s–1960s this idea has been critically examined by historians in the United States, France, and England, and now in the West, historians of the First World War believe that claims about the positive impact of the war are "gross exaggeration" (3). In the Soviet conditions of the 1970s and subsequent years, the revival of this approach was associated with the general actualization of military-patriotic attitudes and manifested itself in the studies of historians precisely on the problems of the First World War. It is known that in 1972-1974. it was on the sector of the history of the Eastern Front of the World War that an ideological breakthrough was made: the central government, dissatisfied with the success of Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914" with its "dreary" image of the tsarist military machine, turned the helm of propaganda. The release of hundreds of thousands of copies and promotion to the mass reader of the books by Barbara Tuckman "The Guns of August" (abridged popular translation) and N.N. Yakovlev "August 1, 1914" (4). The military-economic power and international role of the Russian Empire began to be viewed in general in an "optimistic" spirit. The planting of an "optimistic" interpretation was accompanied by an increase in censorship pressure. The apparatus was destroyed in 1971–1973. the so-called "new direction" at the Institute of History of the USSR - a group of the most competent specialists who studied the economic and military-political aspects of Russian history at the beginning of the 20th century ("A.L. Sidorov's school"), which showed obstinacy.

As D. Saunders noted a quarter of a century after this turn, Western literature, like late Soviet literature, depicted the development of the Russian Empire in iridescent colors: “the latest English-language works copy the entire Soviet historiography with its tendency to emphasize what has progressed due to the fact that remained unchanged"; in these works, "artificial protrusion" of the phenomena of socio-economic renewal is carried out "to the detriment of the study of traditionalism, inertia and backwardness" (5).

“The applicability of the thesis about the backwardness of Russia” is still a question that worries many of our historians who reject this “stereotype” (6). But supporters of a more radical “formula of Russian movement along the path of social progress”, not satisfied with this, suggest not to strive at all for “simple comparison with other countries”, but to direct attention to something else - “revealing the identity of Russia's forces”. “The strength of the country is in the number of its inhabitants”, and there were “more of them in the Russian Empire than in England, Germany and France combined, and one and a half times more than in the USA” (7).

Vladimir Polikarpov

RUSSIAN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

State tasks and private interests

As one such controversial issue, the overall assessment of the ability of domestic production to meet the needs of the armed forces remains important.

Such a complex ideological prehistory of the problem encourages one or another assessment and generalization to be treated with caution.

In studies on Russian economic life in 1914–1917. a number of outwardly quite specific data, flowing from one work to another, established in the status of textbooks, do not withstand verification by sources. Much here originates from Professor Norman Stone's 1975 book about the Russian Eastern Front, which abounds in unreliable facts and forced figures. Most recently, noisy advertising in Russia has received the experience of statistical and economic generalization - completely untenable in relation to the period 1914-1917. work "World War I, Civil War and Reconstruction: Russia's National Income in 1913-1928" (M., 2013). Together, the efforts of the authors of this new work, A. Markevich and M. Harrison, as well as N. Stone and historians using his data, are reduced to depicting the beneficial effect of military conditions on the economic development of the country and are ultimately aimed at explaining the useful aspects of the militaristic policy and the war itself.

Instead of a review: V. Polikarpov "Russian military-industrial policy 1914-1917". February 27th, 2016

A very solid book, which carefully and without ideological predilections examines the state of affairs in the military-industrial complex of the Republic of Ingushetia before and during the First World War. This topic is terribly biased, so only extreme assertions prevail: from “tsarism has screwed up all the polymers” to “a mighty empire that fell from a treacherous pin prick in the back.” Vladimir Polikarpov dwells on all these statements in detail, revealing the sources of these statements, proving with numbers: from which events the legs grow.

In general, it can be seen that the best military minds saw the impending big war and understood what problems the unpreparedness of military production for it brings. Programs were developed for the modernization and construction of the main specialized plants, which was supposed to end (ta-dam!) In 1917. However, it should be noted here that no one guaranteed that this program would be implemented due to both the lack of budgetary funds and the sluggishness of the performers (a common story for the Republic of Ingushetia).

In general, it should be noted that any preparation will still not be enough, which all the active participants in this massacre have experienced. And its beginning served as a test of the strength of the entire social and economic basis of the country. And here RI ran into a lot of problems. One of which was the weak development of the high-tech base, which required either purchasing a lot of finished products or components from abroad (and here we were very dependent on German imports), or buying factories and technologies there, or developing them ourselves. They simply didn’t have time with the developments, because they didn’t have enough strength, time, or resources. Many factories were ready to be built by foreigners (which was considered undesirable for the military-industrial complex), or by Russian entrepreneurs. However, their military department did not like them for a number of reasons. Firstly, such entrepreneurs demanded the conclusion of long-term contracts, which the military could not always afford. Secondly, they demanded loans, which meant that private factories would be built again at public expense. Thirdly, no one guaranteed that a private enterprise would be successful. Disruptions of orders, low-quality products, constant debt to the treasury and the pulling of public money - were a frequent companion of such enterprises. Which eventually led to the need to sequester them for public benefit. At the same time, it was problematic to agree on the prices necessary for the military department with a private monopoly, which was much easier to do for state-owned factories. It should be noted here that the struggle for influence between the bureaucracy and private enterprise, which escalated during the war years, still played a significant role.

In general, it can be seen that the development of large-scale military industry was in any case considered through the participation of the state, which once again shows the dependence of the emergence of large-scale industry on it, since it required the concentration of forces of the entire country. This was the main difference from other developed countries, where the industry was developed on the basis of private capital, and the state was mainly engaged in protective protection and promotion of its goods to foreign markets (however, this became the prerequisites for the start of WWI).

What more can be said? War is a test that shows not so much speculative potential in the future as the basis achieved by the country at the current moment. Therefore, despite the positive schedules for the development of the Republic of Ingushetia, it was a weak, largely archaic state, which influenced its collapse in the future.

To understand what happened - you can imagine the following. Modern Russia. All fetters connecting with the damned Soviet past are broken. And, first of all, economic instruments. Incl. with state planning. We don’t know, we don’t know how, the frames are confused. And here bam and a new world confrontation (it doesn’t matter with whom - even with Alpha Centauri), which requires not just the tension of the forces of the entire state, but super-tension. And it can be achieved only by competently and painstakingly planning the economic life of the entire state. Voldemar Voldemarych puts the task of planning to the government, otherwise he shrugs his shoulders: we don't know how. As always, they rush to look for foreign recipes from, like, allies, but the joke is that even there everything “what they knew” was forgotten during the frenzy of the uncontrolled growth of financial markets, and all smart specialists are busy with their planning. Either charlatans go, or they send truncated training manuals (so that they don’t become too smart). They rushed to look for their personnel, but it turned out that there are only effective managers who know how to sell cell phones and cut the budget. And a few specialists are torn apart, involving in the most important areas. Personnel units are knocked out in the first few months, recruits are sent to the battlefield with cuttings from shovels instead of rifles (by the way, Mikhalkov stole this plot from the realities of WWI) with the corresponding results. And as soon as the industry and foreign purchases began to give a tolerable result, the infrastructure began to crumble, which at one time had not been given due attention.

Of course, this is a very loose comparison. And there were many differences. In the Republic of Ingushetia, instead of effective managers, there were bast peasants. Remember how Yegorushka SiP happily proclaimed: So, as soon as the need arose to increase them many times, it turned out that the educated layer was simply not enough to fill the need. And there was nowhere to take it from - there were a lot of people around, but mostly gray-footed. This can be prepared in a couple of months for the infantry, but not as a highly literate specialist.

Well, unlike modern Russia, which uses the infrastructure of the USSR, the Republic of Ingushetia did not have it corny, which led to a sad picture that had to be eliminated already during the war. A clear example is the lack of a railway to Murmansk, which made it extremely difficult to supply foreign supplies during the winter navigation period. But there were other equally depressing situations:

Having no access lines, the Izhevsk plant (the largest enterprise in the empire) used river routes during the navigation period. The access road to the Golyany pier on the Kama - a 40-kilometer tract - in the summer during the rainy season, in autumn and spring became impassable. Traveling even in a light carriage over this distance could take 18 hours, and the transportation of goods stopped.

The Sestroretsk plant, like 20 (two hundred?) years ago, was powered by water wheels. In the summer of 1915, the lack of water in the lake did not allow all the workshops to work at the same time, and only then did the matter "come to the replacement of water pipes, oil engines are being installed."
Also the plant is not the last.

It is clear that smart people understood this situation, wrote plans, but there was always not enough money in the treasury. It was necessary to build during the war, diverting forces and means to this matter. Fortunately, English and French loans became available. Well, they swung not sourly. We tried to build a lot and everything in order to avoid dependence on imports in the future. True, most of the factories were planned to be put into operation as early as 1917, or even later. But the imperial leadership did not stop it. Firstly, they acted according to the principle - so far they give order. Well, and, secondly, (ta-dam!) They were serious about the fact that as soon as Germany was defeated, relations between the allies would deteriorate sharply. That, at least, will cut off the country from import supplies.

But the funniest thing was not the last reason. Russia for the functioning of these high-tech and productive plants simply did not have enough of its own raw materials. For example, there was not enough metal for the operation of existing factories, so they had to be imported from abroad. And what was to provide new capacities? If they thought about this, then there was no longer enough strength to resolve the issue. As a result, at the end of the war, the credit line for the construction of factories over the hill was constantly squeezed.

Here is another ironic moment. Now a number of “crunch sellers” claim that during the war, the Republic of Ingushetia made an unprecedented technological breakthrough, incl. at the expense of their own strength, which served as the main base for the skinny Soviet industrialization. At the same time, they refer to studies of the Stalinist pre-industrialization period, which manipulated statistics in order to show the indecisive members of the Central Committee and the Politburo that even the mossy tsarist regime could independently resolve issues of industrial growth in the country. And already from these studies (which are easier to call agitation), the data flowed into the anti-Soviet writings of the gentlemen of the Khrustosellers. The story is very ironic.
Well, and finally. The tsarist bureaucracy also wanted to sit on two chairs. On the one hand, the idea of the inviolability of private property was preached, on the other hand, the bureaucracy disposed of it quite freely, if there was an interest in it. At the same time, they could not develop legislation on the sequestration of the same enterprises to the treasury. For example, on the sequestration of those belonging to subjects of hostile states, the Duma adopted (ta-dam!) in February 1917. Before that, of course, sequestration also took place, but, to put it mildly, not according to the laws of the Republic of Ingushetia.

At the same time, one must understand that the class society dictated a different approach to understanding private property. There was a very large category of citizens (Jews, Poles and other foreigners) who were limited in the ownership of private property. Yes, and most of the peasants had the slightest idea about the legal aspects of this case. That is why the workers of private factories (mostly former peasants) welcomed the sequestration procedure, considering it the solution to all problems. It turns out that during the years of WWI, the government of the Republic of Ingushetia had already prepared the masses for the idea of nationalization.

This was facilitated by another moment, which is very intersects with the current realities. The bureaucracy of the Republic of Ingushetia believed (and not without reason) that the Russian people are patriotic by nature and love autocratic power, so they will tighten their belts with pleasure and will courageously endure adversity. So it was at first. But the war did not end, the people's belts were tightened ever tighter, while it brought huge profits to the top involved in servicing military orders. What created a picture when some lived from hand to mouth, while others fattened. And that, of course, did not fit into the concept of popular justice, which was accompanied by an increase in discontent, incl. and military establishments. In general, the ground for the Bolsheviks was prepared.

In this regard, the Stalinist approach during WWII is interesting, when the elite pulled the strap along with the ordinary person. No, she had better rations, but for the most part, that was the end of it. There was no luxury that irritated the working population, tired of the hardships of the war. In general, they saved on the lives of the elite, and they asked a lot more strictly. It is clear that this particular moment is not liked by the modern elites who fuck Stalin in full.

Summarizing, it can be noted that the cause of the catastrophe of the Republic of Ingushetia, and, accordingly, the loss in the war, is the country's extreme weakness in almost all areas. Which led to the country's technological dependence on Germany and on the Entente financially. Therefore, despite the rather vigorous pace of development, Russia more and more lagged behind other developed powers of its time. The war in this case was only an exam in the race of social evolution, which put a natural end to the existence of the Republic of Ingushetia. And after reading it, I get the feeling that our elites gladly accepted the idea of “a pinprick in the back of a mighty empire”, therefore they are happy to repeat all the mistakes of a hundred years ago.

Vladimir Polikarpov

RUSSIAN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

1914-1917

State tasks and private interests

As one such controversial issue, the overall assessment of the ability of domestic production to meet the needs of the armed forces remains important.