What Was the Russian Military Doctrine?
In the early hours of 26 August 1812, the Russian army of Mikhail Kutuzov, retreating before Napoleon’s Grande Armée, bivouacked on the Borodino Heights. The decision to make a stand at Borodino, rather than continue the Fabian retreat that had brought the French across the Russian steppe, was the single most-cited operational decision of the imperial period. The doctrine behind it — strategic depth, attrition, the use of a vast, exposed geography to absorb an invader — became the organising principle of Russian military thought for the rest of the imperial era, and the basis on which the post-Soviet Russian General Staff continued to plan (see Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon, 2009).
The Petrine foundation
The Russian army of the imperial period was the creation of Peter the Great. The standing army of 1711, the system of conscription of 1705-1712, the regimental organisation, the new drill manuals, the founding of the engineering and artillery schools, the construction of a Baltic fleet — these were the foundations on which the later doctrine was built. Peter had studied the Swedish, Saxon, and Dutch military systems in person, and he had borrowed from each (Showalter, Russia’s Own Orient, 2001).
Suvorov and the offensive school
The Suvorov doctrine, set out in his short Nauka pobezhdat’ (“The Science of Victory,” written 1795-1796), was a set of prescriptions for the field battle: the bayonet, the rapid manoeuvre, the surprise, the “eye of the general.” Suvorov’s maxims — “one minute decides the outcome of the battle, one hour decides the outcome of the campaign, one day decides the outcome of the war” — were the basic tactical vocabulary of the Russian officer. The doctrine was articulated not as theory but as practice: Suvorov’s record of 60-odd engagements without a major defeat, between the 1760s and 1800, set a standard that the next generation of Russian generals aimed to match (Riehn, 1812: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, 1991).
Kutuzov and the strategic retreat
Kutuzov’s doctrine was the opposite of Suvorov’s. The 1812 campaign, decided by the depth of the Russian territory and the inability of the French supply system to operate beyond the line of the Smolensk road, was the model. Kutuzov fought three major battles in 1812 — at Smolensk on 17 August, at Borodino on 7 September, and at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October — and lost two of them; what mattered was that he fought them in the right place, and that the campaign destroyed the invader’s force more than the invader’s. The doctrine was institutionalised in the period after 1815 by the German-educated General Staff and by the military historian Bogdanovich, whose monumental History of the Patriotic War of 1812 (1859-1860) became the standard interpretation (Lieven, 2009).
The Crimean defeat and the Milyutin reforms
The Crimean War exposed the gap between the Suvorov/Kutuzov doctrine and the technology of industrialised war. The rifle, the shell-firing artillery, the railroad, the telegraph, the rifled cannon, the ironclad — all had made the existing doctrine obsolete. The minister of war Dmitry Milyutin (1861-1881) set out to rebuild the army on the European model: the introduction of the breech-loading rifle from 1868, the Berdan I and II; the establishment of district military districts; the founding of the M. V. Frunze Military Academy and the expansion of the cadet-corps system; the abolition of serf recruitment; and the introduction of general conscription of 1874, which replaced the old system of a 25-year term of service with a 6-year active term and a 9-year reserve (Fuller, Strategy and Power in Tsarist Russia, 2018).
Dragomirov and the moral school
The Russian late-nineteenth-century doctrine was the doctrine of General Mikhail Dragomirov: the moral’nyi (moral) school, which emphasised the offensive, the bayonet, and the importance of training the soldier to think on the field. Dragomirov’s doctrine was institutionalised in the 1874 and 1883 regulations and was taught at the Nicholas General Staff Academy. Dragomirov’s principle was simple: the soldier had to be trained to think, not just to obey. The doctrine had a long run in Russian practice (it informed the Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, and the early Red Army of Trotsky) (Fuller, 2018).
The Russo-Japanese War and the First World War
The 1904-1905 war against Japan was a strategic disaster that exposed the Russian army’s administrative weaknesses and the poor quality of the General Staff. The 1914 campaign — Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes, the Carpathian winter — exposed a doctrine that had not been updated for the rifled machine gun and the heavy artillery. The 1916 Brusilov Offensive, the single most successful Russian strategic action of the war, was an attempt to fuse the Suvorov tradition of the offensive with the new technology; the exhaustion of the army in the summer of 1917, when half a million men had been lost in a single campaign, was the price (see Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, 1975).
The legacy
The imperial doctrine is the immediate ancestor of the Soviet doctrine of the deep battle, formulated in the 1930s by Vladimir Triandafillov and developed at the Frunze Academy, and of the late-Soviet doctrine of the strategic offensive, the udar, of the 1960s and 1970s. The continuity runs directly from Suvorov through Dragomirov, the Brusilov Offensive, Tukhachevskii, and the Soviet General Staff of 1941-1945 (Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).