Belyaev becomes Russian Minister of War

On 16 January 1917 (3 January by the Julian calendar) Tsar Nicholas II changed his Minister of War. He relieved General Dmitry Shuvayev of his post and made him a member of the State Council, appointing in his place General of Infantry Mikhail Belyaev. The British chronology of the war records the change a day later, under 17 January, and the same date is given by the British military attaché in Petrograd, Alfred Knox, who wrote that on 17 January Belyaev was recalled from Romania to take over the ministry. It was another change in the government, which for a week had been headed by a new Prime Minister, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn.

Shuvayev’s departure

Shuvayev had headed the ministry since March 1916, when he replaced Alexei Polivanov. The Tsar had chosen him then as an entirely loyal man who was “not at all afraid of the Duma”. In time, however, the minister began to seek an understanding with the deputies. In November, during the crisis over Prime Minister Stürmer, he appeared in the State Duma together with the Navy Minister, Admiral Ivan Grigorovich, and assured it of his readiness to cooperate. Knox wrote that Shuvayev was dismissed not for incompetence, though he might well have been, but, as was said, for his frank, soldierly remarks about the government’s reactionary tendencies.

The new minister

Belyaev was 53. He was born in St Petersburg into a military family and graduated from the Mikhailovsky Artillery School and the Nicholas General Staff Academy. For his part in the Russo-Japanese War he received the golden sword for bravery, but he spent most of his career in staffs and offices in the capital. From the start of the war he was acting Chief of the General Staff, and from June 1915 he was also Deputy Minister of War, responsible for replacements and for supplying the army with weapons. According to Knox, throughout this time he worked in exemplary fashion with the Allied military representatives. At the end of August 1916, after returning from a mission to Britain and France, he was suddenly pushed aside by Shuvayev. The minister telephoned him and announced that he was appointing him a member of the War Council, because although Belyaev was “a most honest and most noble man”, he could not work with him. Knox put this down to a difference of character: Shuvayev was an effusive Russian “with a big heart”, while Belyaev, though a Russian of pure blood, was a pedant “of the German type”. A seat on the War Council in practice meant retirement, but Belyaev was soon sent to Romania as the representative of the Russian command at King Ferdinand’s headquarters. There, at the end of November, before the Battle of the Argeș, he advised the Romanians to retreat.

According to Russian historians, Belyaev was chosen by Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, who valued his loyalty to the throne. Contemporaries judged him a hard-working and meticulous but petty official. The protopresbyter of the army and navy, Georgy Shavelsky, recalled that everyone considered him a diligent and conscientious worker, though lacking broad horizons, and that he was “of course unsuited” to be Minister of War. General Alexei Ignatyev wrote that his comrades from the war with Japan had nicknamed the bald and colourless Belyaev “the death’s head”.

The last Tsarist Minister of War

As minister, Belyaev was ex officio chairman of the Special Council for State Defence, which coordinated production for the army. In early February he chaired the discussions on arms and ammunition supplies during the Allied conference in Petrograd. He lasted in office a mere six weeks. During the February Revolution, together with the commander of the military district, General Sergei Khabalov, he tried to suppress the unrest in the capital, declared a state of siege there and called for reinforcements from the front. In March 1917 he was arrested. After the Bolshevik coup, in 1918, he was shot by the Cheka.