Mikhail Alekseyev

General Mikhail Alekseyev was the most important staff officer of the Russian Army in this war. In 1914, as chief of staff of the Southwestern Front, he helped bring about the victory in Galicia; in 1915 he led the armies out of the Kingdom of Poland; and from September 1915, as chief of staff to Tsar Nicholas II, he in fact directed all of Russia’s operations. In March 1917 his telegrams to the front commanders settled the Emperor’s abdication. After the Bolshevik coup he created the nucleus of the White Volunteer Army. The son of a soldier who had risen to officer rank, modest and extraordinarily hard-working, he was one of the few Russian generals who reached the top without connections at court.

Before the war

He was born on 15 November 1857 (3 November in the Julian calendar) in Vyazma in Smolensk Governorate. His father, a veteran of the defence of Sevastopol, had begun his service as a private. Mikhail joined the army as a volunteer, and in 1876 he graduated from the Moscow junker school. In the war with Turkey of 1877–1878 he was an orderly officer to General Mikhail Skobelev and was wounded at Plevna. In 1890 he graduated top of his year from the Nicholas General Staff Academy, where he later lectured on the history of Russian military art.

During the Russo-Japanese War he was quartermaster general of the 3rd Manchurian Army. After the war he worked in the General Staff on plans for a war with Austria-Hungary, and from 1908 he was chief of staff of the Kiev Military District, commanded by General Nikolai Ivanov. From 1912 he commanded XIII Corps in Smolensk. He was regarded as an excellent theorist and organiser who did everything himself and was reluctant to share work with his subordinates.

Galicia and the Great Retreat

When war broke out, Alekseyev became chief of staff of Ivanov’s Southwestern Front. The Russian plan, which he had helped draw up, envisaged encircling the Austro-Hungarian armies in Galicia. After defeats in the north, at Kraśnik and Komarów, the front’s troops won the Battle of Galicia and at the beginning of September took Lviv. For this Alekseyev received the Order of St George, 4th class, and promotion to general of infantry. Many contemporaries, such as the future general Anton Denikin, considered him the real author of the Galician victories. In the winter, together with Ivanov, he argued to the Stavka that the road to victory led across the Carpathians into Hungary, which led the Russians into the bloody Winter Battle in the Carpathians.

In March 1915 he took command of the Northwestern Front, the largest grouping of the Russian Army, which defended the Kingdom of Poland. When, after the breakthrough at Gorlice, the Germans and Austrians drove the Russians out of Galicia, in June he was given part of Ivanov’s troops as well. In July the Central Powers struck the exposed “Polish salient” simultaneously from the south, at Krasnystaw, and from the north, on the Narew. On 19 July, at a conference in Siedlce, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich agreed that Alekseyev should withdraw the armies from the Vistula. The retreat proceeded in stages, and although the Russians gave up Warsaw, suffered enormous losses and lost the fortresses of Kovno and Novogeorgievsk, the Germans did not manage to encircle the main forces. It was for this above all that Alekseyev was valued. In August his front was divided in two, and Alekseyev himself kept command of the Western Front.

Chief of staff to the Tsar

When on 5 September 1915 Nicholas II took over the supreme command himself, Alekseyev became his chief of staff. The Tsar had no experience of command and every morning listened to a report, usually approving the general’s proposals. In practice Alekseyev was the commander-in-chief. In the very first weeks he had to save the situation at Vilna, where German cavalry had broken through into the rear of the Western Front. The Russians gave up the city but closed the gap, and in the autumn the front stabilised. In the winter he backed the plan of General Nikolai Yudenich, who took Erzurum in the Caucasus.

In 1916 Russia kept its commitments to its allies, but paid a high price for it. The March offensive at Lake Naroch, launched to relieve the French at Verdun, collapsed in the mud and under the fire of the German artillery. At a conference in April Alekseyev entrusted the main summer blow to General Aleksei Evert’s Western Front, and only a subsidiary one to the Southwestern Front. General Aleksei Brusilov, however, broke through the Austrian front, while Evert moved late and was defeated at Baranovichi. Alekseyev shifted reserves to the south, but the Brusilov offensive petered out in the autumn in the marshes of the Stokhid. For a long time he preferred Romania neutral rather than as an ally, and when in August it entered the war and was quickly defeated, Russia had to defend a new, long front. He also agreed to send Russian brigades to France and to Salonika.

Alekseyev was a monarchist, but the state of the home front worried him more and more. He proposed to the Tsar the appointment of a single minister to run the whole war economy and the removal of the reserve regiments from Petrograd, but the Tsar rejected these ideas. He made no secret of his dislike of Grigori Rasputin. Empress Alexandra Feodorovna did not trust him, especially when copies of letters sent to him by the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov began to circulate in Petrograd. Historians still argue over whether in the autumn of 1916 the general knew of the plots against the Tsar and whether he considered them. What is certain is that in November he fell seriously ill with a kidney complaint and left for treatment in the Crimea. General Vasily Gurko stood in for him. He returned to General Headquarters in Mogilev at the beginning of March 1917, a few days before the revolution.

The abdication and 1917

When on 12 March the garrison mutinied in Petrograd, Alekseyev at first carried out the Tsar’s orders and prepared to send troops from the front. He soon concluded, however, that only an agreement with the Duma would save the army from disintegration. He prepared a draft manifesto on a government responsible to the Duma, and when the President of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, judged it too late, on 15 March he sent the front commanders a request for their opinion on abdication, worded so as to suggest the answer. All of them came out in favour of the Tsar’s departure, and he abdicated that same day. According to the memoirs of General Alexander Lukomsky, Alekseyev later told him that he would never forgive himself for having believed in the sincerity of certain people and sent out that telegram.

Only on 15 April did the Provisional Government appoint him Supreme Commander. Alekseyev tried to save discipline and opposed the soldiers’ committees that the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1 had spread through the army, but the army was falling apart ever faster. On 4 June the Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky, had him replaced by Brusilov. In September, after General Lavr Kornilov’s putsch, he accepted at Kerensky’s request the post of chief of staff, so that the suppression of the revolt would be as lenient as possible for those involved. On 14 September he arrested Kornilov and his officers in Mogilev, and a dozen or so days later he resigned.

The Volunteer Army

After the Bolshevik coup Alekseyev left Petrograd in disguise and in mid-November reached Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossacks. Ataman Alexey Kaledin received him coolly but allowed him to recruit volunteers. From a few hundred officers, cadets and students arose the so-called Alekseyev Organisation, and after Kornilov’s arrival at the turn of 1917 and 1918 the Volunteer Army. Kornilov took military command, while Alekseyev dealt with politics, finances and contacts with the Allies. The two generals did not like each other.

After Kaledin’s suicide the volunteers left Rostov on the night of 22/23 February 1918 and set off for the Kuban. The seriously ill Alekseyev made this “Ice March” in a carriage. After Kornilov’s death in April, Denikin took military command, while Alekseyev remained formally the army’s supreme head. He died on 8 October 1918 in Yekaterinodar, today’s Krasnodar. Sources give the immediate cause of death differently; they mention heart failure and pneumonia in a man who had been seriously ill with kidney disease for years. In 1920, before the Bolsheviks arrived, his family moved his remains to Belgrade.

Assessment

Alekseyev is regarded as the ablest staff officer of the Tsarist army. His supporters stress that in 1915 he saved the army from encirclement in Poland and in 1915–1916 rebuilt it after its defeats and coordinated the fronts’ operations better than the Grand Duke’s Stavka had. They also point out that he was conscientious, selfless and loyal to the Allies.

His critics note that he could not impose his will on the front commanders. In 1916 he let Evert delay and Brusilov disperse his forces, and he failed to exploit the Russian army’s only great success. He also lost himself in details that he could have left to his staff. His role in March 1917 remains the most contested. Some authors, especially among Russian monarchists, saw him as a participant in a conspiracy against the Tsar. Most scholars, however, believe that he belonged to no conspiracy and came out in favour of abdication because he believed Rodzianko’s assurances that only this would allow the war to continue. The disintegration of the army that followed the fall of the monarchy showed that he was wrong, and his later struggle against the Bolsheviks was also an attempt to make up for that mistake.