Russian troops in Salonika

On 30 July 1916 the first soldiers of the Russian 2nd Special Infantry Brigade, sent by the tsar to the Salonika front, arrived in Salonika. The British journalist Gordon Gordon-Smith, who was in the city at the time, wrote that the arrival of the Russians caused a sensation and that the whole of Salonika turned out to greet them. The soldiers, tall and well built, marched along the quay and through Liberty Square, lined with cafés, while thousands of people standing along the streets cheered them. The date of 30 July is also given by the British chronology of the war and by French studies. The British official history of operations in Macedonia says that the brigade landed on 1 August. The discrepancy probably arises from the fact that the Russians arrived in successive echelons: according to Russian studies, the plan provided for the arrival of three transports, on 27 July and on 8 and 10 August, and according to some sources the last units reached Salonika only in mid-September.

A brigade for the Balkans

The Russian special brigades were the fruit of the mission of the French politician Paul Doumer, who in the winter of 1915/1916 urged Russia to send soldiers west in return for French arms and ammunition. The first brigade arrived at Marseilles in April. Before that happened, the French government of Aristide Briand wanted to land it at Salonika, and the Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov obtained the tsar’s consent. The French representative at Russian headquarters reported, however, that this change was very badly received at the Stavka, because the soldiers knew they were going to France. The commander-in-chief of the French army, General Joseph Joffre, therefore proposed that the first brigade go to France and the second to Salonika. According to a dispatch of the end of March 1916 from the Russian military representative in France, General Yakov Zhilinsky, Sazonov replied that sending both brigades to Macedonia fully corresponded to the intentions of the Russian government. He added that the appearance of Russian troops in Macedonia would give the lie to rumours that Russia did not wish Britain to act against Bulgaria. The chief of staff of the Supreme Commander, General Mikhail Alekseyev, regarded the dispute over the place of disembarkation as a secondary matter to which the diplomats had given undue importance, and left the decision to the French. In the end the first brigade went to France, and the next one was sent to Macedonia.

The brigade for Salonika, the 2nd Special, was formed in the spring and summer of 1916 in barracks in Moscow from two new regiments, the 3rd and 4th Special, and a march battalion. Unlike the first brigade, made up of drafts from reserve regiments, whole companies of existing regiments were detached to the new one, which gave it greater cohesion. Its establishment was 224 officers and 9,338 men. For the expedition the Russians received only field kitchens and carts, while their weapons, machine guns and transport were to be supplied by the French on the spot. The commander was Major General Mikhail Diterikhs, a general staff officer who supervised training with pedantic precision, because the brigade was to be the showcase of the Russian army in the Balkans.

The route through France

The first brigade sailed to France by a roundabout route through the Far East and the Indian Ocean. The second was sent by a shorter route. Ships took the soldiers from Archangel on the White Sea and sailed round Scandinavia to Brest in Brittany. There the French gave the Russians a ceremonial welcome and then carried them by rail across the whole country to Marseilles, where they boarded transports bound for Salonika.

On the Salonika front

The arrival of the Russians was politically important for the Entente. General Maurice Sarrail, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Macedonia, was preparing an offensive in which he was to cooperate with Romania once it entered the war. The Russian brigade was to take its place between the reconstituted Serbian army and the Vardar valley. It could not, however, go into action at once. The Russians had to be armed, taught to handle foreign weapons, and given transport. They were quartered in the great Zeitenlik camp on the edge of Salonika. According to Russian studies, completely unbroken mules were sent from Australia for the transport, with no drivers for them, so 550 men had to be detached from the 3rd Regiment for this work. Malaria was raging around the city, and in that regiment alone some 180 soldiers were already ill.

In Salonika people wondered how the Bulgarians would react to the Russians. Bulgaria owed its independence to Russia, and at Plevna and on other battlefields of the war with Turkey in 1877–1878 tens of thousands of the tsar’s soldiers had fallen. The Serbs hoped that the Bulgarian soldiers would be unwilling to fire on their former liberators. Gordon-Smith described how Serbian soldiers in the front line wrapped a stone in a note announcing the arrival of the Russians and threw it into a Bulgarian trench. The reply, which the commander of the Šumadija Division showed him, read: “Our bayonets are just as sharp for the Russians as for you.” At the end of August the still incomplete brigade was sent to the left wing of the front to help the Serbs halt the Bulgarian offensive, and in the autumn it fought in the advance on Bitola. In the autumn the 4th Special Infantry Brigade also reached Macedonia.