The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

World Wars of the Twentieth Century 329

Russia, too, faced intense internal administrative difficulties as the

strain of war set in. It was hard to feed and supply the enormous

numbers of men drafted into the tsar’s army. But by giving an absolute

priority to their military effort the Russians accomplished miracles of

production parallel to those the Germans, French, and British were

simultaneously bringing to pass. Russia even outstripped the produc­

tion record of the Hapsburg lands, where internal frictions among the

nationalities and administrative Schlamperei hampered every departure

from routine.^46

As in France and Germany, the Russians entrusted the allocation of

munitions contracts to committees of businessmen. They succeeded in

increasing shell production from about 450,000 per month early in

1915 to 4.5 million per month in September 1916; and other forms of

munitions manufacture increased more or less in proportion.^47 But

profits grew even faster than production, and in 1916 runaway infla­

tion began to register the overload on the Russian economy that the

war effort had created. Price levels almost quadrupled between Janu­

ary and December 1916; wages lagged seriously behind prices; and

most disastrous of all, peasant food producers found less and less

incentive to bring their harvest to market, since consumer goods be­

came so scarce as to be practically unavailable.

Subsistence patterns of village life swiftly reasserted themselves

under these circumstances. In 1917 only 15 percent of a reduced

harvest was brought to market as compared to 25 percent of the 1913

harvest. The army preempted most of the grain that did become avail­

able, so that catastrophic food shortages hit the towns. As a result, by

1917 industrial production plummeted, and army morale soon fol­

lowed.^48 Munitions shortages at the front played their part, of course;

but squandering of materiel through undisciplined fire and poor coop-

Index of

Industrial

Production

Grain Harvest

(mil. poods)*

Delivered to Towns

(mil. poods)

Price Level

in Russia

(^1914) 4,309 1913–14 390 June 1914 100 1913 100
1915 4,659 1915–16 330 June 1915^1151914 101.2
1916 3,916 1916–17 295 June 1916^1411915 113.7
1917 3,809 Dec. 1916^3981916 121.5
June 1917^7021917 77.3
Dec. 1917 1,172
*1 pood = 56 pounds. Source: Stone, The Eastern Front, pp. 209, 287, 295.

46. But cf. Robert J. Wegs, Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft 1914– 1918 (Vienna,

1979. for a record of what was accomplished.

47. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front (New York, 1975), pp. 149–52 and passim
    disproves the notion that Russian armies were starved of munitions in World War I.


48. The following statistics tell the tale.