The Ideology of the Offensive:
Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914
Jack Snyder
Chapter 7
Russia:
The Politics and Psychology of Overcommitment
“Russia: The Politics and Psychology of Overcommitment” is chapter 7 of The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). The book as a whole asks why the major continental powers all began the war with offensive military strategies that failed to accomplish their political or military objectives and that helped to cause the war by increasing the insecurity of all these states. The book argues that the offensive bias in 1914 mainly stemmed from the preference of professional military organizations for offensive strategies and doctrines, which enhance their prestige and autonomy by purporting to create decisive military solutions to the paramount political problems of the state. The weakness of civilian oversight over professional militaries before 1914 unleashed this bias. The larger conceptual purpose of the book was to explore how strategists in any era might come to believe that security could be best achieved by destabilizing offensive means, including striking first. For a general overview of the theory and the 1914 case, see chapter 1, pp. 15-34.
Chapters on Germany and France illustrate these main arguments of the book very directly. The Russian case manifests less of a systematic, long-term bias for the offensive. It explores the causes of a shift in Russian military strategy between 1910 and 1914 from a cautious, largely defensive war plan to a highly overcommitted plan for simultaneous offensives on three fronts. Two background factors – the growing strength of the Russian army and the tightening of the Russo-French alliance in response to Germany’s offensive war plan – help to explain the evolution of Russia’s strategy in a more offensive direction, but these considerations do not account for the disastrously overcommitted excesses of this move. I emphasize three explanations for the overcommitted offensives: 1) bureaucratic compromises in which different military bureaucratic factions each got the offensive that it wanted, 2) oversimplified decision processes that paid insufficient attention to logistical feasibility, and 3) a psychological bias for seeing the necessary as possible. These explanations are summarized in chapter 6, pp. 157-164, especially 163-64.
Chapter 7 on Russia was chosen for active citation because the research for it added considerable information not widely available in the West, and because the footnotes take considerable pains to explain the connection between details of evidence and the arguments of the chapter. Although the chapter relies on many primary sources and on Soviet scholars’ archival research, I was denied access to the Soviet military history archive, which some Western scholars have subsequently been able to exploit in the post-Soviet period. For details on sources and methods, see Ideology of the Offensive, pp. 34-40.
The Ideology of the Offensive has been discussed and debated by international relations scholars in political science and by military historians of the First World War. Among political scientists, it has most commonly been referenced as part of the literature on “the security dilemma” and the “offense-defense theory” of the causes of war. Even some historians, most recently Stefan Schmidt, Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), have drawn on these concepts and historical interpretations in shaping their own research.
Critics have most typically offered two kinds of objections. First, they claim that the choice of offensive strategies and doctrines was not the result of ideological bias, but simply reflected the objective constraints and opportunities created by European geography and the logic of alliance commitments. The offensives failed, but they almost succeeded and might have succeeded if they had been implemented somewhat better. Second, critics argue that one or more of the European powers had revisionist political aims and needed offensive strategies to carry out their aims of conquest. For key points and references, see the debate between Keir A. Lieber and me, “Defensive Realism and the ‘New’ History of World War I,” International Security 33:1 Summer 2008), 174-194.
Several significant Western studies of Russian military planning before 1914 have appeared since The Ideology of the Offensive. William C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 423-451, places war planning in the context of Russia’s foreign policy aims. While admitting that the multiple offensives of 1914 stretched Russia’s capacity to its limits, he blames their failure on implementation rather than any inherent flaw in the plans, and he warns against exaggerating the role of bureaucratic politics in determining the outcome (p. 443). Bruce W. Menning, “The Offensive Revisited: Russian Preparation for Future War, 1906-1914,” in David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215-231, exploits archival sources in concluding that “the ideology of the offensive,” decentralized military planning, and weaknesses in implementing reforms all contributed to the emergence of war plans that “failed to deal adequately with issues of time, mass, and space” (224, 230). Annotations and active links to the arguments and evidence presented in these and other new works are provided.
One of the controversial topics addressed in the chapter is the military preparatory measures taken by Russia near its border with Austria during the First Balkan War in the fall of 1912. Based in part on archival research by Soviet historian V. I. Bovykin, I argued that the Russian military viewed these measures as reactive to Austria’s preparations for conflict arising out of its possible embroilment in the wars of the small Balkan states (Ideology, p. 185, and note 98 on p. 248), reflecting the Russian army’s wary sense of unpreparedness more than a swaggering desire to risk war to expand Russian influence.
More recent scholarship has been interested in this episode as a dress rehearsal for the Russian flirtation with partial mobilization in 1914, which some see as a crucial misstep in an inadvertent slide to war. A prominent discussion can be found in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2012), 263-270. Clark portrays Russia’s military preparations as a largely unprovoked attempt to intimidate Austria, neutralizing the diplomatic value of the threat of Austrian intervention against Serbia in the Balkan Wars. Clark mainly blames Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov for pursuing this reckless but vacillating policy aimed at shoring up Russian influence in the Balkans and the Turkish Straits. He can also be read as implying that War Minister Sukhomlinov was in league with this assertive policy in requesting authorization to place the army on a footing of enhanced strength and readiness, citing the same passage in Bovykin that I cite as evidence of the reactive nature of Russia’s moves. Readers of Russian can read the relevant passage in Bovykin, attached here to the annotation to note 98, and decide for themselves.
A more detailed treatment of this episode, based on archival sources and published subsequent to Ideology, is Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., “Military Dimensions of Habsburg-Romanov Relations during the Era of the Balkan Wars,” in Bela Kiraly and Dimitrije Djordjevic, eds., East Central European Society and the Balkan Wars, vol. XVIII, War and Society in East Central Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes , NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications; New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 317-337. He describes a varying sequence of Austrian and Russian military moves, with Moscow sometimes undertaking gratuitous measures to exert diplomatic pressure, but Vienna sometimes doing likewise (319, 325). Williamson begins by saying that the question of civilian understanding of the implications of mobilization in 1912 and 1914 motivates his study, but his conclusion stresses mainly the lesson about the diplomatic efficacy of military shows of force that Russia may have learned from the 1912 encounter (318, 331). Williamson cites Ideology throughout his chapter without taking issue with its interpretation.