The Stavka of the Supreme Commander () was the wartime supreme headquarters of the Russian Imperial Army in the field during World War I until the demobilization of the army in March 1918.
The Stavka was led by the supreme commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich from 1914 to 1915 and then Emperor Nicholas II until the February Revolution in 1917. Grand Duke Nicholas presided over the initial offensives in East Prussia and Galicia before the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive forced Russia to withdraw, becoming known as the Great Retreat. After this the emperor took command, and the second half of 1915 and early 1916 was a break from large-scale operations (with the exception of the Lake Naroch and Erzurum offensives) until the start of the Brusilov Offensive. While Nicholas II was the supreme commander he left military decisions to his chief of staff, Mikhail Alekseyev, who ran the Stavka.
Throughout the political upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 the Stavka remained in command of millions of troops at the front line. After the emperor's abdication in March 1917, his chief of staff Alekseyev was appointed the Supreme Commander, but in May he was replaced by Aleksei Brusilov ahead of the June offensive, as he was more optimistic about working with the new "revolutionary army" of the Provisional Government. After the failure of the June offensive, in part because of troops disobeying orders, Alexander Kerensky appointed Lavr Kornilov as the head of the army to restore order. But the Stavka supported Kornilov when he attempted a military coup against the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, causing Kerensky to take the post of Supreme Commander himself. When he fled during the October Revolution, his chief of staff, Nikolay Dukhonin, assumed command.
The Russian Army was the last tsarist institution to survive the Revolution, and in late November 1917 the Bolsheviks began taking control of the command structure. Nikolai Krylenko was appointed as Supreme Commander after Dukhonin refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as the legitimate government. After Krylenko and the Bolsheviks arrived and took control of the Stavka, the high command was kept in place for several months as military technical experts because of the need for the Bolsheviks to maintain an army at the front while negotiations with Germany were ongoing. The remaining "old army" was demobilized in March 1918 with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Stavka was dissolved.
History 1914–1916: Imperial Army
When war with Germany broke out, Emperor Nicholas II wanted to take direct command of the army at first. Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin later said that Nicholas never forgave himself for not leading the army during the Russo-Japanese War. But he was advised against it. The Emperor instead appointed his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, as Supreme Commander of the Imperial Army on 31 July 1914. He had previously been the head of the Russian Imperial Guard. The Grand Duke accepted on the Emperor's recommendation Nikolai Yanushkevich as his chief of staff and Yuri Danilov as Quartermaster-General, and in mid-August 1914 was the first time that he met his other staff officers that would make up the Stavka. One of his first acts as Supreme Commander was giving an order for the invasion of East Prussia, as he thought that Russia's priority should be to assist the French, which would be the prelude for later advancing into Silesia and then onto Berlin. Russia's prewar planning, known as Plan 19A, called for the main concentration of forces to be against Germany's ally Austria-Hungary, but Grand Duke Nicholas believed that the priority should be for Russia to assist its ally France against Germany, and the plan also did not rule out an invasion of German territory. It was decided to attack both at once, and the Grand Duke and his staff initially expected a quick victory in the war.
On 16 August 1914 the Supreme Commander and his staff arrived from Petrograd at the Supreme Headquarters, the Stavka, in the town of Baranovichi, an important railway junction and located in the middle of the front. It was chosen as the site of the Supreme Headquarters to make it easier to communicate with armies along the front and for Grand Duke Nicholas to visit army commanders. Taking over a military railway brigade building, the Stavka had a permanent staff of 60, which assisted the Grand Duke in running an army of about 6,000,000 troops after the mobilization. The limited size of the staff and a lack of equipment made it difficult to communicate with front line troops or to direct operations. To the north of the Stavka was the Northwestern Front along the German frontier and to the south was the Southwestern Front opposite of Austria-Hungary.
The closest associates of Grand Duke Nicholas in his role as the Supreme Commander were his chief of staff, General Yanushkevich, who was his closest confidant and controlled access to him; General Danilov, the head of operations; and the French military attaché, General de La Guiche (also spelled Laguiche), who was the liaison between the Grand Duke and General Joffre, his equivalent in the French Army. He was favored by Nicholas over the British representative, John Hanbury-Williams, and he also flew the French flag at the Stavka headquarters in addition to the Supreme Commander's standard. During his time as Supreme Commander, he never visited the troops at the front line. There were different explanations for this given by those at the Stavka: that Yanushkevich advised him against it, who was worried about making the Emperor jealous of the Grand Duke's popularity among the troops, or the Grand Duke himself simply did not want to go. In any case, this led him to grant broad authority to his subordinate front and army commanders. Many of the orders he sent out were written as suggestions rather than as strict commands. However, he kept up to date on military operations and occasionally gave orders that went against what front commanders wanted. He was still actively engaged in commanding the army.
The first offensives of 1914 were aimed at defending Russia's Polish salient, by attacking German East Prussia to its north and Austro-Hungarian Galicia to its south. The East Prussia campaign ended with a Russian defeat, with the Northwestern Front's Second Army being nearly destroyed by the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg and the First Army withdrawing from German territory in September 1914 to avoid being encircled. In the south, there was more success, and by mid-September the Austro-Hungarians were being pushed back out of Galicia towards the Carpathian Mountains. The Russians advanced all the way to the Carpathians before stopping. However, an offensive by Germany and Austria-Hungary into Russian Poland, the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive, caught the Russians off guard and threatened the armies on the Carpathian front with encirclement. In the summer of 1915 the Stavka ordered a Great Retreat, abandoning their gains in Galicia, Poland, and part of the Baltic region.
Because of this, on 23 August 1915, Emperor Nicholas II took command of the army himself. He appointed General Mikhail Alekseyev to replace Yanushkevich as the Supreme Commander's chief of staff, after which the performance of the Stavka improved significantly. He ran the Stavka almost on his own and directed military operations from August 1915 to March 1917. Alekseyev was seen as the de facto leader of the Russian Imperial Army during the Emperor's tenure as Supreme Commander. During this time there was the Lake Naroch offensive against the Germans, which was unsuccessful, though they did capture the Ottoman Empire's fortress of Erzurum in the Caucasus. The Brusilov Offensive in 1916 caused massive damage to the Austro-Hungarian Army, but at the cost of high casualties. However, by the end of 1916 and early 1917, the losses of the Russian Imperial Army were being replaced and the armaments industry was meeting the needs of the troops, making it still an effective fighting force.
1917: Revolution February to October
After the start of the Russian Revolution, the advice of General Alekseyev and the Stavka officers, as well as every front and army commander, to Emperor Nicholas II that he should abdicate was the decisive factor in him making that decision, on 15 March 1917. Their belief was that a new government would stabilize the home front and allow the war to continue: more liberal generals wanted a constitutional monarchy while conservative ones wanted to replace Nicholas II with Grand Duke Nicholas. After the abdication, both Nicholas II and the Grand Duke urged the officers and troops to recognize the authority of the Russian Provisional Government. The majority of the officer corps took an oath of loyalty to the new government. The Russian Army and its command structure, the Stavka, became the only institution of the Romanov dynasty that survived the February Revolution as it was still needed because of the ongoing war. A committee of the Provisional Government attempted to purge senior officers who refused to cooperate with the new authorities, but the Stavka conducted its own purge, removing those who were too friendly with the Provisional Government, so the composition of the senior ranks did not change too much from before.
Grand Duke Nicholas briefly took control as Supreme Commander after the emperor's abdication, which was accepted by the head of the Provisional Government, Prince Georgy Lvov, but another minister, Alexander Kerensky, threatened to resign if a Romanov was allowed to be the head of the army. Lvov gave in to revolutionary pressure and when the Grand Duke arrived at Mogilev he was informed that he had been replaced by General Mikhail Alekseyev.
Also starting in March 1917, the authority of the officer corps over the soldiers began eroding. When the Petrograd Soviet Order No. 1 reached the front lines it was misinterpreted by many to mean that the troops no longer had to follow orders from officers and could elect their own commanders, which, combined with the emperor's abdication and the lack of direction from the Stavka on situation, meant it became difficult for the Provisional Government to get the troops to follow orders from their officers over the next several months. An Order No. 2 issued together by the State Duma and the Petrograd Soviet was ineffective at restoring the authority of officers and undoing the damage caused by Order No. 1. Meanwhile, the Stavka underestimated the influence of the Petrograd Soviet and the weakness of the Provisional Government. This was in part because the location of the supreme headquarters 400 miles away from Petrograd insulated the Stavka from political developments in the capital.