Cockfield’s 1999 book, With Snow on Their Boots. At the start of the war, the Russians had 800,000 men in uniform who didn’t even have rifles to train with, and those who did often had to make do with obsolete weapons that were nearly 40 years old, according to Jamie H.
That made Russia vulnerable in a war, because its factories simply couldn’t produce enough arms and ammunition to equip the Czar’s 1.4 million-man army. The antiquated czarist regime’s determination to hang onto power hindered modernization efforts, as a result, “the Russian Empire trailed behind the rest of Europe in terms of economic and industrial strength,” says Lynne Hartnett, an associate professor of history at Villanova University and an expert on the Russian Revolution. To make matters worse, Nicholas II was starting to roll back the limited democratic reforms that he had agreed to in 1905. But as he notes, the Czarist regime faced plenty of threats to stability, from dire urban working conditions to labor strife that the Czar’s soldiers tried to put down by massacring gold miners in Siberia in 1912. “Some argue that Russia was slowly evolving more modern political and social institutions, that it had a vibrant culture, a highly educated elite, that it had survived the upheaval of the 1905 revolution, and that it had the fastest-growing economy in the world before 1914,” Miner says.
Prior to the war, Russia was at a crucial crossroads.
0 kommentar(er)
