Though peasant soldiers suffered the most casualties, “for regime stability, the most serious losses were among the officer corps,” Miner explains. “By the end of the year, the Russian empire had lost more than one million men.” Russia’s ammunitions were all but exhausted and the country’s infrastructure was not equipped to efficiently resupply troops.

“Things didn’t Improve as the months dragged on,” Hartnett says. Some 30,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and nearly 100,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans. The war quickly turned into a disaster, with Russia suffering a brutal defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg just a few weeks into the war. L-R: Grand Duchess Anastasia, Grand Duchess Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexei, Grand Duchess Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Maria, along with Kuban Cossacks. The Romanovs visiting a regiment during World War I, c. As she notes, Nicholas disregarded a prewar memorandum from one of his advisors, warning that in the event of a defeat by Germany, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.” “He fancied himself a military strategist, but he was not,” says Mayhill Fowler, a Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies professor at Stetson University. To compound the lack of preparedness for war, Nicholas II also led the Russian military, a position that he didn’t have the training or experience to do. Russian Military Loses Confidence in Monarch

And Russia’s output of bullets initially was just 13,000 rounds a day, so they had to make every shot count. Some soldiers had to go into battle unarmed, until they could pick up a rifle from another soldier who had been killed or wounded.

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.

Cossacks back to war german