Foreign Purchases for the Needs of Russian Transport during the First World War: Problem Statement and Historiographical Aspects

The First World War, contrary to expectations, did not turn out to be fleeting and dragged on for 4 years. Already in the autumn of 1914, both the Central Powers and the Entente countries had to abandon hopes for an early denouement – the war was turning from maneuverable to protracted, which crossed out pre-war calculations and made the pre-war stocks of artillery, quartermaster, engineering, sanitary and other materials necessary in the conditions of the World War obviously insufficient. Faced with the prolongation of the war, the governments of the warring countries were forced to rebuild the economy in a military manner, trying to supply their armies and their populations with everything they needed during the largest war in world history at that time.

In Russia, with its large territory, from the very beginning of the war, transport acquired special importance. From the first day of the war, the Russian logistics system was subjected to the most difficult exam imaginable – the mobilization of the Russian army required the highest exertion of the forces of all Russian transport, especially railways, completely subordinated at that time to military transportation. After all, not only state security, but also the defense of allied France, which turned out to be the target of Germany's main strike in August 1914, depended on how quickly the Russian army was mobilized and transferred to the west ^{[1, p. 44]}.

This most difficult task was brilliantly accomplished, however, in the future, the load on the Russian transport system not only did not weaken, but, on the contrary, gradually increased, constantly demanding an increase in its carrying capacity and the effectiveness of its work. Already in the autumn of 1914, the Ministry of Railways and the Stavka Directorate of Military Communications faced the need not only for the current repair of highways in an accelerated time and in significantly increased volumes, as required by wartime, but also for the construction of new roads, the expansion of existing lines, their duplication and modernization, and the restoration of destroyed enemy tracks. Trying to cope with the ever-increasing volume of tasks, the government ordered materials for transport needs from domestic rail rolling, locomotive and wagon-building and other plants, but already in the autumn of 1914, the government's requests significantly exceeded the capabilities of Russian enterprises. As one of the employees of the Ministry of Railways wrote, the order of transport materials abroad "became inevitable" ^{[2, p. 74]}. The longer the war went on and the greater the load on Russian transport, the more transport goods had to be ordered abroad. With the beginning of the "great retreat" of the Russian army, the task of evacuating refugees, state institutions and property from the abandoned territories also fell on the transport system with all its weight. By 1915, foreign purchases were becoming huge: the nomenclature of transport materials ordered abroad was expanding and it gradually included not only goods needed for railways (including rolling stock), but also goods for the fleet, aviation, road materials, cars.

Another important problem was the need to restructure the work of the domestic aviation and automotive industries. Dependent on German components and spare parts, with the outbreak of the war, Russian enterprises were forced to use French, American and British analogues, the purchases of which became of crucial importance for this industry.

Russia, forced since 1914 to order transport materials abroad, has been constantly expanding the volume of these orders over the course of the war. In this regard, determining the role of foreign procurement in improving the efficiency of the Russian transport system will allow assessing the country's capabilities in resolving the impending "transport crisis", which had the most serious impact not only on the successes of the Russian armies at the front, but also on the stability of the domestic political situation in the country. This circumstance highly actualizes the very trivial "technical" side of the problem.

Russia's military-technical cooperation with the Entente countries is one of the popular directions in the framework of research on the history of Russia's participation in the First World War: historians often and willingly turned to this topic, exploring the struggle of the stavka and the government with the "shell famine", therefore, the historiography of the problem is voluminous and includes works on a variety of aspects. Moreover, this multidimensional nature leads to the fact that this topic is touched upon in works devoted to different sides of the history of the First World War – foreign policy, economics, military history, political history, the history of the activities of special services.

The comprehension of the experience of Russian foreign purchases during the First World War began almost immediately after its end, partly due to the fact that the largest government orders placed in the United States caused a series of high-profile scandals. Already in 1918, a brochure by M. I. Gaiduk on the activities of Russian procurement commissions in the United States was published in New York, which, although it has a journalistic and memoir character, nevertheless contains a number of important facts, including the publication of some documents ^[3]. This publication was followed by others (for example, D. G. Ter-Asaturov's pamphlets), which, criticizing the financial abuses of Russian commissions in the USA, gave a kind of analysis of their activities ^[4].

A great contribution to the scientific development of the topic of military-technical cooperation between Russia and the Entente was made by researchers who studied the history of the First World War – emigrant (N. N. Golovin, Yu. N. Danilov, A. A. Kersnovsky, E. V. Maslovsky, etc.) ^[5], Soviet (A.M. Zayonchkovsky, A. K. Kolenkovsky, P. G. Beskrovny, etc.) ^[6] and modern (Yu. A. Bakhurin, A. B. Astashov, S. N. Bazanov, etc., but especially O. R. Airapetov, whose pen, among others, owns several works directly devoted to foreign orders) ^[7]. Y. M. Bukspan, G. I. Shigalin, P. V. Volobuev, T. M. Kitanina and others addressed the problem of military-technical cooperation in their works on the Russian economy during the First World War ^[8]. Russian Russian Army in World War I and, of course, no specialist dealing with the problem of foreign purchases during the First World War can do without the book by A. A. Manikovsky "Combat supply of the Russian army in the World War" and the works of A. P. Zalyubovsky, among which the work "Supply of the Russian army in the Great War with rifles, machine guns, revolvers and cartridges for them" ^[9-10]. Soviet historiography is rich in in-depth research on the history of Russian diplomacy and Russian-American relations on the eve and during the First World War, in which Russian foreign purchases were also considered (G. K. Seleznev, A. E. Ioffe, V. V. Lebedev, A.V. Ignatiev, P. N. Efremov, R. S. Ganelin, Z. M. Gershov, V. A. Yemets, B. D. Kozenko, etc.) ^[11], as well as on the history of Russian industry of this period (E. Z. Barsukov, I. V. Mayevsky, etc.) ^[12].

A kind of historiographical "master" in the field of studying foreign purchases of Russia during the First World War is A. L. Sidorov, whose sphere of scientific interests combined the economic, military and diplomatic history of the period of the First World War. Having defended his doctoral dissertation in 1943 on the topic "The economy of Russia during the First World War, 1914-1917", he published several works devoted to the study of various sectors of the national economy, including foreign purchases (for example, in 1945, his article "Relations of Russia with the Allies and foreign supplies during the First World War of 1914-1917") ^[13].

Research on the history of Russian purchases abroad has received a new impetus recently, when a large number of works on this topic began to be published. A huge contribution to the development of the topic was made by A. Y. Pavlov, P. V. Vinogradov, Y. N. Kryazhev, A. A. Malygina, A.V. Bodrov, E. A. Baryshev, N. A. Stankevich, S. V. Fedulov, I. E. Magadeev, T. V. Alekseev, A. G. Senokosov and others ^{[1, 14-15]}. Among the latest works devoted to Russian diplomacy and foreign economic relations of Russia on the eve and during the First World War, it is worth highlighting the research of S. G. Belyaev, S. V. Listikov, I. V. Rogachev ^[16].

There is also an extensive historiography on the history of individual modes of transport during the First World War. The topic of foreign transport orders was partially raised in the framework of research on the construction of the Murmansk (R. Nakhtigal, A. A. Golubev, S. F. Kharitonov, P. V. Fedorov, etc.) and Northern (O. V. Gudkova, N. P. Ryazantsev) railways ^[17]. Recently, several serious works have been published on the history of the development of railway transport in the first quarter of the XX century, in particular the work of N. V. Starostenkov ("Railway transport and the defense capability of the Russian Empire") ^[18], a generalizing work edited by T. L. Pashkova ("Transport of Russia. Historical essays. Transport at the turn of the epochs (1899-1917)") ^[19], a study by V. A. Serdyuk ("Forgotten personnel: women's labor on the railways of the Russian Empire") and some others, dotted touching on the problems of the project ^[20]. The best work on this topic to date is the study by A. S. Senin "Railway transport in Russia in the era of wars and revolutions (1914-1922)., published in 2009 ^[21].

Cooperation between Russia and the maritime powers on the eve and during the First World War in the field of the fleet is being developed by S. N. Sinegubov, S. P. Shilov, A. N. Shcherba, already mentioned above S. N. Fedulov ^[22]. A separate direction in domestic and foreign historiography is research on the history of the design, creation and use of Russian aviation during the First World War. The available studies can be divided into general (G. F. Petrov, V. G. Rokhmistrov, S. N. Antoshkin, V. L. Gerasimov, etc.), specific (M. A. Khairulin, V. P. Kulikov, I. K. Spatarel), dedicated to aircraft construction (A. O. Alexandrov, G. I. Katyshev, V. R. Mikheev, D. A. Sobolev and others), individual personalities (M. S. Neshkin, S. V. Gribanov) and technical reference (Y. L. Fotinov, V.P. Kulikov) ^[23-24]. E. D. Karamyshev's articles on balloons can be singled out separately. In modern research on the history of motor transport and automotive industry, it is also possible to distinguish general (E. Y. Prokofiev, A.V. Moravsky, I.S. Antonov, etc.) and technical reference (K. V. Shlyakhtinsky, S. V. Voronkova, etc.) works ^[25]. In general, it can be stated that the topic of procurement of foreign components for the needs of the domestic aviation and automotive industries has never been a separate subject of study. Similarly, purchases abroad for the needs of Russian sea and river transport did not often come to the attention of specialists. Of particular interest are the articles of contemporaries published in the "Marine Collection" (for example, the article by E. I. Mazik "Examples from the history of the construction of patrol boats in America"). From the scientific literature, one can note the works of V. P. Puzyrev (especially his work "The Merchant Fleet of Russia in the First World War"), A. Y. Emelin, L. M. Grankov, the first volume of the collective work "The History of the fleet of the Russian State" edited by V. A. Zolotarev and others.

Among foreign researchers, it is necessary to mention the works of Keith Nilson (in particular, his monograph "Strategy and Supply: The Anglo-Russian Alliance 1914-1917"), Dale Rilage (and his most important work for this project "Russian Supply Efforts in America during the First World War"), Elizabeth Greenhalgh (for example, her work "Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War"), Marina Soroka ("Britain, Russian and the Road to the First World War": The Fateful Embassy of Count Alexander Benkendorf"), Clifford Foust ("John Frank Stevens: Civil Engineer (Railroads past and present)", etc. ^[26]. Some aspects of railway procurement are raised in the work of the German historian Reinhard Nachtigal on the Murmansk Railway. Of course, it is impossible not to mention the Briton Norman Stone, the author of the best foreign work on the history of Russia's participation in the First World War ("The Eastern Front"), which is a reference book for all English—speaking specialists. A large number of Russian and foreign studies devoted to the events of the February Revolution relate to transport problems to one degree or another, but in most cases they give very brief sketches of the development of the Russian transport network. Russian Russian emigration The problem of foreign supplies to anti—Bolshevik forces is touched upon in many works on the history of the Civil War in Russia and the White Movement, as well as in works on Russian emigration (as a vivid example is O. V. Budnitsky's monograph "Money of Russian Emigration: Kolchak gold 1918-1957").

To date, the largest study on the history of military-technical cooperation between Russia and the Entente countries and on Russian foreign purchases is the collective monograph "Gunpowder gold and Steel: Military-Technical Cooperation during the First World War" edited by Professor of the Faculty of International Relations of St. Petersburg State University A.Y. Pavlov, published in 2017 ^[2]. She not only summarized the data accumulated by historical science, but also made a huge contribution to the development of the problem. However, it is important to note that this monograph does not concern Russian transport orders, affecting only some aspects of blanks for the needs of the fleet (anti-submarine defense), as well as the problems of delivery and transportation of goods ordered and produced abroad to Russia, which is the subject of the third section of the book. The only thorough study of the problem of purchasing materials for railways abroad at the moment is the article by British historian Anthony Heywood "Russia's Foreign Supply Policy in World War I: Imports of Railway Equipment", published in 2003 in the Journal of European Economic History ^[27]. E. Heywood also developed this problem in his monograph about Professor Y. V. Lomonosov ("Engineer of Revolutionary Russia. Yuri Vladimirovich Lomonosov (1876-1952) and railways").

Thus, despite the colossal historiography of military-technical cooperation during the First World War, a comprehensive study of foreign orders for the needs of Russian transport has not yet been written. The whole directions in the field of Russian orders of materials and means for the needs of the transport system remain unexplored, which should compensate for the insufficiency of Russian production and, thereby, prevent the development of a "transport crisis". Historiography also lacks a study of the process of abandoning the Russian automotive and aviation industries in 1914 from German components and the forced transition to French, British and American analogues.