Background
Dmitry Shcherbachev was born February 6, 1857.
Dmitry Shcherbachev was born February 6, 1857.
He completed the Mikhailovsky Artillery School in 1876 and graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1884. By 1907 he was commandant of the academy, and five years later he received charge of the IX Infantry Corps.
In the early weeks of World War I Shcherbachev fought in the Galician campaign; and the IX Corps led the Russian army into the strategic city of Lemberg. By the close of the year Shcherbachev had been promoted general of infantry. In April 1915, he received the Eleventh Army in time for the long summer retreat. In October he found himself the new commander of the Seventh Army on the southwestern front. He undertook his new duties just in time to participate in the calamitous Strypa offensive under General Ivanov.
Stone sees Shcherbachev as an example of the limited Russian general who, under the leadership of a Brusilov, could fight effectively. Shcherbachev was taken with the action of the French on the western front, and he leaned invariably toward attacks on a narrow sector where his artillery had been able to pummel the enemy at great length. The Strypa offensive had seen such an approach bring bloody fiasco. Brusilov took Shcherbachev and other self-willed army commanders like Lechitsky and Sakharov in hand. The Brusilov technique of attacking with little in the way of a preparatory bombardment to awaken the enemy was coupled with other promising innovations. Attacks were to come simultaneously along a broad front. Reserves were carefully and secretly to be positioned near the proposed breaks in the enemy line well before the attacks commenced.
With such techniques Brusilov's attack in June 1916 brought stunning results. Shcherbachev crossed the Strypa River, where he had failed with bloody losses only six months earlier. Cutting the line of communications of the South Army under Bothmer, Shcherbachev threatened to unhinge the entire enemy line. These Russian successes near the northern rim of the Carpathians helped entice Rumania into the war in August 1916.
In April 1917, after the start of the Russian Revolution, Shcherbachev was named commander of Russian forces on the Rumanian front; with this position came the parallel responsibility of serving as military adviser to Rumania's King Ferdinand. The Russian soldiers on the Rumanian line soon became a considerable military and political prize. Their distance from the urban centers of Russia, and hence from the worst effects of the political upheaval on military discipline, made these units a reliable fighting force in a time of scarcity. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in November, Shcherbachev dreamed of organizing his own Ukrainian front; with Allied aid he would take on both the Germans and the Bolsheviks.
Such dreams died quickly. By December the Ukrainian authorities were negotiating peace terms with Germany. In early 1918, fearful of Berlin's wrath, the Rumanians pressured Shcherbachev not to send his troops eastward to join the anti-German and anti-Bolshevik White forces collecting on the Don. Shcherbachev remained in Jassy, however, even after Rumania made peace with the Central Powers in May 1918. He came up with a new scheme: he hoped to bring large French contingents into southern Russia where they would aid the White armies on the Don. After the November armistice, Premier Clemenceau made it clear France saw no reason to follow such a plan.
Finally, in January 1919, Shcherbachev succeeded in making his mark on the rapidly escalating Russian Civil War. He mediated the differences among the motley collection of anti-Bolshevik contingents on the Don; thus he helped form a powerful White army that bedeviled Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky for nearly two years.
Shcherbachev went into exile in Western Europe later in 1919. He died in Nice, on January 18, 1932.