Background
Pavel Plehve was born June 11,1850, to a Russian noble family of German origin.
Pavel Plehve was born June 11,1850, to a Russian noble family of German origin.
He completed the Nikolaevsky Cavalry College in 1870 and the General Staff Academy in 1877.
He was immediately posted to serve in the 1877/1878 war against Turkey. The young officer remained in the Balkans, spending two years as adviser to the Bulgarian army and the Bulgarian War Ministry. Pleve returned to Russia in 1880 to follow the customary career pattern of a Genshtabist, or General Staff officer, rotating through a series of progressively more responsible staff and line posts. In 1909 he received the plum assignment of commanding the Moscow Military District.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pleve took command of the Russian Fifth Army. With the Fourth Army, soon in the hands of General Evert on his right, Pleve met the full weight of the Austrian offensive northward from Galicia in the last week of August 1914. At Komarow, August 26-31, Pleve's forces paid with 40 percent casualties for the mis-judgments of front commander Ivanov. Pleve waited in vain for Ivanov to bring up General Ruzsky and the Third Army to mask his open flank spread over a huge expanse. With the Austrian Fourth Army under Auffenberg curling around Pleve's exposed units, the old Russian cavalryman avoided another Tannenberg by a timely withdrawal.
Such decisiveness was unusual in the hidebound upper reaches of the Russian officer corps. But it was in character for Pleve. Sixty-five years old and in fragile health, he would have been put to pasture in most other armies, not handed a hundred thousand men to march around Poland. But Pleve, whom British General Alfred Knox described as "old and bent" with a sharp mind and an iron will, was miles above the customary Russian mediocrity of advanced years. In two and a half days in mid-November he marched his army seventy miles northward across the Polish plains to help the beleaguered Russian Second Army at Lodz. In early 1915 he received command of the new Twelfth Army. Pleve's orders read to strike East Prussia from the south, while General Sievers and the Tenth Army thrust in from the east. The Germans made a hash of this effort to rerun the 1914 Tannenberg campaign through to a different conclusion. They bloodied Sievers at Augustovo in mid-February, leaving Pleve only the option of launching a subsidiary offensive to ease Sievers' plight.
Pleve played the fireman one last time in September 1915. With Russian Poland safely in hand, General Ludendorff sprang a final offensive eastward and northward from his base in East Prussia. Pleve, then back with the Fifth Army, displayed his usual grit. Holding the crucial sector, from the Gulf of Riga to Kovno, he could hardly fail to note that nothing stood between him and Petrograd but undefended, open space. But Pleve and the Fifth held their line. The old man, in truly precarious health, briefly commanded the north-western front in the second winter of the war. But his days were numbered. He left active duty in February 1916, and died in Moscow, April 10, 1916.
No strategic virtuoso, the perpetually ailing Pleve was, at the least, calm and tough. He represented the best Russia's senior generals could normally muster in leading their field armies in the calamitous first year and a half of the war.