Background
Mikhail Vasilevich Alekseyev was born in Tver province on November 15, 1857. He was the son of an officer.
Mikhail Vasilevich Alekseyev was born in Tver province on November 15, 1857. He was the son of an officer.
Alekseyev completed the Moscow Infantry Cadet School in 1876 and went to war against the Turks almost immediately. Like many of his contemporaries, Alekseev smoothed the path to higher command by attending the General Staff Academy, graduating in 1890. He did a turn as staff officer in the St. Petersburg Military District, then returned to the General Staff Academy to teach military history from 1898 to 1904.
As a newly promoted major general, Mikhail Alekseyev left for the Russo-Japanese War in late 1904. There he served as deputy chief of staff of the Third Army. Apparently he survived the debacle in the Far East with his reputation intact, since, in 1908, he was named chief of staff for the important Kiev Military District. There he took the lead in opposing the plan of General Yury Danilov (q.v.) of the General Staff to concentrate on attacking East Prussia at the start of a future war with the Central Powers. Rallying other local military leaders who would have to face Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of war, Alekseev shaped a plan more to his liking: the main weight of the Russian army was to move against Austrian Galicia, with a subsidiary attack to be pointed at East Prussia.
At the outbreak of World War I, Alekseev was named chief of staff to General Nikolai Ivanov (q.v.), the ineffectual commander of the southwestern front, that is, Southwestern Army Group. In the tangled Galician campaign that followed, the Ivanov-Alekseev team proved incapable of driving forward their forces, notably the Third and Eighth Armies, advancing westward along the Carpathians. Without sufficient speed and aggressiveness, the Russians failed to cut off the exposed Austrian armies thrusting northward toward Cholm and Lublin.
The problem of lackadaisical and timid field army commanders was all too familiar to Alekseev by March 1915, when he took command of the northwestern front. He then began to exemplify the other major failing of the Russian army in World War I: the tendency of front commanders to act without regard to orders from above. Two months after assuming his new post, Alekseev received word of catastrophe to the south. General von Mackensen (q.v.) and an Austro-German Eleventh Army broke through Ivanov's thin defenses at Gorlice on May 2, and then drove upward into central Poland. Alekseev followed the precedent set in 1914 and only grudgingly shifted his reserves to mend the critical situation that was developing. Nonetheless, against the fading reputations of Ivanov, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (q.v.), the commander in chief, and Danilov, the de facto chief of staff for the entire army, Alekseev's prospects boomed. He held the line of the Narev River against a new German offensive from East Prussia in mid-July and then retreated in good order from the perilous Polish salient. By the time the entire Russian front stabilized, in late August, the majority of the field armies had come under his direct command.
At the start of September 1915, Tsar Nicholas II (q.v.) took over as generalissimo. Alekseev was named the tsar's chief of staff; in fact, he led the entire army. Alekseev's subsequent performance has received only mild praise. A cool workaholic, he tried, in a fashion that Nikolai Nikolaevich had never done, to coordinate the army groups: the northern front, the western front, and the southwestern front. Incompetents like Ivanov were removed, although the promotion of aged officers like General Kuropatkin (q.v.), who took over the northern front in March 1916, demonstrated the shallow pool of senior talent Alekseev could tap. But the new commander mainly tried to hold the line and, at the same time, to respond to pressure from Russia's allies.
By the start of 1916 Alekseev reluctantly began to send troops to France at the urging of the Allies. The German assault on Verdun (in February) and the Austrian Strafexpedition against Italy (May to July) pushed Alekseev into action to promote an offensive on his side of the continent. He soon found that most of his front commanders had no desire to respond. Only the fiery new commander of the southwestern front, General Brusilov (q.v.), volunteered to undertake an early offensive to relieve the burdens on the French and Italians. Alekseev was unimpressed, however, by Brusilov's promising tactical innovations. When the southwestern front became the scene of sweeping Russian advances in June, Alekseev refused to press other front commanders to shift substantial reserves to Brusilov. General Evert (q.v.), the commander of the western front, controlled the bulk of Russia's combat divisions and artillery; Alekseev could neither push him into a vigorous offensive nor bring himself to snatch away Evert's forces for Brusilov.
As the Brusilov advance sputtered to a halt in the late summer, Alekseev again found himself pushed this way and that by Russia's partners in the war. France had insisted on drawing Rumania into the fighting. Alekseev correctly predicted that the Rumanian army could not stand up to the test of World War I; he was also on target in predicting that Russia would have to stretch her forces in order to buck up the Rumanians. Foresight made no difference. By the close of 1916 thirty-six Russian divisions had been diverted to aid the nearly defunct Rumanian army.
Throughout 1916 Alekseev found himself the object of appeals from political leaders disgruntled with the tsar and the course of the war. Any links that he established with such figures as Aleksandr Guchkov (q.v.) were likely suspended at the close of 1916 when the tired old general suffered a heart attack. Alekseev recuperated in the Crimea, returned to duty in February 1917, and almost immediately faced the coming of the March Revolution. His actions during the days of rising unrest in Petrograd and the subsequent collapse of the monarchy have given rise to heated controversy. Katkov suggests that more vigorous action by Alekseev at the start of the bread riots might have brought the situation under control, and his timely inaction may have reflected a long held desire to promote political change. In any event, as the revolution gathered momentum, Alekseev urged the tsar on March 14 to grant parliamentary government. With the solid support of the front commanders, Alekseev arranged the tsar's abdication by March 16.
Alekseev went on to play a role in the months following the March Revolution. He accepted the post of commander in chief from the provisional government and supported Aleksandr Kerensky (q.v.) in his call for a new offensive. The general and the minister of justice (soon to be named war minister) agreed that Russian inaction gave the Central Powers a free hand first to crush the Western Allies, then to turn German and Austrian armies to the task of smashing Russia. But Alekseev disliked the rapid course of democratization Kerensky prescribed for the army and insisted on a well-planned offensive that bore some promise of success. Tagged by now as both too conservative and too pessimistic, Alekseev was dismissed in late May and replaced by Brusilov.
Following the November Revolution, the old general, whose health was rapidly failing, left for the Don. There he intended to build a new army to fight both the Germans and the Bolsheviks. By early 1918 he had formed the core of the future White military forces in the South, the so-called Volunteer Army. But Alekseev found himself with only nominal authority, as younger White leaders, notably General Lavr Kornilov (q.v.), took charge. Alekseev did not live to see the White movement reach the peak of its power and expectations. He died in Ekaterinodar on October 8,1918.