Background
Nikolai Yanushkevich was born in May 1868.
Nikolai Yanushkevich was born in May 1868.
A graduate of the Nikolaevskii Cadet Corp (1888) and Mikhailovskii Artillery School (1888), Yanushkevich was commissioned sub-lieutenant in the artillery of the Life Guards. He graduated from the Nikolaevskii General Staff Academy in 1896.
Most of his service for the next decade and a half took place in the bureaucracy of the Ministry of War. He became a professor of military administration at the General Staff Academy in 1910, left for duty with the ministry of war briefly, then returned to command the General Staff Academy in 1913. Early in 1914, promoted general of infantry, Yanushkevich was appointed chief of staff of the Russian army.
The appointment occasioned surprise within Russian military circles as well as among foreign observers. The new chief of staff was only forty-six years old, he had seen no field service, and much of his work in the Ministry of War had concerned only questions of military supply. Nothing in his activities had indicated exceptional military talent. To most observers, his rapid rise was a credit to his adroitness as a courtier and owed much to the patronage of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Tsar Nicholas II.
As chief of staff Yanushkevich played a significant role in the crisis of July 1914. Along with Minister of War Sukhomlinov, he was an early advocate of general Russian military mobilization. On July 28, after the announcement of Austria's declaration of war on Serbia, Yanushkevich urged Foreign Minister Sazonov to persuade the tsar to declare general mobilization. That evening Yanushkevich, on his own authority, ordered general mobilization to begin on July 30. He presumably expected the tsar to be won over to such a move within two days. The tsar wavered on July 29, then reluctantly accepted Yanushkevich's proposals the following day.
With the outbreak of war, Yanushkevich became chief of staff to the new supreme commander, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. The inexperienced chief of staff, facing a role patently beyond his talents, left military matters to subordinates like General Yury Danilov, the chief of operations, and concentrated on the civil administration of the vast geographic area placed under the army's wartime jurisdiction. Russia's initial military defeats prevented him from implementing his plan to deport all able-bodied German males from East Prussia to the Russian interior.
Other groups were not so lucky. Yanushkevich led the effort to purge Russian territory of what he saw as unreliable elements. The tsar's Jewish subjects in large areas near the fighting front suffered systematic harassment and mass deportation. Yanushkevich summarily rejected criticism of the course voiced by the tsar's council of ministers.
During the retreat from Poland following the German breakthrough at Gorlice (May 1915), Yanushkevich directed a massive scorched-earth policy. The routine destruction of homes, crops, and industrial resources led at once to mass popular migrations eastward. Yanushkevich's refugee policies unquestionably served to alienate large segments of the population from the army and the regime. Moreover, the influx of refugees placed heavy burdens on the urban centers of Russia where many of the displaced had to settle.
Yanushkevich was relieved as chief of staff in August 1915, and followed Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to obscurity in the Caucasus for the rest of the war. Yanushkevich retired from the army following the March Revolution in 1917, and he was killed in the Caucasus in unknown circumstances sometime the following year.