A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

by G.J. Meyer

On the day Nivelle arrived at Verdun, Tsar Nicholas peremptorily discharged Alexei Polivanov as minister of war, thereby removing a man who, in the months since his appointment, had been achieving near-miracles. Polivanov had been fearless in flushing corruption and incompetence out of the administration of the Russian war effort and in repairing the damage done to the tsar’s armies in 1915. He was dismissed not because of the defeat at Lake Naroch, in which he had no role, but because Tsarina Alexandra hated him and had long wanted him put out of the way. As a reformer, Polivanov was despised by the court’s inner circle; he was willing to work cooperatively with the national legislature that the tsar had been forced to create in the bloody turbulence following the Russo-Japanese War; and he had tried to dissuade Nicholas from assuming command of the army in 1915. All these things, in Alexandra’s small and rigid mind, made him an enemy of the autocracy that she was pathologically committed to preserving for her son. His final offense, the one that finished him, was to intervene when he learned that four of the war ministry’s fastest automobiles had been handed over to Rasputin to enable him to escape police agents.