DOI: 10.5064/f6kw5cxs
title: Data for: “Russia: The politics and psychology of overcommitment,” in: The ideology of the offensive: Military decision making and the disasters of 1914

description: &lt;b&gt;This is an Active Citation data project. Active Citation is a precursor approach to&lt;br/&gt;&lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati"&gt;Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)&lt;/a&gt;. It has now been converted to the ATI format. The assembled project can be viewed at:&lt;/b&gt; &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/ideology-of-the-offensive#annotations:group:2Nopp9mx" &gt;https://qdr.syr.edu/atipaper/ideology-of-the-offensive&lt;/a&gt; &lt;h3/&gt;

&lt;h3&gt;Project Summary&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Data for Chapter 7 in "The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914" (Cornell University Press, 1984) The book from which this chapter is taken asks why the major European continental powers all began the First World War with offensive military strategies that failed to accomplish their political or military objectives and that helped to cause the war by increasing the insecurity of all these states. The author argues that the offensive bias in 1914 mainly stemmed from the preference of professional military organizations. Offensive strategies and doctrines enhanced their prestige and autonomy by purporting to create decisive military solutions to the paramount political problems of the state. The weakness of civilian oversight of professional militaries before 1914 unleashed this bias. The larger conceptual purpose of the book was to explore how strategists in any era might come to believe that security could be best achieved by destabilizing offensive means, including striking first. Chapters on Germany and France illustrate these main arguments of the book very directly. The Russian case manifests less of a systematic, long-term bias for the offensive. It explores the causes of a shift in Russian military strategy between 1910 and 1914 from a cautious, largely defensive war plan to a highly overcommitted plan for simultaneous offensives on three fronts. Two background factors – the growing strength of the Russian army and the tightening of the Russo-French alliance in response to Germany’s offensive war plan – help to explain the evolution of Russia’s strategy in a more offensive direction, but these considerations do not account for the disastrously overcommitted excesses of this move. The author emphasizes three explanations for the overcommitted offensives: (1) bureaucratic compromises in which different military bureaucratic factions each got the offensive that it wanted, (2) oversimplified decision processes that paid insufficient attention to logistical feasibility, and (3) a psychological bias for seeing the necessary as possible. Chapter 7 on Russia was chosen for active citation because the research for it added considerable information not widely available in the West, and because the footnotes take considerable pains to explain the connection between details of evidence and the arguments of the chapter.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Data Abstract&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The evidence for the chapter comprises many primary sources and several Soviet scholars’ archival research. At the time of the data collection (in the 1980s), however, the author was denied access to the Soviet military history archive, which some Western scholars have subsequently been able to exploit in the post-Soviet period. One qualification the author makes concerns the general insufficiency of data in the Russian case at the time of his writing (as compared to the German and French). Although the chronology of the Russian planning process is well documented, the motivations for some of the changes in the war plan are not. The explanations presented in memoirs and published documents tend to be superficial. Soviet historiography had not been particularly incisive, and Western scholars at the time (like Snyder himself) did not have access to archival material on military planning. Consequently, the interpretations of Russian decision making are not definitive. Nonetheless, he considered using evidence from a past but critical period to be the major advantage of using historical rather than contemporary cases to study the sources of bias in strategic policy making, which remain similar in the present despite changes in military technology. FILES DESCRIPTION: The key documents used for citation activation come from published collections of diplomatic materials of WWI and Soviet historiography from the early part of the 20th century. For example, a critical source used on numerous occasions is a 1926 study by Andrei M. Zaionchkovskii, a general and military historian, who commanded the Russian 30th Army Corps during WWI, of the Russian planning for the war. The memoirs of Yuri Danilov, chief of operations of the Russian Imperial Army general-headquarters during the period, serve as another key source of evidence. Additional important sources used contain Soviet army publications of archival maps and plans and studies conducted by Soviet military academies’ scholars. Where possible, the author cites the English-language versions of books (e.g., the reminiscences of Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov, published in London in 1928), but many of the source materials are in Russian, German and French, and the author provides translations for many relevant excerpts. The source files are scanned versions of relevant pages cited from close to 80 individual publications.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;Logic of Annotation and Activation&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The author’s criteria for activating citations were whether the source material had a bearing on key arguments or historical interpretations, and whether the rarity or intrinsic interest of the materials warranted making them more easily accessible to researchers – even in cases where the materials might have played a relatively smaller role in the argument. As in the footnotes of the book itself, the author sometimes included English-language material for general background, even when it was not as directly on point as the Russian sources. Additionally, a few of the original sources used for this research conducted in the mid-1980s could not be tracked down for logistical reasons.&lt;/p&gt;
description: Standard access for all the files, which are either from publicly available documents or fair-use excerpts from secondary sources. The text of the original publication is used with explicit copyright permission obtained from Cornell University Press.