The Russian general Sukhomlinov was one of the key factors in the tragic preparation of the Russian army before the First World War. Ambitious and archomaniacal, servile and a man of intrigue, a slave to his passions and an enemy of every modernizing idea, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of brave soldiers, the one who, although a general, had hardly smelled gunpowder in his life.
Born, in 1848, in Lithuania, Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov entered the Cavalry School in 1867 and then studied at the General Staff Academy from which he graduated in 1874. He participated as a staff member in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. After the war he was appointed a professor at the General Staff Academy and the Cavalry School and other schools.
Between 1884-86 he exercised active command, for the first time, in the 6th Dragoon Regiment. Without having done anything important he was promoted, in 1890, to major general in command of the 10th Cavalry Division. Ambitious and ambitious managed to become chief of the general staff in 1908 and minister of war in 1909 , thanks to his intrigues, connections and his servitude to the tsar.
He himself was a poorly trained officer with little military experience, but he created an army of rogues to fight his opponents and secure his position. He himself could not even bear to hear about "modern war".
"The war remains as it was. All this modern war stuff is silly novelties. Look at me, for example, in the last 25 years I have not read a single military manual' … he was saying. A fan of unbridled aggression, adhering to theories of the Napoleonic Wars and preventing the modernization of the army, he was the main culprit of the embarrassing defeats that the Russian army suffered in WWI.
He himself had taken care to place as many of his official followers as possible in key positions, regardless of their merit. The result of his theories, the placement of his incompetent friends, and his own inability to ensure the supply and equipment of the Russian army, led to mass graves. Thousands of brave Russian soldiers were led to slaughter by charging, without serious artillery support, en masse against the German machine guns.
"At 62 himself, a slave of only 32 years to his wife, intelligent but rude, servile to the tsar, a friend of Rasputin, surrounded by a mob of middlemen for his intrigues, he is a man who has forgotten what it is like to you work and exhausts his energy in shocking anecdotes", the French ambassador to Russia wrote about the Russian general Sukhomlinov.
Sukhomlinov did not hesitate to serve his friends at the expense of the army. So when he learned that the army was going to buy a large plot of land he informed his friend Mikhail Adronikov who bought it first, at a humiliating price and then sold it to the army at a high price.
Even worse was the case of colonel Sergei Miasozhentov , who was Sukhomlinov's informant gathering information on his political and military opponents. However, the colonel was also a spy for the Germans. Finally in 1915 the "smokeless" Sukhomlinov was expelled from the Ministry of War and in April 1916 he was arrested on charges of abuse of power, corruption and high treason. It was then revealed that the general had transferred a lot of money to a German bank in Berlin!
The authorities also began investigating his spy friends. They arrested Miasogentov and two other officers of Sukhomlinov's entourage. Myasogentov who was also the lover of Sukhomlinov's wife was tried and convicted by a military court and hanged. Accusations were also brought against Andronikov and other beneficiaries of the former minister.
Sukhomlinov's wife had a real obsession with expensive clothes and furs, and it seems that the general did not spare her. She even did not hesitate at one point to organize a charity event for the wounded soldiers, in the name of the Tsarina, grabbing the money collected. She herself belonged to the close circle of the notorious schemer and traitor Rasputin.
With the intervention of Rasputin, Sukhomlinov was released. However, after the fall of the tsarist regime, he was arrested again on charges of high treason. In May 1918 he was released again and finally fled to Finland and then to Germany. In 1924 he published his memoirs dedicated to the former Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany...
He lived his last years in incredible poverty. He was finally found dead, frozen, on a park bench in Berlin in 1926. However, his tragic end does not absolve him of his disastrous mistakes, omissions and stupidity that cost rivers of Russian blood.
