Stavka of the Supreme Commander

Stavka of the Supreme Commander
A meeting of the Stavka in 1916.
Active	31 July 1914 – March 1918
Country	Russian Empire  Russian Republic  Russian SFSR
Role	Headquarters
Part of	Imperial Russian Army  Russian Army (1917)
Location	Baranovichi (1914–15) Mogilev (1915–18) Petrograd (1918)
Engagements	World War I

The Stavka of the Supreme Commander (Russian: Ставка Верховного главнокомандующего) was the supreme headquarters of the Russian Imperial Army in the field during World War I until the demobilization of the army in March 1918.

The Stavka was led by the supreme commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich from 1914 to 1915 and then Emperor Nicholas II until the February Revolution in 1917. Grand Duke Nicholas presided over the initial offensives in East Prussia and Galicia before the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive forced Russia to withdraw, becoming known as the Great Retreat. After this the emperor took command, and the second half of 1915 and early 1916 was a break from large-scale operations (with the exception of the Lake Naroch and Erzurum offensives) until the start of the Brusilov Offensive. While Nicholas II was the supreme commander he left military decisions to his chief of staff, Mikhail Alekseyev, who ran the Stavka.

Throughout the political upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 the Stavka remained in command of millions of troops at the front line. After the emperor's abdication in March 1917, his chief of staff Alekseyev was appointed the Supreme Commander, but in May he was replaced by Aleksei Brusilov ahead of the June offensive, as he was more optimistic about working with the new "revolutionary army" of the Provisional Government. After the failure of the June offensive, in part because of troops disobeying orders, Alexander Kerensky appointed Lavr Kornilov as the head of the army to restore order. But the Stavka supported Kornilov when he attempted a military coup against the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, causing Kerensky to take the post of Supreme Commander himself. When he fled during the October Revolution, his chief of staff, Nikolay Dukhonin, assumed command.

The Russian Army was the last tsarist institution to survive the Revolution, and in late November 1917 the Bolsheviks began taking control of the command structure. Nikolai Krylenko was appointed as Supreme Commander after Dukhonin refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as the legitimate government. After Krylenko and the Bolsheviks arrived and took control of the Stavka, the high command was kept in place for several months as military technical experts because of the need for the Bolsheviks to maintain an army at the front while negotiations with Germany were ongoing. The remaining "old army" was demobilized in March 1918 with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Stavka was dissolved.