Not naval related but just finished Norman Stone's The Eastern Front 1914-17.
This well researched study on the Russian Army in WW1 shatters the conventional view of what went wrong in the war that doomed the Czar and gave the world its first communist regime.
While the popular image of Russsian soldiers fighting without rifles is accurate on the surface, that picture is woefully incomplete and distorted. The facts are that by all conventional yardsticks czarist Russia became a relative economic powerhouse as a direct result of the war. But this ocurred within a system that rewarded incompetence, where cities starved as excess grain rotted in the countryside, where gold was shipped overseas to pay for contracts that were never filled while war production at home, ammunition, weapons and rations sat unused in magazines and forts rather than going to the combat troops. Where over aged, incompetant generals were continually removed from one command for failure only to be placed elsewhere to repeat the process.
The Eastern Front 1914-17 does not cover the events of the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 but does show how the fall of the Czar and rise of the Provisional Government really did not lead to any substantive improvements as the army melted away: "voting with their feet" in the famous phrase of Lenin.
A worthy read for anybody with an interest in World War 1, Russia or the Russian Army.
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