Study of the military-technical cooperation of the Russian empire with the allies during the First world war in the Russian historical literature

This article deals with the issue of the Russian Empire's military-technical cooperation with its allies during the First World War. Unlike the Lend-Lease of the Second World War, which received wide coverage in historical literature, Tsarist Russia's attempts to overcome the military equipment crisis by making orders from its allies turned out to be on the fringe of Russian historians' attention. Therefore, studying the issues of the military-technical cooperation between the Russian Empire and its allies represents an essential scientific task. The purpose of this article is to examine the main approaches to studying this issue in Russian historiography. The main stages of studying the military-technical cooperation are based on the analysis of Russian historical literature dealing with this issue. The literature takes forms of studies on the development of country's military forces as well as the aspects of the Russian Empire's foreign and internal policies during the First World War. The author states that the earliest researches on this issue were made by the direct participants of the events in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, those researches suffer from a certain degree of subjective interpretation and a negative attitude towards the effectiveness and importance of the military-technical cooperation with the allies in increasing the readiness of the Russian army. In the 1950s - 1970s, academic studies on the economic development of the Russian Empire and its diplomatic relations with the allies during the First World War appeared. They made it possible to expand the scope of study on the military-technical cooperation and to introduce new archival materials into scientific literature. However, ideological attitudes played an important role in the evaluation of this issue. They led to judgmental conclusions about the use of the military-technical cooperation as a means of economic enslavement of Russia. In the late 1990s - early 2000s, a series of studies on the military-technical cooperation between the Russian Empire and its allies that was free of ideological cliches appeared. That allowed not only to expand the source materials of the researches, but also to use foreign literature, which undoubtedly raised credibility in the interpretation of the issue. However, there is still no complete research comprehending the whole set of issues related to the studies on the military-technical cooperation. Therefore, it seems appropriate to continue the studies on this issue. On the one hand, it is worth describing the system of organized foreign military deliveries from each of the allied states that was created during the War. On the other hand, it is necessary to specify the amounts of foreign deliveries to Russia for a balanced assessment of the effectiveness of the military-technical cooperation.

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