That must have been a great comfort to the Russians, Tsar down to the peasantry. [Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that

That must have been a great comfort to the Russians, Tsar down to the peasantry. [Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.