While Nicholas II was the supreme commander he left military decisions to his chief of staff, Mikhail Alekseyev, who ran the Stavka.

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.

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.

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.

[2] One of his first acts as Supreme Commander was giving an order for the invasion of East Prussia, as he thought that Russia's priority should be to assist the French, which would be the prelude for later advancing into Silesia and then onto Berlin.

Taking over a military railway brigade building, the Stavka had a permanent staff of 60, which assisted the Grand Duke in running an army of about 6,000,000 troops after the mobilization.

He was favored by Nicholas over the British representative, John Hanbury-Williams, and he also flew the French flag at the Stavka headquarters in addition to the Supreme Commander's standard.

[5] The first offensives of 1914 were aimed at defending Russia's Polish salient, by attacking German East Prussia to its north and Austro-Hungarian Galicia to its south.

[11] He appointed General Mikhail Alekseyev to replace Yanushkevich as the Supreme Commander's chief of staff, after which the performance of the Stavka improved significantly.

[10] However, by the end of 1916 and early 1917, the losses of the Russian Imperial Army were being replaced and the armaments industry was meeting the needs of the troops, making it still an effective fighting force.

[15] The Russian Army and its command structure, the Stavka, became the only institution of the Romanov dynasty that survived the February Revolution as it was still needed because of the ongoing war.

[22] Because of this Alexander Kerensky, who replaced Prince Georgy Lvov as the head of the Provisional Government,[20] toured the front line and gave speeches in the spring of 1917.

[22] At a meeting of the Stavka commanders on 29 July 1917, with Kerensky in attendance, Brusilov's chief of staff Anton Denikin criticized all of the Provisional Government's measures since March 1917 and called for the return of capital punishment to restore discipline among the troops.

There are contradictory accounts whether he wanted to work with the Provisional Government against the Soviet or to remove it, but in any case he ordered the 3rd Cavalry Corps under General Krymov to enter Petrograd.

Kerensky briefly appointed General Alekseyev as his chief of staff and sent him to Mogilev to restore the Provisional Government's control over the Stavka, where he arrested Kornilov and several of his supporters.

[24] After the outbreak of the October Revolution and the disappearance of Kerensky, on 16 November 1917, his chief of staff (who succeeded Alekseyev in September) became the new Supreme Commander.

Also at the Stavka were five imprisoned generals, including Kornilov and his accomplices – Anton Denikin, Ivan Romanovsky, Alexander Lukomsky, and Sergey Markov.

[25] At the same time, Lenin and the Revolutionary Military Committee, which was having difficulty asserting control over the Petrograd garrison and other troops near the capital, had to exert influence over the rest of the army outside of their vicinity.

Lenin disavowed the counter-revolutionary generals and called on soldiers' committees at the front to start peace talks themselves, which led to local ceasefires.

Around that time Dukhonin signed an order to release the imprisoned generals,[25] who proceeded to escape south towards the Don territory, which they thought would be anti-Bolshevik.

[25] From December 1917 to March 1918 main goal of the Bolsheviks' military authorities at that point was to demobilize the "old army" and to create a new force capable of internal security.

The Revolutionary Field Staff under Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, created by the Bolsheviks in December 1917, worked separately from the Stavka and was building a new force capable of serving their interests.

In January 1918 he told Krylenko, who was uninterested in the Stavka, that Russian Army units at the front were decaying and that some forces should be organized to put up at least token resistance if the peace talks with the Germans broke down.

On 19 February, after the German Army broke the arimistice and began advancing, Bonch-Bruyevich moved what remained of the Stavka east, before Lenin ordered him to bring it to Petrograd.