In the event, overseas manufacturers, already struggling to fill orders from their own governments, failed to match Russian expectations. By November 1916 foreign suppliers had delivered only 7.1 million of the 40.5 million shells ordered. Even if they did arrive, there was still the problem of transporting them. The northern ports were closed by ice for much of the year and the Trans-Siberian Railway was capable of handling only 280 railway wagons a day. Little was done to sort out the chaos that developed at Archangel in northern Russia and, while a railway connecting it to Petrograd was completed in 1917, the development of Murmansk as an ice-free port was not finished until 1923. By March 1917 American boot manufacturers had resorted to sending their products by parcel post.11
Russia's own industrialists led the demand to be allowed to reorganise the war economy. In the wake of the retreat from Galicia and the shell shortage, the Special Council of Defence was established by industry and the Duma in May 1915 on the model of the British Ministry of Munitions. It was intended to encourage amalgamation and consolidation of industrial units, and to channel government finance to key areas such as munitions and railways. In all, the Special Councils, of which four were created, spent some 15 million roubles between 1914 and 1917, representing about a third of all government expenditure.
The prices charged by private enterprise, however, rose significantly and there was inefficiency and corruption, as well as a failure of coordination. In the process, the labour force in heavy industry quadrupled between 1914 and 1916. The number of miners doubled, the numbers in the building trade went up by a third, and those employed in the oil industry increased to half a million. The number of women employed in manufacturing also rose by between 30 and 40 per cent by 1916. In all, the total urban population expanded from 22 million in 1914 to 28 million by 1916. Overall, Russia's economy grew by 21.6 per cent between 1913 and 1916, and there was more modernisation and standardisation of manufacturing processes. Though productivity declined rapidly after 1916, therefore, it could be argued that the mounting economic crisis was born of over-rapid growth.
The problem was that industrial expansion was based on a few areas like Petrograd and Moscow, which were precisely those most affected by food and housing shortages. Between 1914 and 1917, the Petrograd labour force increased from 242,000 to 391,000 and in Moscow from 153,000 to 205,000. With municipal authorities forced to compete for food supplies on the open market, prices rose. Inflation was also encouraged by the amount of money the government had to raise in loans since it was reluctant to incur unpopularity by raising taxes. By 1917, the budgetary deficit of 1.9 billion roubles in 1914 had increased to 31.1 billion. There was little check on inflation so that a price index for Petrograd set at 100 in December 1914 would have reached 192 by December 1916. A similar index of 100 set in Moscow in December 1913 would have reached 361 by January 1917. Prices rose even more rapidly between March and November 1917. Effectively, while wages had gone up by between 50 per cent and 200 per cent depending upon the industry, all prices had increased by at least 100 per cent and, in some cases, by 500 per cent. Not unexpectedly, strikes were ever more prevalent, from 1,946 in 1915 to 2,306 in 1916, with 751 in the first two months of 1917.
Exacerbating all the other problems was the sheer number of refugees who moved into central Russia from Galicia, Poland and the Caucasus to escape military operations. There were already 3.5 million refugees by 1915, and conceivably as many as 7.4 million by July 1917. The numbers were fuelled by the Russians themselves forcibly deporting Jews and other minorities such as ethnic Germans from western Russia as they retreated in 1915. As elsewhere, there was much hostility to perceived aliens, over 3,000 premises of supposedly foreign ownership being looted in Moscow in May 1915. Minority groups that would have remained loyal to the state in other circumstances were alienated from it.12
All this put much more strain on food supplies. The food crisis afflicting Russia by 1917 was once attributed to declining production, as a result of conscription of the agricultural labour force and the greater mobility of the remaining rural labour force seeking new opportunities in industry. In fact, with women, prisoners of war and refugees making up some of the labour shortfall, agricultural production actually grew with good harvests. The real difficulty was one of transportation. It was not the case, as is sometimes imagined, of grain chasing trains but, as Norman Stone has argued, of trains chasing grain.13 Food was not a transport priority and track maintenance had declined, but the whole pre-war system had been geared to taking bulk supplies from larger producers. Wartime increase in production took place among smaller producers, thus requiring longer rail journeys and more trains. Such were the difficulties of marketing that many peasants either resorted to feeding surplus to livestock or reverted to subsistence agriculture.
As a result, by 1917, despite some 2.5 billion roubles being spent on the rail network, Petrograd was receiving not much more than half its daily requirement of grain and Moscow only a third. Bread and flour rationing were introduced in Moscow on 11 March 1917, having been resisted previously for fear of raising expectations that could not be fulfilled. Significantly, the revolution erupted in Petrograd on the back of food disturbances compounded by fuel shortages and severe winter weather, which exacerbated the transport crisis. Ironically, crowds on the streets were swelled once the disturbances began by a sudden improvement in the weather, which encouraged people to go outside after several months’ confinement.
At this point, another key factor was the disintegration of the army. While shortage of material has been advanced as the primary reason for Russian military disasters in the Great War, these have been exaggerated in the sense that the German and Austro-Hungarian forces on the Eastern Front were also frequently short of supplies. The Russian army also performed better than is sometime suggested, capturing more German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war than the British and French combined, and also accounting for a higher percentage of German combat deaths than the Western allies. Indeed, it won significant victories against the Austro-Hungarian army in Galicia in 1915 and at least initially during the Brusilov offensive in June 1916.
The ‘old army’, however, was effectively destroyed in 1915. Only harsh discipline kept the army together. Increasing fraternisation with German and Austro-Hungarian troops was perceived as growing evidence of war-weariness. Most Russian soldiers were peasants, and they were affected by separation from home and land, and unsettled by events on the home front. They also appear to have had little interest in Russia's wider war aims although they would have fought willingly in defence of Russia itself. In fact, the replication of peasant society in the army's ranks and the bonding of military service helped preserve the army as a military instrument at least until early 1917, when the abdication of the Tsar removed the vital traditional cement underpinning discipline.
The Russians did have a major manpower problem, with almost 6 million casualties by January 1917. Losses badly affected the officer corps. Many new officers, recruited from the middle classes and from students, were, to quote Allan Wildman, ‘negatively disposed’ towards the government through their previous involvement in politics or their awareness of progressive ideals.14 At the same time, the gulf between officers and men steadily widened as soldiers increasingly questioned poor treatment of the wounded, censorship of mail, and dwindling rations, a factor made more significant by the relatively generous provision of rations in 1914. Trained NCOs were also a decreasing asset.
By the autumn of 1916, therefore, there was a number of mutinies. Battle fatigue and war-weariness were factors, but politicisation of the army was mainly a feature of rear garrisons and transport centres. As with the industrial working force, most recruits tended to be trained in large centres such as Moscow, Petrograd and Kiev, where they suffered the same privations as the civilian population with few officers to control them.
Sailors of the Baltic Fleet were to prove still more radical than the army. The majority of the Russian seamen were o
f non-peasant background and literate. More significantly, due to a combination of ice-bound ports and German naval domination of the Baltic, they spent long periods in bases such as Helsingfors (Helsinki) in Finland, Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia and Kronstadt close to Petrograd, where they were frequently in contact with shipyard and other industrial workers. Moreover, many naval officers were of Baltic-German or Finnish origin, and were thus distanced from their men by both class and nationality.
Discipline amid the enforced idleness of naval life was often harsh. In the case of the cruiser Aurora, for example, which was sent to undergo repairs in Petrograd in September 1916, a new commanding officer attempted to tighten discipline at a time when the crew were working alongside workers in a Socialist Revolutionary stronghold. When the disturbances broke out in Petrograd in March 1917, the crew were confined to the ship and some workers were detained in the ship's brig. The crew mutinied on 13 March, murdering the captain and his executive officer. There is little evidence that the majority of sailors belonged to any political organisation and revolt was almost certainly spontaneous. It spread to Kronstadt on the same day, to Reval on 15 March, and to Helsingfors on 16 March. At least 76 naval officers were killed and over 300 arrested in the course of a few days.
In Petrograd the chain of events leading to revolution was set off on Thursday, 8 March 1917 by a riot of women textile workers from the Vyborg district who were queuing for flour. Ironically, it was International Working Women's Day, an event first suggested by the German Social Democrat, Clara Zetkin, in 1910: it had then been held in a number of European states in 1911, and had been observed in Russia for the first time in 1913. As suggested earlier, the number of women in industry had increased, women comprising some 43.2 per cent of the Russian industrial labour force by 1917. As elsewhere, they experienced at first hand the problems of keeping their families fed. One calculation is that, by 1917, the average working woman in Petrograd spent forty hours a week in queues for food or other requirements. Police agents had been reporting mounting distress for months. The women were quickly joined by militant metalworkers.
There were at least 180,000 troops available in the capital. Most, however, were under training or recovering from wounds, with only perhaps 12,000 regarded as reliable. Protopopov had worked on a plan to maintain order with the war minister, General Mikhail Beliaev; the City Prefect, General A. P. Balk; and Lieutenant General Sergei Khabalov, whom he had recommended to Alexandra as military governor of the Petrograd region. It did not amount to much, however, and the strikes took all by surprise. Spreading out from Vyborg, large crowds of women gathered on the Sampsonesvsky Prospect on 8 March and headed for the Aleksandrovsky bridge over the Neva, which would have given them access to the city's main thoroughfare of Nevsky Prospect. Police blocked the bridges, but large numbers of people got across the frozen river. On 9 March, with workers joining the women, the police were unable to hold the bridges and there were some violent clashes and widespread looting. More troops were apparent on 10 March but they were not called upon to open fire, and generally mingled with crowds in what now amounted to a general strike. In any case, the troops would have been reluctant to fire on women representing wives and mothers of servicemen. Therefore, when on Sunday, 11 March, Khabalov in the Tsar's name ordered the army to suppress the disturbances and to open fire, as well as threatening to conscript strikers, troops began to mutiny. Opening fire on the crowd by a training company of the regiment located at the Pavlovsky Barracks led to mutiny by the rest of the regiment. The Volynsky Regiment of the Imperial Guard also went over to the crowds. With further reinforcements unable to move on the frozen rail lines, the Tsar's younger brother, Grand Duke Michael – the ineffectual ‘Misha’ – took the decision to abandon the Winter Palace on the night of 11/12 March at a time when crowds had actually dispersed.
The atmosphere that Sunday was curious. Stella Arbenina, an actress from an English family long resident in Russia and the wife of Baron Paul Meyendorff, went to the theatre. Driving through virtually empty streets, she found not much more than fifty people present for a performance of what had been a wildly popular play. By contrast, when returning to his residence, the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue witnessed the lights burning brightly and a party in full swing at the town house of Prince Léon Radziwill. Returning to Petrograd from Reval in the early hours of Monday, 12 March, Meriel Buchanan found the city strangely deserted: ‘In the bleak, grey light of that early morning the town looked inexpressibly desolute and deserted . . . the streets seemed completely empty, nearly all the shops were boarded up, not a face showed at the windows of any of the houses.’15
The change later that morning was dramatic. Hearing sudden firing and ‘a strange and prolonged din’ from the direction of the Aleksandrovsky bridge while he was at breakfast, Paléologue went to the window. He recorded ‘a disorderly mob carrying red flags appeared at the end which is on the right bank of the Neva, and a regiment came towards it from the opposite side. It looked as if there would be a violent collision, but on the contrary the two bodies coalesced. The army was fraternising with revolt.’16 Similarly, looking from his window at soldiers thronging the street outside, the British military attaché, Alfred Knox, thought himself like a spectator 'in a gigantic cinema’.17 In the normally quiet Sergvievsskaia district, Stella Arbenina was equally startled by the sudden sight of two lorries full of soldiers, workers and ‘horrible disreputable women, whom they were embracing in the street’, with others running alongside. It soon dawned on her that the soldiers were Imperial Guardsmen. It was a ‘hideous, nauseating spectacle that remains graven in my memory. I could not believe my eyes.’18
By the evening of 12 March the Council of Ministers had dissolved itself and surrendered authority to an ad hoc executive committee of the Duma hastily convened in the Tauride Palace, and dominated by Alexandr Kerensky, a lawyer and Trudovik deputy. A Provisional Government then emerged on 14 March under Prince L'vov with Miliukov as Foreign Minister, Guchkov as Minister of War, and Kerensky as Minister of Justice. Kerensky authorised the arrest of a number of Tsarist ministers and officials. The authority of the new government, however, was already being challenged ominously by the self-appointed and Menshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, led by Irakli Tsereteli, which had emerged on 10 March.
At the time of the initial disturbances, Nicholas and Alexandra were preoccupied with the measles that had struck Aleksei and his eldest sister, Olga. Alexandra merely reported to Nicholas on 9 March that ‘the poor people stormed the bread shops’, before passing rapidly on to the condition of the children. The following day, by which time Tatiana had also succumbed to measles, Alexandra was attributing ‘a hooligan movement’ of ‘young boys & girls running and screaming’, and ‘work men preventing others fr. work’, to the long spell of cold weather. She felt it would soon quieten down. She was at least aware that lack of bread was a problem and proposed sending an officer to speak to Khabalov about using military ovens to bake bread for the population. On 11 March Alexandra suggested that 200,000 people were now involved in the disorders but that ‘all adore you & only want bread’. She accepted the assurances from some Duma members that all would be calm by the following day. She feared above all that, without her presence by his side, Nicholas might be forced to sign ‘some paper of theirs, constitution or some such horror’. Indeed she did not learn of her husband's abdication until the day after it had occurred.19
Nicholas, meanwhile, who had only returned to Stavka on 7 March, was aware of the transport difficulties resulting from the bad weather, with locomotive boilers frozen and tracks blocked by snow. However, he confined his replies to Alexandra almost entirely to his children's health. He expressed the hope that Potopopov would direct Khabalov to act firmly against the ‘street rows’. A telegram on 11 March from Mikhail Rodzianko, the Octobrist chairman of the Duma, specifically warned Nicholas that the situation was out of hand and that concessions had to be made im
mediately. Nicholas ignored it, telling the Swedish-born minister of the imperial court and household, Count Vladimir Fredericks, ‘That fat guy Rodzianko has again written me all sorts of nonsense, to which I will not even give a reply.’20 Nicholas, who believed recuperating soldiers were primarily responsible for the disorders, told Alexandra that Alekseev, who had only just returned from sick leave, was one of the few at Stavka who remained calm. But Alekseev, too, urged the appointment of new ministers to take action. According to Lieutenant General Alexandr Lukomsky, Nicholas refused to discuss the matter with Alekseev who, still feeling ill, took to his room with a temperature of 102ˆ. Having considered the issue, Nicholas subsequently sent for Alekseev, but Lukomsky reported he was in bed. The Tsar handed Lukomsky a telegram for the Council of Ministers, telling him to relay to Alekseev, ‘that this is my last word, that I will not change my mind, and that consequently it will be useless to report anything more on the subject’.21 Other warnings were also equally casually dismissed, including those of Aleksei Brusilov, commanding the Southwestern Front, Nikolai Ruzsky, commanding the Northern Front, and the Tsar's brother, Michael. Telegrams from Beliaev, Protopopov and Khabalov had all tended to suggest that the disorder had been contained. It was only on 12 March that Khabalov requested units to be sent to Petrograd urgently from the front, though Beliaev was still insisting that ‘I am firmly convinced that calm will soon arrive.’22
Having prorogued the Duma, and ordered the Guard Cavalry and other troops under General Nikolai Ivanov to Petrograd to restore order, Nicholas set out to return the 500 miles to his capital from Stavka early on 13 March. The Tsar's train was halted in the early hours on 14 March by the news of mutinous troops blocking the line. The train diverted to Ruzsky's headquarters at Pskov. Alekseev now took the initiative with his fellow generals in cooperation with the Duma, the liberal opposition having been assiduously cultivating the army's leadership ever since 1915. Having effectively suspended any military coercion by informing Ivanov that the Tsar would almost certainly appoint a new government, and this would ‘change your manner of action’, Alekseev drafted a new manifesto for the Tsar to sign.23 Ruzsky, who was the most committed of the increasing number of military dissidents, had supposedly been wearing rubber galoshes as a token of disrespect when he arrived late to greet the Tsar at Pskov station. He also urged concessions on the Tsar. Finally yielding, Nicholas sent a telegram to Rodzianko indicating he was now prepared to make the concession of a government responsible to the Duma. Rodzianko tersely replied, ‘It is too late.’24
The Making of the First World War Page 20