At that moment, Nicholas made a momentous, and another disastrous, decision. He decided to leave the capital and go to his headquarters at Mogilev, to resume command. He would leave the capital in highly incapable hands: those of his minister of war, Gen. M. A. Beliaev, a career bureaucrat of limited skills and intelligence; and city military commander Gen. Sergey Khabalov, who likewise had no experience dealing with urban insurrections. Nicholas’s decision to leave Petrograd would decapitate the government at a critical moment. Only his wife, Czarina Alexandra, someone with absolutely no credibility with members of the Cabinet or the Russian people, was left in charge.
Indeed, the day after the czar left, demonstrations broke out across the city. Once again, the weather conspired to make the government’s job difficult, this time by going in the opposite direction from the way it had gone all winter. That day, temperatures soared up into the forties. People who had been cooped up in their homes and offices all winter poured out into the streets, many of them joining the mass demonstrations demanding bread and other foodstuffs. French ambassador to Russia Maurice Paléologue was “struck by the sinister expression on the faces of the poor folk” lined up in front of a local bakery.3
The real turning point, however, came on March 8. It was International Women’s Day, and a parade of Petrograd women, joined by a crowd of workers numbering somewhere between 78,000 and 128,000, went on strike to protest the food shortages. There was no violence, and by 10:00 p.m. the streets were clear. But observers noted that the Cossacks and troops who had kept their eye on the swarming crowds had been reluctant to intervene—a sharp contrast with 1905, and a bad sign of things to come.
Meanwhile, in the Duma, the leaders of the antigovernment socialist opposition were beginning to speak out. One was Alexander Kerensky, lawyer, member of the Diet since 1912, and Socialist Revolutionary firebrand, who gave a speech demanding that the czar step down at long last. “To prevent a catastrophe,” he said, “the Czar himself must be removed—by terrorist methods, if there is no other way . . . If you will not listen to the voice of warning now, you will find yourself face to face with facts—not warnings. Look up at the distant flashes that are lighting the skies of Russia!”4
Incendiary stuff—and when the czarina read the speech, she demanded that Kerensky be hanged. A writ came from the Department of Justice requiring that he lose his parliamentary privilege as a member of the Duma. Mikhail Rodzianko, the chairman of the Duma and one of the few members who had influence at court despite being part of the Progressive Bloc, who had already advised the czar that it was time to change government, reassured the young lawyer: “Be sure, we will never give you up to them.” That night, Kerensky’s career was made. As events spun out of control, he would be the politician everyone increasingly turned to.
Still, there were other, more pressing matters at hand, such as feeding the inhabitants of Petrograd. At dinner that same night, French ambassador Paléologue asked former prime minister Trepov what the government was doing to get food into the capital. Trepov’s stumbling answer seemed “anything but reassuring.” The fact was the czar’s ministers had lost all control where it counted most.
On March 9, the situation turned ugly. Some one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand workers began marching out of Petrograd’s industrial quarter and into the heart of the city. Officials tried to cut them off by closing the bridges across the Neva, but the workers simply walked across the frozen river to the other side.
The march saw the first appearance of Marxist Social Democratic agitators, a faction known as Mezhraiontsy, even though their titular leader, Leon Trotsky, was in exile in New York.5 But they were as much helpless spectators at what was happening as the government was. As for Lenin and his rivals Martov and Bogdanov, the news of the events in Petrograd came as a complete surprise, catching them off guard. Far from having a hand in what was unfolding, they were as removed from the action as the czar’s ambassadors in capitals such as London, Paris, and Washington, DC.
No one was in charge; no one was directing events. What was happening in Petrograd that week was as spontaneous as any incipient revolution could be. The slogans heard in the March 9 demonstrations included “Down with the autocracy!” and “Down with the war!” Meanwhile windows were broken, stores were looted, and rioters clashed with police. Once again, the military authorities seemed hesitant, and reluctant to get involved. The Russian army, the final firewall between civic disorder and urban insurrection, was looking shaky and unreliable—and the real troubles had yet to begin.
On March 10, the crowds were, if anything, even larger. Gendarmes, Cossacks, and troops roamed the city menacingly, but lacking orders, they did nothing to interfere with the growing crowds. The first red banners, the color of revolution, began to appear among the throngs of workers, students, housewives, and mothers, along with banners reading, “Down with the German Woman!” meaning Czarina Alexandra. Other banners read, “Down with the War!” but also “Down with Germany!” Russian patriotism was by no means absent among the demonstrators who filled the streets. Still, there was a growing feeling, witnesses later said, that the residents of the capital now had the fate of the government in their hands.
Students and workers gathered in Kazan Square, in the center of Nevsky Prospekt, the main street in Petrograd. Under a forest of red flags, they began singing “La Marseillaise.”6 And even as the first deaths occurred—police killed three workers in the shopping district of Gostinyy Dvor, while elsewhere, a crowd beat a policeman to death—people were emboldened by the failure of the government to make any effort to regain control of the capital.
Members of the Duma were emboldened, too, including Menshevik deputies who proposed organizing a “workers’ soviet,” or deliberative committee drawn from the various factories on strike. As for the Bolsheviks, they were largely nowhere. When one of them was asked if there was a genuine revolution taking place, he replied offhandedly, “What revolution? Give the workers a pound of bread and the movement will die away.”7
Others had a better grasp of what was happening. That very evening, Saturday, March 10, a worried acquaintance of the French ambassador, Madame du Halgouët, asked Paléologue, “Are we witnessing the last night of the regime?” The French ambassador said nothing, but he knew the country’s troubles were just starting.8
If the Bolshevik deputies were clueless about what was really happening, so was the czar in his military headquarters at Mogilev. Eight hours’ train ride from Petrograd, Nicholas II could not have been farther removed from events if he had been living on the moon—or sharing a bowl of oatmeal with Lenin in Zurich. The vague reports he was getting all suggested that the situation was entirely manageable, when the exact opposite was the case. It was not until March 11 that the czar was finally informed that something had to be done to restore order in the capital, before it was too late.
Nicholas II’s first instinct was the same as in 1905: order his troops to shoot. But the soldiers he could give such orders to were not the dedicated, disciplined professionals who, in massacres such as 1905’s Bloody Sunday, had mowed down strikers and demonstrators without blinking an eye. The Russian troops garrisoning Petrograd were conscripts, most with barely a few weeks of rudimentary training, and with their minds and hearts still in the villages and factories from which they had been pulled to serve in the army.
This was a crucial problem, one the government ignored until it was too late. When push came to shove, as it did in the second week of March 1917, the average Russian conscript had to choose between supporting people like himself, those parading in the streets demanding bread, or obeying his aristocratic officers and a czar who was nearly five hundred miles away. It was an easy choice. The Petrograd garrison, instead of providing the firewall between order and chaos, was prepared to join the forces of chaos, almost to the last man.
It’s not clear if Nicholas, even had he been informed of the reality on the street, would have acted any differently. In any case,
he ordered General Khabalov to clear the streets and restore order by the next day.
Khabalov was flummoxed. He had a garrison of one hundred sixty thousand men at his disposal but knew that barely a small fraction would be reliable in a full-scale crisis—perhaps only one thousand to two thousand men.9 He did issue two proclamations, one banning all large demonstrations and warning that the army would open fire on anyone who disobeyed; the other ordering all workers to return to their jobs by March 13 or risk losing their draft deferments.
Neither proclamation had the least effect on the crowds, which were turning increasingly violent. At one point, troops opened fire on a large crowd in Znamenskaya Square that refused to disperse. Forty demonstrators were killed, and at least that number were wounded. Workers sacked a police station in the working-class district, burning it to the ground. Vasili Maklakov of the Kadet Party in the Duma warned the French ambassador, “We’re in the presence of a great movement now . . . There is only [one] step between riot and revolution.”10
Yet by midnight on March 11, the streets were quiet again. The use of force had worked—or so it seemed. Nicholas II felt confident enough to order the Duma dissolved, and that evening, Petrograd’s elite attended a magnificent party at Princess Radziwill’s palace, with no sense of fear or foreboding.
They, and the government, got a rude shock the next morning. Soldiers disturbed by the Znamenskaya Square massacre had sat up all night debating what to do if ordered to fire on civilians again. On the morning of March 12, they voted to disobey such an order. One regiment after another joined the vote; soon, soldiers were pouring out into the streets to join the demonstrators. It was the largest military mutiny in history.11
Whatever law and order still existed in Petrograd vanished as the day went on.
Mutinous soldiers hijacked armored cars and began driving around the city brandishing their rifles and shouting revolutionary slogans. Others broke into government arsenals and passed out guns and ammunition to the demonstrators; still others opened fire on the Petrograd police, as gun battles erupted across the capital. At one point a mob sacked the Ministry of the Interior; another rushed the headquarters of the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, and destroyed papers and files.
Soon, the red flag of revolution appeared atop the apple-green walls of the Winter Palace. Meanwhile, the looting of stores, restaurants, and the homes of the wealthy continued without stop.
A stunned eyewitness, French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, could report that, by afternoon, the Law Courts, the Arsenal, the Ministry of the Interior, the Okhrana headquarters, the offices of the minister of the courts, and “scores of police stations” were in flames. The Peter and Paul Fortress was under siege, and the rioters, now full-fledged revolutionaries, had occupied the Winter Palace.
“Fighting is in progress in every part of the city.” On the way back to the embassy, Paléologue’s own car was halted and surrounded by mutinous soldiers. The situation was about to turn ugly when a noncom recognized the ambassador and yelled out in a commanding voice, “A cheer for France and England!”
At once, the soldiers responded with an enthusiastic shout to Russia’s allies, proof that support for the war had hardly died away, and the ambassador drove on amid a storm of cheering from soldiers who had been ready to lynch him and his aides a few minutes before.12
That same day, March 12, a desperate telegram reached Nicholas II at Mogilev, from the chairman of the Duma the czar had just dissolved. “Situation deteriorating,” it read. “Imperative to take immediate steps for tomorrow will be [too] late. The last hour has struck, decisive [for] the fate of the fatherland and dynasty.”
Nicholas read it and tossed it aside with a snort. “That fat fellow Rodzianko has again written me all kinds of nonsense,” he remarked to his aide Count Frederiks, “which I won’t even bother to answer.”
But as evening came, even Nicholas realized that this was a situation he could no longer afford to ignore. At 2:00 p.m., a note came from Prime Minister Nikolai Golitsyn saying that the Cabinet wanted to resign and hand power over to a ministry chosen by the Duma. A stunned Nicholas ordered the Cabinet members to stay where they were; he was now going to take steps to restore order in his capital. That night during dinner, he informed Gen. N. I. Ivanov that, the next day, he was to proceed to Petrograd as military dictator. He also ordered no fewer than eight combat regiments, supplemented by several machine-gun battalions, to leave the front to join with Ivanov. In Nicholas’s mind, this was going to be a serious military operation from start to finish.
The final showdown between the czar and his opponents, brewing since 1905, was at hand. The czar’s position was actually stronger now than in 1905. Only Petrograd was in revolt. Except for some sympathy strikes in factories in Moscow, the rest of the country was quiet. Nonetheless, what happened in the next forty-eight hours could determine the fate of the Romanov dynasty and possibly the entire course of the Great War.13
And thus far, Lenin had played absolutely no role in what was happening.
WASHINGTON, MARCH 1–MARCH 20
WHILE DEMONSTRATORS WERE rioting in the streets of Petrograd, on the other side of the world, Washington was locked in an epic battle over the meaning and significance of the Zimmermann telegram.
The man who had triggered the fight was Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. He intended to use it to force Woodrow Wilson into doing what the president was still adamantly saying would be a “crime”—namely, declaring war on Germany. To do so would reverse Wilson’s policy and transform not only the course of the war but also America’s role from disinterested spectator into Great Power, with the means and opportunity to impose its will on world events. Lodge knew this, as did his friend and mentor Theodore Roosevelt, which was why they were set to pursue this policy to the hilt—and to use the Zimmermann telegram to get there.
“The moment I saw it,” Lodge wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, “I felt it would arouse the country more than anything else that has happened.” Applied properly, it could be “of almost unlimited use in forcing the situation.”14
On March 1, a Thursday, Lodge took his seat in the U.S. Senate. The other senators streamed in one by one, thinking they were going to debate the Armed Ship Bill. But Lodge had other ideas. He immediately entered a resolution demanding a statement from the president regarding the authenticity of the German foreign minister’s telegram of January 17. Lodge then sat down and watched with satisfaction as the drama he had anticipated played out.15 Every senator in the chamber knew the telegram was an affront to American pride and prestige, perhaps even a casus belli. All the newspapers, and much of the public, had said so. For those senators who were still opposed to anything but strict American neutrality, there was therefore only one possible course of action: to assert that the telegram was in fact a forgery.
Indeed, a great deal about the document was still shrouded in mystery, including how it had been obtained. President Wilson himself had said nothing about its authenticity, even when he was having it leaked to the press. Rumor had it that it had come from the British, but no one had said a word about how they had gotten their hands on it. (For good reason: Wilson, Ambassador Page, and other American officials had been sworn to absolute secrecy regarding Room 40 and its code-breaking efforts.) Later the story circulated that it had been picked up by the Americans themselves.16 Everyone also knew the British were eager to get America on their side in the war, and that many Americans were willing to use any excuse to get their country to join the Allies. What if the document was a British forgery designed to force the issue?
“Did this information come from London?” Sen. William J. Stone from Missouri asked as the debate began. “Was it given to us by that government . . . That is all I am asking at this time.” Stone’s case was helped by a piece of misinformation that had crept into Associated Press coverage of the story, namely, that the president had been given the telegram not on February 25 but on January 19, two days after it was supposed to have bee
n sent. Why withhold the document for more than four weeks? Was its release now, even as American ships were being sunk by German U-boats, timed as a deliberate propaganda ploy, critics wanted to know, perhaps one engineered by those with a vested interest in committing America to world war?
There were those who took a different tack. Senator Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama, for example, was willing to accept the document’s authenticity but said that it was still not reason enough for war. What Zimmermann was doing, Underwood argued, was simply informing the ambassador to Mexico of what Germany might do if it found itself at war with the United States, a prudent move with no “unfriendly intention” toward America.17
Few in the Senate were willing to bend over that far backward to let Zimmermann, and Germany, off the hook. Instead, most of those who rejected the telegram as sufficient reason to go to war simply refused to believe it could be genuine. As Sen. Ellison Smith of South Carolina brutally framed it, it was a “forgery and a sham born in the brain of a scoundrel and a tool.” Smith didn’t say who the scoundrel was, but the implication was that he was sitting in an office somewhere in London. He didn’t name the tool, either, but there was no doubt in the Senate chamber that he meant the American president.
This was exactly what Lodge had hoped for. He had no doubt the telegram was the real thing. If he could get Wilson to attest publicly to its authenticity, if only to protect his own honor, then the chief point for those arguing against going to war would be blasted to bits. The key was getting Wilson to commit, and that was what today’s resolution was intended to do.
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