Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  AUTOCRACY PREPARES A REVOLUTION

  Russia had gone to war with a non-binding constitution tacked on to the autocracy, and neither side in the Duma-autocracy antagonism understood or had any sympathy for the other.91 Nicholas II clung to autocracy even though it afforded him no personal pleasure and he proved incapable of living up to the role.92 That said, the tsar often outmaneuvered the constitutionalists: the Duma was scarcely being summoned into session. It met for a day on July 26, 1914, to approve war credits (a formality), and for three days on January 26–29, 1915.93 Following the 1915 retreat, which was cast as a terrible rout, even though its orderliness impressed (and stymied) the Germans, Nicholas II did recall the Duma to session, and in August 1915, Paul Miliukov, head of the Constitutional Democrat party, emerged as the leader of the six-party Progressive Bloc. The latter comprised almost two thirds of Duma deputies and aimed to improve the war effort with what the deputies called a government of confidence.94 At one level, this connoted a cabinet appointed by the tsar that had the Duma’s positive appraisal. But the interior minister, suspecting that the constitutionalists really sought a genuinely parliamentary order—a government reflective of electoral majority—denounced Duma president Mikhail Rodzyanko as “stupid and bombastic,” adding, “You just want to get together and put forth various demands: ministers answerable to the Duma and, perhaps, even a revolution.”95 Russia’s conservatives, meanwhile, sought to counter the Progressive Bloc with a Conservative Bloc, but in August 1915 the rightists lost one of their foremost leaders, Pyotr Durnovó, who suffered a fit of apoplexy, fell into a coma, and died.96

  Even more important than that loss, Nicholas II continued to discourage rightist political parties organizing on his behalf as attempts to “interfere” in his autocratic prerogatives.97 He refused even a private secretary to organize his vast responsibilities and ensure implementation of his decisions, because he feared falling under any secretary’s sway; so the “autocrat” opened all his own correspondence. Later, Trotsky would observe that a debilitated autocracy got the enfeebled autocrat it deserved. That was true, to a point. The much-missed Alexander III had managed to project will and authority; had he not died prematurely of illness, he would have been sixty-eight years old in 1914. Still, everything about his reign indicates that he, too, would have held fast to the autocracy and its incoherence. The autocrat alone retained the prerogative of ministerial appointments, without parliamentary recommendation or confirmation, and if a tsar allowed perceived loyalty and lineage to trump competence, there was nothing to be done. Between July 1914 and February 1917, Russia saw a parade of four different prime ministers and six interior ministers, all of whom became laughingstocks.98 (Able officials, in many cases, increasingly chose to keep their distance.) The ministers’ initial response to the 1915 war crisis was depression. The generals Nicholas II appointed, meanwhile, often blamed scapegoats for the problems they themselves caused.99 Nicholas II, predictably, reacted to the 1915 crisis by suspending the Duma he reviled. At the same time, the tsar imagined he could inspire the troops, and the people more broadly, by naming himself frontline supreme commander.100 In September 1915, Nicholas II relocated to staff headquarters at the town of Mogilyov, displacing his strapping first cousin Grand Duke Nicholas, who was known in family circles as Nikolasha—and, among the masses, as Nicholas III.

  Nearly everyone in Russia’s establishment who was high enough to do so advised against the move. That included eight of the tsar’s own twelve ministers in writing—two more concurred orally—who feared that the monarch and monarchy could now be directly tarnished by a sagging war effort. Their pleading was in vain: even an overwhelming majority of the top state officials was powerless to correct the will of an autocrat. Other than an autocrat’s own (rare) about-face, the tsarist system provided no corrective mechanisms.

  The tsar’s notorious personal shortcomings were on full, and fatal, display. At Mogilyov, some 490 miles from the maddening Russian capital, Nicholas II finally seemed to find that elusive world he craved of “no political parties, no disputes, no Government, no opposition . . . just a united Russian people, readying to fight for months or years to the very last drop of blood.” Recalling his extended escapes from St. Petersburg in Crimea, Nicholas II took long strolls with his English setters, rode into the countryside in his Rolls-Royce, listened to music, played dominoes and solitaire, and watched motion pictures. The tsar occasionally had Alexei brought to Mogilyov for visits, and the heir “marched about with his rifle and sang loudly,” interrupting the war councils. True, although Nicholas II loved the romance of military pageantry, he knew next to nothing of strategy and tactics, but then again, neither had Nikolasha, a graduate of the General Staff Academy, nor German Emperor Wilhelm II. But as chief of staff, Nicholas II had appointed the gifted General Mikhail Alexeyev, a relatively small man but “a gigantic military force.”101 At the same time, the domestic mobilization for the war and domestic politics had to be taken care of, but Nicholas II’s escape to Mogilyov had, in effect, left his wife, rather than a strong political figure like Witte or Stolypin, in charge of the wartime empire’s capital.102 Described by the French ambassador as “constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, . . . credulousness, superstition,” Alexandra did not shrink from making personnel and policy recommendations, and from presenting her husband “the autocrat” with faits accomplis.103 “Do not fear what remains behind,” she wrote to him. “Don’t laugh at silly old wify, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.”104 For Russia’s state officialdom and the officer corps, fighting a monumental war for the very survival of the motherland, what they observed or heard about the wartime regime felt like daggers to the heart.

  Whatever Nicholas II’s personal shortcomings, Alexandra was several magnitudes below even him as would-be autocrat. To boot, she was German. The German-sounding St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd, but spy mania had already broken out in Russia. “There is not one layer of society that can be guaranteed free of spies and traitors,” thundered the military prosecutor, who arrested hundreds, including long-serving war minister General Vladimir Sukhomlinov. He was innocent of treason, but his public trial broadcast damaging revelations about deepset corruption and incompetence, which was cast as sedition (a dangerous obfuscation that prefigured aspects of Bolshevism in power).105 Alexandra, too, incessantly wrote to Nicholas of “traitor-ministers” and “traitor-generals.” But soon, the rumors of “dark forces” boomeranged onto her and her entourage, which included Grigory Rasputin (Novykh). Born in Western Siberia in 1869, the son of a poor peasant, not educated and unable to write proper Russian, Rasputin, known to the tsaritsa and tsar as “our Friend,” was a religious wanderer and pretend monk who had made his way into the heart of power. He was rumored to smell like a goat (from failing to bathe), and to screw like one, too. He identified with the outlawed sect of Khylsty, who taught rejoicing (radenie), or “sinning in order to drive out sin”; Rasputin advised followers to yield to temptations, especially of the flesh, asking, “How can we repent if we have not first sinned?”106 Tales of a court harem spread, conveyed in cartoons of Rasputin’s manipulative hands emanating from a naked Alexandra’s nipples. That was myth. Still, in public, as the okhranka noted, he approached female singers in a restaurant and exposed his penis while striking up a conversation. The faux “Holy Man” accepted sexual favors from noblewomen seeking his influence at court and sent half-literate policy memoranda to top ministers. Officials became afraid to incur his displeasure—he never forgot a slight—and paid him regular cash gifts, but a few fought back. A would-be female assassin, connected to a rival monk, behind whom stood high figures at court, had taken a knife to the mystic’s stomach on June 29, 1914—the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo—but Rasputin, his entrails hanging out, survived.107

  Throughout the war, the highest Russian government ministers tried but could not manage to evict the “Siberian
tramp” from the capital. Alexandra was immovable.108 Why? Why did she permit a debauched phony and rumoredGerman agent the run of Russia’s corridors of power? The answer was twofold. First, despite all the talk that Rasputin was running state affairs through Alexandra, it was the tsaritsa who used the pretend monk, having him voice her personnel and policy preferences as “God’s will,” thereby rendering what she wanted more palatable to the pious Nicholas II. Rasputin’s sway began when Alexandra lacked an opinion, but he held no definite, enduring political views of his own.109 Second, the heir’s hemophilia posed a daily threat to his life from possible internal bleeding into joints, muscles, and soft tissue, and no cure existed, but Rasputin could somehow alleviate the “Little One’s” symptoms.

  Nicholas II’s family certainly seemed bedeviled. His first brother (and next in line), Alexander, had died of meningitis in infancy (1870). His next brother, Grand Duke Georgy, Nicholas II’s childhood playmate, died in 1899 aged twenty-eight (the tsar kept a box of jokes uttered by Georgy that he had written down and could be heard laughing in the palace by himself). That is how Nicholas II’s younger brother Mikhail became heir, until the birth of Alexei in 1904 displaced him to second in line and regent for the minor, should Nicholas II die before Alexei’s maturity (in 1920). Then, the incurable hemophilia was diagnosed. Back in the autumn of 1912, at an imperial hunting preserve just below tsarist Warsaw, the-then eight-year-old Alexei had bumped his thigh exiting a boat. This mundane occurrence caused vast internal hemorrhaging and a bloody tumor near his groin, which became infected and produced spiking fevers (105°F). Death appeared imminent, yet an operation was out of the question: the blood flow from surgery would be unstoppable. Nicholas and Alexandra prayed to their most revered icons. They also appealed to Rasputin. “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” he telegrammed while traveling back in Siberia. “The Little One will not die.” Miraculously, following the telegram, the bleeding stopped, the fever subsided, and the tumor was reabsorbed.110 The doctors were stunned; the royal couple became attached still more unshakably to the magical Holy Man. Grand Duke Mikhail also did his part to bond Nicholas and Alexandra to Rasputin. At the time of the whispers in the fall of 1912 that Tsarevich Alexei had been given last rites, Mikhail, the next in line, evaded the okhranka and eloped in Vienna with his lover, Natalya Wulfert, a commoner and a divorcee, thereby appearing deliberately to forfeit his right to the throne. This left no one except the precarious boy.111 Alexei’s life-threatening incidents continued—falling off a chair, sneezing hard—yet each time Rasputin’s ramblings calmed the boy (and the boy’s mother) and halted the bleeding.

  Mysticism and the occult were rampant among Russia’s privileged orders—as everywhere in Europe’s aristocratic circles—but Nicholas and Alexandra’s anxiety for the dynasty’s future was entirely legitimate. And yet, among Europe’s monarchies secrecy in court affairs was the norm, and Russia’s royals refused to reveal the state secret that explained everything—and that might have elicited mass sympathy. Not even top generals or government ministers knew the truth about Alexei. In the resulting information vacuum, a public bacchanalia flourished about the pretend monk’s debauch with Alexandra and his malignant court camarilla. These tales were widely published, and sabotaged the monarchy in ways that all the alleged spies (like Sukhomlinov) never did. Street hawkers helped burn the Romanovs in figurative effigy with such pamphlets as The Secrets of the Romanovs and The Life and Adventures of Grigory Rasputin, in print runs of 20,000 to 50,000. And for the illiterate, picture postcards, skits, easily remembered verses, and jokes spread the stories of the monarchy’s moral decay and treason.112 “What’s the use of fighting,” soldiers at the front began to say, “if the Germans have already taken over?”113

  The supreme paradox was that despite everything, by 1916 the Russian state, assisted by self-organizing public associations tightly intertwined with the state’s agencies, had immensely improved the wartime economy.114 Until that year, Russia had to purchase most of its weapons abroad, and Russian soldiers were often hard pressed to match ammunition with their weapons—Japanese Arisakas, American Winchesters, British Lee-Enfields, on top of ancient Russian Berdans.115 The frontline troops were short of shells, short of rifles, short of uniforms, and short of boots (the army demanded a quarter-million pairs of boots per week).116 But after two years of war, Russia began producing ample quantities of rifles, ammunition, wireless sets, aircraft.117 Russia’s economy in 1916 was humming: employment, factory profits, and the stock market were way up. Taking advantage of the manufacturing surge, as well as new aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions, General Alexei Brusilov launched a bold offensive in June 1916. Technically, he was only conducting flanking support against Austria-Hungary as part of a Russian offensive against Germany to relieve the pressure against France and Britain (which were bogged down in the Verdun and Somme slaughterhouses). But in just weeks, Brusilov, adapting a crude form of an advanced technique—artillery combined with mobile infantry—while attacking on a wide front, broke through Austro-Hungarian defenses and devastated its rear. His forces annihilated nearly two thirds of Austria-Hungary’s eastern-front army: 600,000 enemy dead and wounded, 400,000 captured.118 A shattered Austrian chief of staff warned that “peace must be made in not too long a space, or we shall be fatally weakened, if not destroyed.”119 Instead, the German field marshal Paul von Hindenburg was sent to assume direct command over Habsburg forces—he called it the “worst crisis the eastern front had known.”120

  “We have won the war,” boasted the Russian foreign minister, who added that “the fighting will continue for several more years.”121 In the event, Russia’s own generals undermined Brusilov. One insubordinate general even marched the elite Imperial Guards—“physically the finest human animals in Europe”—into bogs, rendering them sitting ducks for German planes.122 Betrayed, in addition, by the railroad, Brusilov ran out of supplies. Brusilov himself had sacrificed a staggering 1.4 million Russians killed, wounded, and missing, and left himself no reserves. The final indignity came courtesy of Romania, which joined the Entente precisely because of Brusilov’s successes, but then had to be rescued when its catastrophic army went into battle. Nonetheless, Brusilov had mounted the Entente’s single best performance of the entire war, and optimists in Russia looked forward to 1917 as the year when military victory would be at hand. Politically, however, things looked increasingly shaky. “In our monarchy,” one former justice minister observed in 1916, “there is only a handful of monarchists.”123

  Soon enough, not victory but political implosion came to seem more likely. In fall 1916, a clutch of mutinies broke out, some involving whole regiments, in Petrograd’s outskirts, where rear units had swelled with untrained call-ups who fraternized with workers.124 Nicholas II heaped fuel onto the bonfire that was the dynasty’s image by transferring the accused traitor Sukhomlinov—known to be championed by Alexandra—from prison to house arrest. On November 1, 1916, the respected Paul Miliukov, speaking from the rostrum of the Duma, lit into the government, punctuating his indictment of war mismanagement with the ringing phrase “Is this treason, or is it stupidity?” Many deputies chanted “stupidity,” others “treason,” and quite a number shouted “Both! Both!” Miliukov elicited an ovation.125 The incendiary speech was banned from publication, but a disillusioned monarchist in the Duma, Vladimir Purishkevich, a prominent member of the Union of the Russian People, had it illegally distributed in thousands of copies at the front. Purishkevich himself, in the Duma, denounced government ministers as “Rasputin’s marionettes.” Hours before the Duma’s holiday recess, Purishkevich helped murder Rasputin, in a plot led by Prince Felix Yusupov with the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, as well as British intelligence officials. The mutilated and bullet-riddled corpse was found floating in the capital’s icy river a few days later, on December 19, 1916.126 Nicholas II was both quietly relieved and revolted.127 But many members of the establishment, cheering
the sensational demise of the “internal German,” nonetheless continued to sound the alarm. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote to his cousin the tsar after Rasputin’s murder, “Strange as it may sound, Nicky, we are witnessing a revolution promoted by the government.”128

  An autocrat strangely absent from the wartime capital, a pseudomonk in the autocrat’s absence inexplicably running wild at court, a government of nobody ministers who came and went anonymously, tales of treason on every newspaper’s front page, every street corner parliament, and in the Duma—the autocracy’s image became wrecked beyond repair. “I am obliged to report,” Maurice Paleologue, ambassador of France, Russia’s closest ally, telegraphed Paris in January 1917, “that at the present moment the Russian empire is run by lunatics.”129 Open gossip about pending palace coups speculated whether Nicholas II and Alexandra would both be murdered or just the latter.130 At staff headquarters, General Alexeyev and the brass discussed how they had managed the Brusilov offensive on their own, and began to think the once unthinkable. But what if a putsch against Nicholas II from the left came first?

  LAST LAST STRAW

  Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come. Throughout 1916 and into early 1917, almost every branch of the okhranka was warning of pending revolution (as well as anti-Jewish pogroms).131 No top revolutionary leaders were in Russia—Lenin, Martov, Chernov, Trotsky were all abroad—and the okhranka had neutralized many of the lesser socialist leaders who were resident in Petrograd, if the latter had not already neutralized themselves by political mistakes.132 On January 9, 1917, the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 170,000 strikers massed in the capital, shouting “Down with the government of traitors!” and “Down with the war!” but the day passed without revolution, thanks to numerous arrests. On February 14, 1917, up to 90,000 workers in the capital went on strike, and again the police made mass arrests.133 Strikes persisted; a February 22 lockout over wages at the Putilov Works sent thousands of men into the streets.134 A number of factories ceased operating for want of fuel, idling more workers. As fortune would have it, after a frigid January, the weather in Petrograd had turned unseasonably mild. On February 23, International Women’s Day—March 8 by the Western calendar—some 7,000 low-paid women left Petrograd’s textile mills to march, shouting not only “Down with the tsar!” and “Down with the war!” but also “Bread!” Why were marchers on International Women’s Day demanding bread? Contrary to myth, the tsarist state had managed to cope with most exigencies of the war, as Brusilov’s well-supplied offensive demonstrated (by the end of 1917, the shell reserve would reach a total of 18 million.)135 But the tsarist state fumbled the organization of the food supply.136 The state’s food supply emergency emerged as a kind of last last straw.