The psychological moment, at which for many years past grain had been taken to market, had been missed. And once it had been missed, there was nothing to be done. Even a price increase would not conjure up grain again. The producers were not so much in need of paper money that they could not wait for a further increase.
The army’s plenipotentiaries requisitioned the grain they needed, but the wholesale purchasers did not succeed in moving grain by river in summer or in autumn. In 1916 they let the whole navigation season slip by, though rivers were the arteries of the Russian grain trade. The Nizhny Novgorod barge train, which traditionally collected 10 million poods of the new crop from the lower Volga, returned to its winter moorings empty. In the autumn of 1916 the first-class mills of the middle and lower Volga, which used to mill a hundred thousand poods a day for the whole north, came to a standstill and dismissed their workers. At railroad stations too many freight cars stood empty waiting for grain that never came. For the Novgorod, Pskov, and Archangel provinces buying grain became more and more of an impossibility. In autumn, as always, Russia’s dirt roads were washed out, and although there was still a month of navigation left, it was impossible, with the best will in the world, to transport grain to the docks or to a railroad.
A full crop was harvested by soldiers’ wives, old people, and adolescents in 1916. But it was not where it was needed: in the depths of rural Russia it languished in barns and ricks out of reach of mills, bakers, and bread shops. There was bread in Russia—but there might as well not have been. There was no need for famine in Russia—but by the spring of 1917 the threat of famine might become reality. Before autumn was out even provinces as far south as Kharkov and Rostov-on-Don had begun to experience interruptions in grain supplies, while Moscow and Petrograd had laid in no stocks at all, and were living on deliveries organized from day to day by the government.
The progressive public should have been triumphant: it had obtained low fixed prices and so succeeded in damaging the hated landowners. But, contrary to the predictions of Kadet economists, and to Groman’s amazement, it was not the village that found itself in dire difficulties—forcing it to market its grain speedily—but the towns, further burdened as they were with refugees from the western provinces. They had denied the agrarians the chance to get rich quickly. But they had handed it to the urban profiteers instead.
Only an unusually firm government would have dared to think and decide for itself, ignoring the loud self-confident voice of educated society. The Russian government’s response to the reproaches and importunities of the public was to give way, to vacillate, and sometimes to retract the concessions it had made. Its will was eroded, churned into a fluid mess like the Russian dirt road in autumn. The opposite ends of an invisible rope were in the hands of the educated public and of the government, and each side tugged away, sometimes gaining, sometimes giving ground, never noticing that the rope had formed itself into a noose, and that the noose was not just anywhere, but around the gullet of their country.
After the dismissal of the Duma in September 1915 the Kadet leaders were deeply disillusioned. The word was, of course, that now events would bypass the monarch, that he had put himself in the position of having to make amends, but payment had to be postponed until Germany was defeated. Even the restrained Maklakov made these transparent remarks in Russkie Vedomosti:
If you and your mother are being driven along a narrow mountain road by a chauffeur who doesn’t know what he is doing, but, having taken the wheel, refuses to surrender it, would you, I ask you, try to wrest it from his hands? No! Indeed, you would give the driver helpful advice and put off the reckoning with him until that longed-for time when you were back on level ground …
The right wing of the Bloc did not see what had happened as a disaster.
We regarded the replacement of the Supreme Commander as a tragedy, but the Emperor was more farsighted and the change proved to be for the best. We insisted on the replacement of ministers, yet the most undesirable of them, Goremykin, remained—and the war went better. The flow of refugees was stemmed, Moscow will not be taken—and that is infinitely more important than who is going to be a minister, or when they convoke the Duma. So if we shake our fists at the government we will only weaken our own authority.
The Kadets felt even worse. Maybe they should not have joined the Bloc at all? A long line of left-wing parties was forever tugging the left-leaning Kadets in their direction. The more to the left a party was, the more the intelligentsia respected it, and in that noble array the Kadets were a mob of opportunist office hunters. The Kadet Party itself had its own left wing, led by Nekrasov, Margulis, and Mandelstam, who accused Milyukov of leading the party into a bog, demanded that it get into line with the left, adopt illegal tactics, unite with the socialists, and, of course, leave the Bloc.
The center of the Bloc also acknowledged the collapse of its hopes.
Efremov: Society is dismayed by the Bloc’s failure to assert itself. The Duma session was ended—the Bloc was silent.
Prince G. Lvov: The Bloc wanted to make a sacrifice, share the responsibility, but obtuse people explained this as an aspiration to carry out some sort of coup. The Bloc has made no mistakes. But Russia is left in the air.
In 1915–16 Milyukov needed great resourcefulness in argument, and great sureness of foot, as the Bloc teetered on the brink of the abyss. No ordinary eyes would discern it, but their outstanding leader discerned, and revealed to his intimates, that the Bloc’s time was at hand. Once the war ended, France and England would not give a single kopeck to any government which was not answerable to the Duma. The nearer victory came, the more anxious our stupid government would be to compromise. It could not appear at a peace congress with its daggers drawn against the Duma. It had wedged itself into a dead end more constricted than itself by going to war with Germany. But it must not be allowed to make peace with Wilhelm, it must be forced to carry the war to a victorious conclusion! And victory would deliver the Russian government into the hands of the liberals. Hence, their strategy must be to wait, and be patient.
On the other hand, of course, the threat of revolution was growing, and here the Kadets must deploy all their skill: they must restrain their just indignation and remember that accounts with the government could be settled only after the war. They must endure the humiliations, the harassment, the contempt they could expect from the government, but make sure that no social explosion took place before the war ended. Otherwise Wilhelm would emerge victorious and deliver us into the hands of an all-powerful Nicholas. If a social explosion was in fact inevitable, it would come on the day after the war, and the cowardly government would capitulate instantly, enabling the country’s educated and liberal circles to seize power without bloodshed, especially as they would have the support of England and France.
In either case, they argued, we will soon be in power.
Throughout those months they met frequently in private apartments, and Milyukov, methodical as ever, diligently recorded those wearisome ding-dong debates for the benefit of history. (He subsequently abandoned his notes in Russia, instead of taking them with him into emigration, where he would probably have destroyed them. These notes look fresher to a modern reader than his cunningly crafted, polished memoirs or his published speeches.)
Astrov: The social strata below look on us with hatred and exasperation. The people’s anger is vented not on the government but on the social organizations.
Maklakov: The leftists are mounting a disgusting attack on the franchised classes. I’m afraid we are in for a radical disagreement with the left.
Milyukov: We must prepare our defense against accusations from the left.
Maklakov: But from the moment when we enter into conflict with the crown I have no fear of the left. How can we arouse the public? Should we devise a compelling slogan and call for strikes? We are afraid to go down that road. I put my hopes on 23 March (date of the Emperor Paul’s assassination).
Prince G. Lvov: If w
e put too much emphasis on conflict with the crown the result may be complete failure. We unite people by an appeal to greed.
Chelnokov: I’m afraid the so-called upsurge will be a weak and ineffective one. How many times do we have to adopt the same resolutions?
Guchkov somehow or other got into the act:
I would be prepared to await the end of the war, if we could be sure that it would end favorably. But we are being led to total defeat and collapse. Your silence, and ours, will be interpreted as acquiescence with the regime. We must break off peaceful relations with it.
Meller: We are a threat now because we are silent. Our position is very strong.
VI. Gurko: If we remain silent Grishka (Rasputin) himself will become Prime Minister. Only fear has any effect. We must frighten the wits out of them. Should we appeal to the streets? Perhaps as a last resort we should.
Stempkovsky: Supplies to the army are now running smoothly. So price inflation and the chaos on the railways are the sticks we must use to beat the government.
Efremov: We must set the press on them.
Shidlovsky: And include in a future Duma resolution patriotic phrases and ideas to indemnify ourselves. To preserve the Bloc we have to avoid raising thorny questions.
Milyukov put forward a draft resolution for adoption by a Duma which had yet to be convened. It contained all the demands without which victory over Germany was—supposedly—impossible: first and foremost, an amnesty for the revolutionaries, then equal rights for the Jews and conciliation of the non-Russian peoples, and finally “a government made up of people strengthened by the confidence of the country at large.” Once again they were brought up short by the intractable problem of identifying such people for the benefit of the Emperor. How could they be sure that a particular person really did enjoy the country’s confidence? What if the Emperor agreed tomorrow—and asked, “Where are they?” Would it not be tactless to mention names at this point?
Dmitryukov: Public confidence is a concept not mentioned in constitutional law.
(So perhaps it should be?)
Efremov: It is dangerous to attach too much importance to a change of faces. What is needed is a change of system. The formula “an administration enjoying confidence” is a mistake, the administration must be responsible. Ministers should not be driven out from above but should depart when they are denied the confidence of the Duma.
Milyukov: That means changing the whole state structure. No one does that in wartime. You don’t change horses in midstream.
But they all agreed that the Bloc had one main, indisputable, immediate task:
—To make a scapegoat of Goremykin, blame him for everything.
—But we said that the Duma could not be convened with Goremykin still there—and now we’re agreeing to it?
—Serious conversations with Goremykin must wait till after the war. We must arm ourselves with patience.
—No, we can’t let Goremykin sign the peace treaty.
—If it comes to complete victory over Germany we won’t be able to rekindle hostility toward Goremykin.
—We must sound the alarm: the Council of Ministers is the only unpatriotic group in the country!
Shulgin: We must run the whole show so we can say as much as possible before we’re sent packing!
But the government, feeble and sluggish as it was, outmaneuvered the Bloc yet again. In mid-January the superannuated Goremykin was dismissed. This was three weeks before the Duma was due to assemble: their sacrificial victim had been spared. Only to be replaced by … By whom? Was Nicholas II deliberately devising a farce? With the World War at its most intense, and Russian society seething, whom did he single out from among his gifted subjects, from among Russia’s 170 million people, to serve as Prime Minister, and by what ludicrous criterion? A dutiful hack from the General Affairs Department, born to supervise the ceremonial side of government, with a German name to boot—Stürmer, the High Chamberlain of the Imperial Court. (He was perfectly honest and reasonably active, but a mediocrity. But the worst of it was that the Emperor had no ear for the insulting ring of the name.) Goremykin’s two widely separated prongs of beard were replaced by a single long, limp mop which looked as if it was glued on like Santa Claus’s whiskers. And whereas the odious Goremykin in his time had wanted to govern alone, without the Duma, the new All-Russian Master of Ceremonies not only did not object to its protracted sittings but did his best to get along with the Progressive Bloc, and even invited the deputies to a social gathering!
The flabbergasted deputies conferred in secret.
Shidlovsky: Why shouldn’t we go to his party?
Milyukov: Never, come what may—we would be letting ourselves down.
Efremov: We must not play a waiting game: that will make the government feel more sure of itself. We must say right away we have no faith in the government!
Maklakov: How can we—on its very first day—say that we have no faith in the government? That just looks like blind prejudice.
At this point, however, the Zemgor militants arrived in Petrograd and presented their note to the Duma. They asserted not only that victory was impossible under the present government but that the country should not go on fighting one day longer while it was in power.
N. Kishkin: Transport, the food supply, refugees must all be taken away from the government and handed over to the social organizations. Otherwise we must break with it completely!
N. Shchepkin: Should we preserve this semblance of a Duma simply for the sake of a free platform? Or in its present inglorious existence has it already lost all significance and would final dissolution of the Duma serve the country better?
Astrov: We sought to set out our impressions in the memorandum. No amendments are necessary. An objective formulation is not what concerns us. What we want from the Bloc is an assured and stern tone. The inner core of the social organizations is getting tired of waiting.
The Duma met on 22 February 1916. They wanted originally to put it off for another two weeks and meet on Forgiveness Day—the last day of Shrovetide, which is dear to every Russian, the day when Orthodox Christians bow low to each other and beg forgiveness. The Kadets were so remote from Orthodoxy that Forgiveness Day was most unlikely to mollify them. The throne, however, was conscious of some mistake or tactlessness on its part, and Russia’s most imposing fatty, Rodzyanko, scored a success: he talked the Emperor into taking an unusual step—attending the opening of the Duma and in fact visiting it for the first time in his life. The turbulent deputies assembled in the Catherine Hall greeted the Emperor with prolonged “hurrahs.” A solemn service was held, and the members of the Duma, the far left excluded, sang “Save, O Lord, Thy people.” The Emperor looked very pale as he first set foot in that tigers’ cage, but gradually recovered his composure.
But for the stiffness to which his lack of self-assurance condemned him, that man might even then have changed the history of Russia: a frank gaze, a big smile, a man-to-man handshake with the deputies, then perhaps he could have mounted the rostrum, stood under that frigid portrait of himself, and opened his heart to his Russian subjects, tell them of his own anxiety, his sadness, but say at the same time that together with the people’s representatives (never mind for the moment whether they really were that) he hoped to get the better of Wilhelm, that there would never be a separate peace, that in truth he had never entertained such a thought, had never made a move in that direction, because to do so you would have to be a traitor to Russia, and he, her Tsar, who owed her most, strove to serve her to the best of his abilities. All this, not just in words but in a voice that was loud and steady. He should have gone on to replace the Master of Ceremonies with some competent person as Prime Minister—almost any change would have been for the better.
But the energy of the dynasty, and its ability to speak out boldly and frankly, had died with Aleksandr III.
On that day, as always, the looks, words, gestures, and actions of the monarch were as constrained and as evas
ive as could be. He said a few vague words to the circle of deputies immediately around him, peeked for the first time in the ten years of the Duma’s existence into the chamber, asked which party sat on which benches, signed the distinguished visitors’ book, chatted amicably with the Duma clerks, with whom he felt more at ease, and took his leave. (His brother Mikhail at least stayed on through the boredom of the Duma session.)
Then the limp old Master of Ceremonies with his long brush of a beard mounted the rostrum holding an exercise book, to read out in his feeble voice a government statement.
He was answered by Milyukov:
At some point lack of expertise seems to have become a qualification for appointment to a ministry. This is a government with no confidence in the Russian people. I leave the rostrum without an answer, and with no hope of receiving one from the present government.
He had mastered as well as anybody the tactic of pretending to break relations and not going through with it. His cautious hoof could always feel the brink of the abyss before him.
Restraining himself and others was the main effort Milyukov had to make throughout 1916: restraining the Progressive Bloc, restraining the rabid Zemgor Alliance, and above all restraining the left in his own party. At the Kadet congress late in February the leftists savaged and sought to annihilate Milyukov. His harshest critics were the Kadets from Kiev and Odessa and the Moscow attorney Mandelstam.
Mandelstam: Milyukov is sure that he is saving the party from disaster, but he is in fact destroying it. We must, before it is too late, cross over to the other side of the abyss, and form a bloc with those to our left, not with those to the right. Our political calculations must start from the fact that there will be a reckoning, a stern judgment by the people, after the war. Let us be frank: there are many in our midst who see revolution as another Pugachev rising and nothing more. But if we do not want a senseless rebellion we must endeavor to play the leading role in the popular movement.
Shingarev was inclined to agree with him in part:
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