Within the Council of Ministers there was a growing majority in favour of a compromise with the Progressive Bloc. Krivoshein and Polivanov, Sukhomlinov's replacement, led the way. But eight others soon followed, especially after the Tsar had announced his decision to take over the military command, thus leaving the government to the mercy of the Tsarina and Rasputin. On 28 August the 'revolt of the ministers' came to a head with a direct appeal to the Tsar to appoint a new ministry enjoying the confidence of the Duma. Only 'the old man' Goremykin, the discredited Premier, refused to join the demands for reform, blindly convinced to the end of his absolute duty to obey the Tsar. The next day he hurried to Mogilev and urged Nicholas to close down the Duma and sack his disobedient ministers in order to reassert his autocratic power. The Tsarina, who had always believed in her husband's mission to rule 'like Ivan the Terrible', added her own voice, condemning the rebel ministers as 'fiends worse than the Duma' who 'needed smacking'.
It was not hard, by this stage, to convince the Tsar that he should reassert his autocratic authority. That, after all, had probably been his main objective in assuming the supreme command. As he saw it, none of his concessions to the liberal opposition had stemmed the public criticisms of his government, in fact they had only grown louder, and it was time to stop any further erosion of his authority. He deemed it intolerable that at this critical moment for the Empire, when the firm hand of autocracy was needed more than ever, his ministers should think fit to ask him to renounce his personal rule. On 2 September he ordered the dissolution of the Duma and reconfirmed his confidence in the government of his old and faithful servant, Goremykin. When the Premier returned to Petrograd and announced this decision to the Council of Ministers there was uproar. 'Il est fou, ce vieillard,' Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was heard to say.36
There followed a two-day general strike in Petrograd against the Duma's closure. But otherwise the opposition's response was muted. Lvov was elected to lead a delegation of the public organizations to plead with the Tsar to 'place the heavy burden of power upon the shoulders of men made strong by the nation's confidence'. But Nicholas refused to receive them. They were summoned instead to the Ministry of the Interior where they were told that their 'intrusion into state politics' had been presumptuous. The Tsar had made up his mind to rule as an autocrat should, and no counsel, however wise or loyal, could make him change his mind. On 16 September the ministers were summoned to
Mogilev for a final dressing down. 'Show your fist,' the Tsarina had urged her weak-willed husband. 'You are the Autocrat and they dare not forget it.' She even implored him to comb his hair with Rasputin's comb in order to strengthen his will.37 The magic must have worked. For the ministers, having come determined to argue their case for reform, lost their nerve when confronted by the Tsar. The 'revolt of the ministers' was over and the monarchy's final chance to save itself by political means had now been thrown away.
The dissolution of the Duma highlighted the liberals' impotence. Power lay firmly with the Romanov court and, even with ten of the highest government officials on their side, there was nothing, short of revolution, the liberals could do to prevent the Tsar from taking power into his own hands. The Kadet politician, V A. Maklakov, summed up the liberals' dilemma in a widely quoted article in September. He compared Russia to an automobile being driven down a steep and dangerous hill at uncontrollable speed by a mad chauffeur (Nicholas). Among the passengers there are one's mother (Russia) plus competent drivers, who recognize that they are being driven to inevitable doom. But no one dares grab the steering wheel for fear of causing a fatal accident. The chauffeur knows this and mocks the helplessness and anxiety of the passengers: 'You will not dare touch me,' he tells them. And, indeed, in these terrible circumstances, Maklakov concluded:
you will not dare touch him, for even if you might risk your own life, you are travelling with your mother, and you will not dare endanger your life for fear that she too might be killed. So you will leave the steering wheel in the hands of the chauffeur. Moreover, you will try not to hinder him — you will even help him with advice, warning and assistance. And you will be right, for this is what has to be done.38
The liberals' paralysis was determined, above all, by their fear of sparking violence on the streets. They were caught between the devil of autocracy and the deep red sea of a social revolution that would undoubtedly drown them too. Miliukov was afraid that if the Duma went into open conflict with the regime and encouraged a popular revolt, as some on the left of his party advocated, it would lead to an 'orgy of the mob'.39 Pushkin's nightmare of the 'Russian riot, senseless and without mercy' would finally come to pass. Rather than risk this, the liberals played a waiting game: if they could hold out until an Allied victory, new channels for reform would open up. It was not the most dignified stance (a 'revolt on their knees' is how Stalin described it) but, short of moving to the barricades, there was little more that they could do. Essentially, it marked a return to the position of 1906, when the failure of the Vyborg Manifesto to rally the masses in the defence of the Duma had left the liberals high and dry,
with nothing more to cling to than the hope of persuading the regime to liberalize itself. Ten years later, with the lessons of Vyborg behind them, they were even more frightened of the masses, who now were hardly more likely — at the height of the war with all its hardships — to limit themselves to the narrow political revolution envisaged by the liberals.
Encouraged by the success of his own show of strength, Nicholas followed it up with a series of further measures to roll back the liberal challenge to his autocracy. The promised Duma session in November, granted to appease the critics of its prorogation in September, was postponed indefinitely. The status of the War Industries Committees was gradually downgraded as the government returned to its old alliance with the big business interests of Petro-grad. And, one by one, the main rebel ministers were dismissed. Samarin, the new Procurator of the Holy Synod and a prominent critic of Rasputin, was the first to be forced out, much to the fury of the Church and conservative opinion. Krivoshein, the Agriculture Minister, followed soon after. Next Shcher-batov, the Interior Minister, was replaced by Khvostov, an ally of Rasputin's, distinguished only by the huge size of his belly, who immediately pledged to silence all public criticism of the government. He stepped up police surveillance of the Duma politicians, banned meetings of public organizations, tightened censorship and lavished government funds on the Black Hundred groups, which blamed the Jews for the army's defeats and all the ills of war.
In all these personnel changes the Tsarina's hand was at work. With the Tsar at the Front, she now became the real autocrat (in so far as there was one) in Petrograd. 'Lovy,' she wrote to her husband, 'I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don't laugh at silly old wify, but she has "trousers" on unseen.' The main telephone in the Winter Palace was in her drawing-room, where she sat at her writing desk before a portrait of Marie Antoinette. She liked to boast that she was the first woman in Russia to receive government ministers since Catherine the Great, and in these delusions she was encouraged by Rasputin, who effectively used her as a mouthpiece for his own pretensions to power. Her letters to Nicholas were filled with advice from 'Our Friend', as she liked to call the 'holy' peasant. 'It's not my wisdom', she would write, 'but a certain instinct given by God beyond myself so as to be your help.' Or: 'We, who have been taught to look at all from another side see what the struggle here really is and means — you showing your mastery, proving yourself the Autocrat without which Russia cannot exist.' It seems there was almost no matter of state beyond Rasputin's expertise. She would write to the Tsar with his recommendations on food supply, transport, finance and land reform, although she herself admitted that such things made her own head spin. She even tried to persuade her husband to base his military strategy on what Rasputin had 'seen in the night', although here Nicholas put his foot down.40
Most of the Tsarina's ink was used on recommendations for appointments. She saw the
world in terms of friends and enemies of the 'hidden cause' waged by Rasputin and herself. Ministers, commanders of the armed forces and members of the court all rose or fell in her favour according to where they stood in relation to the 'cause'. The patronage of Rasputin was the quickest way up the greasy pole — and criticism of him the quickest way down. In the seventeen months of the 'Tsarina's rule', from September 1915 to February 1917, Russia had four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. This 'ministerial leapfrog', as it came to be known, not only removed competent men from power, but also disorganized the work of government since no one remained long enough in office to master their responsibilities. Bureaucratic anarchy developed with competing chains of authority: some ministers would defer to the Tsarina or Rasputin, while others remained loyal to the Tsar, or at least to what they thought the Tsar was, although when it came to the crunch he never seemed to know what he stood for and in any case never really dared to oppose his wife. Boris Sturmer, the longest-lasting Prime Minister of the 'Tsarina's rule', who replaced the senile Goremykin in January 1916, was best known as a provincial governor who had been accused of venality, and as an Assistant Minister of Interior who had been charged with incompetence. In Sazonov's memorable phrase, he was 'a man who had left behind a bad memory wherever he had occupied an administrative post'. The affairs of state proved utterly beyond him. He ran to the Tsarina and Rasputin so often for advice that even the extreme monarchist V M. Purishkevich began to compare this ridiculous figure to Chichikov in Gogol's Dead Souls, who, after calling on all the dignitaries of the provincial town, sat for a long time in his carriage wondering who to visit next.41
* * * Perhaps the most damaging change of personnel was the dismissal of Polivanov in March 1916. More than any other man he was responsible for the rebuilding of the Russian army after the terrible losses of the Great Retreat. Major-General Knox, the British military attache in Russia, thought him 'undoubtedly the ablest military organizer in Russia' and called his dismissal 'a disaster'. Polivanov's crime, in the eyes of the Tsarina, had been his readiness to work with the public organizations in improving army supplies. 'Oh, how I wish you could get rid of Polivanov,' she wrote to her husband in January. 'He is simply a revolutionist.' His friendship with Guchkov, head of the War Industries Committees, was seen by the court with special alarm, since in November the Octobrist leader had invited elected workers' representatives to sit with him on the committees' central governing body. 'I wish you could shut up that rotten war industries committee', the Tsarina implored her husband in March, 'as they prepare simply anti-dynastic
questions for their meetings.' As for Guchkov, she asked, 'Could one not hang him?'42
The appointment of General Shuvaev, Polivanov's successor, proved beyond doubt that unthinking obedience was now deemed far more important for a Minister of War than military expertise. Shuvaev himself once told Knox that if the Tsar ordered him to jump from the window he would gladly oblige. And when his gross mismanagement of the war led to growing public charges of 'treason in high places', all he could honestly say in self-defence was 'I may be a fool, but I am no traitor.'43
With the help of the public organizations Polivanov had greatly improved the supply and morale of the army. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the South-Western Front, where Brusilov had been appointed the Front commander in March. He brought in a new style of military professionalism to the Front headquarters, promoting talented officers such as Klembovsky and Velichko (who along with Brusilov and Polivanov himself would later help inject a similar professionalism into the Red Army). Brusilov was quick to establish a good working relationship with the public organizations, and the effects of this were soon felt on his Front. 'Little by little', he recalled:
our technical equipment improved; rifles were supplied, of various types perhaps, but anyhow with a sufficiency of cartridges; while ammunition for the artillery, especially the light guns, arrived in abundance . . . We had every cause to reckon on being able to defeat the enemy and drive him across our frontier.44
Brusilov's optimism marked him out at the Council of War on 15 April, when Russia's Front commanders met with the Tsar at Stavka to plan out the summer's operations. Generals Kuropatkin and Evert, commanders of the North-Western and Western Fronts respectively, were pessimistic about the prospects for an offensive. But Brusilov promised to make things easier for them by launching an attack against the Austrians on his own South-Western Front, despite being warned that no extra men or supplies would be spared from the north. The other commanders were shocked and annoyed by his boldness. 'You have only just been appointed Front commander,' one of them told him as they sat down to dinner, 'and you are lucky enough not to be one of those picked out to take the offensive, and so aren't called upon like them to risk your military reputation. Fancy rushing into such colossal dangers!' But this complacent attitude, so typical of the Tsar's favourite generals, was a long way from Brusilov's own determination and, perhaps naive, optimism. He was sure that God was leading Russia to victory, a faith reflected throughout the war in his letters to
his wife. 'I remain convinced', he wrote to her at the height of the Great Retreat, 'that somehow things will work out and we will win the war.'45
Nor did the scorn of Brusilov's colleagues take into account the sheer ingenuity of his tactics, which were set to make his offensive, in the words of Norman Stone, the main historian of the Eastern Front, 'the most brilliant victory of the war'.46 What distinguished Brusilov's military genius was his willingness to learn from the tactical lessons of 1914—15. Ever since the Fronts had become fixed and the war of mobility had given way to the war of position, Europe's generals had attempted to break through the enemy lines by concentrating men and munitions at a single point of the Front. The German breakthrough at Gorlice was a classic example of this 'phalanx' method, which Russia's generals slavishly followed thereafter. Brusilov was the one exception. He argued that the Russians, with their primitive railways, could not hope to concentrate their forces in one place without the enemy learning of it with plenty of time to bring up defensive reserves. As long as the element of surprise continued to be sacrificed on the altar of strength, Russia could not hope to gain a decisive breakthrough. He proposed instead to attack simultaneously at several points along the Front, thus making it difficult for the enemy, even with intelligence of the offensive positions, to guess where defensive reserves would be needed most.
Intensive preparations were made for the offensive. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The key to Brusilov's plan was surprise, so everything was done to safeguard secrecy (even the Tsarina could not find out when or where the attack would begin). Offensive trenches were dug deeper than usual and camouflaged by a novel device of spraying the ground with paint. Assault tunnels were built under the Austrian barbed wire to within a hundred yards of their lines, so that when the assault was launched the first wave of attackers could reach their trenches in one rush. The enemy's positions were carefully studied with the benefit of aerial photography. This enabled Brusilov to build full-scale models of the Austrian trenches and train his assault troops on them. It also meant that when the offensive began the Russians knew the precise location of the Austrian batteries and, in some places, even of individual machine-guns. Despite its inferior numbers, the Russian artillery thus had the one decisive advantage of knowing its targets, and this was to ensure the offensive's initial success.47
The offensive began on 4 June, in Brusilov's words, 'with a thunderous artillery barrage all along the South-Western Front'. 'The entire zone of battle was covered by a huge, thick cloud of dust and smoke,' an Austrian officer wrote, which 'allowed the Russians to come over the ruined wire-obstacles in thick waves and into our trenches.' Within forty-eight hours the Russians had broken through the Austrian defences along a fifty-mile front, capturing more than
40,000 prisone
rs. By day nine the number had risen to 200,000 men, more than half the Habsburg forces on the Eastern Front, and Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, was starting to talk of the need to sue for peace.48
If Evert and Kuropatkin had followed up Brusilov's advance with their own promised attacks on the Western and North-Western Fronts, the enemy might have been pushed back and the course of the war changed entirely. Hindenburg later confessed that with a second offensive, 'We [would have been] faced with the menace of a complete collapse.' According to the original war plan, Brusilov's Front was considered secondary to both Evert's and Kuroptakin's. Yet neither of them was prepared to attack. To be fair, their task would have been much harder than Brusilov's. For they would have had to fight the German troops, which were much stronger than the Austro-Hungarian forces whom Brusiloy had overcome on the South-Western Front. But their vanity was also a factor: the increased risk of defeat made them all the more afraid of losing their own precious reputations. Perhaps the real blame lay with Stavka. Alexeev had served under Kuropatkin and Evert during the Japanese War and was still too frightened of them to force them to attack. The Tsar also indulged the cowardly generals — they were the favourites of his court — and ignored Brusilov's daily requests to order an offensive. The Tsarina was partly behind this. She bombarded her indecisive husband with Rasputin's 'expert' advice against an offensive in the north 'because', in his words, 'if our successes in the south continue, then they [the Germans] will themselves retreat in the north'.49
Such military stupidity was largely to blame for the slow-down of Brusilov's advance. Instead of starting a second offensive Stavka transferred troops from the north to Brusilov's Front. They were not enough to maintain the momentum of his offensive, however, since the Germans, with their position eased by the inactivity of Evert and Kuropatkin, were also able to transfer reinforcements to the south. Conscious of his declining advantage, Brusilov now reverted to orthodox tactics, advancing towards Kovel but fighting, in his own words, 'at a lower pressure ... to spare my men as far as possible'. Slowly but surely, the Russian advance was grinding to a halt. In eight weeks of fighting Brusilov's armies had captured 425,000 men and a large part of Galicia; the enemy had been forced to withdraw troops from the Western Front, thus relieving pressure on Italy and the French at Verdun; while Romania, for what it was worth, was at last persuaded to join the war on the side of the Russians. Ludendorff called it 'the crisis in the East'. In 1918 he would pay the ultimate compliment to Brusilov's tactics by using them himself on the Western Front.50
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