As the casualties piled up in the millions, opposition to the war began to surface among the socialists in Western Europe. The first to break ranks were the left wing of the German Social-Democrats, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and their followers, who voted against the war credits in the Reichstag in December 1914. Soon the anti-war socialists held small meetings in Switzerland to call for an end to the war and discuss tactics, and even here Lenin, with his uncompromising call for revolution, was in the minority. The Russian Bolsheviks for the first time came to the attention of the world, as a tiny band of revolutionaries who stuck to their position even though it seemed to doom them to isolation and defeat. Their position began to attract support among Western socialists, and out of these small groups meeting in Switzerland came a world movement with decisive consequences for Russia as well as for China, Vietnam, and other countries as well.
The consequences of these obscure meetings lay in the distant future. Back in Russia, the situation gradually deteriorated and offered no comfort to either the tsar and his government or the Bolsheviks. At the start of the war Nicholas suspended the Duma, hoping to rule alone. The initial defeat in East Prussia was followed in spring, 1915, by a general Russian retreat from Poland, and this retreat finally led to a government crisis. The Duma was recalled over the summer, and the Kadets and moderate conservatives managed to put together a “Progressive Bloc” that offered to cooperate in the war effort with the government. Ultimately the government did have to call on the zemstvos and various committees of businessmen to resolve the crises in supply, but only reluctantly and too late. New agencies appeared to regulate the economy for the war, as in Germany and other warring powers, but Russia lacked the infrastructure to make them work. The government regulated grain prices to supply the army and cities with cheap food, but the result was that the peasants began to cut back on their sowing, and food production began to fall, worsening the situation.
In late 1915 Nicholas himself took over command of the army, moving from Petrograd to the Stavka, the army headquarters near Mogilev. His move did the army no good and only further disorganized government in the capital, for he remained the sole authority and now it was even harder to get his attention. His repeated consultation with Empress Alexandra and Rasputin probably did not have much impact on policy but served to further alienate the public. The Russian army had mixed successes, for it could do little against the Germans but scored a major victory against Austria in 1916 (the “Brusilov Offensive” led by General Aleksei Brusilov) and against the Turks. Erzerum in eastern Anatolia fell to General Nikolai Yudenich the same year. These successes could not change the general stagnation in the war nor stop the bloodshed. Russia’s casualties mounted toward some two million dead, two-and-a-half million wounded, and five million prisoners of war. In the Duma the Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov spoke of treason in high places (a reference to the Empress Alexandra, among others) and then in December 1916, a group of young aristocrats fearful of the fate of the monarchy assassinated Rasputin. Inviting him to dinner, they first fed him heavily poisoned food and wine, and then when that had no effect on his massive frame, they shot him and put him under the ice of the St. Petersburg canals. Rasputin was gone, and the monarchy soon followed.
In many respects the fall of the Romanov dynasty was almost an anticlimax. In late February 1917, the worsening food situation in St. Petersburg led to long lines at bakeries and other food stores in working class parts of the city. On International Women’s Day (February 23/March 8; a socialist holiday) many women workers, exhausted by standing in the food lines on top of long work days, went out on strike. In a few hours the men in the factories heard the news and they went out on strike as well, soon shutting down the entire city. Students and the middle classes joined them. The government called out troops, who fired on the demonstrators, killing several dozen. The next day, however, the very same soldiers who had fired refused to fight and mutinied, taking other regiments with them, even the Cossacks. The ministers and the Duma sent increasingly desperate telegrams to the tsar, and Nicholas hurried back from the Stavka. Before he got to the capital he was met by representatives of the government who convinced him to abdicate. This he did, on March 2/15, and the monarchy abruptly came to an end.
REVOLUTION
Even before the tsar’s abdication two new governments were forming in Petrograd. As the tsar’s government collapsed, the Duma leaders formed a Provisional Government led by Prince Georgii Lvov, the head of the Union of Zemstvos, a liberal country gentleman with a law degree and a record of service in the local councils and the Duma. His foreign minister was the leader of the Kadet party, the historian Pavel Miliukov. The only more or less radical voice was that of Aleksandr Kerenskii, a lawyer known for defense work in political trials and a member of the Duma’s “Labor Group,” agrarian socialists close to the right wing of the SRs. His father had been the principal of the high school in Simbirsk when Lenin was one of the pupils. These men were the flower of liberal Russia, broadly conceived, but as a group had no idea how to lead the masses and spent much of their time worrying about the reactions of Russia’s wartime allies, Britain, France, and soon the United States. Their preferred solution to all problems facing Russia was to call a Constituent Assembly to write a constitution for a democratic republic that would address the peasants’ desire for the land and the grievances of the workers. In the meantime they would pursue the war, hopefully to an allied victory over Germany.
The other “government” was the Petrograd Soviet. On Menshevik urging, the workers at nearly every factory in the city elected delegates to the city Soviet, which numbered nearly a thousand members. Its first act was “Order no. 1” that specified that the army was to be run by elected soviets of the soldiers, the officers having command only during operations. As the revolutionary parties came out into the open for the first time in Russian history, the Mensheviks and SRs, not the Bolsheviks, quickly asserted dominance in the Soviet in Petrograd and most other towns. The Menshevik tactic was to refuse support to the Provisional Government and simultaneously push it toward a more radical direction, a hopeless compromise position. Right at the start, the war had to be faced as an issue. While the Russian Mensheviks differed from most European socialists by arguing that the war should be ended without victory for either side, they had no workable plan to stop it, nor did they advocate an immediate socialist revolution. Their position did reflect real popular hostility to the war, and in May Miliukov and others had to leave the Provisional Government, for they wanted to push the war to a victorious end and the Soviet would not have that. Lvov organized a new government with several moderate socialists, including Kerenskii who was in charge of the army and navy, and started a new offensive at the front. Soviets were also formed in Moscow and other cities, in the army, and even in some parts of the countryside. They represented workers, soldiers, and peasants only, not the middle or upper classes. Reelected every few weeks, the local soviets reflected the popular mood very closely.