Russia’s entry into the war (a “just war,” it seemed, not an autocratic adventure) briefly rallied the nation behind the tsar, and gave the government a short reprieve. But by the end of 1916 the initial enthusiasm had disappeared with the realities of the carnage and was completely buried along with Russia’s 5 million dead. In Siberia, all of the regular troops stationed in the Far East had been sent to the European front, and most of the Siberian Cossacks had left their farms. Simple peasants too were mobilized, and the industrial workers in the towns were called up. Farms lay idle, factories were shut down. But up to the very end, Nicholas refused to cooperate with the reconstituted Duma, and assumed personal command of the armed forces over the vehement objections of his cabinet. The reins of civil government were surrendered to his wife Alexandra, whose judgment was perversely guided by Grigory Rasputin, a mystic Siberian peasant and self-styled starets, or holy man, from Tyumen, whose ability to ease the hemophilia of the tsarevich Alexei placed her under his power. State and ecclesiastical officials were appointed or dismissed according to his whim, and domestic policy was narrowly shaped to protect his own exalted position in the imperial household. Even military affairs received some inflection through his intuitive advice (not always, by the way, inferior to that of the tsar’s); but no private scandal or public mistrust could shake Alexandra’s faith in him, and toward the end of 1916 he was murdered at a banquet by a conservative clique. A few weeks later the autocracy itself was swept away in the tide of revolution.
Endnotes
‡‡‡‡‡ A Russian trader by the name of Julius Bryner (the grandfather, incidentally, of Yul Brynner, the actor), operating out of Vladivostok, had acquired a timber concession along the river covering an area of 3,300 square miles. In May 1897, when Bryner put the concession up for sale, the government bought it under the auspices of the East Asiatic Company in order to advance its own imperialistic designs.
PART FOUR
15
THE RED AND THE WHITE
Throughout the land, war weariness, resentment against the corruption of the imperial court, the food shortages in Petrograd, and all the abiding, intractable problems of the realm which seemed destined to sustain unrest even in more pacific times led to escalations in the violence. Bread marches began in the capital on February 23, 1917, and three days later a mutiny took place in the Fourth Company of the Pavlovsky Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Within twenty-four hours thirty thousand soldiers had gone over to the side of the demonstrators and some clashed with the mounted police. On March 2, Nicholas abdicated, and on the 8th he was arrested at his general headquarters at Mogilev.
A Provisional Government was immediately set up under Prince Georgy Lvov, with a Socialist, Alexander Kerensky, as Minister of Justice; it announced plans for the election of a fully democratic Constituent Assembly as well as various reforms. But the Provisional Government also affirmed its intention to remain in the war. Most Russians in fact were reluctant to unilaterally desert the Allied cause, and in general the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a revolutionary committee with broad popular support, cooperated with the new regime.
Siberian Marxists were in the forefront of these developments. They favored a broad-based tolerance of diverging opinion, accepted traditional ideas of national defense, and hoped to unify “all the vital forces in the country,” not excluding the bourgeosie.639 It was in Siberia, in fact, that the groundwork was laid for the Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary coalition that dominated the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 – and which might have led the Soviet Union down a completely different road.
The Provisional Government, however, failed to preserve law and order and even basic services within the empire, and proved unable to lead the Russian armies to victory against the Central Powers. Nor could it arrest the economy’s decline. The transportation system had almost completely broken down, and the Trans-Siberian was in such a decrepit state that it was said that it would require three hundred ships over the course of six months to ferry all the rolling stock and equipment needed from across the seas to bring the line back up to standard.
Meanwhile, in April 1917, the German high command granted Lenin safe passage in a sealed train through Germany in the hope, as Winston Churchill expressed it, that he would enter Russia like a “virus” and undermine its will to remain in the war. Upon arrival, he found that the new workers’ Soviets by and large supported the Provisional Government – “the bourgeois constituent assembly,” as Lenin saw it – and he tried to shake their allegiance by simple emotional slogans like “All Power to the Soviets” and “Bread, Land, and Peace.” As Russia’s losses at the front continued to mount, the army’s morale deteriorated, industry foundered, unharvested crops remained standing in the fields. The government reshuffled its cabinet and brought more Socialists in. Kerensky emerged as prime minister, but faced a Bolshevik attempt to topple him in July. Lenin, denounced as a German spy, fled to Finland, but by summer’s end had returned, incognito, to urge the revolution on. On October 25, his adherents seized strategic locations – railroad stations, bridges, telephones, and so on – throughout the capital, stormed the Winter Palace, arrested members of the Provisional Government, and installed Lenin at the helm.
In power, the Bolsheviks acted with dispatch. They nationalized banks, turned factories and other industrial enterprises over to the workers, introduced price regulations, and expropriated large estates. Soviet power was rapidly extended across the Eurasian landmass with relatively little resistance, but at the moment of their triumph, the Bolsheviks were still very much a minority party in the land. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November, in fact, they won only 25 percent of the seats, and both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks (the majority of the left) distrusted the despotic presumptions of the professional revolutionary vanguard. Their mistrust was not misplaced. To consolidate his hold on the government – and to “combat counterrevolution and sabotage” – almost the first act of Lenin’s regime was to dismiss the Constituent Assembly and establish the Secret Police.
The “dictatorship of the proletariat” had begun.
On the international stage, the Bolsheviks had also managed to antagonize the Allies. The new government canceled its foreign debt, unilaterally withdrew from the war, and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 with Germany, yielding up, in return for peace, the Baltic states, Byelorussia, the Crimea, and the populous and industrially developed Ukraine. That promised to breathe new life into Germany’s war machine.
Indeed, Russia’s early contribution to the Allied cause had been tremendous, and by forcing the Central Powers to divert considerable forces from the Western Front, had indirectly saved Paris, prevented German victories at Verdun and Ypres (as General Von Hindenburg acknowledged in his memoirs), and helped win the Battle of the Marne. In 1917, its great Eastern Front extended from the Baltic through Romania all the way to the Black Sea, tying up from 2 to 3 million troops of the Central Powers. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk allowed forty German divisions to roll westward as part of the last great German offensive, and the looming disaster faced by the Allies at this juncture brought a reluctant United States more forcefully into the war.