Although all the ethnic and confessional communities of the empire proclaimed their solidarity with the emperor's war (even those many groups who had no formal representative in the Duma), the wartime climate of suspicion, espionage and treason spread from the western borderlands, where the fighting was most intense, into the rest of the empire. After the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Central Powers, the Turkic and Muslim populations of the empire came under increasing scrutiny, despite generally low levels of flight or oppositionist sentiment. The campaigns on the Caucasian front also soon resulted in a large influx of Armenian refugees from the Turkish forced march and massacre of 1915; most of them ended up in the first major city across the border, Baku, which was also home to Azeri Turks and others. Despite the efforts of the enthusiastically pro-Armenian Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov in Tiflis, the Armenians suffered new pogroms after their escape from the Ottoman Turks on the part of local Turks who were, similar to their counterparts in European Russia, largely overwhelmed by the influx of new populations without income, housing and community resources.
The most violent ethnic conflict of the war came in the Steppe region and Turkestan (today's Central Asia) in 1916. The army, haemorrhaging from the devastating losses during the first two years of fighting, insisted on a labour mobilisation of ethnic groups previously exempt from military service in June 1916. Throughout July and August the Turkic natives, largely Kazakhs and Kirgiz, rose up against the Russian and Ukrainian peasants who had only recently been resettled in the area as part ofStolypin's solution to the agrarian problem. Conflict over land use and other resources provided the broader context for the bloodletting, but the immediate excuse was the call-up to labour service. As many as 1,000,000 Kazakhs and Kirgiz lost their lives in the widespread pogroms or fled to Chinese Turkestan across the eastern border. Only in mid-January 1917 did Russian officials regain control over the region. In the meantime, 9,000 Slavic homesteads had been destroyed and 3,500 settlers killed in what looked very much like a conventional colonial war.
In short, the wartime policies and the economic hardships that were their mostly unintended consequences shaped a hardening of ethnic and national identities that quickly filled the ideological space after the abdication of Nicholas II and the discrediting of the monarchical principle. This dynamic is key to understanding the dismantling of the Russian Empire in 1917 and beyond.
The politics of war
The war shaped a dramatic transformation of political life in the Russian Empire. At one level, that of the autocrat, it was as if little had changed. Nicholas II seemed as determined as ever to undermine his own government in the name of defence of his autocratic prerogatives. But the poor performance of the Russian army in the first year of the war, and especially the 'Great Retreat' and munitions crisis of 1915, emboldened the opposition to challenge the court for new political reforms. The Progressive Bloc, a coalition of parties from progressive nationalists to Kadets, demanded among other things a government of confidence, amnesty for those convicted or deported without trial on religious and political grounds, the repeal of discriminatory measures against Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and religious minorities, concessions to Finland and the extension of local self-government - in other words, respect for the constitution. The emperor angrily prorogued the Duma and decided to leave for the front to replace his great-uncle as commander-in-chief. That decision was certain to introduce yet more confusion and lack of co-ordination in the government, as court intrigues and constant personnel replacements came to replace policy-making; the possibility of any co-operation with 'society', even in the Duma, seemed more and more remote.
Still, the moderate opposition was able and willing to cloak itself in the cause of patriotism in its conflict with the autocracy to a far greater degree than it had during the Russo-Japanese war. Oppositionist patriotism, in the form of a defence of Russia's Great Power status and the integrity of the empire, united the Right and Centre parties of the political spectrum. The Bolsheviks had cast the lone votes against war credits for the government in the Duma and were promptly arrested on charges of treason, and they were joined by the Mensheviks in a resolution condemning the war and the political and social order that had brought it about. The two largest socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, quickly faced splits in their leadership over rival programmes of internationalism and the pursuit of immediate peace or more patriotic justifications for war in the name of combating German militarism. Here was born the ideology of defencism (and later, revolutionary defencism), a type of left-wing patriotism that would play a large role during 1917 and after.[52] The revolutionary parties, or at least a large part of their mass membership, thereby began to express an ideological justification for the further pursuit of war and the mobilisation of society in that cause. Against a European-wide tradition of anti-militarism and international peace, this development portended a new era of revolutionary politics. Still, by 1917 society was poised to reorganise itself along lines of war and peace, even if those lines were frequently shifting.
Perhaps an even more important development of the early war years than the relative impotence of the legal political parties and the tacit dissolution of the Duma was the, in part, compensatory rise of what has been recently described as 'the parastatal complex',[53] semi-public, semi-state structures that were summoned into being by the tragically evident shortcomings of the government in outfitting its own war effort and by the political class of educated society demanding a role in this war effort. The largest and most influential of these organisations were: the union of zemstvos, the union of towns and the war industries committees. The zemstvos, organs of local self-government, were the first to propose an expanded role for society when they founded the All-Russian Union for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers. The Moscow provincial zemstvo convened an emergency session on 7 August 1914, and succeeded in enlisting thirty-five provincial zemstvos in its relief initiative. The tsar reluctantly acknowledged their offer, and ungraciously warned that their existence would be limited to the duration ofthe war. A loose agreement divided up the empire between the Red Cross and the War Ministry, on the one hand, and the union on the other, with the Red Cross serving the immediate front-line area. In fact, the unions' legal status remained unsettled throughout their existence because the Duma was unable to pass legislation regulating their activities; this extra-legal, or illegal, status, was characteristic of several of the agencies that emerged during the war years. This seeming disability notwithstanding, the expansion of zemstvo activities significantly transformed local government and forced open the franchise of the local bodies to include large numbers of the technical and professional intelligentsia. As an indicator of their semi-public, semi-state status, zemstvo doctors were exempt from the draft.[54] From their initial charge to aid in the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the front, the unions moved into army supply of food and clothing, civilian public health and food supply, refugee relief and other spheres.
As the war situation deteriorated, the parastatal complex expanded its activities to help mobilise industry more effectively, in effect becoming an integral part of the military supply administration. In response to the munitions crisis of the first year of the war, patriotic business circles created the war industries committees in mid-1915 and brought together representatives of the government, business, public organisations and eventually labour, in a revolutionary departure from Russia's traditional administrative practices, but here, too, in the name of mobilising the economy more effectively for the war effort.[55]The issue of working-class participation forced the socialist parties to face squarely the dilemmas of defencism in late 1915 and they split over their tactics towards collaborating with the 'bourgeois' government. Initially, Menshevik Internationalists and Bolsheviks were in a minority in advocating boycott on the grounds that workers must not support a bourgeois government engaged in an imperialistic war. The leaders of the war industries committees themselves, the industrialists of Moscow and the provinces, largely supported what they called 'healthy militarism' in the name of 'Great Russia'. Though they contributed significantly to the mobilisation of industry for the war, their efforts were frustrated by continuing governmental intransigence, their own disunity and growing social conflicts articulated by the workers' groups that formed throughout the country under their aegis. The imperial government even embarked on a brief experiment to integrate the war effort with the creation of a Special Council for Defence in August 1915.
52
See Ziva Galili y Garcia, 'Origins of Revolutionary Defensism: I. G. Tseretelli and the "Siberian Zimmerwaldists"',
53
See Peter Holquist,
54
See William Ewing Gleason, 'The All-Russian Union of Towns and the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos in World War 1:1914-1917', Ph. D. diss., Indiana University, 1972.
55
See Lewis Siegelbaum,