Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, appointed deputy interior minister in January 1913, launched a series of reforms ofthe security police aimed at cutting costs, winningpublic support forthe government and restricting police reliance on informants. In March he prohibited the recruitment of informants in the military, despite a growing perception among senior police officials, expressed at two security conferences in late 1912, that the use of informants should be increased to combat the spread of sedition among enlisted personnel. In May, Dzhunkovskii prohibited deploying informants in secondary schools, which appears to have been an infrequent practice anyway. It might have seemed that he had in mind an all-out assault on the security system, for between May 1913 and February 1914 he abolished most of the provincial and regional security bureaus and transferred their functions to the provincial gendarme chiefs. Although some officials considered the regional bureaus ineffective, senior police officials incessantly criticised most provincial gendarmes, and an authoritative report of December 1912 had attributed the disorganisation of the revolutionary movement to the efficiency of the regional bureaus. In the short term, nevertheless, Dzhunkovskii's reforms seem not to have gravely weakened the security system, and for two reasons: the security bureaus in the imperial capitals remained strong (although Dzhunkovskii dismissed the very able St Petersburg bureau chief, Mikhail von Koten) and the regional bureaus were not abolished until January 1914 when the revolutionary organisations had already been severely weakened.
The logical response to harsh police repression for many revolutionaries lay in developing legal methods of protest and agitation. The Social Democrats founded Pravda in April 1912 and Luch in September, Bolshevik and Menshevik newspapers, respectively. The police watched them, naturally, seized individual issues and occasionally closed them down, but they repeatedly reopened under different names, a ruse the police were legally powerless to prevent. Pravda, for example, was closed down eight times during its two-year pre-revolutionary existence. The police's only recourse was to maintain informants within the editorial board. One informant, Miron Chernomazov, edited Pravda from May 1913 to February 1914.[108] Similarly, the Bolsheviks participated eagerly in the Fourth Duma, elected in late summer and early autumn 1912. One of the six Bolshevik deputies, Roman Malinovskii, by far the most talented and charismatic, was, in fact, a police informant. In May 1914, however, Dzhunkovskii ordered his dismissal. The rumours attending this event stunned the Bolshevik leadership, as Azef's exposure had disconcerted Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, to the extent that Lenin, still dumfounded, barely reacted to the major political strikes of industrial workers in Petersburg and Moscow in June
1914.[109]
Historians disagree on whether the incidence of labour unrest between April i9i2 and June i9i4, greater than during the previous years, proves that the government was unstable. All agree, however, that the declaration of war against Germany on i7 July i9i4 at least temporarily put an end to this and other popular unrest in Russia. The maintenance of public tranquillity was facilitated by the immediate imposition throughout the empire of a state of either extraordinary security or martial law, which permitted the suppression of legal newspapers, trade unions and educational societies linked to revolutionary groups.[110] The security police also arrested many remaining underground activists and worked to keep Bolsheviks and Mensheviks from uniting. By early 1916 the prospects for revolution seemed to many revolutionary activists very dim.
Yet the imperial system was on the eve of collapse. In September 1916, Aleksandr Protopopov, a favourite of Rasputin and an erratic administrator, became the fifth interior minister in thirteen months. The economic situation, already dismal, worsened throughout i9i6. By late November, a court security police report spoke of a 'food crisis', and on 5 February 1917 the Petrograd security bureau warned of coming hunger riots that could lead to 'the most horrible kind of anarchistic revolution'.[111] Large-scale strikes took place on 14 February, but efficient crowd control prevented their getting out of hand. On the night of 25 February the Petrograd Security Bureau arrested a hundred radical activists. The bureau's last report was prepared on the twenty-seventh amid a general strike, massive troop mutinies and the formation ofthe Duma's Provisional Committee and the Soviet. That evening crowds sacked and burned the security bureau headquarters in Petrograd.[112] Although Moscow and much of the rest of the empire temporarily remained calm, this concatenation of events marked the end of the imperial government.
On 4 and 10 March, the Provisional Government abolished the security bureaus, the Police Department and the Gendarme Corps; transferred gendarme officers and enlisted men to the regular army; and dismissed all governors and vice-governors. On 18 March it created a bureau for counterespionage, but against domestic threats to state security the new government left itself nearly defenceless.[113] This was because Russia's new leaders imagined that the collapse of the monarchy would usher in a new form of politics without internal threats to state security. In fact, the dismantling of the imperial police apparatus, as odious as its institutions may have been to many educated Russians, was an invitation to takeover by political conspirators. The imperial security police could not forestall the February Revolution, because it was driven purely by mass discontent; a reasonably sophisticated security police almost certainly could have saved the Provisional Government from the October Bolshevik overthrow, which lacked the sort of mass participation that brought down the imperial dynasty and government in February.
War and revolution, 1914-1917
ERIC LQHR
With the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March 1917 in favour of the Grand Duke Michael and the latter's subsequent refusal of the crown, the Romanov dynasty came to an end. The struggle for power and for the definition of the new regime continued through more than four years of revolutionary turmoil and civil war. This chapter outlines Russia's involvement in the First World War, concentrating on the specific ways in which it caused the end of the old regime.
Any attempt to attribute causes must begin with a definition of the event to be explained. When describing 'the end of the old regime', historians are often primarily concerned with the social and national transformations of the revolutionary era that brought the end of the old social order. This chapter focuses on explaining the more specific political end point of regime change when the tsar abdicated and representatives of the national parliament (the Duma), in consultation with representatives of worker and soldier councils, formed a new provisional government. This event marked the end of the Romanov dynasty, the end of Imperial Russia, and the beginning of the social and national revolutions which swept the land through the rest of 1917 and beyond.
108
For a detailed study of government policies toward the radical press in this period, see my 'Pravitel'stvo, pressa i antigosudarstvennaia deiatel'nost' v Rossii, 1906-1917 gg.',
109
On Malinovskii, see Ralph Carter Elwood,
111
Special Section of Court Commandant report, 26 November 1916, GARF, Fond 97, op. 4, d. 117, ll. 93-5; Petrograd security bureau report, 5 February 1917, ibid., ll. 124-124 ob.
112
The most complete study ofthe February Revolution is TsuyoshiHasegawa,
113
Zhurnal zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel'stva, 4,10 and 18 March 1917, GARF, Fond 1779, op. 2, d. 3, ll. 2, 3 ob., 25, 70.