Despite all the economic problems, Russia managed to increase output for defence, and to do so fairly rapidly. Moreover, by late 1915, Russia's allies were delivering substantial quantities of guns and ammunition. The situation recovered sufficiently that by June 1916, Russia was actually able to fight and win a major offensive on the Habsburg section of the front. The offensive led to nearly a million Austrian casualties and prisoners and forced Germany to send reinforcements to save the Habsburg army from complete collapse. On the eve of February 1917, the Russian army was holding the line. Russia was certainly not losing the war in a military sense. But inflation and the distorted grain market contributed both to the general level of discontent and to the key precipitant cause of the revolution: bread lines in Petrograd.
The rapidity of the wartime industrial expansion caused wrenching social changes. The rapid increases in production by the urban defence industry led to a massive influx of peasants to the cities, increasing the urban population by as much as 6 million by 1917. The institutions and infrastructure of the cities, which could barely cope with the rapid growth of the pre-war years, were simply overwhelmed. In this hothouse growth of the industrial workforce, women entered the workplace in large numbers, breaking down old gender norms. The proportion of women in industry rose from 27 per cent in 1914 to 43 per cent in 1917.[122] In the drive to produce military supplies, the rapidly growing workforce toiled in a dangerous environment where accidents were frequent and long hours the norm. Moreover, shortages of skilled labour and the impossibility of slowing production put many of the most politically active skilled workers in a relatively strong bargaining position. With official recognition on the war industry councils, the skilled workers of Petrograd were in some measure empowered by war conditions. They played an important role in the February crisis by taking control of the working class Viborg district on the twenty-fifth, then engaging in a general strike and crossing over from the working districts to take over the central avenues and squares of the capital. The election of worker councils on 27 and 28 February created a political alternative to the old regime and pressed the Duma leaders to form their own government. But it was the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which was the turning point in the revolution.
The Petrograd garrison and its mutiny
Why did the Petrograd garrison refuse to follow orders to suppress the demonstrations and strikes? The problem was not a lack of troops. There were roughly 180,000 men in Petrograd itself and another 150,000 in the suburbs. In fact, these large numbers were part ofthe problem. The Russian reserve system used Pet- rograd and other cities as places to keep troops before sending them to the front. So rather than a manageable force with some preparation for civilian duty, the barracks housed a massive number of some ofthe least reliable troops in the entire army. Many were new recruits who had almost no training. This reflected larger problems with the military as a whole that were building up as the war ground on. Attrition rates for trained officers and soldiers were high. By the end of i9i6, of nearly i5 million men who served in the army, over 2 million had been taken prisoner, over 1.5 million had died and 2 million were seriously ill or injured for a total of 5.5 million casualties.[123] The pointlessness of the endless slaughter makes it perhaps more incumbent upon the historian to explain why mutiny and rebellion did not occur sooner rather than to explain why it occurred when it did.
By 1916 the regime was increasingly desperate for new bodies for the army. Among other things, it abolished exemptions for primary breadwinners; these recruits tended to resent their obligation to serve and were more outspoken than the young. Exemptions previously granted to minorities also came under pressure. Most dramatically, the Kyrgyz in Central Asia rose in a major rebellion to resist their induction in i9i6. In the military campaign to suppress the rebellion, thousands were killed. The difficulty in finding reliable men to draft into the army by late i9i6 was a problem for the whole army but was particularly acute for the Petrograd garrison, where the Russian reserve system left the least trained and least reliable recent recruits. The Petrograd garrison included disproportionate numbers of convalescent soldiers recovering from injuries and expectingto be forced to return to the front, primary breadwinners and even Petrograd workers who had lost their draft exemptions as punishment for participation in strikes.[124]
Even so, it would be somewhat misleading simply to attribute the causes of the participation of soldiers from the garrison in the revolution to anti-war sentiments. For one thing, many studies of soldier loyalties have found that the key to explaining their behaviour lay in the dynamics of the primary unit. This is a powerful explanation for the occurrence of the first major mutiny in the Russian army well behind the front, where the sense of abandoning fellow soldiers was less direct. Likewise, the mutiny spread most rapidly to sailors of the Baltic fleet (in particular to the crews of the larger warships) - that is, to groups that had not seen action in the war. Police and army reports on the mood of the soldiers often reveal that they expressed their opposition to the tsar and regime along with hatred of the enemy. Among the troops, the notion that the tsar and his government had become the main impediments to the war effort became widespread. This idea took ribald form in the barracks, where rumours ran wild about treason at court and among generals with German names. Respect for the tsar disintegrated so thoroughly by February 1917 that patriotism and mutiny no longer seemed mutually incompatible for many rank-and-file soldiers.
The army command and the February Revolution
Patriotic motives of course much less equivocally lay at the core of an explanation of the actions of the army commanders during the February crisis. At the crucial moment on 1 March, the commander-in-chief of the army, M. V Alekseev, ordered General Ivanov to halt his march on Petrograd to put down the mutiny, then tried to convince the tsar to abdicate. When the tsar did not immediately agree, Alekseev sent his crucial telegram to all the major military front commanders asking their opinion on the future of the monarchy. The responses came quickly and unanimously argued that Nicholas should abdicate to save the nation and the war effort. In part, Alekseev and the other generals feared that sending frontline troops against the Petrograd garrison and civilians in the Petrograd streets would risk rapidly spreading the revolution to the army at the front. But the unified reaction of the army commanders was also the result of the powerful notion that had long been promoted among military reformers that modern wars could only be won by truly national citizen armies.
Some of the key generals - most importantly General Ruzskii, who was with the tsar on the day of the abdication - had come to believe that the tsar stood in the way of a successful national mobilisation against the enemy well before the February crisis. A key event in the development ofthis outlook had been the March 1916 removal of the popular war minister A. A. Polivanov, who had worked closely with the Union of Cities and Towns (Zemgor), War Industries Councils, and nationalist moderates and liberals. Discussions among military and opposition civilian leaders about the possibility of a coup d'etat had begun in earnest already in late 1916. The army command had come to see the tsar and the nation as separate, and even in opposition. As one of the most important generals, A. A. Brusilov, the hero of the successful summer 1916 offensive, reportedly said: 'if it comes to a choice between the tsar and Russia, I will take Russia'.[125]
122
J. McDermid and A. Hillyar,
123
A. Wildman,
124
J. Sanborn,