Respect for the tsar continued to decline throughout the following year. Rumours spread throughout society about the pernicious influence and even defeatist or treasonous inclinations of Empress Alexandra and Rasputin, along with ministers and generals with German names. The tsar's rule had always depended to a certain degree upon the respect and dignity of his title and person. By late 1916, the tsar and court had become a laughing-stock. While no solid evidence of treason or even probes for a separate peace by Alexandra, Rasputin or others at court has surfaced, it is clear that they influenced ministerial appointments from late 1915 through the end of 1916 and successfully pushed the wavering tsar to abandon competent moderate ministers willing to work with Zemgor, the War Industries Councils and the Progressive Bloc. The rumours about Alexandra and Rasputin help to explain the sensational response to Miliukov's speech in the Duma in November 1916, in which he directly accused the government of treason. Shortly thereafter, political actors of all persuasions began to take increasingly radical steps against the monarchy in the name ofthe nation and the war effort. Symbolic of this turn was the assassination of Rasputin by the leader of the extreme Right in the Duma, Vladimir Purishkevich, with the assistance of two relatives of the tsar: F. F. Iusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitrii Pavlovich. By the end of 1916, the monarchy had become fully discredited among liberal and conservative elites alike. At the same time, quasi-governmental organisations headed by liberal politicians had gradually taken over many key elements of the domestic war effort. This dual process - disintegration at the top and the coalescence of opposition from below - drove the politics of the February Revolution and made possible the decisive third step in the revolution, from mutiny to regime change.
The regime change itself was the single most important cause of the series of events that led to the disintegration of the state and the army, the agrarian revolution and the emergence of minority nationalist movements. With the loss of the tsar as the symbolic centre of authority and loyalty, little held the empire together. In creating the new government, the Duma leaders accepted a list of strict conditions imposed upon them by the leaders of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This compromise dissolved the police and declared elections to positions in local government. This undermined the two most important remaining pillars of authority, the administration and the police. Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet on 1 March, called for elections of soldier councils throughout the army and contributed directly to the collapse of authority among army officers. The collapse of the army and the bureaucracy was a complex process that continued through the end of 1917. The disintegration of authority facilitated the agrarian revolution, which swept the land during that year as peasants flooded back to the villages from the army and the city to participate in the expropriation of lands belonging to individual proprietors, gentry and the Church, and then reabsorb them into the commune, which rapidly reasserted its dominance over the countryside.
But the war not only led to the collapse of state authority. As in other countries, it also brought an expansion of the state's activities, in many ways paving the way for the revolutionaries' attempts to transform and shape the population, to watch over it, to cull it of enemies and to manage it more actively. For example, the politics of nationalising both rural and urban property got well under way during the war. The army used its broad powers to requisition, sequester and simply confiscate land, grain, horses and machinery and the civilian government enacted a set of measures to nationalise both lands and businesses belonging to enemy minorities. Likewise, as part of its wartime economic policy, the regime - with the support of public bodies - attempted to overcome 'middlemen' in the grain trade, and in effect the entire domestic grain market. The old regime ended up conducting a massive experiment in a state-administered grain monopoly replete with coercive measures to force grain delivery to the state. These measures can be seen as the first steps in a vicious cycle of increasingly violent interventions in the countryside that continued through the revolutionary era. The First World War not only brought the end of the Russian monarchy but also began the revolutionary creation of a new regime.