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War and revolution, 1914–1917

eric lohr

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.

The proximate causes of February 1917

The immediate events leading to the abdication began with the confluence of several factors to bring large numbers of people into the Petrograd streets. First, heavy snows in early February 1917 slowed trains, exacerbating chronic wartime problems with flour supply to the cities. Many bakeries temporarily closed due to shortages of flour or fuel. On 19 February, the government announced that bread rationing would be introduced on 1 March, leading to panic-buying and long lines. Fuel shortages led several large factories to close down and the temperature suddenly rose after a long cold spell, both

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contributing to the number of people in the streets. On 23 February, walkouts and demonstrations to protest against bread shortages coincided with a small International Women’s Day protest march. The next day, these events led to strikes of nearly 200,000 workers. For the first time since 1905, massive demonstrations were held in the centre of the city, on the squares of Nevsky Prospect.

On 25 February, events on the streets remained difficult to classify. Was it another in the series of wartime demonstrations and strikes – which were growing in frequency in late 1916 to early 1917 but still tended to be of short duration because workers preferred not to undermine the troops at the front – or was it the beginning of a revolution? This case exceeded all previous wartime demonstrations and strikes in scale, and people from all walks of life filled the streets, not only protesting against the shortage of bread, but also raising banners calling for the downfall of the monarchy, singing the Marseillaise, cocking their caps to the side and struggling with police for control of public space. In several instances, Cossack soldiers showed their sympathy for the crowd. The proliferation of symbolic acts and the sheer number of people involved already by 25 February gave the sense that a revolution was under way.1

But many observers thought that the disorders were primarily focused on the bread shortages and even Aleksandr Shliapnikov, the leading Bolshevik in Petrograd, dismissed the idea that a revolution was at hand on the evening of 25 February. Recent bread riots had eventually run their course, and the commander of the Petrograd garrison, General Sergei Khabalov, thought that the correct course of action would be to continue to avoid confrontation with the crowds.

However, that night the tsar sent the fateful order to Khabalov to use troops to restore order. A small group of the most trusted soldiers was deployed on Sunday morning 26 February. In several places, they fired into the crowds, killing hundreds and invoking parallels to the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre that had set that revolution in motion. Troops had fired into crowds on other occasions during the war; most seriously when the Moscow garrison was ordered to fire into crowds on the third day of a massive 1915 riot against Germans. That time it succeeded in restoring order; this time it did not.2

The bulk of the Petrograd garrison remained in the barracks on 26 February, but heated discussions led to mutinies which spread rapidly through the garrison. By the twenty-seventh, the commanders and loyal officers completely

1Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1 91 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 37.

2Iu. I. Kir’ianov, ‘“Maiskie besporiadki” 1915 g. v Moskve’, VI 12 (1994): 137–50.

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lost control of the soldiers, many of whom joined the revolution in the streets. Soldiers freed prisoners, broke into the secret police headquarters and took over government buildings.

For four days, the situation in the capital was uncertain. Power flowed to the soldiers and the authority of the government rapidly melted away. By most accounts, the leaders of socialist parties only began to mobilise and play an active role on the twenty-seventh. A small group of party leaders declared themselves to be an executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and claimed to speak for the workers and soldiers. It sent an appeal to workers to send representatives to an assembly of the Petrograd Soviet. The process of choosing delegates was extremely informal, resulting in a massive body, twothirds of which were soldiers. It was such an unwieldy assembly that in practice, the executive committee ended up making nearly all decisions. The executive committee included representatives from a broad array of socialist parties, and they quickly decided not to make an outright bid for power. Some of the party leaders were influenced by the Marxist theory that Russia had to pass through a bourgeois stage (with a presumably bourgeois Duma government) before conditions would be ripe for a proletarian revolution. Many socialists (including the Menshevik defensists, who played a prominent part in these crucial days) feared the anarchy and violence that was already emerging on the streets, and wanted a restoration of order and governmental authority, in order to prevent a collapse of the war effort.

In an all-night negotiation, the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet worked out a joint programme with the Provisional Committee of the Duma for the creation of a new provisional government. The result, declared early on 2 March, became the basic programme of the revolution. It fulfilled the liberal dream of full equality before the law for all citizens, declaring the immediate abolition of all legal differentiation based on religious, ethnic or social origins. It also granted amnesty for all political prisoners, freedom of speech, assembly, right to strike, and declared elections to organs of local self-government.3

While this new polity was forming, the tsar was isolated in Pskov. He remained obstinately opposed to abdication and even refused to make political concessions to the Duma late on 1 March. He changed his mind only when the army command turned against him. A small group of army commanders, in close communication with the president of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, decided early on 2 March that the only solution was abdication.

3F. Golder (ed.), Documents of Russian History, 1 91 4–1 91 7 (New York: Century Co., 1927), pp. 308–9.

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That morning, the commander-in-chief of the army, Mikhail Alekseev, conducted something close to a coup d’etat, sending a circular to the leading army commanders making the case for Nicholas to abdicate and requesting that each send their response directly to the tsar. The commanders of the fronts, including the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, unanimously supported abdication. Nicholas consented, insisting only that he abdicate in favour of the Grand Duke Michael rather than his haemophiliac son Alexis. The next day, the Grand Duke Michael met with the Provisional Government leaders and acquiesced to their majority opinion that he should also abdicate. This left government authority solely in their hands until the convocation of a constituent assembly, which was to determine the future governmental system. The promulgation of the two abdication manifestoes marked the formal political end of the old regime.

To reiterate, the immediate chain of events leading to the regime change began with the declaration of bread rationing, followed by the large number of people demonstrating, striking and observing events in the streets. The proximate cause of greatest weight in explaining the end of the monarchy was the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison and, consequently, the pressure applied by the military commanders upon Nicholas to abdicate on 2 March.

Without the mutiny, the demonstrations were probably not sufficient to cause the revolution – as the apparent success of the initial military intervention showed. The mutiny dramatically raised the stakes, radicalising and arming the streets, and making it likely that the only way to preserve the monarchy was to send troops from the front to put down the rebellion forcibly. The tsar was willing to do this up to nearly the last moment, but the army commanders balked. The final crucial factor was the formation of the Provisional Government even before the actual abdication occurred. In a sense, it was stepping into the void left by the absence of the tsar from the capital and the more serious widely shared sense that the tsar and the monarchy had become a barrier to the effective mobilisation of society and industry for the war effort. Recognition of the willingness and ability of the moderate Duma leaders to take over the government in turn helped convince the army commanders to support the revolution.

Relative economic backwardness as a cause?

The first proximate cause, the bread shortage in Petrograd, is inextricably linked to a larger question about the significance of relative Russian economic backwardness as an underlying cause of the revolution. Many memoirs,

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foreigners’ accounts and narratives portray the link between war and revolution in terms of a relatively backward economy unable to hold up under the demands of total war or to produce the shells and weapons needed to compete on the battlefield. But, as Norman Stone has convincingly argued, in many battles, it was not so much a lack of shells, guns or technology that explains Russian defeats as failures of tactics, strategy and command efficiency. He puts the blame on the Russian generals and their strategies, such as the wasteful stockpiling of millions of rounds of ammunition and guns in a massive network of fortresses, which in the end had almost no tactical significance in the fighting. Moreover, old-style social prejudices and outmoded notions of honour contributed to prejudices against the enhanced role of artillery and defensive positioning. As on the western front, a senseless cult of the offensive led to countless wasted lives.4

But economic factors also mattered. While the Russian army was superior to the Ottoman army and arguably had a technological edge on the Habsburg army, it was significantly behind the German. At the beginning of the war, the average German division had more than twice the artillery of a Russian division, and Russia was never able to fully close the gap. Unless overwhelmingly outnumbered, technical superiority enabled German troops consistently to defeat Russian troops throughout the entire course of the war. The crucial role of high-powered precision artillery and shells and the drawn-out nature of the fighting behind entrenched defences rapidly turned the war into a production contest.

The mobilisation of Russian industry to increase production for the war effort began slowly and faced many obstacles. Only gradually did the government turn to the kind of aggressive state measures to influence and direct economic activity towards the war that were so successful in Germany. Defence production was further constrained by the relatively poor financial state of the empire. Compared to other countries, Russia had only a very small domestic market for government debt, making it heavily reliant on foreign loans for extraordinary expenditures. This added to the costs and limited the extent of direct state action to expand the output of military products. Moreover, in the decades prior to the war Russia relied heavily on massive yearly inflows of loans and direct investments from abroad. In fact, foreign investment accounted for nearly half of all new capital investment in industry from the 1890s to 1914.5 The war brought a sharp and sudden end to this key source of industrial growth.

4	N. Stone, The Eastern Front, 1 91 4–1 91 7 (London: Penguin, 1998).
5	J. P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1 885 –
	1 91 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 28–9.

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Germany had been the largest single source of direct investment in the Russian economy. Upon the outbreak of the war, German loans were frozen and by early 1915, the regime embarked on a radical campaign to nationalise businesses and industrial firms owned by enemy citizens. Moreover, from the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war in October 1914, the Straits were closed, leaving only distant Vladivostok and the northern ports of Archangel and Murmansk to receive allied shipments of war materiel´. Archangel was frozen half the year and had only a single-track railway line incapable of handling even a portion of the burden. Murmansk had no railway link at all until a wartime project was completed in January 1917. As a result, even when allied shipments finally began to arrive in substantial quantities in mid-1915, many of them simply piled up at their ports of entry. The blockade of Russia was thorough and caused tremendous difficulties for Russian industries and businesses of all kinds by suddenly severing ties to suppliers, engineers, technicians and firms producing specialised items.

These problems were greatly exacerbated by the declaration of prohibition – first of nearly all types of alcoholic beverages during mobilisation, and then of vodka for the duration of the war. On the eve of the war, as throughout its long history, the Russian state had received roughly a quarter of its revenues from alcohol taxes and state sales of vodka. Most studies conclude that prohibition probably curbed some of the traditional drinking bouts as soldiers gathered and travelled to the front, and likely had some positive impacts on health and efficiency in the short run. But the cost to the treasury was immense. Moreover, as the war dragged on, home distilling and illegal markets for alcohol took on a massive scale. The continued sale of wine in elite restaurants added to social resentments, and crowds breaking into alcohol storage facilities contributed to the violence of mobilisation riots, pogroms and the 1915 riot in Moscow. By 1917, the cumulative effects of prohibition were extremely serious. One contemporary financial expert claims the cost reached 2.5 billion roubles by mid-1917, or 10 per cent of all expenditures on the war.6

Not least of the impacts of prohibition was that the massive demand for alcohol switched to consumer items and manufactured goods, thereby contributing to inflation – one of the most important links between the war and the revolution. Inflation, of course, had other important sources. Most fundamentally, the lack of a domestic market for government debt, difficulties in acquiring foreign credit and the sharp reduction of exports all combined to

6Arthur McKey, ‘Sukhoi zakon v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny: prichiny, kontseptsiia i posledstviia vvedeniia sukhogo zakona v Rossii, 1914–1917’, in V. L. Markov (ed.), Rossiia i Pervaia Mirovaia Voina (St Petersburg: RAN, 1999), pp. 147, 154.

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leave the government with only one way to pay for its massive defence orders: expansion of the money supply. Russia abandoned the gold standard already on 27 July/8 August 1914 and by January 1917, the amount of money in circulation had more than quadrupled. Inflation affected the domestic situation in a number of ways. In April 1915, the first significant riots broke out in Moscow over price increases in shops and markets. Inflation riots became an increasingly common and important occurrence on the home front as the problems of the wartime economy accumulated.7 It also contributed to ethnic violence. The right-wing press and police officials often blamed Jewish, German and foreign shopkeepers and speculators for inflation, especially after the head of the extreme right faction in the State Duma, A. N. Khvostov, was appointed minister of interior in October 1915. Liberals in the Ministry of Agriculture and in co-operatives, zemstvos (local elected assemblies) and other public organisations involved in food supply also campaigned against speculators and the market. All co-operated in attempts to require below-market price sales of grain to the army and state and, at the same time, to get rid of the ‘middlemen’ involved in the pre-war grain market. Both efforts only exacerbated shortages and tensions in the countryside.8

Inflation also contributed to the problem of shortages of grain deliveries to the cities. The grain-delivery problem was not the result of an actual shortage of grain. With the blockade, massive exports were entirely shut off, leaving more than enough grain for both the army and for domestic consumption. The problem was the decline in the amount of that grain that was reaching urban markets. Here one of the key problems was that military commanders often used their martial law authority to ban ‘exports’ of grain from given areas thinking they could thus ensure its delivery to the army at artificially low prices. The civilian administration also tried to regulate prices and work around the commercial grain market. Peasants responded to these kind of administrative measures by waiting for higher grain prices. Unwilling to sell grain to buy industrial products at inflated prices, peasants in increasing numbers chose to store their grain, feed it to their livestock or illicitly convert it into alcohol rather than deliver it to market as inflation accelerated in late 1916 and early 1917.

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

7Iu. I. Kir’ianov, ‘Massovye vystupleniia na pochve dorogovizny v Rossii (1914–fevral’ 1917 g.)’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 1 (1993): 3–18.

8Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1 91 4–1 921 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990), pp. 9–16; Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis,

1 91 4–1 921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 33–4.

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