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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 1917.9 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

9J. McDermid and A. Hillyar, Midwives of Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1 91 7 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), p. 128.

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180,000 men in Petrograd itself and another 150,000 in the suburbs. In fact, these large numbers were part of the problem. The Russian reserve system used Petrograd 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 of the 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 1916, of nearly 15 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.10 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 1916. In the military campaign to suppress the rebellion, thousands were killed. The difficulty in finding reliable men to draft into the army by late 1916 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 expecting to 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.11

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

10A. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. I: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1 91 7 ) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 95.

11J. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics,

1 905 –1 925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, p. 157.

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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 of this 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

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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’.12

The formation of the Progressive Bloc and the Provisional Government

One reason the generals thought such a choice could be made in the middle of the war was that a broad-based political opposition that supported the war had firmly established itself as an alternative to the tsar. The crucial turning point in the rise of the political opposition was the abandonment of the ‘internal peace’ (the pledge of most political and nationality parties to stop all oppositional activities and to stand firmly in support of the tsar) and the creation of a united opposition to the government in the form of the ‘Progressive Bloc’, a broad coalition of parties in the Duma.

This in turn was a direct result of the German decision to launch a major offensive against Russia in the spring of 1915 in an attempt to force Russian capitulation. Taken by surprise, outnumbered and vastly outgunned, the Russian armies suffered defeat after defeat, retreating in rapid order from April to September 1915 until most of previously occupied Austrian Galicia, all of Russian Poland, Lithuania and much of Latvia had been lost. This ‘Great Retreat’ had enormous implications for domestic politics. First, it caused a massive wave of refugees to flee the front zones for the Russian interior. Estimates vary widely but likely exceeded 6 million civilians during the war.13 The refugee crisis was greatly exacerbated by the military command, which had nearly unlimited powers over civilian affairs in a massive zone declared under military rule. While many refugees left of their own volition, the army also conducted targeted mass expulsions of at least a million civilian Jews, Germans and foreigners. Briefly in the summer of 1915 the army turned to a disastrous ‘scorched-earth’ policy that included driving the entire civilian population of certain regions to the interior. The army did little to stop a wave of dozens of violent pogroms against Jews in the front zones primarily instigated by Cossack army units with substantial participation of local populations. These policies stirred up ethnic tensions both in the predominantly non-Russian areas of refugee creation near the front and in the internal provinces inundated by millions of impoverished displaced people. Not only did inter-ethnic tensions

12Golder, Documents of Russian History, pp. 116–17.

13P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 212.

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often run high between refugees and native populations, but the refugees put an enormous financial and administrative strain on local governments and administrations throughout the country.

The retreat also caused a great wave of popular anger. The press – on all sides of the political spectrum – turned much more critical of the government. The defeats at the front were in part caused by shortages of key weaponry, and industrialists and Duma members alike began to call on the government to do more to organise and stimulate defence production – above all, to include society more closely in the process. In early June, the tsar made a series of key concessions, replacing conservatives in the Council of Ministers with moderates who were more willing to work with society. In July, the Duma reopened to a series of blistering speeches attacking the government for incompetence in its prosecution of the war. Behind the scenes, negotiations began for the formation of a broad national coalition of parties to form a political opposition. This opposition united nearly three-quarters of the Duma membership in the Progressive Bloc, with representatives from moderate socialists on the left to Russian nationalists on the right. The Progressive Bloc renewed many of the liberal demands of 1905, demanding more powers for the Duma, more legal limitations on the state and military’s extraordinary wartime powers in civilian affairs, amnesty for political prisoners, and full equality before the law for all religious and national groups.

The programme was classically liberal, and it expressed the growing sense that the tsar and his government stood in the way of a successful war effort. Only the granting of full civic equality and rights, and the granting of a fully representative government could inspire society and the army to mobilise with true enthusiasm and patriotism for the war effort. Nothing was more instructive of this underlying notion than the negotiations between the notorious right-wing Russian nationalist leader Vasilii Shulgin and Pavel Miliukov, leader of the radical liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party during the formation of the Progressive Bloc. As Shulgin recalls, he had been deeply suspicious of Miliukov, whom he regarded as an unpatriotic political opponent until he heard Miliukov’s ardently patriotic logic based on the idea that only a truly national effort that included society could bring victory.14 If anything, the leader of the socialist Trudovik faction, Aleksandr Kerenskii (later the head of the Provisional Government), was an even stronger proponent of these ideas than Miliukov.

14V. V. Shulgin, The Years: Memoirs of a Member of the Russian Duma, 1 906–1 91 7 (New York: Hippocrene, 1984), pp. 241–5.

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These moves were followed in the summer of 1915 by the creation of special councils with officials, private entrepreneurs and Duma deputies to deal with the economic crisis and co-ordinate national responses to the war effort. Four special councils – on transport, fuel, grain and, most importantly, warindustry – were created. The war councils included representatives of elected municipal and local government, from private industry, and even worker representatives. It was an important concession to the demands of liberals for a truly national war effort in which society had a significant role to play. The councils made significant contributions to turning around the dire situation in defence production.

At the same time, the government finally dropped its opposition to the formation of a national association to represent local elected bodies, allowing the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils (Zemgor) to form. Zemgor took on such tasks as caring for the welfare and needs of the massive wave of refugees that appeared in internal provinces and providing aid and nursing for convalescent soldiers. The special councils and Zemgor together not only helped bring thousands of employees and volunteers directly into the war effort but also gave the leaders of both these national organisations leadership experience and national recognition. They also worked in close cooperation with some of the more progressive branches of the administration such as the food supply administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, assuming what one historian has called ‘parastatal’ functions.15 In some measure, liberal society was simply taking over the state.

In 1905 the tsar granted constitutional concessions and appointed strong and competent ministers who accepted the new political realities. Ten years later, the tsar turned in the opposite direction. When the crisis of the German offensive passed, Nicholas misread it as the passing of the larger political crisis. His first move was to take personal command of the army in August 1915. His ministers saw this as a potential disaster. Not only would it create a power vacuum in the capital which they rightly feared might be filled by Alexandra and her favourite Rasputin, but they also saw the replacement of the popular Grand Duke Nicholas with the tsar – who had no real military qualifications for the post – as a move that would directly tie the fate and legitimacy of the monarchy itself to the fortunes of war. But they were unable to convince him to rethink his decision. Within months, the tsar had replaced the competent ministers that he had appointed in June with reactionaries who had no ties to liberal society – perhaps as a result of Empress Alexandra’s prodding on

15 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, pp. 12–46.

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behalf of Rasputin.16 The most significant change was the replacement of the reasonable N. B. Shcherbatov as minister of interior with Khvostov, leader of the radical Right faction in the Duma, a chauvinist who used every chance to expound on his paranoiac conspiracy theories of Jewish, German and foreign domination of Russians. His repressive policies did much to undermine any remaining spirit of co-operation between the government and society. From late 1915 to February 1917, conflict between the government and society grew more and more intense.

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 of the 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

16 Golder, Documents of Russian History, pp. 227–33.

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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.

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