Yet the empire suffered as much from traditionalism as from modernity. For example, the possession of land in the village commune or the ability to return to the village for assistance was a powerful factor in enabling Russian workers to go on strike. Russian and Ukrainian peasants identified more with their village than with any imperial, dynastic or national idea. Furthermore, those inhabitants of the empire who had developed a national consciousness, such as the Poles, were deeply discontented at their treatment and would always cause trouble. The religious variety of the empire only added to the regime’s problems, problems which were likely to increase as urbanization and education proceeded.
Yet if the empire was ever to fall apart, it would not even be clear to which area Russia might easily be confined. Russians lived everywhere in the Russian Empire. Large pockets of them existed in Baku, in Ukraine and in the Baltic provinces. Migrations of land-hungry Russian peasants had been encouraged by Stolypin, to Siberia and to Russia’s possessions in central Asia. No strict notion of ‘Russia’ was readily to hand, and the St Petersburg authorities had always inhibited investigation of this matter. The Russian-ruled region of Poland was described as ‘the Vistula provinces’; ‘Ukraine’, ‘Latvia’ and ‘Estonia’ did not appear as such on official maps. So where was Russia? This sprawling giant of a country was as big or as small as anyone liked to think of it as being. Few Russians would deny that it included Siberia. But westwards was it to include Ukraine and Belorussia? National demography and geography were extremely ill-defined, and the vagueness might in the wrong circumstances lead to violence.
After the turn of the century it was getting ever likelier that the wrong circumstances would occur. Social strife was continual. National resentments among the non-Russians were on the rise. Political opposition remained strident and determined. The monarchy was ever more widely regarded as an oppressive, obsolescent institution which failed to correspond to the country’s needs. Nicholas II had nearly been overthown in 1905. He had recovered his position, but the basic tensions in state and society had not been alleviated.
2
The Fall of the Romanovs (1914–1917)
Yet it was not the internal but the external affairs of the empire that provided the ultimate test of the dynasty. Clashes of interest with Japan, the United Kingdom and even France were settled peacefully; but rivalry with Austria-Hungary and Germany became ever more acute. In 1906 a diplomatic dispute between Germany and France over Morocco resulted in a French triumph that was acquired with Russian assistance. In the Balkans, the Russians themselves looked for France’s help. The snag was that neither Paris nor St Petersburg relished a war with Austria-Hungary and Germany. Consequently the Russian government, despite much huffing and puffing, did not go to war when the Austrians annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The existence of a Duma and of a broad press meant that newspaper readers appreciated that a diplomatic defeat had been administered to Nicholas II. Tsarism, which had paraded itself as the protector of Serbs and other Slavs, looked weak and ineffectual. It looked as if the monarchy was failing the country.1
The diplomatic rivalries intensified. The British and the Germans did not abandon friendly relations with each other; but the Anglo-German naval race narrowed the options in Britain. Meanwhile Russia looked on nervously lest Germany might take advantage of the crumbling condition of the Ottoman Empire. Exports of Russian and Ukrainian grain from Odessa through the Straits of the Dardanelles were important to the empire’s balance of trade. In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire. In this instance Russia refused to back Serbian efforts to obtain access to a sea-port and a crisis in Russo-Austrian relations was avoided. Unfortunately this sensible decision was seen in Russia as yet another sign of Nicholas II’s weakness of will. Then a second Balkan war broke out in 1913. This time it occurred between Serbia and Bulgaria, the joint victors over the Turks. As a result Serbia obtained greater territory in Macedonia and appeared even more menacing to Austrian interests.
Russia’s relations with Austria-Hungary and Germany steadily worsened, and on 28 June 1914 a fateful event occurred. This was the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, capital of recently-annexed Bosnia. Austria demanded humiliating concessions from the Serbian government, which it blamed for the Archduke’s death. Russia took Serbia’s side. Germany, where influential leaders wanted a pre-emptive war before Russian military strength grew any greater, supported the Austrian cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia announced a general mobilization of her armies. Then Germany declared war on Russia and France. Britain showed solidarity with France and Russia by declaring war on Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Nobody had anticipated exactly this denouement. No one as yet had definite ideas about war aims. Nor was there much understanding that the fighting might drag on for years and bring down dynasties and whole social orders. The calculation in Russian ruling circles was that a short, victorious war would bind Imperial society more closely together. A few long-sighted politicians such as Pëtr Durnovo could see that war against Germany would lead to intolerable strains and might initiate the regime’s downfall. But such thoughts were not given a hearing in mid-1914. The Emperor’s sense of dynastic and imperial honour predominated.2 He might anyway have run into trouble if he had not taken up the challenge in the Balkans. The Octobrists and Kadets would have made a fuss in the Duma; even many socialists, whose Second International had opposed general war in Europe, felt that German pretensions should be resisted.
In the event their pressure did not need to be exerted: Nicholas II leapt into the darkness of the Great War without anyone pushing him. The decisions of the European powers had consequences of massive significance. The Great War produced the situation in Russia, Austria and Germany that shattered the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies. It also made possible the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Except for the Great War, Lenin would have remained an émigré theorist scribbling in Swiss libraries; and even if Nicholas II had been deposed in a peacetime transfer of power, the inception of a communist order would hardly have been likely. The first three years of this military conflict, however, caused an economic and political disorder so huge that Nicholas II had to abdicate in February 1917. The subsequent Provisional Government proved no less unequal to its tasks, and Lenin became the country’s ruler within months of tsarism’s overthrow.
But let us return to 1914. As massive military struggle commenced, the Russian steamroller moved effortlessly into East Prussia in mid-August. Victory over Germany was identified as the crucial war aim. Even so, Austria-Hungary was also a redoubtable enemy and the Russians had to mount an attack on the southern sector of what was becoming known in the rest of Europe as the Eastern front. Not since the Napoleonic wars had so many countries been directly involved in military conflict.
Yet the Russians were quickly encircled by German forces. At the Battle of Tannenberg 100,000 Russian prisoners-of-war were taken, and the Germans advanced into Russian-ruled Poland.3 On the Western front, too, Belgium and north-eastern France were overrun by German forces. But the Allies – Russia, France and the United Kingdom – regrouped and the lines were held. Static warfare ensued with two great systems of trenches cutting north to south across Europe. By the end of 1916, the Russian Imperial Army had conscripted fourteen million men, mainly peasants. Russian industrial expansion was substantial; so, too, was the size of Russia’s factory and mining work-force, rising by roughly forty per cent in the first three years of the Great War.4 All classes of the population supported Russian entry into the war and sought victory over Germany and Austria-Hungary. A surge of patriotic feeling was suddenly available to the government.
The Emperor was determined to gain the greatest advantage from the war. Negotiating with the Western Allies in early 1915, his Foreign Minister Sazonov laid down that the Straits of the Dardanelles should be incorporat
ed into the Russian Empire when the Central Powers were defeated. Secret treaties were signed with Britain and France in accordance with these demands. Russian war aims were not simply defensive but expansionist.
All this had to be kept strictly confidential; otherwise the Fourth State Duma might not have rung loud with support for the war when it voted financial credits to the government in January 1915. Only the socialist parties had sections that repudiated the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict. Yet it was not long before popular antagonism to the monarchy reappeared. The scandalous behaviour of Rasputin, the favourite ‘holy man’ of Nicholas and Alexandra, brought still greater opprobrium on the court. Prince Yusupov, a disgusted monarchist, led a group that killed Rasputin in 1916. But Alexandra’s German ancestry continued to feed rumours that there was treachery in high places. Nicholas II did not help his cause by dutifully deciding to stay at military headquarters at Mogilëv for the duration of the war. Thereby he cut himself off from information about the situation in the capital. The government’s conduct of affairs induced Pavel Milyukov, the Kadet party leader, to put the question in the State Duma: ‘Is this folly or is it treason?’5
Sharp dilemmas none the less awaited any conceivable wartime administration in Petrograd (the new name for the capital after St Petersburg was judged to be too German-sounding). Food supplies were a difficulty from the start; the task of equipping and provisioning the soldiers and horses of the Imperial armed forces was prodigious. The government showed no lack of will. In the winter of 1915–16 it introduced fixed prices for its grain purchases and disbarred sellers from refusing to sell to it. Nor had Nicholas II entirely run out of luck. Weather conditions in 1916 were favourable and agricultural output was only ten per cent below the record annual level attained in 1909–13.6 And the German naval blockade of the Black Sea had the effect of preventing the export of foodstuffs and releasing a greater potential quantity of grain for domestic consumption.
All this, however, was outweighed by a set of severe disadvantages for the Russian Empire’s economy after 1914. Sufficient foodstuffs regularly reached the forces at the Eastern front; but the government was less successful in keeping the state warehouses stocked for sale to urban civilians. Among the problems were the peasantry’s commercial interests. Peasants were affected by the rapid depreciation of the currency and by the shortage of industrial goods available during the war; they therefore had little incentive to sell grain to the towns. Certainly there was massive industrial growth: by 1916 output in large enterprises was between sixteen and twenty-two per cent higher than in 1913.7 But the increase resulted almost exclusively from factories producing armaments and other military supplies. About four fifths of industrial capital investment was directed towards this sector, and the production of goods for the agricultural sector practically ceased.8
No remedy was in sight so long as the country was at war and military exigencies had to dominate industrial policy. Not even the huge state loans raised from the empire’s banks and private investors, from Russia’s allies and from American finance-houses were sufficient to bail out the Imperial economy.9 The government was compelled to accelerate the emission of paper rubles to deal with the budgetary pressures. Rapid inflation became unavoidable.
Transport was another difficulty. The railway network had barely been adequate for the country’s uses in peacetime; the wartime needs of the armed forces nearly crippled it.10 Grain shipments to the towns were increasingly unreliable. Industrialists complained about delays in the delivery of coal and iron from the Don Basin to Petrograd and Moscow. Financiers, too, grew nervous. In 1916 the banks started to exert a squeeze on credit. Each sector of the economy – agriculture, trade, industry, finance, transport – had problems which aggravated the problems in the other sectors. Nor was it human error that was mainly to blame. Not enough Russian factories, mines, roads, railways, banks, schools and farms had attained the level of development achieved by the world’s other leading powers. A protracted war against Germany – the greatest such power on the European continent – unavoidably generated immense strains.
Nicholas II characteristically fumbled the poor hand he had been dealt. Above all, he continued to treat liberal leaders of the State Duma with disdain; he rejected their very moderate demand for a ‘government of public confidence’ even though it was only by introducing some liberals to his cabinet that he could hope to have them on his side if ever his government reached the point of revolutionary crisis.
The tsar, a devoted husband and father, was more adept at ordering repression than at mustering political support. The Marxist deputies to the Duma, including both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, were arrested in November 1914 on the grounds of their opposition to the war effort; and the Okhrana broke up the big strikes which occurred across the country in late 1915 and late 1916. The socialist parties survived only in depleted local groups: most Bolshevik, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders were in Siberian exile or Swiss emigration or had withdrawn from political activity. The state’s sole compromise with the labour movement came with its granting of permission to workers to join their employers in electing War-Industry Committees. These bodies were supposed to flush out the blockages in industrial output. But the existence of the Committees allowed work-forces to discuss their grievances as well as any proposals for the raising of productivity – and this gave the labour movement a chance to escape the government’s tight grip.11
Furthermore, Nicholas II’s very acknowledgement of the necessity of the War-Industry Committees counted against him. Traditionally the emperors had invoked the assistance of ‘society’ only when the state authorities despaired of solving their difficulties by themselves. But the German government was intent upon the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. This was a life-or-death combat for Russia, and the Emperor perceived that his administration could not cope by itself.
The War-Industry Committees were not his only compromise. In 1915 he allowed the municipal councils and the provincial zemstva to establish a central body known as Zemgor. The aim was to enhance the co-ordination of the country’s administration. Zemgor was also authorized to supplement the inadequate medical facilities near the front. But neither Zemgor under Prince Georgi Lvov nor the War-Industry Committees under the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov were given much scope for initiative. Frustrated by this, opposition politicians in the State Duma, the War-Industry Committees and Zemgor started to discuss the possibilities of joint action against Nicholas – and often they met in the seclusion of freemason lodges. Thus co-operation grew among the leading figures: Guchkov the Octobrist, Milyukov the Kadet, Lvov of Zemgor and Alexander Kerenski the Socialist-Revolutionary. Something drastic, they agreed, had to be done about the monarchy.
Yet timidity gripped all except Guchkov, who sounded out opinion among the generals about some sort of palace coup d’état; but in the winter of 1916–17 he still could obtain no promise of active participation. His sole source of consolation was that the commanders at Mogilëv tipped him the wink that they would not intervene to save the monarchy. Indeed nobody was even willing to denounce him to the Okhrana: opinion in the highest public circles had turned irretrievably against Nicholas II.
This did not happen in an ambience of pessimism about Russian victory over the Central Powers. On the contrary, it had been in 1916 that General Brusilov invented effective tactics for breaking through the defences of the enemy.12 Although the Central Powers rallied and counter-attacked, the image of German invincibility was impaired. The hopeful mood of the generals was shared by industrialists. They, too, felt that they had surmounted their wartime difficulties as well as anyone could have expected of them. The early shortages of equipment experienced by the armed forces had been overcome; and the leaders of Russian industry, commerce and finance considered that the removal of Nicholas II would facilitate a decisive increase in economic and administrative efficiency. Such public figures had not personally suffered in the war; many of them had actually ex
perienced an improvement either in their careers or in their bank accounts. But they had become convinced that they and their country would do better without being bound by the dictates of Nicholas II.
The Emperor was resented even more bitterly by those members of the upper and middle classes who had not done well out of the war. There was an uncomfortably large number of them. The Okhrana’s files bulged with reports on disaffection. By 1916 even the Council of the United Gentry, a traditional bastion of tsarism, was reconsidering its loyalty to the sovereign.13
The background to this was economic. There were bankruptcies and other financial embarrassments among industrialists who had failed to win governmental contracts. This happened most notably in the Moscow region (whereas Petrograd’s large businesses gained a great deal from the war). But small and medium-sized firms across the empire experienced trouble; their output steadily declined after 1914 and many of them went into liquidation.14 Plenty of businessmen had grounds for objection to the sleazy co-operation between ministers and the magnates of industry and finance. Many owners of rural estates, too, were hard pressed: in their case the difficulty was the dual impact of the depreciation of the currency and the shortage of farm labourers caused by military conscription;15 and large commercial enterprises were discomfited by the introduction of state regulation of the grain trade. But the discontent did not lead to rebellions, only to grumbles.
The peasantry, too, was passive. Villages faced several painful problems: the conscription of their young males; the unavailability of manufactured goods; inadequate prices for grain and hay; the requisitioning of horses. There was destitution in several regions.16 Even so, the Russian Empire’s vast economy was highly variegated, and some sections of the peasantry did rather well financially during the war. They could buy or rent land more cheaply from landlords. They could eat their produce, feed it to their livestock or sell it to neighbours. They could illicitly distil it into vodka. Nothing, however, could compensate for the loss of sons buried at the front.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 6
