Of these, far and away the most important was the Defense Council. As with the other Special Councils, it was chaired by a minister, in this case the Minister of War, Polivanov. It consisted of 36–40 members, the majority private persons, including ten deputies each from the Duma and the State Council, four representatives of the Central Military-Industrial Committee (see below), and two from zemstva and Municipal Councils.104 Rodzianko received virtual carte blanche to select the non-governmental representatives.105 The Defense Council enjoyed broad authority. It lay in its power to confiscate private enterprises that were not performing satisfactorily, to hire and dismiss managers, and to determine wages. It held its first meeting on August 26, 1915, in the presence of Nicholas and Alexandra, and subsequently met twice a week.
To help implement the decisions of the Defense Council, the government authorized the creation of a Central Military-Industrial Committee (Tsentral’nyi Voenno-Promyshlennyi Komitet). Based in Moscow and chaired by Guchkov, it had the mission of bringing medium and small plants into war production. The committee opened some 250 branch offices throughout the country and through them placed orders for the production of artillery shells, hand grenades, cartridges, and other hardware. As a result of its efforts, around 1,300 small and medium-sized industrial establishments went over to war production.106 Just as the government felt it necessary to invite the participation of private enterprise, so private enterprise found it desirable to secure the cooperation of industrial labor. To this end, the Military-Industrial Committee took the unusual step of inviting factories working for the military and employing 500 or more people to send worker representatives. Bolshevik agitators opposed this proposal and for a while discouraged worker participation,107 but the Mensheviks, who enjoyed greater labor following, managed to overcome the boycott. In November 1915 there came into being the Central Workers’ Group (Tsentral’naia Rabochaia Gruppa), chaired by the Menshevik worker K. A. Gvozdev, which helped the Central Military-Industrial Committee maintain labor discipline, prevent strikes, and resolve worker grievances.108 The participation of workers in industrial management and, indirectly, in the management of the war economy was without precedent in Russia, serving as yet another indicator of the social and political changes that the pressures of war had helped to bring about.
The leaders of the Military-Industrial Committees tended to exaggerate their contribution to the war effort: recent studies indicate that they accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of the defense procurements.109 Even so, they played an important part in helping to break bottlenecks in certain sectors of the war economy, and it is unfair to describe them as “unnecessary,” let alone a “nuisance.”110
The achievement of the Defense Council and the Military-Industrial Committee can be demonstrated on the example of artillery ammunition. Whereas in 1914 Russian industries were capable of turning out only 100,000–150,000 shells a year, in 1915 they produced 950,000 and in 1916, 1,850,000. By then, shell shortages were a thing of the past. On the eve of the February Revolution, the Russian army Jiad more than enough artillery ammunition for its needs, estimated at 3,000 shells for each light gun and 3,500 for each heavy gun.* To speed production, the Defense Council in early 1916 nationalized two of the largest defense manufacturers, the Putilov and Obukhov plants in Petrograd, which had been plagued by poor management and strikes.
Of the three other Special Councils—Transport, Food Supply, and Fuel Supply—the first ranked as the most important. Its accomplishments included improving the railroad line from Archangel to Vologda by converting it from a narrow to a normal gauge, which tripled the freight it could carry from this port of entry for Allied supplies.111 The council also initiated the construction of the railroad line to Murmansk.
While the immediate importance of the Special Councils lay in their contribution to the war effort, they also had a major political significance. In the words of the historian Maxim Kovalevskii, they were a “complete innovation”112—the first institutions in Russia in which private persons sat side by side on terms of equality with government functionaries. This went a long way toward the dissolution of one of the last vestiges of patrimonialism still embedded in the Russian state structure, which held that the administration of the realm was the exclusive domain of officials appointed by the Tsar and in possession of “rank.” It was a development perhaps less dramatic than granting the parliament the right to choose ministers would have been, but one scarcely less important in the country’s constitutional evolution.
A third organization created at this time to assist the government in running the war effort was the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils, known as Zemgor. The government, which in the past had forbidden national associations of self-government organs, now finally relented, and in August 1915 permitted the zemstva and Municipal Councils to form their own national unions to help take care of invalids and refugees. As if to emphasize its humanitarian mission, the Zemstvo Union (Zemskii Soiuz) adopted the Red Cross as its emblem. The chairmanship of this organization was assumed by Prince George Evgenevich Lvov, a prominent zemstvo figure who had directed a like effort during the war with Japan. Similar authorization was given concurrently to the Municipal Councils. In November 1915, the two groups combined into the Zemgor, which, with the help of many thousands of volunteers as well as salaried employees, assisted the civilian population to cope with the hardships of war. When masses of refugees fled into the interior of Russia from the combat zone (among them Jews forcefully evicted on suspicion of pro-German sympathies), it was Zemgor that took care of them. Bureaucrats and army officers dismissed these civilian busybodies as “zemstvo hussars.” Nevertheless, as in so many other areas of activity, the authorities had no choice but to rely on private bodies for lack of adequate resources of their own.113
In addition to these quasi-public private bodies, volunteer organizations of all kinds sprang up in Russia at the time, notably producer and consumer cooperatives.114
Thus, in the midst of the war, a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the formal structure of what on the war’s eve had been a semi-patrimonial, semi-constitutional state: its development resembled the vigorous growth of saplings in the shade of an old and decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank alongside rank holders in governmental institutions and the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptoms of a silent revolution, the more effective in that it was accomplished to meet actual needs rather than to realize Utopian visions. Conservative bureaucrats were dismayed by the rise of this “second” or shadow government.115 For the very same reason, the opposition brimmed with confidence. Kadet leaders boasted that the mixed and civic organizations created during the war would demonstrate so convincingly their superiority over the bureaucracy that once peace was restored nothing would be able to prevent them from taking charge of the country.116
*The Russians gained additional confidence in their ability to crush the Austrians from access to Austrian operational plans provided by their agent, Colonel Alfred Redl, who worked for them between 1905 and 1913. See William C. Fuller, Jr., in E. R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 115–16.
*This procedure followed the one adopted in the war with Japan, when Russia had also carried out a partial mobilization: L. G. Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot Rossii v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1986), 11.
*Russian Jews were, in theory, liable to military service. But because there were more men available for the annual draft than the services required, Jews had little difficulty buying their way out of conscription by bribing the examining doctors or the clerks in charge of birth certificates. In 1914–17, however, they were drafted en masse: it is estimated that some half a million Jews served in the Russian army during World War I.
*Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot, 70. After the Japanese war, Russia also adopted the policy of not ordering abroad any military equipment that could be produced at home: A. A. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi
armii v mirovuiu voinu, I, 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), 363.
*N. N. Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossiia v mirovoi wine, I (Paris, 1939), 56–57. A. L. Sidorov in Ekonomicheskoepolozhenie Rossii vgody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1973), 567, calculates that in terms of territorial coverage, Russia’s railroad network was one-eleventh of Germany’s and one-seventh of Austria-Hungary’s.
†St. Petersburg, which sounded Germanic, was renamed Petrograd on the outbreak of the war.
‡In early 1915, the British attempted, without success, at Gallipoli to break through this blockade. See W. S. Churchill, The Unknown War: The Eastern Front (New York, 1931), 304, and John Buchan, A History of the Great War, II, (Boston, 1922), 12. Had the Gallipoli campaign met the expectations of Churchill, its main protagonist, the course of Russian history may have been very different.
*A leading proponent of this theory was I. S. Bliokh, whose six-volume study appeared in an English condensation as The Future of War (New York, 1899).
*Rennenkampf was captured in early 1918 by the Bolsheviks near Taganrog while helping General Lavr Kornilov. According to a contemporary newspaper, he was frightfully tortured and then shot: NZh, No. 83/298, May 4, 1918, p. 3.
*E. von Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, 1914–1916 (Berlin, 1920), 17. In evaluating Falkenhayn’s assessment, however, it must be borne in mind that, convinced that Germany could gain victory only in the west, he had strenuously opposed offensive operations against the Russians. In his memoirs he could have hardly been expected to show impartiality toward Hindenburg, who in August 1916 replaced him as chief of staff.
†It must also be remembered that Hindenburg and Ludendorff destroyed the Russian Second Army without the help of reinforcements from the west. The latter arrived in time to help expel the Russian First Army from East Prussia.
*Sources on the Progressive Bloc have been published in KA, No. 1–2/50–51 (1932), 117–60, No. 3/52 (1932), 143–96, and No. 1/56 (1933), 80–135, as well as in B. B. Grave, ed., Burzhuaziia nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 19–32. See further V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), passim.
*Nikolai Nikolaevich went to the Caucasus as viceroy. He would play a minor role in the events leading up to the February Revolution.
*Sidorov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 117–19. As will be noted in the next chapter, a significant portion of the shells available in 1916–17 came from foreign suppliers.
7
Toward the Catastrophe
The whole purpose of the Progressive Bloc was to prevent revolution so as to enable the government to finish the war.
—V. V. Shulgin1
In the second year of the war, Russia succeeded in solving her most pressing military problems. The shortages of artillery shells and rifles were largely made good by the efforts of the Defense Council and imports. The front which in the late summer of 1915 had seemed close to collapse, stabilized once the German High Command decided to suspend offensive operations in the east. By the summer of 1916, the Russian army had recovered sufficiently to launch a major offensive. But just as the front stiffened, the rear displayed alarming symptoms of malaise. In contrast to 1915, when disaffection had been largely confined to the educated elite, it now spread to the mass of the urban population. Its causes were primarily economic—namely, growing shortages of consumer goods, especially foodstuffs, and inflation. The government, treating these problems as transitory and self-correcting, did next to nothing to correct them.
The urban inhabitants of Russia, having had no previous experience with shortages and rising prices, had difficulty grasping their causes. Their instinct was to blame the government, an attitude in which they were encouraged by the liberal and radical intelligentsia. By October 1916 the discontent in the cities reached such intensity that the Department of Police in confidential reports compared the situation to 1905 and warned that another revolution could be in the offing.
In the hope of averting an explosion, the Duma resumed pressures on the government to concede it the power to make ministerial appointments, something that had become an idée fixe with a good part of its membership. This demand, which Nicholas and Alexandra stubbornly resisted, added fuel to popular passions, with the result that economic discontent acquired a political dimension. The sudden contact between the restless urban masses, with the mutinous military garrisons, and the frustrated politicians which occurred in the winter of 1916–17 produced the short circuit that sent the Imperial regime up in flames.
Although compared with the major industrial powers, Russia was poor, before the war her currency was regarded as one of the soundest in the world. The Russian Treasury followed stringent rules for the issuance of paper money. The first 600 million rubles of notes had to be backed 50 percent with gold reserves: all bank-note emissions above that sum required 100 percent gold backing. In February 1905, the Treasury had in its vaults 1,067 million rubles’ worth of bullion; with 1,250 million paper rubles in circulation, the ruble was 85 percent gold-backed.2 On the eve of World War I, Russian bank notes were 98 percent backed by gold. At the time, Russia had the largest gold reserve in Europe.3
The outbreak of World War I threw Russia’s finances into disarray from which they never recovered.
The steep inflation in the latter stages of the war can be traced partly to national poverty and partly to fiscal mismanagement. Unlike the richer belligerents, Russia could not extract much of the money needed to pay for the war either from current revenues or from internal loans. It has been estimated that whereas the national per capita income of England in 1913 was $243, of France $185, and of Germany $146, Russia’s was a mere $44. And yet Russia’s war costs would be equal to England’s and inferior only to Germany’s.4 Even so, the government could have done more to pay for the war from revenues had it imposed direct taxes, made a greater effort to sell war bonds, and maintained state income at the prewar level. As it was, a good part of the war deficit had to be covered by emissions of paper money and foreign borrowing.
One cause of the decline of state revenues was the introduction at the outbreak of the war of prohibition on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Russia took this measure—the first major country in the world to do so—in an effort to reduce alcoholism, which was believed responsible for the physical and moral degeneration of her inhabitants. Prohibition, however, had little effect on alcohol consumption since the closing of state-owned outlets immediately led to a rise in the output of moonshine. During the war, in addition to homemade vodka, a popular beverage was khanzha, made of fermented bread reinforced with commercial cleaning fluids. But while alcoholism did not decline, the Treasury’s income from alcohol taxes did, and these had formerly accounted for one-fourth of its revenues. These and other losses of income, such as declines in customs duties, caused a sharp drop in revenues.
During the war, the “ordinary” income of the Russian Treasury more than covered the “ordinary” part of the budget; but this part did not include the costs of the war. In 1915, “ordinary” revenues were 3 billion rubles and “ordinary” expenditures 2.2 billion; in 1916, they were 4.3 billion and 2.8 billion, respectively.5 But, of course, the bulk of expenses went for the war, and here “ordinary” revenues were of little help. Russia’s total wartime deficit is estimated at 30 billion rubles, half of which was covered by domestic and foreign loans and the rest by emissions of paper currency.
On July 27, 1914, the government suspended for the duration of the war (but, as it turned out, permanently) the convertibility of paper rubles into gold as well as the gold-reserve requirements for the issuance of bank notes. The Treasury was empowered to print notes upon receipt of authorization without regard to the amount of gold in its vaults. The immediate effect of this ruling was the disappearance from circulation of specie. On the outbreak of the war, the Treasury issued 1.5 billion rubles in bank notes, which had the effect of doubling the quantity of pa
per money. This procedure would be repeated several times in the course of the war. By January 1917, the quantity of paper in circulation had increased fourfold, according to some sources, and fivefold or even sixfold according to others.* The gold backing of paper currency declined proportionately, from 98 percent (July 1914) to 51.4 percent (January 1915), 28.7 percent (January 1916), and 16.2 percent (January 1917).6 This development contributed to the drop in the exchange rate of Russian currency abroad: in Stockholm, between July 1914 and January 1916, the ruble declined by 44 percent; it stayed at this level until the summer of 1917.†
Thus, in two and a half years, the amount of paper notes in Russia increased by as much as 600 percent. This compares with a 100 percent increase in France, a 200 percent increase in Germany, and no increase at all in Great Britain during the four years these countries were at war.7 Russia printed more money than any other belligerent power and, as a consequence, suffered more severely from inflation.
The Russian Revolution Page 38
