The First World War
Page 44
REVOLT IN RUSSIA
It was not only the French army that recoiled from the mounting cost of the war in 1917. The Russian army too, never as cohesive or as “national” as the French, was creaking at the joints, even before its high command began to organise the spring offensives its representatives had promised at the inter-Allied Chantilly conference in December 1916.45 Its complaints mirrored those to be heard from the French after the Nivelle offensive: bad food, irregular leave, concern for the welfare of families at home, rancour against profiteers, landlords and “shirkers,” those who avoided conscription and earned good wages by so doing, and, more ominously, disbelief in the usefulness of attacks.46 The military postal censorship, which had warned the French government so accurately of discontent in the ranks, intercepted at the end of 1916 evidence of “an overwhelming desire for peace whatever the consequences.”47 It was fortunate for the Russian high command that the winter of 1916–17 was exceptionally severe, preventing any large-scale German offensive which, in the prevailing mood of the Tsar’s army, might have achieved decisive results.
Yet the situations in France and Russia were not comparable. Even during the worst of its troubles, at the front and at home during 1917, France continued to function as a state and an economy. In Russia the economy was breaking down and thereby threatening the survival of the state. The economic problem, however, was not, as in Germany or Austria, one of direct shortage, brought about by blockade and the diversion of resources to war production. It was, on the contrary, one of uncontrolled boom. Industrial mobilisation in Russia, financed by an enormous expansion of paper credit and abandonment of budgeting balanced by gold, had created a relentless demand for labour, met by releasing skilled workers from the ranks—hence so much of the discontent among peasant soldiers who did not qualify for a return to civilian life—and by a migration of exempt peasants, those who could show family responsibilities, from the land to the cities, where cash incomes were far higher than those won, often by barter, on the farm. Migrant peasants also found work in the mines, where employment doubled between 1914 and 1917, on the railways, in the oilfields, in building and, above all, in factories; state factories more than tripled their work force during the war.48
Higher wages and paper money brought rapid inflation, inevitable in a country with an unsophisticated treasury and banking system, and inflation had a particularly disruptive effect on agricultural output. Large landowners took land out of production because they could not afford the threefold increase in wages, while peasants, unwilling or unable to pay high prices for trade goods, withdrew from the grain market and reverted to self-subsistence. At the same time the railways, though employing 1,200,000 men in 1917, against 700,000 in 1914, actually delivered less produce to the cities, partly because of the demands made on them by the armies, partly because the influx of unskilled labour led to a decline in maintenance standards.49 By the beginning of 1917, at a time when exceptionally low temperatures had increased demand, supplies of fuel and food to the cities had almost broken down. In March, the capital, Petrograd, had only a few days’ supply of grain in its warehouses.
It was the shortage of food which provoked what would come to be known as the February Revolution (Russia, working by the old Julian calendar, calculated dates thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the west). The February Revolution was not political in origin or direction. It was initially a protest against material deprivation and became a revolution only because the military garrison of Petrograd refused to join in the repression of the demonstrators and then took their side against the gendarmerie and the Cossacks, the state’s traditional agencies of police action. The revolution began as a series of strikes, first staged to commemorate the “Bloody Sunday” of 9 January, when the Cossacks had put down the 1905 revolt, widening in February (March) to large-scale and repetitive demands for “Bread.” The size of the demonstrations was swelled by a sudden rise in temperatures, which brought the discontented out into winter sunshine, at first to search for food, then to join the activists in the streets. On 25 February, 200,000 workers were crowding the centre of Petrograd, smashing shops and fighting the outnumbered and demoralised police.50
The Tsar’s government was used to civil disorder and had always before found means to put it down. In the last resort, as in 1905, it called out the army to shoot the crowds. In February 1917 ample military force was to hand, 180,000 soldiers in the capital, 152,000 nearby. They belonged, moreover, to the Tsar’s most dependable regiments, the Guards—Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, Ismailovsky, Pavlosky, fourteen in all—which had served the dynasty since the raising of the most senior by Peter the Great. The Preobrazhensky, which wore the mitre caps of the wars against Charles XII of Sweden, and into which the Tsarevitch was traditionally commissioned as a boy-officer, were the guards of guards. The Tsar himself chose its soldiers from the annual recruit contingent, chalking “P” on the clothes of those he selected, and he counted on them to defend him to the death.
By 1917, however, the infantry of the guards had been used up several times over. Those stationed at Petrograd belonged to the reserve battalions and were either new recruits or wounded veterans, “very reluctant to be returned to duty.”51 Their officers were for the most part “raw youths,” recent products of the cadet schools, while some of the soldiers were of a type—educated townsmen—whom care had been taken to exclude in times of peace.52 One of them, Fedor Linde, recorded his reaction to the first attempts at repression of the demonstrations near the Tauride Palace. “I saw a young girl trying to evade the galloping horse of a Cossack officer. She was too slow. A severe blow on the head brought her down under the horse’s feet. She screamed. It was her inhuman, penetrating scream that caused something in me to snap. [I] cried out wildly: ‘Fiends! Fiends! Long live the revolution. To arms! To arms! They are killing innocent people, our brothers and sisters!’ ” Linde, a sergeant of the Finland Guards, was billeted in the barracks of the Preobrazhensky who, though not knowing him, followed his call, took to the streets, and began to battle with gendarmes, Cossacks, officers and such troops—the Ismailovsky and Rifle Guards held firm—as remained loyal.53
The main outbreak of violent demonstrations was on 27 February. By 28 February strikers and the whole of the Petrograd garrison had joined forces and revolution was in full swing. Tsar Nicholas, isolated at headquarters at Mogilev, preserved a characteristic unconcern. He seems to have believed, like Louis XVI in July 1789, that his throne was threatened by nothing more than a rebellion from below. He did not grasp that the army of the capital, the chief prop of his authority, was, like the Gardes françaises in Paris in 1789, in revolt against his rule and that the political class was following its lead. Russia’s parliament, the Duma, was discussing its mandate in the Tauride Palace, while Soviets, committees of the common people formed spontaneously not only in factories and workshops but in military units also, were meeting, sometimes in almost permanent session, passing resolutions and appointing representatives to supervise or even replace those in established authority. In Petrograd, the chief Soviet had nominated an executive committee, the Ispolkom, which was acting as the representative body of all political parties, including the Marxist Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as well as moderates, while on 27 February the Duma had formed a Provisional Committee which anticipated the creation of a new government. At the front, the officers of the General Staff recognised the force of irresistible events. A proposal to despatch a punitive expedition to Petrograd under the command of General Ivanov was cancelled by the Tsar himself when he conferred with his military advisers at Pskov, en route to his country palace of Tsarskoe Selo, on 1 March. There he also conceded permission for the Duma to form a cabinet. There, finally, on the afternoon of 2 March, he agreed to abdicate. The decisive influence upon him during those two days had been the advice of his Chief of Staff, Alexeyev, who on 1 March had cabled him in the following terms:
A revolution in Russia … will mean a disgraceful termi
nation of the war … The army is most intimately connected with the life of the rear. It may be confidently stated that disorders in the rear will produce the same result among the armed forces. It is impossible to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear. The youthful makeup of the present army and its officer staff, among whom a very high proportion consists of reservists and commissioned university students, gives no grounds for assuming that the army will not react to events occurring in Russia.54
The Tsar’s abdication left Russia without a head of state, since the succession was refused by his nominee, the Grand Duke Michael, while the Duma would not accept that of the Tsarevitch. The revolution also shortly left Russia without the apparatus of government, since by an agreement signed between the Duma cabinet and the Ispolkom of the Petrograd Soviet, on 3 March, all provincial governors, the agents of administrative power, were dismissed and the police and gendarmerie, the instruments of their authority, disbanded. All that was left in place outside the capital were the district councils, the zemstva, boards of local worthies without the experience or means to carry out the orders of the Provisional Government. Its orders were, in any case, subject to the veto of the Ispolkom, which arrogated to itself responsibility for military, diplomatic and most economic affairs, leaving the government to do little more than pass legislation guaranteeing rights and liberties to the population.55
Yet the two bodies at least agreed on one thing: that the war must be fought. They did so from different motives, the Provisional Government for broadly nationalist reasons, the Ispolkom, and the Soviets it represented, to defend the revolution. While they continued to denounce the war as “imperialist” and “monstrous,” the Soviets nevertheless feared that defeat by Germany would bring counter-revolution. Thus their “Appeal to the Peoples of the World” of 15 March called on them to join Russia in action for “peace” against their ruling classes, but at the same time they were urging the army, through the Soviets of soldiers, to continue the struggle against “the bayonets of conquerors,” and “foreign military might.”56
The soldiers, with a popular revolution to defend, rediscovered an enthusiasm for the war they seemed to have lost altogether in the winter of 1916. “In the first weeks of the [February Revolution], the soldiers massed in Petrograd not only would not listen to talk of peace, but would not allow it to be uttered”; the petitions of soldiers to the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet indicated that they “were likely to treat proponents of immediate peace as supporters of the Kaiser.”57 The only supporters of immediate peace among all the socialist groups represented on the Ispolkom, the Bolsheviks, were careful not to demand it and, with all their leaders—Trotsky, Bukharin and Lenin—currently in exile, were in no position to do so.
A renewed war effort needed leadership of its own, however, and neither the Ispolkom nor the original Provisional Government was headed by figures of inspiration. The Ispolkom’s members were socialist intellectuals, the Prime Minister, Prince Lvov, a benevolent populist. The socialists, obsessed with abstract political ideas, had no understanding of practicalities, nor did they wish for any. Lvov had a high-minded but hopelessly unrealistic belief in the capacity of “the people” to settle the direction of their own future. The Bolsheviks, who knew what they wanted, were excluded from influence by the people’s reborn bellicosity. In the circumstances it was to be expected that leadership should pass to a man of dynamism. He appeared in the person of Alexander Kerensky, whose unsocialist instinct for power but impeccable socialist credentials allowed him to combine membership of the Ispolkom with ministerial office, and to enjoy the strong support of ordinary members of the Soviet. First appointed Minister of Justice, he became Minister of War, in May (April under the Julian calendar, which the Provisional Government had dropped), and at once set about a purge of the high command, which he regarded as defeatist. Brusilov, the army’s most successful commander, became Chief of Staff, while Kerensky’s own commissars were sent to the front with the mission of encouraging an offensive spirit among the common soldiers.
Those in the Petrograd garrison may have been adamant for war in the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution. They petitioned, and sometimes demonstrated—“War for Freedom until Victory”—safe in the knowledge that they would not be called upon to risk their lives; the seventh of the eight points of the Ispolkom’s notorious Order No. 1, abolishing governorship and police, stipulated that “military units that had participated in the Revolution … would not be sent to the front.” Troops at the front, though they treated Kerensky as a popular idol on his tours of inspection, proved less enthusiastic for what has come to be called the “Kerensky offensive,” of June 1917, launched to bring about the defeat of “foreign military might” for which there was so much verbal enthusiasm in the rear. General Dragomirov, commanding the Fifth Army, reported the warning signs: “in reserve, regiments declare their readiness to fight on to full victory, but then baulk at the demand to go into the trenches.”58 On 18 June, nevertheless, Kerensky’s offensive opened, after a two-day preparatory bombardment, against the Austrians in the south, directed once again against Lemberg, pivot of the fighting in 1914–15, and target of Brusilov’s offensive the previous summer; subsidiary offensives were launched in the centre and the north. For two days the attack went well and several miles of ground were gained. Then the leading units, feeling they had done their bit, refused to persist, while those behind refused to take their place. Desertion set in, and worse. Fugitives from the front, in thousands, looted and raped in the rear. When the Germans, who were forewarned, counter-attacked with divisions already brought from the west, they and the Austrians simply recovered the ground lost and captured more themselves, driving the Russians back to the line of the River Zbrucz on the Romanian border. The Romanians, who attempted to join the Russians in the offensive from their remaining enclave north of the Danube, were also defeated.
While calamity overtook the Revolution’s forces at the front, the Revolution itself was coming under attack in the rear. Those who had overthrown the monarchy were not, in Russian political terms, extremists. That title belonged to the Majority (Bolshevik) wing of the Social Democrat Party whose leaders—Lenin, Bukharin—were in February either absent from Petrograd or in exile abroad. Lenin was in Zurich, Bukharin and Trotsky, the latter not yet a member of the Bolsheviks, in New York. By April, however, all had returned, Lenin through the good offices of the German government which, scenting the opportunity to undermine Russia’s continuing if faltering will to war by implanting the leaders of the peace movement in its faction-ridden capital, had transported him and his entourage from Switzerland aboard the famous “sealed train” towards Sweden. From Stockholm the party proceeded to Petrograd, where it was welcomed not only by the local Bolsheviks but also by representatives of the Ispolkom and the Petrograd Soviet. Immediately after his arrival he addressed a Bolshevik meeting where he outlined his programme: non-co-operation with the Provisional Government; nationalisation of banks and property, including land; abolition of the army in favour of a people’s militia; an end to the war; and “all power to the Soviets,” which he already had plans to bring under Bolshevik control.59
These “April Theses” failed to win support even from his Bolshevik followers, to whom they seemed premature, and his first effort to put them into practice justified their misgivings. When in July some of the more dissident units of the Petrograd garrison took to the streets, with Bolshevik connivance, in protest at an order to go to the front, an order designed to get them out of the capital, Kerensky was able to find enough loyal troops to put their rebellion down. The “July Events” gave Lenin a serious fright, not least because, in the aftermath, it was revealed that he was receiving financial support from the German government. Time, nevertheless, was on his side, time measured not in the “inevitability” of the “second revolution” for which he was working, but in the increasingly limited willingness of the field army to remain at the
front. The collapse of the Kerensky offensive had dispirited even those soldiers who resisted the increasingly easy opportunities to desert. Their lapse of will allowed the Germans in August to launch a successful offensive on the northern front which resulted in the capture of Riga, the most important harbour city on the Baltic coast. Militarily, the Riga offensive was significant because it demonstrated to the Germans the effectiveness of a new system of breakthrough tactics, designed by the artillery expert, Bruchmüller, which they were perfecting with the thought of applying it on the Western Front.60 Politically, it was yet more significant, since it prompted a military intervention which, though designed to reinforce the authority of the Provisional Government, would shortly result in its collapse.