Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Reform, war and revolution

informants among them, and quite successfully: the major revolutionary par-

ties in 1912 were so disorganised that they could not turn much to their beneﬁt

the deep popular outrage provoked by the massacre of 172 striking workers in

the Lena Goldﬁelds on 4 April 1912.

Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, appointed deputy interior minister in

January 1913, launched a series of reforms of the security police aimed at cutting

costs,winningpublicsupport forthe government and restrictingpolice reliance

on informants. In March he prohibited the recruitment of informants in the

military, despite a growing perception among senior police ofﬁcials, expressed

at two security conferences in late 1912, that the use of informants should be

increased to combat the spread of sedition among enlisted personnel. In May,

Dzhunkovskii prohibited deploying informants in secondary schools, which

appears to have been an infrequent practice anyway. It might have seemed

that he had in mind an all-out assault on the security system, for between

May 1913 and February 1914 he abolished most of the provincial and regional

security bureaus and transferred their functions to the provincial gendarme

chiefs. Although some ofﬁcials considered the regional bureaus ineffective,

senior police ofﬁcials incessantly criticised most provincial gendarmes, and an

authoritative report of December 1912 had attributed the disorganisation of

the revolutionary movement to the efﬁciency of the regional bureaus. In the

short term, nevertheless, Dzhunkovskii’s reforms seem not to have gravely

weakened the security system, and for two reasons: the security bureaus in the

imperial capitals remained strong (although Dzhunkovskii dismissed the very

able St Petersburg bureau chief, Mikhail von Koten) and the regional bureaus

were not abolished until January 1914 when the revolutionary organisations

had already been severely weakened.

The logical response to harsh police repression for many revolutionaries lay

in developing legal methods of protest and agitation. The Social Democrats

founded Pravda in April 1912 and Luch in September, Bolshevik and Menshevik

newspapers,respectively.The police watchedthem, naturally, seized individual

issues and occasionally closed them down, but they repeatedly reopened under

different names, a ruse the police were legally powerless to prevent. Pravda,for

example, was closed down eight times during its two-year pre-revolutionary

existence. The police’s only recourse was to maintain informants within the

editorial board. One informant, Miron Chernomazov, edited Pravda from May

29 See Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries,

June 1907–February 1917 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990 ), pp. 88–97.

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1913 to February 1914.

Similarly, the Bolsheviks participated eagerly in the

Fourth Duma, elected in late summer and early autumn 1912. One of the six

Bolshevik deputies, Roman Malinovskii, by far the most talented and charis-

matic, was, in fact, a police informant. In May 1914, however, Dzhunkovskii

ordered his dismissal. The rumours attending this event stunned the Bolshe-

vik leadership, as Azef’s exposure had disconcerted Socialist-Revolutionary

leaders, to the extent that Lenin, still dumfounded, barely reacted to the

major political strikes of industrial workers in Petersburg and Moscow in June

1914.

Historians disagree on whether the incidence of labour unrest between April

1912 and June 1914, greater than during the previous years, proves that the gov-

ernment was unstable. All agree, however, that the declaration of war against

Germany on 17 July 1914 at least temporarily put an end to this and other

popular unrest in Russia. The maintenance of public tranquillity was facili-

tated by the immediate imposition throughout the empire of a state of either

extraordinary security or martial law, which permitted the suppression of

legal newspapers, trade unions and educational societies linked to revolution-

ary groups.

The security police also arrested many remaining underground

activists and worked to keep Bolsheviks and Mensheviks from uniting. By early

1916 the prospects for revolution seemed to many revolutionary activists very

dim.

Yet the imperial system was on the eve of collapse. In September 1916,

Aleksandr Protopopov, a favourite of Rasputin and an erratic administrator,

became the ﬁfth interior minister in thirteen months. The economic situation,

already dismal, worsened throughout 1916. By late November, a court security

police report spoke of a ‘food crisis’, and on 5 February 1917 the Petrograd

security bureau warned of coming hunger riots that could lead to ‘the most

horrible kind of anarchistic revolution’.

Large-scale strikes took place on 14

February, but efﬁcient crowd control prevented their getting out of hand. On

the night of 25 February the Petrograd Security Bureau arrested a hundred

radical activists. The bureau’s last report was prepared on the twenty-seventh

30 For a detailed study of government policies toward the radical press in this period, see

my ‘Pravitel’stvo, pressa i antigosudarstvennaia deiatel’nost’ v Rossii, 1906–1917 gg.’, VI

10 (2001): 25–45.

31 On Malinovskii, see Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovskii: A Life Without a Cause

(Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977).

32 Daly, ‘Emergency Legislation’, 626.

33 Special Section of Court Commandant report, 26 November 1916, GARF, Fond 97,op.

4,d.117, ll. 93–5; Petrograd security bureau report, 5 February 1917, ibid., ll. 124–124 ob.

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amid a general strike, massive troop mutinies and the formation of the Duma’s

Provisional Committee andthe Soviet. Thatevening crowdssacked and burned

the security bureau headquarters in Petrograd.

Although Moscow and much

of the rest of the empire temporarily remained calm, this concatenation of

events marked the end of the imperial government.

On 4 and 10 March, the Provisional Government abolished the security

bureaus, the Police Department and the Gendarme Corps; transferred gen-

darme ofﬁcers and enlisted men to the regular army; and dismissed all gov-

ernors and vice-governors. On 18 March it created a bureau for counter-

espionage, but against domestic threats to state security the new government

left itself nearly defenceless.

This was because Russia’s new leaders imagined

that the collapse of the monarchy would usher in a new form of politics with-

out internal threats to state security. In fact, the dismantling of the imperial

police apparatus, as odious as its institutions may have been to many edu-

cated Russians, was an invitation to takeover by political conspirators. The

imperial security police could not forestall the February Revolution, because

it was driven purely by mass discontent; a reasonably sophisticated security

police almost certainly could have saved the Provisional Government from

the October Bolshevik overthrow, which lacked the sort of mass participation

that brought down the imperial dynasty and government in February.

34 The most complete study of the February Revolutionis Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, TheFebruary

Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981).

35 Zhurnal zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel’stva, 4, 10 and 18 March 1917, GARF, Fond 1779,

op. 2,d.3, ll. 2, 3 ob., 25, 70.

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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, walk-

outs 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 alreadyby25 February gave the sense that a revolution wasunder way.

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.

The bulk of the Petrograd garrison remained in the barracks on 26 February,

but heated discussions led to mutinies which spread rapidly through the gar-

rison. By the twenty-seventh, the commanders and loyal ofﬁcers completely

1 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and

Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 37.

2 Iu. 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, two-

thirds of which were soldiers. It was such an unwieldyassemblythat 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.

While this new polity was forming, the tsar was isolated in Pskov. He

remained obstinately opposed to abdication and even refused to make polit-

ical 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 com-

manders, in close communication with the president of the Duma, Mikhail

Rodzianko, decided early on 2 March that the only solution was abdication.

3 F. Golder (ed.), Documents of Russian History, 1914–1917 (New York: Century Co., 1927),

pp. 308–9.

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That morning, the commander-in-chief of the army, Mikhail Alekseev, con-

ducted 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 abdi-

cation. 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 gov-

ernment authority solely in their hands until the convocation of a constituent

assembly, which was to determine the future governmental system. The pro-

mulgation 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 interven-

tion showed. The mutiny dramatically raised the stakes, radicalising and arm-

ing 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 Govern-

ment 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 eco-

nomic backwardness as an underlying cause of the revolution. Many memoirs,

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foreigners’ accounts and narratives portray the link between war and revolu-

tion 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 net-

work 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.

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 divi-

sion, 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 pro-

duction contest.

The mobilisation of Russian industry to increase production for the war

effort began slowly and faced many obstacles. Only gradually did the gov-

ernment turn to the kind of aggressive state measures to inﬂuence and direct

economic activitytowardsthe war that wereso successful inGermany. 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 1890sto1914.

The

war brought a sharp and sudden end to this key source of industrial growth.

4 N. Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Penguin, 1998).

5 J. P. McKay, Pioneers for Proﬁt: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885–

1913 (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 mat

eriel. 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 weregreatly 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,or10 per cent of all expenditures on the war.

Not least of the impacts of prohibition was that the massive demand for

alcohol switched to consumer items and manufactured goods, thereby con-

tributing to inﬂation – one of the most important links between the war and

the revolution. Inﬂation, of course, had other important sources. Most fun-

damentally, the lack of a domestic market for government debt, difﬁculties in

acquiring foreign credit and the sharp reduction of exports all combined to

6 Arthur McKey, ‘Sukhoi zakon v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny: prichiny, kontseptsiia i posled-

stviia 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 circu-

lation 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 increas-

ingly common and important occurrence on the home front as the problems

of the wartime economy accumulated.

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 organi-

sations 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 ‘mid-

dlemen’ involved in the pre-war grain market. Both efforts only exacerbated

shortages and tensions in the countryside.

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 theycould 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 marketas inﬂation accelerated inlate 1916 andearly1917.

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

7 Iu. I. Kir’ianov, ‘Massovye vystupleniia na pochve dorogovizny v Rossii (1914–fevral’ 1917

g.)’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 1 (1993): 3–18.

8 Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

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

1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 33–4.

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