A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (79 page)

The results of all the propaganda would be tragic. By raising the stakes of the war beyond the limits of reason, the propagandists ensured that whichever side lost would feel terribly, irredeemably wronged. And that whichever side won would find it difficult to deal rationally with the populations it had defeated.

Chapter 27

Revolution and Intervention

“All this is really no business of mine but something must be done. And if I don’t do it nothing will be done.”

—E
RICH
L
UDENDORFF

T
he six weeks leading up to the Nivelle offensive brought two of the most world-changing events since the French Revolution. The Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries came to an end, and the United States entered the Great War.

Like many of history’s great upheavals, the end of the Romanovs was both a long time coming and shockingly sudden. In military terms, Russia’s situation had seemed mildly promising as 1917 began. The Brusilov offensive, in spite of its costs, had been one of the war’s most brilliantly successful campaigns and had given the Russian commanders new confidence. The winter had provided the army with months in which to regroup, Austria-Hungary was obviously no longer dangerous, and France and Britain were sending huge amounts of equipment—artillery and shells in particular, but other weapons and essential matériel as well—to the Eastern Front. Even Germany, its forces stretched thin, no longer seemed as intimidating as before. As Churchill would write after the war, to emerge victorious Russia had only, from 1917 on, to maintain an intact front. Its generals thought they could do more than that. When Joffre originally proposed a multifront offensive for 1917, they showed no reluctance to join in. When Joffre fell and was succeeded by Nivelle, and when Nivelle’s plan for the Chemin des Dames became the Entente’s Western Front plan for 1917, the Russians said they would have seventy divisions ready for action when Nivelle attacked. Those divisions would be equipped with tens of thousands of machine guns and pieces of artillery. Such numbers made even generals as cautious as Evert, whose timidity in 1916 had saved the Germans from ruin, willing to attack.

These promising developments would mean nothing in the end, however, because the Russian home front was slipping into chaos. The winter of 1916–17 was exceptionally hard, with extraordinarily deep snows and temperatures so low that more than a thousand steam locomotives froze up and exploded. The railway system, never more than satisfactory, became barely capable of functioning. Throughout most of Russia the situation remained manageable, but the flow of food and fuel into the largest cities slowed to a trickle. The problem was especially serious in Petrograd—which in addition to being the capital was Russia’s most important industrial center—because of its remoteness from the interior. By early in the new year factories were shutting down for lack of fuel. The workers were left with nothing to do but roam the streets, cold and hungry, frightened and angry. The bakeries that had flour could not make bread because they could not heat their ovens; the women of the city, unable to get their usual scant rations even by waiting in line for hours, began to loot. The tens of thousands of troops stationed in Petrograd, many of them untrained and bewildered recruits, were harangued by wandering agitators calling for revolution and an end to the war.

Almost everyone by now was demanding change, especially the appointment of a “responsible” Council of Ministers—one willing and able to carry out the duties for which the tsar’s cabinet was supposed to be responsible. But nothing changed, and the expectation of a final crisis came to be almost universal. That any such crisis would almost certainly topple the regime seemed obvious, and outbursts of hostility toward the tsar and tsarina became commonplace even in privileged circles. General Sir Henry Wilson, a senior member of the British general staff, visited Russia and reported that “everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with them.” When the young democratic socialist Alexander Kerensky told the Duma that Nicholas and Alexandra must be deposed “by terrorist methods if there is no other way,” he was cheered and promised protection. Though his words were suppressed by the newspapers, they spread through the capital and were everywhere applauded. On February 23 the Duma’s president, ending a meeting with the tsar, said he thought they would not meet again because revolution was imminent. Nicholas, who had retreated deep within himself by now, did not respond. Among the civil authorities, however, an uprising was regarded as so nearly inevitable that the police were issued machine guns.

Russian women reading the latest list of deaths on the front

Nicholas was weary, isolated, impervious to advice, incapable of action, possibly aware of what lay ahead and internally preparing himself for it. He had spent much of the winter secluded with his wife and children in their palace at Tsarskoe Selo near the capital. Almost everyone who had access to him—Alexandra excepted—was begging him to appoint a new cabinet, but he did nothing. The tsarina, a majority of one, was urging him to rule autonomously and ruthlessly. “Lovy, be firm, because the Russians need you to be,” she wrote him after he left home for army headquarters. “At every turn you show love & kindness—now let them feel your fist, as they themselves ask. So many of late have told, that we need the knout. It’s strange, but that is the Slav nature.” But even to her appeals Nicholas made almost no response. People who met with him would remember how distant and detached he had become, seemingly untouched by what was happening. He would listen patiently to repeated appeals for action, smile vacantly, and say and do nothing. The only official in whom either Nicholas or Alexandra placed any confidence was the ludicrously incapable Alexander Protopopov, who gave less attention to his duties as minister of the interior (which duties were supposed to include getting essential supplies into the cities) than to the séances at which he assisted the tsarina in trying to establish contact with the late Rasputin. Protopopov was a singularly manipulative fool: in the presence of the tsarina he would fall to his knees and declare in tones of wonder that he had seen the figure of Jesus standing behind her.

Alexander Kerensky
His fatal error: trying to keep
Russia in the war.

On Wednesday, March 7, Nicholas raised the hopes of every reasonable member of the government by abruptly announcing that on the following day he would go to the Duma and declare his intention to appoint a new cabinet. That same evening, however, he made a second announcement—that he was leaving immediately for army headquarters, that there would be no visit to the Duma, that he was, in short, breaking his promise. Within hours he was gone from the capital. It is likely that he departed both at the insistence of his wife, who thought Nicholas was being intolerably weak if he so much as acknowledged the existence of the Duma, and to escape from her constant instructions and appeals. He had no particular need to be at army headquarters, with the Eastern Front still locked in winter. That may be precisely why he went—to escape from everything. He was perhaps in a depression, perhaps simply resigned. As soon as he was gone, events began to unfold rapidly.

On Thursday street demonstrations in Petrograd turned as before into riots and looting. Cossack troops, the cavalry traditionally used by the tsars to control unruly or merely disfavored civilian populations, were sent into the streets to restore order. These Cossacks, however, were mainly young, inexperienced, and half-trained; those of their elder brothers who had not by now died in the war were off at the front. Significantly, they did not carry with them the whips with which Cossacks customarily subdued crowds. Instead of attacking the rioters, most of whom were women, they mingled with them and assured them that they were in no danger.

On Friday the crowds were even larger than before, the rioting more violent. The leaders of the capital’s most radical leftist groups, suddenly bold after years of ferocious repression, called for a general strike.

On Saturday the crowds and the Cossack horsemen were once again out in force. The latter, ordered to fire on the demonstrators, turned their guns on the police instead. This almost unimaginably shocking turn of events, the end of generations of Cossack loyalty to the regime, sent the cabinet into a panic. Members sent a telegram to the tsar offering their resignations and asking him to return to Petrograd and form a new government. The reply that he sent was magnificently absurd in its irrelevance to the situation: “I order that the disorders in the capital, intolerable during these difficult times of war with Germany and Austria, be ended tomorrow.”

That tomorrow, Sunday, March 11, was in fact comparatively quiet, the streets almost empty. Before leaving the capital Nicholas had given his newest prime minister, an aged and well-intentioned but ineffectual veteran of the Petrograd bureaucracy, a signed order for the dismissal of the Duma. His instructions had been to hold this document in reserve and use it if necessary. Now it was delivered to the assembly, whose members promptly voted to disregard it. In doing so they effectively joined the revolution.

On Monday tens of thousands of soldiers joined it as well. Many simply deserted. Others joined the civilians in a fresh outbreak of rioting. The capital’s huge armory was attacked, taken, and pillaged. Thousands of rifles were carried off into every corner of the city and into the hands of every would-be revolutionary. Courthouses and the offices of the secret police were set ablaze. Prisons were broken into, their inmates freed to flee or join the mob.

On Tuesday, March 13, Tsar Nicholas finally left army headquarters and began the five-hundred-mile rail journey back to Petrograd. His progress was slow. In yet another of his endless acts of well-intentioned foolishness, Nicholas had ordered that his train should follow an indirect route so as not to interfere with the flow of troops and matériel to the front. As he drew closer to the capital, he encountered increasing signs of disorder. Finally, with the imperial train still far from its destination, reports of violence along the line ahead made it clear that further progress would be impossible. The locomotive pulling Nicholas and his entourage was shunted into the railyard of the obscure provincial town of Pskov, where it came to a halt.

Telegrams arrived from senior military commanders—one came from Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus—telling the tsar that it had become imperative that he surrender the crown. Nicholas seemed unsurprised. He showed concern only for his wife and children, virtually prisoners since the forty-thousand-man garrison at Tsarskoe Selo had joined the rebellion. All five of the royal children were sick with the measles—no trivial disease in 1917. The tsarina, unable to communicate with her husband, at first found it difficult to believe that any of these things were happening. Soon, however, she recovered. She threw herself into the care of her daughters and twelve-year-old son, and into arranging meals and warm quarters on the ground floor of the palace for the two companies of Cossacks that alone remained loyal. After years of almost insanely self-destructive behavior, she began to display the strength and calm acceptance that would support her family through the months of life that remained to them.