By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The transformation of the Russian Empire

For a millennium, Russia has been an autocracy with power concentrated in the hands of an all-powerful leader or leadership group. The strong centralized rule has held together with a disparate, centripetal empire and preserved it from the predations of powerful foreign enemies. Sporadic attempts at democracy have ended in a return to the same default mode of governance; the cause of the state has taken priority over the interests of the individual.

Faced with the war in the east and riots in the streets, Tsar Nicholas bowed to pressure from his ministers, announcing what appeared to be a comprehensive program of political reform. This was on October 17; the tsar's decree included a guarantee of civil rights for Russia's people and the creation of a national assembly, or Duma, which would have the power to approve the legislation. 

In some quarters, the October decree garnered approval. Elsewhere it created even more chaos. In rural Russia, peasants saw that strikes were going unpunished in the cities. They decided they needed to get in on the action, taking what they saw as justice into their own hands, which meant trying to force landlords to sell up and move away. This violence, largely directed against the property because the landlords were absent anyway, was ultimately met with extreme violence directed against humans by the state. 

As violence spread in the countryside, the tsar undermined whatever goodwill (there wasn't a lot of it) had accrued due to his decision to summon the Duma. A logical conclusion that could have been drawn from the October decree was that Nicholas was creating a constitutional monarchy. That was not how Nicholas understood himself. He saw the Duma as a consultative assembly to his continuingly autocratic self. 

The result of what appeared to members of the liberal intelligentsia as the tsar's prevarication was that the divisions continued to fester. The first Duma, elected in 1906, was almost immediately dissolved for being too liberal. A second Duma, also elected in 1906, was also dissolved for excessive liberalism (it was chock full of socialists). When a Duma marginally acceptable to the tsar took office in 1907, the leading parties were conservative. Landowners dominated these parties with close connections to zemstva. They believed private property rights provided the foundation for modern civilization and were strongly nationalistic. They wished to see Russia as a dominant power in the Middle East and the chief protector of Slavs everywhere. They tended to be deeply suspicious of the Germans, whose assumption of racial superiority they deeply resented. The most liberal group in the Duma (aside from a few socialists) were people linked to urban and industrial groups. The ministers who formed the tsar's effective government met with the Duma, and while there was a chair who ran the Duma's meetings, Nicholas rather than the Duma appointed the ministers. 

The complicated politics of the earlier Dumas had left severe splits pretty much everywhere. Left-wing parties loathed the tsar, whom they felt had betrayed them by not living up to the promise of a constitutional monarchy. Socialists loathed the liberals, who, they thought, had betrayed them by dealing with the tsar. They also tended to hate each other. In 1912, eighteen Bolsheviks, meeting in Prague, formally split from the Social Democrats. The most important things liberals and radicals had in common were the beliefs that workers could overthrow the state and that the tsar was evil. Just for good measure, the court continued to loathe the professional classes. 

Beyond the walls of the Duma, the peasants, whose hopes for massive land distribution had been enflamed by the revolution of 1905, saw their hopes quashed by the conservatives, and workers did not feel they had gained much of anything. Conservatives, who regarded Russia's Jews as potential revolutionaries, took advantage of their power to foment mass murders of the Jewish population (pogroms). The depth of these divisions was lost on Nicholas as he contemplated leading Russia to war. 

Although Russia's military had been modernizing at a good clip in the wake of the catastrophe of 1904/5, it was still far from complete functionality in the event of a major war. This was not lost on the government. When tensions erupted with Turkey over the appointment of a German general to the senior post in the Turkish army, Russia had contemplated war. At that point, Peter Durnovo, a former interior minister, had published a memorandum in which he pointed out that:

The quantity of our heavy artillery . . . is far too inadequate, and there are few machine guns. The organization of our fortress defenses has scarcely been started. . . . The network of strategic railways is insufficient. The railways possess a rolling stock sufficient, perhaps, for regular traffic but not commensurate with the colossal demands made upon them in the event of a European war. Lastly, it should not be forgotten that the impending war will be fought among the most civilized and technically most advanced nations. Every previous war has invariably been followed by something new in the realm of military technique. Still, the technical backwardness of our industries does not create favorable conditions for our adoption of new inventions. 

On all points, he was correct, as he was when he predicted that the government would be blamed for disasters and that:

In the legislative institutions, a bitter campaign against the government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans capable of arousing and rallying the masses, starting with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking absolute authority in the people's eyes, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen. 

Durnovo died in 1915, just as what he wrote here was proving to be entirely correct. For, even though a settlement was reached with Turkey, the salient facts he outlined were shoved under the carpet when tensions erupted in the Balkans following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. 

Russia's government was not alone in behaving irrationally in the summer of 1914. The Austro-Hungarian regime was given to magical thinking, as was the government of Serbia. But it was Russia's government that started the war despite the deficiencies noted earlier that year. The German government, which had encouraged the extremely aggressive Austro-Hungarian response to the assassination, was awash in Social Darwinist fantasies about the greatness of imperial states. This made it possible for the chief of the German general staff to assert that it was better to start a "preventative" war (his term for a war that would begin with the all-out violation of the sovereignty of a peaceful state) sooner rather than later because Russia would complete rearming within two or three years. That would make the "inevitable" two-front war between the Germans, the French, and the Russians much more dangerous. Also, there was a well-developed tendency in German thought to regard extreme violence as logical when deployed in the state's interests. In the German view, civilians were no more protected by international conventions than stated, if "reality" dictated otherwise in the event of war. Hence the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg's genuine surprise when England responded to the invasion of Belgium by declaring war, and his infamous comment that he could not believe Britain would enter the war because of a "scrap of paper" (the treaty obligating it to come to Belgium's defense in the event of an invasion).

The one thing all the governments had in common, hastening into the war that would destroy them, was the belief the war would be short. They had no plan for what would happen if an offensive through Belgium, depending in part on the physical conditioning of reservists (not good), should grind to a halt at the Marne; or if the aggressive offensive into the Rhineland, lacking proper artillery support, should be blown to smithereens. On all sides, long-standing expectations of a future "great war" that would reshape the balance of power, linked with "all or nothing" military planning, had created a situation in which freedom of diplomatic maneuver was restricted. 

Brutal as the losses were on the western front, the biggest disasters were those suffered by the Russians in the east. Offensives against the pitifully equipped and worse-led Austrian army in western Ukraine were successful, but two armies, sent into Germany on an accelerated schedule per France's request, were annihilated. The year 1915 was even worse for the Russians. While the war in France and Belgium sputtered along like a bloody, mud-soaked stalemate, the German army launched an all-out offensive into Poland. Russian armies, which had not been adequately equipped, men were routinely sent into the front lines without rifles, were pummeled. Demoralized soldiers surrendered en masse. Around a million Russians became prisoners of war, more than the number of soldiers still under arms in September 1915. When the Germans ended their offensive, they had occupied more than 10% of Russia's prewar territory. 

Nicholas' response to the disasters of 1914 and 1915 completed the destruction of the monarchy's vestigial authority. In January 1915, Nicholas prorogued the Duma for seven months. When it reconvened in July, with the army in full retreat, liberals and conservatives joined forces in attacking the conduct of the war. A leading figure was now Alexander Kerensky; a leading topic of discussion was the need for the Duma to take charge of affairs from the now-discredited bureaucracy. There was no actual plan for this, but the tsar didn't like all the negativity. He prorogued the Duma again in August. This made the creation of a unity government that would include himself an impossibility. Then, also in August, Nicholas sacked his uncle, also Nicholas, the titular commander of the army since the outbreak of the war. Nicholas assumed command, which meant all future failures would be blamed on him, and disasters would happen even though Mikhail Alekseev, the new chief of staff, was competent. 

The previous war minister, Sukhomlinov, was another casualty of the 1915 campaign. His replacement, a man, named Polivanov, was stunningly competent. Joining with industry leaders, he solved the production problems that had disarmed the army in the previous two years. He was so good at his job that Nicholas sacked him in March of 1916 (later assisting Leon Trotsky in creating the Red Army). Otherwise, Nicholas was visibly under the influence of his wife Alexandra, whose loyalty was suspect since she was German by birth; and aristocratic society was appalled by the influence exercised through Alexandra on Nicholas by a man named Rasputin. Rasputin had gained influence with Alexandra by claiming that he could cure the hemophiliac crown prince (in fact, all he did was hypnotize him from time to time). Rasputin had advised Nicholas not to go to war, but now that the war was on, he supported Alexandra in her efforts to toughen Nicholas' resolve. 

The war went better for Russia in 1916. Polivanov's reforms meant soldiers went into battle with weapons, and the artillery had shells. The Germans were largely distracted by their offensive against the French fortress city of Verdun and by the British offensive on the Somme. Russian armies could thus turn on the hapless Austrians for much of the summer, which they did. The Germans only intervened to halt Russian progress at the summer's end. By that time, there were new problems. Chief among them was the food supply of major cities.

The peacetime rail system was geared to shipping grain south to the Black Sea for export. It could not be easily redesigned to ship the large quantities of food needed by the army and urban populations largely located in the north. Bureaucratic issues further complicated the transport issue. The recruitment of their workers hard hit the large estates which provided most of the surplus for the market into the army; common peasants, who were less well connected with the export market, found little reason to sell their grain when inflation seemed to be pushing their potential returns higher. They might as well hold on to their grain, and there wasn't much for them to do with whatever money they might get. With production shifted to the war effort, there were few consumer goods on the market. Also, the production of anything was hampered by problems in delivering coal to major cities, where there were factories to be run and buildings to be heated. By the end of 1916, Moscow and Petrograd were getting only a third of the food they required. The Duma, which was still meeting in December, expressed ever-increasing frustration with the regime. And, on the evening of December 16–17, right-wing aristocrats assassinated Rasputin. The assassins thought they could save Russia by removing his banal influence from the court that even they no longer trusted. It made no difference.

More serious were the morale issues afflicting the mass of the population. Peasants recruited into the new army and sent into rear areas for training were worse off than peasants who stayed home with their food. Also, with much of the professional officer corps either dead, captive or at the front, the process of re-professionalizing the reservists who made up the bulk of new draftees fell into the hands of officers who were badly outnumbered even when, as some were, they were competent. By the winter of 1916/17, Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was now called) was filled with hungry, unhappy soldiers. There were more than 150,000 men stationed there in barracks built for 20,000. To make matters worse, the weather turned foul. Such was the situation in February 1917, when the Duma was scheduled to reconvene. Durnovo's dire predictions were about to be realized.

Arthur Zimmermann was a German diplomat who liked interfering in other countries affairs. He is perhaps most famous for the ludicrous telegram (the straw that broke the camel’s back) he sent to Mexico, urging the Mexican government to seize the territories forming part of the United States' southern border. That helped precipitate the United States' entry into the Great War. He was equally destructive with information passed upstream by a Marxist businessman, active in Zurich, that Vladimir Lenin was living there. Zimmermann arranged for Lenin's return and several associates, including his wife and his mistress, to Russia. On March 24, the train left Zurich for the port of Sassnitz, where the travelers took ship for Sweden and a new train that would take them through Helsinki to Petrograd. On the evening of April 3, the train reached Petrograd's Finland Station. Lenin greeted the Bolsheviks and other socialists who gathered to meet him with a speech attacking the Provisional Government.

Three weeks after Lenin's arrival, the Bolsheviks organized riots against the regime and recruited "Red Guards," thugs to attack their enemies. In May, Leon Trotsky, who had been in New York when the February revolution broke out, arrived back in Russia. Reconciling earlier differences, Trotsky would become Lenin's invaluable agent, without whom the Bolshevik revolution could not have succeeded. British intelligence had briefly detained Trotsky in Canada, then continued his journey at Miliukov's request. That was a significant error on the part of the Provisional Government. Lenin planned to use the Petrograd Soviet as a base from which to pressure the Provisional Government into collapse. Trotsky would be the point person for putting the plan into action. In plotting his revolution, Lenin was aided by a series of errors on the Provisional Government's part (aside from not shooting him on sight). For a complete timeline the subjects under discussion see.

The Provisional Government was an unelected entity whose members had taken over from the tsar. Unlike members of the Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, who were elected to their positions, the leadership of the Provisional Government could not claim any popular mandate. As the Provisional Government delayed seeking a mandate, soviets were springing up all over Russia, seven hundred by 1917, and labor unrest increased. The Provisional Government's first error was, therefore the failure to immediately seek a popular mandate. The Constituent Assembly was pushed off until January. The Provisional Government's second error, arguably as severe as the failure to seek a mandate, agreed to General Order Number 1. This was issued on March 1 (13) by the governing committee of the Petrograd Soviet, addressed to the garrison of Petrograd. Among other things, it required the election of soldiers' committees which would provide members for the Soviet; that the garrison was politically subject to the Soviet; that the Soviet could countermand orders of the Provisional Government; that off-duty soldiers should have the same rights as civilians; and that officers, who were not to be rude to their men, were no longer to be addressed by their titles. General Order Number 1 undermined the discipline of the whole army and deprived the Provisional Government of the ability to control the capital. General Order Number 1 also made the continued prosecution of the war effort deeply problematic. The third error was not ending the war as soon as possible. Instead of ending the war, the Provisional Government insisted it would honor existing agreements with the allies. In the context of the continuing war, Kerensky's tendency to dress in a military uniform and claim that he would be the Carnot of the new regime caused concern.

The Provisional Government rapidly lost credit. Because it was necessary for the nation's honor, the continuation of the war alienated the garrison in Petrograd, which remained the ultimate power broker. But all was not yet lost. In June and July, the garrison was unready to abandon the Provisional Government for the unknown quantity of the Bolsheviks. The failure of a riot, which he inspired, to gain traction with the garrison caused Lenin to flee to Finland. Kerensky, proactive for once, saw that "details" of massive payments from the German government to the Bolsheviks were published in Petrograd newspapers. Lenin would not return to Russia until October, and then it would be in disguise. Lenin instructed his followers to issue a simple message working from his Finnish base: "Bread, Peace, Land."

Kerensky, who became Russia's virtual dictator after the failure of the Bolshevik agitation in July, meanwhile, alienated whatever support he might have expected from the army outside of Petrograd. In August, he suppressed a nascent coup being planned by General Lavr Kornilov to stop the Bolsheviks. In doing so, Kerensky alienated the military's leadership and was left pinning his hopes on the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which was still not due to assembling in Petrograd until January. A Congress of Soviets was scheduled to assemble in October.

Lenin once again sprang into action. Taking advantage of the fact that Kerensky had alienated the Petrograd garrison and the general staff and anticipating the convening of a Congress of Soviets, Lenin ordered a coup against the Provisional Government for the evening of October 23–24. By the morning of October 25, the Bolsheviks had seized control of Petrograd, Kerensky had fled the scene, and the last defense of the Provisional Government, by a battalion of female soldiers stationed in Petrograd's Winter Palace, ceased. Although still a minority party, the Bolsheviks secured ratification for their seizure of power from the Congress of Soviets. A few days later, again employing armed force, the Bolsheviks took control of Moscow. From these two bases, they would gradually develop the capacity to govern Russia. As crucial as Lenin's leadership was Kerensky's failure to build any coherent opposition to Bolshevik extremism. He had no answer for the slogan "Bread, Peace, Land." His inherent suspicion of tsarist institutions, honed by years of antagonism between the tsar and the Duma, made it impossible for him to build an effective coalition to suppress the growing power of what had been, in February 1917, indeed the oddball fringe of the Russian political spectrum. Bolshevism was so outside the mainstream that many of its leaders, among those who were not incarcerated, had not lived in the country for years. Lenin had crushed the hollow Provisional Government. The next challenge was building an actual government of his own. The structure that rapidly evolved, by which a single party took over the institutions of a state, bore an eerie similarity to states imagined in the historical past, such as the vision Theodor Mommsen (whose History of Rome Lenin had read) had offered of the government of Julius Caesar. He "retained the deportment of the party-leader" while building a new Roman state after 48 BC. Even more critical for Lenin was the French experience of the 1790s. He had eighty-seven books on French history in his library, most of them on this period; his enthusiasm for the Jacobins had led to colleagues and rivals comparing him to Robespierre as early as 1903. Now, with an actual coup to run, Lenin often turned his thoughts to the events of 1793 and 1794. Despite analogies people drew, Lenin didn't think he was Caesar or Robespierre. But he was very aware of what happened to them, and he had no intention of falling short of total success hence he initiated the so-called Red Terror.

Tsarist Russia and Weimer Germany were failing states before either Lenin or Hitler came along. But that does not mean their victories were foregone conclusions. Neither man had ever run anything; their immediate supporters hadn't either. Powerful slogans and mass demonstrations were more critical to their campaigns than the capacity to point to any active achievements in public policy (of which there were none). The theory was more important than reality. That should not have been a recipe for success is the particular combination of an alternative ideological system and a period of community distress that are necessary conditions for radical changes in direction. The historical disruptions, the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, Protestant reformations, the Age of Revolution (American and French), and Bolshevism and Nazism--will help readers understand when the preconditions exist for radical changes in the social and political order. As we demonstrated, not all radical change follows paths that its original proponents might have predicted.

Lenin needed peace with Germany to gain the space he required to impose his vision of a new society. Opposition newspapers were banned, private property was abolished; supplies of food for the starving cities were expropriated from peasants. A new army was formed to suppress the resistance movements beginning to take shape in various parts of Russia, and a new secret police force began to round up domestic opponents. Lenin drew a direct analogy to the Terror of 1793/4 which he saw as essential to protect a revolution from counterrevolutionary forces.

 

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