The Penguin History of Modern Russia

looked as if the monarchy was failing the country.¹

The diplomatic rivalries intensified. The British and the Germans did not abandon friendly relations with each other; but the Anglo-German naval race narrowed the options in Britain. Meanwhile Russia looked on nervously lest Germany might take advantage of the crumbling condition of the Ottoman Empire. Exports of Russian and Ukrainian grain from Odessa through the Straits of the Dardanelles were important to the empire’s balance of trade. In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire. In this instance Russia refused to back Serbian efforts to obtain access to a sea-port and a crisis in Russo-Austrian relations was avoided. Unfortunately this sensible decision was seen in Russia as yet another sign of Nicholas II’s weakness of will. Then a second Balkan war broke out in 1913. This time it occurred between Serbia and Bulgaria, the joint victors over the Turks. As a result Serbia obtained greater territory in Macedonia and appeared even more menacing to Austrian interests.

Russia’s relations worsened with Austria-Hungary and Germany even though Serbia had not been acting at Russian instigation. And on 28 June 1914 a fateful event occurred. This was the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, capital of recently-annexed Bosnia. Austria demanded humiliating concessions from the Serbian government, which it blamed for the Archduke’s death. Russia took Serbia’s side, and Germany supported Austria. Austria stood by her ultimatum and declared war on Serbia. Russia announced a general mobilization of her armies. Then Germany declared war on Russia and France. Britain showed solidarity with France and Russia by declaring war on Germany and Austria- Hungary.

Nobody had anticipated exactly this denouement. No one as yet had definite ideas about war aims. Nor was there much understanding that the fighting might drag on for years and bring down dynasties and whole social orders. The calculation in Russian ruling circles was that a short, victorious war would bind Imperial society more closely together. A few long-sighted politicians such as Petr Durnovo could see that war against Germany would lead to intolerable strains and might initiate the regime’s downfall. But such thoughts were not given a hearing in mid-1914. The Emperor’s sense of dynastic and imperial honour predominated.² He might anyway have run into trouble if he had not taken up the challenge in the Balkans. The Octobrists and Kadets would have made a fuss in the Duma; even many socialists, whose Second International had opposed general war in Europe, felt that German pretensions should be resisted.

In the event their pressure did not need to be exerted: Nicholas II leapt into the darkness of the Great War without anyone pushing him. The decisions of the European powers had consequences of massive significance. The Great War produced the situation in Russia, Austria and Germany that shattered the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies. It also made possible the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Except for the Great War, Lenin would have remained an emigre theorist scribbling in Swiss libraries; and even if Nicholas II had been deposed in a peacetime transfer of power, the inception of a communist order would hardly have been likely. The first three years of this military conflict, however, caused an economic and political disorder so huge that Nicholas II had to abdicate in February 1917. The subsequent Provisional Government proved no less unequal to its tasks, and Lenin became the country’s ruler within months of tsarism’s overthrow.

But let us return to 1914. As massive military struggle commenced, the Russian steamroller moved effortlessly into East Prussia in mid-August. Victory over Germany was identified as the crucial war aim. Even so, Austria-Hungary was also a redoubtable enemy and the Russians had to mount an attack on the southern sector of what was becoming known in the rest of Europe as the Eastern front. Not since the Napoleonic wars had so many countries been directly involved in military conflict.

Yet the Russians were quickly encircled by German forces. At the Battle of Tannenberg 100,000 Russian prisoners-of-war were taken, and the Germans advanced into Russian-ruled Poland.³ On the Western front, too, Belgium and north-eastern France were overrun by German forces. But the Allies — Russia, France and the United Kingdom — regrouped and the lines were held. Static warfare ensued with two great systems of trenches cutting north to south across Europe. By the end of 1916, the Russian Imperial Army had conscripted fourteen million men, mainly peasants. Russian industrial expansion was substantial; so, too, was the size of Russia’s factory and mining work-force, rising by roughly forty per cent in the first three years of the Great War.⁴ All classes of the population supported Russian entry into the war and sought victory over Germany and Austria-Hungary. A surge of patriotic feeling was suddenly available to the government.

The Emperor was determined to gain the greatest advantage from the war. Negotiating with the Western Allies in early 1915, his Foreign Minister Sazonov laid down that the Straits of the Dardanelles should be incorporated into the Russian Empire when the Central Powers were defeated. Secret treaties were signed with Britain and France in accordance with these demands. Russian war aims were not simply defensive but expansionist.

All this had to be kept strictly confidential; otherwise the Fourth State Duma might not have rung loud with support for the war when it voted financial credits to the government in January 1915. Only the socialist parties had sections that repudiated the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict. Yet it was not long before popular antagonism to the monarchy reappeared. The scandalous behaviour of Rasputin, the favourite ‘holy man’ of Nicholas and Alexandra, brought still greater opprobrium on the court. Rasputin was assassinated by a disgusted monarchist, Prince Yusupov, in 1916. But Alexandra’s German ancestry continued to feed rumours that there was treachery in high places. Nicholas II did not help his cause by dutifully deciding to stay at military headquarters at Mogilev for the duration of the war. Thereby he cut himself off from information about the situation in the capital. The government’s conduct of affairs induced Milyukov, the Kadet party leader, to put the question in the State Duma: ‘Is this folly or is it treason?’⁵

Sharp dilemmas none the less awaited any conceivable wartime administration in Petrograd (the new name for the capital after St Petersburg was judged to be too German-sounding). Food supplies were a difficulty from the start; the task of equipping and provisioning the soldiers and horses of the Imperial armed forces was prodigious. The government showed no lack of will. In the winter of 1915–16 it introduced fixed prices for its grain purchases and disbarred sellers from refusing to sell to it. Nor had Nicholas II entirely run out of luck. Weather conditions in 1916 were favourable and agricultural output was only ten per cent below the record annual level attained in 1909–13.⁶ And the German naval blockade of the Black Sea had the benefit of preventing the export of foodstuffs and releasing a greater potential quantity of grain for domestic consumption.

All this, however, was outweighed by a set of severe disadvantages for the Russian Empire’s economy after 1914. Sufficient foodstuffs regularly reached the forces at the Eastern front; but the government was less successful in keeping the state warehouses stocked for sale to urban civilians. Among the problems were the peasantry’s commercial interests. Peasants were affected by the rapid depreciation of the currency and by the shortage of industrial goods available during the war; they therefore had little incentive to sell grain to the towns. Certainly there was massive industrial growth: by 1916 output in large enterprises was between sixteen and twenty-two per cent higher than in 1913.⁷ But the increase resulted almost exclusively from factories producing armaments and other military supplies. About four fifths of industrial capital investment was directed towards this sector, and the production of goods for the agricultural sector practically ceased.⁸

No remedy was in sight so long as the country was at war and military exigencies had to dominate industrial policy. Not even the huge state loans raised from the empire’s banks and private investors, from Russia’s allies and from American finance-houses were sufficient to bail out the Imperial economy.⁹ The government was compelled to accelerate the emission of paper roubles to deal with the budgetary pressures. Rapid inflation became unavoidable.

Transport was another difficulty. The railway network had barely been adequate for the country’s uses in peacetime; the wartime needs of the armed forces nearly crippled it.¹⁰ Grain shipments to the towns were increasingly unreliable. Industrialists complained about delays in the delivery of coal and iron from the Don Basin to Petrograd and Moscow. Financiers, too, grew nervous. In 1916 the banks started to exert a squeeze on credit. Each sector of the economy — agriculture, trade, industry, finance, transport — had problems which aggravated the problems in the other sectors. Nor was it human error that was mainly to blame. Not enough Russian factories, mines, roads, railways, banks, schools and farms had attained the level of development achieved by the world’ s other leading powers. A protracted war against Germany — the greatest such power on the European continent — unavoidably generated immense strains.

Nicholas II characteristically fumbled the poor hand he had been dealt. Above all, he continued to treat liberal leaders of the State Duma with disdain; he rejected their very moderate demand for a ‘government of public