The First World War and the Fall of the Tsar
A Patriotic Summer
When Russia entered the First World War on 1 August 1914, crowds knelt in Palace Square chanting ‘God save the Tsar’. The strikes that had crippled St Petersburg in July evaporated overnight. The Duma, the Kadets and the Octobrists all voted war credits. Many Bolsheviks were exiled or imprisoned for opposing the war. The capital was renamed from the German-sounding St Petersburg to the Russian Petrograd. For perhaps a month, the regime looked united. Nothing else would go right for Tsarism for the next two-and-a-half years.
Russia entered the First World War in August 1914 in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm; St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to remove its German sound. The strike wave that had reached 1905 levels by July 1914 collapsed almost completely.
From Tannenberg to Catastrophe
The Russian high command had promised allies they would crush East Prussia within six weeks. They invaded with two armies in mid-August. By the end of the month one had been encircled and destroyed at Tannenberg; its commander, General Samsonov, shot himself. A week later, the other army was driven back at the Masurian Lakes. By 1915 the Russians had been pushed out of Russian Poland, Lithuania and Galicia. The army lost around 1.4 million men killed and wounded in 1915 alone, and another 1.6 million as prisoners. Officer casualties were so high that peasant conscripts were being commanded by sergeants without proper training.
Industry was overwhelmed. Russia produced barely a fifth of the rifles its army needed in 1915. Shells, machine guns, boots and even rifles ran short. Soldiers were sent to the front in pairs with one rifle between two, instructed to pick up the dead man’s weapon. The Brusilov Offensive of 1916 briefly recovered some ground in Galicia at the cost of another million casualties, but it could not be exploited because there were no reserves left.
Russia was the world’s fourth largest industrial economy in 1914 but still concentrated in a handful of cities and dependent on imports. The Baltic was closed by Germany; the Black Sea by Ottoman Turkey from late 1914; only Vladivostok and Murmansk-Archangel remained, and the latter was iced over half the year. Without imported chemicals, machine tools and rolling stock, military production never matched Germany’s. Coal output fell by a third; railways collapsed; food trains rotted in sidings. The collapse of transport, more than the front-line defeats, would eventually starve Petrograd.
The Tsar Takes Command
In September 1915, against the unanimous advice of his ministers, Nicholas dismissed his uncle Grand Duke Nikolai and assumed personal command of the army at Mogilev. The decision was a disaster on two counts. Strategically, Nicholas was no general; in practice his Chief of Staff, Alekseyev, ran the war. Politically, every defeat from now on was personally his. He spent the next eighteen months at headquarters while government in Petrograd was effectively delegated to the Tsarina Alexandra and the small circle around her.
Alexandra and Rasputin
Alexandra was hated for three reasons. She was German by birth, in a country at war with Germany. She was domineering, repeatedly purging capable ministers in favour of nonentities loyal only to her. And she relied on Rasputin, a Siberian peasant holy man who appeared able to ease the haemophilia of the heir Alexei. By 1916, Petrograd was full of stories — many exaggerated, some invented — that Rasputin slept with the Tsarina and chose ministers between drinking bouts.
The damage was less the truth than the perception. Even members of the Romanov family openly accused the Tsarina of treason. In November 1916 the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov delivered a speech in the Duma listing every disaster of the war and ending each example with the question, ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’ In December a group of conservative aristocrats led by Prince Felix Yusupov murdered Rasputin. His body was dumped under the ice of the Neva. The killing only deepened the sense that the dynasty had lost its grip.
Bread, Coal and Bullets
The home front was breaking faster than the front. About 15 million men were conscripted between 1914 and 1917, stripping farms of labour. Inflation rose to 400% by 1917. Real wages collapsed. Bread queues formed before dawn. Coal shortages closed factories and froze homes. Rural conscription disrupted harvests; railway breakdowns left grain rotting in Siberian sidings while Petrograd starved. By February 1917 the official daily bread ration in the capital had fallen below subsistence and was being missed even on that.
On 23 February 1917 (8 March, new style) women textile workers in Vyborg marked International Women’s Day with a bread strike. By 25 February over 200,000 workers were out. On 26 February the Tsar ordered General Khabalov to disperse them by force. Some units obeyed; the Volynsky Regiment refused and joined the protesters on 27 February. Within forty-eight hours the Petrograd garrison — some 160,000 men — had mutinied. The Duma formed a Provisional Committee. Generals at headquarters told Nicholas the army would not fight for him. On 2 March (15 March, new style) Nicholas abdicated for himself and for his son Alexei, passing the crown to his brother Michael. Michael refused it the next day. Three centuries of Romanov rule had ended in eight days.
The February Revolution was triggered by women textile workers’ bread strike on International Women’s Day, 23 February 1917 (Old Style). Within eight days the Petrograd garrison had mutinied, the Duma had formed a Provisional Committee, and Nicholas had abdicated. The revolution was spontaneous — no political party planned it.
Why It Mattered
The fall of the Tsar was the most surprising political event of the early twentieth century. Lenin, in Zürich, had told an audience two months earlier that he would probably not live to see the revolution. The autocracy collapsed not because revolutionary parties had grown strong but because military defeat, economic strain and the discrediting of the dynasty by Rasputin had hollowed it out from inside. The Tsar abdicated, but the war was still being fought, the cities were still hungry, and the soldiers in the capital had just learned that they could disobey orders. The next chapter would test whether the new Provisional Government could solve any of these problems faster than the Tsar had.