Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

The effect was not durable, however. Military defeat, notably the loss of Poland in 1915, faltering ammunition supplies at the front, food shortages, profiteering, and inflation in the rear all revived the pre-war confrontational mood, intensified now that so much was at stake. One result was the abrupt desacralization of the image of the monarchy. Nicholas’s reputation, sullied by Bloody Sunday, was further damaged by military defeat – a crucial matter for a Tsar. Further damage was done by the disreputable antics of Grigorii Rasputin, a Siberian sectarian ‘holy man’ who had wormed himself into the Empress’s confidence by being able to staunch the bleeding of her long-awaited son, Alexei, who had haemophilia. Increasingly, Rasputin influenced court and even government appointments, exploiting his power to make sexual conquests among high society ladies. To the newspapers, the mixture of heresy and debauchery in high places proved irresistible, and the public was entertained with lurid tales about his behaviour. The fact that the Empress was German (a perfectly normal situation in royal families) compounded the widespread suspicion, even amongst the most loyal, that corruption and treachery were infecting the court.

In February 1917, demonstrations over food shortages combined with workers’ grievances to bring hundreds of thousands on to the streets of Petrograd (as the capital had been renamed). Placards appeared demanding an end to the war and to autocracy. Politicians decided the time had come to demand Nicholas’s abdication and sent a delegation to him at military headquarters. Most of the generals, whose priority was a united nation backing the army, concurred that Nicholas had become a liability. He duly abdicated in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. The latter, dismayed by the anti-monarchical feeling in the capital, declined the throne.

The 1917 revolution

Russia was suddenly without a monarch, for the first time for three hundred years. Duma politicians set up a Provisional Government to head the war effort and plan reforms pending a Constituent Assembly, which would be elected to decide the future form of Russia’s government. Immediately at its side appeared another institution, designed to represent the masses rather than the elites: encouraged by the political vacuum, the workers and peasants, now reinforced by soldiers and sailors, hastened to resuscitate their most effective political weapon of 1905, the soviets. The Petrograd Soviet was backed by a network of similar assemblies in towns throughout the empire. Workers also improvised a variety of other associations: trade unions, factory committees, and, in a growing number of towns, Red Guard militias, which acted both as custodians of civil order and as armed representatives of the working class. Never had the Russian genius for improvised collectives manifested itself so visibly – but not in a form which strengthened national unity. On the contrary, ‘dual power’ made visible the continuing split between elites and masses.

The soviets in a sense embodied the centuries-old popular drive towards social justice and self-government. Yet what had worked tolerably well in the villages was not so easy to transfer to the towns. The scale was so much bigger, and the problems to be tackled so much more complex. A Menshevik activist has left us a vivid depiction of the working of the Petrograd Soviet, where the crowd was so dense that everyone was standing rather than sitting:

The ‘presidium’ was also standing on a table, while around the shoulders of the chairman was a whole swarm of energetic people who had clambered on to the table and were hindering him from conducting the session.

In such circumstances, little could be decided in plenary sessions, and responsibility inevitably devolved upon executive committees, where the socialist political parties were well represented. During the summer, as the masses became ever more impatient at the temporizing of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks gained ground in soviets throughout the country.