This week’s episode is brought to you by keeps the best way to prevent hair loss is to do something about it while you still have hair. Left prevention is the key keeps offers a simple stress-free way to keep your hair. There are convenient. Virtual doctor consultations, and the medications are delivered straight to your door every three months.

So you don’t even have to leave your home. They’re also low cost treatment. Start low as just $10 a month and keeps offers generic versions prevention is key. Treatments can take four to six months to see results. So act fast. If you’re ready to take action and prevent hair loss, go to K E E P s.com/revolutions to receive your first month of treatment for free that’s K E E P s.com/revolutions.

To get your first month free. K E E P s.com/revolutions.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.54: War or Revolution

In our last two episodes, we have done some background on World War I. Some background. We’ve reviewed things we already learned over the course of the Revolutions podcast, and then focus specifically on the Balkans and Russian interest in the Balkans to explain why the Russians went to war in the summer of 1914. I am leaving a lot out of the story, especially out in the west — like we’re not talking about the Moroccan crises at all — and really, I’ve probably mentioned about 20% of the things that would go into a general account of the origins and causes of World War I. It’s an incredibly complicated confluence of factors. And what were the causes of World War I is as complex a historical question as, why did the Roman Empire fall? I’m just trying to get us to a point where we are comfortable with the Russian angle on things so I can explain the Russian Revolution.

Now that said, before we move on today, I do want to mention that I got a nice long email from listener Darius who took some exception to my portrayal of the Ottoman Empire in all this, relegating them to mere power acted upon by others rather than an active player with their own dynamic agency. I probably oversold the Ottomans and collapsed thesis and ignored too much the reforms and revolutions taking place inside the Ottoman Empire at the time. This was after all the heady days of the Young Turks. So, if you want more information to construct a complete story of what was going on, with some correctives of the standard Eurocentric view on the Eastern Question, he recommended A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, which you can google and find anywhere. So if you’re interested, do check that out.

But like I said, I am trying to keep this centered on events in Russia, so that we can explain why the Russian Revolution happened in Russia. And this week, we are going to approach the July Crisis from their perspective, with a specific eye on how this was all playing domestically. When events started cascading towards war in the summer of 1914, Tsar Nicholas and his ministers were of course playing the great game of international real politique, but that was not the only thing on their minds. Far from it. And that is what we are here to talk about today.

Now, just as a general statement, we often tend to downplay ignore, or straight up forget about domestic political concerns when we’re talking about the origins of foreign wars. This is understandable, because wars are between two or more sovereign entities, and so it’s only natural to talk about the irreconcilable conflicts between those sovereign entities that caused the war. The jockeying, the maneuvering over territories and colonies and ideologies; those causes are almost by definition, situated in the realm of foreign policy and international diplomacy.

But international concerns are not the only thing pressuring kings and presidents and prime ministers and emperors to declare war, or make a peace. Domestic concerns weigh just as heavily on their minds, we just don’t talk about them as much. Those domestic concerns take different forms depending on the system of government or period in history we’re talking about. Maybe a king or an emperor is concerned about being ousted in a palace coup by disgruntled elements at court if he does not declare a war or sign a peace treaty. Or, that a collection of noble lords might rise up and revolt if the king does not stand up to a neighboring power, or maybe it’s the opposite, and the risk of domestic revolt comes if a bellicose head of state launches a war that is unpopular with his most powerful subjects. In democratic systems, leaders have to think about the electorate and public opinion. Maybe they are afraid of looking weak, and that will make them fatally unpopular. Maybe they are afraid if they talk too tough, that will also make them fatally unpopular. Maybe they think they can use a war to rally the nation to support them and make their political rivals look unpatriotic or even treasonous. There’s no universal way it plays out. This is just to say that when calculating foreign policy, everyone always has at least one eye planted firmly on their domestic political position. Thus was it ever was. Unfortunately, a lot of this can come down to the individual self-interest of the leaders. They’re calculating the trajectory of their individual political careers, and then that becomes conflated with the national interest. Like, I personally stand a better chance of keeping my cushy job if I declare war or sign a peace, whether I think it’s a good idea or not. Basically, what I am saying is the foreign policy of a nation, kingdom, or empire always exists inside a domestic political context. And so it was for all the leaders of all the great powers navigating the July Crisis of 1914, Tsar Nicholas and his ministers very much included.

As we know, Russia entered a new and uncharted phase of domestic politics after the Revolution of 1905. Like, there was now such a thing as domestic politics. However much Stolypin’s coup of 1907 circumscribed and rolled back the promises made in the October Manifesto, there were still things like political parties and elections and newspapers and speeches. There was this thing called public opinion that had to be taken into account. Now there were boundaries to freedom of speech and opinion of course, Russia was far from a free society politically. I mean, it’s not like the socialists or the anarchists weren’t harassed, fined, imprisoned, and exiled, but in the wake of 1905, the authorities deemed it far safer to have something resembling an open public discourse, rather than risk and other revolution by going whole hog on reactionary conservatism. Now Tsar Nicholas grumbled about this continuously — like, for example, when his new friend Rasputin became fodder for the newspapers — but no matter how much he wanted to, there was no practical way of going back to pure autocracy. An uncontrolled press was going to have to be tolerated in some form or another.

Now, no different than today, the topics bandied about in the press and in various clubs and societies and associations now legally allowed to operate involved foreign affairs. Liberals, moderates, conservatives, monarchist, parliamentarians, westernizers, and slavophiles all had opinions about the state of the Russian Empire on the global stage and the future of the Russian Empire on the global stage. The Russo-Japanese war was incredibly fresh in everyone’s mind, and the regime’s incompetent mishandling of the war, and Russia’s subsequent humiliating defeat were matters of national shame felt by everyone, liberals and conservatives alike. The tsar was supposed to be the embodiment and defender of Russia national honor, and he had blown it spectacularly. And remember, many of the showdowns in the first couple of Dumas — the ones that eventually got shut down — were about the Duma trying to exercise oversight over the military and over foreign policy. Not because they wanted to dismantle the Russian Empire, but because they thought the tsar was doing a terrible job running things and they believe they could do better. In their minds, Tsar Nicholas was an obstacle to Russia maintaining its rightful place as a preeminent world power. So, foreign policy and global current events drew a great deal of interest among educated and literate Russians, whether in the major urban centers or out among the rural intelligentsia, foreign affairs were a regular topic of debate. And increasingly, a regular path to criticizing the tsar. Usually obliquely and by implication, but sometimes openly and directly. The Bosnian Crisis of 1908, which we talked about last week, was the first big foreign crisis to break out in this new atmosphere. And the tsar got raked over the coals for his conduct. The cause of the Serbs was popular, and it fit into a larger narrative that the Slavic peoples needed to stand up for each other against condescending German tyrants, and that it was Russia’s duty as the largest Slavic power to have the backs of their smaller cousins. When Stolypin, his fellow ministers, the generals, and ultimately the tsar himself concluded that they were in no position to fight a war on Serbia’s behalf in 1908 and they had to back down from Germany’s ultimatum, it triggered howls of incredulous and offended protest in the Russian press. One editorial called Russia’s humiliation in the Bosnian Crisis a diplomatic Tsushima. What stung Nicholas in particular was that the criticisms were framed as the tsar failing to live up to his own beliefs that Russia was the defender of Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans. He was accused of failing to do his duty, a duty that he himself believed was his duty.

These strong domestic criticisms helped convince the government that they could never let such a thing happen. Again, the tsar’s calculations going forward were never just about the fear of looking weak in the eyes of the other great powers, but a fear of looking weak in the eyes of his own subjects. He was, after all, their leader. He encouraged them to believe that he was living embodiment of Russian national interest and pride and ambition, and if he continued to fail to live up to those expectations, then his people might start asking what he was even good for.

So after the Bosnian Crisis of 1908, the tsar and his government resolved that they would never be put in that position again, the position where they could be bullied by the other great powers. They approved massive new expenditures to rebuild the military. There were conflicts over where this money should go: the army thought the navy just wasted resources and land armies were what made Russia great, while the navy and its supporters said, strong navies are essential to modern warfare and empire building, and our navy is currently at the bottom of the Pacific, so we kind of have to rebuild it. And ultimately they did both. Russian military spending went up and up and up year over year to put them back in a place where no other power could ever dictate terms to Russia ever again. Along the way, they spent a great deal of time, attention and energy reforming how the Russian military operated, and specifically how quickly it was able to mobilize for war. The thing that had forced them to back down in the Bosnian Crisis wasn’t just that the Russo-Japanese War had left them weak compared to Germany — although it had — but that the Germans could mobilize and put their armies into the fields so much faster. Conventional military thinking at the time was to mobilize fast, strike first, and knock your opponent out of commission before they could even get off their feet. With the other powers in Europe way ahead of Russia on planning and executing mass mobilizations on strict and efficient timelines, Russian war planners spent the years after 1908 focused on making sure they were never caught flat-footed again. And if you know even a little bit about the origins of World War I, you know that everyone was obsessed with these national mobilization plans and terrified of the consequences of the other guy mobilizing faster than you.

And just to keep with the theme of today’s episode, the ability of the Russian army and navy to mobilize rapidly and efficiently was of course about the tsar’s standing in the other courts of Europe, but it was also about his standing at home. When the next crisis came, and it would, the tsar must be able to stand tall and proud and tough so that his subjects would keep their faith in him. Nicholas and his advisors just hoped that such a crisis wouldn’t come until at least 1917, when the war planners believed Russia would be truly ready.

And there were lots of reasons to be optimistic about Russia being ready. Over the next few years, the Russians really were beginning to stand taller, prouder, and tougher. This was also the heyday of the Stolypin reforms, which were aiming to fix all the broken parts of society and the economy, and in general, each passing year made it looked like the Russian Empire really was getting stronger and healthier. The economy bounced back and grew larger and more prosperous each year; consecutive good harvests kept people happy and well fed, which allowed for even more peasants to make the transition to being nonagricultural industrial workers; new foreign investments and loans came in now that Russia was tied diplomatically to the strong capitalist economies of France and Britain; the great upheavals and strikes of 1905 gave way to an era of labor peace. Now the era of labor peace was partly, of course, thanks to Stolypin being perfectly willing to trample the rights of socialists and union organizers and labor activists, and in fact, he preached as much leniency and latitude as possible with the liberal and moderate papers so they did not find common cause with the more left wing writers, who were absolutely being shut down and censored and fined and arrested and exiled. But the years of labor peace were also about a pleasantly growing economy being pretty good for everyone involved. Strike numbers, which had peaked around 14,000 separate incidents in the calendar year of 1905, were hovering around 200 by 1910 and 1911.

All of this gives Tsar Nicholas some hope that the madness of 1905 really was in the rear view mirror, and that the Russian empire was really coming back to life. He had weathered the storm. Then, as we talked about in episode 10.48, Nicholas stopped seeing any urgent reason to keep Stolypin on his prime minister. He had only accepted Stolypin under duress anyway. And, as I said, it was entirely likely Stolypin was about to be dismissed from the government at the time of his assassination at the end of 1911. This, though, was complacency. And after Stolypin’s death, Nicholas let his government drift. He didn’t want another strong prime minister, nor did he feel much obliged to develop and carry out coordinated policies. Stolypin’s great reform project was driven by his own personal commitment to that project, and when he died, the energy died with him. But, that was fine. Because everything was fine, and getting finer.

Not six months after Stolypin’s death, the winds of social unrest started to pick back up. The period between 1907 and 1912 was going to turn out to be not the beginning of a great imperial renewal, but the eye of the hurricane of war and revolution. Just as had happened in 1904, criticism of the tsars corrupt and incompetent management of the empire abroad was going to start merging with resurgent working class anger, all combining to make Nicholas believe by the summer of 1914, that all the pieces were moving back into place for a return of social and political revolution, and that may be a great patriotic national war to distract everyone was a blessing rather than a curse.

The fuel that brought the smoldering embers of working class activism back to full flame was the Lena Goldfield massacre of April 1912. The brief background on this is that gold had been discovered way off in Northeastern Siberia around the Lena River. The potentially lucrative area came under the direction of a private company, jointly owned by British and Russian investors — among them, Sergei Witte, and the Empress Maria, the tsar’s own mother. Soon enough, around 6,000 workers and their families were out there mining for gold, but conditions were like a parody of industrial revolution horror stories. Wages were extremely low, and the company had a routine policy of issuing job-related fines to drive these low wages even lower. What was left, was paid in company script, only good at the company store. There were no safety standards to speak of, and there were an absolutely incredible 700 workplace accidents per 1000 employees. Far away from everything and everybody, and owned and operated by powerful political and financial interests in Britain and Russia, the workers and their families were just stuck with it. And they were ignored.

Tensions built as the months and years went by, and in mid-March 1912, the last straw finally dropped. As is often the case, it came down to… the food. One day, the commissary served rancid meat, and the workers announced they had had enough. They called a spontaneous strike and refused to go back to work until their demands were met. These demands were drawn up by a strike committee and presented to the bosses. And it’s nothing you haven’t heard before: an eight hour workday, a thirty percent raise, better food, and an end to the abusive system of fines.

The company refused to budge. The workers refused to budge. And so the strike went on day after day. After about a month, the company and the administrative authorities decided to break the strike. In the wee hours of April 17, 1912, the police raided and arrested the strike leaders. The next day, the workers woke up and discovered their leaders had been arrested in the middle of the night. This prompted them to organize a mass march to the local prosecutor’s office to protest an arbitrary violation of the law. Numbering about 2,500, they set off in the afternoon, but before they got to the prosecutor’s office, they were met by a company of soldiers dispatched to stop them. And this led to a mini bloody Sunday. The troops opened fire on the protesters, and the results were very bloody indeed. Of these 2,500 protestors, 270 of them were killed, and another 250 wounded. This is quite a little bloodbath.

The Lena Goldfield strike had thus far not been a hugely galvanizing event. But the massacre made national headlines and triggered shocked condemnation. Immediately strikes and protests and solidarity with the victims of the massacre sprang up. There were 700 strikes in St. Petersburg alone in the last week of April 1912, May Day saw a thousand separate strikes and walkouts. The company tried to offer concessions to the gold miners, but the workers rejected them as half-measures, and so the strike continued. And so too, did the solidarity demonstrations. Over the course of 1912, 300,000 workers went on strike at some point. And this was by far the largest numbers since the heady days of 1905. And it put everybody on notice that anger in the working classes may have subsided, there may have been labor peace, but their anger had never gone away. From his exile, Lenin noted with approval that the Lena Goldfield inflamed the masses with revolutionary fire, and it gave hope to him and all his comrades that the Russian working classes were still on their way to revolution. The original Lena Goldfield strike, meanwhile, finally ended in August, when the vast majority of the remaining workers and their families just gave up. They quit and went home.

Anger, protests, and strikes that were relaunched by the events around the Lena massacre continued through 1913 and into 1914, renewing concerns in the government that the working classes were something to be concerned about again. But, of equal concern, and perhaps of even greater concern, was that liberals and moderates and more respectable elements of society had been appalled by the bloody massacre. And one young lawyer in particular used the Lena massacre to vault himself into the national spotlight. And he’s going to become very important down the road, I’m talking about Alexander Kerensky.

The domestic criticism of the government over the Lena Massacre, and the return of sympathy for the working classes as a salient issue for liberals and moderates were then exacerbated by events in the Balkans. Because this was all happening at the same time as the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 that we talked about at the end of last week’s show. The outbreak of war in the Balkans led to calls for Russia to get into the fight on behalf of the Serbs and their allies, to push out the Ottomans and push out the Austrians. Instead, the Russian government used their influence over the Serbs to force them to withdraw from Albania and accept a worse treaty than anyone believed they deserved.

The Russian government did this because they were trying to hold off a final showdown with Germany and Austria until at least 1917, but the general public knew little of these internal calculations. All they saw was the tsar once again selling out the Serbs and doing the bidding of the Austrians and the Germans. The tsar’s conduct was extremely unpopular in the press, and he now had to fully reckon with the consequences of not going to war the next time a crisis in the Balkans broke out. To back down, yet again, was to threaten the legitimacy not just of his government, but of the entire tsarist system.

This brings us to the seminal event we’d been building towards, and one of the seminal events in world history. Because another crisis in the Balkans was just a few months away. Now I am not going to rehearse all of this in minute detail, but we do need to get down the basics. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Austrian throne. And as his uncle Emperor Franz Joseph was 83 years old and had been on the throne since 1849, Franz Ferdinand was not just heir to the throne abstractly. He was likely going to be the emperor within a few short years.

In June, 1914, he embarked on a good will tour of Sarajevo, capital of the oh so recently and oh so controversially annexed province of Bosnia. The response to this tour was mixed. The Catholic Croat population was happy enough to be with the Hapsburgs — I mean, not happy, but happier than if they were with the Serbs. The Muslim population was not happy either, but at least they preferred a dynasty used to ruling a multi-ethnic multi-lingual multi-religious empire to annexation by the Serbs. Meanwhile, the Serb population was highly agitated and very angry. They thought the annexation of Bosnia by the Hapsburgs was illegal, and preferred annexation by the Kingdom of Serbia.

Always looking for a way to provoke the Austrians into the war they believed necessary to achieve the dream of greater Serbia, the Serbian nationalist group Black Hand decided to assassinate the archduke. As Franz Ferdinand and his wife traveled in a car through Sarajevo on June the 28th, 1914, one of their assassins tossed a bomb that the driver of the archduke’s car managed to avoid. But this scare prompted the archduke to change the route he was going to travel for the rest of the day. In one of the all-time great coincidences in world history, the drivers of the motorcade got mixed up about the route, and when the archduke’s car had to briefly stop so that it could make an awkward turn to stay on the new revised safer course, they stopped right next to one of the assassins by pure coincidence. The assassin couldn’t believe his luck. He stepped forward, pulled out a gun, and fired multiple shots into the car, hitting both the archduke and his wife, killing them both.

Entire books have been written about the next four weeks. There is an entire section of historiography about July 1914. But we’re going to blow through it in about two minutes. The Austrian government decided that they were going to use this incident to solve their Serb problem once and for all. Before they could act, though, they had to get assurances of support from the Germans. The Germans, aware that the Austrians were upset over their previous equivocations, told Austria, do what you have to do. The Kaiser told the emperor, whatever you do, Germany will back you to the hilt, and that becomes known as Germany’s blank check. This led Austria to pursue its most aggressive option, because they knew the Germans now had their backs. That aggressive option: declare war on the Kingdom of Serbia, crush them and dismember them. But as they laid the groundwork for war, they led everyone else in Europe to believe that they were going to play it cool, that they weren’t going to overreact, and that really this incident could all be taken in stride. But they did this, they stalled for time especially because the French president was about due to pay a state visit to St. Petersburg at the end of July, and the Austrians didn’t want the French and Russians to be able to coordinate a response. But the minute the French president got back on his boat to sail home from this summit in St. Petersburg, the Austrians issued what they believed would be an unmeetable ultimatum to the kingdom of Serbia that would guarantee war. This surprise ultimatum shocked the capitals of Europe end triggered a mass flurry of diplomatic cables trying to contain the crisis. Because if Austria declares war on Serbia, will Russia declare war on Austria? And if that happens, will Germany declare war on Russia? And if that happens will France declare war on Germany? And if that happens, will Austria declare war on France? And if all that happens, will Britain join France and Russia and also declare war on Germany and Austria? The answer to all these questions was a very frightening yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Now calculations inside Russia were driven by two overriding factors. And the whole point I’m trying to make here in this episode is that one of the biggest was entirely about domestic politics. That if the tsar once again failed to come to the aid of Serbia, that it would trigger protests at home that might trigger a full blown revolution, they were very afraid of this. The tsar would have proven himself once and for all to be so weak that he was practically treasonous. The effort to avoid looking weak then kicked them over into the other big factor, which is we need to start mobilizing for war as soon as possible, so that when we start doing knife’s edge brinksmanship, we will be ready. We will be able to stand tall and tough and strong.

So on July the 25th, as the Serbs unsuccessfully tried to placate the Austrians, the tsar declared what was called a period preparatory to war, to get the wheels of military mobilization in process. Once those wheels get going, they are going to be very difficult and almost impossible to stop. But still, this period preparatory to war did not mean Russia had to go to war. But when it was noticed in Germany, there was just no way they could sit around not mobilizing for war, or they would be the ones caught flat-footed. Austria, meanwhile, remained laser focused on Serbia and believed that the Russians were bluffing, and they declared war on Serbia on July 28th. On July 30, the tsar responded by ordering a general mobilization, which by definition meant following a plan that called for the simultaneous mobilization against both Austria and Germany. This spooked the hell out of the Germans who had given their blank check to Austria and now had to back it up.

Through all of this, Nikki and Willy exchanged their final telegrams. Both of them were trying to avoid a war that neither personally wanted, but both also made it clear that the other was the one who had to back down. Meanwhile, the apparatus of military mobilization with its inertia far beyond either of their powers was underway. On July 31st, Germany issued a double ultimatum to Russia and France to either stay neutral in any conflict between Austria and Serbia, or face war with Germany.

The tsar now faced a terrible choice. And in his mind, that choice was between war and revolution. All the recent criticism in the press, the popular protests, the renewed labor conflicts over the last few years, helped convince the tsar that the danger of not going to war outweighed the danger of going to war. To back down again, to show his weakness again, might trigger a domestic crisis of political legitimacy that could lead to revolution. Reflecting on these days and the tsar’s decision, his foreign minister later said, and I’m quoting Now, “unless he yielded to the popular demand for war and unsheathed his sword on Serbia’s behalf, he would run the risk of revolution, and perhaps the loss of his throne.”

Meanwhile, war also offered a very promising possibility of ending all the criticism and labor unrest. It would turn angry workers into patriotic subjects. It would turn critics into supporters. It would rally the entire nation to a great patriotic cause, which would not destabilize the tsarist system, but reinforce it and make it stronger than ever. Nicholas himself believed that by declaring war in the summer of 1914, that it would create — and he said this to his children’s tutor, who wrote it down — a national movement in Russia like that which took place in the great war of 1812. And it was indeed to great fanfare and cheering the the tsar stepped out onto the balcony of the winter palace and declared to his people that Russia was at war. Though many dangers and horrors lay ahead, Nicholas could at least rest easy knowing that if nothing else, he had saved his throne.