This week’s episode is brought to you by me again, but I’m not here. Plugging Hero of Two Worlds, although on second thought. Yeah, go pre-order Hero of two worlds, but I’m actually here to plug the verge reformation Renaissance and 40 years that shook the world by fellow history podcast guy, Patrick Wyman. The verge is about the crucial decades between 1490 and 15.

That birth so much of what we understand as the modern world I’ve read it. It’s fantastic. And even though it’s technically going to teach you about banking and the logistical micro economics of like the early printing press, it’s super engrossing and wraps all this information up in the stories of fascinating individual lives.

So I wrote a blurb for the book, and I think I’m just going to read it to you right now. In the Verge, Patrick Wyman expertly weaves the story of the birth of modernity. With a masterful gift for storytelling, Wyman connects fascinating individual lives to the massive social changes they unleashed, making the Verge as engrossing as it is informative. Wyman takes us from fleets in the Atlantic to silver mines in Hungary to wool traders in England to the richest banks, clearly illustrating the sophisticated economic, technological, and political forces driving Europe towards global domination. The Verge is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the origins of the modern world.

So that sounds pretty good, right? Um, so this is pub week for Patrick. His book comes out on July 20, and part of the reason I’m here talking to you now about it is that I will be doing a virtual event with Patrick at Powells Books on July 22nd. It’s a virtual event, but it’s with Powells. I’ve put a link in the show notes to register for it, but you can also just find it at the Powells event page. It’ll be me and Patrick talking history for an hour, and I frankly can’t believe you wouldn’t want to come out for that, so come out! Buy the Verge. This is after all the summer of history podcast guy books, and you do not want to miss out.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.61: The Precipice

Last time we left off with Nicholas and Alexandra doing absolutely everything in their power to not get off the jagged and icy path leading them step by step towards the cliff of revolution. They were determined to not heed any warnings that they ought to pick a different path. Now, even at this late stage, there’s a possibility that they could have averted going over the edge that was now plainly visible, just up ahead. But even had they done it, had they stopped, turned left, or turned right, or turned around or done whatever, it’s possible there was actually now no way to avoid what was coming. That the giant avalanche of social unrest was barreling down the hill at high speed, and there was no time left to get out of the way, and it was just going to sweep them off the cliff no matter what. Can you picture it? They’re kind of like, walking along a mountain path and there’s a cliff, but also an avalanche? Yep. I promise this makes sense in my head.

So this avalanche that’s now barreling at them was composed of all the accumulated social, economic, and political anger and frustration that’s been building over the past few years, and frankly, over the last few decades. Russia was, after all, a society that had gone through a major revolution just 12 years earlier, and that revolution had not really resolved anything. Now I like this avalanche metaphor too, because it properly invokes one of the last major revolutionary factors that was added to the mix here in the winter of 1916-1917: the incredible freezing cold. As has happened in many of our revolutions — the 1780s in the French Revolution, the hungry 40s leading up to 1848 — climatic conditions played a crucial role in the Russian Revolution. The winter of 1916-1917 was one of the worst on record and certainly the worst since the war began. Average winter temperatures in Petrograd at the time usually hovered around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so just above freezing. In January 1917, those average temperatures were 10 degrees Fahrenheit. In February, they were going to drop to six degrees Fahrenheit. Over in Moscow, the average was two degrees, that is just two degrees Fahrenheit. This is all way below freezing. This winter was also marked by almost continuous blizzards that piled snow up everywhere. The biggest consequence was that the already overtaxed and underperforming railroads just stopped running. Trains couldn’t move because there was too much snow covering the tracks and there were not enough workers to clear them. And even if the snow wasn’t blocking the way, trains could freeze in place, literally unable to build up enough steam to move. The climatic conditions took the dysfunctional transportation network and turned it into a non-functional transportation network. Over the winter of 1916-1917, something like 60,000 railroad cars that would have otherwise been loaded with food and other basic necessities did not move.

So obviously this is big trouble for the urban population, which was already deep into dealing with the double whammy of inflation and scarcity. And the specifically fatal problem in January and February 1917 was the amount of fuel needed to keep the fires and ovens going. Right on the eve of the February Revolution, a government inventory of Petrograd found that there were 9,000 pounds of flour out there in various warehouses, and they concluded the food situation wasn’t that bad.

But there was no fuel. The bakers couldn’t turn the flour into bread. So it was just sitting there, these giant piles of coal powder. The lack of fuel also led factories to intermittently shut their doors, which meant the workers couldn’t work, which means they were not getting paid, and they were quite literally being kicked out into the cold with no money to buy the no food that was available anyway. So upshot of all this: the population of the cities of Russia and Petrograd in particular are hungry, irritable, angry, freezing, and afraid. Strikes, demonstrations, marches and meetings become a recurrent feature of daily life. On January 9th, 1917, the 12th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a hundred thousand workers went on strike in the capitol. And after that, it seemed like there was some kind of action taking place in Petrograd nearly every day of the week.

A similar mood of hungry, irritable, angry, and freezing fear also took hold in the rank and file of the army and navy. Now many of the worst logistical and supply issues that plague the military in 1914 and 1915 had been resolved… for the munitions and war material shortages. But the problem of food shortages was hitting the military as hard as the civilian population. The same trains not reaching the cities were not reaching the front lines. And of course, the soldiers were starving and frozen in the middle of a traumatically brutal war. By January, 1917, the Russian army had amassed 6 million casualties — that’s 6 million — killed, wounded, and missing. Discipline was now incredibly shaky. Most of the original officers had been killed; those who had been promoted were usually in way over their heads, trying to control way more soldiers than anyone had any right to expect, and frankly, as angry, hungry, and freezing as their men.

Into this mix, political literature began to circulate, fixing blame for all that was wrong on the tsar and tsarina. Milyukov’s "stupidity or treason" speech was printed and widely circulated. The government also made the mistake of punishing civilian political agitators and working class activists by conscripting them into the army. And so by the end of 1916, all those troublesome malcontents were causing troublesome malcontent at the frontline. Disobedience and mutiny became increasingly normal.

But even more politically dangerous to the regime than the mood at the front was the mood in the garrisons in the rear. These reserve forces, most especially the Petrograd garrison, were the most mutinously disobedient part of the military. The garrisons were filled with the two most discontented groups of soldiers: first, married fathers who wanted no part of the army, and were furious they had been drafted in the first place; and second, soldiers previously wounded and traumatized by duty at the front lines who were now reassigned to the rear. These guys are extremely restless, extremely angry, and extremely sympathetic to the political opposition.

As social unrest acutely grew in the urban centers over the winter, these rear garrisons almost uniformly sided with the people against the government and the police. And back in October 1916, there’s actually an incident in Petrograd where striking workers clashed with the police and soldiers cheered on the people from their vantage point of their base. And then as we saw last week, George Buchanan tried to warn Nicholas that in case of revolution, he could not expect his soldiers to rush to his defense.

Nicholas tried to buck up his restless troops by issuing a manifesto where he implored them to stay strong and stay the course — that’s what he was going to do. The war had gone on too long, but they couldn’t give up until the war was won. He wrote, "the time for peace has not yet come. Russia has not yet performed the tasks this war has set her. The possession of Constantinople on the straits, the restoration of a free Poland. We remain unshaken in our confidence and victory."

This was like a message in a bottle from a long forgotten age back when the Russians thought they were going to be parading through the streets of Constantinople by September 1914 — well, October at the latest. This picture of triumph was so far removed from the reality of 1916 and 1917, that the French ambassador called the manifesto "a kind of political will, a final announcement of the glorious vision he had imagined for Russia and which he now sees dissolving into thin air."

Back on the home front, Minister of the Interior Protopopov was working hard to prevent the revolution everyone now seemed to be anticipating. If they could ride out the winter and win the war, they might actually get through this. And as I said at the end of last week’s episode, heading into February 1970, all sides were focusing on the reconvening of the Duma which was set for February 14 as day one of the revolution, the most likely moment the political opposition in the Duma would be able to merge with the anger in the streets to make the revolutionary avalanche too wide, too fast, and too powerful to avoid.

And the most obvious solution would have been to just cancel the session, or at least postpone it. Maybe even dissolve the Duma entirely. But Protopopov believed dissolving the Duma would be even more dangerous than letting them convene. Refusing to let them meet would simply galvanize the political opposition so much that they would be inviting the very revolution Protopopov was trying to avoid.

So what to do? Believing it too dangerous to directly target leaders of the Duma opposition, Protopopov decided to decapitate the working class leadership. Because the key to avoiding revolution was preventing the linkage of the anger in the streets with the opposition in the Duma. Sabotaging the worker’s ability to organize into a revolutionary political force seemed like the safest way to go. That way the Duma could meet, they could make their speeches, but it would be so much hot air.

Now, when I say targeting the working class leaders in the street, I’m not talking about most of the revolutionary leaders we’ve talked about so far in the series — Leninn, Viktor Chernov, Trotsky, Martov — who, you will notice, are not showing up at all in the story right now, because most of them are in exile, living as emigres in Switzerland or France or England or wherever. Now there were Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs operating and all the major cities. But they were operating without any kind of direction from their "leaders" abroad due to the, y’know, massive war that happened to be standing between them.

The war years also saw the rise of new leaders and activists coming out of the working classes themselves, who were spontaneously organizing their shops and factories, sometimes working with the socialist and revolutionary agents, but sometimes just acting totally independent. The linkage between the working class leaders and the political opposition was going to come from two places:

First, radicals in the Duma who had direct connections to radicals in the streets. There were still a handful of out and out socialists in the Duma, but also people like Alexander Kerensky and the Trudoviks. They believed the time had absolutely come to stop with the speeches and the petitions and the personal appeals, and call out the streets. That was the only way forward.

The other link was an organization called the Workers Group, which was tied directly to the somewhat more conventional opposition leaders, especially in the business wing of the progressive bloc. If you remember a few episodes back, when the opposition to government incompetence and corruption really started to take hold, industrialists in Moscow formed that thing called the War Industries Committee to coordinate business and manufacturing interests outside of government control. Many of the key leaders of the Duma’s progressive bloc and, spoiler alert, the coming provisional government, came from the war industries committee. As they organized, they created an auxiliary organization of workers to ensure that management and labor stayed on the same page to keep Russia’s industrial sector pumping out the material needed to win the war. Now, of course, what happened at first was the Workers Group found that they were mostly ignored, and those who tried to steer industrial policy towards pay raises and reforms and better conditions found themselves often politely heard, but mostly ignored.

But in late 1916, the workers group was still a thing, and their leaders still had personal connections to the leaders of the progressive bloc. And they were certainly viewed, at least by the police, as being the entity that could potentially mobilize the streets on behalf of the political opposition in the Duma. And by 1917, the leaders of the workers group had concluded the only way to improve the lives of the workers they represented was to overthrow the government. No social or economic reform would be possible without a complete change in the political system. All of their problems now have a political answer.

So at the end of January 1917, the workers group released an appeal to the workers. They encouraged all workers to stage a huge demonstration at the Tauride Palace when the Duma reconvened on February 14th. Their proclamation said, "the working class and democracy can no longer wait. Every day that is allowed to pass brings danger. The decisive removal of the autocratic regime and the complete democratization of the country are tasks that must be solved without delay." Their message to the workers was now: "through the Duma, to the revolution."

But though they had connections to the progressive bloc, and looked to be rallying in support of them, massing in front of the Duma was not just about showing support. It would also menace the Duma leaders into not losing their nerve. Like: we’ll be here, and we’ll cheer you, and keep the forces of order at bay with our mass turnout, but also don’t forget we now surround the building, so you better do what we need you to do.

With what appeared to be a coordinated plan in place to turn February 14 into day one of the revolution, Protopopov struck the day after this manifesto was published. He ordered a sweep of arrests targeting about 300 individual leaders, and tossing the entire leadership of the Workers Group into the Peter and Paul Fortress. This operation was a complete success, and even better, it came off without any rioting in the streets or unmanageable protests from opposition leaders. By February 1st, Protopopov believed he had nipped the revolution in the bud. Now the chief of the Petrograd police said Protopopov made a mistake only arresting the working class leaders while leaving the political opposition leaders like Kerensky and his lot free to roam around the city, but the minister of the interior was convinced everything was going to be fine.

To further head off the revolution, Protopopov also declared Petrograd an independent military district, and removed from command the general who had been in charge because that general was believed to be sympathetic to the opposition. In his place, Protopopov appointed a guy named General Khabalov.

Now, Khabalov was a loyal functionary, though all he had ever done was be a loyal functionary. He was good at ceremonial parade ground work, but not much else. He wasn’t a real soldier in any sense of the word, nor did he have any real experience leading troops in battle.

But, given a free hand to maintain order in the capitol, Khabalov issued a public warning to the people of Petrograd on February 9th to not make any trouble when the Duma reconvened, or else.

Surprisingly, printed alongside this warning was a similar statement from Pavel Milyukov, echoing the call to please not congregate at the Duma on February 14th. That the people should not listen to agitators in the street telling them it was the only way forward. Milyukov said, "I will only direct the attention of the workers to the fact that the bad and dangerous advice which is being distributed in their midst apparently emanates from very murky sources."

This was a not particularly veiled swipe at Kerensky, who was now absolutely running around telling everybody the streets have to rise in support of the Duma or all is lost. Kerensky was afraid more cautious leaders like Milyukov were going to let this moment pass by being too afraid to pull the trigger on endorsing popular protests. That to miss this opportunity to not seize this opportunity would ultimately be the end of everything, that they would just be stuck living under a bunch of incompetent tyrants, even though everyone now agreed they were just a bunch of incompetent tyrants.

On February 10th, 1917, Mikhail Rodzianko, the chairman of the Duma, met for the final time with Tsar Nicholas. He found the tsar brusque and dismissive. All Nicholas would do was vaguely hint that maybe after the war and after all the disturbances had died down that then he could reform things. But to do so now would be to signal weakness. It couldn’t be like he was being forced to do something against his will. Nicholas said, "I will do everything afterwards, but I cannot act now."

And that’s a big problem. Nicholas is focusing so much on not looking weak, that he is completely missed the obvious fact that he is at this moment very, very weak. Sometimes when you’re weak, you have to do things you don’t want to do to survive. Rodzianko said to the tsar, "I consider it my duty, Sire, to express to you my profound foreboding and conviction that this will be my last report to you."

And indeed it was his last report to the tsar.

But still, for like half a beat in mid February 1917, it actually did kind of look like the revolution was not going to break out. That the avalanche was dissipating, and the opposition was letting the moment get away from them. But it wasn’t just moderates in the Duma pulling back. On the far left, Bolsheviks, left-leaning Mensheviks, and SRs refused to join Kerensky’s calls for a demonstration at the Duma because they didn’t want any part of anything that might prolong the war. Now we’ll talk more about the defensivist versus defeatist controversies down the road, but people like Kerensky wanted to win the war — or at a minimum, head into the post-war treaty negotiations with as strong a hand as possible. The whole pitch for the necessity of getting rid of the tsar was premised on the need to not lose the war. But the Bolsheviks and SRs believed the best way to stage the revolution — their revolution — was to have the tsar and his idiot ministers lose the war, plunging a defeated Russia into truly demoralized chaos that would make the mood after losing the Russo-Japanese War look like a pretty fun birthday party. So they resisted Kerensky’s calls to turn everyone out on February 14th. They had no interest in playing the chorus for a movement dedicated to winning the war.

So the expected demonstration on February 14th didn’t really happen. Now, it’s true something like 90,000 people did turn out for various strikes and demonstrations, but these were not explicitly connected to the goings on at the Duma, nor physically located at the Tauride Palace. The Duma did not open surrounded by workers, but police and soldiers. Now in this session, Kerensky gave another barn burner of a speech where he made it clear that his position was one of patriotic national defense. But he looked at the tsar’s manifesto saying, well, we haven’t gotten Constantinople or the Dardanelles yet, and said, that’s crazy! We shouldn’t be trying to win in the sense of trying to extend the Russian empire to the Mediterranean. This should be about getting out of the war as painlessly as possible with Russia, its economy, and its people as intact as possible. His point was that nothing good could come from being conquered by Germany.

But while this put him on the defensivist side of the lines, Kerensky also took this opportunity to openly claim that he was a member of the socialist revolutionaries. That he defended and supported even their terrorist tactics as eminently forgivable in times of oppressive crisis. He made an appeal to antiquity, lauding what citizen Brutus did in classical times. Kerensky said the present goal was, "the destruction of the medieval regime immediately at any cost." And he chastised his colleagues for not seizing the moment. "You cannot break with the old government, all the way," he said. "You can’t because, as I have already said, up to now, you do not want to subordinate your economic and social interests, the interests of one group of the population to the interests of the whole."

He basically accused them of shrinking from doing the right thing for the people of Russia, who suffered so miserably at the hands of a government everyone in the Duma agreed was awful, because their own wealth and position might be at stake. It was an angry, righteous, and scandalous speech, but the majority in the Duma were utterly unmoved. Well, they moved a little — they moved away from Kerensky, who they did not want to have anything to do with anymore.

So February 14 came and went and basically nothing happened. But though it seemed like the revolutionary moment had passed, the prevailing unrest in Petrograd did not cease. In fact, it only got more intense.

On February 17th, a major strike broke out at the Putilov Iron Works. Management responded by locking everyone out. The strike continued for days, and very quickly became overtly political in its objectives. The Putilov workers sent deputies from their strike committee to other factories to maybe try to get a general strike going. They also met with Kerensky and told him, we tried to keep industry going in the name of the war of national defense, but the lock out has radicalized everyone and made them more militant than ever. They said, the workers were conscious that it was the beginning of some sort of major political movement. They considered it their duty to warn the deputy about it, how this movement would finish, they didn’t know. But to judge the mood of the workers around them, it was clear to them that something very serious could happen.

Then a rumor started circulating that the government was about to start rationing bread. It would be one pound of bread, per adult, per day, which is not nearly enough to live on. The news spread throughout Petrograd causing a run on food, to the extent that there was any food left to be had, and I know I’ve mentioned a few times that all the store shelves are empty, but now, I mean, my god, they are really super empty. People were panicking, people were scared, and people were angry.

Meanwhile, Minister of the Interior Protopopov took this moment to turn into the Jules de Polignac of the Russian Revolution. Polignac, you will recall, was King Charles the Tenth’s infamously blithe minister from the Revolution of 1830 — he’s one of the reasons the revolution of 1830 happened. Protopopov believed everything was now well in hand. After February 14th, he exhibited supreme confidence that everything was just going to work out. He believed that all the coup plots were a bunch of hot air, and to be fair, he wasn’t exactly wrong about that. He also believed that the sweep of arrests he had made of the Workers Group leaders had headed off the revolution. He believed General Khabalov’s warning had taken the wind out of the Duma sails, and so after this, he just sort of let things drift. The council of minister stopped meeting. There stopped being any real coordinated government policy. He let the acting head of the national police stepp down without bothering to replace him. He issued no special instructions or orders to the secret services or the police forces. He did order for cavalry regiments transferred from the front lines to Petrograd, but they never showed up, because the general at the front in charge of the transfer countermanded the order, because he did not believe the army should be used to attack the Russian people.

But with things so seemingly well in hand. the tsar decided it was time for him to go back to headquarters and resume his duties as supreme commander of the imperial armies of Russia. This would mean removing himself from the political situation in Petrograd, and return control of domestic politics to Alexandra. Now, even Protopopov, master of trying to make everything seem better than it was, said to the tsar, "the time is such, Sire, that you are wanted both here and there. I very much fear the consequences."

But Protopopov also didn’t want to break the soothing and comforting story that everything was well in hand and that he personally had the situation under control. So, Nicholas decided to return to the front. He departed Petrograd on February 22nd, 1917.

The next day was February 23rd, 1917. It was International Women’s Day. Now, at this point, the moment that seemed to be building to a revolutionary moment had been February 14th, the opening of the Duma. But that did not come off. Most of the revolutionary and socialist leaders decided probably what was going to happen is they were going to have to wait out the hard winter and then maybe mobilize again for May Day, maybe stage a general strike. But as we will discuss next week, women activists, both liberal democratic feminists and suffragists and working class wives and mothers and socialists who were out there standing in bread lines all day and have absolutely had enough — they made plans of their own to mark International Women’s Day, despite active discouragement from their male counterparts and comrades. And in the end, it is the women who did not let this moment pass. And it was the women who ensured Russia was not going to get out of February without a revolution.