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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.66: Finland Station

Okay, so first of all, obviously we’re here now. Pub week is upon me. It’s upon us. Heroes of two Worlds publishes on Tuesday, August 24th, and as I record this, that’s like 36 hours from now. And because pub week is upon us, the media has started to take notice and there’s a bunch of really nice pieces out there. Um, Adam Gopnik wrote a New Yorker article about Lafayette that heavily features me and the book. David Cleon wrote a very nice thing in the New Republic about me, about the book, about Revolutions and podcasting and my approach to history in general, I thought it was great, thank you, David. Uh, and then if you didn’t see it, CBS This Morning Saturday aired a segment about me and the book, and I knew that one was coming, ’cause I was just back in DC for a few days doing filming and interviews for it, so it’s out there too, it came out really nicely. Uh, I’m putting the link to all of those in the show notes. If you can’t get enough Mike Duncan content, or if you feel like you want to just broaden the scope of your general celebrations for the release of hero Of Two Worlds. Um, it kind of feels like Saturnalia Eve around these parts, and I got to tell you, the attention and the support and the buzz have been giving me a very nice feelings all week. So there is technically still time to pre-order the book if you want to join in the fun, but otherwise, you know, just go buy it on Tuesday. It’ll be on the shelves. I think I’m getting pictures it’s already out on the shelves in someplace. Everyone keeps telling me it’s good. I’m even starting to believe it myself. So, you know, enjoy it. I really think you will.

But I cannot rest on my laurels here because there’s still work to be done. There’s always work to be done.

Now over the past two episodes, we talked about the emergence of dual power in post February Revolution Russia. The provisional government and the Soviet with the latter nominally supporting the former, but with so many strings attached one imagined the provisional government suspected it was far more of the puppet than the puppet master in the spring of 1917. But however contingent the Soviet support for the provisional government was, they did support the provisional government for both ideological and practical reasons. On an ideological level, most of the Mensheviks and SRs in the executive of the Soviet believed that the transition from medieval autocracy to modern socialism required an intermediate stage. A bourgeois democratic period that would create the social, economic, and political conditions that would lay the groundwork for the future socialist revolution. This is the old two stage theory of revolution. But then on a practical level, taking over and running the Russian Empire at this precise moment in history in the middle of an acute crisis seemed like such an insanely difficult task that was bound to upset and disappoint a lot of people the Soviet thought it would be a fine idea for the provisional government to take the heat. After all, they’re the official government, not us. But just as everybody was settling into this dynamic, it would be severely disrupted by a man who is about to get off the train at Finland station and start mucking everything up for everybody; that is, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Now, as I’ve noted a couple of times, Lenin and the other major socialist and revolutionary leaders took no part in the February Revolution because they weren’t there. Lenin had been living as an emigre for most of the past 17 years. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lenin had been packed up and shipped off to Switzerland, where he had been living and working since the summer of 1914. As we talked about in episode 10.55: On the Second International, Lenin was shocked when he started getting word at the beginning of the war that all the principal leaders of European socialism — including the really super important leaders of the German SPD — had all discovered justifications for supporting their national war efforts rather than sticking to their anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, and anti-nationalist principles. Their collective retreat into national chauvinism was so unexpected that at first Lenin thought it was German propaganda. But as we did discuss in episode 10.55, these guys didn’t just become blind flag-waving super patriots, they had decent strategic reasons for thinking that sticking to an internationalist antiwar policy as a gigantic great power war was breaking out would be suicide, metaphorically and perhaps even literally.

But though most of the leading European socialists took this path to supporting their respective war efforts, many others did not, and so every faction in party across Europe wound up having a small minority of internationalists, who like line and felt betrayed and refused to abandon their principles. This was particularly true among the emigre Russian population, and so there are international Mensheviks, like our old friends Pavel Axelrod and Julius Martov, who refused to follow Plekhanov into the ranks of Russian patriots. There were internationalist SRs like Victor Chernov. And thanks to the stamp Lenin put on the party, there were a lot of internationalist Bolsheviks. Lenin, in fact, tried to find a silver lining in the collapse of the Second International by saying, at least it revealed who the weakling hypocrites were. He said, "the European war has done a great service to international socialism in that it has clearly revealed the whole state of rottenness, baseness, and swinery of the opportunists, thus giving a magnificent incentive toward cleaning up the workers movement and ridding it of the filth which has accumulated during the scores of peaceful years." The International’s wing may be small and isolated in a few emigre colonies, but in Lenin’s estimation, they were at least strong and tough and resolute, and those are the kind of people you need to make a real revolution.

Those who truly oppose the war gathered in Zimmerwald, Switzerland in September 1915 to either outright claim the mantle of the Second International or at least create something new from it ashes. It was not a very big event; there were only 38 attendees, including all the Russians I just mentioned, plus Trotsky representing a Russian group in Paris, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were there representing Germany, and in all a dozen or so national groups were represented. But even at a meeting like this where everybody ostensibly agreed with each other, there were factional disputes because this is after all a Congress of left wing deputies. Lenin was personally disgusted that many of the people there were opposed to the war on purely pacifistic and moral grounds. They only wanted to end the war because war is bad, not because the powers that wage war are bad. Lenin on the other hand, organized a small, hard left minority faction whose opposition to the war would be grounded in revolutionary principles and class conflict. He believed the pacifists would, and I’m quoting here, "help the bourgeoisie nip the revolutionary movement in the bud, if in exchange, they stop the conflict." This was a deal that Lenin himself would not stomach.

Now, despite the divisions and the conference and arguments about language and emphasis, the Zimmerwald conference produced a scathing denunciation of the war drafted by Trotsky. It said:

"The war has lasted more than a year. The battlefields are littered with millions of corpses. Millions more have been crippled for the rest of their lives. Europe is like a gigantic slaughterhouse. Its entire civilization created through the labor of many generations is consigned to destruction. Fierce barbarity celebrates its triumph over everything that was until now the pride of humankind. Regardless of the truth regarding immediate responsibility for the outbreak of this war, one thing is clear. The war that produced this chaos is the result of imperialism, the striving by capitalist classes of each nation to feed their greed for profit through exploitation of human labor and natural resources around the entire globe."

These were just the opening paragraphs, and it just goes on like this, denouncing capitalism, imperialism, militarism, and the old guard of the Second International who betrayed the class struggle. The statement concluded, "Never in world history has there been a more urgent and noble task to be accomplished through our combined efforts. No sacrifice is too great, no burden is too heavy to achieve the goal of peace among the peoples." Now, Lenin and the other members of the left wing faction at the Zimmerwald Conference did not actually agree with this final assessment, but they signed the manifesto in the interest of putting on a unanimous face. Their great critique was that the goal here was not peace among the peoples, but the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling classes of Europe by the workers of the world. And for all its bombast, the Zimmerwald manifesto fell well short on this front. So Lenin emerged as a leader of what is going to be known as the Zimmerwald left, anti war socialists who were focused on responding to the crisis of the war by helping trigger a revolution, not responding to the crisis of war merely by trying to end the war. In Lenin’s most well-known formulation, he said, "they should turn the imperialist war into a civil war in every country". That is, encourage the proletariat of every belligerent nation not to work for peace, per se, but to work tirelessly to overthrow their own governments.

And this takes us into a question that I’ve alluded to a number of times but have not yet explained fully, and that is what is the distinction between defeatists and defensivists in the socialist community. Now, most socialists in Europe and most socialists in Russia were defensivists. They believed that on a moral level — and emotional level, a practical level, and a strategic level, it was good to help your country win the war, or at the very least, help your country not lose the war. This is how you get all those socials leaders pledging to ban strikes and promising to keep war industries rolling and not do anything to inhibit the conscription of soldiers. The alternative to this was to be a defeatist, someone who believed it would be better for their own country to be defeated, because it would bring about the collapse of their existing state, create a chaotic vacuum that would be perfect for a revolutionary uprising. Now, there were not many defeatists out there. You gotta be pretty ideologically committed to actively hope your country loses a war the size and scope of World War I, which after all is not some peripheral imperial conflict you’re debating in the abstract, but a gigantic industrial war happening right in your own backyard. Lenin is for sure the most prominent socialist leader during World War I to be tagged with the defeatist label, and the Bolsheviks became the party in Russia most associated with that tendency. But as with all things Lenin, he tended to have very flexible and nuanced beliefs that he kept well hidden behind blunt and exaggerated bombast. So, during the war years, he, for example, said to a fellow Bolshevik, "Tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism," apparently indicating that he would much prefer a German victory to the perpetuation of the tsarist regime. And then he said at another point, "From the point of view of the working class of the toiling masses of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its army."

But what we need to understand here is that Lenin is making these remarks inside a very tiny world of squabbling emigre socialists. He’s not like writing up public proclamations and sending them back to Russia saying, I hope we lose the war. But mostly the point he’s trying to make here is not strictly about whether it will be good or bad for the revolution if Russia lost the war, but rather whether it would be good to give up the revolution just to keep Russia from losing the war. Now, this is a very subtle distinction, but in his mind, it was very clear: defensivists who were willing to give up revolution and prioritize military victory had it wrong. Just as on the other side, anti-war pacifists who prioritized peace over the revolution also had it wrong. And the reason they had it wrong is because they weren’t prioritizing the revolution. So would Lenin rather see Russia lose the war than see Russian socialists or the Russian proletariat miss opportunities to overthrow the regime? In that sense, I think the answer is yes, absolutely he would. That was the thing that was driving him crazy; when the war started, everybody agreed to set aside the revolution and focus on winning the war. "The entire essence of our work," he said, "must be to turn the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is not clear. We have to let the moment ripen, force it to ripen, but we are duty bound to work for as long as it takes in this direction."

Now, the problem for Lenin on a PR and communications front is that he may have had all of these subtle and nuanced and sophisticated beliefs, but he kept saying very clear and straightforward things like better the Kaiser than the tsar. And he would say these to his own Bolshevik followers, who would then pick up that line and repeat it, because he seemed so clear and straightforward. And then Lenin would get very frustrated because all of his factional enemies would eagerly paint Lenin and the Bolsheviks as unpatriotic traders who were now indistinguishable from German agents. After a couple of good years of expanding the party from 1912 to 1914, the Bolsheviks in Russia contracted sharply during the war years. Many members quit the party, and it was hard to recruit replacements because the Mensheviks and the SRs and the Trudoviks were happy to paint the Bolsheviks with a defeatist brush.

So Lenin spent all of 1916 quite isolated with a group of other Bolsheviks in Switzerland. They were pretty cut off from their comrades in Russia, as there was a big giant war happening between them, though they were occasionally able to slip things through the line. Lenin held out hope during this period that the war would ultimately destabilize Europe to the point where the working classes would get tired of being chucked at each other to die, and instead go off and overthrow the tiny clique of Imperial masters who were doing the chucking. In the meantime, Lenin spent a great deal of time in libraries, brushing up on his philosophy, reading a lot of Hegel and Aristotle so that he could better understand the tenants of Marxism — and would, ironically enough, caused him to drift from his former Marxist orthodoxy. While he was doing this reading, he also commenced work on what was to become one of his most famous works, Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism, wherein Lenin outlined a theory that capitalism had moved beyond the progressive stage that prevailed in Karl Marx’s time to something higher, something different. Business and banking interests were coalescing into huge monopolies and outgrowing their domestic markets. That’s what drove them into a colonialist feeding frenzy, they were looking for new resources and new markets. The scramble for new colonial markets had spread across the whole globe, across the Americas and Africa and Asia, and with the amount of unconquered territory running out, the imperial powers of Europe were forced by the logic of capitalism to fight each other to take possession of each other’s possessions. Hence, giant global war.

Now, when you combine this with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and uneven and combined development, the idea that peripheral countries in this global conflict which were colonized by foreign capital and advanced technology were going to chart a different path than the one laid out for them in the orthodox version of historical materialism, we can really start to see Lenin’s strategic lines in 1917 were on the one hand a sudden and surprising break with everything he’s been saying since the 1890s, but also, something that develops quite naturally from what he had been reading and thinking and writing in 1915 and 1916. By the end of 1916, Lenin had settled into a solid routine of research in Zurich. He was now in his mid forties and had always suffered from recurrent illnesses, he had stomach problems and headaches, he was prone to fit to extreme rage when he got too worked up about like, the Mensheviks, and he suffered for it physically, and mentally and emotionally. He was absolutely convinced that he was right and everyone else was wrong, but no one else seemed to agree. He had a loyal group of Bolshevik lieutenants around him, but outside that group, it was a lot of eye-rolling and, oh yeah, Lenin, sure. He’s probably not going to amount to much of anything.

He had his good days and his bad days. He constantly switched between the boundless optimism of a lifelong revolutionary and the dispirited pessimism of a… lifelong revolutionary. In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to a group of Swiss students, and I quoted from this speech just a little bit a few episodes back when I wanted to establish the honest truth, that all Russian socialists everywhere were taken by surprise by the February Revolution. But what Lenin said in full was:

"The coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular risings by the working class. And these upheavals will lead to the victory of socialism. We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution but I can express the confident hope that the youth, which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement, will be fortunate enough, not only to fight but to win this revolution."

Then in another conversation, Lenin told a young Romanian that it was true, the revolution probably wasn’t right around the corner, but it would come and I’m quoting here, "perhaps in two, perhaps in five, at the latest, ten years." So when Lenin says he doesn’t expect a revolution anytime soon or doesn’t expect to see the revolution in his lifetime, he’s not talking about it taking place in some far flung future. He does believe it’s coming, just not like, in the next few weeks. And to the extent that he didn’t believe he would live to see it, this is probably saying more about his state of physical exhaustion and recurrent health problems that might cause him to drop dead sooner rather than later.

But then a few weeks later, on March the second, 1917, lenin was getting ready to return to the library in Zurich after lunch and a young Polish Bolshevik burst through the door and said, have you heard the news? There’s a great revolution in Russia. At first Lenin, brushed this off and said it’s probably just another example of German propaganda, but he and Krupskaya and a few others went down to a spot where international newspapers were posted. Those international newspapers confirmed the incredible story. Now, at this point, the news they were reading about was the mutiny of the troops in Petrograd on Monday, February 27th, the resulting street fighting, and some information about a Soviet being formed as well as maybe a new provisional government. Now they did not read about the application of the tsar because that hadn’t happened yet, literally as they’re sitting there reading it, Nikki is sitting on a train trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his life.

What Lenin read sent a jolt of electricity through him. It absolutely supercharged him. He became manic with energy. He may not have expected this nor been able to predict how it would shake out, but he was able to instantly apprehend the possibilities. He set about formulating what he believed the Bolshevik response ought to be, and over the next few days drafted communiques back to Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd outlining what their strategy ought to be. These would become called The Letters From Afar, and to the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd who received them, they were very much letters from afar. Lenin was clearly drafting them without any clear idea what was actually happening in Petrograd. Without guidance from anybody, the Bolsheviks in the capital had more or less gone along with the approach of the Mensheviks and the SRs: support the provisional government as the legitimate government for the ideological and practical reasons we talked about at the beginning of the episode. Circumstances had also tended to merge all the socialist parties back into an increasingly united block, with Mensheviks and SRS and Bolsheviks all toeing the same line. Certainly the more rank and file party members who weren’t burdened by decades of mutual hurt feelings and lingering personal grudges saw no reason why Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could not take this opportunity to reunite, to become a single party again and go forth and march into the revolutionary struggle together. But, in Lenin’s letters from afar he was telling the Bolsheviks in Petrograd they must not form any alliances with any other parties and they must not support the provisional government. Now these letters are going to become the basis for the April theses that we’ll talk about more next week, and which formed the basis of Lenin’s latest stubbornly held minority position, where he insists that he and the Bolsheviks are right, and everyone else is wrong.

More than anything though, Lenin was now dying to get back to Russia, and he was not alone in that. A meeting of all the emigre Russian socialists was convened, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRS, and they all kicked around plans for how to get home. Lenin said, "we must go at all costs, even if we go through hell." Martov suggested figuring out a way to negotiate passage with the Germans, maybe arranging some kind of prisoner exchange deal. Other people talked about taking ships through England, maybe taking an airplane, they were debating which country offered the best opportunity of forging passports. They didn’t come to any kind of consensus, and these discussions just went on for days as each group tried to figure out the best way home. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were ultimately aided by an unlikely source in far off Denmark. This was Alexander Parvis, who we last saw letting Trotsky crash on his couch for six months while they developed the foundations of what became the theory of permanent revolution. Now Parvis had long since abandoned the ideals of revolutionary socialism in favor of the profits to be made from being an international adventurer, dealing in arms and information, but he’s still very well-connected, and with news of events in Russia reaching the west, he approached the German ambassador in Denmark with a suggestion: the German government should absolutely reach out to Lenin and help the Bolsheviks get back to Russia.

Now, if you will recall, and probably you don’t, Parvis had made a name for himself predicting the course of the Russo-Japanese war and the Revolution of 1905 with beat for beat precision. And now he basically did the same thing. He told the German ambassador, Lenin is an uncompromising revolutionary. He is absolutely opposed to the war. If he is allowed to return to Russia, he will not stop until he has overthrown the provisional government, at which point he will almost certainly turn around and cut a separate peace deal with Germany, taking Russia out of the war and relieving all the pressure on Germany’s eastern front. This in fact might be something that only takes a matter of months… if you can get him into Russia. The German ambassador took this idea up the chain of command, and with that high command well aware the war was going badly for them, and knowing that the United States was about to enter the war on the side of the Allies,

they believed something drastic needed to be done in order to salvage victory. And the most logical place to find that something drastic was by exacerbating the chaos unfolding in Russia. The tsar was abdicating the throne, an untested provisional government was claiming power. There was chaos in the streets. The army was an open mutiny. This was absolutely something that could and should be exploited by the Germans, and they knew it. So this was not a low level scheme. This was Foreign Minister Zimmerman, General Ludendorff, and ultimately Kaiser Wilhelm approving a plan to send a batch of uncompromising hardcore revolutionaries who absolutely wanted to overthrow the Russian provisional government into Russia. These Russian socialists were to be put on a sealed car in Switzerland, and transported in secret through the German empire. Then they would go up through Sweden, cross over into Finland, and then head back into Switzerland, where, hopefully, they would disembark and bring the whole Russian empire crashing down.

So the German ambassador in Switzerland thened open negotiations with Lenin and about 30 other Bolsheviks. Over the next few days, they reached a few mutual understandings, mostly about trying to keep this on the down low for both sides, because Lenin, for example, was acutely aware it would not look good if they appeared to be agents of the kaiser — especially as everybody had spent the last few years accusing them of being agents of the kaiser — but ultimately they reached a deal that was acceptable to both sides, and when it was struck on March the 27th, nobody wasted any time. The Bolsheviks had just hours to pack up all their stuff and get on the train.

Now this was all supposed to be secret, but it was not secret for very long; the emigre community is small, and word soon leaked that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in cahoots with the Germans. Everyone else was aghast that Lenin would make this deal, but Lenin was not, and he was absolutely not going to be dissuaded. He knew it didn’t look good, but he also knew it was probably the safest, fastest, and most direct route back to Russia, and that was all that mattered to him. When they went down to the train station, they were greeted by a small crowd that heckled and shamed them, calling the Bolsheviks traders and German spies and pigs and frauds. But Lenin was convinced this was the only way, and he remained optimistic and undeterred in his own inimitable way. When they all finally settled down on the train Lenin turned to one of his comrades and said, "In six months time, we shall either be swinging from the gallows, or be in power."

And then the train departed.

The trip home took nearly a week. At first, they were in a sealed car through German territory — sealed not so that the Bolsheviks couldn’t spread their revolutionary message, but sealed so that nobody would see them and spread the story that the Bolsheviks were being chauffeured back to Russia by the kaiser. Along the way, Lenin distilled the points he made in his letters from afar into a concise program that he planned to make the basis for the party as soon as he got back. Once through German territory, the group passed over on a ferry to Sweden and then continued on. Now less conspicuously, hidden behind a sealed car, the local communities in Sweden appeared to be well aware that there was a train full of Russian revolutionaries passing through. There was one tense moment at a checkpoint at the Finland border, but they were allowed to pass, and then started really breathing a sigh of relief. Finland was, after all, territory of the Russian empire. And so if nothing else, the group was no longer at the mercy of a foreign power. Now as for the reception they would receive from the domestic powers, that remained to be seen. On April 3rd, 1907, the train finally pulled into Finland Station in Petrograd. A crowd knew Lenin and the others were on the train and they came down to greet them with enthusiastic cheers. Lenin got out and gave as stirring a speech as he was capable of giving. Now, for most of the past 17 years, Lenin had lived his life as an exile. The total number of days he had spent inside Russia numbered probably less than 200. But now he was back.

And this time, he planned to stay.

Hero of Two Worlds is out now please go buy it thank youuuu.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.65: The Dawn of a New Day

I want to start this week by saying that this is the penultimate episode of the revolutions podcast before Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution publishes on August 24th, 2021. I kinda can’t believe it’s already here. I kind of can’t believe I’ve been doing this for this long and something is finally going to come of it. Uh, I am consumed by nervous anticipation. This is three and a half years in the making. But anyway, this is basically the last time I’ll have to ask you to please pre-order the book before it comes out, and just so you know, all the pre-orders count as transactions on the date of publication, and therefore massing all of those sales in a single week and on a single day, uh, helps put the book on the New York Times bestseller list, if that’s a possibility, and maybe we can help prove that I’m not just a one hit wonder. So if you’re planning on getting the book, please just go ahead and pre-order it right now, thank you very much. Um, now people have asked me, how are we doing on the 10,000 pre-order campaign, and the honest answer is, I have no idea. That is because all the local indie bookshops out there don’t report their pre-order numbers, they just take the order, and then process the resulting sale on publication date. So my big push to get you all to pre-order the book from local stores has left me and the publisher basically blind. But I don’t really care because it sounds like we’ve done exactly what I wanted to do. And I just want to read to you now, some bullet points that were reported from the indie channel rep at the publisher in a recent roundup of how things are going out there for the whole catalog of offerings:

The first one is, "Mike Duncan has done an incredible job driving sales of Hero of Two Worlds to the indies. Accounts are picking up on average five to 20 copies." And then later she said, "Speaking of pre-orders, Mike Duncan is the new hero of independent bookstores everywhere. His pre-order campaign for Hero of Two Worlds sending listeners to our stores has made a big impact." and then the final bit is from a final call-out of things worth focusing on, Hero of Two Worlds. This has been one of the most successful author generated pre-order campaigns. I’ve seen in some time. Almost every indie has commented on how thrilled they are with their advance orders."

So this is exactly what I wanted, exactly what I hoped would happen. And it’s all thanks to you guys out there for doing this the right way. I mean, I already consider the pre-order campaign to be a massive success. We have made a huge, positive impact, it has been noticed, it has been appreciated, and it’s something I think we can all take a great deal of pride in accomplishing. And we did it together; I mean, it says, like, mike Duncan did this and Mike Duncan did that, but all I did was ask you guys to go do something and you did it. So this is really, this is all of us doing this together. And truly, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I really do have the best fan base in the world, and people out there are noticing it. So great job. Really great. Great job.

But enough about us. The last two episodes covered what we call the February Revolution, which took place in the final week of February 1917, according to the old style calendar. But what began in February finally finished in March, and what we’re here to talk about today is all of the stuff that is associated with the February Revolution, and is wrapped up in the memory of glorious February, but which actually happened in March. So today we’re going to run through events in March because after March comes April, and if you’ve read ahead even a little bit, you know, that you know who is coming back in April.

So we’re going to pick things up today with a phone call at six o’clock in the morning on March 3rd, 1917, so just a few hours after Nicholas signed his abdication in a rail car in Pskov. The phone call was placed by the leaders of the rapidly coalescing new provisional government to Nicholas’s younger brother Grand Duke Mikhail. This phone call informed a groggy Mikhail that Nicholas abdicated the throne. And at least according to the paperwork, Mikhail was now tsar of Russia. But this was not a happy call, a congratulations on your promotion and let us know when you want us to come down and pledge fealty to. It was instead, this is where things stand at the moment, but please do come down at your earliest convenience to discuss this with us, because there are some very important things to discuss.

So Mikhail got dressed and went to meet the leaders of the Duma’s provisional executive committee, which as I said, is rapidly transitioning into becoming an official provisional government. When the grand duke entered, he expressed surprise and consternation at his brother’s decision. Like almost everyone else, he expected that if and when Nicholas abdicated, it would be in favor of Alexei, and if anything, Mikhail would be a regent, not the tsar himself. He admitted, he didn’t quite know what to do. The leaders around him, almost to a man, told the grand duke, we think it would be a catastrophic mistake for you to accept the crown. The news has already been spreading that you’re the new tsar. And the response, particularly from the soldiers has been hostile and dissatisfied.

And this gets back to what we talked about last week, which is one of the key points in the agreement between the leaders of the Duma and the leaders of the Soviet is that a constituent assembly would be convened to settle Russia’s post-revolutionary constitution. This is the expectation that was out there in the streets and in the barracks. These people were not going to accept a backroom deal to simply replace one Romanov for another.

Now, almost alone among his colleagues however, Pavel Milyukov told Grand Duke Mikhail that he must accept the crown; that the monarchy itself was still an essential institution, and if Mikhail refused to be tsar, he would guarantee a civil war. But Milyukov was the only one who believed that. After this general discussion, the grand duke was taken aside by Chairman of the Duma Rodzianko who later recorded, "It was absolutely clear to us that the grand prince would reign for only a few hours before enormous bloodshed would occur in the capital. It was clear to us that the grand prince would be murdered immediately and all his supporters with him. He did not have any loyal troops at his disposal, and therefore could not rely on any armed force. He asked point blank whether I could guarantee his life if he accepted the throne. And I was compelled to tell him no."

Mikhail emerged from this meeting and announced to the other leaders surrounding him he would not accept the crown… unless it was offered to him by the anticipated constituent assembly. He drafted a statement to this effect, wherein he also implored everyone to recognize and obey the provisional government. This statement was published the following day in the newspaper alongside Nicholas’s official letter of abdication. And this is how legal political authority passed first from Nicholas to Mikhail and then from Mikhail to the provisional government. And there, it would remain until October.

The new provisional government, which officially marks its beginning to March 2nd, 1917 was drawn from the senior leadership of the progressive block, most of whom had been sitting on the unofficially convened provisional executive committee of Duma delegates. Pavel Milyukov became foreign minister, Alexander Guchkov became minister of war, Alexander Kerensky became minister of justice. Heading up the provisional government was Prince Lvov, the highly effective and well-respected leader of the Zemstvo Union, who became minister of the interior and also prime minister of the new provisional government.

All of these guys took up their post quickly and without very much infighting. The progressive block had been aggressively trying to force Nicholas to accept a new government composed of them for years now. And so the question of who would get what job had long since been settled. For months, newspapers had openly published lists of what leaders would take over which ministries. So while the revolution of course caught them by surprise, they had been expecting to get this call for years now. It’s not like they were totally caught off guard and suddenly rushing to do things they weren’t expecting to be doing. Now, the general public had also been waiting for these guys to become the government for months now, for years now, and when the news finally started to spread, the provisional government enjoyed broad support from the right and from the left, from workers and aristocrats, soldiers and civilians at home and abroad. As I’ve hopefully established by now, just about everyone was ready for a new government by the winter of 1917, and even any lingering shred of loyalty to Nicholas and Alexander out there among conservatives had long since frayed beyond repair. As word spread over the next few hours and days and then weeks, news of the tsar’s abdication, and that Russia was now in the hands of capable leaders was greeted with celebratory. Not the least reason being that these guys were all viewed as patriotic Russians, unlike Empress Alexandra, and the people who surrounded her, who most everybody had long since concluded were like secretly pro German and trying to lead the empire to ruin.

So there were celebrations in city streets, and out in the trenches and in tiny rural villages. A new day was dawning, and the wave of optimistic joy and relief was nearly uniform throughout the empire. With the Russians themselves clearly ready to embrace and recognize the provisional government, Russia’s foreign allies quickly followed suit. On March 9th, the United States became the first power to formally recognize the provisional government as the legitimate government of the Russian Empire, with Britain, France, Italy, and the other allies quickly following. With this final test of legitimacy passed, the provisional government was the government.

So, what were they going to do with their new found power, authority, and legitimacy? Well, they very quickly got to work trying to live up to everyone’s expectations, to deliver on what was generally understood to be the promise of the revolution. And that promise can be distilled down to two essential components: one destructive, the other constructive. And by that, I mean, they needed to dismantle the most abusive parts of the old absolutist regime, while at the same time, fostering something new, a participatory government that included all of Russian society, not just a tiny clique of incompetent sycophants appointed by Nicholas and Alexandra. For years now, decades really, the arbitrary, centralized state apparatus had been a major source of anger and resentment at nearly all levels of Russian society. So to maintain the good will and support of that society, the provisional government knew they were going to have to embark on a rapid program of destruction and construction. On the destructive side, that meant eliminating the most hated parts of the old regime, and on the constructive side, it meant replacing the deeply unpopular, closed up, and arbitrary bureaucratic apparatus with something that was far more open and responsive to the Russian people.

One of the first targets for destruction was the tsar’s police and internal security apparatus. Within days of taking power, the provisional government straight up abolished the ministry of police, the gendarme, and the Okhrana. These forces were the most visible symbol of an unjust and coercive state. The police in Petrograd had been the most staunchly violent defenders of the old regime during the street fighting between February 23rd and March 2nd, and thus abolishing the existing police force had been one of the things the provisional government had promised to do in order to secure support from the Petrograd Soviet. Now, of course it helped that the headquarters of all these police agencies had already been trashed, their senior leaders arrested or lynched, and the rank and file officers dissolved and scattered in the wake of revolutionary victory in the streets. So, announcing that these forces were abolished was merely announcing something that had kind of already taken place. And before we go on, I do want to note with a bit of a wry smile that many revolutionaries destroyed and burned the offices of the Okhrana with particularly meticulous zeal on account of how many of them had been paid agents of the Okhrana for years.

Now in place of these dissolved police forces, the provisional government expected to organize militia companies, drawn from the citizenry and led by elected office. So the idea was not to have no police force, but instead to have a police force by and for the people, rather than by and for the tsar.

The provisional government also move quickly to reorganize provincial administration throughout the empire. The provincial governors enjoyed considerable power in their provinces, and all of them were appointed directly by the tsar. They thus stood as an enormous potential roadblock to expanding the revolution out from Petrograd into the rest of the empire. Leaving them in place would have been a grave political mistake. They had been entrusted with broad discretionary power out in the provinces specifically because they were loyal to Nicholas and Alexandra. These were hardly people who could be trusted to support the revolution. So on March 5th, all governors and deputy governors were summarily dismissed from service. To replace these governors, the provisional government invited local leaders to take control. Specifically, they called on the provincial zemstvos, municipal councils, and other elements in the local professional classes and intelligentsia to step into the vacuum and take over administration. And it’s not like these groups weren’t ready to do the job. The zemstvo had been begging for years to be allowed to play an official role in local government and administration, but had been kept at arm’s length by the paranoid central authorities who feared they were trying to take over. Well, now they got a chance to take over. And over the course of the first few weeks of March, 1917, they moved into government offices and administrative headquarters and all their local capitals and went about the business of governing their provinces.

Meanwhile, back in Petrograd, the provisional government was decreeing all aspects of our well-known list of liberal and democratic reforms, most of which were also included in that eight point agreement with the Soviet we ended on last week. They were announcing freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. And since the general critique of the tsar from a liberal perspective was that his arbitrary central authority was unresponsive to the people, the provisional government leaned heavily into a more hands-off and decentralized vision of democratic liberalism. As we just saw, their idea for provincial government was not to replace the centrally appointed governors with somebody else, but to let local elites take up the job for themselves.

Meanwhile, when it came to national minority groups, everybody was promised some kind of autonomy. Finland’s constitution would be absolutely respected; Poland was basically promised self-government after the war was over. All of this fit into the widespread belief that for too long, the great potential of the Russian Empire had been kept bound by the tsar’s shackles. The February Revolution was supposed to set them free. And in March of 1917, that’s exactly what it looked like was happening, that’s what the provisional government is trying to do. They are trying to set the people of the empire free.

But of course the Revolution of 1917 is not just about what the provisional government is doing, because one of the key dynamics of the Revolution of 1917 is this business of dual power. Because growing right alongside the provisional government is the Petrograd Soviet, who sometimes supported, sometimes criticized, and sometimes outright undermined what the provisional government was doing. And in fact, to make sure the interests and goals of the Soviet were protected, its leaders built out their own parallel apparatus of power. And while their official policy was supporting the provisional government, it was very clear that their support was entirely contingent on the provisional government not doing anything that the Soviet opposed. And as the Soviet was an assembly of workers and soliders — which is to say, the mass of people under arms — the leaders of the Soviet believed, not incorrectly, that the provisional government only existed because the Soviet let them. The Soviet could frankly overthrow the provisional government practically anytime they wanted, and both sides were well aware of it.

Now, thanks to holding the trump card in this uneasy power sharing dynamic, the Petrograd Soviet felt free to pursue their own initiatives without bothering to seek the approval of the provisional government. So they would just do stuff. For example, on March 5th, they blew off freedom of the press and announced that no paper could be published without Soviet approval. Now mostly permission was granted, but they specifically named a bunch of reactionary newspapers with known ties to the Black Hundreds and said, yeah, you’re shut down. You can’t publish. Now on the level of principle, this was an opposition to the professed respect for freedom of speech and the press trumpeted by liberals in the provisional government and which was supposed to be one of the goals of the revolution, but the leaders in the Soviet did not care. Their eye was on a very practical ball: if you want a revolution to succeed, don’t let conservative thugs publish anti-revolutionary propaganda in the middle of the revoution.

In the weeks that followed, the Soviet then expanded on what was becoming a loose working policy that whatever happened out there, whether in the streets or in the army or in the provinces, required the stamp of approval from the Soviet. They were now casting themselves as the closest thing to a true expression of popular sovereignty. They sent commissioners out to set up shop in key locations and sectors: telegraph offices, railroad stations, post offices, printing presses, radio stations, industrial factories; the Soviet put commissioners everywhere. The basic idea was that while the provisional government technically wielded power, the Soviet exercised a kind of supreme oversight authority. Representatives of the Soviet told anyone they encountered, you are to obey orders from your superiors or laws from the provisional government, unless they contradict decrees of the Soviet, in which case you are duty bound to disobey them.

One of the examples of the Soviet having more control over things than the provisional government they were allegedly supporting was the fate of Nicholas and Alexandra. After Nicholas signed his abdication, he secured permission from Prince Lvov to go to army headquarters to say goodbye to his office. Then he requested permission to go back home to the Imperial Palace, link up with his family, and from there, they would all hopefully retire to a coastal community until the end of the war. Nicholas received permission to do all this, and the ex-tsar returned to army headquarters to bid tearful farewell to his officers.

But after he departed Pskov, the provisional government talked it over more, and decided they could probably not let the tsar and his family just stay inside Russia. So they sounded out the diplomatic core in Petrograd, and found the British, willing to accept Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children. All of the allies were concerned that if Nicholas and Alexandra settled anywhere in close proximity to the Germans, that they would become a focal point, not just for domestic counterrevolutionary activity that would further destabilize Russia, but that the Germans would be able to get in contact with Alexandra and fund and support such counter-revolutionary activity. In fact, the restoration of the Russian monarchy might become a German war aim. The whole Eastern front could collapse on Russia might very well become a permanent ally of Germany. So, the Imperial family remaining in eastern Europe was not in the national interest of any of the allies, and so the British made logistical arrangements for the imperial family to be put on a British steam ship. King George the Fifth even wrote a personal letter inviting his cousins to come settle in England.

But this whole idea was quickly short-circuited when rumors leaked of the plan. When the leaders of the Soviet found out about it they were incensed. They did not believe Nicholas nor Alexandra should be allowed to simply depart Russia without standing trial for their many crimes. The leaders of the Soviet informed the provisional government that they would not stand by and let the ex-tsar leave the country. The provisional government immediately backed down. They sent four deputies to army headquarters to escort Nicholas back to Tsarskoye Selo where he would be placed under house arrest. The provisional government, also order officers and soldiers that they trusted to go take control of the imperial palaces and make sure no one got in or out without permission. In the midst of all this, the leaders of the Soviet briefly panicked when the ex-tsar was in transit back to Petrograd because they lost track of him, and they believed he was being hussled out of the country. They went so far as to issue radio broadcasting, if you see the tsar, you must arrest him at once, he is a fugitive. But the provisional government had not double-crossed the Soviet, and shortly thereafter Nicholas was deposited back in the Imperial Palace. To be super sure of things though, the Soviet then sent its own company of about 300 infantry men backed by a company of machine gunners under an officer who just so happened to be an SR. Their job was to make sure Nicholas was in fact there, and this officer may have had further orders to either take command of security at the palace or possibly go so far as to take the imperial family into custody and deposit them in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Although what this officer wound up doing was negotiating with the soldiers he found on site and decided not to push the envelope, and instead reported back to the Soviet that he believed the imperial family were under proper custody. So it’s not a hundred percent just the Soviets representatives running roughshod over anybody here. But that said, if the provisional government had had their way, Nicholas and Alexandra and the children would have been safely sent to England. Instead, at the behest of the Soviet, they remained very unsafely in Russia.

As the Soviets claim to their special authority grew, the Soviet itself also grew. After the first week of March, there were about a thousand elected delegates, and within just a few weeks, that number is going to top out at over 3000. Then, the newly forming Soviets out in the provinces and out on the front lines started sending delegates to Petrograd. After a brief debate, the Petrograd Soviet voted to allow these people to come in as full-fledged members, and by the last week of March, they were no longer calling themselves the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies; they were now the All-Russia Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies. Bolstering their claim to be the true representatives of the people, not just the people of the capital, but of the whole empire. As the Soviet grew, the executive committee also grew until it hit more than 70 members, and as this body became increasingly unwieldy, they created another nested committee called the bureau composed of 24 members, mostly Mensheviks SRs, and Trudoviks. General assemblies of all the delegates became infrequent, there were only a handful of full sessions over the course of the rest of the month, and this self-selected group of socialist party leaders in the executive committee and in the bureau made most of the decisions on behalf of the people they claimed to speak for.

Now it would be easy and partly true to cast these socialist leaders as cynically co-opting the sovereignty of the people. But it is worth keeping in mind that the workers and soldiers clearly believed the Soviet represented their interests better than any other institution. And so, if you would ask them at this moment, they would have probably said, yes, the Soviet is the institution of the people, and I support them for that very reason. But that said, it is worth pointing out for the umpteenth time that the vast majority of Russians were peasants, and peasants were not represented at all in the Soviet. No matter how much they might’ve claimed to speak for the people, the Soviet was only reasonably speaking for like 10% of the population, 15% tops. And it’s not like the peasants were just passively inert on the one hand or clamoring to join the Soviet on the other. As we’re going to talk about more down the road, the peasants were having their own revolution. For them, the February Revolution meant agrarian revolution, and they were already taking matters into their own hands on the land front. But in terms of political representation, a bunch of regional SR organizations got the idea of getting the old Peasant Union back together. The Peasant Union had become a major locus of peasant power during the Revolution of 1905, but it had been broken and dispersed in the repressive aftermath. So as we’re going to see with the peasants, they are, again, the vast majority of the population, and they are going to remain aloof from the Soviet and seek to create their own representative institutions where their representatives were representing their interests. So whatever the assumed pretensions of the Soviet, they were never going to be more than what they officially were: a Soviet of workers and soldiers.

But as to this question of who represented the people, and what could be considered an authentic voice of the nation, we’ll end today with a big mistake that the provisional government was making. As we’ve noted several times over the past couple episodes, the final verdict of the February Revolution was always supposed to be rendered by a constituent assembly. Everyone was under the impression the provisional government was just that: provisional. That one of their most important jobs was figuring out when, where, and how to hold democratic elections to convene a national assembly that would hammer out a new constitutional order. An assembly that could truly claim popular legitimacy. But, instead of treating this promised constituent assembly as a matter of vital urgency, the provisional government dragged their feet. They formed a committee to come up with an electoral plan, but this committee got bogged down, either arguing minutiae or getting distracted by minor concerns. So weeks passed, and then months passed, before they even had a preliminary idea of how to hold elections.

So not only was the provisional government failing to fulfill one of their most important promises on a moral level, on a strategic level, their failure to convene the constituent assembly left laying around a very big and very obvious cudgel critics of the provisional government could pick up and beat them with. It is going to become very easy to argue the provisional government was not interested in forging a government of the Russian people, but of simply perpetuating their own power indefinitely.

So, that’s the political situation heading into April 1917: a great deal of promise, a great deal of promises, but with the initial rush of hope and optimism getting its first tinges of suspicious disappointment. There were now multiple power structures forming out there, all of them beginning to truly jostle with one another and no big national assembly that would sort it all out anytime soon. This was the atmosphere into which a train pulled into Finland Station on April the third, 1917. When the train stopped a small group of Russian ex-pats got out, returning home for the first time in more than a decade.

Though before we go, I have to take this second to last opportunity before Hero of Two Worlds comes out to ask you to please pre-order Hero of Two Worlds from your favorite independent bookstore, and if you are so inclined, please join me on August 20th with Jamelle Bouie, August 23rd with Ben Rhodes, August 24th with Alexis Coe or August 31st with Patrick Wyman. Those are going to be the online events that go along with publication week, which is now, my God, just one week away.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.64: The Origin of Dual Power

Last time, we finally successfully got rid of Tsar Nicholas the Second. He’s done. He’s out. He is in fact presently on his way to say goodbye to his troops, and then depart for a long and peaceful retirement finally free of the burdens he never had the talent or fortitude to handle anyway. But in order to connect the dots directly from international women’s day to the abdication a week later, I kind of had to breeze through some really important stuff going on at Petrograd. And so today, we are going to hit rewind until we are back on the evening of Sunday, February 26th, after a day of street clashes led several regiments of the Petrograd garrison to decide to mutiny the next morning, and march out to join the revolution.

Now, the reason I want to go back to Sunday night is to emphasize that even at this incredibly late hour, many of our professional revolutionary socialists, party leaders, and organizers, whose lives were dedicated to bringing about the revolution were caught flat-footed by events. Many, in fact, went to bed on Sunday night convinced the forces of order were already winning. One of the top Bolsheviks in Petrograd groused at a meeting held at Kerensky’s house, "There is no and will be no revolution. We have to prepare for a long period of reaction."

Another of them said, "The unrest in the barracks is subsiding. Indeed, it is clear that the working class and the soldiery must go different ways. We must not rely on daydreams for a revolution." Several years later, an SR leader looked back and admitted, "the revolution found us, the party members, fast asleep, just like the foolish virgins in the gospel." And this is to say nothing of the senior leadership of all these parties, all of whom were in exile abroad, and more or less convinced the next revolution was unlikely to break out in their lifetimes.

Now, this is not to say that the years of organizing and tutoring and propagandizing from the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and SRs was not partly responsible for the fundamental infusion of revolutionary hopes and dreams, strategies, and tactics into both the Petrograd working classes and the rank and file of the military. But, when the rank and file of the military dramatically defected on the morning of Monday, February 27th, it was of their own accord, and not under the leadership or guidance of revolutionary parties. The leaders of those parties would wake up on Monday, February 27th, realize the revolution was in fact happening, and then run out to recast themselves as leaders of events they were clearly being led by.

Now, all that said there was one group of leaders who could not be the leaders of this revolutionary moment, even if they wanted to, because they were all locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I’m talking here about the leaders of the Workers Group, who had all been arrested at the end of January. This was the sweep of arrests Minister of the Interior Protopopov believed had successfully short-circuited the revolution. Because those guys were the leaders connected to the working class organizations on one side, and the Duma opposition leaders on the other, and who stood the best chance of making the former work for the latter. Well, as we touched on last week, when the Petrograd garrison mutinied one of the things they did was storm the Peter and Paul Fortress, and free all the prisoners inside. So, the freed leadership of the Workers Group immediately returned to the task of organizing the streets, to make sure the demonstrations and mutinies and street fighting formed a cohesive momentum towards the goal of political revolution.

In terms of political affiliation, most of the leaders of the Worker’s Group were Mensheviks or SRs. And the one who we need to specifically namecheck here is Nikolay Chkheidze. Chkheidze was an old school Georgian socialist, and one of the founders of the first Social Democratic group in Georgia back in the early 1890s. When the party split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Chkheidze and most of his Georgian comrades became staunch Mensheviks, and he was among those fighting against the frustrating Bolshevik loose cannon and obnoxious gangster of Georgian socialism, young Joseph Stalin.

Now, starting in 1907, Chkheidze managed to get himself elected to the Duma, and he was one of the tiny handful of active Social Democrats remaining in the body after Stolypin’s coup. He then became a working ally of Alexander Kerensky, and starting in 1915 was a key leader of the Workers Group. This was a project championed by the Mensheviks to bridge the gap between the political opposition in the Duma and the working classes in the street. After being released from prison and conferring both among themselves and the other leaders of the several socialist parties Chkheidze and his comrades improvised a solution about how to organize and direct the exuberant chaos presently consuming Petrograd. As Alexander Kerensky later recalled the question arose — and I’m quoting here — "as to how and by whom the soldiers and workmen were to be led. For until then, their movement was completely unorganized, uncoordinated, and anarchical. Kerensky said it was suggested they organize an elected soviet, and he said, "the memory of 1905 prompted this cry. The need of some kind of center for the mass movement was realized by everyone. The Duma itself needed some representatives of the rebel populace. Without them, it would have been impossible to reestablish order in the capital."

And before we go on, let’s just recall here that the soviets — that is elected worker assemblies — had been born spontaneously in the strikes of 1905, and were then used as a model copied by various urban municipalities, including Petrograd. The first Petrograd soviet, remember, became the home base of young Trotsky and was shut down in December 1905 in the first wave of post October Manifesto repression. With the idea for a soviet in hand, socialist party leaders then approached Kerensky about securing a location for such an assembly to meet. Kerensky who also wanted to get a handle on things, saw an opportunity to create a line of communication, authority, and exchange between the workers and soldiers who were up in arms, and the Duma leadership who did not know how to talk to them or control them, or even what it would take to get them back under control. Kerensky said later, "The organizers applied to me for suitable premises. I mentioned the matter to Rodzianko, and the thing was arranged." The leaders were not just assigned to place to meet; they were given space inside the Tauride Palace itself, to make sure the line of communication between the soviet and the Duma was literally physically as short as possible.

These leaders then went out in front of the palace and proclaimed to the tens of thousands of workers and soldiers who had by now assembled in front of the building that they were forming an elected Soviet of soldiers, and that everyone was to go out and spread the word that industries, factories, and companies of soldiers were to elect representatives and send them down to the Tauride Palace. When all of these delegates assembled, they were then to consider themselves the legitimate representatives of the people of Petrograd.

Now, by the evening of Monday, February 27th, most people had still either not heard about the Soviet, or were still in the middle of arranging how to hold little elections to pick deligates, most of whom would thus not be ready to assemble until the next day of the earliest, and then looking forward a little bit, the Petrograd Soviet is not going to hit its maximum size for several weeks to come, as every day, new delegates are showing up saying they have just been elected. But even though most people weren’t ready to show up, a self-selected group who were immediately on hand did convene in the early evening. And we’re talking about roughly 50 delegates, and about 200 observers who crammed into a room in the Tauride Palace. But none of these people were working class delegates from factories or soldiers from mutinous companies. They were instead representatives of the existing socialist parties. They were the ones instigating the creation of the Soviet, and they were the ones who had an existing apparatus in place to select and send representatives of their party to the Tauride Palace very quickly. So, this first meeting of the Petrograd Soviet mostly resembled a summit of socialist party leaders. There were SRs and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and Trudoviks. This group of about 50 socialist party leaders then elected from their number an executive committee of eight or nine people, depending on what source you use, who would be free to take decisive action, and, for example, negotiate directly with the leaders of the Duma, who were themselves at this same moment choosing their own provisional executive committee to navigate the crisis.

The Soviet executive committee was effectively a power sharing agreement between the several socialist parties, as each of them received at least two representatives. Nikolay Chkheidze was elected chairman of the executive committee, with Alexander Kerensky, who represented the Trudoviks, elected one of the vice chairmen. And this is where and how Kerensky becomes such an important and influential figure in the February Revolution and the post February Revolutionw period, because he’s going to emerge from this momentous week serving as both a senior officer of the Petrograd Soviet, and being a minister in the Duma’s provisional government. He’s going to be the living bridge between the two institutions that are going to spend most of the next eight months kind of pulling in opposite directions.

Now, the fact that they were going to pull in opposite directions was not planned or expected at the time though, and Kerensky later recalled, "Two different Russia’s settled side-by-side. The Russia of the ruling class who had lost, though they did not realize it yet, and the Russia of labor, marching toward power without suspecting it." Because with the establishment of the Petrograd Soviet, right alongside the provisional government inside the Tauride Palace, is the origin of dual power, which is going to become very important once the main cadre of Bolshevik leaders gets off the train at Finland station in April and start plotting how they can take over the whole dang thing.

But that is still a bit down the road. For right now, Kerensky’s influence is shown this very evening, Monday, February 27th. That night, the leaders of both the Duma and the Soviet confronted an unexpected problem. The ministers of the government — that is, the now effectively deposed government — started presenting themselves one by one or in small nervous groups. Well aware that lynchings of enemies of the people were happening all over Petrograd, these former ministers volunteered to be placed under arrest by the Duma, in the hopes that the Duma would be able to guarantee their physical safety. Kerensky, who is poised to become minister of justice, interceded with the angry crowds inside the palace to not immediately lynch the ministers, but instead to take them into custody and guarantee their safety. He even stuck with this when former Minister of the Interior Protopopov snuck into the Tauride Palace in disguise. When his presence was finally detected, he came very near being killed on the spot, but Kerensky barged through, saved his life, and put him in protective custody. The point here is both that Kerensky believed the revolution needed to maintain something like the rule of law, if only not to risk provoking retaliatory counter-revolution by the senior command of the army, who were clearly ready to pitch Tsar Nicholas overboard, but probably would not stand too long for reports of lawless violence in the capital. But the other point is that Kerensky clearly commanded enough authority and respect that when he started shouting at people don’t lynch Protopopov that people listened.

Now the next day, Tuesday, February 28th, we get to the first large scale meetings of the Petrograd Soviet. Initially, about 600 deputies elected by various industries and military companies started showing up. As the weeks progressed, this number is going to grow to about 3000, with soldiers routinely outnumbering workers, about two to one. So though the assembly would be officially called the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, in terms of who actually commanded a majority in the assembly, it would actually be the Soviet of soldiers and also some workers deputies.

Now, the first session of the Soviet was, like most of the sessions of the Soviet, incredibly chaotic. The first meeting was defined by people simply standing up and making speeches or introducing themselves or reporting what they had seen and heard over the past several days. There was no agenda, there were no rules of order, it was just a bunch of people noisily inhabiting the same space as each other.

Now as this main assembly was inevitably very messy and chaotic, the meetings of the executive committee that had self-selected itself the night before it became the focal point of immediate action. The committee was augmented to take into account all the new arrivals, and two more representatives from each of the major parties were added, and were talking Trudoviks, the popular Socialists, the SR, the Bund, the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks. And though, in the main, the executive committee tended to be Menshevik and SR in outlook, at least for the moment they wanted to make sure that all the socialist parties felt like they had a place and a voice inside the Soviet.

As all of these leaders came together to discuss what to do and how to proceed, there were two overriding concerns in front of them: how to restore order to the capital, and then determine what the Soviet’s place would be inside the post-revolutionary order of things. To take the second of these first, the Menshevik leanings of the Soviet leadership meant they still saw events unfolding according to the old two-stage theory of revolution, that first would come the bourgeois democratic revolution, and then, the working class socialist revolution. According to this formula, what they believed was happening right now was the revolutionary transfer of power from the old absolutism of the medieval tsar to the new democratic order of the bourgeoisie. Since they believed this was not just how things ought to go, but how things must go, it naturally followed that the role of the Soviet, as the assembled representatives of the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, was to support the overthrow of the tsar, and the assumption of power by the Duma.

But the other big thing in front of them was how to effectively get control of the spontaneous revolutionary uprising currently parading through the streets of Petrograd. More than anything, the question was, how do we get all the mutinous soldiers back under something resembling military discipline? On March the First, the provisional executive committee of the Duma attempted to assert command of the soldiers by issuing a public order for all of them to return to their barracks and place themselves back under their officers.

But word immediately bounced back up through the soldiers and workers delegates in the Soviet, saying this is impossible without certain guarantees. I mean, they had, after all just mutinied against their officers, in many cases, killed their officers, and the men were justifiably concerned that if they just returned to their barracks and placed themselves back under the command of those officers, that they would be liable for some pretty severe punishments: execution, imprisonment, exile. It was not at all out of line for them to be concerned that that’s what awaited them back in the barracks. With the Duma’s attempt to get the soldiers back in line a non-starter, the leaders of the Soviet discussed what they could possibly do. And their own concern about reprisals from the officer corps w’re not limited to individual punishment for mutinous disobedience, but also that the officer corps, as a whole, represented probably the strongest potentially counter-revolutionary force in Petrograd, and frankly the whole empire. It would be an impossibly stupid mistake to simply reassert the previous status quo in the army. So on March the first, 1917, the Petrograd Soviet addressed both problems simultaneously by issuing the famous — or infamous, depending on who you talk to — Order Number One.

Now, Order Number One actually contained a whole bunch of orders. It called on all military units to immediately form democratic committees and elect delegates to the Petrograd Soviet. It then said all weapons and firearms in the unit’s possession were to be placed under the control of these committees. And that included all the weapons of the officers, who were to be immediately disarmed. The order said that the unit committees were then to control and issue the weapons at their discretion, but not under any circumstances or weapons to be issued to the officers. The order said very specifically, "Weapons–" and I’m quoting here — "shall by no means be issued to the officers, not even at their insistence." The disarming of the officer Corps was to prevent them from being a threat to the unit specifically, and to the revolution generally. The officers would, by practical necessity, still lead the unit and issue orders, but they would do so standing literally defenseless against the armed men they commanded. Which would make them think twice about what orders they issued.

Order number one, went on to say that if the officers issued orders that contradicted decrees of the Petrograd Soviet, the men were commanded to ignore those orders. There were also further decrees about how and when military discipline would be observed, and generally creating an air of social equality between the men and the officers, even if, while on duty, the men were mostly supposed to obey the commands of their superior officers. But again, unless they contradicted decrees in the Petrograd Soviet.

Now, given what’s to come for the Russian army in 1917 and 1918, there has been a prevailing myth that Order Number One commanded military units to begin electing their own officers, but this is not true. All mention of elections in Order Number One are confined to the topic of sending delegates to the Soviet, not out and out electing their own officers. There was also immediate confusion about who Order Number One was supposed to apply to, whether it was just the Petrograd Garrison or the army as a whole. And the next day, the Soviet had to scramble to clarify that it was only meant to apply to the mutinous Petrograd garrisons, not the army as a whole. But by then, Order Number One was already spreading and taking on a life of its own, whereupon it will get wrapped up in the wider story of the total collapse of discipline and cohesion in the Russian army in 1917.

Order Number One is also wrapped up in the story of the Petrograd Soviet operating on its own, and just completely ignoring the authority of the Duma’s provisional government. This will also become a major issue for the rest of 1917, but it was not consciously the goal of the leaders of the Soviet, who issued Order Number One, and then immediately proceeded to spend the whole rest of March the first and overnight into March the second working out the terms of the Soviet acknowledging, supporting, and defending the political authority of the Duma’s provisional government. Which, as I’ve said, the leaders of the Soviet were eager to do. So if you set Order Number One aside, which has to be understood in the context of getting the mutinous soldiers of Petrograd back under control, the leaders of the Soviet mostly wanted to turn the Soviet into an auxiliary assembly that would act as a direct line to the workers and the soldiers of Petrograd, bring them on board with the plan to support the provisional government, and then ensure the provisional government was well briefed on what they needed to do to not lose the support of the workers and the soldiers.

But though the leaders of the Soviet were eager to come to terms with the leaders of the Duma, there would be terms. And after midnight on what was now technically March 2nd, negotiators from both sides hammered out an eight point plan that both sides could live with. And just to link us back around to what we talked about last week, these negotiations were going on simultaneous to the final round of telegrams Rodzianko was sending to Pskov saying Nicolas appointing a new government was no longer enough, that he had to abdicate the throne. And he was saying that because the leaders of the Duma and the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet had already moved on and were crafting their own vision for the political future of Russia.

So, the eight point agreement that will define this political future for post-revolutionary Russia is not very long, and so I’m just going to tick it off in full.

One, immediate amnesty for all political prisoners including terrorists.

Two, immediate granting of the freedom of speech and association and assembly, and of the right to strike as promised by the tsarist government in 1906, but never fully implemented.

Three, immediate abolition of disabilities and privileges due to nationality, religion, or social origin.

Four, immediate operations for the convocation of a constituent assembly to be elected on a universal, secret, direct and equal ballot.

Five, all police organs to be dissolved and replaced by a militia with elected officers to be supervised by local government.

Six, new elections to organize local self-government on the basis of universal direct, equal, and secret voting.

Seven, military units that have participated in the revolution to keep their weapons and to receive assurances they would not be sent to the front.

And finally, eight, military discipline in the armed forces to be maintained, but off duty soldiers were to enjoy the same rights as civilians.

And what we see here in these eight points is what was believed to be the immediate goal and result of the February Revolution. Anyone who had been previously punished or might be punished for opposing a regime that has now been overthrown would be absolved of them. We’re going to find the full realization of the political liberties that had been allegedly guaranteed after the Revolution of 1905, but which had then been ignored. We’re looking towards the elimination of ethnic and aristocratic privileges inside the Russian Empire. The abolition of police forces controlled by the autocratic regime, and instead law and order being handed over to democratically organized and controlled militia groups. And then finally, democratic participation at all levels of government, both at the national level and at the local level, all of it on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret ballots.

Now none of these points are surprising and all of them represent core parts of the kind of democratic bourgeois revolutions that we’ve seen lots of times so far in the Revolutions podcast. But, before we wrap things up this week, I do want to zero in specifically on point number four, immediate preparations for the convocation of a constituent assembly to be elected on a universal, secret, direct, and equal ballot.

Both the leaders of the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet believed everything they were doing was provisional and temporary. That they were merely stewards, and that it would take the convening of a democratically elected constituent assembly to hammer out a new permanent constitutional order for Russia. The constituent assembly is what they were all going to look forward to to ultimately legitimize everything they were doing here at the end of February and beginning of March.

Now having reached this agreement, the provisional government being organized by the Duma was essentially accepting upon itself full legitimate political authority. And we can connect back up now to the end of last week’s episode, because just after they did all of this, news came back from Pskov that Tsar Nicholas was agreeing to abdicate the throne. And so next week, we will pick things back up with everybody on March the third, 1917, the first day of post February Revolution Russia.

But we’ll get into all of that next week. Before I go this week, however, I do want to remind everybody that we are now just two and a half weeks away from the publication of Hero of Two Worlds, and please, everybody pre-order the book if you haven’t. And if you would like to pre-order a signed copy of the book, please do come to one of our four online virtual events. And just so you know, all of those events did hit their initial max capacity and all the bookstores wrote us back and said, can you please up the max capacity, and we did. So if you weren’t able to get into one before, uh, go check right now, you’ll probably be able to get into one, cause we just did it.

But I’m not actually going to end today plugging my own book Hero of two Worlds, I’m going to end today by plugging another book: Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman. I have been reading Ackerman for like 20 years now, and he has just written a book that quite successfully creates the narrative link between the events of September 11th and the current state of American politics through the lens of national security and the war on terror and all of its adjacent rhetoric and policies. Ackerman is an exceptional journalist who is uniquely positioned to tell this story. And if journalists are in the business of writing the first draft of history, then this is an excellent first draft of history that is going to be used as a building block for many years to come. So do please pick up and read Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman, it comes out on August 10th. I highly recommend it, and I think you should all buy it.

Now you might be asking yourself, why are you plugging Spencer Ackerman’s book, besides it being a really good book? And if you follow me on Twitter, you already know that among other things, Spencer Ackerman is the drummer of a band that we have started, because I did an insane thing where I wrote a 12 song punk rock opera about the French Revolution. This is a real thing that is actually happened. We decided it would be a really good and fun idea to just make some ridiculous music projects and take it out on the road while we both sold our books. Uh, this is something that we’re looking to do in the near future. We’re going to take this out on the road. Hopefully it was going to happen in the fall, but it’s kind of starting to look like maybe fall of 2021 is not a time where we’re going to be able to do a lot of live events because things are getting worse rather than better. So, if you ever want to do find out what it sounds like when Mike Duncan writes 12 punk rock songs about the French Revolution, and you want to hear that live, please do get vaccinated, because right now the whole thing is looking like it’s actually going to get canceled and I’m not able to sit here and triumphantly tell you where we’re going to be in October and November, which I was kind of hoping I would be doing right now, but it kind of looks like that’s not what I’m going to be able to do, and we’re going to have to look ahead to the spring.

But to even do it in the spring, we need everybody to get on board with the program here. I want live events, you want live events, we all want live events, we all want to see what happens when I got up on stage with a guitar and start yelling about the French Revolution. I promise it will be really, really fun when it happens. But until then first buy Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman, then later buy Hero of Two Worlds by Mike Duncan, and then three stay tuned for more information about future live events, and four, stay healthy, stay safe, get vaccinated, and we’ll see you next week.

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And welcome to revolutions

Episode 10.63: Abdication

Last week, we discussed the events of International Women’s Day, which was Thursday, February 23rd, 1917. When the women of Petrograd refuse to sit back and wait any longer to be heard, they were sick of being ignored while their family starved and froze to death. They refused to take orders from their male counterparts, who urge them to not make any waves, and to be patient and bide their time. But their patience was all gone. The incompetence and corruption and myopic cruelty of the tsarist regime had boiled them right over. And so they marched out into the streets, forcing the men to come out with them to demand bread, peace, and the overthrow of the tsar. And this began one of the most fateful weeks in Russian history.

The mass demonstrations, the women kicked off on February 23rd, continued into the weekend. Crowds and demonstrators paraded through the streets of Petrograd, and by Saturday, February 25th, a defacto general strike had ground nearly all non-protest related activity to a halt. Industries shut down and the transportation networks inside the city — that is, railroads and trolley cars and cabs all stopped running. There were probably at any given time 200 to 250,000 people out there in the streets. Their demands had moved decisively beyond mere economic and social relief. They were now overtly political, overtly rebellious, and overtly revolutionary. The cries and banners were all, down with autocracy, down with the war, and specifically down with the German woman.

Now the German woman herself — and we’re talking here of Empress Alexandra — was as disgusted with the people of Petrograd as they were with her. Describing the protest, she said, "this is a hooligan movement. Young people run and shout that there is no bread simply to create excitement, along with workers who prevent others from working. If the weather was very cold, they would probably all stay home."

Now she probably wasn’t wrong about that last bit. But to believe that all of this was simply the result of unscrupulous agitators making things up, that it was just people running around and shouting "no bread" simply to create excitement as if there wasn’t literally no bread, well, that just speaks to her insanely distorted view from the imperial bubble, a bubble that is just days away from being shattered forever.

Alexandra’s husband was 500 miles away at army headquarters, having departed the night before all hell really started breaking loose. Now, he was not at all concerned about the first reports of the protests, and in his diaries and correspondence during these days, he makes as much mention of playing dominoes as the crisis erupting in the capital. Now, in Nicholas’s teeny tiny defense, ever so teeny tiny defense, he was being aggressively misled about the situation by the people he trusted most. Most especially Minister of the Interior Protopopov, who spent these days reassuring the tsar over and over again that the strikes were nothing to worry about, nothing that couldn’t be handled, and nothing they hadn’t seen before. This really isn’t much of a defense though, because Nicholas had been warned repeatedly that Protopopov was a huge liability, and responsibility for the fact that he was still minister of the interior and in a position to so thoroughly mislead the tsar ultimately rests with the tsar himself. Nicholas was thus somewhat taken aback on the evening of Saturday, February 25th, to receive a telegram signed by all his ministers — except Protopopov, of course — saying, sire, we would be perfectly willing to resign en masse in favor of a government in order to end the crisis in Petrograd. Still blind to the enormity of the events engulfing him, Nicholas was like, what crisis in Petrograd? Nicholas rejected the idea out of hand, and instead sent a directive to General Kolobov, the guy those are had recently elevated to the position of military governor of Petrograd. This order said, suppress the disorders in the capital at once. He wrote somewhat peevishly, "I order that the disorders in the capital, intolerable during these difficult times of war with Germany and Austria, be ended tomorrow."

Now, Nicholas had been warned many times, by many people that the troops in Petrograd were probably not going to follow orders if they had to choose between obeying the tsar and murdering a bunch of people in the streets. But as with Protopopov, Nicholas continued to listen to his heart, rather than all the brains that were surrounding him. And he knew in his heart that the army was with him.

At that moment, the Petrograd garrison who Nicholas believed would surely quell the unrest by tomorrow night, numbered about 160,000. This was more than enough in the tsar’s estimation. But as we discussed a few episodes back, morale and discipline in the Russian army over the winter of 1916-1917 was cracking up, and the Petrograd garrison was cracking harder than anyone. Most of them were deeply unhappy to be in the army at all. They resented their conscription. The majority were in fact raw recruits who were only supposed to be in Petrograd for a few weeks to get basic training before being shipped off to the front in the spring. They were hardly soldiers at all. Mostly they were peasants who had recently been shoved into a uniform and handed a gun. They were quite the motley concoction of inexperience, lack of discipline and seething anger. They were also crammed into barracks that were only meant to hold 20,000 soldiers and which now bulged with an impossibly uncomfortable 160,000 soldiers. To say that they sympathized with the protesters out in the street would be a massive understatement.

General Khabalov, for his part, was aware the men were not exactly reliable, but he followed the tsar’s orders, and on the morning of Sunday, February 20, signs went up all over the city saying that meetings, assemblies, demonstrations, marches, and strikes were strictly forbidden. Violation of this order would result in being shot on sight by soldiers. There was also signs that said the following day, everybody was expected to go back to work, and any worker not found on the job would be conscripted into the army and sent to the front lines at once. Then, army regiment, police squads, and companies of cossacks fanned out to occupy the city. Now, the people of Petrograd just straight up ignored these orders, they were riding high and they felt that momentum was with them. And so, on this Sunday, they came out. And asked the two sides met out in the streets, there were skirmishes and gunshots, a few lobbed grenades, and people wounded and killed on both sides. The most dramatic incident was when an angry officer became enraged when his raw recruits refused to fire into a crowd, and he started personally blasting away indiscriminately with a rifle until his men followed his lead, and they all killed about 50 people. Word of this incident outraged public opinion, including many soldiers, who started resolving individually and then collectively to prevent any further use of violence against the people of Petrograd.

Back at army headquarters, the tsar received a few updates on what was happening in the city, including an urgent telegram from chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko. His telegram read: "Serious situation. In the capital, anarchy. Government paralyzed. Transport of food and fuel completely disorganized. Public disaffection growing. On the streets, chaotic shooting. Army units fired on each other. It is essential at once to entrust a person enjoying the country’s confidence with the formation of a new government. There should be no delay. All delay is death."

Nicholas read this telegram with disbelief, and became convinced the political opposition was exaggerating to manipulate him into making concessions he didn’t really have to make. And he remarked to the army chief of staff, "that fat Rodzianko has sent me some nonsense, which I shall not even bother to answer."

But that wasn’t really true. He did answer the telegram. He sent an order back to Petrograd dissolving the Duma until April. This was an order the leaders of the Duma would wake up to on the morning of Monday, February 27th, 1917.

Monday, February 27th, 1917 is the second capital B capital D big Day of the February Revolution. Now, the first was obviously International women’s Day, when the women broke open the flood gates of popular unrest. Well, today, events hinge on the soldiers in Petrograd. And those soldiers will turn the tide of Russian history by not only refusing to suppress the disorder in the capital, but by going into mutiny, and by marching out into the streets to join the revolution already in progress. Many of the soldiers stayed up all night in their barracks after the events of Sunday, and by morning, at least one regiment had decided that come the dawn, they were quitting the garrison and marching out into the streets. And when they did this, after killing one of their officers, about a half dozen other regiments, quickly caught mutiny fever and joined them. They all headed first for the working class districts, where they linked up with the already rebellious population. And they started erecting barricades and making plans to seize key points in the city, and also gather as many guns and rifles as they could find and as much ammunition as they could carry.

By noon, large crowds were moving towards the center of the city, aided and protected by the soldiers. And there are now about 25,000 or so in active, mutinous rebellion. They looted and ransacked various government buildings, including the ministry of the interior, and the headquarters of the Okhrana. They forced their way into the Peter and Paul Fortress, taking possession of the cache of weapons and the artillery batteries inside the fortress, and freeing any prisoners they found. Many of those prisoners were the detainees who had been rounded up back in January, the leaders of the Workers Group, who Protopopov had arrested thinking he was going to prevent the linkage between the Duma opposition and the agitators in the streets. Those guys immediately returned to the working class districts and started getting ready to form the Petrograd Soviet.

At about 1:30 in the afternoon, a large crowd of people and soldiers arrived at the Tauride Palace, where the Duma was meeting, singing La Marseillaise. Their general message to the Duma was, we support you. We’re just here to ask her instructions about what to do. Without anyone able to stop them, they all just kind of went into the palace and suddenly everything was chaos: people were just wandering the halls going in and out of rooms, yelling and shouting, it was pretty chaotic in there. It kind of made it difficult for the leaders of the Duma to do their job, but they didn’t even know what their job was. They had been in a bind all morning. The tsar had handed down this order for them to disperse, and whether they liked it or not, it was perfectly within the tsar’s rights to order them to disperse. But with the city entering its fifth day of non-stop unrest, and now the army going over to the people, they not only had the means to defy the tsar’s authority, but maybe a responsibility. If they dissolved themselves now in the middle of all this, there would be no leadership in Petrograd to speak of. What would happen then?

Rodzianko. Milyukov, and the other Duma leaders never wanted to lead a popular revolution against the tsar. They didn’t want to go into revolt against Nicholas. And even at this late hour, they hesitated. Should they take control? Should they lead a revolution?

But a conservative delegate named Vasili Shulgin told Rodzianko he had no choice. Shulgin said, "take the power. If you don’t, others will." And by that, he meant socialists and anarchists and SRs. This was almost as horrible a thought as Nicholas remaining on the throne in perpetuity.

So around 3:00 PM, the Duma self-selected an executive committee tasked first and foremost with restoring order in Petrograd, and imposing discipline on the army. Still clinging to the formalities of the law, they did not technically organize themselves as an executive committee of the Duma, but were merely an unofficial committee of Duma members acting in a quasi-private capacity. They dubbed themselves, the Provisional Committee of Duma Members for the Restoration of Order in the Capital and the Establishment of Relations with Individuals and Institutions. Rodzianko was the chairman of this committee, but the two guys who are going to emerge as the most forcefully energetic and important members will be Pavel Milyukov and Alexander Kerensky.

And next week, we will come back to focus in more detail on what’s going on at the Tauride Palace on this same day, at this same moment, because this is when the Petrograd Soviet gets going. And the relationship between the Soviet and the provisional government is massively important, but we’re going to stick a pin in that until next week, because we do have to get rid of the tsar, it’s time for him to go, and there’s no time to lose.

So by sunset on this second big day of the February Revolution, Petrograd has broken free of all heretofor existing political order, and passed into the hands of a spontaneous union of opposition political leaders, mutinous soldiers, who I should now mention are numbering more than 60,000, and the people of Petrograd. 500 miles away at army headquarters, Nicholas finally started getting snippets of reality from people he trusted, people he could not simply hand wave away. General Khabalov reported he had lost control of the city, and now personally commanded no more than 1500 men inside the Winter Palace.

Then came the telegram that truly snapped the tsar to attention. From the palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Alexandra wrote her husband, "concessions inevitable. Street fighting continues. Many units gone over to the enemy. Alex."

Nicholas read this, and ordered his train to be prepared to leave as soon as possible.

At about five o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, February 28th, the tsar’s train got rolling. But they took a long and circuitous route back to the capital, so as not to disrupt the trains running on the direct line from Petrograd to the front. While en route, they received nothing but more bad news. The naval base at Kronstadt had mutinied and joined the rebellion. The soldiers who had taken possession of the artillery at the Peter and Paul Fortress had pointed it at the Winter Palace, and told General Khabalov and his men they had twenty minutes to vacate the premises or they would open fire. The last remnant of tsarist control then simply dissolved out into the street. A red flag was soon waving over the Winter Palace.

Now it’s not clear how differently things would have gone had Nicholas been there in person. What would have happened had he not departed on February 22nd? What would have happened if he had rushed straight back to Petrograd? It’s entirely possible his personal presence would have changed things. It’s also possible that being there in person would not have amounted to a hill of beans. But we’ll never know, because even now, with his presence so desperately called for, he’s taking this long route home.

And he never did make it home.

At about one o’clock in the morning on what was now technically Wednesday, March the first, the Imperial train came to a halt about 150 miles southeast of Petrograd. An officer climbed on board the train to save that up ahead mutinous soldiers had set up a battery of artillery and fortified machine gun positions, and they were not going to allow the train to pass. So the tsar ordered the train to back up and go instead to Pskov, one of the major regional headquarters of the northern armies of Russia. As it turns out, Nicolas had already set foot in Petrograd as the tsar of Russia for the last time.

While the imperial train retreated towards Pskov, events in the capital continued to seal the tsar’s fate. All through Wednesday, March the first, formerly loyal military units gave up on Nicholas. And we’re talking here not about the rank and file of the Petrograd garrison, but inner circle imperial guard units, regiments that had protected the Romanov family for centuries. They made demonstrative pilgrimages down to the Tauride Palace to pledge their loyalty to the executive committee of the Duma, the most significant of these being the unit of marines who served on and guarded the imperial yacht, where the imperial family had spent so much of their time. And for these Marines, this was not an abstract question. They knew Nicholas and Alexandra and their children personally. And they were led by a member of the Romanov family, Grand Duke Kirill, who came down and pledged his support for the Duma’s provisional government. None of these people were radicals or democrats or socialists, but like many conservative members of the aristocracy and in the progressive block, they believed that the monarchy had to be saved from the monarchs.

So all these reports were waiting for the emperor when his train finally pulled into Pskov around seven or eight in the evening on March the first. But even now he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making even the slightest concession. And given all that we’ve talked about over the past few episodes about the disastrously unqualified and incompetent people he and his wife had been appointing to key positions in the government, just listen to the reason Nicholas gives for not wanting to hand power over to a government picked by the Duma. And I am quoting now from an eye witness who was there.

"The tsar with remarkable lucidity ran through the opinions of all those who could in the near future administer Russia in the capacity of ministers responsible to the legislative chambers, and expressed the conviction that the civic activists who would undoubtedly form the first cabinet had no administrative experience, and having been entrusted with the burdens of authority would prove unable to cope with their task."

Now, this is absolutely, gobsmackingly insane stuff to be coming out of the tsar’s mouth, at least given all that we know about everything him and his wife have been up to for the last couple of years. Like, literally saying, oh, we can’t have the Duma appointing the government. They might pick people who can’t do the job. What do you think has been going on for the last like three years? Why do you think you’re in this mess!? All you do is appoint people who can’t do the job! That’s why the job didn’t get done!

I’m so ready to be done with this guy.

Now, Nicholas did start to get turned around a little bit, because he listened to that great font of wisdom, Alexandra. Now, she told Nicholas the time had probably come to make concessions, but to not feel bound by them in any way. That just as had happened with the October Manifesto, Nicholas should make promises, get the situation under control, and then feel absolutely free to wind everything back at a later date and just ignore everything in the future. She told her husband, "if you are compelled to make concessions, then you are under no condition obliged to fulfill them because they have been extracted in an unworthy manner."

So even here, they’re not actually going to concede anything, they’re just going to play act at concessions so they don’t get overthrown. I mean, can you imagine these two being worried that if the government passes into somebody else’s hands, that things won’t be as well run anymore?

So, on the evening of March 1st, Nicholas finally gave in and transmitted a message to Petrograd saying he was ready to accept a government appointed by the Duma. But as we have seen, oh, about a hundred times on the Revolutions podcast, concessions that might have worked a few months ago, a few weeks ago, hell, in this case, a few days ago, were not now enough. The capital wasn’t going to be satisfied by news that there would be a new government. Nicholas had already allowed events to move well beyond that. Rodzianko immediately sent back a telegram:

"His majesty is unable to realize what is happening in the capital. A terrible revolution has broken out. Hatred of the empress has reached a fever pitch. To prevent bloodshed I have been forced to arrest all the ministers. Don’t send any more troops, I am hanging by a thread myself. Power slipping from my hands. The measures you propose are too late. The time for them is gone. There is no return."

The minimum program of appointing a responsible government was no longer enough.

The tsar went to bed, but he did not get much sleep. And overnight, Rodzianko exchanged a series of telegrams with a general who was sitting at Nicholas’s right hand who happened to be sympathetic to the opposition. Rodzianko made it plain that the only option on the table right now was the tsar abdicating, and anything less would mean the complete collapse of the empire into chaos, which meant the industry would shut down, military discipline would snap completely, and they would probably lose the war in a matter of months, Rodzianko expressed that the expectation was now for Nicholas to abdicate in favor of his son, with the tsar’s younger brother Mikael serving as regent. These exchanges were then typed up and forwarded to the army chief of staff, who read them with horror, but also, with the realization that it was all probably true.

And so, just as the rank and file had stepped into the revolution on Monday with their giant mutiny, and really helped transform it into a revolution, the senior officers now decided it was their turn to step up. And the best way to prevent this from falling into a full blown social revolution and creating upheavals that would destroy the army and probably lose the war, that they needed to sacrifice Nicholas. Lose the monarch to save the monarchy, lose the emperor to save the empire. So the chief of staff canvassed for notes to this effect from all senior generals and admirals in the Russian military, who dutifully sent back, telegram signed under their name, addressed to the tsar, saying sire, we need you to abdicate in favor of your son. It’s the only option left.

So after breakfast on Thursday, March the second 1917, the tsar was presented with all these telegrams in his imperial rail car. After reading them, he went white faced and silent, as the reality of his situation finally, truly dawned on him. And even if all the carping and complaining and manipulations of ambitious and greedy and disingenuous and murderous and traitorous politics would never persuade the tsar to give up his divinely appointed throne, this pile of telegrams from his generals and his admirals, their unanimous agreement that he had to abdicate, and if he didn’t, it would mean losing the war and the destruction of the Russian empire, that convinced him. He got up and he went to the window, and he stood silently for a moment. And then he turned around and said, "I have decided that I shall give up the throne in favor of my son, Alexei."

At three o’clock in the afternoon on March the second, an abdication declaration to this effect was drawn up and Nicholas signed it. But then they were told that two representatives of the Duma were on their way. One was Alexander Guchkov, one of the main organizers of the progressive bloc, and the other was that conservative monarchist I just mentioned, Vasili Shulgin. Both were coming to personally witness the abdication and then carry it back to Petrograd, so that there would be no disputing its legitimacy, especially as Shulgin would be able to vouch for its authenticity as a well-known conservative monarchist, not some frothing democratic radical. But as these two would not arrive for several hours, the tsar and his aides sat around and waited. As they did, Nicholas began to reconsider what he was doing. Not the abdication, but whether or not he could, or should, pass the throne to twelve-year-old Alexei. His poor hemophiliac son was constantly one accident away from painful death. He was so young, and so fragile. And now Nicolas considered what it meant to place the almost intolerably complicated burden of ruling the Russian empire on his shoulders, a burden which had just crushed Nicholas himself.

The family doctor was on board the train and Nicholas chatted with him about the prospects of his son’s health, and the doctor said, there’s no cure for hemophilia and your son will always be in mortal danger. Then the doctor said, please also consider that your abdication will almost certainly mean you and Alexandra will have to go into exile, and there’s absolutely no way that anybody is going to let you take young Alexei with you. He will be tsar. He will remain in Russia. Now, sure, he’ll be left in the care of Mikhail and other minders, but also by people who will not love him and care for him the way you do. The family had, after all kept the hemophilia well-hidden; most people didn’t even know the tsarevitch was sick. Nicholas considered all this and decided he could not bear this as a parent. Leaving his poor son behind to probably die miserably without being able to be there to comfort him? It was intolerable. So by the time Guchkov and Shulgin arrived at the train station at Pskov around 9 or 10 o’clock that night, they walked into the Imperial train car and Nicholas said, "I have decided to abdicate, but I’ve changed my mind a little bit. I’m not going to abdicate in favor of my son, I am going to remove him from the line of succession and instead hand power directly to my brother Mikhail. Neither Guchkov nor Shulgin liked this idea. Both of them had been kind of hopeful that an innocent and angelic looking twelve-year-old tsar would help calm temperatures, maybe turn the people of Russia back into loving and supporting their tsar, rather than hating and despising him. But Nicholas would not be moved.

So they redrafted the order of abdication. Nicholas would now hand power directly to Grand Duke Mikhail. They set the timestamp on this application to 3:00 PM, so that it did not look like Nicholas was only signing this after the arrival of the two Duma delegates, that he had done everything of his own free will before they arrived. He then signed two further orders, one appointing Prince Lvov the leader of the Zemstvo Congress as the premiere of a new ministry to be chosen by the Duma, and another appointing Grand Duke Nicholas commander in chief of all the armed forces of Russia. Both of these orders were dated 2:00 PM, because technically by the time he signed them, Nicholas Romanov was no longer the tsar of Russia.

His final letter of abdication was addressed not to the Duma or to the people of Russia, but to the chief of staff of the Imperial army. It said, "in these decisive days in the life of Russia, we have thought it a duty of conscience to facilitate for our people close union and consolidation of all national forces for the speedy attainment of victory. And, in agreement with the Imperial Duma, we have thought it good to abdicate from the throne of the Russian state, and to lay down the supreme power. In the name of our dearly loved country, we call on all faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfill their sacred duty to him by obedience to the tsar, at a heavy moment of national trials. To help him, together with the representatives of the people, to bring the Russian state on the road of victory, prosperity, and glory. May the Lord God help Russia."

And with that, Nicholas Romanov cease to be tsar.

This abdication has been a long time coming for dear Nikki. It didn’t have to be this way. Uh, it’s about a million miles from inevitable. And I’m reminded of the old parable of the devout Christian who was caught in a flood. The news report recommended evacuation, but he said, God will save me. As the waters rose, a neighbor offered to drive him to safety. The man said, no, God will save me. When the flood drove the man to his roof, a helicopter came by and dropped a ladder, but the man shouted, God will save me. And then he drowned. When he got to heaven, he asked God,w? And an exasperated, God said, what are you talking about, I sent an evacuation order, a driver and a helicopter. That is the fate of Nicholas in a nutshell. He had been told a hundred different ways from a hundred different angles the simple things he needed to do to keep his crown, to keep his family intact, to keep the empire going, to win the war. And he chose to do none of them. He lacked imagination, he lacked vision, and he had ultimately led his empire to the brink of destruction. It was time for him to go.

In his personal diary that night he recorded an entry that was far less magnanimous and patriotic than what he wrote in his abdication letter. He wrote, "For the sake of Russia and to keep the armies in the field, I decided to take this step. Left Pskov at one in the morning. All around me, I see treason, cowardice, and defeat." And one can only say to Nicholas: yes. And it’s mostly your fault.

So that’s it for Nicholas. That’s it for dear Nikki, we are now going to leave him behind. Russia is going to move on without him. But before we go this week, I want to say that we are three weeks away from the publication of Hero of Two Worlds, and I want to tell everybody that seats are going fast for the four pub events that I will be doing: August 20 with Jamelle Bouie, August 23rd with Ben Rhodes, August 24th with Alexis Coe, and August 31st with Patrick Wyman. I’m looking forward to each of those, each for their own reason, and so I hope to see you there, and I hope everyone has a good time when you come. So again, three weeks left until Hero of Two Worlds publishes, if you haven’t, pre-ordered the book, please pre-order the book, if you have pre-ordered the book, thank you very much for pre-ordering the book. Uh, go out to your local independent bookseller and get it, and if you don’t, pre-order it by all means, just go on August 24th and buy it in person, that’ll be cool too. So, until then, I’ll see you next week for the beginning of the power struggle between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government.

This week’s episode is brought to you by hero of two worlds. The Marquis de Lafayette in the age of revolution, we are officially four weeks from pub date. Pub date is August 24th, 2021. And now it’s time to announce some good fun stuff. Like for example, book events. Now all book events are still online these days, so you don’t have to be anywhere in particular to see me.

You just have to log in and come see me. If you want to be able to see me in person at some point in the future. Let me just go ahead and slip in the obvious PSA and say, go get vaccinated. I did it. Everyone should do it. Please get vaccinated so we can have in-person events again. Thank you. Now, if you have attended online book events, you know, that it has tended to work better when two people are in conversation with each other, rather than having just one person deliver some talking head.

So I am very excited to reveal the following events with the following conversation partners. On Friday, August 20th, I will be with politics and prose with every historians. Favorite New York times columnist Jamelle Bouie Bouie is a longtime friend of the podcast, and we’re really looking forward to doing our first official event together.

So that again, August 20, me and Jamila. Then on Monday, August 23rd, I will be with Midtown scholar along with former Obama white house staffer. Ben Rhodes, Ben Rhodes is also a long-time fan and supporter from the history of Rome days and has his own book out called after the fall. So again, August 23rd, me and Ben rose.

Then on pub date itself, Tuesday, August 24. I am very excited to be at the strand with the enormously talented writer and historian, Alexis co who among other things is the most recent biographer of George Washington. And we are both very much looking forward to talking all things, Washington and Lafayette, and then last, but certainly not least Patrick Wyman.

And I will be getting together with Harvard bookstore on Tuesday, August 31st. If you enjoyed our performance. And we both certainly did well. We’ll be doing the same thing in reverse. So that again, Jamelle Bouie, August 20, Ben Rhodes, August 23rd, Alexis co August 24th and Patrick Wyman August 31st now onto the nitty gritty terms and conditions of all this first space is limited.

There is a cap on how many people can come to these things. So please do sign up quickly. Second, the events are going to be ticketed. These are ticketed. So, what does that mean? It means that when you register for the event, you will be purchasing a signed copy of the book that will then be mailed to your house.

So that’s the basic deal. Buy a ticket for the event. You get a signed copy of the book. Now, of course, under normal circumstances, you would just come to a live event at a bookstore and get your book signed. But we can’t do book signings right now. So again, please go get vaccinated so we can have live events.

Thank you. Now. I know what you’re saying. How are there going to be signed books? How are they going to get to you? Well, I signed like 2000 title pages over about a week, a couple months ago. Then I boxed up all those signed title pages and mailed them to the printer who then inserted them into a special run of the day.

So these are not simply signed book plates or anything that we just stick inside of a signed copy of the book. It’s a signed copy of the book. That page has been inserted and bound along with everything else. It was actually quite a bit of work, but I think it was all worth it. So space is limited for these events.

The number of signed copies is limited. So if you want to get one of these, how do you. Well, first of all, bad news for my international fans. Uh, and since I was just among you over in France, I am cognizant that this isn’t exactly fair, but these four bookstores aren’t shipping internet. So, if you sign up for this, you got to have a friend or someone in the United States to ship the book, too.

I do have a representative in the UK working on some publicity stuff, and hopefully we can get some events in Europe, at least. But for now you do need a us shipping address. Uh, sorry about that. But the call to action here is that I’ve put some links in the show notes that will tell you how to register for any of the events, which are.

August 20 politics and prose with Jamelle Bouie, August 23rd, Midtown scholar with Ben Rhodes, August 24th with the strand and Alexis co and then August 31st with Patrick Weiman at the Harvard bookstore. But in case you are just sitting there with pen in hand, the website for all of this is B, B I T dot L Y slash Lafayette.

Book. That again is B I T dot L Y slash Lafayette. Okay. So I’m super excited about all these events. I think they’re going to be very, very, very, very, very, very fun. Uh, you won’t want to miss it. You won’t wanna miss a chance to get a signed copy. So do please come out. I will see you there. And until then on with the show,

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.62: International Women’s Day

Today we move beyond the dangerous but still solid ground Nicholas and Alexandra had been walking along for the past several months, the past several years, the past several decades. They had been warned repeatedly they walked towards an abyss, warned repeatedly they stood on a precipice, but those warnings had not been heeded. When the tsar boarded a train and headed back to army headquarters on February 22nd, 1917, he left solid ground behind forever. That train carried him right over the edge into the fall of revolution, and any further attempt to twist, turn, or maneuver now resulted in mere futile spinning in the face of gravity. He was on a straight line to the rocks below.

In Nicholas’s ever so teeny tiny defense, we ended last week by discussing that a prevailing belief had set in among nearly all sides in the ongoing political struggle — disaffected aristocrats, high ranking, military officers, bourgeois businessmen, Duma delegates, working class organizers and revolutionaries of all stripes, that Minister of the Interior Protopopov had successfully defused the political bomb that looked set to explode on February 14th, 1917. By arresting all the leaders of the Workers Group, the police believed they had severed the link between popular protesters in the streets and the leaders of the progressive block in the Duma. And with those progressive block leaders already incredibly hesitant and nervous about turning to the streets for help, the moment came and went, and nobody took decisive action. Among the rest of the working class political organizers not targeted in the sweep — among them, revolutionary Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs — the word went round to lay low, husband their resources, and prepare for May Day. That would be the next best time to strike.

But obviously we know that there was no May Revolution of 1917; it’s the February Revolution of 1970. But, we’ve already taken events to February 22nd, so, there’s not much time left to stage a revolution, especially as all the leaders seem to be pulling back, not driving forward. So what happened? Well, two things happened: mother nature happened, and the women of Russia happened.

They combined on February 23rd, 1917, the morning after the tsar left Petrograd, to launch the February Revolution of 1917.

Now to set up how and why the women of Russia, and in particular, the women of Petrograd, managed to precipitate the fall of the 300 year old Romanov dynasty and bring about the collapse of the tsarist regime, we need to back up a bit, and trace the development of the women’s rights movement in Russia. And in particular, the relationship between liberal democratic feminists coming out of the more bourgeois classes, and their sisters inside the working classes, who were sometimes allies, sometimes opponents, but who would come together on February 23rd to mark International Women’s Day together, and in so doing, change world history forever.

So to trace these threads, let’s go all the way back to nearly the beginning of our series, when we started talking about the origins of the counter-cultural revolutionary underground in the 1860s. This is back in the days of the Nihilists, right, those hippie beatniks, who among many things were hoping to break down all gender norms. They cohabitated with each other on an equal basis, even outside of marriage. So right from the start, the Russian revolutionary character was laced, at least in the abstract, with the idea that gender equality was among the things any revolution worth its name would achieve. This remained true all through the first great revolutionary epoch from the mid 1860s, up to the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881. And you’ll remember when we discussed what this first generation got up to — for example, Going to the People — there were at least as many women as men involved in all of this, especially as one of the main components of going to the people was educating the peasants. And as I talked about, when I introduced Krupskaya, she was probably first radicalized as a young girl by an idealistic revolutionary teacher with connections to People’s Will. That young teacher wasn’t herself more than 18 years old, and she wound up arrested and completely disappeared from history. Then, after the Going to the People failed, and Peoples’ Will turn to terrorism among their heroes were Vera Zasulich, and then when they finally got the tsar in 1881, a couple of women were in the inner circle of that plot, one of them Vera Figner, the other Anna Yakimova and if you’re looking for a dynamite book, read Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Vera Figner, or the defiant life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution by Lynn Ann Hartnett.

But despite all this, many of the women active in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary underground were acutely aware that despite the outwardly progressive politics of their male comrades in talking up equally rights, when it came to meetings, priorities, and leadership, the men all still tended to dominate, and they expected a certain degree of subservience from their female comrades. Katerine Breshkovskaya, the Babushka of Revolution, later recalled that at meetings back in the old days, she and her revolutionary sisters were of course allowed to be full members and attend meetings, and they were expected to participate in all party activities, but it was super rare for women to actually get up and speak their minds on an equal basis at those meetings, and that when she herself dared to do so, she could feel the uncomfortable shifting of her male comrades.

Now we know that this first wave of revolutionary activity was more or less crushed after the assassination of the tsar in 1881. But despite the hyper reactionary, hyper anti-revolutionary tenor of the 1880s and 1890s, there were actually still plenty of progressive social reforms that accompanied the regime’s attempt to modernize, and keep up with their neighbors to the west. Among these reforms was a great push to increase access to education. This was from basic primary education and literacy programs at the village level, all the way up to expanding advanced university programs in the major cities of the Russian empire. Women were not shut out of this expanded world of education, and an entire generation of young women now advanced through what we would today consider high school. Now the universities were still almost exclusively male, though by now we are starting to hit the first round of trailblazing women who pushed for admittance into the universities and then attain degrees. They were still, however, very much the exception rather than the rule. But even after hitting a ceiling imposed on them by their acutely misogynistic and patriarchal society, these women took the education they received from the state and used it as the foundation to continue on with their own self-education.

And that brings us into contact with a group we have not yet talked about in this series, and that is progressive liberal feminists in pre-revolutionary Russia. And most of what I’m about to discuss comes mainly from a great book by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild called Equality and Revolution, which discusses the role of Russian feminists and suffragists in the tumultuous milieu of early 20th century Russia. These women form the Russian chapter of the wider international women’s rights movement unfolding throughout the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. And they were aiming for the same basic goals, of equal rights, political and legal equality, the right to vote, run for office and act as free and autonomous individuals.

In Russia, the leaders of the feminist movement typically drew from the ranks of the middle and upper classes, who received a good education and lived in comfortable material circumstances, and who found themselves justifiably dissatisfied with their second class citizenship. These women could travel, acquire foreign books and periodicals, and they eagerly joined, supported and contributed to the broader international women’s rights movement.

Now, the thing that makes Russian feminism somewhat different from their western counterparts was the state of political freedom in Russia before the revolution of 1905, which is to say, there wasn’t any. So while, say, British and American and French feminists struggled inside a political system that already mostly allowed for broad-based universal male suffrage, the Russian women struggled inside a system that had no broad-based universal suffrage whatsoever. And this was of great tactical advantage to the Russian feminists, because their calls for the right to vote entered into harmony with their male counterparts who were also trying to get the right to vote. Which is to say, that in the west women were having to fight, to convince men who already had the right to vote, to extend it to women. Whereas in Russia, women were pitching themselves to men who also did not have the right to vote, and thus the whole movement for democracy and universal suffrage in Russia came to embrace the call that universal meant everyone without distinction of sex. So men and women were standing shoulder to shoulder demanding voting rights. And both sides found it tactically advantageous in their struggle against tsarist absolutism. Though, it should come as no surprise, that the women were among the first to be told, well, not yet, we must wait, let set your demands aside, when the revolution came.

And this is basically how the Revolution of 1905, went for them. As the revolutionary energy grew, and the union of liberation movement got going, women’s rights organization supported the broad coalition of all anti autocratic factions. This included a group called the Mutual Philanthropic Society, as well as new organizations like the Women’s Equal Rights Union. But as the revolution of 1905 exploded, women struggled to keep their goals above water, and plenty of men out there believed pursuing women’s equality would be counterproductive, and turn off undecided elements of society. Conservative liberals tended to see feminists as way too radical, making unrealistic demands for gender equality that would threaten the whole democratic movement. The women argued that it wasn’t very democratic if half of the population could not vote, but that didn’t get them very far.

While they endured being called too radical by those conservatives, they were also accused of being too conservative by the socialists. The socialists did not much like these feminists coming out of the bourgeois circles, who were focused too narrowly on winning legal equality and the right to vote. They believe that gender based organizing and focused on gendered issues would be a distraction from the real class conflict.

Vera Zasulich, by this point a Menshevik, called these women’s rights groups, quote, unnecessary, if not harmful, because in her opinion, everything worth achieving for women had to be achieved along with the socialist revolution, and that these liberal bourgeois feminists would ultimately hinder that larger project. Now, slightly more nuanced politics came from several other socialist women, the most famous and outspoken of them being Alexandra Kollontai, who was until World War I allied with the Mensheviks, and then after that became a very prominent Bolshevik. She believed it was vital to both head off the ultimate social and economic conservatism of the bourgeois feminists, but also, to organize working class women as women, and speak to the issues that affected them as women. That recognizing the primacy of the class struggle did not mean being blind to the special ways women were oppressed. And they believed that tactically, it made sense to reach out to them as fellow women, even if they didn’t quite embrace the class struggle as fellow workers.

When the October Manifesto of 1905 came around, it was a very bittersweet moment for women’s rights activists of all stripes, as it achieved so many of their liberation dreams, but made absolutely no mention of women, their rights, the right to vote, or to run for office. And they were now in fact dangerously close to the predicament of their sisters in the west, where the men folk gain the right to vote and suddenly did not care much about supporting the women folk. This definitely played out in the first and second Dumas. The feminists went in with high hopes as the Kadet Congress that hammered out their platform heading into the first Duma had voted narrowly to include a demand for gender equality. But unfortunately, Pavel Milyukov — who ran the first Duma from the tea room — was skeptical of women’s rights at that moment, and believed the party had much bigger fish to fry. Women’s rights was certainly not a hill he planned to defend. The group that wound up doing the most to aggressively bring up the issue of women’s rights in the Duma were the Trudoviks, who put forward motions to support women’s rights, even as they landed on ears deafened by allegedly more important concerns.

Now eventually, the feminist groups along with their Trudovik allies lobbied hard enough that they got the Duma to create a commission to study women’s equal rights, but then the first Duma was shuttered before the commission could even meet. Now the first major victory for feminism inside the Russian empire actually occurred over in Finland. Now, as I’ve noted a couple times, Finland enjoyed a special position inside the Russian empire. Now, Tsar Nicholas was Tsar Nicholas, but in controlling Finland, he did so as the Grand Duke of Finland. On July 7th, 1906, as Grand Duke of Finland, Nicholas signed off on a law giving women the right to vote and run for office, which was the first time both of those had been achieved in the same country. New Zealand has kind of a claim to fame for being among the first to grant women the right to vote, but they still could not stand for office, so this is a distinction that goes to the Finns. And the reason Finland got to earn this distinction is that the struggle for women’s rights got tied up in the national struggle for Finnish autonomy from Russian dominance, and for them, the Revolution of 1905 was also about national liberation, and so a broad coalition of nationalists and liberals and socialists all tended to see Finnish women as allies in that struggle.

Now, with this victory in Finland and with events in Russia seeming to constantly move in the direction of more democracy, it seemed like brighter things were ahead for the women of Russia. But instead, July 1906 turned out to be the high watermark. The second Duma then came along and was even less enthusiastic about pushing women’s issues, and then it too was dissolved. And then along came Stolypin’s coup, and the momentum for democracy just drained out of the Russian empire. Anyone who was committed to any kind of progressive social reform or change or revolution saw their fortunes plummet between 1907 and 1912.

But there were a few highlights sprinkled in there. In December, 1908, there was a Russian Women’s Congress in St. Peterburg, and by now, Pavel Milyukov said that he had come to see the error of his ways. He sent a telegram welcoming the Congress to St. Petersburg expressing his profound conviction in the need to establish women’s political and civic equality. And then he later spoke at a reception of attendees and apologized for underestimating the problem of equal political rights for women.

But this All Women’s Congress also triggered a walkout of some of the more working class women leaders as the Congress adopted a platform calling merely for universal suffrage, using very vague language, without making it explicit that everything must be written nor discriminated against on the basis of sex. So it wasn’t all solidarity inside the movement, but they were all still pointed mostly in the same direction.

Then a couple of years later, International Women’s Day was born. The prototype for this was staged by the Socialist Party of America in February 1909 in New York City. Then in August 1910, there was an international socialist women’s conference in Copenhagen, leading up to a Congress of the Second Internationale. Leading socialist delegates like Clara Zetkin proposed an annual women’s day to promote the special needs of women’s workers and the need for equal rights and the right to vote. This motion passed, and they set a date of March 19th, 1911 as the first International Women’s Day. And on that day, all over central and northern Europe, about a million people took part both men and women. And in the main, it was about equal legal rights and equal political rights and the right to vote and run for office and against general sex discrimination. International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 on the last weekend in February. Then World War I came along, and changed everybody’s calculations everywhere.

Now at the very beginning of the war, most of the feminist publications in Russia were very supportive of the war, and they patriotically supported the tsar and Russia. They believed that their visible support for the war effort and constant professions of loyalty and support would earn them official gratitude, and the after the war was over, they would be rewarded with something like equal rights and the vote. They believed they had come very very close to achieving this back in 1905 and 1906, and they believed the time had come to try again. This time, not by trying to overthrow the tsar, but by trying to help him. But then, also of course, when it comes to the debate between the Defensivists and the Defeatists — that is between people who hoped Russia would win the war and people who hoped Russia would lose the war — women’s rights activists were almost uniformly Defensivists. No feminists could stomach the idea of losing the war to Germany and then having a German army subsequently invade and occupy the country. Women do have a special opposition to occupying foreign armies for obvious reasons, as rape and abuse has historically been one of the first things that all conquering armies throughout history have considered their spoils of war.

Now Russian women’s rights activists pretty much went on the same journey that every other group in Russia did, and by 1916, they had gone from supporting the tsar and supporting the war to opposing the tsar and opposing the war. Official Russia told them that the rapid fire decline in standards of living and the plight suffered by women all over the empire was just something they had to endure. They needed to sacrifice for Russia. But women were sacrificing a lot for Russia. A group started called the Women’s Economic Union, whose goal was to improve the economic and social situation of women everywhere, and when the war really started to go badly, they aligned their interests with the progressive bloc, and whether it was working class women or these bourgeois liberal feminists, they all came around to the notion that the tsar had to go.

But thanks to the war, they had some economic heft that they themselves could lift. The war brought way more women into the urban industrial workforce. In 1913, women accounted for about 25% of the working classes in Petrograd; by 1917, that was up to 33%. Across all of Russia though, they went from 26% to fully 43%. There was also an acceleration of women participating in the various professions, most especially the medical fields, like doctors. They were also now being admitted into universities on an almost equal basis, filling the empty slots left behind by men who had been carried off to war, or who had then been carried off to meet their maker.

But out in the streets, all of these working women saw their entire quality of life just plummet. They were the ones standing in the freezing bread lines to get basic food to feed their family. And so while there was something like gender solidarity floating around out there, there was still a lot of class conflict, and a great deal of the wrath coming out of the working class women was directed, not just at the tsar or his ministers or men generally, but also at rich women who are able to come into the store, flash around a load of valuable stuff or cash, and buy things at prices that now put everything out of the reach of the poor families. As the war went on and the supply chain broke down completely, there started to be riots, disorder, strikes, and these were staged by male and female workers alike. Among the many police reports coming out of January 1917 warning of imminent disturbances, one said, the mothers of families exhausted from the endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half starving and sick children, have made them incredibly volatile. The police report continued that these women are very likely closer now to revolution than Milyukov and Rodzianko and company, and of course they are more dangerous because they represent that stored up inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire.

So that brings us to February 23rd, 1917, when one spark set off a fire. February 23rd, 1917 was the date set aside for celebrating International Women’s day in Russia. Feminist groups, as well as working class women, decided they wanted to mark the day with special demonstrations, marches, and strikes. This, even as male organizers and leaders, both among the socialists and the liberals said, don’t waste your time, don’t make a big deal out of it. We can’t expend a bunch of energy on women’s rights issues right at this particular moment. And in fact, on this particular February 23rd, the women workers went on strike indirect defiance of orders from male leaders not to go on strike. Trotsky later wrote of this, "February 23rd was International Women’s Day and meetings and actions were foreseen despite orders to the contrary." Textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for their support in the strike.

Pretty soon, tens of thousands of women were demonstrating throughout Petrograd, with the chief of police being so out of touch he didn’t know what was happening or why. There was a gathering near the headquarters of the League of Women’s Equal Rights, another out at Nevsky Prospekt, there were demonstrations near the Duma as well as in all the working class districts. Women were suddenly everywhere. In the working class districts where the women were employed as metal workers and in textile factories, they went out on strikes, and joined various demonstrations that became more raucous and turbulent as the day progressed. The general demands of this International Women’s Day were threefold, one social, one military, and one political: bread, peace, and down with the tsar. Now, initially it was mostly just women marching around out there, but they decided they didn’t want to be alone. So they started going around to various factories, demanding that their husbands and brothers and comrades come out and join them. Oftentimes, they were chucking rocks and tiles and snowballs at factory walls and windows trying to disrupt and shame the men who were still working into coming out to join them. And it worked. They started shutting down factory after factory, one by one. Hundreds marched off the job here, several thousands over there soon 50,000 were out in the street, then a hundred thousand, then 200,000, then 250,000, all of them parading throughout Petrograd calling for a new government and the overthrow of the tsar.

But you will recall that at the beginning of this episode, I said that two big things combined on this particular February 23rd. That one of them was the women of Russia, and the other was Mother Nature. Because remember last week we talked all about how it had been just freezing cold this particular winter. Temperatures had been hovering well below freezing for months. Now, suddenly, on this particular February 23rd, temperature shocked back up to a positively balmy 46 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have ever lived in subfreezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, and then magically overnight, it suddenly shoots up above freezing, you know that it’s like t-shirt and shorts weather. It’s not like spring out there, it feels like summer. And we’re talking about 46 degrees Fahrenheit here, this is like pretty chilly under most normal conditions, but compared to subfreezing temperatures, it feels fantastic. So when it’s suddenly 46 degrees out, people are opening up their doors and their windows. It feels like summer. They’ve all been cooped up inside, they’ve all been freezing, they’ve all been starving, and now everybody is pouring out into the streets. And they feel this crazy mix of anger, but also exhilaration, jubilation, and a kind of chaotic, hopeful energy just bursting forth from everybody.

The police forces in Petrograd were caught completely off guard and completely unprepared. And when the police and soldiers and cossacks were dispatched to try to head off these demonstrations, they found a majority of those in the frontlines were women. And here the subtle patriarchal biases worked to the advantage of the women. Soldiers and cossacks who might not otherwise have hesitated to crack skulls or open fire on unruly crowds hesitated to beat and murder women. And it was at this point of contact between the forces of order and the women leading the demonstrations that the line into revolution was breached. The soldiers, as we discussed last time were already on the verge of mutiny. And when they were ordered to fire on the women, they simply couldn’t do it. Especially as the women were calling out to them saying, we’re your wives and your mothers, don’t fight us, join us. And so they did. By the end of February 23rd, 1917, the situation in the capitol was completely out of hand. The opposition leaders in the Duma belatedly realized whether they liked it or not, the streets were now out in full force, and they could either be leveraged to the advantage of the Duma opposition, or the Duma opposition could just be swept away along with everything else. Socialists leaders in the working class districts, belatedly realized there was no waiting for Mayday. The women had forced the issue. The time to strike was actually right here and right now. They hadn’t planned for it, they hadn’t expected it, they weren’t the drivers of it, but the revolution was at hand.

Less than 24 hours after the tsar left Petrograd, the capitol had turned decisively again imh. And next week, the reckoning for Nicholas and Alexandra had finally come. Minister of the Interior Protopopov believed he had successfully stopped the union of elite level political opponents of the regime with working class street demonstrators, but he was clearly wrong. And next week the tsar will be told in no uncertain terms that the only option left to him was abdication.

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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.

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Episode 10.60, The Abyss that Lies Ahead of You

We ended last week with the murder of Rasputin, which the murderers hoped would jolt Nicholas and Alexandra back to their senses and change the disastrous course they were on. And while the death of Rasputin did have a major impact on the imperial couple, it was not what the assassins intended. It drove Nicholas and Alexandra closer together, isolated them further from their subjects, and convinced them they must maintain the course they were on at all costs. To do anything less would be to surrender to the enemies of Russia and God.

Life in the inner circle of the court over the winter of 1916-1917 was saturated in an omnipresent sense of defiant depression. One of the ways Rasputin kept his hooks in Alexandra had been telling her repeatedly that he received visions saying, and I’m quoting here, “If I die, or you desert me, you will lose your son and your crown within six months.” Now this is insanely manipulative, but clearly Alexandra believed it, and with everything that’s about to happen, you were never going to convince the empress Rasputin was wrong. Because, what happened? He died and less than two months later, she lost her crown. Now, was Rasputin’s death the reason the Romanov dynasty fell? Like, was he some sort of mystical linchpin holding it all together? Goodness no. His death was not the cause of anything. It was merely a preliminary effect of the real causes of the fall of the dynasty — social breakdown, economic breakdown, political breakdown — and besides, he was wrong about Alexei. The tsarevitch did not die within six months; he in fact lived for more than one whole year until he was mowed down by Red Army machine guns.

So to the extent that Rasputin’s death played a causal role in the Russian Revolution, it’s only that it drove the imperial couple into a state of fatally stubborn resentment. By New Year’s Eve 1916, Alexandra had clearly gone to a place where she would rather lose everything, including her life, than give an inch to the enemies of her family. She and her husband were the last things upholding the divine order of things, orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. No matter what, they could not surrender to the liberals and the Jews and the socialists, all of them atheists, heretical, greedy, corrupt, murderous scumbags. The task of the tsar and the tsarina was to bravely face this threat with uncompromising firmness. God was watching, and God was the audience to whom they now played. Everyone was telling them, if you change course, you’ll be able to save the crown. But for Nicholas, and especially Alexandra, they were far more worried about their souls.

Alexandra was ready to be strong and withstand anything, but her husband was going to need her help to hold the line. The tsar had come back to Tsarskoye Selo after Rasputin’s murder, but he was quite the shell of himself. He had never been the best ruler, nor the most able sovereign, but as we discussed back when he first ascended to the throne, Nicholas was a hardworking and engaged ruler. He was attentive to affairs of state, he was well briefed on what was happening out there in the world — or at least he was engaged with whatever his ministers allowed him to believe was happening out there in the world. Now, true, he was weak-willed, indecisive, and had a pension for drifting off into fantasy land, but he dutifully did his duty, and was regarded by those who came into contact with him as personally gracious and charming and attentive.

But that Nicholas was now gone. He was now detached, anxious, and distracted. He was not sleeping well. He couldn’t focus. He chain smoked cigarettes. People who saw him reported that he was gaunt, pale, his cheeks were sinking. His smile, which had always been tanged with a kind of forlorn sadness in his eyes now didn’t even have that. His lips made the motion of a smile, but the eyes were vacant. When he had meetings with ministers and aides and foreign diplomats, he just wasn’t all there. People would ask him questions that he should have known the answer to, but which he now struggled to answer. He was muddled and confused. In a word, the tsar was extremely depressed.

Now, one of the things the assassins of Rasputin had been hoping to accomplish was to end Alexandra’s period of influence over domestic affairs in Russia. They hope that maybe Alexandra might even be removed physically from the capitol, sent away to the Crimea, or forcibly locked up in a convent. That with the demonic puppet master gone, Nicholas would snap out of it and appoint the responsible government people had been trying to get him to a point since the dark days of the Great Retreat in 1915, and were now relentlessly hammering him to do ever since the reopening of the Duma in November 1916. But, like I said, Rasputin’s murder drove the couple to rely on each other more than ever. Alexandra’s influence was not waning, but positively waxing. It was clear Nicholas needed her support more than ever, and the couple actually had a secret passage built so that Alexandra could listen in on Nicholas’s meetings with various ministers and diplomats so she could weigh in and give him advice. Nicholas, for his part, welcomed Alexandra’s support and became incredibly angry when anybody suggested his wife was not the solution, but the problem, and in an admirable kind of way, Nicholas went all in on defending his wife from her many critics, detractors, and enemies. He was especially furious at all the insinuation that Alexandra was somehow some pro-German secret agent leading Russia to defeat on purpose. “The emperess is a foreigner,” Nicholas said. “She has no one to protect her but myself. I shall never abandon her under any circumstances. In any case, all the charges made against her are false. Wicked lies are told about her. But I shall know how to make her respected!”

From Nicholas’s perspective, the people telling him to get rid of his wife were doing so because they believed she was in league with the enemy, which he knew wasn’t true. And after Rasputin’s murder, it was clear these people were not content to simply slander his wife, but also to murder a man near and dear to her heart. So rather than moving towards a place where Nicholas is like, okay, Alexandra, maybe you should take a step back, he’s saying, no, I love you, and I trust you. You’re the only one I love and trust, because all these other people are liars and murderers and we cannot give in to them. So the brief little window that opened in early 1916, when Nicholas gave in to the opposition in the Duma, closed as quickly as it had opened. He replaced Prime Minister Stürmer with Alexander Trepov, and very nearly dismissed the controversial minister of the interior Protopopov, but those days, and they could be numbered in days, were over. In fact, in late December 1916, the tsar fired the oh so recently appointed Trepov, and on December 29th, 1916, elevated an aging loyalist of the empress named Nikolai Gallitzin to be prime minister of Russia. His previous job experience was being deputy chairman of a charity run by Alexandra.

Now Gallitzin himself knew he was not cut out for the job, and spent quite a bit of time trying to beg off the appointment. And he later said, “if someone else had used the language I use to describe myself, I should have been obliged to challenge him to a duel.” But when you’re an arch loyalist and believe in the divine authority of the autocrat of all Russia, when in the autocrat of all Russia appoints you prime minister, you kind of can’t say no.

Then, on January 3rd, 1917, the tsar dumped the minister of war and replaced him with a guy named Mikhail Belyaev. belief was recommended by Alexandra for all the reasons she always recommended ministers: unquestioning devotion, and loyalty. It didn’t matter that Belyaev was a paragon of upward failure, commanding the respect and confidence of no one, and who had spent his time in the military, shuffling papers around and not even doing that ver. So it was clear to everyone now that Nicholas and Alexandra were not changing course. On January 5th, 1917, the new Prime Minister Gallitzin reported as gently as he could to Nicholas that he had reports of people in Moscow openly discussing who the next tsar was going to be. Nicholas responded, “the empress and I know that all is in God’s hands, and his will be done.

Which, I mean, it’s very clear how much he’s resigning himself to his fate here, as if he’s just a helpless actor in some grand cosmic morality play doomed to whatever fate God deals out, as if he couldn’t just, like, appoint some better ministers and everything would be fine. But before I get too far down this intentionally courting martyrdom narrative, I should mention that, as we’re about to see, many people were trying to warn the tsar of the danger he faced. But Minister of the Interior Protopopov, who had Nicholas and Alexandra’s confidence, was working overtime to keep them in that bubble of placid ignorance, constantly telling them, oh, the situation’s not that bad, the people who are against you are very tiny minority, everybody else loves you, really, anything to keep them from doubting themselves. In fact, Protopopov decided a swell way to lock in the empress’s favor was to fill the divine boots left behind by Rasputin. He took to calling her every day at 10 o’clock in the morning, which was the time of day Rasputin used to call her, so Protopopov was quite literally filling that void in her schedule. He would also just casually mention that his advice was being guided by some kind of divine inspiration, or he would say, oh, last night, the spirit of Rasputin came to me in a dream and said, you know, blah-blah-blah or that when he came into Alexandra’s present, he could feel the spiritual glow of Christ. Just feeding her everything she wanted to hear, but not telling her anything she needed to hear.

Meanwhile, everyone else was trying to get the tsar to snap out of it. After most everyone in the family was caught celebrating the death of Rasputin and begging leniency for poor Grand Duke Dimitri, Nicholas and Alexandra cut them all off. They didn’t let them come around the palace anymore, and more than awere outright banished from Petrograd. A few of them could still get through though, and one of them was Grand Duke Alexander, simultaneously Nicholas’s cousin and brother-in-law and of the tsar’s boon companions going back their days as young men gallivanting around Europe together. Alexander was still welcome at the palace and tried to use what personal trust and confidence he had to convince Alexandra to step back for the good of both the dynasty and Russia.

Alexander arranged an audience with the empress, and told her, your interference with affairs of state is causing harm to Nikki’s prestige. I have been your faithful friend for 24 years, and, as a friend, I point out to you that all the classes of the population are opposed to your policies. Alexandra replied that Nicholas was a divinely appointed autocrat, and could not allow himself to sink to sharing power with anyone. The grand duke said, you are very much mistaken. Alex. Your husband ceased to be an autocrat on October 17, 1905. When the empress refused to hear any more about it, Alexander got angry, because this wasn’t just about Nicholas and Alexandra. It was about their selfish myopia putting the whole family and the whole empire in jeopardy. He said, for 30 months, I have never said a word to you about the disgraceful goings on in our government, better to say, your government. I realize that you are willing to perish, and that your husband feels the same way, but what about us? You have no right to drag your relatives with you down the precipice.

At this point, he was more or less kicked out of the palace and invited to never come back, and later he wrote:

“We are watching an unprecedented spectacle: revolution coming from above and not from below.”

Which is to say that at least in his mind, Nicholas and Alexandra were creating a revolution that did not have to happen, but which they seemed to be pursuing with as much single-minded purpose as the most obsessed SR terrorist.

With no one in the family able to get through, there was some hope maybe Russia’s wartime allies can help. The domestic political crisis in Russia was now at the level of being a matter of national security to both France and Britain. What would happen to the western front if Russia collapsed into chaos and could no longer continue the war? So leaders of the opposition in Russia, which now included practically everyone, would drop by the French embassy or the British embassy and say, look, we can’t get through to the tsar, but maybe as leaders of our wartime allies, you can lean on him to change course, to put the administration of Russia and its war effort on sound footing?

Now, this is a very delicate situation for a foreign diplomat, because, as a foreign diplomat, you are not supposed to comment on domestic politics. It is a great way to get your credentials revoked and get kicked out of the country. Your brief is foreign policy. But by the end of 1916, British Ambassador George Buchanan decided to stretch the limits of his mandate, because the domestic crisis in Russia was ultimately turning into a foreign policy crisis for Britain, France, and the other allies. In a meeting with the tsar on New Year’s Eve, Buchanan decided to broach this incredibly sensitive topic with Nicholas. Buchanan asked permission to speak frankly about the trouble surrounding the Russian government. When Nicholas said okay, Buchanan said, “Your majesty, if I may be permitted to say so, there is but one safe course open to you, namely to break down the barrier that separates you from your people, and to regain their confidence.” qby which Buchanan meant, appoint new ministers. Ministers that the Duma, as representatives of the people, had confidence in. Nicholas took resentful umbrage at this, and said, “Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?” Which is a devastating indictment of Nicholas’s state of mind. He clearly believed that the problem was not that the tsar was failing his people, but that the people were failing their tsar.

But Buchanan pressed forward and said specifically, you’ve got to get rid of Protopopov, who, Buchanan said, if your majesty will forgive me for saying so, is bringing Russia to the verge of ruin. Nicholas said, I chose Protopopov from the ranks of the Duma in order to be agreeable to them and this is my reward. In Nicholas’s mind, he had already taken the path Buchanan recommended, appointed a minister with the Duma’s confidence, and all he had gotten in return was a doubling down on opposition, complaints, and disobedience.

Buchanan pressed on and continued to speak frankly about the information he was receiving — that the tsar had very few people he could count on in the event of a real political showdown. In the event of a revolution, Buchanan said, only a small portion of the army can be counted on to defend the dynasty. So Buchanan is appoint new ministers, it’s going to be a revolution. And when that revolution comes, nobody is going to rush to your defense.

But aware he was wildly out of bounds as a foreign diplomat, trying to steer domestic politics, Buchanan concluded by emphasizing that he was speaking on a personal level, as Nicholas’s concerned friend. “As an ambassador,” Buchanan said, “I am well aware I have no right to hold the language to which I have held to your majesty. And I have to take courage in both hands before speaking as I have. But if I were to see a friend walking through woods on a dark night along a path which I knew ended in a precipice, would it not be my duty, sire, to warn him of the danger? And is it not equally my duty to warn your majesty of the abyss, that lies ahead of you?” The tsar nodded assent to all this and thanked Buchanan for his concern, but that didn’t mean he would take the advice, or that he really appreciated Buchanan’s concern. Buchanan was later told by reliable informants that had he been a Russian subject, that conversation would have gotten him exiled to Siberia. His efforts were for naught, and the tsar did not change course.

About a week after Buchanan’s meeting, the tsar was treated to another blunt assessment of his position. This time It was a Russian subject. The chairman of the Duma, Mihail Rodzianko. Rodzianko was one of the founders of the Octobrists Party back in 1905, and he had been chairman of the Duma since 1911, and was now an inner circle leader of the progressive bloc opposition.

On January 7th, 1917, in his capacity as chairman of the Duma, he felt it was his duty to report to the tsar: “your majesty, I consider the state of the country to have become more critical and menacing than ever. The spirit of all the people is such that the gravest upheavals may be expected. All Russia is unanimous in claiming a change of government and the appointment of a responsible premier invested with the confidence of the There’s not a single honest or reliable man left in your entourage. All the best have been eliminated or resigned.” Rodzianko then addressed the most delicate matter of all: he said,”it is an open secret the empress issues orders without your knowledge and that the ministers report to her on matters of state. Indignation against and hatred of the empress are growing throughout the country. She is looked upon as Germany’s champion, and even the common people are speaking of it. Now this is exactly the kind of slander that sent Nicholas into a white hot fury, and he said, none of it is true. Rodzianko said, frankly, it doesn’t matter. It’s what everybody believes.”

According to Rodzianko, Nicholas then leaned back and put his head in his hands and said, “is it possible that for 22 years I have tried to act for the best, and that for 22 years it was all a mistake?”

Rodzianko allegedly plucked up all his courage and replied, “Yes, your majesty. For 22 years, you followed a wrong course.”

But like Buchanan before him, Rodzianko’s efforts were for naught. The tsar did not change course.

With Nicholas and Alexandra resisting all efforts to get them to change, talk of replacing them became widespread and unashamed. All through January 1917, rumors flew of a coup, a forced abdication of revolution. People spoke of it openly at all levels of society, in bread lines, in salons, in palace ballrooms. Opposition groups were all but openly planning what to do after Nicholas and Alexandra had been pushed out of power. These leaders were holding conferences, meetings, and congresses without police approval. Censorship was completely breaking down, as editors and publishers simply ceased submitting their work to the censor’s office. Seditious pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsheets circulated openly among the civilian population, as well as in the ranks of the army and navy. In the highest rungs of society, Rodzianko famously recorded a meeting he had with Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, Nicholas’s hugely influential aunt. Known as the grandest of the grand duchesses, Maria Pavlovna now presided over the wing of the Romanov family hostile to Nicholas and Alexandra. Particularly, she was hostile to Alexandra, who was seen to be leading the whole dynasty to ruin. Rodzianko was invited to a lunch where the grand duchess openly badmouthed the government incompetence, and laid into Alexandra and Protopopov. Rodzianko reported Maria Pavlovna said, Alexandra was driving the country to destruction, that she was the cause of the danger which threatened the emperor and the rest of the Imperial family, that such conditions could no longer be tolerated. That things must be changed. Something done. Removed. Destroyed.

Rodzianko got nervous and asked what she meant. The grand duchess said to him, the Duma must do something. She must be annihilated. Rodchenko said, who? And the grand duchess said, Alexandra.

Then Rodzianko allegedly said, your highness, allow me to treat this conversation as if it had never taken place. Because if you addressed me as the president of the Duma, my oath of allegiance compels me to wait at once on his imperial majesty, and report to him that the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna has declared to me that the empress must be annihilated.

But he did not report any of this. He only recorded it later, in his memoirs.

Rodzianko also took meetings with high ranking officers in the army, one of whom told him frankly, “the state of mind of the army is such that it will accept with joy the news of the coup d’etat. If you decide on this extreme measure, we will support you.” There was a growing consensus among many high ranking military officers that the single best way to improve military morale and win the war would be to announce that the tsar and his wife had abdicated and the whole empire was now under new leadership.

Lower down the social ladder, and further to the left, there was also lots of talk of forced abdication, and the sooner, the better. This was because, as you traveled further down the social ladder and further to the left into the ranks of the liberals, and the Kadets, and even radicals like Alexander Kerensky, that twofold goal of winning the war and preventing social revolution, were still the binary north star that guided their every move. Now, as we’ll talk more about next week, at the end of January, Kerensky was himself more than ready to turn to the streets if need be. But most of the other Duma leaders were not. Kerensky said, “everyone reacted determinately in the negative to the possibility of a popular outbreak, fearing, once provoked, a popular mass movement would turn in an extreme left direction, and this would create extraordinary difficulties for the conduct of the war.” He also said that, “even a transition to a constitutional regime provoked serious reservations, and the conviction that the new government would be unable to manage without harsh measures for the maintenance of law, and the prohibition of defeatist propaganda.” But though they feared what might happen if things got out of hand — they might lose the war and trigger a revolution — they also seemed to believe that both of those things were inevitable if Nicholas and Alexandra were allowed to remain in power. Kerensky said, “Opposition fears that things might get out of hand did not shake the general determination to finish the indecisiveness of court circles, and depose Nicholas.

But for all the talk of the coup, nothing actually seems to have gotten going. Everybody seems to have assumed somebody else was going to do it. Whatever plans any one of these groups was making never coalesced into a proper plot. They did not get the necessary guard units, or officers, or political leaders in place, to be at a certain place at a certain time, none of it was really shaping up. And indeed, by late January, the imperial couple were getting reports from Protopopov — not wholly inaccurate — that while there was a lot of griping out there, and a lot of wildly seditious fantasizing, nothing was actually coming together. Protopopov could report no evidence of an active plot that seriously threatened the couple’s power and authority. The only thing that did kind of worry Protopopov at the moment was the reconvening of the Duma, which had gone into recess over the holidays, and was set to restart their work on February 14th. But he assured Nicholas and Alexandra that he had the situation well in hand, and he had a plan to short circuit any attempt to turn the reopening of the Duma into ground zero for a revolution. Once that danger was past, the worst would probably be over. In hindsight, Protopopov was both right and wrong. As we’ll see next week, he did have a plan to prevent February 14th from marking the beginning of a rBut he was wrong that if he successfully prevented that, the worst would be over no one knew it, but the opportunity for a quick palace coup, forced abdication, the rabid replacement of the government without plunging into social revolution, was over. So please join me next week as we plunge headlong into the most famous February in Russian history.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10 point 58 inflation and scarcity. We spent the last two episodes discussing Russia’s bloody trudge through world war one, taking us from the summer of 1914, roughly up to the fall of 1916. And as we discussed, there was nothing inevitable about Russia’s. They were caused by and exacerbated by incredible mismanagement.

But it’s not as if Russia was on the verge of losing the war, at least not more or less than any of the other great powers heading into the end of 1916. It’s not like any army or government on any side was like, yes, this is awesome. And the war is going great for us. We’re so happy about our situation.

And when you take a look at it, what we find is that out on the front line, the war had kind of stable. And many of the worst logistical issues, the munitions and weapons shortages that plagued them through the first two years of the war had been largely resolved. Now, morale was still terrible out there.

Don’t get me wrong and we’ll get into that more as we go forward. But morale was terrible everywhere across all of Europe, they were all suffering through a war that killed millions, pointlessly and endlessly. So this week we are going to turn our attention to the domestic. Because just as things were sort of stabilizing out on the front lines, a social economic and political crisis was breaking out back home.

And that is going to be the main source of the February revolution. This was a crisis centered, especially in the urban areas that will trigger unrest, agitation, and direct action that will provide fuel for the ever and large winning political opposition to Nicholas, an alligator. And we’ve been here many times before on the podcast.

This is how revolutions are made people with money, influence, power and ambition who feel stifled and frustrated with the existing regime and believing. They now have to take drastic action in order to avert what they see as a national catastrophe being supported by and driven by agitation in the street that has a lot more to do with literal bread and butter.

Like there’s no bread or butter. So let’s talk about what’s going on in these urban areas, because like I said, this is where the February revolution is going to come from. For starters, I should say that we’re not exactly dealing with an economic depression or hard times as such the war. In fact, triggered an economic boom, even with the inefficiencies and corruption and contradictions inside the urban industrial sectors that were supplying the milk.

Ramped up wartime production drew literally millions of peasants into working class industrial jobs in the cities between 1914 and 1916. The population of the cities of Russia grew from 22 million to 28 million. So this is not about an economic depression or unemployment. Everyone had a job and everyone was working and everyone was getting paid.

So the economy is just happily chugging along. In the wartime, boom, everybody’s employed. Everyone’s happy things are robustly being produced and everyone’s wages are going up and everything is great. Right? Wow. Now there were two huge problems that started to take hold that drove the urban population from people just going about their business to people launching a revolution.

Those two problems were inflation and scarcity, inflation and scary. This is the one, two punch that is going to knock out the Romanoffs. So let’s talk about them. Fighting a war means paying for a war. The Russian government did several things to meet their financial obligations. They contracted some foreign loans, mostly from Britain.

They issued war bonds, like all the other great powers, but none of this was quite enough. They did not. For example, find as many takers for their war bonds as the other grape. The government was also loathed to impose new taxes. And in fact, in one critical area, they actually managed to knock out a significant pillar of their annual tax revenue.

But we’ll talk about that in a second. So absent other options, they embrace the expedient of printing more paper currency to pay their bills. Prior to the war, Russia was on a strict gold standard and nearly every note in circulation was backed by an equivalent amount of gold housed somewhere in the.

But they disengage themselves from the gold standard to meet wartime financial needs between the summer of 1914 and the end of 1916, the amount of paper money in circulation increased by something like 600 to 800%. That is a lot, a big effect of all this paper printing was price inflation, especially the prices of vital commodities.

Like. And now I’m sure you already know what I’m going to say next. And that’s right. The rise in prices was not matched by rise in wages. So every day everyone’s take home, pay, bought them less and less at the store. This was especially true for anyone on a fixed salary. Lower-level bureaucrats, doctors, teachers, those sorts of professions.

They just kept receiving the same paychecks as the prices began to. But it was not just a dynamic of rising prices and stagnant wages. In fact, between 1914 and 1916 average wages of the urban working classes practically doubled the problem was that over that same period, the average cost of basic necessities quadrupled.

And so even though they were making more, they were still able to buy. So from the lowest ranks of the unskilled working class on up through the previously comfortable professional middle classes, people are taking their wages to the store, the market, the bakery, and finding they were simply unable to buy the things they needed with the amount of money they had.

Now, maybe inflation alone bad as it was, would not have been a revolution sparking. Were it not for the fact that it was also being met by an acute scarcity of those same necessary commodities. And I am talking here about really basic stuff, food fuel for fires, coats, and boots, tools, anything and everything you actually need to live on a daily basis.

Shop shelves. Scarcity became a problem, which like inflation impacted, not just laborers and workers, but white collar workers, bureaucrats, functionaries lawyers, doctors, and teachers. They were all staring at the same bare shelves. Even rich factory owners had to sometimes shut their plants down because they could not find enough coal to heat their furnaces.

The causes of wartime scarcity were structural and they were also understanding. The needs of the army came first, both in terms of what was produced and who got priority use of the railroads. And there are stories for example of grain that was supposed to go to the feed Petrograd rotting in a Depot because the railcars never moved.

The food was there. It was available. It just never got access to the railroads to take it where it needed to go. Or we can look at the call center. Russia’s recent orientation toward Britain meant Petrograd had been getting most of its coal imported from Britain rather than transported internally by rail, which was more expensive, took longer and a far more difficult journey.

Then when the war started an enormous obstacle called Germany now stood between Petrograd and its British supply of coal. There’s also just a very basic supply and demand problem. You take all those rural workers who were conscripted into the army or who took jobs in the city. And you’re turning people, producing food into people who need food.

There were about 8 million men now out on the front lines. And as I just said, the populations of the cities increased by about 6 million in just two years. And in particular, what this led to was a collapse of productivity from large commercial estate. Those biggest states had been the entities traditionally producing the grain that fed cities, but the population transference caused by the war basically remove the wage labor force, working those biggest states almost overnight.

There was no one to work. The estates and productivity collapsed, and I’m out here in the countryside. We do need to talk about the fact that what we’re talking about here today is a great crisis in the urban centers in the city. From everything I have read the rural areas and the peasantry were actually enjoying some of the best times of their lives during world war one.

You know, the ones who weren’t drafted into military service what’s going on is that with so many bodies having been removed from the rural areas and shipped out to the frontline or into the cities, there was much less pressure on the villages they left behind. As inflation began to set in. And the peasantry realized that growing things just to sell for paper money, that would soon be worthless.

And they stopped selling things were worthless paper. They voluntarily withdrew from market crops and focused on subsistence farming. They just kept everything for themselves. So as the cities were starving, the peasantry was actually eating more and better than ever. They had stores of reserves. They were feeding their animals better than.

And it was with mounting bitterness, but it was remarked. A cow in the countryside ate better than a worker in the city. So when we talk about the social crisis that drove the February revolution, we are talking about a mostly urban phenomenon, no one angle of these big structural problems, supply demand, transportation and distribution explains the alarming scarcity of necessary commodities.

But combined, they created an alarming scarcity of necessary commodities in the cities, which as you can imagine, also fueled the ongoing price inflation. That was also rampant. All of this was combining to make everybody hungry, miserable, and angry, and the government’s response to these two great issues of inflation and scarcity was utterly.

Both problems were greatly exacerbated by the passively incompetent quote unquote leadership from the government. As we have discussed over the past two episodes and plus Alexandra and Rasputin promoted men who were loyal to Empress Alexander and Rasputin with almost no regard whatsoever to whether they were qualified for the job.

Now, even these unqualified ministers knew there was a. And there was a lot of talk about what could possibly, maybe be done, but they just kind of never did anything a few times. In 1915 and 1916, they made half-hearted stabs at requisitioning food from the rural areas at fixed prices. But none of it was pursued with any kind of vigor or purpose to make matters worse while they didn’t do anything about it.

They also didn’t let anyone else do anything. Various elected municipal councils in several cities volunteered to take up the task of providing for their populations, but the government wouldn’t let them do it. They did not want those municipal bodies to become too important or too powerful. The Petrograd municipal council asked the government for authority to organize distribution of food.

And the government said, no, you can’t. The general feeling inside the halls of the Imperial palace was that this was all just a temporary thing that everybody needed to endure on account of the war. Now, one great example of government mismanagement was the decision in the summer of 1914 to ban the sale of vodka.

The government had a monopoly on the sale of vodka and for vague reasons of moral and physical health, the government stopped selling vodka at the beginning of the. Now, this might seem like a small thing, maybe even a good thing, but the vodka ban touched on almost every facet of what was feeding into the February revolution.

For example, roughly one quarter of direct state tax revenue was coming from the tax on vodka. So when they stopped selling it, that alone knocked out 25% of annual state revenue, which was mostly made up by printing that much more paper. It was also, as you can imagine, a major source of resentment in the lower classes as they were the ones who drank the vodka, fancier liquors and wine was not subject to the same ban.

So high society could get as drunk as they wanted, as often as they wanted. And only the lower classes were prohibited from their drink of choice. This is the kind of thing that will make people angry all on its own. It also of course, did very little to solve their desire to drink. It simply drove more people into the black market, a black market that started being supplied by various kinds of moonshine.

And a great deal of this moonshine was made with incredibly dangerous mixtures of chemicals. The kinds of mixtures that will make you go blind or kill you. And there was actually a minor epidemic of people dropping dead after drinking poisonous moonshine concoct. So the vodka ban was a blow to one of the key pillars of state revenue and a source of almost daily, resentment and anger against the ruling class.

And also it was literally killing people by the fall of 1916, things were reaching threat level midnight. The main cities of Petrograd and Moscow were only receiving about one third of the amount of food they needed to feed their populations. And only about half the fuel they needed for their. So even if grain was delivered, bakeries did not have the means to turn it into bread because they could not heat their ovens.

And so that brings us back to one of the all time leading locations of radicalization throughout human history. No, not the university. No, not reading groups. Studying centered literature. No, not clandestine meetings of revolutionary parties. I am talking about Bret line. There is no place in human history that more quickly and more completely radicalizes a formerly politically inert population than a broad line.

A bunch of angry and hungry people standing in close proximity to one another for hours and hours on end can pretty quickly talk themselves into some pretty heavy ideas. The bread lines in the Russian cities were inhabited mostly by. I mean the fall of 1916, for example, women workers in the factory would work all day and then simply move over to go stand in line for bread, which they frankly did not know whether they would even get in 1914 and 1915, they would take along stools.

So they could at least sit down by 1916, the stools were replaced by cots and beds because it was hardly even worth it to go home. So these women were just bouncing back and forth between factory shifts and shifts in the bread line, trying to get food. It is estimated that the working women of Petrograd spent 40 hours a week in various food lines, simply trying to acquire the basic necessities for their family.

And then of course, there’s the problem of every time you go into these stores, the wages you’re taking in are buying them less.

So the reports now coming out of the police departments and the Okhrana and various other observers is that we have a situation of anger and unrest and increasing tension. That looks a lot like 1905 and there are two great long quotes from Richard pipes. His history of the Russian revolution called creatively the Russian revolution, which I’m just going to quote to you.

The first one is a police report to the ministry of the interior. In October, 1916, it is essential to concede as an unqualified and in controvertible fact that at present the internal structure of Russia’s political life confront the very strong threat of the relentless approach of great turbulence brought about and explainable exclusively by economic.

Hunger, the unequal distribution of food and articles of prime necessity and the monstrous rise in prices for the broadest strata of the population of the vast empire. The problem of food is one of the dreadful inspiring impulse that drives the masses toward gradual affiliation with the growing movement of discontent and hostility.

There exists in this case, concrete and precise data that makes it possible to assert category. That until now, this entire movement has had a purely economic basis virtually free of any affiliation with this strictly political programs. But this movement needs only to take a concrete form and find expression in some specific act, a pogrom, a large scale strike a major clash between the lower strata of the population and the police, et cetera, to assume at once absolutely a purely political.

The second quote is also from the fall of 1916. And it’s from the chief of the Petrograd core of gendarme. He said the exceptional seriousness of the period, which the country is living through and the countless catastrophic disasters with which the possible imminent rebellious actions of the lower classes of the empire angered by the difficulties of daily existence can threaten the entire vital structure.

Urgently demand in the opinion of loyal elements, the extreme necessity of speedy and comprehensive measures to remove the existing disorder and to relieve the excessively Laden atmosphere of social disaffection. As recent experience has shown under existing conditions, halfway decisions, and some palliative accidental measures are entirely inappro.

So let’s go back to what we were talking about at the end of episode, 10 point 54 and the czar hoping that when he declared war in the summer of 1914, that all the labor unrest that had been building since the Lena Goldfield massacre would disappear as everyone joined this great patriotic war effort, it’s at least part of the reason why he declared war.

And now here two years, We have reports from people with their eyes and ears on the ground in Petrograd and Moscow saying the people are more upset than ever work. Stoppages are beginning. People are throwing down their tools and marching out in protest. And as the police report said in the beginning, they were protesting insufficient wages and scarcity of bread.

But by now they were connecting the dots that their social and economic. May require an abrupt political solution. Now, as we have discussed over the past two episodes, this was a conclusion that had already been reached by many of the elites in Russia. In fact, it’s sort of where we ended the last two episodes with a group of Russian leaders deciding the real problem here was very specifically Nicholas and Alex.

Now, originally most of these leaders coming to this conclusion were progressives and liberals, but by now even conservatives arch, royalists and members of the upper nobility were joining the so-called progressive block, demanding a complete overhaul of the government. Deputations from the United nobility, an organization created after 1905 to defend the traditional rights of the Aristotle.

We’re going to the czar and saying, you need to change the government. You need better ministers. You need to work with the Duma. And the thing is, at this point, I can’t really shorthand all this criticism as being directed at the Romanov family, because by now critics included members of the Romanov family, Nicholas’s siblings and cousins were going to him and saying the same thing and also hinting as gently as Paul.

That the czar needed to stop listening to his wife. That Rasputin was a huge problem. Now none of these people wanted to overthrow the monarchy far from it, but they were becoming convinced that it might seem to become necessary to save the monarchy from the monarchs. By the fall of 1916, there were very few members of elite society who were not hyper critical of Nicholas and Alex.

You’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thought the emperor and Empress were like doing a bang up job. And that’s liberals and conservatives alike. Forward-looking industrialists and backward looking aristocrats. All of high society was unifying against them. This is a political situation that has calmed down to a very tiny clicks surrounding Nicholas and Alexandra who were hyper loyal, sick offense.

And who held all the power and wielded it. Surrounded by a mass of angry and frustrated people who believe that for the good of Russia, something might have to be done. Something that might require an abrupt political solution. One of the things that unified opposition to the Imperial couple across the ideological spectrum was the widespread belief that Russia’s difficulties during the war were the result of treason and high.

One of the things that made Alexandra. So odious was not that she was merely incompetent or in over her head or listening too much to her peasant. Holy man. But that she was German. Alexandra came from the Germanic part of the extended Royal dynasty ruling Northern Europe. And right from the start, she was accused of being sympathetic to the Germans.

Maybe even hoping they won. The sycophantic minister she promoted were accused of taking bribes from the German government, secretly arranging to conduct a separate piece that would sell out Russia, but make them rich. When Alexandra elevated a guy named Boris Stormer to the rank of defacto prime minister earlier in 1916, his German name increased suspicions that there was a pro German anti Russian click at the very heart of.

These accusations of a pro German treasonous faction inside the Imperial palace helped trigger patriotic and nationalistic fear and outrage. The problems that beset Russia were not caused by stupidity, but treason. And as we’ll see, the February revolution was in large part, a patriotic and nationalistic movement against suspected foreign use.

The opposition leaders came to believe they had to act decisively and outside of all constitutional measures to remove the influence of foreigners and traders. Now, as I’ve said, most of this is not true. Alexandra was not approached German secret agent trying to destroy the Russian war effort from the inside, but that’s hardly the point.

The point is that they are going to come to believe that pushing out Nicholas and Alexander. Is a Supreme act of patriotism. So all through the fall and winter of 1916, there are inside the ranks of the high nobility and the upper reaches of the army conversations about what to do about Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin.

There are anecdotal rumors of several different palace coups being played. One involved detaining the Imperial couple in a rail car and forcing Nicholas to name his brother as Regent. And then he would then appoint a government approved by them. Duma, apparently principal of off the liberal noble leader of the Zemstvo Union was in loose talks with various high ranking military officers, including the hero of the war general Brasil off to compel Alexandra, to cede all her authority to grand duke.

Who would then appoint prince Levophed prime minister of a government approved by the Duma general Brasil offset. If he has to choose between the emperor and Russia, I March for Russia, these pals Q talks were extremely preliminary and obviously never happened, but it speaks to the mounting sense of frustrated alarm prevailing everywhere, especially up in high places in the same circles.

And at this same time, There was also talk about what to do to neutralize Rasputin, who was now almost universally considered a malevolent threat to national security. That would be one plot that did come to fruition. Now for like a quick beat. It looked as though maybe the prevailing atmosphere of exasperation and alarm were finally getting through to the Imperial.

In September, 1916, Nicholas and Alexandra sack, the minister of the interior and appointed a guy named Alexander proto pop-off pro to pop off leading member of the Duma from the conservative liberal Octobrists faction. He had never actually served in any part of any ministry. He was a businessman, a textile manufacturer, and a landlord.

He had no experience in government or bureaucratic administer. But he was a leading and trusted member of the Octobrists and his appointment to be minister of the interior was taken by everyone as the czar, turning sharply in the direction of compromise and reason here was a man that Duma approved of and trusted now running arguably the most important ministry in the empire, but whatever hopes were raised by protocol POVs.

Quickly gave way to disappointment and disillusionment. He was not really cut out for the job, especially not in a time of great national crisis. He was very adept at talking about big plans and big ideas, but displayed no will or ability to implement any of these plans or ideas. He fancied himself the next election, but had not one, 1000th of Stolypin’s.

Now part of the problem though, was that proto pop offs ideas were often rooted in loss, fair economics. He believed it was the government’s job to get out of the market’s way. And so even as the urban grain supply was put under the ministry of the interiors jurisdiction, because the lack of food was becoming a security threat, proto pop off, did the opposite of actively intervening to get supply trains filled and rolling to the sea.

It also turns out that proto pop-off was enormously vain and susceptible to flattery. When Alexandra offered him all the trappings of Imperial favor, he went weak in the knees. He had never enjoyed perks of office like this. And he became enamored with the lifestyle well aware. He owed his position and new lifestyle to the favor of Alexandra.

He wasn’t going to do anything to him. Whatever hope there was that proto pop off would be a voice of firm reason inside the Imperial palace vanished almost overnight. Alexandra is aggressive cultivation, a proto off was also a calculated part of a larger plan. According to the lingering vestiges of the constitution of 1906, the Duma had to approve the annual.

They had only held sporadic sessions over the course of the war and had not yet met at all in 1916, but they needed to be called into session before the end of the year to approve the budget. So when recommending the appointment of proto pop off to her husband, Alexandra wrote that his elevation would dampen the hostility of the Duma and help them navigate the budget to speedy approval.

And basically once that was done and everyone had gone home. Part of pop-off would have served his usefulness and could be discarded if he made any real trouble. Meanwhile, the progressive block of the Duma delegates themselves prepared for this coming session, which was set to begin on November 1st, all through October 19, 16 leaders and parties convene to discuss strategy and tactics, it would be the first chance they would have to voice all their concerns and put pressure on Nicholas, Alexandra, and the guy.

But they didn’t know how hard they should push at conferences of the cadet party. For example, Pavle Amelia Coff attempted to steer his colleagues towards being willing to accept compromises from the Tsar to get a more competent and trustworthy government appointed, but not to get too overheated and risk triggering full-blown social revolution out in the streets.

But the left wing of the Kadets now loudly demanded the time for all that. The time for compromise was passed. They needed to aggressively confront the czar and force him to back down. They had tried petitions and delegations and appeals back in the fall of 1915 and the so-called revolt of the ministers, which we discussed in episode 10 point 56, resulted in the czar, blowing them off and dissolving the Duma.

They could not make the same mistake twice in the end. This argument carried. Even Milyukov concluded, it was a risk, but probably a necessary risk. They were all in Petrograd and well aware of the major crisis Burling in the streets and in the bread lines Milyukov and the other Kadets received their own reports that the Duma was now being talked about as a useless institution that did nothing for the people, but the new session beginning November 1st would be something of a moment.

Either the Duma would prove it was willing to aggressively stand up for the people or they would find themselves swept aside when the day loose finally came. So they resolved to adopt the most confrontational posture possible and refuse to accept any compromises from the government. It was incredibly risky, but the conclusion was that anything less would be even riskier.

And next week the Duma will face this moment. And we will finally introduce a guy who will be among the loudest and most confrontational of all the Duma delegates Alexander Kerensky. And before we go, I just want to thank everyone who has pre-ordered hero of two worlds so far. And to those of you who have submitted the name and location of the bookstore, you ordered hero two worlds from there are now more than 2000 entries on that.

And there’s a link to where you can go to do this included in the show notes to this week’s episode. Thank you very, very much. And please, if you haven’t, pre-ordered the book, go ahead and take this opportunity to do so now. Um, I’m also right now in the middle of recording the audio book. And in fact, when I’m done recording this week’s episode, I’m just going to turn my attention to finishing it off I’m in the back.

Third of the book I’m at chapter 19. And I just gotta say, um, if you do a thing where you read the first third of a book or the first two thirds of a book, and then put it. Look, I’m guilty of doing that too, but don’t do that with hero of two worlds. I think the back third of the book is actually my favorite part.

It certainly the stuff you won’t find in any other biography of Lafayette, which usually cut out after he winds up in an Austrian prison. So please pre-order hero of two worlds. And next week we will come back and have everybody start screaming, quite literally screaming at the czar .

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.56: Great War, Great Retreat

Before we get going this week, I feel like I should take some executive notice of the fact that we are at episode 10.56 of the Russian Revolutionses series. So, despite several confident claims I have made in the past about how there being no possible way any series could ever surpass the 55 episode length of the French Revolution series, well, here we are at episode 10.56. We are now beyond the last outpost and plunging ahead into the unknown abyss. And at least we can all take some comfort in the fact that while this series is the last series of the Revolutions podcast, it is now, also, officially the longest.

We have so far successfully carried the story in the longest podcast series to date to August 1914, and the beginning of World War I. Now of course, nobody knew at the time that it would be called World War I, nor even that in the immediate aftermath of this conflict, it would be referred to as the Great War. And indeed, the first and most important thing to understand about the nature of World War I is that everybody walked into the conflict in August 1914 believing that it would all surely be over by Christmas.

In the hundred odd years since the Congress of Vienna finally put 23 years of nonstop great power conflict to bed, wars were typically single season affairs, and rarely lasted longer than a single calendar year. Armies marched out, waged a campaign, fought a battle or two, and then hammered out a treaty based on the result. And there were exceptions to this, but this was generally the style of warfare that had rained inside the living memory of all the leaders of Europe, and it naturally colored their assumptions in the summer of 1914. Now of course there were plenty of prominent voices inside every republic and monarchy and empire saying, ah, I think this one might be a little different and in a very bad way, but in the main, planning, preparations, expectations revolved around the assumption that 20th century warfare would just be more of the same: mobilize fast, strike first, knock out your opponent, then drive a hard bargain in the peace talks. Everyone will be home by Christmas.

Now in the interest of massively oversimplifying this, the principal axis upon which the whole insane apparatus of World War I hinged was Germany on one side, and France and Russia on the other. Ever since France and Russia aligned in 1794, they had been planning how to wage a two front war against Germany. And during that same period, Germany had been trying to figure out how to avoid a two front war at all costs. And this is how we get to the famous Schlieffen Plan. The basic assumption of German war planners was that they could not sustain or win a two front war. So they concluded that the best thing to do would be to mobilize rapidly on their western front, invade France, and knock them out of the war before the slow moving Russians even got their boots on. So by the time the Russians were actually ready to fight, the French would be neutralized, and the Germans could turn and focus entirely on their eastern front. And so this is what they tried to do. And if you know even a little bit about the origins of World War I, you know that the Schlieffen Plan involved Germany invading France through Belgium, even though Belgian neutrality had been on the books since 1839. When the Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan, that is what gave the British the official diplomatic reason they needed to join the war on the side of France and Russia.

But while Germany versus France and Russia was the principle axis of World War I. It was far from the only axis, far, far, far from the only axis. The Russians themselves faced a multi-front war: a northwest front against Germany, a southwestern front against Austria-Hungary, and a southern front against the Ottoman Turks, who joined the central powers in August 1914. Now if the Russians acted in a strictly self-interested way, their best plan was to launch a strong offensive against the weaker Austria-Hungary on their southwestern front, while being satisfied to merely hold the defensive line in the northwest against the Germans. Then once they knocked Austria- Hungary out, they would be free to close in on a now isolated Germany from both the east and the south. But the French, not incorrectly, told their Russian allies, look, we need you to exert heavy pressure on the Germans right from the start, or they will throw everything at us and we will lose. So the Russians agreed that it was in the best interest of the entire allied effort for the Russians to advance both in the northwest and southwest simultaneously. And that is what they did at the beginning of the war.

Now sometimes you see the Russians portrayed as being backwards and inept at the beginning of World War I, but they had been working very hard to reform and overhaul their military in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, and especially since the Bosnian crisis of 1908. And though the Russian timeline aimed for them to be really totally ready for a great power war in 1917, it’s not like they were hopelessly third rate blunderers who were in over their heads in 1914. Now I’m following here Norman Stone’s classic account of the eastern front, but he makes a very good case that Russia was ready for war. In the seven or eight years leading up to 1914, they had been outspending Germany on their military; they had been stockpiling weapons and ammunition; they had reorganized their active duty troops and their reserve army; they built out their railroads and dramatically improve their mobilization speed and efficiency; and when they marched out to war, they could be confident that they would command numerically superior forces on every front. Now the Russians may not have been at maximum readiness, but they were certainly more ready than most people then or now gave them credit for.

Then when things did get going in August 1914, all this planning and preparation paid off. The Russians did not fumble, stumble, or face plant out of the gate. Mobilization actually went faster and smoother than expected. They got all their men called up and moving to their assigned armies, they successfully gathered and transported the weapons and ammunition and cavalry horses and food and supplies and everything else that they were going to need to fight a war and all of it according to plan. There was a checklist, and there were timetables, and they were hitting their marks. They certainly moved with much more competent swiftness than the central powers expected, and it was about to throw the Germans completely off balance and nearly knock Austria-Hungary out of the war.

So I’m not going to do a play-by-play of the opening campaigns of World War I here, they are incredibly complicated. And if you want that, there’s a very nice podcast out there — it’s it’s finished now, but you can still get it, called The Great War, that will walk you through all of this in detail. But for the Russians, the first phase of World War I was defined by victories against Austria-Hungary in the southwest and defeat to Germany in the northwest. Now down south, they invaded a region of the Austro-Hungarian empire called Galicia, which is now Western Ukraine-ish, Southern Poland-ish. Meanwhile, up in the Northwest, two Russian armies invaded East Prussia and advanced parallel to each other, aiming to link up and advance on Berlin.

In a strategic sense, the invasion of East Prussia was a success. It did in fact tie the Germans down in the east, and give the French the breathing room they needed to fend off the German invasion. But after being initially pushed back, the Germans refound their footing in the east and launched a brutal counter attack against the Russians. They isolated, surrounded, and destroyed the Russian Second Army at the Tannenberg Forest, and then they drove the Russian First Army back a few weeks later in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. So by September, the Russian line looked a lot like a yin yang symbol, pulled back in the north and bulging out in the south.

But the story of the opening round of World War I, for all sides, was not so much this or that battlefield victory or defeat, but the appalling costs to victors and vanquished alike. The casualty numbers of World War I are stomach churning, and this is when the true nature of the war reveals itself, where 19th century mentalities were meeting 20th century industrial technology. All the combatants had the technological ability to efficiently mobilize millions of men, and the technological ability — like artillery and machine guns — to efficiently mow those millions of men down. So for the Russians, the battle of the Tannenberg Forest, which lasted for just a couple of days, cost them 78,000 killed or wounded, and another 92,000 captured. Only 10,000 troops from the Russian Second Army managed to escape this. At the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September, it was 70,000 killed or wounded with 30 or 40,000 taken prisoner. The successful Russian invasion of Galicia cost them 250,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action. These are almost unfathomably large numbers. And again, we are talking about just the opening weeks of the war, and just for one of the belligerents. When the French attacked the Germans at the Marne in this same September of 1914, it led to half a million battlefield casualties and losses on both sides over just a few days.

These shocking casualty rates were typically the result of either infantry and cavalry charges heading into defensive lines protected by heavy machine guns, or people being blasted to smithereens thanks to the increased range and accuracy of modern artillery. It led everyone to rethink their tactics. Mostly. Kind of. Eventually. But at least for starters, the idea that they could continue to wage a campaign of speed and nobility gave way to the tactical superiority of fortified defenses. So trenches were dug to absorb the impact of artillery, lines were solidified and became calcified. As Christmas 1914 approached, it was very clear to all sides that they were literally entrenching themselves for a long war of attrition, and nobody was coming home anytime soon.

The reality of this was especially hard on Russia. They were simply not equipped to fight a long war of attrition. They may have laid in huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, but now those stockpiles had been all used up, and they did not have a plan for how to make more. They didn’t think they would ever need to make more. And that was true of practically everything: shells and ammunition and rifles and boots and coats. They couldn’t produce or deliver the food they needed. In late 1914, the Russian Army in the southwest had advanced up into the Carpathian Mountains and they were plenty ready to descend down onto the Hungarian plane, but they had to stop short for a variety of logistical reasons, not the least that they were up in the mountains in the middle of winter, and they did not have boots or coats or ammunition.

This is when the heavy load, the heavy burden of abject leadership failures, starts to sink Russia. Despite successfully executing their pre-war plans, they did not adapt once the war itself blew up all the assumptions that those prewar plans were based on. Senior officers continued to be obsessively focused with cavalry operations, which required using the railroads to transport tons of horses, and the necessary food to feed those horses, which used up critical rail car space that could have been used for more important things — like practically anything, because cavalry charges were now just suicide missions by another name. They also continued to obsess about defending a string of defensive fortresses on their western frontier. These fortresses continued to be manned by huge garrisons, who were then not out on the front lines trying to win the war, and they were jam packed with artillery, ammunition, and supplies that could have been used at the front, but the Russian senior officers wanted to use them to defend these fortresses. Now just weeks into World War I, the reality of 20th century warfare had revealed these fortresses to be completely obsolete. They revealed cavalry to be completely obsolete. But the Russian senior commanders would not give up their fixation with cavalry and fortresses until long after the disastrous results of this fixation, were plain to see.

The other huge leadership problem was that there was no clear unified leadership. There were divisions, fault lines, and rivalries all over the senior command. The Ministry of War and the Supreme Army Headquarters were almost reflexively at odds with each other and had been for years. The tsar appointed senior commanders based on little more than personal favor or personal loyalty. The supreme commander of the whole war, for example, was the tsar’s cousin. Grand Duke Nikolai, who had never fought a battle in his life. The grand duke’s chief of staff was an imperial guard who Nicholas happened to quite like, and so that’s why he got the job. And then, thanks to both personal rivalries and terrible communications, the various front commanders out there just seem to do their own thing when and how they wanted, often clutching a handful of contradictory orders and plans coming from the several different chains of command floating around out there.

One general said out on the front that everything was order, counter-order, and disorder. And through all of this, only a few senior commanders even grasp the reality of the war they were supposedly leading. Most of them stayed back in the rear in comfortable lodgings with their wives and families, out of danger, plenty warm, and very well fed. They did not know and they did not care about the hardships endured by the rank and file, and the general consensus, especially among the officers coming out of the old nobility, was that all these defeats were simply the results of the troops being too soft and too cowardly.

Now, as you can imagine, morale in the Russian army plummeted among the rank and file. `The first levy of soldiers called up to fight in the initial battles were mostly peasants who could barely articulate why they were fighting a war in the first place. The pan-Slavic commitment to the Serbs turned out to be an obsession mostly centered among the intellectuals and journalists. The vast majority of Russians did not know who the Serbs were, let alone why they had to risk their lives on behalf of the Serbs. Then, they would get sent off to get killed or maimed in these great industrial slaughterhouses that we fancifully called battlefields, and then, when only a handful of them managed to actually make it back safely, they would be dressed down by their officers for being cowards. The trauma of the early battles was insane, mass death and dismemberment doled out by the enemy, utter disdain and cruel indifference doled out by their own officers.

All of the casualties and losses and August and September 1914 necessitated calling up additional reserves that had never really been factored into the war planning, and whose training had been eliminated as a cost cutting measure. These troops entered the war completely unprepared, and now bearing the brunt of the massive supply shortages. They found themselves hungry, freezing, and unarmed, and feeling abandoned, abused, and tortured by their leaders. Over the winter of 1914-1915 morale was horrible. Desertions skyrocketed, and all the while the senior officers responded by imposing strict discipline and corporal punishment, literally embracing the old joke line about how beatings will continue until morale improves. Meanwhile, operating in between the rank and file and the senior leadership were a new batch of middle ranking officers who were promoted up from below to replace the tens of thousands of lieutenants and captains who had been blown to pieces back in August and September. These newly promoted officers not only had way more troops to keep in line than anyone could have reasonably expected them to manage, but also their sympathies were entirely with the men and against the aristocratic officer class. And small spoiler alert, this new cohort of officers will be the leaders of the mutinies that will help overthrow the tsar.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, frustration mounted. When the war began in August 1914, nearly everyone did the whole rally ’round the flag routine. Just like in the Russo-Japanese War, civic leaders, business leaders, and professionals of every shape and size wanted to contribute however they could. The zemstvos once again became self-organizing engines, mobilizing doctors and nurses and setting up hospitals. They formed committees to coordinate and produce the supplies the military needed. Everyone was happily pitching in and doing their part. Then roundabout September and October, their efforts took on a more desperate and vital energy. It became clear the official state apparatus did not have a plan for how to meet the ongoing needs of either of the soldiers or the civilian population. Meeting those needs was going to come down to voluntary, private, and unofficial efforts. The zemstvos became clearinghouses for nearly all wartime logistical operations, and they once again unified at the national level into a new zemstvo union, chaired by the old liberal noble, Prince Lvov.

These people worked around the clock with a patriotic and tireless zeal to do the work the government did not seem capable of doing or interested in doing. They would soon be begging the government to recognize them in some kind of official capacity, for the tsar to toss out his incompetent government and rely on them instead. These people were not unpatriotic or disloyal; far from it. They were in fact super patriotic and driven by a sense of national civic spirit. But instead of embracing them, Nicholas kept them at arms length. The fear that was shared by Nicholas and Alexandra and their inner circle of advisors, including Rasputin, was that the zemstvo men were trying to use the war to revive constitutional government, and bind the tsar to their vision of a liberal Russia, where they ruled, and the tsar merely reigned. By focusing on the threat he felt these people pose to him, and Nicholas’s fears of making liberal concessions, the tsar did not co-op them into his government, which turned potentially valuable allies into some of his harshest and most powerful critics, especially as it became obvious that they were doing far more to win the war than he was.

The hard and demoralizing winter of 1914-1915 then rolled seamlessly into the utterly disastrous spring of 1915. The German high command concluded that their western front against the French and British was an unbreakable stalemate, and that a major offensive campaign in the east was probably their only clear path to victory. In May 1915, they began a massive offensive, which caught the Russians off guard. The Russians were under-supplied, underequipped, and totally unprepared for this. There was practically not any real fighting to speak of here, because the Russians were basically out of ammunition. And for example, of the 220,000 troops in the Russian Third Army, only about 40,000 remained intact and days later. And there are stories from these battles about how the second wave of troops that would be sent out into a battle would be sent out unarmed. They were simply instructed to pick up the rifle of somebody else who had died already. This is insane. This is horrifying stuff. The Russian army was driven back with heavy casualties.

In response to this potentially fatal breakthrough, the Russian high command ordered a general retreat. They told all their forces to fall back, and they would collectively attempt to redraw a line and make a new stand. They hoped and prayed that maybe they would be able to recreate the great patriotic effort of 1812, where a scorched earth retreat and the steadfast resolve of the men and the officers had eventually defeated Napoleon. But there was no real plan to make another 1812 happen, it was just kind of a hope they had. The general retreat, which history has now dubbed the Great Retreat, was all confusion and panic and disorder. There was mass looting and desertion and destruction. Buildings, depots, bridges, and crops were destroyed haphazardly and in seemingly random uncoordinated and pointless waste. Hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees were set in motion, with no provisions made to help or handle them, which would turn into another task for the leaders of the zemstvo. A s they all retreated, they had to abandon that string of fortresses the senior officers had deemed so important just a couple of months earlier. All of them were packed full of vital supplies and guns and ammunition that had to be abandoned or destroyed.

The human cost of the Great Retreat was enormous. In military terms alone, it cost the Russians something like 2 million men. 500,000 dead, another 500,000 wounded, and a cool million surrendering at various points between May and August 1915. Desertions of course skyrocketed as men retreated, and then just disappeared. Now, just to look ahead a little bit, the Russians do regroup, and they do form a new defensive line, and the German advance does get bogged down on the eastern front and resettle along lines that will remain basically static until 1917. But it was in the midst of the Great Retreat that everyone started looking at the tsar, his ministers, his lackeys, his cronies, and thinking, my god, these guys are screwing this all up.

Now the thing that was really driving people nuts was that it didn’t have to be this way. One of the big things causing the critical shortage of shells, for example, was not that Russian industry did not have the capacity to produce the shells, but that contracts were going exclusively to friends and cronies of the Romanovs or government ministers. In June of 1915, as the debacle of the Great Retreat unfolded, the government formed a special council for artillery supply, but it was composed almost entirely of friends in the government in Petrograd. Which, as soon as I say that, I realize, I forgot to mention that in a fit of acute war fever, the tsar decided to officially rename St. Petersburg Petrograd to make it sound less German and more Russian. Because, you know, that’s the kind of thing you do when you get into a war — sauerkraut becomes liberty cabbage, french fries become freedom fries. So yeah, we’re going to start calling it Petrograd, now just FYI. Anyway, the famous Putilov Ironworks, which you’ll recall were the epicenter of the revolution of 1905, received more than a hundred million rubles worth of orders for shells, while charging the government six times the normal rate.

Now here’s the thing: the Putilov Ironworks did not have the capacity to meet this order, and in the end they did not meet the order. And in fact, Putilov, the owner of the Putilov Ironworks, used the money he got from the government to prop up his other failing enterprises, until the whole thing collapsed into a heap of bankruptcy in 1916. Meanwhile, other factory owners, less well connected factory owners, especially in Moscow, complained that their factories were sitting idle in the midst of wartime emergency. With massive shortages of nearly everything, they were struggling to keep their doors open because they were not getting any orders or any contracts. In July of 1915, some of these Moscow leaders got together and organized something called the War Industries Committee, and it was made up of a lot of liberal critics of the autocratic regime, who believed that the economic health of Russia and the national war effort were being stymied by the current tsarist leadership and frankly, the whole system. And another little spoiler alert: when a provisional government is formed in the wake of the February revolution, something like half its members come from the War Industries Committee.

Now the tsar’s response to this was first to placate his critics, and then make arguably the biggest mistake of his life. In June 1915, he sacked some of the most conservative and reactionary ministers he had, and then in July of 1915, under heavy public pressure, he recalled the Duma to session. And when the Duma came back into session, about two thirds of the delegates promptly formed a patriotic progressive block, ranging from the moderate right to the moderate left, under the guidance of the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov, whose goal here would be twofold: first, win the war and two, prevent a revolution. The delegates of the recalled Duma were very concerned that military defeats, strikes, demoralization and social unrest were all on the upswing, and that if they didn’t get a handle on things, the whole empire was going to blow up. They begged the tsar to appoint a new slate of ministers that they approved of, competent ministers who could win the war, and by extension, prevent a revolution.

But instead of leaning on this patriotic bloc who were trying to win the war and prevent a revolution, Nicholas got spooked and ran in the other direction. Encouraged by Alexandra, who was already becoming a massive political liability, Nicholas decided to go all in on autocracy. With the war effort failing, he would take over as supreme commander of the war. He would go to the front and he would personally lead his people to victory. Now was not the time to sit back and let these ambitious liberals and business leaders take over, but to prove that the system worked. That God was right, and that he, Nicholas, was still the man for the job.

The tsar’s decision to take over a supreme commander of the war turned out to be a huge mistake. Nicholas was not a soldier, and could provide nothing in the way of strategic vision or leadership or advice, and no matter what, he was just going to have to defer to whatever the generals told him. But okay, maybe he could be a morale boosting figurehead. Everyone likes it when the boss is out there sharing hardships, you know, meeting and encouraging people face to face, showing that he’s with them. With morale plummeting, this would have been a not inconsequential contribution Nicholas could have made to the war effort. But the tsar had spent his life in a bubble. He had only rarely met with, like, real people. The tsar was visibly uneasy around the soldiers that he met, he was a weak and nervous public speaker, and he certainly never even pretended to share their hardships.

But that was only half the problem with Nicholas becoming supreme commander. The other half, which we will talk a lot more about next week, was that when Nicholas went to the front, Alexandra was left alone in Petrograd, and she became the defacto political leader of Russia on the homefront. Now in deeper than ever with Rasputin, Alexandra would turn out to be a terrible leader, who made terrible decisions. Now, out in the streets, whispers were that her German-ness made her sympathetic to Germany and possibly even treasonous, but I don’t think that bit is fair. I don’t think she was actively trying to help Germany when the war. It’s just that when she started making personnel decisions, naming and removing government ministers — with Nicholas’s blessing of course — her sole criteria was how loyal they were to her family. Her response to the War Industries Committee in Moscow was to gripe that they were trying to take over the empire, and she wrote to Nicholas saying things like, ah, I just wish we could hang these people. Alexandra is going to turn out to be a disaster for Russia and a disaster for her family, there’s just no way to sugarcoat that.

Next week, we will talk all about this, as the conflicts and tensions, both at home on the war front grow and grow. Now Russia was not knocked out of the war by the Great Retreat — they did regroup, they did hold the line — and in 1916 would launch a massive and successful counter-attack their own. The truth that was now dawning across Russia was that Russian society, the Russian economy, the Russian military were capable of winning the war. It’s just that the biggest obstacle to victory was the tsar, his wife, and their friends.

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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.

 

 

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So we’re finishing up with Rasputin today, but if you want to learn way, way, way more, I recommend Rasputin faith power and the Twilight of the czars by Douglas Smith, which was my main source for most of the stuff. He covers pretty much everything you would want to know about Rasputin and more. I mean, it’s 33 hours long, so don’t expect to walk away feeling like something got skipped or skimmed over because trust me nothing was skipped or skimmed over as an audible member, you will get one credit every month.

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Episode 10:51: Our Friend

Welcome to the third installment of what was supposed to be a single episode about Rasputin and his relationship with the imperial family, but which became three mini-episodes thanks to my recent health adventures. Um, as I wrote this episode, I was propped up in bed, in between kidney stone procedures. The next one is scheduled for this coming Friday, April 16th, after which we almost immediately hop on a plane and fly home on Sunday, April 18. So, there will be an episode that drops that day on Sunday, April 18th, but it will have nothing to do with the Russian Revolution. Instead, it’ll be a little standalone reflection called The Streets of Paris, a few episodic slices of life from living here between 2018 and 2021 that connect back to scenes from our previous series on the various French revolutions, right, what it was like to be in the middle of Parisian streets, crammed with angry protestors, or streets crammed with jubilant crowds, or streets as empty and silent as a post-apocalyptic fantasy. After that, I will take two weeks off to adjust to moving back to the United States, and then we’ll come back to the launch World War I.

So last week we got as far as Rasputin’s first introduction to the imperial family in November 1905, Nicholas and Alexander took a shine to the peasant holy man, but it’s not like he immediately moved into the palace. Over the course of the next several years, he regularly bounced back and forth between St. Petersburg and his home village in Siberia, developing and cultivating his reputation on both sides of the Ural mountains. So after the first meeting between Rasputin and the imperial family in late 1905, he did not actually see them again until July 1906, and then after that, not again until October 1906. Now in between this, he sent various letters and salutations and they came to think rather highly of him, but his movement into the inner circle was slow and steady, not sudden and all at once.

Rasputin really started becoming a recognizable fixture in the imperial circle in the spring of 1907, not just in St. Petersburg high society, but out on the outskirts of town, in the imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo. In particular, he won over a young woman named Anna Vyrubova, who had become an intimate personal friend of Alexandra. About a decade younger than the empress, Anna served as a close friend and protege and devoutly loyal supporter. She was invited to take up residence in a home adjacent to the main imperial palace and very much inside the imperial bubble. An unhappy marriage to an unhappy husband led Anna to seek spiritual solace with the apparently holy Rasputin, and she became one of his most fervent supporters in the inner circle. Many of the meetings between Rasputin and Nicholas and Alexandra physically took place inside Anna’s house.

Rasputin was successful enough at conquering St. Petersburg high society and earning special attention and favors from the imperial family that by the fall of 1907, he was able to buy a fine two story house on the main street of his home village. He was fast transitioning from charismatic, eccentric to well-connected figure with powerful friends and allies. On this particular trip home in the fall of 1907, Rasputin also arrived with four devoutly loyal female supporters who all took up residence with him and Rasputin’s wife and children. This led to much speculation and gossip about his relationship with these women. Rasputin had a well-documented habit of publicly hugging and kissing women in ways that were well outside what would be considered decent. He was also known to regularly take mixed gender trips to the bath, which was considered irregular and indecent. Local complaints led local church authorities to investigate them and interview everyone in Rasputin’s little circle over the winter of 1907-1908, which concluded that he was sitting right on the line. He wasn’t necessarily a heretic and hadn’t done anything illegal, but he was probably up to no good.

Local concern out on the far flung periphery of the empire was matched by concern in the inner circle of the empire. When Rasputin was in St. Petersburg, he made increasingly familiar calls on the imperial family, who now welcomed him with eager and open arms. The tsar’s sister Olga was shocked to discover Rasputin was allowed to linger in the family’s private chambers even after the children had changed into their nightgowns. Right around this same time, Olga found herself alone with Rasputin at a little evening soiree and was extremely put off by his advances. He moved over to her real close and started caressing her while they talked, causing her to get up and leave the room.

But though Olga was disturbed by Rasputin’s behavior, shortly after these incidents, the then three-year-old Aleksei fell and hurt his leg, causing all kinds of painful internal bleeding. The doctors could do nothing, but the family called Rasputin and he came over and he prayed over the toddler and in the morning, Aleksei was better. Olga found Rasputin personally distasteful, but after this was convinced that he had some kind of healing ability that could not be denied, and it was this place, as the comforter and healer of the tsarevitch that Rasputin’s place became secure practically no matter what he did or what stories were told about him.

So we should talk about this for a second, because if you are disinclined to believe Rasputin had the ability to literally ask God to heal the sick and God listened, we do have to wonder what’s going on here. Now, Robert Massey’s biography of Nicholas and Alexander spent a lot of time on this question, and the basic takeaway is that a hemophiliac recovering from an incident requires an environment of peace, calm and serenity. You got to eliminate physical jostling and emotional stress to allow extremely tentative and fragile blood clots to form. Now both Rasputin skeptics and his supporters all report that the family believed in him enough that his prayers and his presence created that environment. It also led them to have faith in recovery outside the ministrations of the doctors, which just so happened to be full of exactly the kind of poking and prodding that disrupted the healing process. So again, if you are disinclined to believe a religious explanation, what you might say is that Rasputin showed up and allowed this tsarevitch’s body to heal itself. But Rasputin did provide a kind of faith that allowed Aleksei’s body to accomplish the work it needed to accomplish. There is also some evidence that he intervened to prevent the administration of aspirin as a pain reliever, which thins the blood and was doing far more harm than good. But whatever the explicit mix of factors, Nicholas and especially Alexandra became convinced Rasputin could relieve their little son’s misery, and thus their own misery. And even a skeptic like Olga, who did not like Rasputin personally, could not deny the apparently miraculous results he achieved.

Outside the inner circle though, Rasputin ingratiating himself with the imperial family was a cause for concern. Plenty of people believed he was just a smooth talking charlatan whose ultimate intentions were not known. I mean, we can’t forget that this is all taking place against a backdrop of massive social revolution. Rasputin was an unknown and potentially destabilizing element and maybe even some kind of deep cover subversive revolutionary himself. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Okhrana opened a file on him and kept him under near constant surveillance and shared their findings with prime Minister Stolypin. Their basic conclusion was that Rasputin was a womanizing con artist who should be kept as far away from the tsar as possible. Stolypin took this assessment to Nicholas who promised to never see Rasputin again, but who then just kept right on seeing Rasputin. In any fight between Stolypin and Rasputin for the ear of the tsar, Rasputin was always going to win, because he was happy to tell Nicholas what he wanted to hear, and Stolypin was always telling the tsar things he didn’t want to hear.

Now this set the pattern for the next several years: Nicholas and Alexander ever defending Rasputin, and often referring to him simply as “our friend” from enemies and slanderers who wanted to destroy him for their own sinister reasons. Outside the imperial bubble, their support for him was inexplicable, because even well-connected people did not understand the true nature of Aleksei’s hemophilia. and so they chalked it all up to Rasputin’s manipulative hypnosis or the carnal lusts of the empress. The Tsar’s personal valet routinely fed information to the gossipy salons of high society that Rasputin was around all the time, coming in through the back door, that he was often alone with the empress and overly familiar with the children. It led to widespread rumors of affairs, and worse.

The and worse really started coalescing in 1909, as early supporters in society and in the church grew disenchanted with Rasputin and turned on him. The manipulative way he treated vulnerable women, the overly physical way he pawed at everyone in sight led to stories of orgies and debauchery, and then, inevitably, extremely credible accusations of rape.

The rape accusations came from, among other places, a nun at a convent he visited, two of his early young female admirers, another from the personal governess of the tsarevich. From the distance of a hundred years, the limited amount of evidence available, and the filter of Rasputin’s many enemies, makes it hard to say which of these allegations are true, and which were invented. But after everything that I have read, I am more than comfortable saying the following: one, rasputin was a casual sex pest. He was a creep; two, he took sexual advantage of vulnerable young women; and three, he raped at least several women. So even after clearing out all the obvious fabrications and exaggerations and lies, what we’re left with is more than enough to conclude that Rasputin was guilty many times over of sexual assault and rape.

The stories of his immoral behavior and the various rape allegations against him became well-known in society by 1909 and 1910, and they were a huge part of the reason his early supporters inside of the church turned on him. But Alexandra refused to believe any of it. She dismissed all of it as lies and slanders against our friend, who was a man of deep and loving faith, nothing more. People just didn’t understand him because they could not understand someone who was touched by God. And Rasputin was smart enough to frame all of this as a battle between god and the devil, where he was god, and the minions of the devil were out to get him. The imperial family were already in a state of siege politically, and this became just one more facet of that siege mentality, that demons and Jews and atheists were trying to destroy all that was good and holy on earth.

The connection between this personal sense of siege and the political sense of siege met in the spring of 1910 as the free press finally got ahold of the story that this guy Rasputin was hanging around the imperial family and probably doing horrible things. The Moscow Gazette printed a series of salacious articles describing all manner of Rasputin’s debauchery. When the tsar called in Stolypin to address this PR crisis, it was not, let’s figure out what to do with Rasputin, it was, how do we shut down the free press? Stolypin said, they’re not printing anything illegal so I can’t really arrest anybody or shut down any newspapers, but the tsar still ordered him to lean on editors and newspapers to stop talking about his friend, and Stolypin carried out his orders, and leaned on editors to stop talking about it.

But even after trying to shut down the public debate about Rasputin, Stolypin still tried personally to get rid of him. In February 1911, he called Rasputin in for a personal meeting and presented a damning dossier describing Rasputin’s known activities all from various eyewitness statements and suggested Rasputin leave St. Petersburg and never come back.

Now Rasputin did decide that this was coincidentally a good time to suddenly make a prolonged pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but not before indicating to Alexandra that Stolypin was out to get him, which only helped turn the empress against the prime minister rather than open her eyes to what Rasputin was up to. Stolypin’s falling out with the imperial family and his subsequently unmourned assassination was at least partly due to his hostility to Rasputin.

Rasputin, of course, outlasted Stolypin, and he weathered this initial public storm set against him, but then a truly miraculous incident in 1912 basically foreclosed anyone’s ability to purge him from the imperial bubble. While the imperial family was on vacation in the fall of 1912, eight year old Aleksei fell getting into a boat and injured his leg. But luckily, it didn’t seem so bad at first. But then a few weeks later, the family was out at a Polish hunting lodge, and Alexandra and Aleksei went for a carriage ride. The jostling aggravated the previous injury and he started complaining of pain in his groin and his abdomen. When they got home, he immediately went to bed, and it quickly became the worst and most life-threatening episode of his young life.

He didn’t get better. Doctors raced from St. Petersburg to the tsarevitch as he only got worse and never better. Alexandra maintained a nearly sleepless vigil for a week and a half, while Nicholas maintained the pretense that all was fine and well for the throngs of visitors and attendants who were present at the lodge, all of the wild Aleksei lay in his bed in continuous pain. And the descriptions of this are heartwrenching: he was asking his mother, why don’t you help me, he was asking her if the pain would stop if he died. And pretty soon everyone, the boy included, believed he was dying.

Eventually word started leaking and the public was notified that the tsarevitch was gravely ill. There were public vigils and prayers. On the 10th day after taking to his bed, he seemed to be slipping. They gave him his last rites. And on this last night, Alexandra asked her friend Anna to contact Rasputin over telegraph. He cabled back almost immediately: “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” he said, “Do not be sad. The little boy will not die. Do not let the doctors torment him too much.”

Alexandra was relieved to hear this. And the next day, Aleksei woke up alive. And then slowly, miraculously, and unaccountably, started getting better. Whether it was coincidence or the soothing comfort of being promised that all would be well, or whether the empress insisted the doctors leave her son alone and that did the trick, there seemed to be some kind of causal link between Rasputin’s cable and the recovery. At least in Alexandra’s mind. Alekesi did recover. He did not die. And Rasputin’s place at the side of the imperial family was secure. He would be right there to comfort and guide them and soothe them as they entered into a national crisis that made the Revolution of 1905 look like child’s play: World War I.

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Episode 10.49: The Tsarevich

Well, hello friends. You may have noticed this week’s episode is a bit shorter than usual. That is going to be true for the next few weeks, because guess what, my kidney stone drama has returned. Everything I went through last autumn is now being gone through again, except this time it’s my left side rather than my right side. I am okay at the moment. I’m just biding my time on painkillers, but the amount of legwork I’ve had to do to move towards aranging the surgical resolution to all of this has cut into my work time quite a bit. But I am moving forward, uh, I have a procedure scheduled for this Friday, april 2nd, that’s just a couple of days from now, and then a second one two weeks after that on April the 16th, because it’s a two-step procedure

. So, that’s one thing that’s going on. The absolutely hilarious wrinkle is that with Hero of Two Worlds now finished –and it is finished — our time in France is finished. It has been great, but now it’s time to move back home. Now this has been coming for a while, I just haven’t said anything about it yet, but everything is arranged and the plane tickets are bought and locked in and they are bought and locked in for April 18th. So if you do the math, that means that the schedule for the surgeries is going to mean that I’m practically going directly from a hospital bed to an airplane, which, you know, gee whiz, that will be tons of fun. So basically what’s happening with me is that we have just a few weeks left in France, I have a huge list of things to do, and my body has decided to throw onto that to-do list, have multiple surgical procedures, including all requisite consultations, lab tests, and scans that go along with it. Now, going through all of this at the end of last year was quite a miserable ordeal, but was thus a character building experience, because as you all know, according to Calvin’s dad, being miserable builds character. But my friends, I have to tell you, I find the prospect of doing it all again gratuitous and unnecessary. Like, I’ve had this character building experience, I do not need to do it again, especially not right now three weeks before I’m leaving France forever. But the gods do not seem interested in my opinion, and so I will do it all again.

Now, what will the impact on the show be? What are the implications of this for all of you? Well, I was already going to take two weeks off at the end of April and the beginning of May to account for moving back to the United States and getting resettled. But I still have three more new episodes scheduled for April 4th, April 11th, and April 18 that do need to be published to meet some advertising obligations that I frankly cannot afford not to meet. So I’m going to navigate all this by breaking the material up into much smaller bits just to make it more manageable for me, so what would normally be covered in one episode or two episodes will be covered in multiple episodes. So, this week we were supposed to introduce, he-whose-name-you-already-know, but that part was meant to come after I did the requisite explanation for why he-whose-name-you-already-know even shows up in the first place.

So, this is how we break up the material. Today, I’m going to talk about the plight of Alexei Romanov, tsarevich of Russia, and next week we will do he-whose-name-you-already-know, and it’s Rasputin. I mean, it’s Rasputin. But, uh, let’s get on with this, because as soon as I’m done recording, I’m getting on a train to go meet with an anesthesiologist.

After Nicholas and Alexandra got married in 1894, they started producing a fine healthy batch of children on a two-year clockwork cycle. Their first daughter Olga was born in 1895, and Tatyana in 1897, Maria in 1899, and Anastasia in 1901. The four daughters grew up loving and loved by their parents. They also grew up loving and loved by each other. They were very close in age, and due to the particularly bubble-like world they inhabited, which was even more bubble like than other European royal families, they were around each other far more than they were allowed to be around anyone else their own age. Their bond was tight enough that correspondence emanating from their little world was often signed OTMA, for Olga Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia, as they were practically just one collective entity. They also shared an odd upbringing defined by spartan luxury. On the one hand, they were raised in palaces and surrounded by enormous wealth and privilege, but Nicholas insisted on the same kind of Russian upbringing that had been imposed on him by his father: the girls slept on camp beds with no pillows, there was little decoration or ornamentation in their rooms, and they started each day with a freezing cold bath.

Though the growing Romanov family loved each other, as the years passed, there was a little problem. The tsar did not yet have a male heir. This was despite all of the praying that the devout Nicholas and the especially devout Alexandra could muster. So it did finally seem like a god given blessing when Alexandra finally gave birth to a son in the summer of 1904. As this blessed event occurred just as all the news coming out of the war in the far east was bad, and the swirling domestic forces that were about to coalesce into the Revolution of 1905 were swirling, Nicholas said, “there are no words to thank god for sending us this comfort in a time of sore trials.” Alexandra herself breathe a massive sigh of relief as the nearly decade long burden of not having given birth to a boy was finally lifted, so she could finally relax.

The little baby boy was named Alexei, and the newborn tsarevich could count among his godparents his great grandfather, King Christian the Ninth of Denmark, his great uncle, King Edward the Seventh of the United Kingdom, who everybody called Uncle Bertie, and older once removed cousins the Prince of Wales, aka the future King George the Fifth and Kaiser Wilheim, aka Cousin Willy. And before we move on, I just gotta give it to the old conservative royalists out there because they were totally right that one of the advantages of having all of these royal and imperial families related to each other is that disputes between their countries could obviously just be worked out at the family dinner table, totally precluding the possibility of their respective kingdoms and empires falling into a massive war of suicidal self-destruction. The vast intermarriage of these royal houses in the 19th century paved the way for the 20th century, which as we all know is a period of prolonged peace, harmony, and good will between them.

But there was a downside to all of this interrelation, and the specific downside we need to talk about today is hemophilia. At the dawn of the 20th century, the royal houses of Europe were rife with hemophilia. Thanks to their shared link to Queen Victoria, who was known as the grandmother of Europe. Victoria apparently had a spontaneous gene mutation that made her a carrier for hemophilia, which is a hereditary trait subsequently carried by women, but expressed in men. The disorder was already well-known in the medical community, and understood for decades to be a result of genetic inheritance. So, when Victoria gave birth to nine children who subsequently produced 42 grandchildren, who all went out there and married into the various royal houses of Europe, they took hemophilia with them. One of Victoria’s sons Leopold turned out to be a hemophiliac, and two of her daughters, Alice and Beatrice, turned out to be carriers. Alice then passed the gene along to one of her sons, who subsequently died in childhood of a hemorrhage, and two of her daughters. Irene and Alexandra, now empress of Russia. By the time Alexandra gave birth to Alexei in 1904, hemophilia was spread all throughout the royal houses of Europe, and now it came to Russia.

The first sign of hemophilia in the tsarevich came right away when they snipped the umbilical cord and it just kept bleeding. Then six weeks later, the little babies navel presented even more bleeding. And as hemophilia was known, it caused immediate concern in the family, and Alexei was closely monitored as he grew up. And their early concern transitioned to full blown acceptance, as everybody watched the simple falls of the toddler produced scary blotches and bruises. The main concern here was not simple scrapes and cuts, but those bruises, which indicated internal bleeding. Internal bleeding that caused discomfort, pain and might lead directly to his death. When little Alexei was three, he smacked his face and his eyes swelled shut. Sometimes there would hardly even seem to be any cause at all; he would just wake up complaining that his arm or his leg didn’t work properly as blood had seeped painfully into his joints. After the hemophilia diagnosis became unavoidable, the imperial family elected to hide the condition as much as possible and keep it a strict family secret.

It eventually came to be understood in public and in the global presses that something was amiss with the heir to the Russian throne, that he had some kind of recurring medical issue, but nobody knew exactly what. Even the family’s French tutor, who taught the imperial daughters and who was around the household frequently by 1906, was kept in the dark for many years, and not told why Alexei would take to his bed for weeks at a time, and why his sisters would be so downcast as a result.

The cloud of love, worry, fear and dread led Alexei to have a very uneven and isolated childhood. On the one hand, he had to be monitored round the clock by nurses, and then, when he was five, the family assigned him two trusted sailors who worked on the imperial yacht, who could keep a secret and who were good with children, to act as constant minders, guardians, and nurses. He was also kept away from other boys his own age, as other boys, his own age would naturally want to play way too rough. His mother also forbid him from normal things like playing sports and riding horses because the slightest fall might kill him.

But this protective worrying was balanced on the other hand by excessive leniency in any nonphysically threatening part of his life, because Nicholas and Alexandra seemed to feel so bad forbidding so many things for his own good that they hardly disciplined him at all if he was just being annoying, rather than risking his own life.

By the age of five, so roundabout 1909, the young tsarevich had some kind of understanding of the bizarre position he found himself in: both that he was cursed with some kind of unique affliction, but also blessed to be one of the most important people in the world. At least, that’s certainly how everybody treated him. He was well aware that he was treated differently from other people, and so his life became a mix of maximum prohibition on the one hand, and maximum leniency on the other, depending on whether or not the activity in question was dangerous and this impacted his personality, and it frankly turned him into something of a mischievous little brat. He played pranks, he ignored commands from adults if those commands displeased him, he demanded government minister stand when he showed up, and he yelled and threw tantrums if they did not. He ordered around staff and officials and military officers, and ultimately only seemed to listen to his father, the tsar. He once grabbed a woman’s parasol and threw it in some water and only felt bad and apologized because his father told him he was disappointed, not because he actually felt bad about it. Another time at dinner, he crawled under the table and stole the woman’s shoe, then when the tsar ordered him to put it back, he did, but only after sticking a strawberry in the toe for the poor woman to jam her foot into.

In between these episodes of mischievous brattiness though, he occasionally rebelled against the physical constraints his parents tried to keep him under, but found out for himself that the little bumps and scrapes you acquire just from living life, not even necessarily doing anything too dangerous, sent him to bed for weeks of painful recuperation. All of this took a toll on him, especially as he came to understand that his disorder was potentially fatal.

Now no young kid is supposed to lay around pondering his own mortality and wondering if this time would be the time that he died. But he did. And so too did his parents, especially the emperess, who labored under constant worry. When the doctors can only do so much Alexandra let her spirituality and devout Christianity take her in any direction possible that would ease her worried mind. I mean, look, all parents endure never-ending concern about their children’s safety. Humans are fragile. The world is hard and sharp and moving a thousand miles an hour. One mistake, one accident, and that’s it. We all know it. But the Romanovs lived with this to the extreme, and easing this mental burden led the empress to seek out spiritual advisers and spiritual healers and anybody who might ease herself pain and her own constant worry.

So, this is the mentality of the imperial family when they heard about an obscure faith healer from Siberia who had come to St. Petersburg in 1906 bearing letters of recommendation, and who had patrons in high society. And that, unfortunately, is where we’re going to have to leave it for now, because this is where Rasputin comes from. This is why Rasputin is important. But because the family hid the hemophilia of their son from the world, from Russian society, from the Russian people, from, from everybody, nobody at the time could quite understand how or why Rasputin was able to get such a hole of the tsar and his wife. But it’s pretty simple: they believed he was blessed by god with the power to heal their son.