Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 5

STUPIDITY OR TREASON?

What is it, stupidity or treason? (A voice from the left: “Treason!” [Someone else]: “Stupidity!” Laughter.)

Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), speech in the Duma, November 19161

As a rule, a regime perishes not because of the strength of its enemies but because of the uselessness of its defenders.

Lev Tikhomirov, Russian conservative theorist, 19112

IN 1910, AFTER THEODORE ROOSEVELT met Kaiser Wilhelm II, the former American president (1901–9) confided in his wife, “I’m absolutely certain now, we’re all in for it.”3 After the death of the kaiser’s predecessor and grandfather (at age ninety-one), the inexperienced Wilhelm II had dismissed the seventy-five-year-old chancellor Otto von Bismarck.4 The young kaiser, who proved to be both arrogant and insecure, proceeded to plot coups against Germany’s constitution and parliament, and to engage in a blustering foreign policy, exacerbating the paradox of Bismarck’s unification: namely, that Germany seemed to threaten its neighbors while itself being vulnerable to those neighbors on two fronts. Wilhelm II—known as All Highest Warlord—had declined to renew Bismarck’s so-called German-Russian Reinsurance Treaty, thereby unwittingly spurring Russian reconciliation with France, and raising the prospect for Germany of a two-front war.5 Wilhelm II’s belated attempt to correct this mistake, by manipulating Nicholas II into the Treaty of Bjorko, had failed. Then there was the kaiser’s naval program. As of 1913, Britain accounted for 15 percent of international trade, but Germany came in second at 13 percent, and in this increasingly interdependent world of global trade, especially of vital food imports, Germany had every right to build a navy.6 But Wilhelm II and his entourage had unleashed a sixty-battleship fantasy for the North Sea.7 This had spurred Britain’s reconciliation with France—despite a near Franco-British war in 1898 over colonies—and even with autocratic Russia. “The kaiser is like a balloon,” Bismarck had once remarked. “If you do not hold fast to the string, you never know where he will be off to.”8

It took two to tango, however, and the “sun-never-sets” global position that Great Britain sought to defend was itself aggressive. Britain had reluctantly ceded naval hegemony in the Western hemisphere to the rising United States and in the Far East to upstart Japan, at least temporarily. (Even then, spending on the Royal Navy consumed one quarter of state revenue.) At the same time, British foreign policy had been most immediately fixated on containing perceived Russian threats to its empire in Persia, Central Asia, and China. Many viewed Russia, because of its European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern geography, as the only potential global rival to Britain’s global empire.9 Still, even before the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, the ascent of German power was the more immediate and explosive circumstance as far as the British were concerned. Anglo-German economic and cultural ties were strong.10 But the clash of interests was strong as well, and unlike in the cases of the United States and Japan, Britain was not inclined to accommodate German power. “In my opinion,” Lord Curzon had written in a private letter on September 25, 1901, “the most marked feature in the international development of the next quarter of a century will be, not the advance of Russia—that is in any case inevitable—or the animosity of France—that is hereditary—but the aggrandizement of the German Empire at the expense of Great Britain; and I think that any English Foreign Minister who desires to serve his country well, should never lose sight of that consideration.”11 To manage the fundamental antagonism between the dominant status quo power and a Germany seeking to secure a place in the world order rising on Britain’s continental doorstep, exceptional statesmanship, on both sides, was required.12 Instead, the antagonism was allowed to spur an arms race and two hostile systems of alliance (or understanding): the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Alliances by themselves never cause war; calculation and miscalculation do.13 For Germany, the road to victory against Britain was judged to go through Russia. Just as British imperialists had been obsessed with Russia’s expansiveness in Asia, Germany’s top military had become fixated on a supposed Russian “threat” in Europe. Between the 1860s and 1914, Russia’s GDP had fallen further behind Germany’s: Russian steel production in 1914, for example, was no more than 25 percent of Germany’s. But in that same interval, Russia’s economy expanded fourfold.14 And German military planners—whose job it was to prepare for possible war—harped as well on Russia’s gigantic population (around 178 million versus Germany’s 65 million) and Russia’s recently announced Great Military Program for rearmament, intended to be completed by 1917.15 The German army brass argued that an industrializing Russia, along with Europe’s other land power—and Russia’s ally—France, should not be left to choose a propitious time to attack on two fronts, and that Russia was a near-future threat that had to be attacked preemptively. “To wait any longer,” German chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (b. 1848) complained to the Austrian chief of staff in May 1914, would entail “a diminishing of our chances; it was impossible to compete with Russia as regards quantity.”16 Germany was eager for the conflict in supposed self-defense against a weak Russia that was deemed on the brink of becoming invincible.17

British miscalculations were of longer standing. Britain offered the promise of global order, a Pax Britannica, without the desire or wherewithal to enforce it, while Britain’s much envied imperialism inspired rival imperialisms, which, in turn, struck fear in the British geopolitical imaginary. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable,” the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote. Back in the fifth century B.C., a clash among peripheral states, Corinth and Corcyra, sparked a showdown between the powers Athens and Sparta, a showdown that each had sought and that each would come to regret. Bismarck called such decisions rolling “the iron dice.” In the case of 1914, the British did not reckon fully with the consequences of the rivalry they had helped set up. But while the Anglo-German antagonism was the underlying cause of the Great War and Russia the critical complicating factor, the detonator was supplied not by rivalries over African colonies, where the leftists and others expected it, but in Eastern Europe, where Bismarck had warned in 1888 that war might happen over “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”18 Here, as the Ottoman empire contracted, the other big land empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany—ground up against one another like tectonic plates, which is how the fault line of tiny Serbia precipitated a world war and, on the eastern front, a revolution in the Russian empire.

SARAJEVO AND STATE PRESTIGE

Serbia had emerged out of the Ottoman realm in the early nineteenth century, and a century later enlarged itself in two Balkan wars (1912–13), but neither Balkan war had resulted in a wider war. True, Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina (from the Ottoman empire) and thereby vastly increased its South Slav (Yugoslav) population of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. This 1908 annexation, which Russia failed to prevent, spurred numerous plots to advance the cause of South Slav independence by Young Bosnia, a terrorist group dedicated to the Yugoslav cause. In 1914 the latter resolved to murder the Austrian governor in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s capital. But then its members evidently read in the newspaper that the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would be visiting—exact day and location specified—and they decided to murder him instead. Happenstance had made the archduke, Kaiser Franz Josef’s nephew, Austria-Hungary’s next in line: the kaiser’s son had killed himself. Many observers hoped that the eighty-four-year-old Franz Josef—in power sixty-six years—would at some point give up the ghost and that the fifty-year-old Franz Ferdinand would have a go at reorganizing and stabilizing the realm’s internal politics. After all, in 1913, the archduke, who had a Slavic (Czech) wife, had criticized Austria’s top military commander for “a great Hurrah-Policy, to conquer the Serbs and God knows what.”

On Sunday, June 28, 1914—the couple’s wedding anniversary but also Serbia’s sacred St. Vitus’s Day—the royal pair, as announced, entered Sarajevo. The local Habsburg governor had deliberately selected the Serbian holy day for the visit. It commemorated 1389, when, in losing the Battle of Kosovo, ending the Serbian empire, a Serb had nonetheless managed to assassinate the Ottoman sultan in his tent (the guards then decapitated the assassin).19 As Franz Ferdinand made his publicly preannounced processional in an open motorcar, the first of the six Young Bosnia terrorists spaced out along the route failed to act. A second did hurl his small bomb at the archduke’s car, but it bounced off, and despite an explosion under the car that was behind, which wounded two officers, the heir was able to proceed on his way; the remaining conspirators were still in position but none acted. The Habsburg heir delivered his speech at Sarajevo’s Moorish town hall. The daring assassination plot had been botched.

At the town hall, after the speeches and ceremonies were complete, the archduke decided to alter his itinerary in order to visit the bomb victims in the hospital. Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb member of Young Bosnia and one of those who had not acted that day, had tried to recover by taking up a position on Sarajevo’s Franz Josef Street near Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen, hoping to catch Franz Ferdinand on the rest of his tour. The archduke’s driver, unfamiliar with the new plan to go to the hospital, made a wrong turn toward Franz Josef Street, heard shouts of reprimand, and began to back up, but stalled the car—some five feet from Princip. Six of Princip’s eight siblings had died in infancy, and he himself was consumptive, a wisp of a human being. He had dreamed of becoming a poet. Suddenly point-blank with history, he took out his pistol and shot the Austrian heir, conspicuous in a helmet topped with green feathers, as well as his wife (intending to strike the governor). Both died nearly instantly.

Serbia had just fought two Balkans wars, losing at least 40,000 dead, and the last thing the country needed was another war. But after the Young Bosnia terrorists, all Austro-Hungarian subjects, were captured, some testified that they had been secretly armed and trained by Serbia’s military intelligence, a rogue actor in that rogue state.20 Serbia’s prime minister had not been an initiator of the assassination plot, but he did not repudiate it, and he proved unable to tamp down Serbia’s domestic euphoria, which intensified the fury in Vienna. “The large area in front of the War Ministry was packed,” wrote Lev Trotsky, who was living in Viennese exile and working as a correspondent for a newspaper in Kiev. “And this was not ‘the public,’ but the real people, in their worn-out boots, with fingers gnarled. . . . They waved yellow and black flags in the air, sang patriotic songs, someone shouted ‘All Serbs must die!’”21 If in response to the “Sarajevo outrage” Kaiser Franz Josef did nothing, that could encourage future acts of political terror. But what level of response? The Habsburgs had almost lost their state in 1740 and again in 1848–49; in 1914 they faced a dilemma unlike anything even the multinational Russian empire faced: of Austria-Hungary’s eleven major nations, only five were more or less exclusively within the realm; in the case of the other six, a majority lived outside the empire’s boundaries.22 Austrian ruling circles decided to smash Serbia, even at the great risk of provoking a pan-European war, in effect risking suicide from fear of death.

A Viennese envoy visited Berlin on July 5 to solicit Germany’s backing for a reckoning with Serbia, and returned with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “full support.” There was still the matter of consent from the leaders in Budapest, the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. On July 23, after internal discussion with Hungarian leaders (who came on board by July 9), as well as intense military preparations, Vienna cabled an ultimatum to Belgrade listing ten demands, including assent to a joint investigatory commission to be supervised on Serbian soil by Austrian officials. Except for the latter stipulation—an infringement on its sovereignty—and one other, Serbia’s government accepted the demands, with conditions. Even now, Kaiser Franz Josef could have pursued a face-saving climbdown. “Almost no genius,” wrote the great historian Jacob Burckhardt of Europe’s greatest family, the Habsburgs, “but goodwill, seriousness, deliberateness; endurance and equanimity in misfortune.”23 No longer: with a sense that the monarchy was in perhaps fatal decline and running out of time, Vienna, on July 28, declared war—for the first time in history—by telegraph.24

A wider conflict did not ensue automatically. Escalation—or not—lay principally in the hands of two men, cousins by blood and marriage, “Willy” and “Nicky.” Wilhelm II had a low opinion of Nicholas II, telling Britain’s foreign secretary at Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901 that the tsar was “only fit to live in a country home and grow turnips.”25 The kaiser had no insight into Russian grand strategy. Nicholas II, for his part, temporized, observing that “war would be disastrous for the world, and once it had broken out would be difficult to stop.”26 During the first half of 1914, more strikes had rocked St. Petersburg and other parts of the empire, like the Baku oil fields, than at any time since 1905, and in July 1914 workers became particularly menacing, partly out of desperation in the face of repression. The Duma, before its early June summer recess, was rejecting significant parts of the government budget, including funds for the interior ministry tasked with the domestic repressions. As for Russian military might, Russia’s allies France and Britain overestimated it, while Germany and Austria-Hungary underestimated it—but not as much as the Russians themselves did.27 What is more, Russia and Serbia did not even have a formal alliance, and Cousin Nicky would never go to war out of some supposed Pan-Slavic romantic nonsense.28 Russian officials instructed the Serbs to respond reasonably to Austria. Nonetheless, the bottom line was that Russia would not allow German power to humiliate Serbia because of the repercussions for Russia’s reputation, especially following Russia’s inability to prevent Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina back in 1908.29 Nicholas II was determined to deter Austria-Hungary, which had begun mobilization, for the sake of Russia, not Serbia.

The German leadership in late July momentarily reconsidered, in an eleventh-hour initiative, but Austria-Hungary rejected the peace feeler idea—and Germany acceded. Had Wilhelm II backed off and curbed his dependent Austro-Hungarian ally, Nicholas II would have backed down as well. Instead, facing the belligerence of his cousin, domestic pressure from elites to stand tall, and unrest at home, the tsar ordered, then rescinded, and finally ordered again, on July 31, a full mobilization.30

Russia was no innocent victim, however. The perpetual machinations to have the tsar abolish the Duma, or downgrade it to a mere consultative body, had heated up. In effect, the decision for war was Nicholas II’s sideways coup against the Duma he despised. War would allow his reclamation of an unmediated mystical union between tsar and people (a prolongation of the Romanov tercentenary of the year before). The tsar did suffer genuine pangs of conscience over the innocent subjects who would be sent to their deaths, but he also felt tremendous emotional release from the distasteful political compromising and encroachments on the autocratic ideal. Nicholas II also fantasized about a domestic patriotic upsurge, “like what occurred during the great war of 1812.”31 Conveying such delusions, a provincial newspaper wrote about the war that “there are no longer political parties, disputes, no Government, no opposition, there is just a united Russian people, readying to fight for months or years to the very last drop of blood.”32 There it was, the grand illusion: the hesitant, dubious war to uphold Russia’s international prestige was imagined as a domestic political triumph—throngs kneeling before their tsar on Palace Square. Visions took flight of further imperial aggrandizement as well: a once-in-a-century opportunity to seize the Turkish Straits and the Armenian regions of Ottoman Anatolia; annex the Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking territories of Austria; and expand into Persia, Chinese Turkestan, and Outer Mongolia.33

Nicholas II was not alone in suddenly inverting the traditional link in Russia between war and revolution—no longer causative but somehow preventative.34 In Berlin, too, insecurities fed fantasies of foreign expansion and domestic political consolidation. Germany’s two-front vulnerability had produced a defense scheme to conquer the continent. Known to history as the Schlieffen Plan, for the general Count Alfred von Schlieffen (1833–1913), and originally conceived partly as a bold way to lobby for more war resources, the scheme, reworked by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, had come to entail wheeling huge armies through Belgium into France in a giant arc, while also readying to smash Russia. Germany could, it was hoped, overcome numerical disadvantage by tactical surprise, mobility, and superior training.35 The German general staff, in bouts of pessimism, expressed fewer illusions about a short war than sometimes recognized, but could not admit that war had ceased to be an effective policy instrument—to them, war still promised a decisive resolution of multiple state problems, and the civilians did not disagree. Thus, Germany would violate Belgian neutrality in order to support Austria against Russia, with the larger aim of avoiding losing the arms race to Russia, which also meant war with Britain.36

Less well known is the fact that the British Admiralty, the equivalent of the German general staff, had been planning to fight a war by precipitating the rapid collapse of Germany’s financial system, thereby paralyzing its economy and its military’s ability to wage war—the formula of a quick victory, at supposedly very low cost, and the British equivalent of the Schlieffen scheme. The Admiralty’s plan for Germany’s demise was worked out in a committee on trading with the enemy headed by Hamilton “Ham” Cuffe (1848–1934), known as Lord Desart. It not only extended war far beyond military considerations but presupposed massive state intervention in the laissez-faire market economy. The Admiralty sought control over the wartime movements of British-flagged merchant ships and the private cargoes they carried, censorship over all cable networks, and supervision over the financial activities of the City of London. Because Britain had the greatest navy and wielded a near monopoly over the global trading system’s infrastructure, the Admiralty fantasized that it could somehow manage the effects of the chaos on Britain’s own economy. All of this contravened international law. The British cabinet had endorsed the Admiralty’s plan in 1912, and even predelegated the authority to enact it when hostilities broke out. The internal war debate in Britain took place over whether Britain could avoid also becoming entangled in strictly military actions (sending troops to the continent) while denying Germany access to shipping, communications, and credit.37

Britain and Germany almost pulled back from the brink. Wilhelm II did not give the full go-ahead for war until told that Russia had mobilized.38 The kaiser signed the mobilization order on August 1, 1914, at 5:00 p.m., but a mere twenty-three minutes later, a telegram arrived from the German ambassador in London. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, “has just called me upon the telephone,” wrote the German ambassador, “and asked me whether I thought I could give an assurance that in the event of France remaining neutral in a war between Russia and Germany we should not attack the French.”39 Was this a parallel to Pyotr Durnovó’s (unheeded) advice to Nicholas II to keep out of the Anglo-German quarrel: namely, an expression of London’s dream of escaping war by directing German might eastward, against Russia? Details out of London were sketchy. The conversation between Grey and the German ambassador had lasted a mere six minutes. But the telegram seemed to have broached the core question that would drive world politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century and would become the main dilemma of Stalin’s regime—whither German power?

To an elated German kaiser, the August 1 telegram from London seemed a godsend: the splintering of the Triple Entente, and one less front. Grey seemed to be proposing that Britain and even France could remain neutral in Germany’s support for Austria against Serbia and thus in Germany’s quarrel with Russia. A nearly apoplectic von Moltke protested the great security risk and chaos involved in halting Germany’s precision war plan and (somehow) shifting entire armies from west to east—“Your majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised”40—but when a follow-up telegram arrived seeming to confirm British neutrality if Germany attacked only Russia, Wilhelm II ordered champagne. The kaiser also cabled King George V, another cousin, to give his word that German troops, although continuing to mobilize in the west (for protection), would not cross the French frontier. It looked like a deal. But that very same night, the British king sent a stupendous reply. Drafted by Grey, it called the conversations between Grey and the German ambassador a “misunderstanding.”41 Was it British treachery? No, just stupidity. Paris would never acquiesce in a German annihilation of Russia because that would drastically alter the balance of power on the continent to France’s detriment, and in any case France had formal treaty obligations to Russia. Grey—who deemed Germany a battleship without a rudder but was himself acting inexplicably—belatedly specified that for Berlin a deal to avert war required that Germany had to hold back from attacking Russia, too. A livid Wilhelm II ordered a relieved von Moltke to resume the occupation of Belgium. His revised “Schlieffen Plan” was on.42

Germany declared war against Russia and France; Britain declared war against Germany.43 German officials managed through clever propaganda to make the German war order appear a necessary response to the “aggression” of Russia, which had mobilized first.44 (Stalin would later come to share the general conclusion, fatefully, that any mobilization, even in deterrence or self-defense, led inexorably to war.)45

Lord Desart’s plan was on as well, at least initially, even though financial groups, the department of trade, and other interests had vehemently opposed this grand strategy. But July 1914 had brought a stunning financial panic from a loss of confidence: London banks began calling short-term loans and disgorging their immense holdings of bills of exchange, freezing the London market; interest rates jumped. In New York, European investors dumped American securities and demanded payment in gold. Fear of war pushed insurance rates so high, however, that gold stopped being shipped even though the global financial system was based upon the metal. “Before a single shot had been fired, and before any destruction of wealth, the whole world-fabric of credit had dissolved,” a managing director of the firm Lazard Brothers would observe in fall 1914. “The Stock Exchange was closed; the discount market dead; . . . commerce at a standstill throughout the world; currency scarce; the bank of England’s resources highly strained.” The United States, which was neutral, would not tolerate closing down the global economic system by Britain in its quarrel with Germany. The British government would soon back off attempting to collapse the German economy in toto and would instead improvise a piecemeal effort at economic blockade. It would fail. The transoceanic flow to Germany of goods and raw materials financed by British banks and carried on British ships would increase.46 Meanwhile, Britain had sent a land army to the continent.

World war looks inexorable. Over decades, imperial German ruling circles had lacked elementary circumspection about their newfound might; imperialist Britain lacked the visionary, skillful leadership needed to accept and thereby temper Germany’s power. Elements in Serbia plotted murder with disregard for the consequences. Austria-Hungary, bereft of its heir, opted for an existential showdown. German ruling circles looked to shore up their one ally, a beleaguered Austria, while being fundamentally insecure about an inability to win the arm’s race against the great powers on either side of Germany, especially with the growing military prowess of a weak Russia, and therefore developed a defensive plan that entailed the conquest of Europe.47 Russia risked everything, not over a dubious pan-Slavic interest in Serbia, but over what a failure to defend Serbia would do to Russia’s prestige.48 And, finally, Britain and Germany tried but failed to collude in a last-minute bilateral deal at Russia’s expense. (The thought would persist.) As if all that was not sufficient cause, it was summertime: Chief of Staff von Moltke was on a four-week holiday at Karlsbad until July 25, his second extended spa visit that summer for liver disease; German grand admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was at a spa in Switzerland; the chief of the Austro-Hungarian staff, Field Marshal Baron Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, was in the Alps with his mistress; both the German and Austrian war ministers were on holiday as well.49 Additional structural factors—an overestimation of the military offensive—also weighed heavily in the march toward Armageddon.50 But if St. Petersburg had possessed irrefutable proof of Serbian intelligence’s complicity in the archduke’s assassination, the tsar’s honor might have been offended to the point that he refused standing up militarily for Belgrade.51 If Princip had quit and gone home after he and his accomplices botched the assassination, or the archduke’s driver had known the revised plan to visit the hospital, world war might have been averted. Be that as it may, launching a war always comes down to decision makers, even when those decision makers are themselves the products, as much as the arbiters, of armed state structures. Across Europe in 1914, with few exceptions—a shrewd Pyotr Durnovó, a bumbling Edward Grey—politicians, military men, and particularly rulers hankered after territory and standing and believed (or hoped) that war would solve all manner of their international and domestic problems, reinvigorating their rule, at what each believed was, for them, a favorable moment.52 In other words, when contingencies such as the wrong turn of a driver on a Sarajevo street confronted a tiny handful of men with the question of world war or peace, they hesitated yet chose war, for the sake, in varying combinations, of state prestige, state aggrandizement, and regime revitalization.53

THE SUMMONS TO LENIN

The conflict of August 1914 escalated into a world war partly because of the expectation that states were vulnerable to conquest, but it was protracted because of the circumstance that they were not.54 Already by late fall 1914 the Great War had become a stalemate: Britain, and to a lesser extent Russia, had foiled Germany’s attempted preemptive conquest of France. From that point—and every day thereafter—the further choice, for all belligerents, could not have been starker: Negotiate an end to the stalemate, admitting that millions of soldiers had been hurled to futile deaths; or continue searching for an elusive decisive blow while dispatching millions more. Each belligerent chose the latter course. To put the matter another way, if the decision for war was, in the first instance, Austria-Hungary’s, then Germany’s, then Russia’s, then Britain’s, the decision to prolong the agony was everyone’s. Belligerent states ran out of money yet they persisted in the fight. During fifty-two months of war, the rulers of the world’s most educated and technologically advanced countries would mobilize 65 million men. Up to 9 million were killed, more than 20 million wounded, and nearly 8 million taken prisoner or missing—in all, 37 million casualties.55

For two years, the British had mostly allowed the French and Russians to absorb the brunt of Germany’s blows.56 But in July 1916, during the bloodbath at Verdun—launched by the Germans in a new strategy of attrition to overcome the stalemate by bleeding the French to death—the British countered with an offensive on the Somme farther west in France. At least 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded during the first twenty-four hours. This was the greatest loss of life—working class and aristocrat—in British military history. Before the Battle of the Somme, just like Verdun, ended in stalemate, it would claim 430,000 British killed and mutilated (3,600 per day), along with 200,000 French and perhaps 600,000 Germans.57 On the western front overall, 8 million of 10 million battlefield deaths were caused not by “industrial killing” but by long established technologies: small arms and artillery.58 Still, artillery barrages now shredded men on impact from more than twenty-five miles away (territorial gains were measured in yards). Machine guns had not only become easily portable but could now fire 600 rounds per minute, and for hours on end without pausing, a hail of metallic death.59 Poison gas seared the lungs of the troops in trenches, until shifting winds often brought the lethal clouds right back against the side that had launched the chemical weapons. (Of all the belligerents, the Russian army suffered the worst from the chlorine and mustard gas because of insufficient masks.)60 In the Ottoman empire, which had joined the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Armenian subjects were accused en masse of treason—collaborating with Russia to break away eastern Anatolia—and were massacred or force-marched away from border areas, resulting in 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenian civilian deaths. In Serbia, losses were fully 15 percent of the population, a monstrous price even for a heedless assassination; Serbian incursions into Habsburg territories, meanwhile, failed to ignite a South Slav uprising, demonstrating that the fears in Vienna that had prompted the showdown were exaggerated.61 And what of that vaunted German navy, whose construction had done so much to incite the British and drive Europe toward the precipice? During the entire Great War, the German fleet fought a single engagement against Britain, in summer 1916, off the Danish coast, where the British lost more ships, but the Germans withdrew and chose not to risk their precious navy again.

The war itself, not the subsequent bungled Peace of Versailles, caused the terrible repercussions for decades. “This war is trivial, for all its vastness,” explained Bertrand Russell, a logician at Cambridge University and the grandson of a British prime minister. “No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. . . . The English and the French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta.”62 Beyond the murderous hypocrisy, it was the fact that men could dispose of the destiny of entire nations that Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, now assimilated. But whereas European rulers and generals knowingly sent millions to their deaths for God knows what, Lenin could assert that he was willing to sacrifice millions for what now, thanks to the imperialist war, looked more than ever like a just cause: peace and social justice. Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, had celebrated the intense dynamism of capitalism, but Lenin emphasized its limitless destructiveness: the war, in his view, showed that capitalism had irrevocably exhausted whatever progressive potential it once had. And Europe’s Social Democrats who had failed to oppose the war, despite being Marxists, became similarly irredeemable in his eyes.63 Among socialists internationally, Lenin now stood out, radically. “I am still ‘in love’ with Marx and Engels, and I cannot calmly bear to hear them disparaged,” Lenin wrote from Zurich to his mistress Inessa Armand in January 1917. “No really—they are the genuine article. One needs to study them.” He concluded the letter by disparaging “Kautskyites,” that is, followers of Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat and towering figure of the socialist Second International (1889–1916), which the war destroyed.64

Lenin added a politics of imitative war techniques to his Marxist ideology, which the wartime slaughterhouse helped to validate in ways that the prewar never did.65 His propaganda work would be almost too easy. With the war raging, he wrote his foundational Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), adapting the ideas of the Brit John Hobson and the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding, arguing that capitalism was doomed but for its recourse to exploitation abroad. But it was hardly necessary to read Lenin to appreciate the link between the Great War and colonial rapaciousness. Between 1876 and 1915, gigantic swaths of the world’s territory had changed hands, usually violently.66 France had amassed a global empire 20 times its size, and Britain 140 times, colonizing hundreds of millions of people. Outside Europe, only Japan had managed to stave off the European onslaught and, with its own overseas colonies, emulate Europe’s rapaciousness. In German-controlled South-West Africa, when the colonized Herrero rebelled (1904–7), suppression escalated into extermination—and almost succeeded: Germany wiped out up to 75 percent of the natives.67 The most notorious of all was tiny Belgium’s empire—80 times its size—which, in the pursuit of rubber and glory, enslaved, mutilated, and slaughtered perhaps half of Congo’s population, as many as 10 million people, in the decades before 1914.68 But this was the thing about the Great War: even in countries that practiced rule of law, politicians and generals used their own citizens no better, and often worse, than they had their colonial subjects. The British commander at the Somme, General Sir Douglas Haig, demonstrated no concern for human life, neither the enemy’s nor that of his own men. “Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause,” Haig wrote in his diary. When British casualties were too low, the general saw a sign of loss of will.69 Of the 3.6 million men under arms in 1914 in democratic France—the only republic among the great powers—fewer than 1 million remained by 1917. Some 2.7 million had been killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing. Civilians died en masse, too. No large European city was laid waste—mostly, the Great War was fought in villages and fields—but state “security” now meant the destruction of the enemy culturally, as the Germans had demonstrated from the outset in Belgium: libraries, cathedrals, and the civilians who embodied the enemy nation were made targets of bombing and deliberate starvation.70 “This is not war,” a wounded Indian soldier wrote home from the carnage of France in 1915, “it is the ending of the world.”71

CONSCRIPTS AND THE AWOL

Stalin missed the war. That summer of 1914, at age thirty-six, he was serving the second year of a four-year term of internal exile in the northeastern Siberian wastes of Turukhansk. This was the longest consecutive term of banishment he would serve, wallowing near the Arctic Circle right into 1917. This time, the authorities had moved him too far beyond the railhead for escape. While two generations of men, the flower of Europe, were fed into the maw, he battled little more than mosquitoes and boredom.

None of the top Bolsheviks saw action at the front. Lenin and Trotsky were in comfortable foreign exile. In July 1915, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev, “Do you remember Koba’s name?” Lenin obviously meant Koba’s real name or surname. Zinoviev did not recall. In November 1915 Lenin wrote to another comrade, “Do me a big favor: find out from Stepko [Kiknadze] or Mikha [Tskhakaya] the last name of ‘Koba’ (Iosif J—??). We have forgotten. Very important!” What Lenin was after remains unknown.72 He was soon busy wrongly attributing the conquest of 85 percent of the globe to inexorable economic motivations. Trotsky, who dashed from country to country during the conflict, was writing journalistic essays about trench warfare and the war’s sociopsychological impact, political life in many European countries and in the United States, and the politics of socialist movements in relation to the war, calling for a “United States of Europe” as a way to halt the conflict.73 But Stalin, Trotsky would later observe, published absolutely nothing of consequence during the greatest conflict of world history, a war that roiled the international socialist movement. The future arbiter of all thought left no wartime thoughts whatsoever, not even a diary.74

Extreme isolation appears to have been a factor. Stalin wrote numerous letters from godforsaken Siberia to Bolsheviks in European exile begging for books that he had already requested, particularly on the national question. He contemplated assembling a collected volume of his essays on that topic, building on his 1913 article “Marxism and the National Question.” Before the war commenced, in early 1914, Stalin completed and sent one long article, “On Cultural Autonomy,” but it was lost (and never found).75 He wrote to Kamenev (in February 1916) that he was at work on two more, “The National Movement in Its Historical Development” and “War and the National Movement,” and provided an outline of the content. He was aiming to solve the relationship between imperialist war and nationalism and state forms, developing a rationale for large-scale multinational states.

“Imperialism as the political expression [. . .] The insufficiency of the old frameworks of the ‘national state’. The breaking up of these frameworks and the tendency to form states of [multiple] nationalities. Consequently the tendency to annexation and war. [. . .] Consequently the belief in nat[ional] liberation. The popularity of the principle of nat. self-determination as a counterweight to the principle of annexation. The clear weakness (economic and otherwise) of small states . . . The insufficiency of a completely independent existence of small and medium-sized states and the fiasco of the idea of nat. separation [. . . ] A broadened and deepened union of states on the one hand and, on the other, autonomy of nat. regions within states. [. . .] it should express itself in the proclamation of the autonomy of a nat. territory within multinational states in the struggle for the united states of Europe.”76

These thoughts predated publication of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and dovetailed somewhat with Trotsky’s writings on a United States of Europe (which Lenin had attacked). But Stalin’s promised wartime articles, which he told Kamenev were “almost ready,” never materialized.

Severe isolation cannot be the whole explanation. In Siberian exile Stalin made the acquaintance of a future rival, Yankel “Yakov” Sverdlov (b. 1885), the son of a Jewish engraver from Nizhny Novgorod, who had completed four years of gymnasium. Like Stalin, Sverdlov had been co-opted in absentia into the Bolshevik Central Committee after the 1912 party gathering in Prague. The two had been betrayed by the same okhranka agent within Bolshevik ranks, Malinowski, and overlapped for several years in Turukhansk, including in remote Kureika, a settlement of perhaps thirty to forty inhabitants. During the war in remote Siberia, Sverdlov managed to complete a pamphlet history titled Mass Exile, 1906–1916 and a number of articles: “Essays on the History of the International Worker Movement,” “Essays on Turukhansk Region,” “The Downfall of Capitalism,” “The Schism in German Social Democracy,” “The War in Siberia.”77 He also wrote letters that revealed a rivalry with Stalin. “My friend [Stalin] and I differ in many ways,” Sverdlov wrote in a letter postmarked for Paris on March 12, 1914. “He is a very lively person and despite his forty years has preserved the ability to react vivaciously to the most varied phenomena. In many cases, he poses new questions where for me there are none any more. In that sense he is fresher than me. Do not think that I put him above myself. No, I’m superior [krupnee], and he himself realizes this. . . . We wagered and played a game of chess, I checkmated him, then we parted late at night. In the morning, we met again, and so it is every day, we are our only two in Kureika.” For a brief time, they roomed together. “There are two of us” in a single room, Sverdlov wrote to his second wife, Klavdiya Novogorodtseva. “With me is the Georgian Jughashvili, an old acquaintance . . . He’s a decent fellow, but too much of an egoist in everyday life.” Soon enough, Sverdlov could not take it anymore and moved out. “We know each other too well,” he wrote on May 27, 1914, to Lidiya Besser, the wife of an engineer revolutionary. “The saddest thing is that in conditions of exile or prison a man is stripped bare before you and revealed in all petty respects. . . . Now the comrade and I are living in different quarters and rarely see each other.”78

Stalin took to indulging in the desolate circumstances of his profound isolation. When a fellow Siberian exile drowned, Stalin seized the man’s library for himself alone, violating the exiles’ code, and cementing his reputation for self-centeredness. Stalin also continued to engage in the exiled revolutionary’s pastime of seducing and abandoning peasant girls. He impregnated one of his landlord’s daughters, the thirteen-year-old Lidiya Pereprygina, and when the police intervened he had to vow to marry her, but then betrayed his promise; she gave birth to a son, who soon died. (Stalin would later recall his dog in Siberia, Tishka, but not his female companions and bastards.) During Turukhansk’s eight months of winter, the future dictator cut holes through the river ice to fish for sustenance, like the indigenous fur-clad tribesmen around him, and went on long, solitary hunts in the dark, snowed-in forests. (“If you live among wolves,” Stalin would later say, “you must behave like a wolf.”)79 Sudden, blinding snowstorms nearly took his life. Ever the agitator and teacher, he also harangued the local indigenous people, Yakut and Evenki, in his cold, cramped rented room, whose windows had no glass, vainly trying to recruit them to the revolutionary struggle. He had an audience but few genuine interlocutors, let alone followers. (Stalin’s supposed Caucasus gang, never more than a tiny band of irregular followers, had long ago dispersed, never to be assembled again.) He did manage to turn the pitiful gendarme assigned to guard him into a subordinate who fetched his mail and accompanied him on unsanctioned trips to meet fellow exiles in the scattered settlements.80 And his Armenian fellow exile, Suren Spandaryan, accompanied by his girlfriend, Vera Schweitzer, did make a long trek northward on the frozen Yenisei River to visit. But, dirt poor, Stalin mainly wrote to everyone he knew begging for money as well as for books. “My greetings to you, dear Vladimir Ilich, warm-warm greetings,” he wrote to Lenin. “Greetings to Zinoviev, greetings to Nadezhda! How are things, how is your health? I live as before, I gnaw my bread, and am getting through half my sentence. Boring—but what can be done?” In his supplication to the Alliluyev sisters (in Petrograd), Stalin complained of “the incredible dreariness of nature in this damned region.”81 He fathered a second son by Lidiya, Alexander, who survived—his second surviving bastard—but, like his first, Konstantin, in Solvychegodsk, he left the boy behind.

In late 1916, Stalin received a draft notice. But in January 1917, after a six-week trip by reindeer-pulled sleds from Turukhansk through the tundra down to the induction center at Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia, the future dictator was disqualified from army service because of his physical deformities.82

What was the tsarist state doing trying to induct riffraff like Stalin and his fellow internal exiles? Russia, like most of the Great Powers, had mandated universal conscription in the 1870s. For some time thereafter, states did not wield the governing capacity or financial wherewithal to realize such complete mobilizations. In France, half the second-year call-ups would be given noncombatant jobs, while in Germany about half the possible conscripts were often missing from the ranks. In Russia, two thirds of the eligible pool had been exempted from conscription. As the Great War approached, the imperatives heightened to fulfill the universal call to the colors, but states still fell short.83 Still, at the war’s outbreak Russia fielded the world’s largest force, 1.4 million in uniform. Britain and France referred to their ally’s mass army as “the steamroller.” Despite draft riots, moreover, another 5 million Russian subjects were conscripted in the second half of 1914 alone.84 But just as the war killed or wounded nearly the entire 1914 officer corps, it chewed through conscripts. At least 2 million Russian troops met death over the course of hostilities.85 The tsarist authorities were forced to dig ever deeper.86 Of imperial Russia’s 1914 estimated population of 178 million, nearly 18 million were eligible for service, and 15 million of them would be conscripted. This was a huge number, but proportionately smaller than in France (8 million of 40 million) or Germany (13 million of 65 million). To be sure, during the war, hired labor on Russian farms fell by almost two thirds, and Russian factories were frequently emptied of skilled labor, too. The call-ups also took away half of Russia’s primary schoolteachers (who were not in abundance to start with). And yet, the relative limits in Russian numbers indicated limits to the tsarist regime’s reach over the vast empire. Russia could not manage to take full advantage of what had so terrified the German high command: namely, the gigantic population.87

That said, once on the battlefield, Russian troops and field officers acquitted themselves well, despite initial shortages—more severe than suffered by the other belligerents—of shells, rifles, bullets, uniforms, and boots.88 Between August and December 1914, Russian armies drove into Germany’s eastern flank and over time managed to crush Austria-Hungary. Against Ottoman armies, Russia did far better than the British, emerging victorious after the Ottomans had invaded Russia in winter 1914–15 expecting, erroneously, to ignite Russia’s Muslims. The problem, however, was that the Germans recovered to repel Russia’s early advances and encircle Russian troops at Tannenberg (southeast of Danzig), then forced a 300-mile Russian retreat.89 By late 1915, German-led forces had not only reversed the Russian conquests of the previous year in Habsburg Galicia, but had overrun Russian Poland, with its vital industry and coal mines; much of Belorussia; and Courland (on the Baltic), thereby threatening Petrograd. Nonetheless, from 1914 to 1916, the Russian army tied down more than 100 Central Powers’ divisions on the eastern front; until 1917, Russia captured more German prisoners than Britain and France combined.90

AUTOCRACY PREPARES A REVOLUTION

Russia had gone to war with a non-binding constitution tacked on to the autocracy, and neither side in the Duma-autocracy antagonism understood or had any sympathy for the other.91 Nicholas II clung to autocracy even though it afforded him no personal pleasure and he proved incapable of living up to the role.92 That said, the tsar often outmaneuvered the constitutionalists: the Duma was scarcely being summoned into session. It met for a day on July 26, 1914, to approve war credits (a formality), and for three days on January 26–29, 1915.93 Following the 1915 retreat, which was cast as a terrible rout, even though its orderliness impressed (and stymied) the Germans, Nicholas II did recall the Duma to session, and in August 1915, Paul Miliukov, head of the Constitutional Democrat party, emerged as the leader of the six-party Progressive Bloc. The latter comprised almost two thirds of Duma deputies and aimed to improve the war effort with what the deputies called a government of confidence.94 At one level, this connoted a cabinet appointed by the tsar that had the Duma’s positive appraisal. But the interior minister, suspecting that the constitutionalists really sought a genuinely parliamentary order—a government reflective of electoral majority—denounced Duma president Mikhail Rodzyanko as “stupid and bombastic,” adding, “You just want to get together and put forth various demands: ministers answerable to the Duma and, perhaps, even a revolution.”95 Russia’s conservatives, meanwhile, sought to counter the Progressive Bloc with a Conservative Bloc, but in August 1915 the rightists lost one of their foremost leaders, Pyotr Durnovó, who suffered a fit of apoplexy, fell into a coma, and died.96

Even more important than that loss, Nicholas II continued to discourage rightist political parties organizing on his behalf as attempts to “interfere” in his autocratic prerogatives.97 He refused even a private secretary to organize his vast responsibilities and ensure implementation of his decisions, because he feared falling under any secretary’s sway; so the “autocrat” opened all his own correspondence. Later, Trotsky would observe that a debilitated autocracy got the enfeebled autocrat it deserved. That was true, to a point. The much-missed Alexander III had managed to project will and authority; had he not died prematurely of illness, he would have been sixty-eight years old in 1914. Still, everything about his reign indicates that he, too, would have held fast to the autocracy and its incoherence. The autocrat alone retained the prerogative of ministerial appointments, without parliamentary recommendation or confirmation, and if a tsar allowed perceived loyalty and lineage to trump competence, there was nothing to be done. Between July 1914 and February 1917, Russia saw a parade of four different prime ministers and six interior ministers, all of whom became laughingstocks.98 (Able officials, in many cases, increasingly chose to keep their distance.) The ministers’ initial response to the 1915 war crisis was depression. The generals Nicholas II appointed, meanwhile, often blamed scapegoats for the problems they themselves caused.99 Nicholas II, predictably, reacted to the 1915 crisis by suspending the Duma he reviled. At the same time, the tsar imagined he could inspire the troops, and the people more broadly, by naming himself frontline supreme commander.100 In September 1915, Nicholas II relocated to staff headquarters at the town of Mogilyov, displacing his strapping first cousin Grand Duke Nicholas, who was known in family circles as Nikolasha—and, among the masses, as Nicholas III.

Nearly everyone in Russia’s establishment who was high enough to do so advised against the move. That included eight of the tsar’s own twelve ministers in writing—two more concurred orally—who feared that the monarch and monarchy could now be directly tarnished by a sagging war effort. Their pleading was in vain: even an overwhelming majority of the top state officials was powerless to correct the will of an autocrat. Other than an autocrat’s own (rare) about-face, the tsarist system provided no corrective mechanisms.

The tsar’s notorious personal shortcomings were on full, and fatal, display. At Mogilyov, some 490 miles from the maddening Russian capital, Nicholas II finally seemed to find that elusive world he craved of “no political parties, no disputes, no Government, no opposition . . . just a united Russian people, readying to fight for months or years to the very last drop of blood.” Recalling his extended escapes from St. Petersburg in Crimea, Nicholas II took long strolls with his English setters, rode into the countryside in his Rolls-Royce, listened to music, played dominoes and solitaire, and watched motion pictures. The tsar occasionally had Alexei brought to Mogilyov for visits, and the heir “marched about with his rifle and sang loudly,” interrupting the war councils. True, although Nicholas II loved the romance of military pageantry, he knew next to nothing of strategy and tactics, but then again, neither had Nikolasha, a graduate of the General Staff Academy, nor German Emperor Wilhelm II. But as chief of staff, Nicholas II had appointed the gifted General Mikhail Alexeyev, a relatively small man but “a gigantic military force.”101 At the same time, the domestic mobilization for the war and domestic politics had to be taken care of, but Nicholas II’s escape to Mogilyov had, in effect, left his wife, rather than a strong political figure like Witte or Stolypin, in charge of the wartime empire’s capital.102 Described by the French ambassador as “constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, . . . credulousness, superstition,” Alexandra did not shrink from making personnel and policy recommendations, and from presenting her husband “the autocrat” with faits accomplis.103 “Do not fear what remains behind,” she wrote to him. “Don’t laugh at silly old wify, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.”104 For Russia’s state officialdom and the officer corps, fighting a monumental war for the very survival of the motherland, what they observed or heard about the wartime regime felt like daggers to the heart.

Whatever Nicholas II’s personal shortcomings, Alexandra was several magnitudes below even him as would-be autocrat. To boot, she was German. The German-sounding St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd, but spy mania had already broken out in Russia. “There is not one layer of society that can be guaranteed free of spies and traitors,” thundered the military prosecutor, who arrested hundreds, including long-serving war minister General Vladimir Sukhomlinov. He was innocent of treason, but his public trial broadcast damaging revelations about deepset corruption and incompetence, which was cast as sedition (a dangerous obfuscation that prefigured aspects of Bolshevism in power).105 Alexandra, too, incessantly wrote to Nicholas of “traitor-ministers” and “traitor-generals.” But soon, the rumors of “dark forces” boomeranged onto her and her entourage, which included Grigory Rasputin (Novykh). Born in Western Siberia in 1869, the son of a poor peasant, not educated and unable to write proper Russian, Rasputin, known to the tsaritsa and tsar as “our Friend,” was a religious wanderer and pretend monk who had made his way into the heart of power. He was rumored to smell like a goat (from failing to bathe), and to screw like one, too. He identified with the outlawed sect of Khylsty, who taught rejoicing (radenie), or “sinning in order to drive out sin”; Rasputin advised followers to yield to temptations, especially of the flesh, asking, “How can we repent if we have not first sinned?”106 Tales of a court harem spread, conveyed in cartoons of Rasputin’s manipulative hands emanating from a naked Alexandra’s nipples. That was myth. Still, in public, as the okhranka noted, he approached female singers in a restaurant and exposed his penis while striking up a conversation. The faux “Holy Man” accepted sexual favors from noblewomen seeking his influence at court and sent half-literate policy memoranda to top ministers. Officials became afraid to incur his displeasure—he never forgot a slight—and paid him regular cash gifts, but a few fought back. A would-be female assassin, connected to a rival monk, behind whom stood high figures at court, had taken a knife to the mystic’s stomach on June 29, 1914—the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo—but Rasputin, his entrails hanging out, survived.107

Throughout the war, the highest Russian government ministers tried but could not manage to evict the “Siberian tramp” from the capital. Alexandra was immovable.108 Why? Why did she permit a debauched phony and rumoredGerman agent the run of Russia’s corridors of power? The answer was twofold. First, despite all the talk that Rasputin was running state affairs through Alexandra, it was the tsaritsa who used the pretend monk, having him voice her personnel and policy preferences as “God’s will,” thereby rendering what she wanted more palatable to the pious Nicholas II. Rasputin’s sway began when Alexandra lacked an opinion, but he held no definite, enduring political views of his own.109 Second, the heir’s hemophilia posed a daily threat to his life from possible internal bleeding into joints, muscles, and soft tissue, and no cure existed, but Rasputin could somehow alleviate the “Little One’s” symptoms.

Nicholas II’s family certainly seemed bedeviled. His first brother (and next in line), Alexander, had died of meningitis in infancy (1870). His next brother, Grand Duke Georgy, Nicholas II’s childhood playmate, died in 1899 aged twenty-eight (the tsar kept a box of jokes uttered by Georgy that he had written down and could be heard laughing in the palace by himself). That is how Nicholas II’s younger brother Mikhail became heir, until the birth of Alexei in 1904 displaced him to second in line and regent for the minor, should Nicholas II die before Alexei’s maturity (in 1920). Then, the incurable hemophilia was diagnosed. Back in the autumn of 1912, at an imperial hunting preserve just below tsarist Warsaw, the-then eight-year-old Alexei had bumped his thigh exiting a boat. This mundane occurrence caused vast internal hemorrhaging and a bloody tumor near his groin, which became infected and produced spiking fevers (105°F). Death appeared imminent, yet an operation was out of the question: the blood flow from surgery would be unstoppable. Nicholas and Alexandra prayed to their most revered icons. They also appealed to Rasputin. “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” he telegrammed while traveling back in Siberia. “The Little One will not die.” Miraculously, following the telegram, the bleeding stopped, the fever subsided, and the tumor was reabsorbed.110 The doctors were stunned; the royal couple became attached still more unshakably to the magical Holy Man. Grand Duke Mikhail also did his part to bond Nicholas and Alexandra to Rasputin. At the time of the whispers in the fall of 1912 that Tsarevich Alexei had been given last rites, Mikhail, the next in line, evaded the okhranka and eloped in Vienna with his lover, Natalya Wulfert, a commoner and a divorcee, thereby appearing deliberately to forfeit his right to the throne. This left no one except the precarious boy.111 Alexei’s life-threatening incidents continued—falling off a chair, sneezing hard—yet each time Rasputin’s ramblings calmed the boy (and the boy’s mother) and halted the bleeding.

Mysticism and the occult were rampant among Russia’s privileged orders—as everywhere in Europe’s aristocratic circles—but Nicholas and Alexandra’s anxiety for the dynasty’s future was entirely legitimate. And yet, among Europe’s monarchies secrecy in court affairs was the norm, and Russia’s royals refused to reveal the state secret that explained everything—and that might have elicited mass sympathy. Not even top generals or government ministers knew the truth about Alexei. In the resulting information vacuum, a public bacchanalia flourished about the pretend monk’s debauch with Alexandra and his malignant court camarilla. These tales were widely published, and sabotaged the monarchy in ways that all the alleged spies (like Sukhomlinov) never did. Street hawkers helped burn the Romanovs in figurative effigy with such pamphlets as The Secrets of the Romanovs and The Life and Adventures of Grigory Rasputin, in print runs of 20,000 to 50,000. And for the illiterate, picture postcards, skits, easily remembered verses, and jokes spread the stories of the monarchy’s moral decay and treason.112 “What’s the use of fighting,” soldiers at the front began to say, “if the Germans have already taken over?”113

The supreme paradox was that despite everything, by 1916 the Russian state, assisted by self-organizing public associations tightly intertwined with the state’s agencies, had immensely improved the wartime economy.114 Until that year, Russia had to purchase most of its weapons abroad, and Russian soldiers were often hard pressed to match ammunition with their weapons—Japanese Arisakas, American Winchesters, British Lee-Enfields, on top of ancient Russian Berdans.115 The frontline troops were short of shells, short of rifles, short of uniforms, and short of boots (the army demanded a quarter-million pairs of boots per week).116 But after two years of war, Russia began producing ample quantities of rifles, ammunition, wireless sets, aircraft.117 Russia’s economy in 1916 was humming: employment, factory profits, and the stock market were way up. Taking advantage of the manufacturing surge, as well as new aerial reconnaissance of enemy positions, General Alexei Brusilov launched a bold offensive in June 1916. Technically, he was only conducting flanking support against Austria-Hungary as part of a Russian offensive against Germany to relieve the pressure against France and Britain (which were bogged down in the Verdun and Somme slaughterhouses). But in just weeks, Brusilov, adapting a crude form of an advanced technique—artillery combined with mobile infantry—while attacking on a wide front, broke through Austro-Hungarian defenses and devastated its rear. His forces annihilated nearly two thirds of Austria-Hungary’s eastern-front army: 600,000 enemy dead and wounded, 400,000 captured.118 A shattered Austrian chief of staff warned that “peace must be made in not too long a space, or we shall be fatally weakened, if not destroyed.”119 Instead, the German field marshal Paul von Hindenburg was sent to assume direct command over Habsburg forces—he called it the “worst crisis the eastern front had known.”120

“We have won the war,” boasted the Russian foreign minister, who added that “the fighting will continue for several more years.”121 In the event, Russia’s own generals undermined Brusilov. One insubordinate general even marched the elite Imperial Guards—“physically the finest human animals in Europe”—into bogs, rendering them sitting ducks for German planes.122 Betrayed, in addition, by the railroad, Brusilov ran out of supplies. Brusilov himself had sacrificed a staggering 1.4 million Russians killed, wounded, and missing, and left himself no reserves. The final indignity came courtesy of Romania, which joined the Entente precisely because of Brusilov’s successes, but then had to be rescued when its catastrophic army went into battle. Nonetheless, Brusilov had mounted the Entente’s single best performance of the entire war, and optimists in Russia looked forward to 1917 as the year when military victory would be at hand. Politically, however, things looked increasingly shaky. “In our monarchy,” one former justice minister observed in 1916, “there is only a handful of monarchists.”123

Soon enough, not victory but political implosion came to seem more likely. In fall 1916, a clutch of mutinies broke out, some involving whole regiments, in Petrograd’s outskirts, where rear units had swelled with untrained call-ups who fraternized with workers.124 Nicholas II heaped fuel onto the bonfire that was the dynasty’s image by transferring the accused traitor Sukhomlinov—known to be championed by Alexandra—from prison to house arrest. On November 1, 1916, the respected Paul Miliukov, speaking from the rostrum of the Duma, lit into the government, punctuating his indictment of war mismanagement with the ringing phrase “Is this treason, or is it stupidity?” Many deputies chanted “stupidity,” others “treason,” and quite a number shouted “Both! Both!” Miliukov elicited an ovation.125 The incendiary speech was banned from publication, but a disillusioned monarchist in the Duma, Vladimir Purishkevich, a prominent member of the Union of the Russian People, had it illegally distributed in thousands of copies at the front. Purishkevich himself, in the Duma, denounced government ministers as “Rasputin’s marionettes.” Hours before the Duma’s holiday recess, Purishkevich helped murder Rasputin, in a plot led by Prince Felix Yusupov with the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, as well as British intelligence officials. The mutilated and bullet-riddled corpse was found floating in the capital’s icy river a few days later, on December 19, 1916.126 Nicholas II was both quietly relieved and revolted.127 But many members of the establishment, cheering the sensational demise of the “internal German,” nonetheless continued to sound the alarm. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich wrote to his cousin the tsar after Rasputin’s murder, “Strange as it may sound, Nicky, we are witnessing a revolution promoted by the government.”128

An autocrat strangely absent from the wartime capital, a pseudomonk in the autocrat’s absence inexplicably running wild at court, a government of nobody ministers who came and went anonymously, tales of treason on every newspaper’s front page, every street corner parliament, and in the Duma—the autocracy’s image became wrecked beyond repair. “I am obliged to report,” Maurice Paleologue, ambassador of France, Russia’s closest ally, telegraphed Paris in January 1917, “that at the present moment the Russian empire is run by lunatics.”129 Open gossip about pending palace coups speculated whether Nicholas II and Alexandra would both be murdered or just the latter.130 At staff headquarters, General Alexeyev and the brass discussed how they had managed the Brusilov offensive on their own, and began to think the once unthinkable. But what if a putsch against Nicholas II from the left came first?

LAST LAST STRAW

Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come. Throughout 1916 and into early 1917, almost every branch of the okhranka was warning of pending revolution (as well as anti-Jewish pogroms).131 No top revolutionary leaders were in Russia—Lenin, Martov, Chernov, Trotsky were all abroad—and the okhranka had neutralized many of the lesser socialist leaders who were resident in Petrograd, if the latter had not already neutralized themselves by political mistakes.132 On January 9, 1917, the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 170,000 strikers massed in the capital, shouting “Down with the government of traitors!” and “Down with the war!” but the day passed without revolution, thanks to numerous arrests. On February 14, 1917, up to 90,000 workers in the capital went on strike, and again the police made mass arrests.133 Strikes persisted; a February 22 lockout over wages at the Putilov Works sent thousands of men into the streets.134 A number of factories ceased operating for want of fuel, idling more workers. As fortune would have it, after a frigid January, the weather in Petrograd had turned unseasonably mild. On February 23, International Women’s Day—March 8 by the Western calendar—some 7,000 low-paid women left Petrograd’s textile mills to march, shouting not only “Down with the tsar!” and “Down with the war!” but also “Bread!” Why were marchers on International Women’s Day demanding bread? Contrary to myth, the tsarist state had managed to cope with most exigencies of the war, as Brusilov’s well-supplied offensive demonstrated (by the end of 1917, the shell reserve would reach a total of 18 million.)135 But the tsarist state fumbled the organization of the food supply.136 The state’s food supply emergency emerged as a kind of last last straw.

Prewar Russia had fed both Germany and England, accounting for 42 percent of global wheat exports. The empire functioned as a giant grain-exporting machine, from silos to railways, moving harvests over very long distances in large amounts to far-off markets, until the war shut down foreign trade—which, in theory, meant more food for Russia’s domestic consumption (whose norms were low).137 True, sown acreage declined slightly as peasants moved to the front or cities, and western territories fell under foreign occupation. Moreover, the army, made up of men who had previously grown grain, were now consuming it—half of the country’s marketable grain in 1916.138 But that was not the key problem. Nor was the problem primarily the transportation system, which nearly everyone scapegoated. True, the rail network was not organized to circulate grain to markets within the empire. More fundamentally, however, many peasants refused to sell their grain to the state because the prices were low, while prices for industrial goods peasants needed (like scythes) had skyrocketed.139 Perhaps even more fundamentally, wartime state controls, driven by a deep anticommercial animus, had squeezed out the maligned but essential middlemen (petty grain traders), and failed to serve as an adequate substitute, thereby disorganizing domestic grain markets.140 Thus, although Russia had food stocks, by late January 1917, grain shipments to the capital in the north, from grain-producing regions in the south, did not even reach one sixth of the absolute lowest daily-consumption levels.141 The government had long resisted rationing, fearing that an announcement of rationing would bring expectations for supplies that could not be met. Finally, on February 19, however, the government belatedly announced that rationing would commence on March 1. This attempt to calm the situation induced panicked shelf stripping. Bakery windows were smashed. Bakery personnel were observed hauling off supplies, presumably for speculative resale. Petrograd’s inhabitants also learned through word of mouth that although many bakeries, lacking flour, remained open just a few hours a day, freshly baked white bread was uninterruptedly available in high-priced dining establishments.142 An okhranka agent surmised that “the underground, revolutionary parties are preparing a revolution, but a revolution, if it takes place, will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.”143

A mere four days after the tsarist government’s announcement of impending rationing was when the women had marched through Petrograd demanding bread; within seven days of their march, the centuries-old Russian autocracy was dissolved.

In the winter of 1917, Russia did not suffer famine, as the empire had in 1891 or 1902, two episodes that were within living memory and had not caused the political regime’s overthrow. (The 1891–92 famine had claimed at least 400,000 lives.)144 During the Great War, food shortages in Germany—partly caused by a British blockade designed to starve civilians and break Germany’s will—had already provoked major urban riots in late fall 1915, and such riots continued each year, but the German state would hold up until the German regime would lose the war in 1918. Neither food marches nor even general strikes constitute a revolution. It is true that socialist agitators had been swarming the factories and barracks, finding receptive audiences.145 Revolutionary songs—like the ones Stalin had sung each May Day in Tiflis—new forms of address (“citizen” and “citizenness”), and above all, a compelling story of senseless wartime butchery and high political corruption had conquered the capital, filling the symbolic void that had opened up in tsarism and empowering the people with solidarity.146 Some Petrograd demonstrators took to looting and drinking, but many others placed towels, rags, and old blankets inside their jackets to face the anticipated whip blows of Cossack cavalrymen. The raucous crowds that seized hold of Petrograd’s streets in late February 1917 were brave and determined. Still, protesting crowds are often resolute and courageous, and yet revolution is very infrequent. Revolution results not from determined crowds in the streets but from elite abandonment of the existing political order. The food demonstrations as well as strikes revealed that the autocratic regime had already hollowed out. Almost no one would defend it.

Critically, it was not just the women in the streets: General Brusilov was warning that the army had no more than ten days’ supply of foodstuffs—and there could be no doubt that he, and the rest of the brass, blamed the autocracy. “Every revolution begins at the top,” wrote one tsarist official, “and our government had succeeded in transforming the most loyal elements of the country into critics.”147 Desperate high-level plots to unseat the tsar proliferated, even among the Romanov grand dukes. Already in late 1916, Alexander Guchkov, a former president of the Duma, in cahoots with the deputy Duma president, initiated discussions with the high command to (somehow) force out Nicholas II in favor of Alexei under the regency of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and appoint a government answerable to the Duma. (One of Guchkov’s ideas involved “capturing” the tsar’s train.) In a parallel plot, General Alexeyev, chief of staff, discussed with Prince Georgy Lvov arresting Alexandra and, when Nicholas II objected, forcing him to abdicate in favor of Grand Duke Nikolasha (by then in Tiflis). Still more seriously, in January 1917, before the food demonstrations and strikes, Lieutenant General Alexander Krymov—highly decorated for valor—requested a private meeting with Duma president Mikhail Rodzyanko as well as select deputies and told them, “The feeling in the army is such that all will greet with joy the news of a coup d’etat. It has to come . . . we will support you.”148 It can never be known, of course, whether one of the palace coup schemes against Nicholas II would have come to fruition even if the workers had not gone on strike. But with the masses having seized the capital’s streets, elites seized the opportunity to abandon the autocrat.

CRACKDOWN AND DESERTION

On the eve of the women’s bread march, Nicholas II had made a short visit home to the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, just outside the capital, but on February 22 he returned to his Mogilyov sanctuary. There he buried himself in a French history of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. (Never mind that France was Russia’s ally.) “My brain feels rested here—no ministers & no fidgety questions to think over,” the tsar wrote to Alexandra on February 24–25.149 During those days of no fidgety questions, half of Petrograd’s workforce, up to 300,000 angry people, went on strike and occupied the Russian capital’s main public spaces. Alexandra—among the key sources informing the tsar about the disturbances—dismissed the strikers as “a hooligan movement, young boys & girls running about & screaming that they have no bread,” assuring her husband the disturbances would pass, along with the unseasonably warm weather.150 But the tsar had other sources of information. And although he has been nearly universally derided as indecisive, Nicholas II, from the front, issued an unequivocal order for a crackdown.

The previous mass uprising in the capital, in connection with the Russo-Japanese War, had been terrifying, but it had failed.151 Nicholas II’s apparent lack of grave concern may have been related to the successful use of force back in 1905–6.152 Of course, that had been under Pyotr Durnovó, and before the agonies of Stolypin’s five strenuous years had ended in failure, and before the debacle of Rasputin had stripped the autocracy of its remaining shreds of legitimacy. This time, Major General Sergei Khabalov, head of the Petrograd military district, oversaw security in the capital. Admittedly, he was a desk general who had never commanded troops in the field. Khabalov was assisted by people like Major General Alexander Balk, who had been displaced from Warsaw by the German occupation and whom Nicholas II named Petrograd city commandant only after all other candidates had fallen through. A favorite of Alexandra and Rasputin, Balk, in turn, reported to Interior Minister Alexander Protopopov, Russia’s fifth interior minister in thirteen months. Erratic, voluble, smitten with serial manias, he had previously driven his textile business to near bankruptcy, and now followed advice at seances with the spirit of the deceased Rasputin.153 Nicholas II had had immediate second thoughts and had wanted to dismiss Protopopov, but could not overcome the resistance of Alexandra, to whom he had written: “I feel sorry for Protopopov; he is a good and honest man, but a bit hesitant. It’s risky to leave the ministry of the interior in such hands nowadays. I beg you not to drag Our Friend in this. This is only my responsibility and I wish to be free in my choice.”154

Instead, the dubious interior minister Protopopov was handed near dictatorial powers—“Do what is necessary, save the situation,” the tsar told him. But Protopopov was no Durnovó. Later, the cronyism in Protopopov’s appointment—a favorite not just of Alexandra and Rasputin, but also of Rodzyanko and other government officials—would be scapegoated for the February Revolution.155 But Khabalov and Balk had been preparing for a crackdown. True, Russia, universally viewed as a police state, had a mere 6,000 police in the capital in 1917, far too few to forestall the mass gatherings. But Russia maintained gigantic army garrisons in the rear for political as well as military purposes: Petrograd alone garrisoned at least 160,000 soldiers, with another 170,000 within thirty miles. That was double the peacetime number.156 In 1905, when the regime survived, the entire St. Petersburg garrison had numbered a mere 2,000157; 1917’s bloated soldiery in the rear included mere school cadets and untrained conscripts, but the majority of the capital garrison comprised cavalry (Cossacks) and elite guard units. It was a formidable force. Indeed, a Petrograd military district had been separated from the northern front in early February 1917 precisely in order to free up troops for quelling anticipated civil disorders.158 Now those demonstrations were at hand: on the morning of February 24, people again marched for bread.

Around 9:00 p.m. on February 25, Nicholas II telegrammed Khabalov, “I order you to suppress the disorders in the capital at once, tomorrow. These cannot be permitted in this difficult time of war with Germany and Austria.”159 Khabalov and Balk had already observed some Cossacks hesitating to confront the crowds in Petrograd. “The day of February 25 was lost by us in every sense,” Balk would later recall, noting that “the crowd felt the weakness of authority and got impudent.”160 Now, with the tsar’s order to hand, Khabalov and Balk informed a meeting of government ministers toward midnight on February 25–26 about the next day’s coming crackdown. Doubts ricocheted around the private apartment where the government meeting took place. Hearing of the impending crackdown, the foreign minister advised that they all “immediately go to the Sovereign Emperor and implore His Majesty to replace us with other people.” A ministerial majority inclined toward trying to find “a compromise” with the Duma.161 But in the wee small hours, the okhranka went ahead and swept up more than 100 known revolutionaries, and later that day (February 26), at the sound of bugles, imperial troops fired on civilian demonstrators, in some cases using machine guns. Around 50 people were killed and 100 or more wounded (in a city of 3 million).162 The show of force appeared to puncture the festive crowds. It also stiffened the government ministers’ spines.163 On the evening of February 26, 1917, the chief of the okhranka phoned Petrograd city commandant Balk to report that he expected “a decline in the intensity of disorders tomorrow.” As in 1906, the crackdown seemed to have worked.164

Such confidence was misplaced, however. Correctly, okhranka analysts had concluded that back in 1905–6 only the loyalty of the troops had saved the tsarist regime. And now, surmised one okhranka agent, “everything depends upon the military units. If they do not go over to the proletariat the movement will die down quickly.”165 Ominously, however, one elite guards regiment—the Pavlovsky Guards reserve battalion—had tried to stop the killing of civilians. Another guards unit, the Volhynian, had carried out its orders.166 But those Volhynian Guards stayed up overnight discussing their killing of unarmed civilians, and on February 27, when street crowds defiantly massed again, the Volhynians—24,000 soldiers—went over to the protesters.167 The suddenly rebellious Volhynians visited the nearby billets of other units, too, recruiting the rest of the capital garrison to mutiny. Giddy insurgents ransacked and set aflame the okhranka headquarters.168 They also emptied the prisons of criminals and comrades—many arrested only days before in okhranka sweeps—and broke into arsenals and weapons factories. Armed men started careering about Petrograd in commandeered trucks and armored carriers, wildly shooting in whatever direction.169 “I’m doing all I can to put down the revolt,” Khabalov telegrammed staff headquarters. Yet he also begged them “to send reliable troops from the front at once.” Later that evening he informed staff headquarters that “the insurrectionists now hold most of the capital.”170 Khabalov contemplated bombing Russia’s own capital with airplanes.171 He turned out to be far out of his depth, but even a well-executed crackdown is only as good as the political authority behind it—and tsarist political authority was long gone.172

Events moved rapidly. Duma president Rodzyanko, ambitious for himself and fearful of the crowds, was frantically telegraphing staff headquarters in Mogilyov about “the state of anarchy” in the capital, urging that the tsar reverse his prorogue order so the Duma could legally meet and form a Duma-led government. “Again, this fat Rodzyanko has written to me lots of nonsense, to which I shall not even deign to reply,” Nicholas II remarked.173 While waiting in vain for the tsar, the Duma leaders refused to break the law and assemble on their own. But two socialist Duma deputies goaded some 50 to 70 of the 420 Duma deputies to gather for a “private” meeting in the Duma’s regular building, the Tauride Palace, but outside their usual venue of the ornate White Hall. These deputies declared themselves not a government, but a “Provisional Committee of the State Duma for the Restoration of Order.”174 In the very same Tauride Palace at the same time, hundreds of leftists—including many freed from prison that morning—met to reconstitute the 1905 Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.175 The Provisional Committee had competition. The ministers of the government, for their part, telegrammed Mogilyov headquarters with their resignations, which the tsar refused to accept, but the ministers began to make themselves scarce anyway. “The trouble was that in all that enormous city [Petrograd], it was not possible to find a few hundred people sympathetic toward the government,” recalled one rightist deputy in the Duma. “In fact, there was not a single minister who believed in himself and in what he was doing.”176 The autocracy was deserted not just in the capital’s streets and in the capital garrison, but also throughout the corridors of power.

TREASON

From police reports, Nicholas II knew that the British in Petrograd—the embassy of his ally, for whom he had gone to war—were assisting the Duma opposition against him.177 At staff headquarters that February 27, he received urgent messages, including from his brother Grand Duke Mikhail, the regent for the underage Alexei, pleading that he announce a new “Government of confidence” comprising Duma deputies.178 Instead, blaming Khabalov for botching the crackdown, the tsar made two decisions: first, early the next morning, he would return to the capital (a fourteen-to-sixteen-hour train ride)—actually to the capital’s outskirts, Tsarskoe Selo—where he and Alexandra lived with the children; second, an expeditionary force from the front (800 men) commanded by General Nikolai Ivanov would ride to the capital “to institute order.”179 General Alexeyev, the chief of staff, ordered many additional units—at least eight combat regiments—to link up with Ivanov’s expedition. Nicholas II granted the sixty-six-year-old General Ivanov dictatorial power over all ministries.180 But the tsar himself never made it back to the capital. Deliberate disinformation spread by a wily representative of the Duma’s Provisional Committee exaggerated the extent of worker disorders on the railroad, which made the tsar’s train shunt to and fro for nearly two days. He finally alighted on the evening of March 1 at the staff headquarters of the northern front in Pskov. General Ivanov easily reached Tsarskoe Selo, but in the meantime, his superior, General Alexeyev, had changed his mind and telegrammed Ivanov not to take action in the capital. Instead, amid reports of the formation of the Duma’s Provisional Committee and of diminished anarchy in Petrograd, Alexeyev now began to urge Nicholas II to concede a Duma-led government.

The commander of the northern front in Pskov, General Ruzsky, had already come out in favor of a Duma-led government well before Alexeyev; now, with Alexeyev’s urging, Ruzsky pressed this idea on his unexpected guest—the sovereign.181 Nicholas II agreed to allow Duma president Rodzyanko to form a government, but insisted that it would report to him, not to the Duma. Later, after more telegrams from Alexeyev, however, the tsar finally granted a government responsible to the Duma. Nicholas II also personally instructed Ivanov, at Alexeyev’s request, to “please undertake no action” (for the time being)—and then Nicholas II retired to the sleeping car.182 Having conceded a real constitutional monarchy and parliamentary regime after so many years of tenacious resistance, the tsar stayed awake in torment.183 Unbeknownst to a sleepless Nicholas II, beginning around 3:30 a.m., and for the next four hours, Ruzsky communicated with Rodzyanko in the capital over the torturously slow direct wire, or Hughes apparatus (which was capable of transmitting about 1,400 words per hour). Rodzyanko shocked the general with the news that it was already too late for a constitutional monarchy, at least for Nicholas II, given the radicalism in the capital.184

Alexeyev, informed by Ruzsky, now took it upon himself to contact all the front commanders and urge them to support Nicholas II’s abdication “to save the army.” Each commander—sharing a general staff esprit de corps—was to telegraph his request for Nicholas to step down directly to Pskov, with copies to Alexeyev. Later that morning of March 2, 1917, General Ruzsky, as per Alexeyev’s instructions, reported to the tsar’s imperial train carrying the tapes of the conversation with Rodzyanko urging abdication in favor of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duke Mikhail as regent.185 Nicholas II read, walked to the carriage window, went silent, then stated he “was prepared, if necessary for Russia’s welfare, to step aside.” Nothing was decided. Around 2:00 p.m., however, the telegrams arrived from the front commanders—Brusilov and all the rest, plus Alexeyev—unanimously urging abdication; Ruzsky took them to the tsar, who made the sign of the cross and soon emerged to request that HQ prepare an abdication manifesto. Whether Nicholas II would have renounced his sacred calling had he made it to Tsarskoe Selo and the arms of Alexandra can never be known. (“And you, who are alone, no army behind you, caught like a mouse in a trap, what can you do?” Old Wify cabled him on March 2.)186 Stoic, as ever, the now-former tsar was quietly anguished. “All around me,” Nicholas II confided to his diary, “there is nothing but treason, cowardice, and deceit!”187 The tsar’s diaries indicate that only the urging of his generals persuaded him to abdicate.188

And so, in the guise of patriotism, it had come to treason after all.

In violating their oaths—sworn to the tsar, after all—the high commanders could imagine they were saving the army. Desertions were running at 100,000 to 200,000 per month, swelling the ranks of protesting crowds and criminal bands, and clogging the critical railroad stations.189 In addition, the February rebellion had spread from Petrograd to Moscow and the Baltic fleet, threatening the front.190 As far back as the disturbances during the Russo-Japanese War, Alexeyev had concluded that “a revolution from above is always less painful than one from below.”191 But though “military dictatorship” crossed the lips of many civilian elites, and contemporary examples existed—General Ludendorff, de facto, in Germany; the young Turk officers in the Ottoman Empire—Alexeyev and Russia’s military men refrained from claiming power themselves.192 It cannot be that Russian generals lacked confidence in their ability to take over civilian affairs (they had already usurped much civilian operational authority to manage the war). Moreover, Alexeyev had very good information from the general staff and the naval staff in the capital about the incompetence and prevarication of Russia’s civilian leaders. But the officers detested the dirty work of serving as an auxiliary police force and crushing domestic rebellion, a task that undermined the army’s military function and tarnished it in society. Steeped in their military general staff ethos, moreover, they had not developed broad political horizons.193 And so, needing to quell the disorders engulfing the wartime capital and save the army and war effort, Alexeyev saw—or imagined—a solution in the Duma’s Provisional Committee, aided by the figurehead of a new tsar, Aleksei, a darling-looking boy.194 Their calculations were destined to be upended.

• • •

RUSSIA WAS a genuine great power, but with a tragic flaw. Its vicious, archaic autocracy had to be emasculated for any type of better system to emerge. Unmodern in principle, let alone in practice, the autocracy died a deserving death in the maelstrom of the Anglo-German antagonism, the bedlam of Serbian nationalism, the hemophilia bequeathed by Queen Victoria, the pathology of the Romanov court, the mismanagement by the Russian government of its wartime food supply, the determination of women and men marching for bread and justice, the mutiny of the capital garrison, and the defection of the Russian high command. But the Great War did not break a functioning autocratic system; the war smashed an already broken system wide open.

Not knowing that the military brass had already successfully pressured Nicholas II into abdicating, the self-appointed Provisional Committee of the Duma had sent two deputies to Pskov to do so. The emissaries were both lifelong monarchists, and inveterate palace coup plotters: Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin. They were unshaven; Shulgin in particular was said to resemble a convict.195 “Having given my consent to abdication, I must be sure that you have considered what impression this will make on all of the rest of Russia,” Nicholas II said to the pair. “Will this not carry dangerous consequences?”196 Consequences there would be.

By February 1917, Pyotr Durnovó was a year and a half in his grave, but his February 1914 prophecies were already on their way to fulfillment: the constitutionalists’ revolt against the autocracy was accelerating a mass social revolution. Lenin—for the time being—lived outside Russia, behind German lines, in neutral Switzerland. Stalin was holed up in the Siberian backwater of Achinsk, one of myriad internal political exiles. There, as almost everywhere in the Russian empire (including in his native Georgia), the February Revolution arrived by telegraph (“All is in the hands of the people”). On March 3, a local soviet assumed power in Krasnoyarsk city, the regional center, and began arresting local tsarist officials. Stalin—suddenly a free man, for the first time in nearly seventeen years—boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway bound for Petrograd. It was some 3,000 miles away. He traveled in the company of fellow Bolshevik exile Lev Kamenev as well as his own latest girlfriend, Vera Schweitzer, the widow of the Bolshevik Central Committee member Suren Spandaryan, who had perished in the wastes of Stalin’s place of exile, Turukhansk, Siberia, at age thirty-four of lung problems. The future dictator arrived in the imperial capital on March 12, 1917, wearing Siberian valenki (felt boots) and carrying little more than a typewriter.197