Stalin, Volume 1

102. Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhavtsa [1924], 461.

103. Pashukanis, “K istorii anglo-russkogo soglasheniia,” 32; de Taube, La politique russe, 118. Perhaps the only other prominent rightist who fully shared Stolypin’s foreign policy circumspection was his high-profile conservative critic on domestic issues, Durnovó. But the latter did not fully appreciate that Stolypin—who was not even responsible for foreign or military affairs (prerogatives of the tsar)—had skillfully kept Russia out of repeating a foreign misadventure in 1908. McDonald, United Government, 151.

104. Nash, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance; O’Brien, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance; Daniels et al., “Studies in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

105. Coox, Nomonhan, 1–16.

106. “Londonskii s”ezd Rossiiskoi sotsial-demokraticheskoi rabochei partii (Zapiski delegata),” in Sochineniia, II: 46–77 (at 50–1), from Bakinskii proletarii, June 20 and July 10, 1907.

107. Getzler, Martov, 124.

108. For Jughashvili, this was neither his first such exercise nor his last, according to Soso Dawrichewy, the former Tiflis seminarian and priest’s son from Gori (whom the okhranka long confused with Kamo). Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 174–5, 177, 181, 213, 237–8.

109. Gerasimov, Na lezvii s terroristami, 92.

110. The Caucasus military governor also reported that locally, in 1905 and 1906, banditry and assassinations claimed 1,239 lives and an equal number of seriously wounded. Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 21, 34–5, 228.

111. Miklós Kun unearthed the internal party disciplinary file on Litvinov, which proved Stalin’s involvement. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 74–80. See also Montefiore, Young Stalin, 3–16 (citing, among many sources, the unpublished memoirs of Sashiko Svanidze, Stalin’s sister-in-law), 178–91. The surviving okhranka files on the Yerevan holdup have been purged. Bordiugov, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, II: 120–42. Kamo had obtained mail coach insider information from another postal clerk, Gigo Kasradze.

112. GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 7, l. 64–84 (G. F. Vardoyan); Perspektivy, 1991, no. 6: 51–7; Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 163–4; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 257; Avtorkhanov, Proiskhozhdenie, I: 183–6; RGASPI, f. 332, op. 1, d. 53. Kamo had three years of schooling. His adoration of Stalin is related in the subsequent recollections of Kamo’s younger sister, Javariya Khutulushvili: Kun, Unknown Portrait, 75; Perspektivy, 1991, no. 6: 51–7; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 257; Avtorkhanov, Proiskhozhdenie , I: 183–6; RGASPI, f. 332, op. 1, d. 53. See also Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 130–2, 163–7; Smith, Young Stalin, 193–211; van Ree, “The Stalinist Self,” 275–6; van Ree, “Reluctant Terrorists?”; and Montefiore, Young Stalin, 7 (citing Candide Charkviani, “Memoirs,” manuscript, 15).

113. As the folklore has it, for a moment, amid the bodies and chaos, the robbery seemed to have gone awry—until Kamo, dressed as an army officer, rode his own phaeton through the smoke, scooped up most of the sacks of banknotes, then misdirected an arriving policeman. Medvedeva Ter-Petrosyan, “Tovarishch Kamo,” 130. Twenty thousand rubles had been left behind in the stagecoach; one of its drivers tried to pocket another 9,500 rubles but was caught.

114. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 393–4; Geifman, Revoliutsionnyi terror, 164; Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, 155.

115. Trotsky, Stalin, 109.

116. Martov, Spasiteli ili uprazdniteli?, 22–3.

117. Bibineishvili, Kamo, 30–1, 371. The daring Kamo would end up in and out of psychiatric prisons; in 1922, he would be run over by a Soviet official’s car while riding a bicycle in Tiflis. He had a damaged left eye (from one of his own bombs in May 1907), and this may have contributed to his accident.

118. Jughashvili may have gone abroad to see Lenin in August 1907 (Stuttgart) and January 1908 (Switzerland).

119. Reiss, The Orientalist, 11–3; Hone and Dickinson, Persia in Revolution, 158–68.

120. Ordzhonikidze, “Bor’ba s men’shevikami,” 42. Many of the Muslim workers were seasonal Azeri migrants, both legal and illegal, from the northern provinces of Iran. Alstadt, “Muslim Workers,” 83–91; and Chaqueri, Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 24–25, who estimates that from 20 to 50 percent of males in northern Iran between the ages of twenty and forty ended up working for some period of time across the border, mainly in the Russian Caucasus.

121. Vereshchak, “Stalin v tiur’me,” 1306; Vereshchak, “Okonchanie,” 1308.

122. The tsarist regime had turned the Dashnaks against Russian power, too, partly by confiscating Armenian Church properties in 1903 (which Nicholas II had to rescind in 1905). Suny, Transcaucasia, 166–7; Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, 48–9, 92.

123. “Otvet na privetstviia rabochikh glavnykh zheleznodorozhnykh masterskikh v Tiflise,” in Sochineniia, VIII: 174–5. Suny, “Journeyman for the Revolution.”

124. Trotskii, Stalin [1985], I: 158, 163.

125. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 190–3 (citing Svanidze family memoirs and an inerview with a Svanidze cousin).

126. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 35; GDMS, f. 87, d. 1955–46, l. 51–6 (Elisabedashvili). The main source on the marriage has long been the emigre Menshevik Iremashvili, who claimed to have attended Kato’s funeral, and who pinpointed her death as the break that left Stalin “bereft of any moral restraint.” Joseph Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 30–40.

127. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 655, l. 18.

128. Arsenidze, “Iz vospominaniia o Staline,” 224; Deutscher, Stalin, 110.

129. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 647 (Sukhova).

130. Dubinskii-Mukhadaze, Ordzhonikidze, 92.

131. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 1, d, 275, l. 23; Smith, Young Stalin, 28–9; McNeal, Stalin, 336, n15; Kun, Unknown Portrait, 18. Svetlana said that he died from a stabbing in a barroom brawl, but without any evidence to that effect. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 153n. In 1939, Stalin ordered the Tiflis party organization not to collect historical information about Beso.

132. Among Social Democrats—his supposed comrades—Stalin was dismissed as “Lenin’s left foot.” Arsenidze, “Iz vospominaniia o Staline,” 223.

133. On the frailty of the revolutionary parties, despite working-class radicalism, see McKean, St. Petersburg.

134. Daly, Autocracy Under Siege, 117–23.

135. Azef had become chief of the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization. By some accounts, while in the pay of the okhranka, he oversaw twenty-eight successful terrorist attacks on government officials; the okhranka never divined his motives and loyalties. In 1909, he fled to Germany, leaving the SR party in disarray and feeling defeated. “Azef” became a metaphor for the entire tsarist system. Nicolaevsky, Aseff; Schleifman, Undercover Agents; Geifman, Entangled in Terror; Daly, Watchful State, 81–109.

136. Biggart, “Kirov Before the Revolution”; Mostiev, Revoliutsionnaia publitsistika Kirova; Kirilina, Neizvestnyi Kirov.

137. Daly, Watchful State, 110–1.

138. Shukman, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, 126.

139. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VI: 176–7 (N. E. Markov).

140. Vitte, Vospominaniia [1960], III: 274–5; Hosking, Russia, 479.

141. Jones, “Non-Russian Nationalities,” 35–63; Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces; Weeks, Nation and State; Woodworth, “Civil Society”; Staliunas, Making Russians; Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 128. On the incompatibility between Russian nationalism and the tsarist state, see Kappeler, Russian Empire, 238–42. Something very similar took place in Hungary’s deleterious Magyarization in its diverse half of the Habsburg empire after the 1867 “compromise” forming the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

142. Steinberg, Bismarck, 3 (citing Karl Heinz Borner, Wilhelm I, deutscher Kaiser und Konig von Preussen: eine Biographie [Berlin: Akadamie, 1984], 221).

143. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I: 282–3.

144. McDonald, United Government, 10, 209, 213.

145. Rieber, Politics of Autocracy.

146. Gurko, Features and Figures, 30. For similar remarks, thirty years earlier, see Stead, Truth About Russia, 199–200.

147. “K. Kuzakov—syn I. V. Stalina,” Argumenty i fakty, 1995, no. 39: 12. The story of the peasant Matryona and the bastard son reached the Alliluyevs, who passed it on to Svetlana. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 330.

148. Gromov, Stalin, 34–9.

149. A photograph of Pelegeya Onufrieva and Pyotr Chizikov was kept in Stalin’s personal papers: Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1998, no. 10: 190. Chizikov died not long after returning to his parents in 1912. He was in his early twenties. Pelegeya died in 1955; her husband, Fomin, was arrested.

150. Hugh O’Beirne, a longstanding British embassy official in St. Petersburg, reported to London in June 1911 that Stolypin was “depressed” and his position “insecure.” Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar, 74. See also Chmielski, “Stolypin’s Last Crisis.”

151. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 183–91; Hosking, Russian Constitutional Experiment, 136; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VI: 252 (Guchkov). Nicholas II, in January 1913, ended the trial of the police officials linked to the assassination, including A. I. Spiridovich.

152. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 321–47.

153. VI (Parizhskaia) Vserossiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP. On whether Prague in 1912 inaugurated a self-standing Bolshevik party, see Lars Lih, “1912.”

154. Those elected to the Central Committee at Prague included Lenin, Zinoviev, Malinowski (an okhranka spy), Filipp Goloshchyokin, D. Schwarzman, and Stalin’s two Caucasus colleagues, the Georgian Orjonikidze and Armenian Suren Spandaryan; those co-opted were Stalin and Ivan Belostotsky, and a bit later Grigory Petrovsky and Yakov Sverdlov.

155. Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 234.

156. This point, with many references, is developed by Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 248–9.

157. De Felice, Mussolini, 35n; de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia, 360; Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel, 44–52.

158. Gregor, Fascist Persuasion, 49.

159. Gregor, Young Mussolini, 35; Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 42–3.

160. PSS, XXI: 409. In November 1914, after war had broken out, Mussolini would reverse himself and declare support for the Italian government’s participation in war, leading to his expulsion from the Socialist Party. Nation, he argued, could not be ignored.

161. Stalin was paid honoraria for the occasional publication and received aid from the Political Red Cross, in addition to his allowance, from 1912, from Bolshevik party coffers. Still, he wrote to seemingly everyone he knew requesting parcels of food and clothing. “I have no choice but to mention this,” he wrote to his lover Tatyana Slovatinskaya in 1913. “I have no money and have even run out of food.” She sent a parcel, for which he wrote, “I don’t know how I can repay you, my darling sweetheart!” Soon, he was begging her again. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 5392. In the 1920s, Stalin repaid her with a position in the secret department of the Central Committee—his innermost fief. In 1937, her daughter was imprisoned, her son-in-law executed, and she herself (along with two grandchildren) evicted from the elite residential compound House on the Embankment. Khlevniuk, Stalinskoe politburo, 307.

162. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 127–8; Trotskii, Stalin [1990], I: 192–3.

163. Pis’ma P. B. Akselroda-Iu. O. Martovu, I: 292–3.

164. Jones, Socialism, 221.

165. Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre; Haimson, “Workers’ Movement After Lena.”

166. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 246 (from Zvezda, no citation).

167. Melancon, The Lena Goldfields Massacre, 155.

168. Mintslov, Petersburg, 111, 231; Rogger, Jewish Policies, 225; Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa [1990], 493; Podbolotov, “Monarchists Against Their Monarch.” Back in 1903, officers of the Belgrade garrison had stormed the Serbian royal palace and assassinated their king—a fact noted by Russian right-wingers. “Let you in on a secret?” B. V. Nikolsky, the Russian Black Hundreds leader and confidant of Nicholas II, confided to his diary in 1905. “I think that it is naturally impossible to bring the Tsar to his senses. He is worse than inept! He is—God forgive me—a total nobody! . . . We need something Serbian.” Nikol’skii, “Iz dnevnikov,” 77. “I have no hope for the monarchist parties,” a rightist professor in Kiev wrote to a colleague in Moscow. “To have power they need a genuine Monarch, but we have instead a kind of miserable blancmange.” Y. A. Kulakovskii, in Shevtsov, Izdatel’skaia deiatel’nost’ russkikh nesotsialisticheskikh partii, 26.

169. Nazanskii, Krushenie velikoi Rossii, 76–7.

170. Suvorov, Trekhsotletie doma Romanovykh; Moskovskie vedomosti, February 23, 1913: 1; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, II: 439–80.

171. Syrtsov, Skazanie o Fedorovskoi Chudotvornoi. The St. Theodore (Fyodor) icon, also known as the Black Virgin, was taken over by the renovationist (obnovlentsy) sect, which had it restored in Moscow in 1928. In 1944, when the sect was dissolved, the Orthodox Church repossessed the icon; it remains in Kostroma, even though the Bolsheviks blew up its original home (Kostroma’s Assumption Cathedral).

172. Semevslkii, Monarkhiia pered krusheniem; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, IV: 195–6.

173. Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennia Biblioteka, otdel rukopisi (RGB OR), f. 126 (Kireevikh-Novikovikh), k. 13 (Dnevnik A. A. Kireeva, 1900–1904), l. 131. As the years passed, Kireev would continue this refrain: “The sovereign . . . is unstable to such a degree that it is impossible to depend on him.” RGB OR, f. 126, k. 14, 1. 343ob (December 22, 1908). See also Elpatevskii, Vospominaniia, 264.

174. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, II: 464, 466 (Ivan Tolstoy).

175. Anan’ich and Ganelin, “Nikolai II”; Lieven, Nicholas II; Mark D. Steinberg in Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 1–37; Warth, Nicholas II.

176. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization, 22–3.

177. Remnev, Samoderzhavnoe pravitel’stvo, 6, 471.

178. Witte’s champions would later claim, rightly, that he had anticipated Stolypin by proposing the emancipation of the peasants from the commune and their receiving private property and civil rights, but the champions often fail to note that after Stolypin introduced the legislation, Witte opposed it in the State Council. For a comparison of the two men, see Struve, “Witte und Stolypin,” III: 263–73.

179. As communicated in December 1911 to British professor Bernard Pares: “Papers Communicated by Professor Pares, December 23, 1911,” in Lieven, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, VI: 185–8 (at 187).

180. Goriachkin, Pervyi russkii fashist.

181. McDonald, “A Lever Without a Fulcrum,” 268–314.

182. Fascism would flourish in the Russian emigration. See, among a wide literature, Markov, Voiny temnykh sil. An ardent anti-Semite, Markov (the younger of two Duma brothers) became a Nazi.

183. Rogger, Jewish Policies, 190.

184. Daly, Watchful State, xi (citing I. Blok, “Poslednie dni starogo rezhima,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, IV: 13).

185. The regime “was in a precarious position,” explained one former deputy interior minister. “In normal times no government should use methods employed by revolutionists, for in its hands such methods become double-edged weapons.” Gurko, Features and Figures, 437.

PART II: DURNOVÓ’S REVOLUTIONARY WAR

1. It had taken rule-of-law Britain from 1832 until 1912 to effect a transition from greatly limited suffrage (propertied men) to universal manhood suffrage.

2. John Channon, “The Peasantry in the Revolutions of 1917,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, at 117.

3. Kurzman, Democracy Denied.

4. Zinaida Gippius’s diary entry in August/September 1915: “The right—they understand nothing, they are going nowhere, and they refuse to let anyone else go anywhere. The center—they understand, but they are going nowhere, and wait (for what?). The left—they understand nothing but are going like the blind without knowing whither or to what ultimate aim.” Siniaia kniga, 32.

5. “Nashi tseli” [unsigned], Pravda, April 22, 1912, in Sochineniia, II: 248–9.

6. Souvarine, Stalin, 133.

7. PSS, XLVIII: 162.

8. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 820–1.

9. It was issued as a separate pamphlet the next year (St. Petersburg: Priboy, 1914); a much revised version appeared in Sochineniia, II: 290–367. See also Fel’shtinskii, Razgovory s Bukharinym, 10.

10. There were some fifty-five revolutionaries just on the Moscow okhranka payroll as of April 1912. Smirnov, Repressirovanoe pravosudie, 101–3.

11. Wolfe, “Lenin and the Agent”; Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 254; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Deposition in the Case of R. V. Malinovsky: Protocols of 26 May 1917, N. A.,” in Pipes, Unknown Lenin, 35; Elwood, Roman Malinovsky.

12. Luchinskaia, Velikii provokator Evno Azef; Geifman, Entangled in Terror. After being exposed as an okhranka agent in 1909, Azev escaped to Germany, where he was imprisoned until 1917 and died the next year, apparently of kidney disease.

13. “Vystuplenie N. I. Bukharina,” 78. In the British novelist G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), seven anarchists, code-named for the days of the week, plot to blow up the Brighton Pier, but every one turns out to be a police agent.

14. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 194.

15. Smith, “Monarchy Versus the Nation.”

16. Russian foreign ministry personnel were far removed from the roiling social hatreds Durnovó feared. Gurko, Features and Figures, 481–562 (commenting, inter alia, on A. P. Izvolsky and S. D. Sazonov).

17. Durnovó to Plehve, in D. N. Liubimov, “Sobytiia i liudi (1902–1906 gg.)” (RGALI, f. 1447, op. 1, d. 39, l. 461).

18. Novoe vremia, April 26, 1912; Aldanov, “Durnovó” 39–40; Lieven, “Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.” Durnovó’s civil service record (RGIA, f. 1162, op. 6, d. 190, l. 82–109) can be found in Al’manakh: Iz glubiny vremen, 1995, no. 4: 151–65. See also Borodin, “P. N. Durnovó”; Shikman, Deiateli otechestvennoi istorii; and Glinka, Odinnadtsat’ let v Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Stolypin and Durnovó became enemies nearly from the moment of their acquaintance in 1904. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 48–9.

19. “Durnovó stood out among the statesmen of that epoch, including Witte, for his great fund of information, his independent ideas, his courage in expressing his opinion, and his statesmanlike understanding of events,” according to his deputy, Vladimir Gurko. Gurko, Features and Figures, 413–5.

20. McDonald, “The Durnovó Memorandum.”

21. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 5.

22. Durnovó also understood that the war would not be quick, and he foresaw which camps Italy, Turkey, and the Balkan states would join, and how even Japan and the United States would play a role. Durnovó’s memorandum was found among the papers of Nicholas II by the Bolsheviks, and Evgeny Tarle published a version of it in 1922: “Zapiska P. N. Durnovó Nikolaiu II.” See also Tarle, “Germanskaia orientatsiia i P. N. Durnovó.” In full in English translation: Golder, Documents of Russian History, 3–23. Witte had allowed himself to communicate with Nicholas II in brusque terms about the military defeat during the Russo-Japanese War. Dillon, Eclipse of Russia, 294–5 (purporting to quote directly from a copy of a letter Witte gave him).

23. Lenin, Detskaia bolezn’ “levizny” v kommunizme (Petrograd, 1920), reprinted in PSS, XLI: 3–90 (at 10).

24. Even before the outbreak of the war, in 1913, widespread fear gripped elites that “the specter of 1905 would once again become a reality,” reported M. F. von Kotten. Korbut, “Uchet departamentom politsii opyta 1905 goda,” 219. In April 1914, Count V. V. Musin-Pushkin summed up the mood at court, writing to his father-in-law that “the most bourgeois circles are becoming revolutionary, and it is worse in the provinces than in the capital. Absolutely everyone is discontented.” The count added that “what is most stupid and annoying is that there are no basic reasons for discontent.” Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution, 12–3.

25. M. O. Gershenzon, in Shagrin and Todd, Landmarks, 81; Paleologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, III: 349–50.

26. In fact, neither the British nor the French were confident in the endurance of a Russo-German antagonism, because no essential interests divided St. Petersburg and Berlin. But in Russia, the leading Germanophiles—Witte and Durnovó—were no longer in positions of power sufficient to influence Nicholas II. A decline in pro-German sentiment in St. Petersburg served as the background for Durnovó’s February 1914 memorandum. Lieven, “Pro-Germans”; Bestuzhev, Bor’ba, 44–6.

27. Fischer, War of Illusions, 334–6.

28. Durnovó’s former deputy noted that his boss “could not fathom the psychological depths of the people.” Gurko, Features and Figures, 415.

29. “Governing a state is a harsh business,” Durnovó had explained in late 1910. “Justice itself yields to the demands of higher state interests . . . The tsar has to be terrible [awesome] but gracious, terrible first and foremost and gracious afterwards.” Gosudarstvennyi Sovet: stenograficheskii otchet, sixth session, December 17, 1910, col. 595; Lieven, “Bureaucratic Authoritarianism,” 395, n25.

30. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, 277–308.

31. “The heir’s illness, the empress’s irritability, the sovereign’s indecisiveness, the appearance of Rasputin, the unsystematic character of general government politics,” recalled Alexander Naumov, another rightist in the State Council, “all this forced honest and serious public officials to ponder the current state of affairs and to look warily upon an indeterminate future.” Naumov, Iz utselevshikh vospominanii, II: 214–5 (includes the Durnovó quote).

32. Years later, in the emigration, the story would be told that the tsar had invited Durnovó to take up the reins of government as prime minister. “Your Highness,” Durnovó is supposed to have demurred, “my system as head of the Government or minister of internal affairs cannot provide quick results, it can only show itself after a number of years, and these years will be a time of utter rumpus: dissolution of Dumas, assassinations, executions, perhaps armed uprisings. You, Your Highness, will not be able to take these years and you will remove me; under such conditions my being in power would bring nothing good, only harm.” The idea that Durnovó would try one more time to win over Nicholas II and then decline an invitation to take charge is beyond fanciful. Still, the fanciful quote attributed to him does reflect how he and others had, essentially, lost heart. Vasil’chikov, Vospominaniia, 225; Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, 229–30.

33. Mal’kov, Pervaia mirovaia voina, 99.

34. Mendel, “Peasant and Worker.” Mendel was commenting on Leopold Haimson, whose influential article argued that revolution in Russia was inevitable, because of a dual social polarization: between workers and the rest of society, and between educated society and the autocracy. Haimson, “Problem of Social Stability.”

35. Dan, Origins of Bolshevism, 399. Originally published in Russian (1946), on the eve of the emigre Dan’s death in New York.

36. Hosking, Russian Constitutional Experiment. For an update, see McKean, “Constitutional Russia,” and the response by Peter Gatrell (82–94). A civil society is impossible in an illiberal political order, but scholars continue to imagine a civil society in tsarist Russia, focusing on the existence of associations, which enjoyed few civil protections and little influence on the state. Walkin, Rise of Democracy; Bradley, Voluntary Association; Ely, “Question of Civil,” 225–42.

37. Shelokhaev, Politicheskie partii Rossii.

38. Holquist, “Violent Russia,” 651–2.

CHAPTER 5: STUPIDITY OR TREASON?

1. Rech’, December 13, 1916, translated and reprinted in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 154–166 (at 164).

2. Tikhomirov, “Nuzhny li printsipy?,” 69.

3. Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, 56.

4. “The Kaiser sent me packing like a lackey,” the embittered ex-chancellor wrote. Later, Bismarck exacted a form of revenge, choosing as his epitaph, “a loyal German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.” Steinberg, Bismarck, 454–5, 463, 480. The kaiser’s dismissal of Bismarck was reminiscent of Nicholas II’s handling of Witte.

5. Kennan, Fateful Alliance.

6. Offer, The First World War, 324–30. The United States was third in international trade at 11 percent: Kennedy, Over Here, 298.

7. Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent.

8. Quoted in Paul Kennedy, “The Kaiser and Weltpolitik: Reflexions on Wilhelm II’s Place in the Making of German Foreign Policy,” in Rohl and Sombart, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 143–68 (at 155). See also J. G. Rohl, “Introduction” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Character Sketch of Kaiser Wilhelm II,” in the same volume (1–62); Hull, Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II; and Hewitson, “The Kaiserreich in Question.”

9. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar.

10. McClelland, German Historians and England; Sontag, Germany and England; and Conrad, Globalisation and Nation.

11. Quoted in Ronaldshay, Life of Lord Curzon, III: 117.

12. Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 360.

13. The literature on the general causes of war has in many ways developed out of the Great War example. Blainey, The Causes of War; Howard, The Causes of Wars. Alas, the political science literature on the causes of war entered a cul-de-sac some time ago, from which it has not fully emerged: Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War.” More helpfully there is Jervis, Perception and Misperception.

14. Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 31–2.

15. Stone, The Eastern Front, 42; Knox, With the Russian Army, I: xix.

16. Fischer, War of Illusions, 400; Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War, 181. “Russia grows and grows,” noted Germany’s civilian chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. “She lies on us like a nightmare.” See also Pollock, Creating the Russian Peril; and Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke. Britain’s shipbuilding industry built warships at twice the speed and half the cost of Russia’s, but Britain bore the self-assigned burden of dominating the world’s sea lanes. Gatrell, Government, Industry, and Rearmament.

17. Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power”; John C. G. Rohl, “Germany,” in Wilson, Decisions for War, at 33–8.

18. Halevy, The World Crisis, 24–5; see also Crampton, “The Balkans,” 66–79.

19. Fay, The Origins of the World War, II: 335; Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, II: 74–88; Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo; Vucinich, “Mlada Bosna and the First World War,” 45–70; Zeman, The Break-Up, 24–34; Remak, Sarajevo; MacKenzie, Apis, 123ff. Back on June 3, 1910, Bogdan Žerajić (a twenty-two-year-old Serb) had tried to kill Kaiser Franz Jozef; twelve days later, Žerajić had attempted to kill the then governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina General Marijan Verešanin. Having failed, Žerajić killed himself.

20. Mark Cornwall, “Serbia,” in Wilson, Decisions for War, 55–96.

21. Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII/1: 190.

22. Franz Josef’s aggressive stance, to some, recalled British behavior in the Boer War fifteen years earlier when London, fearing loss of its grip across southern Africa, invented concentration camps and sought to annihilate the “uppity” Afrikaner population on the Cape. Lieven, “Dilemmas of Empire,” 187.

23. Wandruszka, House of Habsburg, 178.

24. Austria’s decision making has been judged severely (Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery, 521; Williamson, Austria-Hungary, 211). But for a shrewd defense of Austria-Hungary’s gamble, see Schroeder, “Stealing Horses,” 17–42. When Britain declared war on August 3, 1914, within four minutes British commanders in the Far East knew, via telegraph.

25. Newton, Lord Lansdowne, 199.

26. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 77–80. Nicholas may have been influenced not only by Durnovó and the ill-starred Russo-Japanese War but also by the widely discussed book of the Russian-Polish banker Iwan Bloch, Budushchaia voina, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: Efron, 1898). The concluding sixth volume was translated into English as The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic, and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible? (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899).

27. Ropponen, Die Kraft Russlands; Fuller, “The Russian Empire,” 110–20.

28. Immediately after the war began, the Russian foreign minister pressured Serbia to cede the territory of Macedonia (to Bulgaria). Paleologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, I: 22–23 (entry for July 23, 1914).

29. Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, II: 352–62; Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 139–51; Spring, “Russia and the Coming of War,” 57–86. Albertini, among the general accounts, stands out for having thorough knowledge of Russian sources.

30. Turner, “The Russian Mobilization in 1914,” 252–66; Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 312–3; Sazonov, Vospominaniia, 248–9 (Sazonov was foreign minister). For the relevant documents, see “Nachalo voiny 1914 g.: podennaia zapis’.”

31. Hans Rogger, “Russia in 1914.” Alexandra, in a letter to Nicholas, fantasized that the war had “lifted spirits, cleansed the stagnant minds, brought unity in feelings,” and called the war a “healthy war in the moral sense.” Pares, Letters of the Tsaritsa, 9 (September 24, 1914). On Nicholas II’s public announcement of the war from a balcony of the Winter Palace, see Vasilyev, Ochrana, 36.

32. The paper added: “Here begins the second Great Patriotic War.” Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 18. On the press drumbeat for war in 1914 in both Germany and Russia, see Fischer, War of Illusions, 370–88. “Why is it that in general, war is evil but this war alone is somehow good?” wrote Zinaida Gippius, the St. Petersburg poetess, in her diary in August 1914. Gippius, Siniaia kniga, 12.

33. As John LeDonne observed, “These were not the goals of a political establishment that had lost its nerve and was mesmerized by the German danger.” To be sure, as Boris Nolde rightly observed, Russia’s imperialist war aims had not driven the decision for war, but emerged after the war had begun. That emergence, however, did not occur out of the blue. Retrospectively, one of the chief culprits, former Russian foreign minister Aleksandr P. Izvolsky, attempted an exculpation of Russia, arguing that only fears of German hegemony in Europe had motivated Russia’s actions. LeDonne, Russian Empire and the World, 366–7; Boris Nol´de, “Tseli i real’nost’ v velikoi voine,” 81–6; Izvolsky, Memoirs, 83.

34. “Having so long resisted war for fear of social repercussions,” one scholar writes, “the Russian government now entered it for the same reasons.” McDonald, United Government, 207.

35. Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan. See also Snyder, Ideology of the Offensive, chapters 4–5; and Sagan, “1914 Revisited.”

36. Forster, “Dreams and Nightmares: German Military Leadership and the Images of Future War,” 343–76 (esp. 360, 365, 372); Herwig, “Germany and the ‘Short War’ Illusion,” 688; Snyder, Ideology of the Offensive, 112, 122–24; Howard, The First World War, 28–9; Offer, “Going to War in 1914.”

37. Lambert, Planning Armageddon. One of Schlieffen’s arguments for the necessity of a lightning victory had been the supposed impossibility of sustaining a war of attrition given the new economic constraints of war. Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, III: 369ff.

38. Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 214–18.

39. Ambassador Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky to Berlin, August 1, 1914, in Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1922), III: 66; Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, III: 171–8, 380–6; Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 282–3. On the kaiser’s worry and restraint, see Stevenson, Cataclysm, 21–35.

40. Tuchman, Guns of August, 99 (quoting von Moltke’s memoirs).

41. Nicolson, King George V, 328–9 (citing Grey’s note, from the Royal Archives); Young, “The Misunderstanding of August 1, 1914.”

42. Von Moltke, Erinnerungen, 21; von Zwehl, Erich von Falkenhayn, 58–9.

43. Following an agreement of October 1907, effective January 26, 1910, international law required a declaration of war before commencing hostilities.

44. “The [German] government,” the naval cabinet chief approvingly wrote in his diary, “has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.” Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War, 213ff.

45. A. J. P. Taylor famously called it the “war by timetable,” wrongly blaming mobilization, and even asserting that none of the great powers had sought war. Taylor, War by Timetable.

46. The British government had the assets to enforce the blockade but not the ability to coordinate the many British agencies involved. Economic warfare went from being the cornerstone to the afterthought of British grand strategy. Lambert, Planning Armageddon, quote at 189 (Robert Brand). See also Ferguson, Pity of War, 189–97; and Ferguson, “Political Risk.”

47. Whereas Taylor argued that “peace would have brought Germany the mastery of Europe within a few years,” Ferguson countered that British neutrality would have been followed at worst by a temperate German peace imposed on France and the future integrity of Belgium. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery, 528; Ferguson, Pity of War, 168–73, 442–62.

48. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 142–3.

49. This is not meant to absolve von Moltke: In June 1915, after he was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, the megalomaniacal von Moltke complained privately to a friend that “it is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated.” He died one year later. Mombauer, “A Reluctant Military Leader?,” 419.

50. Stevenson, Armaments; Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive.” See also Dickinson, International Anarchy.

51. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 139–40. On honor, see Offer, “Going to War in 1914.”

52. For a basic overview of decision making, see Hamilton and Herwig, Decisions for War.

53. A focus on statesmen, using memoirs (not then closed archives), characterized the phenomenally influential Tuchman, Guns of August. See Strachan, The First World War [2004], 68; Strachan, The First World War [2003], I: 4–162; Stevenson, Cataclysm; and Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed.”

54. Christensen and Snyder, “Chain Gangs,” 66.

55. Horne, A Companion to World War I, 249. “All the nations of Europe to-day, in my humble estimation, if I may say so, have gone mad,” remarked the prime minister of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier) already a few years before the war (1911). Quoted in Offer, The First World War, 268.

56. French, British Strategy, xii, 200–1.

57. Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 169; Keegan, The First World War, 278–99; Ferro, The Great War, 91–2. See also Prior and Wilson, The Somme.

58. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, 142–6.

59. Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun.

60. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud, 243.

61. Gumz, Resurrection and Collapse.

62. Russell, Justice in War Time, 13–4.

63. Harding, Leninism, 8–11, 113–41.

64. Bol’shevik, 1949, no. 1, reprinted in PSS, XLIX: 377–9 (at 378); Lih, Lenin, 13. Lih, whose corpus of works brims with original insights, unfortunately makes Lenin out to be a mainstream European social democrat, kind of the way that Nietzsche’s English-language translator, Walter Kaufmann, made the German radical thinker into an American liberal.

65. “Patriotism was on display only sporadically and disappeared almost completely in 1915 . . . Russians had a pretty good idea against whom they were fighting in the war, but not for whom and for what.” Jahn, Patriotic Culture, 134, 173. War patriotism was an upper-class sentiment: Gurko, Features and Figures, 538.

66. Lieven, Empire, 46.

67. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 5–90.

68. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.

69. Prior and Wilson, The Somme, 222; de Groot, Douglas Haig, 242 (citing Haig, “Memorandum on Policy for the Press,” May 26, 1916).

70. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. One historian observed that “The Allies, and particularly the British, managed to give the impression that they acted brutally or unscrupulously with regret; the Germans always looked as though they were enjoying it.” In fact, the early unprovoked atrocities in Belgium, although exaggerated, were real. Taylor, The First World War, 57.

71. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, 117–8.

72. PSS, XLIX: 101, 161.

73. Thatcher, Leon Trotsky, 212. See also Martynov, “Ot abstraktsii k konkretnoi deiatel’nosti”; and Thatcher, “Trotskii, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks.”

74. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, August 1930, no. 14: 8; Trotsky, Stalin School of Falsification, 184–5. The last entry in volume II of Stalin’s Collected Works dates to January–February 1913, and the first entry in volume III dates to March 1917. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 37.

75. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” at 224, 237, n64 (citing RGASPI, f. 30, op. 1, d. 20; f. 558, op. 1, d. 57); Shveitzer, Stalin v turukhanskoi ssylke. Even when Stalin was preparing his collective works the unpublished article, which was said to have filled two exercise books in longhand, could not be found. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 62, l. 308ff, 424.

76. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” 225 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 54, d. 56).

77. Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 386–90.

78. Krasnoiarskii rabochii, July 25, 2003 (citing Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Krasnoiarskogo kraia): http://www .krasrab.com/archive/2003/07/25/16/view_article; Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1924, kn. 2: 66; Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 276–7. Volkogonov, Stalin: Politicheskii portret, I: 51. See also Sverdlova, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov [1985], 171–208.

79. This is a quote from October 1938: Istoricheskii arkhiv (1994), no. 5: 13; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, l. 55. On his marriage vow, see Istochnik, 2002, no. 4: 74.

80. The library had belonged to Dubrovinsky. In 1929, when the gendarme Mikhail Merzlyakov faced expulsion from his kolkhoz because of his tsarist police past, he wrote to Stalin, who wrote to the village soviet: “Mikh Merzlyakov carried out the task he was given by the chief of police according to the book, but without the usual police zeal. He was not spying on me. He did not make my life a misery. He did not bully me. He tolerated my frequent disappearances. He criticized his superiors on several occasions for their many orders and prescriptions. I regard it as my duty to confirm this to you.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 662.

81. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 21 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 53, l. 1–3: Feb. 27, 1915); Allilueva, Vospominaniia, 118. Anna was another of Sergei Alliluyev’s daughters. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 662. Stalin was in Kureika (1914–16), and later told the local children: “I was capricious, sometimes cried, hard, a tough existence.” TsKhIDNI Krasnoiarskogo Kraia, f. 42, op. 1, d. 356, l. 22.

82. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 414–8. Sverdlov escaped the war, too, because he was a Jew.

83. Best, “The Militarization of European Society,” 13–29.

84. Russia’s army went to battle mostly on foot, with horse-drawn and ox-drawn carts, even though Russia’s soldiers were scattered across some 8 million square miles of territory. Each Russian conscript in 1914 had to travel three times as far, on average, as each German, Austro-Hungarian, or French conscript to reach the arena of mobilization. Knox, With the Russian Army, I: xxxiii; Dobrorolski, Die Mobilmachung der russischen Armee, 28; Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossii, I: 51, 61, II: 69–71; Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia, 76; Danilov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 191–2; Rostunov, Russkii front, 100–1.

85. Many of them perished en route to far-off hospitals in the rear, having been “piled up on the floors of freight cars, without any medical care.” Of the 5 million Russian soldiers hospitalized, around half had war wounds; the rest suffered disease—typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery—or frostbite, which frequently required amputations. Viroubova, Memories of the Russian Court, 109. See also Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 199; Rodzianko, Reign of Rasputin, 115–7.

86. In 1916, the belated introduction in tsarist Turkestan of conscription—on top of a forced supply of horses and livestock to the army at below-market prices—provoked full-scale rebellion. In the violence, which killed perhaps 2,500 Russians, at least 300,000 steppe nomads were displaced, many fleeing across the border to China. Piaskovskii, Vosstanie 1916 goda; Kendirbai, “The Alash Movement,” V: at 855; Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 84. The British also faced wartime revolts in India, Egypt, Ireland, and elsewhere in their empire.

87. Stone, The Eastern Front, 215.

88. Showalter, Tannenberg.

89. Golovine, The Russian Army, 220–1. See also Polivanov, Iz dnevnikov i vospominanii, 186.

90. Stone, The Eastern Front, 12, 93. Russia’s air force, established in 1912, had perhaps owned 360 aircraft and 16 airships in 1914—the largest air force in the world—but most were grounded for want of spare parts, allowing the Germans to move about unobserved.

91. Ol’denburg, Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai II Aleksandrovich; later expanded into Ol’denburg, Istoriia tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II; and translated as Ol’denburg, Last Tsar. It was not just the Duma. “The antagonism between the imperial authority and the civilian society is the greatest scourge of our political life,” lamented Agricultural Minister Alexander Krivoshein during the war. “The future of Russia will remain precarious so long as Government and society insist upon regarding each other as two hostile camps.” Quoted in Paleologue, La Russie, I: 289. In February 1914, Krivoshein had declined, citing health reasons, to become prime minister.

92. Gurko, Features and Figures, 19; Mamontov, Na Gosudarevoi sluzhbe, 144–5, 151–3; Masolov, Pri dvore imperatora , 11–12; Lieven, Nicholas II, 117; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 15–24.

93. The Duma also met July–August 1915, on the war’s first anniversary; February–May 1916; and November 1916–February 1917.

94. Gurko, Features and Figures, 576. “We need to fight, for the Government consists of scoundrels,” explained Vasily Shulgin, of the Nationalist Party. “But since we do not intend to move to the barricades, we cannot egg others on.” Lapin, “Progessivnyi blok v 1915–1917 gg.,” 114.

95. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VII: 116–75 (Rodzianko, on Maklakov) at 124. See also Gurko, Features and Figures, 521–2. The Shchëgolëv volumes were the work of the “Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime,” formed by the Provisional Government and discontinued by the Bolsheviks, who nonetheless partly published the materials (which were transcribed by the poet Alexander Blok).

96. The state paid 4,000 rubles for Durnovó’s funeral.

97. Kir’ianov, Pravye partii.

98. See the table in Eroshkin, Ocherki istorii, 310.

99. Gal´perina, Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoiimperii; Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution. In the western districts close to the front, Russia’s high command did push aside the civilian government (such as it was), but administratively, the military men did not do much better. Graf, “Military Rule Behind the Russian Front.”

100. Jones, “Nicholas II”; Ol’denburg, Last Tsar, IV: 38–42; Brusilov, Soldier’s Note-book, 267–8; Gurko, Features and Figures, 567–71; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 210–1. As Witte remarked of Nicholas II, “a soft haze of mysticism refracts everything he beholds and magnifies his own functions and person.” Dillon, Eclipse of Russia, 327 (quoting a purported interview with Witte).

101. Gourko, War and Revolution, 10–1; Mikhail Lemke, 250 dnei, 149; Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 41.

102. Jones, “Nicholas II.”

103. The words of Maurice Paleologue, quoted in V. Kantorovich, Byloe, 1923, no. 22: 208–9.

104. Letters of the Tsaritsa, 114, 116 (August 22, 1915).

105. Fuller, Foe Within; Shatsillo, “Delo polkovnika Miasoedova”; Knox, “General V. A. Sukhomlinov.”

106. Fulop-Miller, Rasputin, 215; Radzinsky, Rasputin File, 40.

107. Court denied his sexual licentiousness. Viroubova, Souvenirs de ma vie, 115. The Sarajevo murder occurred on June 28 by the Western calendar, and on June 15 by the Russian calendar; the attempt on Rasputin’s life occurred on June 29 by the Western calendar, on June 16 by the Russian. The assassin was Khionia Guseva, from Tsaritsyn.

108. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, II: 40; Beletskii, Grigorii Rasputin, 32–6.

109. Kilcoyne, “The Political Influence of Rasputin.”

110. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 199–202; Fuhrmann, Rasputin, 93–8; Radzinsky, Rasputin File, 187. The nerves in Alexei’s left leg had atrophied, causing excruciating pain right through the summer of 1913, but the grave danger of 1912 had passed. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 28–30. Gilliard, Alexei’s tutor, was not told the cause of Alexei’s illness.

111. Crawford and Crawford, Michael and Natasha, 122–46.

112. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 10; RGIA, f. 1278, op. 10, d. 11, l. 332; Maylunas and Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, 529.

113. Grave, Burzhuaziia nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii, 78. See also Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 156.

114. On what he calls the “parastatal complex” of social organizations in wartime Russia, see Holquist, Making War, 4. Lewis Siegelbaum has pointed out that relative to other powers, cooperation with “social interests and groups previously outside, or even hostile to the state machinery” was “least developed in Russia during the war.” But this was probably not true of 1916. Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilization, xi.

115. Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, 61.

116. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry, 46; Paleologue, La Russie, I: 231–2 .

117. Stone, The Eastern Front, 227; Pogrebinskii, “Voenno-promyshlennye komitety”; Gronsky and Astrov, The War and the Russian Government.

118. Alexeyev objected to Brusilov’s “wide-front” approach, urging him instead to attack on a narrow twelve-mile front, but Brusilov stuck with his plan and, as he foresaw, this meant the enemy could not figure out where to commit reserves. Brusilov, Soldier’s Note-book, 204–75; Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia, 237; Hart, The Real War, 224–7; Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 432–82; Rostunov, Russkii front, 321–3; Rostunov, General Brusilov, 154–5; Dowling, The Brusilov Offensive.

119. Stone, The Eastern Front, 243.

120. He also noted, however, that “sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.” Von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, I: 193; II: 69. See also Asprey, German High Command.

121. Quoted in McReynolds, “Mobilising Petrograd’s Lower Classes,” 171.

122. Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 462–9; Lyons, Diary, 103–10.

123. Daly, Watchful State, 180 (I. G. Shcheglovitov).

124. Fleer, Rabochee dvizhenie, 309.

125. Rezanov, Shturmovoi signal P. N. Miliukova, 43–61; Ol’denburg, The Last Tsar, IV: 99–104; Bohn, “‘Dummheit oder Verrat’?”; Lyandres, “Progressive Bloc Politics.” Miliukov later tried to rationalize his promotion of falsehoods: Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 276–7; Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 243. See also Riha, A Russian European; and Stockdale, Paul Miliukov.

126. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 261–6; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 166–75. Purishkevich had already been publicly accused of wanting to remove Nicholas II. “Sovremennoe pravosudie,” Dym otechestva, 1914, no. 22: 1–2. British ambassador George Buchanan had bought into the rumors of German agents at the Russian court, and an operative of Britain’s secret intelligence service seems to have been a co-conspirator, fearful of a possible separate Russian peace with Germany: Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, whom Yusupov knew from a stint at Oxford, evidently was present at the murder and dined with Yusupov the day after. An exchange between Rayner’s superiors in St. Petersburg indicates his possible involvement. Cook, To Kill Rasputin.

127. Voeikov, S tsarem, 178; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 266–7. The assassins were never brought to trial.

128. V. Mikhailovich, Kniga vospominanii, 186; A. Mikhailovich, Once a Grand Duke, 184. Alexander Mikhailovich was the son of a brother (Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich) of Nicholas II’s grandfather Tsar Alexander II. Prince Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s murderers, was the son-in-law of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.

129. Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, 312 (citing “Telegramme secret de M. Paleologue au Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres,” AdAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Russie, Dossier Generale no. 646: 78–9).

130. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, II: 41.

131. Martynov, okhranka chief in Moscow, noted that the masses were not radicalized because of outside agitators, but because of government errors and a falloff in the tsar’s prestige, as well as court scandals. “Tsarskaia okhrana o politicheskom polozhenii v strane v kontse 1916 g.,” Istoricheskiii arkhiv, 1960, no. 1: 204–9; Pokrovskii and Gelis, “Politcheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii v zhandarmskom osveshchenii,” excerpted in Daniels, Russian Revolution, 9–12.

132. “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia i okhrannoe otdelenie.” “There were no authoritative leaders on the spot in any of the parties. They were all in exile, prison, or abroad.” Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, I: 21.

133. Burdzhalov, Vtoraia russkaia revoliutsiia, 90–1, 107–8.

134. David Longley, “Iakovlev’s Question, or the Historiography of the Problem of Spontaneity and Leadership in the Russian Revolution of February 1917,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, 365–87.

135. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii [1923].

136. Matsuzato, “Soryokusensoto chihotochi.”

137. Anstiferov, Russian Agriculture.

138. Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia, 70–1.

139. Kondrat’ev, Rynok khlebov, 137–8; Holquist, Making War, 31–2.

140. Lih, Bread and Authority; Holquist, Making War, 44–6. Before the war, only one third of Russian cereal production reached market, and half of that went for export.

141. Kondrat’ev, Rynok khlebov, 127; Struve, Food Supply in Russia, 128; Zhitkov, “Prodfurazhnoe snabzhenie russkikh armii”; Pavel Volobuev, Ekonomicheskaia politika Vremmenogo Pravitel’stva, 384–7; Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 408–19; Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia, 217–8.

142. Lih, Bread and Authority, 12; “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 7–72. “We have grain at flour mills that have no fuel,” commented Moscow’s mayor, “flour where there aren’t any freight cars to move it, and freight cars where there is no freight for them to carry.” Quoted in Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 314.

143. The agent warned that “Mothers, exhausted from standing endlessly at the tail of queues, and . . . watching their half-starved and sick children, are perhaps much closer to a revolution than Misters Miliukov and Co.—that is, the Duma’s Progressive Bloc.” But that reckoning underestimated Miliukov. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 201 (citing GARF, f. POO, op. 5, d. 669 [1917], l. 25–33); Shchëgolëv, Padenie, I: 184 (Khabalov).

144. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 170.

145. Mil’chik, “Fevral’skie dni.”

146. Kolonitskii, Symvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’, 14–37. Richard Wortman argues that “the symbolic abdication of Nicholas II took place long before he actually left the throne in February 1917.” Wortman, “Nicholas II,” 127. See also Steinberg, “Revolution,” 39–65; and Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 307–53.

147. Gurko, Features and Figures, 546. See also Kir’ianov, Pravye partii, II: 604–46; and Sadikov, “K istorii poslednikh dnei tsarskogo rezhima,” 241–2.

148. Diakin, “Leadership Crisis”; Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 300–2; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 116; Sovremennye zapiski, 1928, no. 34: 279 (Maklakov); “Aleksandr Ivanovich Guchkov rasskazyvaet,” Voprosy istorii, 1991, nos. 7–8: at 205; Rodzyanko, Reign of Rasputin, 244–5, 253–4; Gleason, “Alexander Guchkov”; Pares, Fall of the Russian Monarch, 427–9; Katkov, Russia, 1917, 215; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 187. Pipes dismisses the plots as idle chatter. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 269–70.

149. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 72; Hynes, Letters of the Tsar, 315 (February 24, 1917); Journal intime de Nicholas II, 93.

150. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 73 (Letter from Alexandra to Nicholas, February 25, 1917); Journal intime de Nicholas II, 92. Khabalov’s first telegram to staff headquarters about the Petrograd disturbances was received on the twenty-fifth at 6:08 p.m., but Alexeyev may only have reported it to the tsar on the twenty-sixth. Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 4–5; Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 80–1.

151. “What revolution?” scoffed the leading Bolshevik figure in the capital, Alexander Shlyapnikov, a Central Committee member (since 1915) who was also close to the workers’ moods, on February 25, 1917. “Give the workers a loaf of bread and the movement would be gone!” Hasegawa, February Revolution, 258 (citing Sveshnikov, “Vyborgskii raionnyi komitet,” 83–4). See also “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 39–41; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, I: 191–4 (Khabalov); II: 231–3 (Beliaev).

152. Voeikov, S tsarem, 195–200.

153. Chermenskii, IV Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 196, n4, 201; Daly, Watchful State, 189–92; Pares, Fall of the Russian Monarchy, 378–81, 393–96, 416–19.

154. Fuhrmann, Complete Wartime Correspondence, 6. There was also War Minister Mikhail Belyaev, known as “dead head,” a functionary whom Nicholas II characterized as “an extremely weak man who always gives way in everything.” Hasegawa, February Revolution, 160–3.

155. Balk led the way in later damning Khabalov, as well as Belyaev, as indecisive. Poslednie novosti, March 12, 1921.

156. “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 32; Burdzhalov, Vtoraia Russkaia revoliutsiia, 96; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 121.

157. Ascher, Revolution of 1905, I: 225.

158. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution, 91–3. The contingency plan for suppressing street protests in the capital did not entail possibly summoning troops from the front—a consequence, perhaps, of having formed a separate Petrograd military district. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 163.

159. Nicholas II’s telegram to General Khabalov has not survived. We have only Khabalov’s testimony: Shchëgolëv, Padenie, I: 190–1. Compare Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 81.

160. “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 38.

161. “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 39–41; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, I: 191–4 (Khabalov), II: 231–3 (Beliaev).

162. Kak russkii narod zavoeval svobodu, 8.

163. Only hours after inclining to compromise with the Duma, the government ministers now took the initiative to use the tsar’s authority to prorogue the Duma! Katkov surmised that Nikolai Golitsyn, head of government, had an undated decree signed by the tsar to prorogue the Duma and acted on his own by filling in the date. Katkov, Russia, 1917, 287. See also Vasilyev, Ochrana, 215.

164. Sukhanov, Zapiski, I: 53, 59. See also the police-perspective account in Daly, Watchful State, 201–6.

165. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Russian Revolution, 161; Burdzhalov, Vtoraia russkaia revoliutsiia, 182. When the okhranka sought to monitor the political reliability of the armed forces, top military men, their sense of honor offended, resisted. Surveillance on the military would have made no difference. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 333–6.

166. Some members of the Pavlovsky Guards were imprisoned. “A terrible breach in the stronghold of tsarism,” recorded Sukhanov. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, I: 29. Of the encounter on February 26, Balk recalled that his office was visited by large numbers of police and state officials concerned about the situation. “Conversing with them about events, a state coup did not come up. Disorder, yes, but Russia had experienced many disorders over the last years and we, staff of the interior ministry, were far from hysterical: we were accustomed to the fact that avoiding victims on each side was not possible, yet the idea that the troops in the end would not put down the rebellion was unthinkable.” “Gibel’ tsarskogo Petrograda,” 42–3.

167. The words of General K. I. Globachev: Ganelin, “The Day Before the Downfall,” 245–55; Ganelin et al., “Vospominaniia T. Kirpichnikova,” 178–95. On a December 1916 Cossack refusal in the Don region to fire on women whose husbands were at the front, see Engel, “Not by Bread Alone,” 712–6.

168. “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia i okhrannoe otdelenie,” Byloe, January 29, 1918: 175–6.

169. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 233–8. “I don’t know how many collisions I saw during those days,” recalled one armored vehicle driver, Viktor Shklovsky. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 16.

170. Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 8 (telegram from Khabalov to Nicholas II, February 27, sent 12:10 p.m., received 12:20 p.m.), 15–6 (telegram from Khabalov to Alexeyev, February 27, sent 8:00 p.m., received at 12:55 a.m.).

171. On the evening of February 27, Balk evidently asked the interior minister for permission to retreat with troops to Tsarskoe Selo. “What, you, the City Chief, think you will withdraw from Petrograd? What is that?” Shchëgolëv, Padenie, II: 149–50 (Protopopov). Protopopov confused the date.

172. Vasilyev, the last tsarist Department of Police head, was correct when he wrote that “there was no possibility of suppressing the revolt.” But like many after him, he wrongly attributes this impossibility to a lack of reliable military units in the capital, arguing that “with a few reliable regiments, order in Petersburg could have been quite easily maintained.” Vasilyev, Ochrana, 221.

173. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, V: 32–49 (at 38) (Frederiks).

174. Bublikov, Russkaia revoliutsiia, 17; Kantorovich and Zaslavskii, Khronika fevral’skoi revoliutsii, 28–9; Skobelev, “Gibel’ tsarizma”; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 41–7; Abraham, Kerensky, 131–2; Chermenskii, “Nachalo vtoroi rossiiskoi revoliutsii,” at 99. See also Lyandres, “On the Problem of ‘Indecisiveness.’”

175. Izvestiia, February 28, 1917, in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 287–8; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, I: 41; A. Blok, “Poslednie dni tsarizma,” Byloe, 1919, no. 15: 28. A “central worker group” had been formed in November 1915 as a liaison between the military-industrial committee and the workers. Another source of the soviet was an all-socialist-party leadership group in Petrograd that had begun to coalesce in November 1916, and met frequently right before and during the February days. Melancon, Socialist Revolutionaries, 256–64.

176. Shul’gin, Dni, 127. Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, the last prime minister (appointed in December 1916), had claimed illness and implored Nicholas II not to appoint him. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, I: 331 (Golitsyn). See also Gippius, Siniaia kniga, 75–6 (diary entry for February 25, 1917).

177. Voeikov, S tsarem, 175.

178. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 86; Lyandres, “‘O Dvortsovom perevorote ia pervyi raz uslyshal posle revoliutsii . . .’,” 252.

179. Nicholas II noted “frightened expressions” but also that Alexeyev wanted “a very energetic man” named to assume responsibility for restoring order. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 83. See also Beckendroff, Last Days, 2–3.

180. Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 114–5; Spiridovich, Velikaia voina i fevral’skaia revoliutsiia, III: 240ff; Shchëgolëv, Padenie, V: 317–8 (Ivanov); Katkov, Russia, 1917, 315–6; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 461–4.

181. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 473–92.

182. Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 145; Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 31; S. N. Vil’chkovskii, “Prebyvanie Gosudaria Imperatora v Pskove 1 i 2 marta 1917 goda, po razskazu general-ad’ iutanta N. V. Ruzskogo,” Russkaia letopis’, 1922, no. 3: 169. Alexeev had on his own already ordered Ivanov to desist. Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” at 31.

183. Back in February 1916, rather than summon the Duma deputies to the Winter Palace, as per custom on the rare occasions that Nicholas II deigned to meet them, the tsar had gone to the Duma’s Tauride Palace himself. Following the Te Deum, Nicholas spoke (his words were inaudible to many), after which there was a spontaneous singing of Russia’s anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” But the good feelings of Nicholas II’s gesture quickly dissipated. Rodzyanko asked him, again, for a “responsible government.” “I shall give it some thought,” Nicholas replied, upon exiting. Rodzianko, Krushenie imperii, 149–50; Dubenskii, Ego Imperatorskoe Velichestvo Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai Aleksandrovich, IV: 221. See also Paleologue, La Russie, II: 196; and Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 226.

184. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 103–5; Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 55–9.

185. Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 72–3.

186. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 93. Nicholas initially did not mention the abdication to Alexandra, who was given to understand only that the tsar had made “concessions” (which in her view could be withdrawn). Fuhrmann, Complete Wartime Correspondence, 699–701. “Never forget that you are and must remain [an] autocratic emperor,” she would exhort him. Hynes, The Letters of the Tsar, 105.

187. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 107; Journal intime de Nicholas II, 93. Katkov has argued, plausibly, that Nicholas II was already broken by having conceded a parliamentary government, thereby violating the autocratic principle, so that the abdication itself, counterintuitively, entailed a lesser step. Katkov, Russia, 1917, 323.

188. Ol’denburg, Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai II Aleksandrovich, 29–31; Ol’denburg, Last Tsar, IV: 152–61; Voeikov, S tsarem, 207–19; Russky, “An Account of the Tsar’s Abdication”; Danilov, “Moi vospominaniia,” 223–4; Danilov, “How the Tsar Abdicated”; Bark, “Last Days of the Russian Monarchy.” As one scholar summarized, “the army did, in fact, destroy the old regime simply by not defending it.” Mayzel, Generals and Revolutionaries, 49.

189. By the fall of 1917, Russia had at least 1 million total deserters. Frenkin, Russkaia armiia, 197.

190. Danilov, “Moi vospominaniia,” 221; Sergeev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda,” 37 40; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 120.

191. Airapetov, “Revolution and Revolt,” 94–118 (at 114).

192. For an argument that Alexeyev’s move against Nicholas II amounted to a de facto coup d’etat, see Lohr, “War and Revolution,” II: 658, 664–5. On military seizures of power, see Trimberger, Revolution from Above.

193. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 228, 262.

194. Mayzel, Generals and Revolutionaries, 78–9; Shulgin, Days, 180–3; Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 259–63. See also Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men.

195. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VI: 263–6 (Guchkov); de Basily, Memoirs, 127–31. “Who would stand with him?” Shulgin had despaired of Nicholas II. “He has no one, no one.” Shul’gin, Gody, 459.

196. Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 96–100 (at 98).

197. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, I: 85; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 418–23; Shveitzer, “V achinskoi ssylke”; Shveitzer, Stalin v Turukhanskoi ssylke; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 662, l. 275 (Shveitzer); Baikalov, “Moi vstrechi s Osipom Dzhugashvili,” 118; Baikaloff, I Knew Stalin, 27–30; Tutaev, Alliluyev Memoirs, 189–90; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda, II: 444–6; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 304.

CHAPTER 6: KALMYK SAVIOR

1. VI s”ezd, 111–2, 114.

2. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, II: 150 (quoting Duma representative Fyodor I. Rodichev, member of the Cadet Central Committee).

3. Karpinskii, “Vladimir Il’ich za granitsei,” II: 105–6; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 385. The month before, the impatient Lenin had complained in a speech to young Swiss socialists, “We, the old people, won’t survive to see the decisive battles of the forthcoming revolution.” PSS, XXX: 328; Tucker, Lenin Anthology, 292.

4. Kornakov, “Znamena Fevral’skoi revoliutsii,” 12–26; and Kornakov, “Opyt privlecheniia veksilologicheskikh pamiatnikov dlia resheniia geral’ dicheskikh problem.”

5. Keep, Russian Revolution, ix. Only one in nine villages had a soviet before October 1917.

6. White, “1917 in the Rear Garrisons,” 152–68 (at 152–3).

7. Steinberg, Moral Communities; Steinberg, “Workers and the Cross.”

8. Rosenberg, “Representing Workers.”

9. Kolonitskii, “Anti-Bourgeois Propaganda.”

10. Kizevetter, “Moda na sotsializm.”

11. Sukhanov, Zapiski, II: 265–6. Sukhanov, wanted by the police, lived illegally in the capital, hiding under his real name (Himmer), which he used to obtain a position in the agricultural ministry as a specialist for irrigation in Turkestan.

12. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 198.

13. Pravda, April 18, 1917 (May Day on the Russian calendar), in Sochineniia, II: 37–8.

14. In all of Lenin’s voluminous writings from July to October 1917 (volume XXXIV of PSS), Stalin’s name is mentioned just once. McNeal, Stalin’s Works, 51–7. Stalin also took part in the Bolshevik commission preparing elections for the Constituent Assembly, and appeared on the candidate list. (One of his nominal constituencies—Stavropol—had to write to ask his real name, age, address, and occupation, to comply with candidate registration laws.) McNeal, Stalin 35–6 (citing Perepiska Sekretariata TsK RSDRP (b), I: 378).

15. The name of the party organ changed several times in 1917 in response to efforts to close it down: Rabochii i soldat (July 23–August 9), Proletarii (August 13–24), Rabochii (August 25–September 2), and Rabochii put’ (September 3–October 26).

16. “The early version (of authoritarianism) was rule by the few in the name of the few; modern authoritarianism is rule by the few in the name of the many.” Perlmutter, Modern Authoritarianism, 2.

17. Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva, March 6, 1917, no. 54: 344; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 297–8; Shchëgolëv, Otrechenie Nikolaia II; Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 160; Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo, 46–7. “I cannot part with him,” Nicholas remarked of Alexei to Shulgin and Guchkov. Mel’gunov, Martovskie dni, 192 (citing the stenogram of the meeting in Pskov); Steinberg and Khrustalëv, Fall of the Romanovs, 96–100.

18. De Basily, Memoirs, 119–20.

19. Mel’gunov, Martovskie dni, 226–7; Miliukov, “From Nicholas II to Stalin.” Kerensky would imprison the grand duke four months later on trumped-up charges of treason; the grand duke was executed on June 12, 1918.

20. Rodzyanko in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VI: 62; Shul’gin, Dni, 295–307; Martynov, Tsarskaia armiia, 181; Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I: 53–5; Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 316–8.

21. Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Nolde were the two jurists. Nabokov, “Vremennoe pravitel’stvo,” 17–22; Boris Nol’de, “V. D. Nabokov v 1917 g.,” in Gessen, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, VII: 5–14 (at 6–8); Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 17–28, 49–55; Mel’gunov, Martovskie dni, 356–7; Katkov, Russia, 1917, 409–15; Holquist, “Dilemmas.” Nor could the Duma legally transfer supreme power to the Provisional Government: the Fundamental Laws of 1906 did not even grant the Duma full legislative authority, and anyway Nicholas II had prorogued the legislature.

22. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 299; Shul’gin, Dni, 182; Nabokov, Vremennoe pravitelstvo, 67–8. Miliukov appears to have decided, on his own, not to root the Provisional Government in the Duma partly in order to exclude Duma president Mikhail Rodzyanko. This was also the Duma of Stolypin’s 1907 electoral “coup,” which the Cadets had denounced. In 1920, Miliukov would come to regret his decision to sideline Rodzyanko in favor of the non-entity Prince Lvov. In 1920, Rodzyanko emigrated to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, where four years later he died penurious at age sixty-four.

23. Kakurin, Razlozhenie armii, 25–7; Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution, 179.

24. Storozhev, “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 g.”; Nabokov, Vremennoe pravitelstvo, 39–40; Startsev, Vnutrenniaia politika, 114–6. In the event, the Provisional Government retained all tsarist laws not expressly overturned or amended until such time as a Constituent Assembly might be convoked.

25. The state subsidized publication of Duma “resolutions” in hundreds of thousands of copies. A June 1917 Congress of Soviets voted to “abolish” the Duma; in fact, the Provisional Government formally abolished the Duma on October 7, as announced in the newspapers. Vladimirova, Kontr-revoliutsiia, 72; Drezen, Burzhuaziia i pomeshchiki 1917 goda, 4–5; Gal’perina, “Chastnye soveshchanii gosudarstvennoi dumy,” 111–7.

26. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 51; The Russian Revolution, I: 36.

27. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 135–6.

28. Kochan, “Kadet Policy in 1917.” See also Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 51; Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, I: 36.

29. Gaida, Liberal’naia oppozitsiia. An earlier portrait of the wartime liberals portrayed them as not power-hungry and cowardly: Pearson, The Russian Moderates.

30. Hoover Institution Archives, Aleksandr F. Kerensky papers, box 1, folder 19: “The February Revolution reconsidered,” March 12, 1957, with Leonard Schapiro (typescript with crossouts); Schapiro is admiring of Kerensky. See also Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization, 25. The last okhranka chief admitted that his agency had had Kerensky under surveillance, but “unfortunately” their target “was protected by his immunity as a member of the Duma”; Vasilyev wrote to the tsarist justice minister asking to revoke Kerensky’s immunity—but before the answer came, Kerensky was himself justice minister and read Vasilyev’s request. “In his [new] capacity,” added Vasilyev, Kerensky “took cognizance of the proposal that I had made to restrict his liberty.” Vasilyev, Ochrana, 213–4. Vasilyev died in Paris in 1928.

31. Zviagintseva, “Organizatsiia i deiatel’nost’ militsii Vremmenogo pravitel’stva Rossii”; Hasegawa, “Crime, Police and Mob Justice,” 241–71. At least one great okhranka cryptographer-analyst escaped to Britain and helped London break Soviet codes through the 1920s.

32. Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, I: 73; Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 62–3, 83–4; Dubentsov and Kulikov, “Sotsial’naia evoliutsiia vysshei tsarskoi biurokratii,” 75–84; Orlovsky, “Reform During Revolution,” 100–25; Rosenberg, Liberals, 59. On the February revolution in the provinces, see Ferro, La revolution de 1917, 126–31. For Moscow, see Burdzhalov, “Revolution in Moscow.” For Turkestan, Khalid, “Tashkent 1917.”

33. Kulikov, “Vremennoe pravitel’stvo,” 81–3; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 3. On armies in political crises and revolution, see Finer, Man on Horseback.

34. Melancon, “From the Head of Zeus.”

35. Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 103. The Soviet poorly mapped onto party affiliations, frustrating not only Chernov.

36. Boyd, “Origins of Order Number 1”; Shlyapnikov, Semnatsadtyi god, I: 170; Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 189.

37. Hasegawa, February Revolution, 396.

38. Izvestiia, March 2, 1917; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 386–7; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 848–9; Shliapnikov, Semnatsadtyi god, I: 212–3; Zlokazov, Petrogradskii Sovet rabochikh, 58–62; Miller, Soldatskie komitety russkoi arm, 25–30. See also the slightly different version in Pravda, March 9, 1917.

39. Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 88; Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, II: 236; Gapoenko, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, 429–30. Guchkov himself would go in May.

40. Golder, Documents of Russian History, 386–90; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 851–4. Order No. 2 was not published in the main Soviet organ. Order No. 3, which was published, reiterated the ban on officers’ elections. Izvestiia, March 8, 1917.

41. Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, a member of the Cadets, captured elite hopes, too, writing that “everyone has participated in the revolution, everyone has made it: the proletariat, the military, the bourgeoisie, and even the nobility.” Rech’, March 5, 1917. On elite fears, see Pipes, Russian Revolution, 289.

42. Purishkevich, Bez zabrala, 3–4. It was also printed in Moscow and Mogilyov, and circulated in typescript to the army and fleet.

43. Purishkevich, Vpered!; Moskovskie vedmoosti, July 23, 1917: 1–3. See also P. Sh. Chkhartishvili, “Chernosotentsy v 1917 godu,” Voprosy istorii, 1997, no. 8: 133–43.

44. Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland.

45. Novaia zhizn’, June 29, 1917. Gorky had worked on a barge.

46. Daulet, “The First All-Muslim Congress of Russia”; Davletshin, Sovetskii Tatarstan, 64–5; Rorlich, Volga Tatars, 127–9; Dimanshtein, Revoliutsiia i natsional’nyi vopros, III: 294–5.

47. “The great task is accomplished!” the Provisional Government declared on March 6, 1917. “A new, free Russia is born.” Vestnik vremmenogo pravitel’stva, March 7, 1917, in Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, I: 158; Rech’, March 8, 1917: 5; Stepun, Byvshee i nebyvsheesia, II: 48–9.

48. Leonard Schapiro, “The Political Thought of the First Provisional Government,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 97–113; White, “Civil Rights,” 287–312.

49. Rechi A. F. Kerenskogo (Kiev, 1917), 8. In April 1917 Kerensky said to frontline soldiers, “We can play a colossal role in world history if we manage to cause other nations to traverse our path.” A. F. Kerenskii ob armii i voine (Odessa, 1917), 10, 32; Rech’ A. F. Kerenskogo, voennogo i morskogo ministra, tovarishcha predsedatelia Petrogradskogo Soveta rabochikh i sol- datskikh deputatov, proiznesennaia im 29 aprelia, v soveshchanii delegatov fronta (Moscow, 1917), 3; Pitcher, Witnesses, 61. Irakli Tsereteli, Soviet leader, envisioned “the final victory of democracy inside the country and beyond its borders.” Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, I: 147.

50. “At present,” observed the eminent scholar and Cadet politician Vladimir Vernadsky in May 1917, “we have democracy without the organization of society.” Holquist, Making War, 49 (citing Rech’, May 3, 1917).

51. Classical liberals, too, quickly rediscovered the importance of “state consciousness” (gosudarstvennost’). Rosenberg, Liberals, 134–69; Holquist, Making War, 49–51.

52. Anton Denikin, who fought side by side with Kornilov in Habsburg Galicia, remarked that “he was extremely resolute in conducting the most difficult and even apparently doomed operations. He had uncommon personal bravery, which inordinately impressed his soldiers and made him extremely popular with them.” Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, 145–6. See also Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 297.

53. Kerensky, “Lenin’s Youth—and My Own,” 69. Later, Kerensky would go so far as to claim that “after old Ulianoff’s death, my father, by virtue of his close association with the Ulianoff family, had become the family’s guardian.” Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 79.

54. Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 174.

55. Kolonitskii, “Kerensky,” 138–49; Kolonitskii, “‘Democracy’ in the Consciousness of the February Revolution”; Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 65.

56. Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 48; White, “Civil Rights,” 295.

57. “To him came the honest and the dishonest, the sincere and the intriguing, political leaders, and military leaders, and adventurers,” wrote General Denikin, “and all with one voice cried: Save us!” Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 463.

58. Fitzpatrick, “The Civil War,” 57–76 (at 74).

59. Daniels, Red October, 12–3.

60. Sigler, “Kshesinskaia’s Mansion”; Hall, Imperial Dancer; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III; 58–61. Armed bands seized the property in March 1917. Krzesinska’s lawyer appealed to the Provisional Government for redress, to no avail, but she did win a favorable ruling from the courts (the order for eviction of the Bolsheviks did not come until June and it was not immediately enforced).

61. Kshesinskaia, Vospominaniia, 191.

62. Reacting to rumors that the villa had become a nest of orgies, witches’ Sabbaths, and gun stockpiling, the police, with agreement of the Petrograd Soviet, evicted the occupants. “Numbering in all about a hundred, they were the lowest dregs of humanity from the slums of Petrograd, clad in tatters and with evil-looking faces bearing every sign of debauchery and vice,” recalled Boris Nikitin, the head of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau, which was itself subject to scurrilous rumor. He added: “Most of them had obviously not used soap and water for years. . . . Among the prisoners were about thirty who might, from their clothing, have been women.” Nikitin, Fatal Year, 82–98; Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, II: 386–8.

63. Vestnik istorii, 1957, no. 4: 26.

64. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 16.

65. Wade, “Why October?”

66. The Provisional Government, in March, had discussed whether, if Lenin were to return, to allow him in the country. Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 143.

67. Lenin’s trip across the front lines was arranged by Jacob Furstenberg, alias Ganetsky, an Austrian-Polish socialist with a smuggling business who worked for Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus, a Minsk-born Jew, German Social Democrat, holder of a doctorate, and a war profiteer. Yevgeniya Sumenson, who was arrested in July 1917 by the Provisional Government counterintelligence, confirmed she handled money, including receiving more than 2 million rubles all told from Ganetsky. After February 1917, Lenin’s correspondence with Ganetsky is said to have been exceeded only by letters with Inessa Armand. Shub, Lenin, 182; Mel’gunov, “Zolotoi nemetskii klyuchik,” 157; Hahlweg, Lenins Ruckkehr nach Russland, 15–6; PSS, XLIX: 406; Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, II: 200–12. Ganetsky continued to run financial errands for Lenin once the Bolsheviks were in power, but in 1937 he was arrested, tortured, and executed as a Polish-German spy and Trotskyite; in fact, Stalin had sent Ganetsky to Poland in September 1933 to retrieve a Lenin archive. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 127–8. The idea of approaching the Germans may originally have been Martov’s.

68. Scheidemann, Memoiren enies Sozialdemokraten, 427–8; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 1.

69. At the German border, the passengers switched to a two-carriage train (one for the Russians, one for their German escorts), for a trip to a Baltic port, boarded a Swedish steamer for Sweden, whence by train they headed for Finland, traveled across the Finnish border in sledges, and boarded a final train for twenty miles to Petrograd. Platten, Die Reise Lenins, 56; Zinov’ev, God revoliutsii, 503; Hahlweg, Lenins Ruckkehr nach Russland, 99–100; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda, II: 77–8; Karl Radek, Living Age, February 25, 1922: 451; Senn, Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 224–8. Radek remained in Stockholm through October.

70. Martov and his Menshevik comrades waited for official Russian foreign ministry permission and landed back in Russia around a month after Lenin, May 9, 1917, leaving other Mensheviks already in Russia to respond to the challenge of Lenin’s April theses. Getzler, Martov, 147–50.

71. Katkov, “German Foreign Office Documents.”

72. G. Ia. Sokol’nikov, “Avtobiografiia,” in Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 39–50 (at 42).

73. Paleologue, La Russie, III: 305, 307–8. Much later, Miliukov would write in his memoirs that at the time, he had no knowledge of Lenin’s “new” stance. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, I: 337.

74. Andreev, Vospominaniia, 52–5.

75. Pallot, Land Reform in Russia; Pozhigailo, P. A. Stolypin. Those who argue that on the eve of the war the land question in Russia was being ameliorated have a point. Frank, “The Land Question.”

76. Less than half of the gentry (perhaps one or two of every five) lived on the land in 1914. Becker, Nobility and Privilege, 28.

77. One scholar observed that “the generals seemed to be talking and acting like revolutionaries.” Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, 418.

78. Kotel’nikov and Mueller, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie; Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire; Ivan Sobolev, Bor’ba s “nemetskim zasiliem.” The Orthodox Church and the crown (imperial household) also owned considerable land.

79. Shanin, Awkward Class, 145–61.

80. Keller and Romanenko, Pervye itogi agrarnoi reformy, 105.

81. “The Peasants’ Revolution,” in Daniels, Russian Revolution, 87–91. Perhaps the most intriguing rendering of the peasant revolution can be found in the fictional Zamyatin, “Comrade Churygin Has the Floor,” 193–203.

82. Antsiferov, Russian Agriculture, 290–6; Keep, Russian Revolution, 211–2.

83. Figes writes of a localized and locally oriented response to an urban-based, largely unsympathetic government. He also notes that the peasants drove out the gentry via land seizures but did not overturn the traditional institutions of local governance. Figes, Peasant Russia, 42, 66–7.

84. Channon, “Tsarist Landowners.” By late 1927, upward of 10,750 former gentry still lived on their estates in the RSFSR, but more than 4,000 were evicted, placing more land in peasant hands. Danilov, Rural Russia, 98.

85. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 717–8; Kim, Istoriia Sovetskogo krest’ianstva, 16; Danilov, Pereraspredelenie zemel’ nogo fonda Rossii, 283–7; Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 178–80; Maliavskii, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie.

86. Harding, Leninism, 92–5.

87. “Protokoly i rezoliutsii Biuro TsK RSDRP (b) (mart 1917 g.),” Vestnik istorii KPSS, 1962, no. 3: 143; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 163; Ulam, Stalin, 132–4.

88. Pravda, March 15, 1917. Molotov would recall that Kamenev and Stalin “expelled me because they had more authority and were ten years older.” Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 91.

89. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, I: 219–20; Slusser, Stalin in October, 46–8. Stalin later apologized for his “mistaken stance” upon arriving back in the capital in March 1917. Sochineniia, VI: 333.

90. Raskol’nikov, Krosnshtadt i piter, 54.

91. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of ‘Old Bolshevism.’”

92. Kamenev, Mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami.

93. Burdzhalov, Vestnik istorii, 1956, no. 4: 51; Poletaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, 15–6; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 168.

94. PSS, XXXI: 72–8; Slusser, Stalin in October, 60; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 312–3. The day after publication, April 8, a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg City Committee voted 13 to 2 to reject Lenin’s position. (The Bolshevik committee in the capital did not change its name to Petrograd.)

95. Tsapenko, Vserossiiskoe soveshchanie soveta rabochikh; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, I: 114, 162–3. “It’s simply shit!” Lenin shouted, while in exile reading a speech by Chkheidze, head of the Petrograd Soviet. “Vladimir, what language!” Krupskaya supposedly interjected. Lenin: “I repeat: shit!” Futrell, Northern Underground, 154.

96. Sukhanov, Zapiski, III: 26–7, VII: 44.

97. “Russia at the moment,” Lenin stated, “is the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world,” and the revolutionaries had to use this liberty to their advantage. PSS, XXXI: 113–6; Daniels, Red October, 4; Service, Lenin, II: 157.

98. Leninskii sbornik, VII: 307–8. No transcript of either the speech or discussion survives, but we have Lenin’s notes for the speech: Leninskii sbornik, XXI: 33. See also Raskol’nikov, Na boevykh postakh, 67.

99. Abramovitch, Soviet Revolution, 30.

100. Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, I: 287.

101. Uglanov, “O Vladmire Iliche Lenine.” Back in 1905, Martov had allowed that in the coming bourgeois revolution, the socialists could take power, but only if the revolution were in danger. In 1917, Martov twisted himself in knots trying to distinguish between a struggle for power (vlast’) and for government (pravitel’stvo). Getzler, Martov, 167 (citing Iskra, March 17, 1905, and Rabochaia gazeta, August 22, 1917).

102. Service, Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 53–7. Many provincials were not in the least Leninist and had to be browbeaten to set aside their desire to reunite with Mensheviks.

103. Ulricks, “The ‘Crowd’ in the Russian Revolution”; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution [1961], 124–66 (esp. 130–1).

104. No contemporary source places Stalin there. Trotsky, who was not yet a Bolshevik, also was absent. Slusser, Stalin in October, 49–52; Trotsky, Stalin, 194. Only later was Stalin inserted, either in the group who had boarded Lenin’s train on the Russian side of the Finnish-Russian border (Beloostrov), or as head of the welcoming party at the Finland Station. On Stalin’s later insertion, see Zinoviev, “O puteshestvii,” Pravda, April 16, 1924; Yaroslavsky, Landmarks, 94; and Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 93. Molotov, late in life, was perhaps “remembering” the Soviet painting of Lenin alighting on the platform with Stalin behind him.

105. “This was a profound mistake, for it implanted pacifist illusions, added grist to the mill of defensism and hindered the revolutionary propagandizing of the masses.” Sochineniia, VI: 333.

106. Reprinted in Volin, Sed’maia, ix–x.

107. Stalin, “Zemliu krest’ianam,” Pravda, April 14, 1917, reprinted in Sochineniia, III: 34–6.

108. Service, Stalin, 128; Service, Lenin, II: 223–8.

109. VII aprel’skaia vserossiiskaia konferentsiia, 225–8, 323.

110. Chuev, Molotov, 216–7, 297. This is a slightly enlarged version of Chuev, Sto sorok. Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 93.

111. Allilueva, Vospominaniia, 185–90.

112. Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 90–4; Tutaev, Alliluyev Memoirs, 131–45, 168–75, 211–15.

113. Vasileva, Kremlin Wives, 56–8; Allilueva, Vospominaniia, 183–91; Kun, Unknown Portrait, 211–5; Montefiore, Young Stalin, ch. 40.

114. Trotsky, Stalin, 207–9. Elsewhere Trotsky called Stalin “a strong, but theoretically and politically primitive, organizer.” Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, I: 288.

115. VII aprel’skaia vserossiiskaia konferentsiia; Petrogradskaia obshchegorodskaia konferentsiia RSDRP (bol'shevikov), 324; Pravda, April 24–May 2, 1917. Word of the figure of Sverdlov had reached Lenin in exile, and the Bolshevik leader tried to correspond with him and bring him to party gatherings outside tsarist Russia, but the two did not meet until 1917. Duvall, “The Bolshevik Secretariat,” 47 (citing L. D. Trotsky, Selected Works, II: 292).

116. “Iz perepiski Sverdlova,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1924, no. 2: 64; Trotsky, Stalin, 173; Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 623; Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov (1926).

117. Perepiska sekretariata TsK RSDRP (b), I: v–ix; S. Pestkovskii, “Vospominaniia o rabote v Narkomnatse,” 126; Trotskii, Sochineniia, VIII: 251, XXI: 336; N. Bukharin, “Tovarishch Sverdlov,” Pravda, March 18, 1919: 1.

118. White, Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia, 15.

119. Oskar Anweiler, “The Political Ideology of the Leaders of the Petrograd Soviet in the Spring of 1917,” in Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 114–28; Anin, “The February Revolution.” On coalition government, see Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, II: 401–17.

120. Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, 14–5. Leonard Schapiro saw the moderate socialist weakness in terms of having scruples: Origin of the Communist Autocracy [1956]. Orlando Figes sees the clinging to a bourgeois revolution strategy as destructive of a lost democratic socialist outcome, rather than as tilting at the wrong windmill: A People’s Tragedy, 331.

121. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/iii: 3–6; Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, III: 1–4. On May 22, Kerensky told the Petrograd Soviet, “parties do not exist for me at the present moment because I am a Russian minister; for me only the people exist and one sacred law—to obey the majority will.” Radkey, Agrarian Foes, 225. In the provinces, “coalition” worked only briefly: local committees of public organizations arose under liberal auspices and recognized the place, and sometimes the supremacy, of organizations representing workers, soldiers, and peasants, but soon the committees succumbed to governance and economic chaos. Class-based suspicions assumed free rein. Rosenberg, Liberals, 59–66; White, “Civil Rights,” 290–3 (citing GARF, f. 1788, op. 2, d. 64).

122. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 102.

123. Mel’gunov, Martovskie dni, 105–13; Anin, “The February Revolution,” 441.

124. Kerensky would recall the “spirit of unity, fraternity, mutual confidence and self-sacrifice” in the Tauride during the early days, lamenting that “afterwards . . . more and more among us turned out to be men with personal ambitions, men with an eye to the main chance, or mere adventurers.” In fact, while Karlo Chkheidze followed the Soviet’s policy and refused to be considered for a Provisional Government portfolio, Kerensky, after the central executive committee denied his request to serve in the Provisional Government, burst into the Soviet meeting on March 2 and exclaimed, “Comrades! Do you trust me?” He pretended to faint and elicited an ovation, which appeared to bless his acceptance of the post of justice minister. Thus did Kerensky become the only person in both the Soviet and the Provisional Government. The leadership of the Petrograd Soviet never forgave Kerensky for his manipulation bordering on blackmail. Izvestiia revoliutsionnoi nedeli, March 3, 1917; Sverchkov, Kerenskii, 21; Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 21, 52–61.

125. Keep, “1917.”

126. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1305. Majorities at the June Congress of Soviets voted for the Soviet’s policy of support for the Provisional Government and for the war. Irakli Tsereteli, by then Minister of Posts and Telegraph, observed that there was no party prepared to assume the responsibilities of governing by itself. “There is!” Lenin rebutted him. The hall erupted in laughter. PSS, XXXI: 267; Service, Lenin, II: 181.

127. Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, I: 159; Keep, Russian Revolution, 131–2.

128. The fact that the socialists were pro-peace helped make peace unpalatable to Russia’s liberals. It would be “absurd and criminal to renounce the biggest prize of the war . . . in the name of some humanitarian and cosmopolitan idea of international socialism,” Miliukov remarked. Richard Stites, “Miliukov and the Russian Revolution,” foreword to Miliukov and Stites, The Russian Revolution, xii. As Clausewitz observed, war and classical liberalism did not mix well. Von Clausewitz, On War, 85.

129. Miliukov behaved as his usual self-defeatingly stubborn self, but Kerensky admitted his own role in bringing “the whole matter to a head.” Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs, 246. Prime Minister Prince Lvov formed a “coalition,” that is, he took some leaders of the Soviet (besides Kerensky) into the Provisional Government, prompting Guchkov to resign in protest, and fatefully allowing Kerensky to assume the war portfolio. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1045 (Rech’, March 28, 1917: 2), III: 1098 (Rech’, April 20, 1917: 4); Sukhanov, Zapiski, III: 254–443 (esp. 304–7); Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 91–117; Wade, Russian Search for Peace, 38–48. Prince L’vov, Rech’, March 28, 1917: 2, in Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1045. Russkie vedomosti, May 2, 1917: 5, in Browder and Kerensky, III: 1267. “There was no end of disputes between Kerensky and myself at the Cabinet sessions, as to the line to be taken in foreign policy and in general policies,” Miliukov wrote of his two months as foreign minister. Miliukov, “From Nicholas II to Stalin.”

130. Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder, 11–21. See also Rutherford, The Tsar’s War.

131. Pedroncini, Les mutineries de 1917; Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience. Those who blame the Allies for Bolshevism, because of their insistence on Russia mounting an offensive, are partly correct. Wheeler-Bennet, Forgotten Peace, 51–2, 292.

132. In mid-April, General Alexeyev had returned from the front to brief the Provisional Government (the meeting took place in War Minister Guchkov’s private apartment, because he was ill), and told a story of the anarchic mood of the army and the collapse of discipline. Medlin and Powers, V. D. Nabokov, 135, 140.

133. Shliapnikov, Semnadtsatyi god, III: 291–3 (March 30, 1917, to Guchkov).

134. Brusilov, Soldier’s Note-book. See also “The Diary of General Boldyrev,” in Vulliamy, From the Red Archives, 189–26.

135. Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder, 51–2.

136. In one version of his memoirs, Kerensky conceded that when he visited the front in 1917, he sensed that “after three years of bitter suffering, millions of war-weary soldiers were asking themselves: ‘Why should I have to die now when at home a new, freer life is only just beginning?’” He also claimed to have found “a healthy patriotism” among some, which he wanted to encourage. Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs, 276–7. For Kerensky’s efforts to balance inevitable concessions to “democracy” in the army with maintaining fighting capacity, see Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 882.

137. Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 246. See also Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder, 54; and Wilcox, Russia’s Ruin, 196–7.

138. Pethybridge, Spread of the Russian Revolution, 154–70 (esp. 161).

139. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: 53 (Radko-Dmitriev, Commander of the Twelfth Army).

140. Lewis, Eyewitness World War I, 279.

141. Viktor Shklovsky, a commissar to the army for the Provisional Government, wrote of an escape from reality into “trench Bolshevism.” Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 60. “The magnitude of the Bolshevik achievement at the front,” one historian has written, “was truly spectacular.” Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, II: 264. See also Ferro, “The Russian Soldier in 1917.”

142. Tsereteli, Vospominaniia, I: 364–681. On March 14, 1917, the Petrograd Soviet had passed “An appeal to all peoples of the world” denouncing the imperialist war and annexationist aims. Izvestiia, March 15, 1917: 1, in Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1077.

143. Fainsod, International Socialism; Forster, Failures of the Peace, 113–25; Wade, Russian Search for Peace, 17–25; Wade, “Argonauts of Peace”; Kirby, War, Peace, and Revolution; Sukhanov, Zapiski, II: 336–42. Sukhanov gives a portrait of Tsereteli (Zapiski, III: 131–8).

144. Pravda, April 29, 1917. See also Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 38.

145. The Soviet had compelled the Provisional Government to promise not to remove troops from the capital and send them to the front (so as to dampen the revolution). Brusilov, A Soldier’s Note-book, 291.

146. Wade, “Why October?,” 42–3.

147. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 1120–1; Getzler, Martov, 149–52. It remains unclear how sincerely the Provisional Government intended its June 3, 1917, public profession of a desire to organize an inter-Allied conference to review the war treaties.

148. Ignat’ev, Russko-angliiskie otnosheniia nakanune), 42, 48, 50–1; Berner Tagwacht [Bern], October 11, 13, 14, 1916. See also Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fatal Blunder, 8–9. The German side had indicated a willingness to cede Habsburg Galicia and Bukovina and the Turkish Straits, provided the Russian army managed to occupy them, but in return Germany sought Courland (Latvia) and a protectorate over predominantly Polish-speaking territories. By contrast, Allied victory over Germany promised Russia all that and more—Bukovina, Turkish Armenia, parts of Persia—for nothing in exchange.

149. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 967; Feldman, “The Russian General Staff.” As in 1916, Brusilov, now supreme commander, used “shock troops” to spearhead the assault, trailed by conscript peasant infantry.

150. Fuller, Foe Within, 237–8; Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 462.

151. Sir Alfred Knox wrote of the July offensive that Russia’s army was “irretrievably lost as a fighting organization.” Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 648.

152. “The worst thing about the committees was that in no time at all they lost contact with those who elected them,” wrote the Provisional Government front commissar Viktor Shklovsky. He added that “the [frontline] delegates to the Soviet did not show up in their units for months at a time. The soldiers were left completely ignorant of what was happening in the Soviets.” Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 18.

153. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 380. British media tycoon Lord Beaverbrook asked Kerensky in June 1931, “Would you have mastered the Bolsheviks if you had made a separate peace?” Kerensky replied, “Of course, we should be in Moscow right now.” Beaverbrook posed the logical follow-up: “Then why didn’t you do it?” “We were too naive,” Kerensky answered. Lockhart, British Agent, 177.

154. David Bronstein would be expropriated during revolution; Trotsky had set him up as the manager of a requisitioned flour mill near Moscow, but in 1922 he would die of typhus.

155. Ziv, Trotskii, 12. See also Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 163; and Volkogonov, Trotsky, 5.

156. “Terrorizim i kommunizm,” reprinted in Trotskii, Sochineniia, XII: at 59.

157. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, II: 120–1.

158. Reed, Ten Days [1919], 21. “Trotsky entered the history of our party somewhat unexpectedly and with instant brilliance,” Anatoly Lunacharsky would write. Revolutiuonary Silhouettes, 59.

159. Trotsky, My Life, 295–6.

160. Moisei Uritsky, quoted in Lunacharskii, Revoliutsionnye siluety, 24.

161. Leninskii sbornik, IV: 303; Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, 127–8; Sukhanov, Zapiski, VII: 44; Raskol’nikov, “V tiur’me Kerenskogo,” 150–2; Slusser, Stalin in October, 108–14; Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia, 76.

162. Frenkin, Zakhvat vlasti bol'shevikami; Stankevich, Vospominaniia, 147–8; Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty, II: 127ff; Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 52–6; Shankowsky, “Disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army,” esp. 321–2.

163. The crowd bundled Chernov into a vehicle and declared him “arrested.” Trotsky rushed outside and got Chernov released. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/i: 243–4; Sukhanov, Zapiski, IV: 444–7; Vladimirovna, “Iiul’skie dni,” 34–5; Raskol’nikov, “V iiul’skie dni,” 69–71; Rabinowitch, Prelude, 188. The regiment from nearby Tsarskoe Selo, sent to arrest the Soviet leadership, is said to have instead decided to guard the Tauride. Sukhanov, Zapiski, IV: 448–9.

164. Sukhanov, Zapiski, IV: 511–2; Nikitin, Rokovye gody, 148; Zinoviev, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1927, no. 8–9: 62; Pravda, July 17, 1927: 3 (F. F. Raskol’nilov); Krasnaia gazeta, July 16, 1920: 2 (Mikhail Kalinin); Petrogradskaia Pravda, July 17, 1921: 3 (G. Veinberg); VI s”ezed RSDRP, 17 (Stalin); Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, II: 13; PSS, XXXII: 408–9; Drachkovitch and Lazitch, Lenin and the Comintern, I: 95 (citing Trotsky, Bulletin Communiste, May 20, 1920: 6); Buchanan, Petrograd, 131–46 (Buchanan was the daughter of the British ambassador). See also Rabinowitch, Prelude, 174–5.

165. Between July 7 and July 24, the Bolsheviks could not publish their daily newspaper in Petrograd. Budnikov, Bol’shevistskaia partiinaia; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 197; Kolonitskii, “Anti-Bourgeois Propaganda,” 184. Lenin is said to have had the Provisional Government dossier on Bolshevik high treason destroyed. Be that as it may, surviving German documents prove German financing beyond a shadow of a doubt. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 94; Latyshev, Rassekrechennyi Lenin; Volkogonov, Lenin: politicheskii portret, I: 220–2; Hahlweg, Lenins Ruckkehr nach Russland. That said, the sixty-six telegrams between Petrograd and Stockholm gathered by the Provisional Government’s justice ministry for the trial in July 1917 have been debunked as forgeries (by former okhranka operatives). Semyon Lyandres, “The Bolsheviks’ ‘German Gold’ Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations,” Carl Beck Papers, 1995; Kennan, “The Sisson Documents”; Stone, “Another Look”; Hill, Go Spy the Land, 200–1.

166. Trotskii, O Lenine, 58; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, III: 127. The Provisional Government supposedly saved the most sensational documents for a public trial.

167. Nikitin, Rokovye gody, 115–6, 122-3; Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor, 13–27. For the specific charges, see Rech’, July 22, 1917, translated in Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1370–7.

168. Allilueva, Vospominaniia, 181–90; Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 24–6; Slusser, Stalin in October, 162–78, 139–50; Service, Lenin, 283–91; Kerensky, The Catastrophe, 229–44. Many Mensheviks pressed for Bolshevik release, with the reasoning that today it would be the Bolsheviks, tomorrow the whole Soviet.

169. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics.

170. After the public accusations of taking German money, which Lenin denied as lies, he did become more careful. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 116–21. The case against Lenin in the Provisional Government was managed by Pavel A. Aleksandrov, who would be arrested in April 1939 (and held in Butyrka). He supposedly testified that he had worked closely with Kerensky on the Lenin case of “state treason” and “espionage.” NKVD investigators deemed Aleksandrov’s investigative work against Bolshevism “a fabrication,” and it is said Beria had his men retrieve archival documents of the Provisional Government to incriminate Aleksandrov for his work. Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 3, Postanovlenie from Kobulov, April 16, 1939.

171. Novaia zhizn’, August 5, 1917 (A. S. Zarudnyi); Zhivoe slovo, July 6, 1917: 1; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, III: 167; Polovtsoff, Glory and Downfall, 256–8.

172. Pol’ner, Zhiznennyi put’ kniazia Georgiia Evgenevicha L’vova, 258. That same day, Kerensky ordered Nicholas II and the royal family transferred to detention in Siberia (the actual move would be carried out July 31). On July 15, the Provisional Government asserted authority over the “political commissars” that the Soviet sent to frontline units would be parallel to those of the government.

173. Sanborn, “Genesis of Russian Warlordism,” 205–6.

174. The general staff conference called for reintroducing the death penalty in the rear, limiting the soldiers’ committees to economic and educational functions, and restricting the powers of political commissars in the military. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, II: 989–1010.

175. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuti, 446–7; Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, II 570; Sukhanov, Zapiski, IV: 469–70.

176. Russkoe slovo, July 21, 1917: 2.

177. Kerensky finally gave approval for the draft decrees to be submitted for cabinet action on August 17. Martynov, Kornilov, 74–5, 100; Kerensky, Prelude to Bolshevism, 27. Kornilov was in the capital twice, on August 3 and August 10. On August 3, he held discussions with Kerensky and the Provisional Government (one newspaper reported that “Kerensky took a deep bow before General Kornilov”), but evidently, when Kornilov began to discuss war plans, Kerensky and Savinkov, sotto voce, told him to be careful. The implication was that Russia’s secret war plans would be leaked by some government ministers, as if by enemy agents. Savinkov, K delu, 12–3; Lukomskii, Vospominaniia, I: 227; Loukomsky, Memoirs of the Russian Revolution, 99; Russkoe slovo, August 4, 1917: 2. The Soviet denounced Kornilov and his visit to the capital. Izvestiia, August 4, 1917.

178. Voprosy istorii, 1966, no. 2: at 12–3 (quoting I. G. Korolev).

179. VI s”ezd RSDRP, 250.

180. VI s”ezd RSDRP, 28, 30–6; Sochineniia, III: 17.

181. During the Bolshevik Party Congress, on July 27, the Georgian Bolshevik Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, who was conducting negotiations on Lenin’s possible appearance to stand trial, asked representatives of the St. Petersburg Soviet how they stood vis-à-vis the Provisional Government’s arrest order for Lenin as a German spy. The Mensheviks could have exacted sweet revenge, tricking Bolshevik negotiators by claiming they would defend Lenin to the death, then betraying him. But the head of the Soviet’s presidium, the Georgian Menshevik Karlo Chkheidze—whom Lenin had demonstratively insulted in April upon returning to Russia—was a man of principle. “If today they arrest Lenin, tomorrow they will arrest me,” he said. “The leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs do not believe in the guilt of Lenin. . . . They should have energetically demanded investigation of the case of Lenin and Zinoviev, but they did not do that. . . . We should not turn in comrade Lenin under any circumstances . . . we should . . . safeguard our comrades out of harm’s way until they are guaranteed a fair trial.” VI s”ezd RSDRP, 310–1.

182. Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest Litovsk, 167; Orlovsky, “Corporatism or Democracy,” 67–90. A Conference of Public Figures, also in Moscow, held between August 8 and August 10 at the initiative of the industrialist Ryabushinsky and chaired by Rodzyanko, was said to be a venue for discussing a putsch. Some 400 people attended, and many side private meetings took place. Moskovskie vedomosti, August 11, 1917; Sevost'ianova, Delo Generala Kornilova, II: 223–4 (Lvov’s testimony); Katkov, The Kornilov Affair, 142–3 (quoting Maklakov).

183. Izvestiia, August 13, 1917. By contrast, see Russkoe slovo, August 12, 13, 14, 15, and 17, 1917.

184. Pokrovskii and Iakovlev, Gosudarstvennoe soveshchanie, 335.

185. Izvestiia, August 13, 1917.

186. Kornilov also spoke with Kerensky by telephone that night. Russkoe slovo, August 15, 1917: 3–4. Kornilov is said to have believed Kerensky did not want him to attend the Conference. Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1546–54 (Lukomsky). Kerensky evidently summoned Kornilov on August 14 before the session. Miliukov, Istoriia vtoroi, I/ii: 134–5; Miliukov, Russian Revolution, II: 108.

187. Holquist, Making War, 90–1 (citing N. M. Mel’nikov, “A. M. Kaledin,” Donskaia letopis’, 3 vols. [Vienna; Donskaia istoricheskaia komissiia, 1923–4], I: 24–5).

188. Kornilov concluded: “I believe in the genius of the Russian people, I believe in the reason of the Russian people, and I believe in the salvation of the country. I believe in the bright future of our native land, and I believe that the fighting efficiency of our army and her former glory will be restored. But I declare that there is no time to lose. . . . Resolve is necessary and the firm, steadfast execution of the measures outlined. (Applause).” Pokrovskii and Iakovlev, Gosudarstvennoe soveshchanie, 60–6; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1474–8; Avdeev, Revoliutsiia 1917 goda, IV: 54–5.

189. Stalin, “Protiv moskovskogo soveshchaniia,” Rabochii i soldat, August 8, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 193–5.

190. Stalin, “Kuda vedet moskovskoe soveshchane?” Proletarii, August 13, 1917, in Sochineniia, III: 200–5 (at 201)

191. “Will the State Conference be able to insist on the implementation of the Supreme Commander’s demands or not?” the rightist paper New Times had worried at the outset. “Will everything remain as before?” Novoe vremia, August 13, 1917: 5. See also Rech’, August 12–17, 1917. For all the immediate reactions in the press to Kornilov’s speech, see Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1515–22. A second conference of public figures would take place in October 12–14, with Rodzyanko again as chairman, remarking “the political horizon of our country has become darker still. . . . We are called reactionaries, we are called Kornilovists.” Russkie vedomosti, October 13, 1917: 5; Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, III: 1745–7.