The Council of Ministers, in a unique act of loyal criticism, pleaded with the Tsar to change his mind. ‘The decision you have taken’, it warned, ‘threatens Russia, You, and Your dynasty with the gravest consequences.’ But Nicholas would not be dissuaded. No doubt the influence of his wife, who had put him up to this coup de main, helped to strengthen his resolve. He may well have seen the move as his last chance to silence the growing public criticism of the war campaign, and the urgent sense that his own throne was threatened drove him on to take what was a huge risk. Coinciding as it did with his decision to close down the Duma, which had been in session since July, it signalled a new resolve on his part to reassert his personal rule. Perhaps he still harboured fantasies that his ‘mystical union’ with ‘the people’ would save the country from catastrophe. Krivoshein, for one, thought that the Tsar’s decision was ‘fully in tune with his spiritual frame of mind and his mystical understanding of his imperial calling’.29 The support he received from the Tsarina and Rasputin, who encouraged his dreams of personal rule, was in line with this, although their real concern was no doubt in part to get him out of their way. With the Tsar absent at the Front, power in the capital would pass to them.
ii The Mad Chauffeur
The war found Prince Lvov at the head of the Zemstvo Union. As in the war against Japan, the needs of the Front had sparked a patriotic movement of public organization. Civic committees and clubs volunteered helpers to pack up supplies of linen, food and medicine in their hours after work, while hundreds of young women enrolled as nurses and coped as best they could with the legions of wounded and dying. The Tsarina turned part of the Winter Palace into a surgical bandage factory, and the best society ladies turned up in droves to roll up their sleeves and work. Brusilov’s wife, Nadezhda, volunteered for the Russian Red Cross in the Ukraine. ‘I work day and night’, she wrote to him in August 1914, ‘and thank God for that, since it keeps me from thinking and makes me feel I am of use.’ Kerensky’s wife, Olga, who worked in a Belgian hospital, looked back on this as ‘one of the happiest periods of my life’.
When I bent down to wash the soldiers’ dirty feet, or cleaned and dressed their nasty-smelling and decaying wounds, I experienced an almost religious ecstasy. I bowed before all these soldiers, who had given their lives for Russia. I have never felt such ecstasy.30
Here at last, for these idle bourgeois ladies, was a chance to ‘serve the people’ and thus to redeem their own guilt.
Lvov’s Zemstvo Union, established with its sister organization the Union of Towns during the first few weeks of the war, took the lead in most of these activities. It virtually ran the military supply campaign in the absence of any effective governmental grasp of logistics. Russia’s war effort, but for Lvov’s efforts, would have quickly collapsed altogether. To begin with the Union was supported by the gifts of money and property that poured in from the public. One landowner donated his whole estate, a fertile expanse of 10,000 acres. Peasants delivered cartloads of cabbages, potatoes and homespun linen to its depots in the rear. But it soon became clear that the government itself would have to provide most of the finance, as the failings of its own bureaucracy became apparent and it came to rely on the Union. Increasingly its volunteers took the lead in setting up field canteens and medical units at the Front, evacuating the wounded and giving them hospital care, purchasing military supplies, combating disease, helping refugees and providing support for the poverty-stricken soldiers’ families. By 1916 it had grown into a huge national infrastructure, a state within a state, with 8,000 affiliated institutions, several hundred thousand employees (the so-called zemgussars) and a budget of two billion roubles. Lvov, at the head of this unofficial government, worked tirelessly from eight in the morning to two or three at night. The queue outside his office stretched into the Moscow streets. As one minister grudgingly acknowledged in the autumn of 1915, he was ‘virtually becoming the chairman of a special government. At the Front they talk only of him and say that he has saved the country. He supplies the army, feeds the hungry, cures the sick, establishes barber shops for the soldiers — in a word, he is some kind of a ubiquitous Miur and Mereliz.fn1 One must either end all this or hand over power to him.’31
The remark was prophetic. For Lvov was to become the first Prime Minister of democratic Russia in March 1917. His experience in the Zemstvo Union, which demanded administrative boldness and an ability to improvise, equipped him for the role above all else. The civic spirit of the February Revolution had its roots in the wartime activities of the voluntary organizations. It was from these that most of the democratic revolution’s leaders, including all but three of the ministers of the First Provisional Government, were to emerge. And yet Lvov had always been a reluctant revolutionary. Had the Tsar liberalized his regime and appointed a government of public confidence, Lvov would not have joined the opposition. Politics were of much less interest to him than the direct effect he could have on the lives of ‘the people’. It was this desire for practical work that had drawn him into the zemstvo movement during the 1890s and, although he had joined the Kadets, he had never been at ease with the party. In short, he was made for public wartime work.
Lvov’s leadership of the Zemstvo Union began with the same essentially practical aims (the good of ‘the nation’) as he had displayed in the Tula zemstvo (the good of ‘the people’). At the heart of Lvov’s political being was what one acquaintance described as ‘a down-to-earth organic patriotism’. It was rooted in his love of the peasants and his belief in their creative powers as the basic strength of Russia. A similar patriotism lay at the heart of his commitment to the Zemstvo Union. Its duty, as he saw it in 1914, was to reconcile the people with the government by uniting the two behind the war effort. Executive meetings finished with his tenor voice breaking into the national anthem.32
By the following autumn, however, even Lvov could no longer stand apart from the growing political opposition to the government and its army command, whose gross mismanagement was being blamed by an angry public for the recent crushing defeats. His own organization had been struggling for some time against constant obstruction by the bureaucracy, and by now he was at the end of his tether. Maklakov, the reactionary Interior Minister of Beiliss trial fame, regarded the Union as little more than a Trojan horse usurping the functions of the government, and had been doing his best to limit its independent powers. He even objected to its labour brigades, some 80,000 strong, which dug trenches and graves in the rear, on the grounds that a public organization should not be allowed to have its own ‘army’. Although it had been pointed out that it would be armed with nothing more dangerous than axes and spades, Maklakov stood his ground and ordered Lvov to demobilize the brigades. By September, with the Duma prorogued, the mild-mannered prince was ready to join the fray. ‘We are no longer prepared to remain in the passive position of being governed,’ he told the Third Zemstvo Union Congress. The Russian people, he went on, were developing into a ‘state-like force’, and through their service to the nation would earn the right to demand a constitutional system from the government at the end of the war. The work of the public organizations was thus no longer a means of uniting the people behind the Tsar, as he had seen it previously, but a means of transition to self-government by the people.33