All this strengthened the arguments of the pro-German faction at court against the headlong drift towards war. In a prophetic memorandum of February 1914 Durnovo warned the Tsar that Russia was too weak to withstand the long war of attrition which the Anglo-German rivalry was likely to produce. A violent social revolution was bound to be the result in Russia, for the liberal intelligentsia lacked the trust of the masses and was thus incapable of holding power for long in a purely political revolution. Durnovo outlined the course of this revolution in remarkably prescient terms:
The trouble will start with the blaming of the Government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the Government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.49
Caution was the key-word of the pro-German faction at court. But from Germany’s point of view, if there was to be a war with Russia, then it was better fought sooner than later. ‘Russia grows and grows, and weighs upon us like a nightmare,’ the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg declared. When the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by Serbian nationalists it was not in Germany’s interests to restrain its Austrian ally from threatening war against Russia’s last real Balkan ally. This threw the delicate balance of Russia’s foreign policy into disarray. The Russian press clamoured for war in defence of Serbia and there were large public demonstrations outside the Austrian Embassy in St Petersburg. On 24 July 1914 the Council of Ministers recommended military preparations. Otherwise, argued A. V. Krivoshein, the influential Minister of Agriculture, ‘public opinion would fail to understand why, at the critical moment involving Russia’s interests, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act boldly’. It was more important ‘to believe in the Russian people and its age-old love for the fatherland than any chance preparedness or unpreparedness for war’.50
This placed Nicholas in an impossible situation. If he went to war, he ran the risk of defeat and a social revolution; but if he didn’t, there might equally be a sudden uprising of patriotic feeling against him which could also result in a complete loss of political control. There was little time to reach a decision, for if Russia was to mobilize its forces it would need a head start on its enemies, who could mobilize theirs very much more quickly. On 28 July Austria finally declared war on Serbia. Nicholas ordered the partial mobilization of his troops and made one last appeal to the Kaiser to forestall the Austrian attack on Belgrade. ‘I foresee’, he warned, ‘that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me and forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war.’ Two days later the Kaiser replied, renouncing Germany’s neutrality in the Serbian question. Sazonov recommended a general mobilization, realizing that a German declaration of war against Russia was now imminent (it came on 1 August). He warned the Tsar that ‘unless he yielded to the popular demand for war and unsheathed the sword in Serbia’s behalf, he would run the risk of a revolution and perhaps the loss of his throne’. Nicholas went pale. ‘Just think of the responsibility you’re advising me to assume!’ he said to Sazonov. But the force of his Minister’s argument was incontrovertible and, reluctantly, the Tsar called for the general mobilization on 31 July.51
Brusilov later claimed that the Tsar had been forced to go to war by the strength of his own people’s patriotic fervour: ‘Had he not done so, public resentment would have turned on him with such ferocity that he would have been tumbled from his throne, and the Revolution, with the support of the whole intelligentsia, would have taken place in 1914 instead of 1917.’ This is undoubtedly an overstatement of the case. The middle-class patriots who assembled in front of the Winter Palace to greet the Tsar’s declaration of war on Sunday 2 August — clerks, officials, high-school students and housewives — were hardly the people to start a revolution. Many of them, according to foreign observers, had been ordered to turn out by their employers or masters. But on that sunny afternoon, as Nicholas stood on the balcony of his Winter Palace and surveyed in the square below him the vast flag-waving and cheering crowds, who then, as one, knelt down before him and sang the national anthem, the thought must have crossed his mind that the war had at last united his subjects with him and that perhaps, after all, there was some reason for hope. ‘You see,’ he told his children’s tutor shortly after in a state of great emotion, ‘there will now be a national movement in Russia like that which took place in the great war of 1812.’52
And indeed in those first heady weeks of August there was every outward sign of a national ralliement. The workers’ strikes came to a halt. Socialists united behind the defence of the Fatherland, while pacifists, defeatists and internationalists were forced into exile. Patriotic demonstrators attacked German shops and offices. They ransacked the German Embassy in Marinskaya Square, smashing the windows and throwing out the furniture, the fine paintings and even the Ambassador’s own personal collection of Renaissance sculptures on to a bonfire in the street below. Then, to the cheers of the crowd, they sent two huge bronze horses crashing down from the Embassy roof. In this wave of anti-German feeling people even changed their names to make them sound more Russian: thus, for example, the orientalist Wilhelm Wilhelmovich Struve became Vasilii Vasilievich Struve. Bowing to the strength of this xenophobia, the government also changed the German-sounding name of St Petersburg to the more Slavonic Petrograd. Nicholas welcomed the change. He had never liked St Petersburg, or its Western traditions, and had long been trying to Russify its appearance by adding Muscovite motifs to its classical buildings.
‘Everyone has gone out of their minds,’ lamented Zinaida Gippius, the poet, philosopher and salon hostess of St Petersburg. ‘Why is it that, in general, war is evil yet this war alone is somehow good?’ Most of the country’s leading writers supported the war, and more than a few even volunteered for the army. There was a common assumption among the intelligentsia, searching as ever for a sense of belonging, that the war would bring about Russia’s spiritual renewal by forcing the individual to sacrifice himself for the good of the nation. The meaning of the war, lectured one Moscow Professor of Philosophy, lay ‘in the renovation of life through the acceptance of death for one’s country’. War should be seen as a kind of ‘Final Judgement’. Few intellectuals would have shared the gloomy verdict of Gorky, recently returned from exile abroad: ‘One thing is clear: we are entering the first act of a worldwide tragedy.’53
The press waxed lyrical on this new-found unity of the Russian people. Utro Rossii, the Progressist paper, pronounced that ‘there are now neither Rights nor Lefts, neither government nor society, but only one United Russian Nation’. Finally, as if to consummate this union sacrée, the Duma dissolved itself in a single session of patriotic pomp on 8 August in order, as its resolution declared, not to burden the government with ‘unnecessary politics’ during its war effort. ‘We shall only get in your way,’ Rodzianko, the Duma President, informed the ministers in the Tauride Palace. ‘It is therefore better to dismiss us altogether until the end of hostilities.’54