Ironically, the military situation improved greatly in 1916. The Polish and Baltic fronts were stabilized, and in 1916 Gen. Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov (Brusilov, Aleksey Alekseyevich) launched a successful offensive in Galicia, took nearly 400,000 Austrian and German prisoners, and captured Chernovtsy (Czernowitz).
In the end it was the economic effect of the war that proved too much for the government. The shock of the munitions shortage prompted a partly successful reorganization of industry to concentrate on military production, and by late 1916 the army was better supplied than ever before. But life on the home front was grim. The German and Turkish blockade choked off most imports. The food supply was affected by the call-up of numerous peasants (peasant) and by the diversion of transport to other needs. The strain of financing the war generated accelerating inflation, with which the pay of ordinary workers failed to keep pace. Strikes began in the summer of 1915 and increased during the following year, taking on an increasingly political tinge and culminating in a huge strike centred on the Putilov armament and locomotive works in Petrograd (the name given to St. Petersburg in August 1914) in January 1917. The government made matters worse by arresting all the members of the worker group of the Central War Industries Committee.
The February (March, New Style) Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) (see Russian Revolution of 1917) began among the food queues of the capital, which started calling for an end to autocracy. Soon workers from most of the major factories joined the demonstrations. The vital turning point came when Cossacks summoned to disperse the crowds refused to obey orders and troops in the city garrison mutinied and went over to the insurgents. The workers and soldiers rushed to re-create the institution they remembered from 1905, the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (soviet). Soon their example was followed in many other towns and army units throughout the empire. Faced by the threat of a civil war that would undermine the war effort, the military high command preferred to abandon Nicholas II in the hope that the Duma leaders would contain the revolution and provide effective leadership of the domestic front.
By agreement between the Petrograd soviet and the Duma, the Provisional Government was formed, headed by Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov (Lvov, Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince) (chairman of the Zemstvo Union) and consisting mainly of Kadets and Octobrists, though Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich) joined it from the Trudoviki. On March 2 (March 15, New Style), this government's emissaries reached Pskov, where the emperor (absolutism) had become stranded in his train, attempting to reach Petrograd. He dictated to them his abdication and thus brought to an end the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.
Hugh Seton-Watson Geoffrey Alan Hosking Dominic Lieven
Soviet Russia
After the monarchy
The following is a general overview of the history of Russia during the period of Soviet domination. For full coverage of the history of the Soviet Union, see the article Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The February Revolution of 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917) was spontaneous, leaderless, and fueled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. The country, having been sucked into World War I, found the strains of fighting a modern war with a premodern political and economic system intolerable. The tsar was well-meaning but fell short as a war leader and was unable to cope with the burdens of being head of state. His wife, Alexandra, meddled in government and, while encouraging her husband to be a strong tsar, sought the advice of Rasputin on matters of state. The strain of the war, complicated by the intrigues and machinations within the royal house, caused a great gulf to develop between the monarchy and educated society and between the tsar and the rest of the population.
Hardly a hand was raised in support when the imperial order collapsed in February (March, New Style) 1917. The key factor had been the defection of the military. Without this instrument of coercion, the tsar could not survive. Most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum had been created that needed immediate attention. The Provisional Government that had been formed was to remain in office until a democratic parliament, the Constituent Assembly, was convened in January 1918. The new government was bourgeois, or middle-class, representing a tiny segment of the population. However, the soviets (soviet), which were proliferating rapidly, did not contest the right of the bourgeoisie to rule.
As Bolshevik domination grew in Petrograd, Moscow, and other major cities, the soviets accepted the idea that the revolution that would give them power would take place in two stages: the bourgeois and the socialist. How long this transition period would last was a debatable point. The Mensheviks (Menshevik), the moderate socialists, held that Russia had to pass through its capitalist phase before the socialist one could appear. The Bolsheviks (Bolshevik), the radical socialists, wanted the transition period to be short. Their firebrand leader, Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), sensed that power could be seized rather easily. The government was weak, and it could not rely on the army. With its large complement of peasants and workers in uniform, it was this group that formed the natural constituency of the socialists (Socialist Revolutionary Party). Like the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the main agrarian party, did not advocate a rush to power. More than 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside, a fact that made the Socialist Revolutionaries certain to be the leading party when the Constituent Assembly was elected.
The Provisional Government was undone by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. Being a temporary administration, it postponed all hard decisions—what should be done about land seizures by the peasants, for example—for the Constituent Assembly. A fatal mistake by the government was its continued prosecution of the war. Middle-class politicians believed wrongly that one of the reasons for the February Revolution was popular anger at the incompetence of the conduct of the war. Disgruntled peasant-soldiers wanted to quit the army. They did not perceive Germany to be a threat to Russian sovereignty, and they deserted in droves to claim their piece of the landlord's estate. Industrial decline and rising inflation radicalized workers and cost the Provisional Government the needed support of the professional middle classes. The Bolshevik slogan of “All power to the soviets” was very attractive. Dual power prevailed. The government seemingly spoke for the country, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moderate socialists—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries—dominated the Petrograd and Moscow soviets after February, but the radical Bolsheviks began to win local elections and by September had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet.