The main theme running through these discussions, known to historians largely from the reports of police informers, was that in her tragic hour Russia required firm authority, but that such authority could no longer be provided by the discredited bureaucracy: it could only come from a popular mandate, as represented by the Duma. This principle agreed upon, the participants nevertheless had difficulty formulating a concrete program. The more radical wing, led by P. P. Riabushinskii, Russia’s leading entrepreneur and spokesman for the Moscow business community, wanted to force the issue and compel the government to capitulate. A more moderate group, led by the Kadet M. V. Chelnokov, the head of the Union of Cities, preferred some sort of compromise.72
The explosive atmosphere in which the Duma held its meetings in July and August 1915 cannot be appreciated without reference to the military disasters which accompanied them. By the time the Duma reconvened, the Russian armies had abandoned Poland and the enemy was in sight of Riga. The mood at headquarters in Mogilev was one of unrelieved gloom. General G. N. Danilov, the Quartermaster General and one of Russia’s most influential strategists, told a friend a few weeks earlier that one might as well give up all thought of strategy because the Russians had no capability to undertake active operations: their only hope lay in the “exhaustion of the German forces, good luck, and the protection of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker.”73 At the cabinet meeting of July 16, Polivanov prefaced his remarks with the terse statement: “The country is in danger.”74 Alexander Krivoshein, in charge of agriculture, told friends that the government resembled an “asylum.”75
The Duma opened as Russian troops were evacuating Warsaw. The senile, universally despised Goremykin addressed the assembly in an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone, conceding that the government had a “moral obligation” to cooperate with it. When he finished, deputy after deputy, representing the entire spectrum of opinion save for the extreme right, assailed the government for its incompetence.76
Notably virulent was the leader of the Trudovik group, Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky, who was destined to play a major role in the revolution. Kerensky, who was only thirty-three when the war broke out, was an ambitious lawyer and a rising star in Russian socialist politics.77 He first acquired fame as a defense attorney in well-publicized political trials. A skilled orator, he had a hypnotic influence on crowds, but was without either strategic sense or analytic powers. In the Fourth Duma, he promptly rose to the fore as the most inflammatory speaker on the left. After the arrest in November 1914 of the Bolshevik deputies (whom he defended in court), he became the chief spokesman of the socialist factions, easily outshining the leader of the Menshevik deputation, the Georgian Nicholas Chkheidze. In 1917, with the publication of police dossiers on Kerensky, it became known that from the instant the war had broken out he rallied socialist intellectuals against the government and attempted to organize a workers’ soviet.78 After the defeat of the Russian armies in Poland, Kerensky worked for the overthrow of the tsarist regime and the sabotaging of the war effort. In the fall of that year, he agitated against worker participation in the joint committees established to improve defense production (see below) and identified himself with the Zimmerwald resolution of anti-war socialists, in the drafting of which Lenin had played a major role. Indeed, by then there was little to distinguish him from Lenin, and in the eyes of the police he was the “chief ringleader of the present revolutionary movement.”79 His biographer believes that in the summer of 1915, Kerensky, in association with his friend and fellow Mason N. V. Nekrasov, and Chkheidze, “came close to precipitating a revolution of the masses around ‘bourgeois’ leadership.”80
In August 1915, Nicholas took two decisions which many contemporaries regarded as a death sentence on the dynasty. One was to dismiss Nikolai Nikolaevich and assume personal command of Russia’s armed forces. The other was to prorogue the Duma.
It is difficult to ascertain what moved Nicholas to take over the military command, for he made the decision in private and persisted in it, without explanation, in the face of solid opposition from most of his family and virtually the entire cabinet. A year earlier he had let himself be dissuaded from such a course; now he grew intransigent. One indubitable factor was concern for his beloved army. He may also have wished to inspire the country in the hour of its severe trials, and set an example by sharing the simple life of a soldier. Perhaps he also thought that his action would calm the political turmoil and put an end to rumors of a separate peace. He received vigorous support from his wife, behind whom loomed the sinister figure of Rasputin. Alexandra, for all her love and devotion to Nicholas, thought him a weakling, too soft to stand up to the politicians: with him away at the front, she could look forward to enhanced political influence with which to defend the monarchy’s prerogatives.
In this endeavor she was seconded by Rasputin. Rasputin, who is sometimes called a “mad monk,” was neither mad nor a monk. A peasant from western Siberia who probably belonged to the outlawed Khlysty sect, he was introduced to the Imperial family in 1905 by Nikolai Nikolaevich. He quickly gained their confidence with his ability, which probably involved hypnosis, to stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac Tsarevich. He also posed, with some success, as a “man of the people,” an unlettered but genuine voice of the Russian masses, who the Imperial couple liked to believe were staunchly royalist. Although his connections at the Court enabled him to behave with growing brazenness, until the fall of 1915 he had no political influence. Rumors of his boasting, drinking, and sexual escapades reached the Court, but both Nicholas and his wife dismissed them as the malicious gossip of their enemies.
It was very much in Rasputin’s interest to have Nicholas out of the way. In encouraging Nicholas to leave for the front, he thought of the influence and the money which would then lie within his reach. He knew that Nicholas tolerated him for familial reasons, but neither liked nor trusted him. With Nicholas out of sight, he could manipulate the Empress and become the regime’s eminence grise. To encourage the Tsar to leave, he spread rumors that Nikolai Nikolaevich, whom he came to count among his enemies, aspired to the throne.81 Later on, he would boast that he had “sunk” the Grand Duke.82 Having returned to Petrograd from his exile, he saw the Tsar on July 31 and August 4 and urged him to assume the supreme command. He followed this advice with telegrams.83 Thus, a combination of patriotism and political intrigue seem the most likely reasons behind Nicholas’s fateful step.
If we cannot be entirely certain what caused Nicholas to assume command of the army, we know well why his advisers opposed his doing so. The Council of Ministers feared that the Tsar would jeopardize his prestige by taking charge of the army when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. If, as was likely, further misfortunes befell the troops, the Tsar would bear personal blame.84 Second, Nicholas had a reputation for being “unlucky”: born on Job’s name day, his coronation marred by the Khodynka tragedy, father to a single male heir who suffered from an incurable malady, he had lost the Japanese war and was the first Russian Tsar to surrender autocratic authority. What inspired confidence that a man with such a record could lead Russia to victory? Last, but not least, apprehensions arose that with Nicholas at the front, power would pass into the hands of the “German” Empress and her disreputable confidant.