No sooner had the outburst of patriotic enthusiasm faded after the first few weeks of war than a crisis of authority began to develop in the army. By July 1915, 9 million men had been drafted. The number of officers, insufficient even for a peacetime army of 2 million, was sharply reduced by the loss of some 60,000 during the first year of war. This meant that hardly any of the 40,000 officers from before the war remained. The military academies graduated no more than 35,000 officers each year. By September 1915 it was a rare thing to find a front-line regiment (usually numbering 3,000 soldiers) with more than a dozen officers. Not until late 1915 and early 1916 did the practice of promoting the most outstanding rank-and- file soldiers begin on a large scale. The lack of noncommissioned officers was felt even more acutely.
The crisis of authority in the army was the most striking symptom of the general crisis of authority in the country. Shulgin, an important figure in the Duma, expressed his complaints to the tsar: "Goremykin [the prime minister], a senile fool, is in fact incapable of being the head of the government in the midst of a world war. ... He is organically incapable, because of his age and his hidebound rigidity, of coping with the demands imposed by the war."18 In January 1916 Nicholas replaced Goremykin with Sturmer. Shulgin had this to say about the new prime minister: 'The problem is that Sturmer is a small man, a nonentity, while Russia is involved in a world war. The problem is that all the great powers have mobilized their best forces, while in our case, we have a Santa Claus for a prime minister. ... That is why the country is in an uproar."19
The country was in an uproar because the Russian armies were being beaten. Prices were rising. Food supply to the cities was breaking down, although there was plenty of grain in the countryside. Russia was in an uproar because it was sick of the war. All segments of the population were beginning to see the source of their misfortunes in the tsar, the tsarina, and Rasputin.
The books that have been written about Grigory Rasputin and his inexplicable influence over the empress and, through her, Nicholas II would form an entire library. The correspondence of the imperial couple has provided abundant material for the most diverse interpretations, hypotheses, and speculations: the empress's mysticism; the miraculous powers of "the monk" Rasputin, who on three occasions saved the hemophiliac prince from bleeding to death; hypnosis; even witchcraft. All that is beside the point. As Shulgin wrote: "Who does not know the sentence [attributed to the tsar]: 'Better Rasputin than ten hysterics a day.'" The historian rightly added: "I do not know whether this sentence was actually spoken, but it matters little since all of Russia repeated it."20
The myth of Rasputin, the illiterate Siberian muzhik reputed to have cast a spell over the imperial family and to be shamelessly officiating in Petrograd, spread all over Russia despite the lack of modern means of communication. The myth wielded a death blow to the emperor's prestige.
The breach between society and its ruler became final in August 1915, when Nicholas assumed personal command of the army, thus shouldering direct responsibility for all of the country's defeats and disasters. His presence at Field Headquarters in Mogilev removed him from the capital.
One consequence of this became evident in February 1917, when the tsar, as if caught in a trap, was unable even to reach Petrograd. Meanwhile the influence of the tsarina and thus of Rasputin over the political life of the country grew apace.
The country lived its own life and the government lived its—in a vacuum. Despite the war—one might say because of it—rapid industrial growth continued. In 1914 the index of economic growth, taking 1913 as 100, rose to 101.2, in 1915 to 113.7, and in 1916 to 121.5.21 The extraction of iron ore increased in the same period by 30 percent, and petroleum production by an equal amount. There was major expansion in both the chemical industry and the machine industry. The drastic reduction of imports forced the industrialists to start producing machinery domestically. According to statistics from January 1, 1917, Russian factories in August 1916 were turning out more munitions than the French and twice as much as the British. In 1916 Russia made 20,000 light cannon and imported 5,625. It was 100 percent self-sufficient in the production of howitzers and 75 percent in heavy artillery.22 Subsequently, the reserves of armaments in imperial Russia proved large enough to last through more than three years of civil war.
In order to harness the turbulent and unplanned process of industrial growth and to eliminate the bottlenecks that developed along the way, some structural transformations, some reforms, were needed. But Nicholas II had only one desire: to keep the country as he had found it upon his ascension to the throne after his father's death. All of the tsar's actions, and all of his inaction, were directed to this end. Shulgin has suggested an eloquent postmortem for the Russia of that time: "An autocracy without an autocrat."23
To the tsar's personal inaction was juxtaposed a tumultuous political area. "In 1917 there were political parties for nearly every social class," the Soviet historian Spirin notes—with some perplexity.24 It should be added that these parties had originated well before 1917 and that most of them functioned legally, with their own representatives in the Duma. The Bolshevik representatives, who openly called for Russia's military defeat, were not arrested until November 1914, and then exiled only after a trial.
By mid-1915 virtually all the parties in the Duma had gone into opposition. The Progressive Bloc, the core of the parliamentary opposition, was formed in August 1915. It included the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), the Union of October 17 (Octobrists), the Progressives, and the Nationalists. The binding force in this coalition of liberals, centrists, and rightists (except for the extreme right) was the sole liberal party in Russian history: the Cadets. The Cadet program stressed that it was a party of all the people, not of one class, and that its highest loyalty was to Russia and a strong Russian state. The Cadets explained their role in opposition to the tsar by their desire to strengthen the state. To a large degree they defined progress as Russia's ability to defend its international position.
The Cadets proclaimed that "everyone without exception" should be subject to the rule of law and that "fundamental civil rights" should be guaranteed to all citizens. They called for the eight-hour day, trade union rights, and mandatory medical and old age insurance paid for by the state. They advocated distribution of crown lands and monastery lands to the peasantry and expropriation of the large landed estates with indemnification. Categorically opposed to federalism or any change in the political structure that might weaken the empire, they saw as their main task to prepare Russia for "a parliamentary system and the rule of law."25
The Cadet party's principal base was among those connected with the zemstvos, the institutions of local government introduced in the reforms of the 1860s. At the beginning of the war two empire-wide organizations, the Union of Zemstvos and the Union of Towns, were founded with the aim of involving the general public in the war effort, in cooperation with the government. The work of these organizations provided considerable scope for the expansion of the Cadets' influence.
The Octobrist and Progressive parties, also members of the Progressive Bloc, held liberal monarchist views. In allying themselves with the parliamentary opposition, they hoped on the one hand to help channel discontent and on the other to persuade Nicholas II to heed the warning voices and change the government, appointing ministers who would "enjoy the confidence of the nation."