The revolutionary parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Social Democrats (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), sought to combine revolutionary activity with legal opposition in the Duma. During the early years of the war, revolutionary agitation found little response among the people. Particularly unpopular was the Bolsheviks' slogan for a Russian defeat. The arrest of the participants in a Bolshevik conference in Finland in November 1914, including Lev Kamenev, who was presiding, and the party's other Duma representatives, deprived the Bolsheviks of their leadership inside Russia.
It was extremely difficult to direct a revolutionary party from exile. The Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, had infiltrated these parties with their agents and watched their every move. One agent, Evno Azef, dealt a particularly devastating blow to the SRs after becoming the head of its terrorist wing and a member of its Central Committee. Agents provocateurs completely penetrated the Bolshevik party as well. The Old Bolshevik Gusev-Drapkin recalled in his memoirs that in 1908-09 the Bolshevik organization in St. Petersburg was in total disarray.
At that time, provocation was extremely widespread. Sverdlov was a member of the Leningrad committee, with four others. He suspected one of them of being an agent. Well, after the February revolution, when the archives of the Police Department were opened, it turned out that all four had been agents. Sverdlov had been the only Bolshevik on the committee.26
The situation was pretty much the same in the other cities. Roman Malinovsky, a favorite of Lenin's and at one time the head of the Bolshevik group in the Duma and actual leader of the party inside Russia, was one of the Okhrana's most highly prized agents.27
The secret police had a special attitude toward the Bolsheviks. Lenin's policy of systematic divisiveness was in perfect accord with the desires of the police: to prevent unification of the different groupings within the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (RSDLP). A Police Department memorandum urged the heads of "all police organizations to give urgent instructions to their secret collaborators that, when participating in party meetings, they must insistently promote, and defend with conviction, the total impossibility of an organic fusion of the disparate tendencies and in particular the impossibility of a reunification between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks."28 This had been Lenin's position since 1903.
The police entered so fervidly into the revolutionary spirit that they began to use party jargon. They referred to one of the tendencies in the RSDLP as "inclined toward opportunism." Violation of party discipline equally provoked the ire of the police. On June 24, 1909, police headquarters informed the Okhrana chief in Moscow:
Some members of the Bolshevik center, Bogdanov, Marat, and Nikitich (Krasin), have begun to criticize the center, have turned toward otzovizm and ultimatumizm, and after getting hold of a large part of the money stolen at Tiflis, have begun to engage in clandestine agitation against the Bolshevik center in general and some of its members in particular. Thus, they have started a school on the island of Capri, where Gorky lives.29
It seems that the police were less concerned about the bank robbery in Tiflis than about otzovizm, ultimatumizm, and criticism of "the Bolshevik center," that is, of Lenin.
The gendarme general A. Spiridovich, in commenting on the usefulness of secret agents, also noted that their work "very often served the party and hurt the government."30 And Lenin was certainly right when, as a witness on May 26, 1917, before an examining magistrate of the special commission on the Malinovsky affair, he affirmed that this agent had done more good for the party than harm.31
SPRING 1917
By the end of 1916 the general discontent that was the result of war weariness, military defeats, and high prices was intensified by reductions in food supplies to Petrograd and Moscow. On January 19, 1917, the "Section for the Maintenance of State Security and Public Order in the Capital" reported in a top secret document that "the rising cost of living and the continual failure of government measures aimed at counteracting the scarcity of food products had provoked a violent wave of discontent, even before Christmas."32
The food difficulties that began to affect the cities in 1916 stemmed above all from the government's inability to organize the purchase and transportation of agricultural products to the rail terminals. The wartime harvests were even better than those before the war (if the territory occupied by the Germans is not counted). In 1914, 1,413 million centners were harvested. In 1915 the figure was 1,529 million, and in 1916, 1,286 million.33 It is true that the army consumed more than in peacetime: 28 million centners of food products in 1913—14; 159 million in 1916-17. But at the same time, grain exports fell from 210 million centners in 1913— 1914 to 1 million in 1916-17. The food difficulties were tied to the peasants' refusal to sell their grain at prices constantly eroded by inflation.
The government was unable to understand the reasons behind this crisis. Its attempts to control prices often amounted to nothing better than the measures applied by the governor of Tashkent who strolled through the bazaar on Saturdays and ordered a flogging for any merchant whose prices were, in his view, higher than "normal." Every attempt to organize the provisioning of the cities with the help of specially appointed officials resulted in fiasco. Not knowing what to do, the government kept changing its policies. The politicians had no better grasp of the situation. The right explained the crisis as the result of Jewish and German conspiracies; the Union of the Russian People opened its own "Russian bread stores." The left blamed it on conspiracies by the landowners and kulaks. And everybody agreed that delays on the railroads were at fault. In reality, however, there was an adequate rail system. What was lacking was grain; the trains rushed out after the wheat, but there was no rush of wheat to the trains.34 The top secret police report on the situation in the capital, cited above, concluded that society was longing "to find a way out of an abnormal political situation that is daily becoming more abnormal and strained."35
The parliamentary opposition was increasingly taken with the idea that it must obtain a "responsible ministry" from the tsar, one in which representatives of the Progressive Bloc would hold the key posts. A group of Duma deputies headed by Aleksandr Guchkov, a confirmed monarchist and leader of the moderate liberals, began to plot the ouster of Nicholas II in order to save the dynasty.
The revolutionary parties, although their slogans against the war and the tsar were finding a growing response in the country, judged that the time was not yet ripe for revolution. In January 1917 Nikolai Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, member of the Duma, and supporter of the international socialist antiwar conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, argued: "At this time there can be no hope for a successful revolution. I know that the police are trying to organize some simulated revolutionary outbursts in order to draw the workers into the streets and attack them."36 Also in January, Lenin, living in Zurich, totally cut off from Russia and receiving infrequent and confused reports, spoke in the same vein as Chkheidze: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution."37 Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Lenin's representative in Petrograd and head of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, wrote, "All of the underground organizations and political groups [at the end of 1916] were opposed to mass actions in the coming months of 1917.',38