Fat Rodzyanko Has Sent me Some Nonsense The Great War

Russia, October 1917.

From Petrograd, a shockwave pulsed and widened

through all this vast land which had once been an empire.

The billows beat in every quarter of the world.

Let everyone remember that in this war there are no reverses

of the Russians, of the English, or of the French alone

and that success or failure is one and the same thing for all.

The fervent hopes once expressed by a Russian politician, now, in the winter of 1917, sounded ominous.

In the east, a spectre more awful than all the shapes of death itself

had appeared upon the battlefield,

a spectre that had long haunted the war leaders' minds.

For here was the most dreaded casualty of all - the will to war itself.

Russia could go on no longer. Hindenburg said,

Hitherto, the unwieldy Russian colossus

had hung over the whole European and Asiatic world like a nightmare.

Time and time again, her efforts had produced considerable crises for us.

Tannenberg, August 1914.

The enemy losses were extremely heavy,

but our high command believed themselves compelled prematurely

to draw away to the east strong forces from the west

where they were trying to secure a rapid decision.

Masurian Lakes, February 1915.

Mighty masses rolled up against us,

overwhelming masses, each one larger than our whole force,

but German resolution bore this load

and Russian blood flowed in streams.

Galicia, May 1915.

The fearful, continuous tension of the situation in the Carpathians,

and its reaction on the political situation,

imperiously demanded some solution.

We found ourselves compelled to send large forces there

to keep up our pressure upon the enemy.

Gorlice-Tarnow, 1915.

There was something unsatisfactory about the encounters of this year.

The Russian bear had escaped our clutches,

bleeding, no doubt, from more than one wound, but still not stricken to death.

Did he have enough life force left to make things hard for us again?

Her casualties are the highest of all the combatant nations.

No-one knows the figures - five or eight million.

All we know is, sometimes in our battles with the Russian,

we had to move the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches

in order to get a fresh field of fire against assaulting waves.

Yet in 1916, the Russians had won a great victory over the Austrians in Galicia.

The Germans and Austrians had had to stretch their manpower resources to the utmost to resist this blow.

In January 1917, an Allied delegation arrived in Russia

to develop efficiency for the planned offensive of that year.

The British military attache in Russia wrote,

The prospects for the 1917 campaign were brighter than in 1916.

The Russian infantry was tired, but less tired than 12 months earlier.

The stocks of arms and equipment were larger

and supplies from overseas were arriving in appreciable quantities.

In fact, desertions from the front ran into hundreds of thousands.

Russia had lost as many dead as the British and French put together.

She had suffered literally beyond endurance.

She had reached her limit.

Her soldiers, once so brave, had had enough.

Now they were getting out of the trenches

to fraternise with the Germans, man to man.

In the rear, industrialisation had changed the face of Tsarist Russia,

drawing peasants into the towns

and creating a new, incoherent proletariat.

The economy functioned in a welter of administrative confusion,

but committees set up to organise production,

after the appalling breakdowns of the early days of the war, had begun to have some effect.

By the end of 1916, great improvements had been achieved.

Patriotic spirit ran high.

Victory over the Germans was the simple aim of most of the population.

Pressure for more efficient management of the war

was exerted by liberal politicians through the parliament, or Duma.

But Tsar Nicholas II had no use for constitutional government.

At his coronation he said,

I shall maintain the principle of autocracy

just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my dead father.

But Nicholas II was gentler, weaker than his father.

Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, wrote,

He would never have been chosen by a responsible board of directors

to manage any business of any magnitude,

and certainly not a business confronted with a serious emergency.

He was a devoted family man, deeply fond of his son, the tsarevitch,

who suffered from haemophilia,

a blood disease which made every scratch dangerous.

There was nothing the Tsar liked better

than to be with his soldiers and sailors.

In 1915, he had made himself Supreme Commander.

He loved the simple link, as he saw it,

that bound him to his wider family -

the 170 million people of Russia.

Emotional faith in a paternal Tsar and the mystery of their religion

were the simple guiding principles of their lives.

The peasants' lives were miserable.

Often, they lodged in the same single-room hovel as their animals

on earthen floors with a hole in the roof for the smoke to escape.

Their diet was poor and the gross mishandling of wartime distribution

meant that, though food was there, many went hungry.

Chaos was aggravated by hundreds of thousands of refugees who poured into Russia in the early defeats.

A British member of parliament observed their misery.

Serried ranks of emaciated, huddled humanity,

brutalised by their abject surroundings, corroded by disease.

Men, women and children of different races and languages,

crowded and congested like litters of pigs

in an asphyxiating sty.

In the towns and factories, too, there was misery.

Strikes had been increasing sharply just before 1914.

War, with its shortages and inflation, aggravated the unrest.

The Tsar himself left affairs more and more to the Tsarina,

a German-born but English-educated niece of Queen Victoria.

The Tsarina's close friendship with her spiritual adviser, a lecherous and drunken monk, Rasputin,

led to a widespread campaign against the entire Tsarist regime.

To the public, this relationship assumed vast dimensions.

It became the symbol of all Russia's ills.

Rasputin's murder was hailed as an act of the highest patriotism.

The winter of 1916-17 was particularly severe.

Fuel was short.

Food queues lengthened.

Pressures on the Tsar to change incompetent ministers continued from all sides.

His own cousin wrote to him,

Shall Russia be a great state, free and capable of developing strong,

or shall she submit to the iron German fist?

Certain forces are leading you, and thus Russia, to inevitable ruin.

It is absolutely indispensable that the ministers and the legislative chambers should work together.

The existing situation, with the whole responsibility resting on you and you alone,

is unthinkable.

The British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, doing what he could to keep Russia in the war,

told the Tsar he must regain the people's confidence. HE replied,

-Do you mean that

-I

-am to regain the confidence of my people

or that THEY are to regain MY confidence?

Suddenly, in the early days of March 1917,

frustration in the Petrograd food queues spilled over into revolt.

People came out to protest, found many others there and took courage.

For the first time, there was doubt about the troops.

The Tsar, true to character,

washed his hands of the awkward situation and went to the front,

leaving matters to the palace guard and the Petrograd garrison.

Now turbulent forces suddenly broke the surface of Russian life.

The French Ambassador watched from the safety of his room.

A strange and prolonged din seemed to come from the Alexander Bridge.

Almost immediately, a disorderly mob carrying red flags appeared at the end on the right bank of the Neva

and a regiment came towards it from the other end.

It looked as if they would collide, but the two bodies coalesced.

The army was fraternising with the revolt.

The vast Petrograd garrison of some 200,000 men

was not typical of the army as a whole.

It consisted of raw recruits, war-weary reserves, convalescents

and even punishment battalions.

Many deserters from the front had drifted to the capital's streets.

Before long, the whole garrison had joined the mob.

In a desperate move to get the Tsar to introduce the necessary reforms,

the President of the Duma, Rodzianko, sent him a telegram. The Tsar received it at his HQ.

This fat Rodzianko has sent me some nonsense

to which I will not even reply.

Nothing could stop the sudden upsurge against the monarchy, symbol of the country's sufferings.

Within days, the Tsar was forced to abdicate and a 300-year-old dynasty came crashing to the ground.

A general amnesty was declared

and political prisoners were set free among the jubilant crowds.

The Tsar's unpopular ministers were arrested.

It is difficult to say how many died in the bloodless revolution,

but most accounts say under a thousand.

Petrograd, thanks to the measures taken by the government,

rapidly resumed its normal aspect and order generally prevailed.

This was especially noticeable at the burial of the victims of the revolution on April the 5th

when a never-ending procession filed past in perfect order

from ten in the morning till late in the evening.

There were in all but some 200 coffins

and as each one was lowered into the grave,

a salute was fired from the fortress,

but no priests officiated at the ceremony which was divested of any religious character.

Somewhat dazed with the success of the revolution,

Russia had to face the bleak task of deciding where she would go.

The rising in the streets had been AGAINST something. Now the people had to decide what it had been FOR.

The wish to run the war better had given the revolution its spark,

but hatred of the war had given it momentum.

In the confusion that followed, responsibility fell upon the Duma,

responsibility to make good their implied promises.

Now they had to do better than the autocracy they had so criticised.

A Provisional Government was formed with a liberal, Prince Lvov, as the first Prime Minister.

A young socialist lawyer, Kerenski, became Minister of Justice.

In the Allied capitals, where the events in Russia looked simple,

the revolution was hailed as a triumph for the Allied cause.

The London Times commented,

The army and people joined hands to overthrow the forces of reaction

which were stifling national aspirations and strangling national efforts.

Lloyd George declared in the House of Commons,

We believe that the revolution

is the greatest service the Russian people have yet made

to the cause for which the Allied peoples have been fighting.

In America, herself about to enter the war on the Allied side, the revolution seemed providential.

The Secretary of State declared,

The revolution in Russia has removed the one objection to affirming

that the European war was a war between democracy and absolutism.

In Petrograd, one of the Provisional Government's first acts

was to declare that it would loyally maintain its alliances

and endeavour to carry the war to a victorious conclusion.

The French Ambassador reported,

Patriotism, intelligence and honesty is on every face,

but the task they have undertaken is patently beyond their powers.

Heaven grant that they do not collapse under it too soon.

Their task was complicated by the fact that a separate revolutionary body convened in the same offices -

the Soviet. The Soviet, or council, claimed to represent factory workers and soldiers.

Its majority wanted to continue the war to defend the revolution.

One of its first acts was to issue Order Number 1 to the army,

directed against the powers of officers and setting up soldiers' councils.

In this uneasy alliance, the Provisional Government had to accept the Soviet's order.

A struggle for the soul of Russia now began. A French observer noted,

Groups were constantly forming with no actual reason in the streets.

One man would have a discussion with another and passers-by would listen.

People thus witnessed exchanges of political opinions where opposing ideas were set against each other.

Groups were constantly forming and dispersing.

At first sight, the crowd appeared to be full of unrest.

Actually, it was only idle.

The Germans had always regarded a revolution as their best hope for an early defeat of Russia.

Now was the time to ensure the outcome.

They saw as their instrument, Lenin, head of the Bolshevik group among the Russian revolutionaries.

Lenin had spent the war years in Switzerland with his wife, Krupskaya.

The Germans had so far made little contact with them, finding other revolutionaries more cooperative.

Lenin himself was no pro-German. Pitilessly single-minded,

he saw all the warring nations as capitalist imperialists.

He wanted peace and worldwide revolution against capitalism.

As late as January 1917, he said,

We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battle of this coming revolution.

When revolution came, only two months later, he was unimpressed.

The militant monarchy in Russia

has been followed by a militant republic -

capitalists who want to continue the imperialist war

and to adhere to the robber treaties of the Tsarist monarchy.

Lenin's aim of peace at any price was at variance with the Petrograd Soviets and even many Bolsheviks.

Now, in Churchill's words, the Germans transported Lenin

"like a plague bacillus" from Switzerland into Russia.

He arrived in Petrograd on April the 16th, determined to capture control of the revolution,

but his moment was not quite yet.

The man of the moment was Kerenski. Unlike Lenin, this socialist lawyer - a compelling orator,

honest, shrewd, energetic - wanted to continue the war.

His efforts to reinvigorate Russian society

in defence of the revolution against German imperialism

found a response among the Petrograd crowds.

A freedom loan, launched to support the revolution, had great success.

Patriotic fellow socialists from Allied countries, like the French socialist minister, Albert Thomas,

were welcomed on goodwill visits to cement Allied solidarity.

Thomas was very impressed. Eyes sparkling as he glanced about him, he said to the French Ambassador,

Now we see the revolution in all its grandeur and beauty.

The strength of Russian democracy lies in its revolutionary fervour.

Kerenski alone is capable of establishing, with the Soviet's aid, a government worthy of confidence.

Soon Kerenski was Minister of War in a new government,

which included members of the Soviet, and with dynamic confidence

he went ahead with his plans for the Russian army's summer campaign.

As in 1916, it was to take place in Galicia.

But in the army, the virus of revolution had spread.

The cracks in discipline were widening.

An English observer wrote,

Desertion had set in wholesale.

Few men left the front trenches, but as soon as they were moved into the reserves they decamped in a body.

The movement was something elemental.

They packed even the roofs of railway carriages.

A photograph of this was published in England entitled, "Russian Soldiers Hasten To The Front."

The Germans purposely left the front inactive

to encourage this crumbling of Russian discipline.

General Brusilov, victor of last year's campaign,

had to spend hours arguing with soldiers, delegates and committees who had their own strategic ideas.

However, Brusilov was optimistic. So was Kerenski,

who issued the order of the day -

I call on the army, fortified by the strength and spirit of the revolution, to take the offensive.

Kerenski's offensive was launched on July the 1st.

There were some initial gains. The Provisional Government issued an intoxicating communique.

July 1st has shown the whole world the might of a revolutionary army,

organised on democratic lines

and inspired by a firm belief in the ideas of the revolution.

It was a pipe dream. After a few days of partial breakthroughs,

the Russian offensive petered out.

The British military attache reported,

They had lost many officers and had no incentive to further effort.

They knew they could retire without being punished.

As a Russian artillery general expressed it,

"They felt lonely out in front, and went to their dugouts to sleep."

Then the Germans and Austrians counter-attacked. The rout of the Russian army was overwhelming.

The real meaning of the revolution now made itself felt.

It had meant a breakdown, not just of the Tsarist regime, but of Russia herself.

Solitary, helpless and dismayed, the individual Russian was looking for direction.

This was a chaos which anyone might exploit,

provided he was ruthless and single-minded enough.

Lenin was such a man. He constantly attacked the Provisional Government

and when the news of the disasters at the front reached Petrograd, it seemed that his moment had come.

Crowds flooded the streets, calling for peace, bread and freedom

and for the overthrow of the Provisional Government.

To foment an armed uprising,

the Bolsheviks called in sailors from the naval base at Kronstadt

Everything now depended on the loyalty of the army.

An observer wrote,

Looking onto the square, I saw an endless multitude

packing the entire space as far as the eye could reach.

A mass of placards and banners with Bolshevik slogans rose above them.

To the left, the black, ugly masses of armoured cars loomed up.

A French correspondent reported,

Suddenly a shot rang out. Whence had it come from? By whom and against whom had it been fired?

Nobody seemed to know, but it was immediately followed by other shots,

which soon increased to a wild fusillade, dominated by the sinister rattle of machine guns.

The bullets whizzed through the wildly fleeing crowd.

The army stood by the Provisional Government

and when it was announced that the Bolsheviks had been receiving funds from German sources

Lenin had to flee to Finland on a forged passport.

Other Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, were briefly arrested.

General Kornilov, the commander in chief,

unsatisfied with the Government's efforts to restore order and continue the war,

marched, with his troops, on Petrograd.

But Kerenski, afraid of being branded as a counter-revolutionary,

refused to accept his support.

He even enlisted Bolshevik aid to stop Kornilov

and thus armed his worst enemies.

Trotsky drilled the workers into a Bolshevik army - the Red Guard.

They were to act as shock troops when the moment came for the Bolsheviks to strike

and that moment was now not far off.

The Germans did their best to hasten it.

They launched an offensive in the north towards Petrograd,

turning the Russian flank above Riga by an amphibious landing on an island in the Gulf of Finland.

Hindenburg described the operation as,

The one completely successful enterprise on either side in which an army and a fleet cooperated.

Our plans were rendered so doubtful by bad weather at the outset

that we were already thinking of disembarking the troops on board.

The arrival of better weather let us proceed with the venture.

From that point, everything went like clockwork.

We succeeded in possessing ourselves of Osel

and the neighbouring islands.

One more pressure was thus added to the sense of crisis in the capital.

In Petrograd, and at the front,

Bolsheviks worked tirelessly.

Soldiers, do not trust these wolves in sheep's clothing!

They call you to fresh slaughter! Well, follow them if you like.

Let them pave the way for the return of the Tsar with your corpses!

Let your orphans, your widows and children, deserted by all,

pass again into slavery, hunger, beggary and disease!

The Bolshevik following multiplied. Lenin himself returned secretly to supervise the insurrection.

On November the 7th, in a superb stroke of political bluff,

Trotsky simply proclaimed that the Provisional Government had fallen and that the Soviet was in power.

20,000 Red Guards appeared on the streets.

Bolshevik oratory and subversion worked among the troops.

During the next few days, Trotsky's statement became a fact.

The Bolsheviks besieged the Winter Palace where the Provisional Government was protected

only by a few officer cadets and the women's battalion.

In a few hours, the Bolsheviks captured the Palace and arrested the Provisional Government.

The Provisional Government, like the Tsar before it, had fallen without a struggle.

Now Lenin could honour his promise of peace.

An armistice was arranged with the Germans, and Russian emissaries went to meet them at Brest Litovsk.

The two sides made a strange contrast.

The Germans - stiff, correct, experienced -

apparently with all the cards in their hands.

The Russians - nervous, uncertain - but with at least one good card.

They could play for time.

To counter the stranglehold of the Allied blockade,

the Germans and Austrians desperately needed access to the vast granaries of the Ukraine.

So they made a separate peace with the independent, anti-Bolshevik government of the Ukraine.

A peace treaty with Rumania, now near the end of her tether, followed.

But there was no peace with Russia.

The endless Bolshevik delaying tactics enraged the Germans.

They resumed their advance.

The Russian army did not try to fight, but fell back in a rabble.

"War is dead in the hearts of men," noted an American observer.

The Bolsheviks were forced to accept the harshest terms of peace.

The eastern front was finished.

Hindenburg said,

In spite of the peace with Russia, it was even now impossible

for us to transfer all our troops from the east.

It was necessary for us to leave behind strong German forces.

Our operations in the Ukraine were not yet at an end.

We had to penetrate into their country to restore order there.

Only when this had been done, had we any prospect of securing food from the Ukraine.

Of a very different import was the military assistance

which in the spring we sent to Finland in her war of liberation from Russian domination.

The Bolshevik government had not fulfilled the promise it made us

to evacuate this country.

We hoped, by assisting Finland, to get her on our side.

The rest of our fighting troops which still remained in the east

formed the source from which our western armies could be reinforced.

Now the patient, enduring German army

might at last bring off the decisive victory

which had escaped its grasp.

The troop trains rumbled across Europe, bearing division after division from east to west.

Every click of their wheels echoed the ticking away of precious time.

For Germany, it was now or never.

Subtitles by Morag Reive BBC Broadcast 2003

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