In 1914, when the war began, it was the world’s
fourth largest economy, and it covered 15% of the world’s landmass. It had what seemed like an endless supply
of men and they patriotically went to war in support of their leader. And yet three years later, that empire was
in tatters and wracked by revolution. I’m talking, of course, about Russia. I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War
Special episode about Russia and the First World War. Russia had been ruled for two decades by Tsar
Nicholas II when the war began. He had ascended to the throne in 1894 at the
age of 26 upon his father’s death.
That same year the zemstvos, a collection
of peasants and workers that made up local governments that had been instituted by Nicholas’
grandfather Alexander II, brought a proposal to Nicholas for adopting a European style
constitutional monarchy, and socio-economic and civil rights reforms for the peasantry. That group, mainly subsistence farmers, made
up 82% of the population. Nicholas denounced the idea as “senseless
dreams”; he would rule by autocracy. Now, Alexander II had made sweeping reforms
decades earlier after the Russian loss in the Crimean War. He modernized his empire’s military-industrial
complex, he expanded the scope of the railways and communications, but most importantly he
modernized Russia’s military personnel, which had been mainly serfs. Seeing the defeat of the Russian serf army
by the free British and French, he enacted the Emancipation Reform of 1861, which effectively
abolished serfdom in the empire over the course of a few years. Eventually, he was even planning constitutional
reform through the proposed Loris-Melikov Constitution, whose contents were a little
more modest than the name might suggest, but which would have made Russia a constitutional
monarchy.
On February 16th, 1881, the Executive Consultation,
in which Alexander participated, unanimously approved the project, and on March 1st, Alexander
told Loris-Melikov that the Council of Ministers would discuss it in four days. That same day Alexander was assassinated by
an anarchist group and any progressive government or civil reforms died with him. Alexander III ascended to the throne, dismissed
the project, and ruled as an absolute monarch. You can imagine that this stirred up a fair
amount of civil unrest, but through sheer force of character and iron will, Alexander
kept order in his empire. His reign was cut short in 1894 by kidney
disease, and he had never taken the time to teach his son, now Tsar Nicholas II, how to
be a proper monarch and maintain peace and order.
Nicholas inherited an immense job, personally
ruling the world’s second largest empire, and as time passed it became quite clear how
ill-prepared he was for a job that, on many levels he didn’t even want, and thought
was a burden. But he did it because he believed in Divine
Right, that he and the Tsarina had been chosen to rule by God and had to do it, like it or
not. He wanted to continue his father’s policies,
but Russia was entering the modern age, and the political landscape was shifting beneath
Nicholas’ feet, and his father’s policies would need a very strong ruler to carry them
out, which Nicholas was not.
Still, for the first ten years of his rule,
Russia flourished. A lot of the credit for that goes to Finance
Minister Sergei Witte and Prime Minister and Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Stolypin. Russia became one of Europe’s fastest growing
economies, expanding at 4% annually. Then came 1905. Russia suffered a surprising and humiliating
defeat to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, which they considered a “secondary power”. Morale plummeted and you saw major economic
stagnation. There was an unprecedented wave of worker
strikes and demonstrations that targeted landlord, industry, and the government. The strikes and civil unrest led to the 1905
Russian Revolution and also a series of anti-Jewish pogroms. Now, the Russian military remained loyal to
the Tsar during the revolution, so Nicholas was not removed from power but he was forced
to sign the October Manifesto, which promised basic civil rights and created a Parliamentary
body, the Duma.
Nicholas hated this, though, and undermined
it at every turn. He had actually wanted to create a sort of
military dictatorship with Grand Duke Nikolai at the helm, but Nikolai threatened to shoot
himself in the head if the Tsar didn’t sign the manifesto. From then until the First World War, Russia’s
economy had something of a recovery, but the promised constitutional government never developed. Nicholas ceded none of his power, and would
dissolve the Duma time and again, rendering it into a feckless entity cooperative with
his own policy. This served to foment underground dissent
and there was a series of assassinations of Tsarist officials, including the Governor-Generals
of Moscow and Finland, and Stolypin himself in 1911.
And then came the war. Nicholas called for all citizens to stand
united against the Central Powers, and to the surprise of many, they did. The peasantry went to war with great patriotism
and Nicholas, for maybe the first time in his reign, enjoyed great popularity. Okay, everybody thought that it would be a
short war. People like economic journalist Norman Angell
thought, “modern war had become unprofitable, and a drawn-out conflict had become impossible. Industrialized economies… were so bound
together by trade… that a conflict of any duration would lead quickly to collapse, starvation,
and revolution”. Russian financier I.S. Bliokh wrote that, it “was agrarian economies,
such as Russia, with a large population of subsistence farmers and a cushion of net food
exports, that would stand up best when global trade was disrupted and the industrialized
economies fell down”. Both of those guys were very wrong. Backed by massive military-industrial complexes
the war grew to a scale never before seen. It also turned out that the industrial economies
were actually better suited for mobilizing national resources. I’m not going to talk about Russian involvement
the war, since I cover all that in the regular episodes, but there were both great successes
and great disasters.
Nicholas made what can only be regarded as
a serious error when he personally took command of the army in September 1915. This meant that any military failures in both
the field or in supply rested on his shoulders. The nation’s economy could not handle the
strain of the war, the unpopular Tsarina and even more unpopular Rasputin wielded great
influence in Petrograd, and as the misery continued, and food shortages became endemic,
strikes and demonstrations broke out on an almost daily basis, culminating in the February
Revolution that saw Nicholas abdicate, abandoned even by his own armies that had saved him
in 1905.
Today I really wanted to look a bit at Russia
before the war. Heading into the 20th century, Russia found
itself racing to adapt to the modernization of the rest of the European powers. The economy expanded thanks to people like
Witte and Stolypin, but progress was stifled by the inflexibility of the autocratic rule
of Nicholas II. Crushing or dismissing all opposition, he
and the larger part of the ruling class disregarded the public unrest coming from below. Ignoring the warnings and lessons of the 1905
Revolution, he failed to see how broken and outdated his system was, and that didn’t
just affect the civilian population, but also the economy and the military. All of the Russian Empire’s woes were exposed
in 1917 when the demoralized, exhausted, and angry public joined together and ended 304
years of Romanov rule..
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