March – June 1917 – The Long Road to Summer
“Frail is the veneer of civilization… On each side of the barricades, we remain Tatars through and through. Soloviev is proved right, once again. You know that my book [Petersburg] foretold that. I feel I know which direction to go from there”.
Andrey Biely to A.M. Remizov, April 1917.
“Under the blue collar of the worker, a Scythian. Under the blue uniform of the Life-Guard, a Mongol. Too long you have disdained this truth. Look inwards, Russia, and do not despair: the red sun will rise anew: not a Marxist aster, mind you, this you should leave to the Germans and their love of mathematics; but a Scythian sun, red, and frightful”.
Alexander Blok, draft of an unsent letter to Maksim Gorky, June or possibly August 1918.
“You should have seen, Piotr Nikolayevich, in what state I found the Tauride Palace! Like Odoacer on the Forum. The shrine of constitutionalism, utterly fouled, desecrated, by the very people it was supposed to represent. It couldn’t have been worse if the Swedes had taken the city ! So much for our attempts to behave like proper English gentlemen ! Once the war is over, it will be necessary for us (and I mean us) to reckon about that country of us where our bayonets are the only thing standing between civilization and anarchy”.
A. Kutepov to P.N. Wrangel, October 1917.
Petrograd was a scarred sepulchre. Throughout the city, many official buildings had burned: police stations, tribunals, but also an entire aisle of the Imperial Library, because the mob believed that it contained the State’s archives: it was a telling sign of the nature of the February Uprising that the people believed that, if they burned the State’s records, they would be free from any debt and servitude. Dozens of palaces had been plundered, works of art destroyed, officials, aristocrats, and really anybody wearing “German” clothes, beaten or murdered. To add to the devastation, Gurko and his troops had brought the peace of the desert to the city, like Belisarius had "pacified" Constantinople during the Nika Sedition.
Police forces from all over Russia came to the capital to achieve the restoration of order. The workers were treated relatively lightly, on the instances of Polivanov who worried about the inevitable drop of productivity in the industries attached to the war effort. In any case, the most outspoken of the workers had already been shot down by the Cossacks during the military operations of 5-11 March. Police detachments were accompanied by trainloads of grain, which helped to bring back peace and order to the industrial neighbourhoods of Petrograd.
The mutineers were treated more severely: the ringleaders (and especially the junior officers who had rallied the mutiny) were shot, or deported to Siberia. The bulk of the mutineers were dispersed to the remotest garrisons of the empire, in Turkestan or the Far-East. Only a fraction of the mutineers, who were able to impress their innocence on the military judges, were able to avoid that fate and were sent to military depots far from the front, where they would be “re-disciplined” by watchful officers. In any case, most of the Imperial Guards regiments were disbanded, the proud legacy of young Tsar Peter desecrated forever by their treachery. Only the Preobrazhensky, who had fielded the majority of the defenders of the Government Square, was maintained. In due course, each of its companies would form the nucleus of new Imperial Guard regiments, whose names (Lodomirsky, Anatolievski, Tsargradski) would echo in frightful glory during the 20's-30's.
As for the liberals and socialists who had tried to “mount the red horse”, whether in the Soviet or through the Duma Committee, their punishment varied greatly, and was in many cases arbitrary. The MP’s who had had the good senses to go over to Stolypin before Gurko’s entry in the city were treated relatively benignly: they were assigned to residence on their country estates or in their hometown, and deprived of their political rights. This was notably the case of A. Kerensky, who was put under house arrest in his father’s home in Simbirsk and forbidden to ever involve himself in politics. This relatively light sentence for someone who had been the darling orator of the Soviet might been explained by the influence of a few well-connected aristocrats, whose palaces Kerensky had apparently protected from the mob during the February days. Many well-connected MP’s like Rodzianko weren’t even forced to leave the city, provided they remained quiet and confined at home. The Soviet delegates were punished according to their faults: the ones who were determined to have taken arms and excited the mutineers were deported to labour camps; the others were condemned to internal exile, which is to say assigned to small towns in Siberia or Northern Russia, in relatively mild conditions. The Duma was officially disbanded, and would be recalled “once the situation allows it”.
This “reprise en main” departed starkly from the negligence previously shown by the regime. Indeed, the February Uprising was something of a wake-up call for the military and civilian authorities. The empire had been shaken to the core. The capital of the empire, the glorious city of Peter, symbol of the Emperor’s power and prestige, had been devastated by anarchy for a full two weeks. Another stinging humiliation, on top of the many that Russia had suffered since the beginning of this wretched war. This had to be the last one. Something had to change, even the Emperor could see that.
The Emperor didn’t even set foot in his ravaged capital. After a short visit to Tsarskoye Selo to meet with his family, he returned to Mogilev, where, with much dithering, he announced to Alekseyev his dismissal, and his replacement by Gurko. There, on 19 March, he took the unprecedented step of convoking in Smolensk an ad hoc War council gathering both military (Stavka and front commanders) and civilian representatives (ministers Stolypin, Krivoshein, Polivanov and Schcherbatov). Smolensk was chosen because, for the Tsar, this old and sacred Russian city, which has been invaded so many times by Russia's foes, embodied the immutable soul of the Russian land, which, through faith and untold sacrifices, would endure and prevail.
The Southwestern and Caucasus front commanders (respectively, Brusilov and Grand-duke Nikolay Nikolayevich) had sent emissaries, but the Northwestern and Western commanders (Ruzski and Evert) came in person. Coincidentally, they were the ones who, at Alekseyev’s behest, had been the most outspoken in pleading for the appointment of a Rodzianko ministry. They were now palpably afraid of losing their jobs.
The conclusions of the Smolensk War Council were the following ones:
The mutiny of the Petrograd military garrison has shown the low morale of the army, pushed to its utmost limits by the war.
The morale and supply on the front remain worrying, especially on the Northwestern and Western fronts (Ruzski and Evert were of course interested in painting the situation in the darkest light, so as to justify their answer to the infamous “Alekseyev telegram”).
Therefore, an offensive should not be considered before at least summer. The Allies would have to accept this decision. The focus of this offensive should be limited: it would be essentially about gaining some breathing space and bolstering morale at home. The theater of operations would be either the Southwestern front (Austria) or the Caucasus front (Turkey). (Gurko, who disliked Brusilov, made sure eventually that the Caucasus front was chosen). If the Allies demur, it would be replied that Russia is only having a go at the “soft belly” strategy that Britain has tried in 1916
[1].
In the meantime, no effort should be spared to bolster the supplies: food, clothing, ammunition, weapons, medicals,… are badly needed. Extra-effort should be made to carry Allied supply from the ports of entry to the front.
The Petrograd riots have also shown the frailty of food supply to the big cities of Northern Russia. The Razvyorstka system of public-controlled grain supply has to be strengthened and systematized to other strategic cities – Ministries of Transports and Agriculture will focus on this, in close cooperation with the Zemstvos (see infra);
Industrial production in Petrograd would inevitably take some time to recover. Every effort has to be made to redirect military production to other industrial zones in Central Russia (Tula, Voronezh, Kharkov, Kursk,…) – skilled workers deemed essential should not be conscripted;
The Zemstvo’s parallel war effort is to be put under firmer control of the government, so that their activities are more efficient and more in line with the aforementioned priorities (of course the provincial liberals balked at that, but the beheading of the liberal leadership during the February Uprising left them stunned and defenseless);
In light of these conclusions, close coordination between the government (especially War and Interior Ministries) and the Stavka is required (This was probably the biggest takeaway of the Smolensk Conference. Thoroughly frightened by the uprising, Nicholas II finally allowed his ministries to work directly with the Stavka through a board of coordination).
Thus started the long slow way to summer. The war was raging on the other fronts, but all was quiet on the Eastern fringes of the great European War. The British blockade was taking its toll on Germany, who threw her submarines in unrestricted warfare in the Atlantic Ocean, which soon led the United States, where the Princeton Presbyterian of the Shenandoah Valley had just been reelected, to sever diplomatic relations with Germany. In Vienna, the new emperor and king tried to impulse secret peace negotiations, not aware of the disloyalty of his own ministers and the fickleness of French politics. The French, desperate of waiting for a new Russian offensive, threw themselves in murderous and useless offensives in the muddy graveyards of the Western front. In Palestine, the German-Ottoman forces managed to halt the British offensive. In Greece, the King and his Prime Minister were at loggerheads. British strategists were venting ideas about “better coordination” (i.e.: more slaughter of Russian soldiers in the Eastern fields). In the meantime, the Russians set about, ever so slowly and painfully, to put back their armed forces into shape.
[1] Direct impact of the Western Allies’ ambiguous reaction to the February Uprising : the Stavka has become less subservient to French calls for massive offensives on the Eastern front. It will allow new Chief-of-Staff Gurko to plan an offensive in the direction he wants, i.e. Caucasus.
