Nine Days That Shook The World: Russia, Revolution and the Abdication of Nicholas II
An excerpt from Greg King's latest book
Prologue
Wednesday, February 22/March 7, 1917
Heavy snow swirled down from a leaden gray sky above the Russian Imperial capital of Petrograd, dusting roofs, shimmering across gilded church domes, floating over the icy, frozen expanse of the Neva River. The white blanket was thick on the ground, “a firm, flat carpet,” as French Ambassador Maurice Paleologue recalled.(1) Bells jingled on troikas passing along the broad Nevsky Prospekt, the main artery slicing the city in half, as impatient horses puffed their breaths into the vaporous air. A few figures, heavily bundled against the cold, stood around braziers, warming their hands; people pushed past them on sidewalks, jostling, rushing, heads down, fur collars pulled taut against necks, hats riding low on brows.
It was Wednesday, February 22/March 7, 1917. The world had been at war for three years; Russian soldiers shivered and starved in trenches stretching from East Prussia to Austria. Waves of fervent patriotism had swept the country when the war broke out in 1914; with an army of 1.4 million and an additional 3 million reservists called up, optimism ran high that the “Russian steamroller” would sweep across Europe and win the war by Christmas. But victories gave way to defeats as shortcomings in training, arms, and infrastructure became apparent. By the beginning of 1917, some 2.5 million Tsarist soldiers were dead, with another 5.5 million wounded or captured as doubts about victory grew, and discontent and desertion replaced optimism.
An air of unreality hung over the capital; in 1914, amid bursts of anti-German sentiment, Nicholas II had changed city's name from the Germanic St. Petersburg to the more Russian Petrograd, but it remained a place of immense contradictions. The city was divided between the elite and the dispossessed. As always, the Nevsky Prospekt bristled with a cosmopolitan crowd. Smartly uniformed officers and elegant ladies imperiously swept from sleighs to dine, shop at Faberge, and carry out trysts. Lights shone bright in the baroque pastel palaces of Russia's aristocracy as they presided over dinner parties; lavish ballrooms scented with the aroma of fresh flowers witnessed diamonds and gold braid flashing through the blue haze of cigarette smoke. Guests exchanged gossip as liveried footmen moved among them holding aloft silver trays of champagne. Gilded boxes at the Mariinsky Theater were still filled with jeweled ladies and their escorts who watched the country's elite ballet stars turn on the stage even in the midst of war. Restaurants and nightclubs did a brisk business: those with the means wanted to be entertained, distracted, amused. Champagne, said a British diplomat flowed “like water.”(2)
But beyond the windows of the privileged, suffering multiplied and misery grew among the silent masses. “Everywhere,” wrote Maurice Paleologue, “I see anxiety and down-heartedness. No one takes any more interest in the war, no one believes in victory any longer; the public anticipates and is resigned to the most evil happenings.”(3) The suicide rate in Petrograd quadrupled: it was not uncommon for newspapers to record that children as young as eight had killed themselves.(4)
It was exceptionally cold that winter. Daily temperatures at the beginning of February fell to 2 degrees. Locomotives froze; incessant snow buried railway tracks, and it was difficult to get them cleared.(5) Fuel ran short. Kerosene, used to heat apartments and stoves, was almost impossible to find. Desperate people began hacking apart furniture and rowboats to provide firewood. A few went farther: at night, shivering workers slipped into the city's cemeteries and stole the wooden crosses marking graves, to use as fuel in their stoves.(6)
Hunger exacerbated the misery. As early as autumn 1915 Major-General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, the British military representative at Russian Army Headquarters, had noted the growing “shortage of food and fuel at Petrograd.”(7) In June 1916 then Minister of Agriculture Alexander Naumov warned the Emperor about the impending dangers. “I tried to tell His Majesty in detail about the situation of the food supply, about the harvests and what was the prospective yield, and about the organization of agricultural work in the agricultural regions of the south. The Emperor kept on interrupting me with questions that related not to the business side of my official journey but rather to everyday trivia that interested him...how the weather was, whether there were children and flowers....I must admit that this kind of attitude from the Emperor toward matters of fundamental national importance at the time discouraged me greatly.” Nicholas, he concluded, “preferred to think and talk about lighter and happier things when we reported to him, rather than to hear and discuss urgent, difficult and worrying issues.”(8)
Nicholas II himself confessed, “I have never been a merchant, and simply do not understand those questions about provisions and stores.”(9) Nor was Alexander Protopopov, his Minister of the Interior, better informed. He later admitted that he had “not thought” about the question of food shortages “sufficiently,” but he excused his ignorance by saying, “I had never even been in the statistics section of the Ministry of the Interior, and I did not know what data concerned supplying the population. Nor would I have brought any useful abilities into the situation.”(10)
On February 5, Konstantin Globachev, Chief of the Petrograd Okhrana, reported: “With every day the food question becomes more acute and it brings down cursing of the most unbridled kind against anyone who has any connection with food supplies. Never before has there been so much swearing, argument and scandal. That the population has not yet begun food riots does not mean they will not in the nearest future. That any kind of accidental step by the hungry masses will be the first and last step on the way to mindless and merciless excesses of the most terrible kind – anarchistic revolution – there can be no doubt.”(11)
Inflation added to the problem. In the two months between December 1916 to February 1917, the price of sugar increased 75 percent; milk 40 percent; meat 20 percent; potatoes 25 percent; and cabbage 25 percent.(12) With rising costs, buying power steadily decreased to roughly 75 percent of what the same wages would have covered in 1913.(13) Most factory workers, finding half of their meager salaries consumed with rents at slum-like lodgings, skipped meat altogether, unable to afford the basics of sustenance.(14)
Russia was fatigued, her people hungry and freezing. By February, transfer of flour into Petrograd dropped to under a tenth of shipments the previous months; there was barely enough flour in the city to last two weeks.(15) Stores were already running short of basic items: hastily scrawled signs at butcher shops warned of no meat; bakeries had no bread. Food lines were everywhere. The impoverished began lining up in the dead of night, waiting six hours in the freezing weather for shops to open in the hope that stocks will have been replenished by morning. The wealthy sent servants to stand in line for them.(16)
Nicholas II’s humble subjects, “ill-clad men and garrulous women,” shuffled dejectedly along streets swept by a mournful wind, hoping to obtain a pound of flour, a loaf of bread, or a can of heating oil to alleviate their misery.(17) “We have given out fathers, our husbands, and our brothers,” the women wailed. “We are willing to give ourselves, but we must have bread for our children.”(18) Maurice Paleologue was “struck by the sinister expression on the faces of the poor folk,” a rather curious expression to use describing the downtrodden and hungry.(19) But the hopeful were often disappointed: after standing in line through the cold nights they often discovered that the shops had no goods to sell. And when the stores did have supplies, they quickly sold out, as people succumbed to panic buying fed by rumors of impending rationing.
Rumors swirled that Minister of the Interior Alexander Protopopov was deliberately withholding food and provisions from the capital. Was Protopopov, as some suggested, starving the people in the hopes of provoking a revolution? And to what end? Did he want to use a rebellion to crack down on protests and the press, or did he envision it as an excuse to make a separate peace with Germany as the only way to restore order? Such was the lack of faith in the government that many believed this talk.(20)
For twenty-three years, Nicholas II had sat on the Imperial throne, presiding over a seemingly unending cascade of disappointments and disasters. From the trampling deaths of at least 1,500 during his coronation in 1896 to strings of political assassinations, from Russia's humiliating defeat in a war with Japan to a revolution in 1905 that left the country scarred by violence, his reign was marked with tragedy. He tried to follow his conscience, to act according to what he believed were Russia's best interests, but the inherent dichotomy of his character revealed a fatal flaw. Convinced since birth that he occupied a position ordained by God, he lacked the temperament necessary to preserve the autocracy. Half measures, reluctant concessions, and intractable opposition to reform characterized his time on the throne.
The government was in crisis, as the Emperor repeatedly appointed and then dismissed minister after minister in an infuriating parade of incompetence that paralyzed the country and exacerbated the woes of war. Some ten weeks earlier, Nicholas II had dismissed his third Prime Minister of the war, Alexander Trepov, replacing him with Prince Nicholas Golitsyn, an undistinguished reactionary so ill-prepared for the role that he had unsuccessfully begged the Emperor to cancel his appointment. No one knew what to expect from one day to the next; without a clear policy, the Russian government drifted toward an abyss.
Anger swelled, not only against Nicholas but also against his German-born wife Alexandra. More autocratic in nature than her autocratic husband, by 1917 Alexandra had alienated a wide swath of the Imperial Family, society, and ordinary Russians. Her devotion to the disreputable peasant Gregory Rasputin, murdered by aristocrats just eight weeks earlier in a desperate but misguided effort to save the tottering throne, remained unshakable despite years of voices warning against his pernicious influence. At cinemas people hissed if Alexandra appeared in newsreels; army censors found that the letters of ordinary soldiers were filled with sordid rumors about the Empress and her late Siberian peasant.(21) With the situation grim and military successes few and far between, people suspected that the Empress was actively conspiring with her cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II to destroy Russia, overthrow her husband, and follow in the footsteps of Catherine the Great by seizing the throne for herself.(22)
The situation in Petrograd, as British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan noted, was “every day becoming more threatening. Revolution was in the air, and the only moot point was whether it would come from above or from below....At a dinner at the Embassy a Russian friend of mine, who had occupied a high position in the Government, declared that it was a mere question whether both the Emperor and Empress or only the latter would be killed. On the other hand, a popular outbreak, provoked by the prevailing food shortage, might occur at any moment.”(23) Another British diplomat remembered: “I have never heard anyone say a good word about the Tsar or Empress, and their assassination is quite openly discussed. No one is shocked by it.”(24) Buchanan's daughter Meriel said that “evil was in the air,” while Maurice Paleologue recorded that, “in drawing rooms, shops, and cafes, people insisted that Alexandra was “about to ruin Russia and must be put away as a lunatic.”(25)
Nicholas II's cousin Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna the Younger was horrified to hear “people speaking of the Emperor and Empress with open animosity and contempt. The word ‘revolution’ was uttered more openly and more often; soon it could be heard everywhere. The war seemed to recede to the background. All attention was riveted on interior events.(26)
For several months, talk ran high of a potential coup d’etat to remove the Emperor. In mid-January, 1917, journalist Robert Wilton of The Times reported: “Chaos has poisoned all the lower branches of the administrations…I hear from all sides that there is a plot to get rid of the Emperor and Empress.”(27) “Quite openly,” recalled the American-born Princess Cantacuzene, “people said, ‘It is not enough to have killed Rasputin, it must be the Empress also, and all her party; and there should be a proper guardian for the Emperor, with a responsible government.”(28) “A palace revolution,” noted Meriel Buchanan, was “openly spoken of, and even in political drawing rooms the assassination of the Empress – and perhaps the Emperor – was mentioned as being the only way of saving Russia.”(29)
“The ominous word 'treason' ran like an electric current through all strata of society,” recalled General Vladimir Gurko.(30) Even at Stavka, the Army Headquarters based at Mogilev some 500 miles southwest of the capital, as Vladimir Voeikov, Commandant of the Imperial Palaces, recalled, there was a “far-reaching belief that something had to be broken, annihilated, changed.”(31) The dark clouds had already gathered on the horizon; the approaching storm only awaited a catalyst to inaugurate the deluge.
***
Comfort and ensconced privilege ruled the protected Imperial enclave of Tsarskoye Selo fifteen miles south of Petrograd. Crisply uniformed sentries from His Majesty's Own Cossack Konvoi Regiment clad in heavy scarlet coats, along with members of the Combined Infantry Regiment, patrolled against the lemon-yellow walls of the Alexander Palace. Russia shivered; here, elaborate porcelain-tiled stoves and fireplaces filled many rooms with so much heat that steam cloaked the windows. Russia starved; here, there was no shortage of food. General Nicholas Ruzsky, Commander of the Northwestern Front, recalled having to divert all of the best cuts of meat from troops and cities to satisfy the Imperial Family and their attendants; the remains went to the soldiers.(32)
This particular Wednesday, Nicholas II prepared to travel to army headquarters at Mogilev. Since 1915, the Emperor II had served as Supreme Commander, but most important strategic decisions were actually made by General Michael Alexeyev, his Chief-of-Staff. For several months, the high command had been discussing a new 1917 offensive along the Southwestern Front, but unexpected circumstances repeatedly delayed final decisions. First, in November 1916, Alexeyev had fallen seriously ill, and taken a leave of absence, retreating to the Crimea to recuperate. Then, after Rasputin's murder in the early morning hours of December 17/30, 1916, Nicholas had left headquarters, spending the following two months with his family at Tsarskoye Selo.
Four myths surrounding the Emperor's departure need to be exploded. Nicholas, it is said, had no intention of leaving for Stavka that day until Alexeyev returned prematurely from his leave, and supposedly sent a cable on either February 21 or February 22, urgently summoning the Emperor to headquarters. This, runs the second myth, came as a surprise to the Emperor. “I cannot really imagine what can have happened to make my presence at Headquarters so urgently necessary now,” he allegedly told Alexandra. “I shall have to go and see myself. I am determined to stay only a week at the utmost, for I must be here.”(33)
Revisionist historians, who portray Alexeyev as a prime mover in a conspiracy against the throne, have suggested that this telegram was part of a plot to lure Nicholas away from his capital. This, in turn, would allow the military high command to stage a coup d'etat and demand the Emperor's abdication as the only means to save the country from a civil war.
In fact, both assertions are false. It is true that Alexeyev returned to Stavka a week before his leave of absence ended, and at a time when he had not quite recovered, but there was nothing ominous in this. Alexeyev was a workaholic; the only complaints leveled against him were that he took on too much responsibility for one man; that he micromanaged military issues; and that he exhausted himself by refusing to delegate work to his subordinates.(34) He cut his leave short because there were pressing issues concerning Russia's military operations for 1917 that needed to be settled. Nothing could be decided without the Emperor's approval: hence, it was natural that Alexeyev, having sacrificed his complete recovery for the sake of planning the campaign, should want to discuss strategy with Nicholas II, whom he had not seen for three months.(35)
Nor was Nicholas II suddenly summoned to Stavka on February 21 or 22. General Vasili Gurko, who had stepped in as Temporary Chief-of-Staff in Alexeyev's absence, recalled that he met the Emperor in an audience on February 18 and informed him that the general planned to return to headquarters on February 20. Hearing this, the Emperor told Gurko that he himself would leave for Stavka on February 22.(36) His departure from Tsarskoye Selo was thus planned four days in advance. There seems to have been no last minute mysterious cable demanding his immediate presence. The allegation that Nicholas professed confusion over this request is a bit of third-hand gossip reported by Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, one of the Empress's ladies-in-waiting. As such, and in the face of Gurko's definitive account, it is best dismissed.
This timetable is borne out by numerous witnesses. Major-General Vladimir Voeikov, who was Palace Commandant, recalled that on February 19 the Imperial Family gathered in the Alexander Palace's Semi-Circular Hall to watch the cinema. After the showing, the Emperor pulled Voeikov aside and said, “I have decided to go to Headquarters on Wednesday.” Nicholas explained that Alexeyev needed to consult with him over some logistical concerns. Thinking that the situation in the capital was too unstable, Voeikov rang Minister of the Interior Alexander Protopopov. “The Sovereign has decided to go to Headquarters on Wednesday,” he told Protopopov. “What is your opinion? Is everything calm, and is this departure untimely?” Protopopov assured Voeikov that all was well: he said that he would give him further details when he came out to Tsarskoye Selo for his next audience with the Emperor on either Monday or Tuesday.(37)
In his memoirs, Michael Rodzianko, the Chairman of the State Duma – Russia's parliament – asserted that Nicholas II met with his Prime Minister Prince Nicholas Golitsyn on February 21. According to Rodzianko, the Prime Minister urged the Emperor to make concessions; surprisingly, Nicholas supposedly agreed, promising to appear at the Duma the following day and announce a change in government. But, Rodzianko recorded, a few hours after this meeting Nicholas changed his mind after receiving an urgent summons to Stavka.(38)
Rodzianko, a not entirely reliable narrator of events, may indeed have heard such a tale from Golitsyn, but if so the Prime Minister was clearly in error on numerous counts. Golitsyn met the Emperor on February 20, not February 21, and during the audience Nicholas informed his Prime Minister that he was leaving for headquarters on February 22.(39) He can thus scarcely have promised to appear in Petrograd when he knew he would be on a train traveling away from the capital. But the tale falls apart with the claim that the Emperor suddenly decided to announce significant reforms. He would spend the next week steadfastly rejecting such pleas, only to finally concede in the last hours of his reign, and then only when his throne was under threat.
It was not until the evening of Tuesday, February 21, that Protopopov reported in person to the Emperor. A third myth surrounds this meeting. Protopopov later claimed that he had begged Nicholas not to leave the capital. “The time is such, Sire,” the minister supposedly warned, “that you are wanted both here and there....I very much fear the consequences.” The Emperor, according to Protopopov, seemed unusually agitated but he assured the minister that he would return as soon as possible.(40)
But this was a bit of retrospective justification. In fact, as Voeikov recalled, the Minister of the Interior had – as he told the Palace Commandant – informed the Emperor that there was no reason for him not to travel to Stavka. “Everything,” Protopopov insisted, “was quite in order,” and he was not the least bit concerned over unrest in Petrograd.(41) And to another courtier, Protopopov complained of those “trying to persuade His Majesty not to leave for Headquarters, saying that there will be some sort of disorder here. And I tell you he can go.”(42)
And so, Nicholas II prepared to travel to Stavka that Wednesday as he had previously planned. The Imperial Family gathered one last time: Empress Alexandra: twelve-year-old Alexei, the Emperor’s hemophiliac son and heir; and the four young daughters Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasia. Their goodbyes were private: princes and princesses did not display emotion in public. Beyond the Emperor's Moorish-style bathroom, with its colorful tiles and sunken tub, valets were busy, retrieving the uniforms that would be necessary at Stavka from ash cabinets in the wardrobe room. They smoothed tunics and trousers into cases, placed military caps into fitted boxes, and arranged the awards and medals the Emperor would display on his tunics into velvet-lined compartments. It was a seamless ritual, enacted time and time again over the last eighteen months.
One of the Emperor's beloved motorcars – he favored French Delaunay-Bellevilles and German Mercedes limousines and landaus – carried the Emperor and his wife away from his palace; sentries saluted as the car swept out of the gates and shouted, “We wish Your Majesty good health!” as he passed. The driver, clad in a khaki-colored coat and matching hat, maneuvered over the snowy roadway, past the ornamental lake whose edges were now clotted with ice. It was, the Emperor noted in his diary, “sunny and frosty” that afternoon. They stopped at the nearby Our Lady of Znamenka Church, built by Empress Elizabeth to house the Miraculous Apparition of Our Lady icon. Passing beneath the slender spire, Nicholas and Alexandra walked to a small chapel on the church's right side reserved for members of the Imperial Family. Here, amid red scagliola walls and luminous icons reflected in the glow of candlelight, they prayed together before driving to the ornate private railway station at Tsarskoye Selo.
A war might be taking place, but Imperial protocol still demanded elaborate ceremonial: officers saluted as Nicholas strode down the crimson carpet toward his train, past a tightly drawn up guard-of-honor flashing polished sabers as a nearby regimental band played God Save the Tsar. Gold-braided courtiers bowed as the Emperor climbed aboard the Imperial train: its ten cars, painted a deep royal blue, were emblazoned with Romanov double-headed eagles in gilded bronze. A second, identical train idled behind the first: fear of potential terrorist attacks means that two trains always set out on journeys, to confuse any would-be revolutionaries.(43) There were no delays: in a few minutes, lights blazed, steam rose from the tracks, and smoke curled from the locomotives as the trains pulled out of the station. The train was carrying the Emperor toward his date with destiny.
Prologue Notes
1. Paleologue, 3:137.
2. Lockhart, 160.
3. Paleologue, 3:133.
4. Ibid., 95.
5. Pipes, 272.
6. Almedingen, I Remember St. Petersburg, 187.
7. Hanbury-Williams, 53.
8. Cited, Lieven, Nicholas II, 221.
9. Nicholas II to Alexandra Feodorovna, September 20, 1916, in GARF, F. 640, Op. 1, D. 106.
10. Protopopov, in Shchegolev, 1:77-78.
11. Globachev and Globacheva, 118.
12. Hasegawa, 200.
13. Ibid., 84.
14. The Times, January 29, 1917.
15. Hasegawa, 199; Khabalov, in Shchegolev, 1:184.
16. The Times, January 29, 1917.
17. Lockhart, 160.
18. Jones, 69.
19. Paleologue, 3:213.
20. Francis, 34; Melgunov, Martovskie dni, 143-44.
21. Wilton, Russia's Agony, 38; Knox, 2:515.
22. Figes and Kolonitskii, 14-16.
23. Buchanan, Mission, 2:41.
24. Francis Lindley to Foreign Office, January 15, 1917, in McKee, 283.
25. Buchanan, Dissolution, 145-46; Paleologue, 3:129.
26. Marie Pavlovna, 248-49.
27. The History of the Times, 4:244.
28. Cantacuzene, Revolutionary Days, 117.
29. Buchanan, Petrograd, 77.
30. Gurko, Features and Figures, 549-50.
31. Voeikov, 185.
32. Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, Diary entry of June 14, 1917, in GARF, F. 650, Op. 1, D 2.
33. Buxhoeveden, Life, 246.
34. Knox, 322; Gurko, War and Revolution, 10-11.
35. Katkov, 260-61, 330; Basily, 111; Oldenburg, 4: 120.
36. Gurko, War and Revolution, 313-14.
37. Voeikov, 267-69; Spiridovich, 3:56-57.
38. Rodzianko, 262-63.
39. Spiridovich, 3:57.
40. Pares, Fall, 437-38.
41. Voeikov, 269.
42. Spiridovich, 3:57-58.
43. Pares, Fall, 459. 41; Spiridovich, 3:58.