The Council of Ministers, in a unique act of loyal criticism, pleaded with the Tsar to change his mind. ‘The decision you have taken’, it warned, ‘threatens Russia, You, and Your dynasty with the gravest consequences.’ But Nicholas would not be dissuaded. No doubt the influence of his wife, who had put him up to this coup de main, helped to strengthen his resolve. He may well have seen the move as his last chance to silence the growing public criticism of the war campaign, and the urgent sense that his own throne was threatened drove him on to take what was a huge risk. Coinciding as it did with his decision to close down the Duma, which had been in session since July, it signalled a new resolve on his part to reassert his personal rule. Perhaps he still harboured fantasies that his ‘mystical union’ with ‘the people’ would save the country from catastrophe. Krivoshein, for one, thought that the Tsar’s decision was ‘fully in tune with his spiritual frame of mind and his mystical understanding of his imperial calling’.29 The support he received from the Tsarina and Rasputin, who encouraged his dreams of personal rule, was in line with this, although their real concern was no doubt in part to get him out of their way. With the Tsar absent at the Front, power in the capital would pass to them.
ii The Mad Chauffeur
The war found Prince Lvov at the head of the Zemstvo Union. As in the war against Japan, the needs of the Front had sparked a patriotic movement of public organization. Civic committees and clubs volunteered helpers to pack up supplies of linen, food and medicine in their hours after work, while hundreds of young women enrolled as nurses and coped as best they could with the legions of wounded and dying. The Tsarina turned part of the Winter Palace into a surgical bandage factory, and the best society ladies turned up in droves to roll up their sleeves and work. Brusilov’s wife, Nadezhda, volunteered for the Russian Red Cross in the Ukraine. ‘I work day and night’, she wrote to him in August 1914, ‘and thank God for that, since it keeps me from thinking and makes me feel I am of use.’ Kerensky’s wife, Olga, who worked in a Belgian hospital, looked back on this as ‘one of the happiest periods of my life’.
When I bent down to wash the soldiers’ dirty feet, or cleaned and dressed their nasty-smelling and decaying wounds, I experienced an almost religious ecstasy. I bowed before all these soldiers, who had given their lives for Russia. I have never felt such ecstasy.30
Here at last, for these idle bourgeois ladies, was a chance to ‘serve the people’ and thus to redeem their own guilt.
Lvov’s Zemstvo Union, established with its sister organization the Union of Towns during the first few weeks of the war, took the lead in most of these activities. It virtually ran the military supply campaign in the absence of any effective governmental grasp of logistics. Russia’s war effort, but for Lvov’s efforts, would have quickly collapsed altogether. To begin with the Union was supported by the gifts of money and property that poured in from the public. One landowner donated his whole estate, a fertile expanse of 10,000 acres. Peasants delivered cartloads of cabbages, potatoes and homespun linen to its depots in the rear. But it soon became clear that the government itself would have to provide most of the finance, as the failings of its own bureaucracy became apparent and it came to rely on the Union. Increasingly its volunteers took the lead in setting up field canteens and medical units at the Front, evacuating the wounded and giving them hospital care, purchasing military supplies, combating disease, helping refugees and providing support for the poverty-stricken soldiers’ families. By 1916 it had grown into a huge national infrastructure, a state within a state, with 8,000 affiliated institutions, several hundred thousand employees (the so-called zemgussars) and a budget of two billion roubles. Lvov, at the head of this unofficial government, worked tirelessly from eight in the morning to two or three at night. The queue outside his office stretched into the Moscow streets. As one minister grudgingly acknowledged in the autumn of 1915, he was ‘virtually becoming the chairman of a special government. At the Front they talk only of him and say that he has saved the country. He supplies the army, feeds the hungry, cures the sick, establishes barber shops for the soldiers — in a word, he is some kind of a ubiquitous Miur and Mereliz.fn1 One must either end all this or hand over power to him.’31
