I received hundreds of telegrams congratulating and blessing me from every class of Russian society. Everyone would have his say; peasants, mechanics, aristocrats, the clergy, the intelligentsia, and the children in the schools, all wanted to let me know that the great heart of the country was beating in sympathy with the well-loved soldiers of my victorious armies.
Brusilov had shown that under competent commanders the imperial army was still capable of military success. Had it not been undermined by Stavka, his offensive might have served as the springboard for the restoration of the army’s morale — perhaps even one day leading towards its eventual victory. But it is doubtful whether even this would have been enough to save the tsarist regime, such was the extent of the political crisis in the country at large. In any case, with the failure of the offensive it now became clearer than ever, even to a monarchist like Brusilov, that, in his own words, ‘Russia could not win the war with its present system of government.’51 Victory would not stop the revolution; but only a revolution could help bring about victory.
For Brusilov the final damning proof of the old regime’s incompetence had come at the start of July, when Alexeev transferred the élite Imperial Guards to his Front in a last desperate bid to save the offensive. These young blue-bloods were described by Knox as ‘physically the finest human animals in Europe’. In their dark-green parade uniforms, trimmed with golden braid, each guard stood over six feet tall. But they came with a gormless commander, General Bezobrazov, another favourite of the court, who disobeyed Brusilov’s orders and sent them into attack through an exposed swamp. As the warriors waded chest-high through the mud, the German planes flew overhead, raking them with their machine-guns. Knox watched in horror as the planes swooped down to hit their targets and ‘the wounded sank slowly into the marsh’.52 In one stupid action the core of the country’s finest fighting force had been lost, and with it the final chance of victory under the old regime.
*
Brusilov’s impatience with the government was increasingly shared by the rest of society as 1916, the third long year of the war, dragged on. Patriotic nobles like Brusilov and Lvov had hoped that a successful war campaign would bring the government and society together and thus forestall the need for radical reforms. They now realized that the opposite was true: radical reforms were a necessary precondition for military success. The growing shortages of food, fuel and basic household goods, the rapid inflation of prices, the breakdown of transport, the widespread corruption of the government and its military suppliers, and the steep increase in crime and social disorder — all these combined with the endless slaughter of the war to create a growing sense of public panic and hysteria. ‘More and more’, Gorky wrote to a friend in November 1915, ‘people are behaving like animals and madmen. They spread stupid rumours and this creates an atmosphere of universal fear which poisons even the intelligent.’ Among the propertied classes there was a general feeling that Russia was on the brink of a terrible catastrophe, a violent social explosion, against which the government was totally unprepared to defend them. People spoke of the Tsar and his government with open contempt. The word ‘revolution’ was on everybody’s lips. ‘A deluge is approaching,’ Guchkov wrote to Alexeev in August 1916, ‘and a pitiful, wretched and flabby Government is preparing to face that cataclysm by taking measures only good enough to protect oneself from a shower. It puts on galoshes and opens an umbrella!’53
Sensing the coming disaster, the rich and the high-born lost themselves in a last desperate binge of personal pleasure. They drank their stocks of champagne, spent huge sums of money on black-market caviar, sturgeon and other peacetime delicacies, threw lavish parties, deceived their wives and husbands and gambled away fortunes in casinos. Foreigners were shocked by their luxurious lifestyles and, even more so, by the indiscretion with which they flaunted their enjoyment. ‘Their wealth and the lavish use they made of it dazzled me after the austere conditions of wartime life in England,’ wrote Sir Samuel Hoare, the British intelligence officer in Petrograd. This hysterical hedonism was best expressed in some anonymous satirical verses of early 1916:
We do not take defeat amiss,
And victory gives us no delight
The source of all our cares is this:
Can we get vodka for tonight.
The victories we can do without.
No! Peace and quiet is our line,
Intrigues and scandal, evenings out
Trimmed up with women and with wine.
We only want to know, next day
What Ministers will be on view,
Or who takes who to see the play,
Or who at Cuba’s sat next who: …
And does Rasputin still prevail
Or do we need another saint,
And is Kshesinskaya quite well,
And how the feast at Shubin’s went:
