The Petrograd garrison was not the only unreliable part of the army. In many units on the Northern and Western Fronts, and even more so in the army garrisons in the rear, the discipline of the troops was rapidly breaking down. Soldiers were increasingly refusing to take up attacking positions, fraternizing with the enemy, and rejecting the authority of their officers, whom, as peasants eager to return to their farms, they now saw more clearly than ever as their old class enemies, the landowners, in uniform. Only on the South-Western Front, a thousand miles from the revolutionary capital, were there whole army units upon which the tsarist regime could readily rely. But even there Brusilov, the Front commander, regularly received unsigned letters from his men warning him ‘that they did not want any more fighting, and that if peace was not concluded shortly, I should be killed’.84
As they entered the third and by far the coldest winter of the war, the morale of the soldiers took a sudden turn for the worse. It was no longer a crisis of supplies: if anything, the supply of clothes and munitions had improved since the previous year, thanks to the increase of domestic production and orders from abroad, although the food situation remained as grim as ever. It was now more a crisis of authority, of utter despair and exhaustion: the soldiers could see no end to the slaughter while the present regime remained in command. As one soldier wrote to his wife in November 1916:
Everyone pretends that the war will end soon, that the longed-for peace will arrive, but that is only to keep their spirits up. People are so worn out and destroyed, they have suffered so much, that it’s all they can do to stop their hearts from breaking and to keep themselves from losing their mind … Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t understand the mood of the men and it only seems to me like this because I myself am exhausted and have come to realise in the past few days that I may lose my own mind in all this chaos … Liulya, I have written all this to you so that you may understand what sort of a man you love.85
Part Three
RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION (FEBRUARY 1917–MARCH 1918)
8 Glorious February
*
i The Power of the Streets
It all began with bread. For several weeks the bakeries in Petrograd had been running out, especially in the workers’ districts, and long bread queues were beginning to appear. The problem was not shortage of supplies. According to Balk, the city’s governor, there was enough flour in the warehouses to feed the population for at least a week when what had started as a series of bread riots turned into a revolution. True, the shops were not full. This was the end of the war’s third winter and there was a general feeling of austerity. Buns, pies, cakes and biscuits were no longer baked. ‘The shops are not carrying such a full line of articles and provisions,’ an Englishman wrote home on 13 February. ‘Restaurants no longer have the big fine pastries, owing to the scarcity of sugar.’ This, moreover, was the coldest winter Russia had experienced for several years. In Petrograd the average February temperature was fifteen degrees below zero. ‘It’s as cold here as in Lapland,’ Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on the 4th. Arctic frosts and blizzards had brought the railways to a virtual standstill. Factories closed. Thousands of laid-off workers milled around the streets.1
It was this that turned the supply problem into a crisis. Because of the breakdown of the transport system, Petrograd was starved of regular supplies of flour and fuel. For want of the one or the other, bakeries were frequently forced to close. Women would queue all night for a loaf of bread, only to be told in the early hours of the morning that there would be none for sale that day. This constant interruption to the bread supply naturally gave rise to rumours in the queues. People said that ‘speculators’ and ‘capitalists’ — which in the xenophobic wartime atmosphere usually meant German or Jewish merchants — were deliberately forcing up the bread prices by withholding stocks. Many people blamed the government (wasn’t it also full of Germans?). Even educated liberals were inclined to see the shortages as the evil doing of a treasonable government. On 19 February the Petrograd authorities announced that rationing would start from 1 March. Rumours spread that there would soon be no bread stocks at all and the unemployed would be left to starve. In the panic buying that followed the shelves were laid bare, scuffles broke out, and several bakeries had their windows smashed.2
