Russia’s urban inhabitants first suffered the effects of inflation and food shortages in the fall of 1915. These shortages grew worse in 1916 and came to a head in the fall of that year. Everyone was affected: the industrial and white-collar workers and, in time, the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and even police employees. Although it is impossible to determine the matter with mathematical precision, contemporary sources agree that during 1916 the rise in prices exceeded wages by a wide margin. The workers themselves believed that while their earnings had doubled, prices had quadrupled. In October 1916, the Police Department estimated that in the preceding two years wages had risen on the average 100 percent while prices of essential goods had gone up 300 percent.15 Inflation meant that many town residents could not afford to buy even those commodities that were available. And they became less and less available as the war went on, largely because of the deterioration of transport. Russia’s principal food-growing areas as well as deposits of fossil fuels (coal and petroleum) were in the southern, southeastern, and eastern regions, at some distance from the urban and industrial areas of the north. Before the war it had been more economical to bring coal to St. Petersburg from England than from the Donets Basin. When the sea lanes to England through the Baltic were closed to Allied shipping on the outbreak of the war, the Russian capital immediately experienced fuel shortages. The supply of food was affected by two additional factors: the unwillingness of peasants to sell and the shortage of farmhands to cultivate the private estates, in peacetime a major supplier of grain to the market. By 1916, while the grain-growing regions drowned in food, the northern cities suffered shortages: here as early as February 1916 it was common to see “long queues of poor people waiting for hours in the cold for their turn at the bread-shops.”16
Alexander Khvostov, who would soon be appointed Minister of the Interior, warned already in October 1915 of looming shortages of fuel and food in the central and northwestern regions. Petrograd, in his judgment, was especially vulnerable: instead of the 405 railway cars needed daily to meet the capital city’s needs, that month it received on the average only 116.17 During 1916, the transport situation grew worse still from breakdowns of equipment caused by overuse and inadequate maintenance. Rolling stock ordered in the United States piled up at Archangel and Vladivostok for lack of facilities to move it inland.
People grumbled, but they did not, as yet, revolt: Russians patiently bore deprivations. The government’s threat to induct troublemakers into the armed forces also had a sobering effect.
The recovery of the army in 1916 surprised everyone, including Russia’s allies, who had more or less written it off. This was in good measure due to the ability of Polivanov and his associates to secure the cooperation of the Duma and the business community. The military command was now staffed with able officers who had profited from the lessons of the 1914 and 1915 campaigns. The flow of war supplies from the West which had gotten underway in mid-1915 made a great difference: in the winter of 1915–16, Russia’s allies sent her over 1 million rifles, a quantity equal to the annual output of the home industries.18 Adequate supplies of artillery shells were also assured. After Polivanov had taken over the Ministry of War, Russia began to place orders for artillery shells abroad: in 1915–16, she obtained from the West over 9 million 76mm shells as well as 1.7 million medium-caliber shells: this compared with 28.5 million and 5.1 million such shells produced at home. Of the 26,000 machine guns delivered to the armed forces in 1915–16, nearly 11,000 came from abroad, mainly the United States.19
In early 1916, the Allies prepared for the Somme offensive, scheduled to begin on June 25. It was agreed with the Russian General Staff that ten days prior to its opening—that is, on June 2/15—the Russians would attack Galicia: this operation, it was hoped, would finish off the Austrians. The command of the four armies assigned to the operation was entrusted to General Aleksei Brusilov:
The preparations ordered by Brusilov’s staff were thorough beyond anything hitherto seen on the Eastern Front. The front-trenches were sapped forward, in places to within fifty paces of the enemy lines—at that, on more or less the entire front. Huge dug-outs for reserve-troops were constructed, often with earth ramparts high enough to prevent enemy gunners from seeing what was going on in the Russian rear. Accurate models of the Austrian trenches were made, and troops trained with them; aerial photography came into its own, and the position of each Austrian battery noted …20
