The Council of Ministers, considerably weakened after the death of Stolypin by the absence of strong chairmen, now reverted to its pre-1905 prototype—that is, an assemblage of individuals who no longer acted as a body. It met less and less frequently since it had less and less to do.28
The disorganization of the administrative machinery was not confined to the ministries. It now became practice also to shuffle governors, the main representatives of state authority in the provinces. In 1914, twelve new governors had been appointed. In 1915, the number of new appointees rose to thirty-three. In the first nine months of 1916 alone, forty-three gubernatorial appointments were made, which meant that in less than one year most of Russia’s provinces received a new head.29
The situation brought to mind the witticism of the Minister of Justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, who in 1915 had spoken of “the paralytics in the government … struggling feebly, indecisively, as if unwillingly, with the epileptics of the revolution.”30
The scent of revolution, indeed, hung in the air. It took two forms: resentment of the government for its failure to deal with economic difficulties, and something new, animosity of the urban population toward the peasantry. The war produced tension between town and country which Russia had not experienced before. The city accused the village of hoarding and profiteering: Knox warned as early as June 1916 that the “town population may give trouble in the winter.”31
During the summer and fall of 1916, the Police Department was in receipt from its provincial branches of a steady flow of disturbing reports. They stated with near-unanimity that in the cities of the Empire inflation and shortages gave rise to dissatisfaction and wild rumors. Industrial workers, after long hours in the factory, went shopping only to find the shelves bare. The strikes which occurred with growing frequency at this time were mostly one-day stoppages to enable workers to buy provisions. The department denied any political motives behind the economic unrest: it felt confident that it was spontaneous in origin and that the professional revolutionaries, most of whom were in prison, Siberian exile, or abroad, had no influence on the masses. But it warned that the economic unrest could easily assume political forms. A police report to the Ministry of the Interior in October 1916 summarized the situation as follows:
It is essential to concede as an unqualified and incontrovertible fact that at present the internal structure of Russia’s political life confronts the very strong threat of the relentless approach of great turbulence brought about and explainable exclusively by economic factors: hunger, the unequal distribution of food and articles of prime necessity, and the monstrous rise in prices. For the broadest strata of the population of the vast empire, the problem of food is the one dreadful inspiring impulse that drives the masses toward gradual affiliation with the growing movement of discontent and hostility. There exist in this case concrete and precise data that make it possible to assert categorically that until now this entire movement has had a purely economic basis, virtually free of any affiliation with strictly political programs. But this movement needs only to take a concrete form and find expression in some specific act (a pogrom, a large-scale strike, a major clash between the lower strata of the population and the police, etc.) to assume at once, absolutely, a purely political aspect.32
In the fall of 1916, the chief of the Petrograd Corps of Gendarmes reported:
The exceptional seriousness of the period which the country is living through and the countless catastrophic disasters with which the possible imminent rebellious actions of the lower classes of the Empire, angered by the difficulties of daily existence, can threaten the entire vital structures of the state, urgently demand, in the opinion of loyal elements, the extreme necessity of speedy and comprehensive measures to remove the existing disorder and to relieve the excessively laden atmosphere of social dissaffection. As recent experience has shown, under existing conditions, halfway decisions and some palliative, accidental measures are entirely inappropriate …33
Especially disturbing to the security organs were indications that popular discontent was beginning to focus on the monarchy. The police chief of Petrograd reported toward the end of September 1916 that in the capital opposition sentiment among the masses had attained a level of intensity not seen since 1905–6. Another high-ranking police official noted that for the first time in his experience, popular anger directed itself not only against the ministers but against the Tsar himself.34
