The Russian Revolution полностью

The measures produced the desired effect. The arrest of the Workers’ Group and the stern warnings of Khabalov caused the February 14 pro-Duma demonstration to be called off. Even so, 90,000 workers in Petrograd struck that day and marched peacefully through the center of the city.¹⁵³

In the meantime, the administration of the country was grinding to a halt. The Council of Ministers virtually ceased to function, as members absented themselves under one pretext or another, and even Protopopov failed to attend.¹⁵⁴ At this, the monarchy’s most dangerous moment, the Department of Police was decapitated: General P. G. Kurlov, a personal friend of Protopopov’s, whom the minister had invited to assume the post of director, met with strenuous opposition from the Duma, and after serving as acting director for a short time, retired without being replaced.¹⁵⁵ The chief of the Special Department (Osobyi Otdel) of the Police Department, charged with counterintelligence, I. P. Vasilev, later wrote that under Protopopov his office received no specific assignment.¹⁵⁶ The opposition was flouting government prohibitions on meetings and assemblies. Military censorship broke down in January 1917, as editors of newspapers and periodicals no longer bothered to submit advance copy to the Censor’s office.¹⁵⁷

None of this much troubled Protopopov, who was in regular communication with the spirit of Rasputin.¹⁵⁸

*Rudolf Claus, Die Kriegswirtschaft Russlands (Bonn-Leipzig, 1922), 15. A. L. Sidorov, Finansovoe polozhenie Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–1917 gg. (Moscow, 1960), 147, gives the higher figure.

†Claus, Die Kriegswirtschaft, 156–57. The London currency market registered a similar decline: Emil Diesen, Exchange Rates of the World, I (Christiania, n.d.), 144.

*Sidorov, Finansovoe polozhenie, 147. Of the sum for the first half of 1914, 1,633 million rubles was in paper currency, the remainder in coinage.

*Bernard Pares, ed., Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–16 (London, 1923), 114. “The old man” refers to Goremykin.

*Pares, Letters, xxxiii. After his dismissal, Polivanov was appointed to the State Council. In 1918–19, he helped Trotsky organize the Red Army. He died in 1920 while serving as adviser to the Soviet delegation at the Polish peace talks in Riga.

*Protopopov was initially made acting minister; he was promoted to minister in mid-December, following the assassination of Rasputin: V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–1917) (Leningrad, 1967), 265.

*A. I. Shingarev was a prominent Kadet and expert on agrarian problems. He served as Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government and was murdered in early 1918 by pro-Bolshevik sailors.

*Because they were suspected of German sympathies, numerous Jews living near the combat zone—estimates run as high as 250,000—were forced in 1915 to move into the interior of the country.

*E. D. Chermenskii, IV Gosudarstvennaia Duma i sverzhenie tsarizma v Rossii (Moscow, 1976), 204–6; Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 241. On the unpopularity of Stürmer due to his German name: IA, No. 1 (1960), 207. If not for that they would have targeted Protopopov, making an issue of his talks with a German representative in Stockholm.

*According to the French Ambassador, this was done at Stunner’s request: Maurice Paléo-logue, La Russie des Tsars pendant la Grande Guerre, III (Paris, 1922), 86–87.

*Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 251. The most vociferous of the hecklers, Kerensky and Chkheidze among them, were suspended by Rodzianko for fifteen days.

*Archive of S. E. Kryzhanovskii, Box 5, File “Rasputin,” Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Vyrubova dismisses gossip of his alleged sexual excesses, saying that he was entirely unlovable and that she knew of no woman who had had an affair with him: Anna Viroubova, Souvenirs de ma vie (Paris, 1927), 115.

*There exist two eyewitness accounts of Rasputin’s murder. Purishkevich wrote down his recollections in diary form two days after the event, which he published in southern Russia in 1918; this version was reprinted in Moscow in 1923 as Ubiistvo Rasputina. Iusupov’s memoirs, Konets Rasputina, came out in Paris four years later. Of secondary accounts, the most informative is that by A. S. Spiridovich (Raspoutine, Paris, 1935): the author, a general in the Corps of Gendarmes, was Commandant of the Guard at the Imperial residence in Tsarskoe Selo.