The bourgeoisie went no further than a “revolt on their knees.” However, a distinct change in the situation took place in the second half of 1916, when the contradictions caused and accentuated by the war began to make themselves fully felt.
The blows of the war were particularly destructive to Russia. First of all, the country was inadequately prepared for a world war. The low technical development of Russia’s munitions industry had made its influence felt in all recent wars. In the Crimean War of 1854, Nicholas I put up against the Anglo-French coalition an army which was largely armed with flintlocks. Only ten cartridges a year per soldier were allowed for firing practice, and even these were issued only nominally. The fortifications of Sevastopol crumbled from the mere concussion of the guns mounted on them. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, the generals, acting in the belief that “firearms are for self-defence and cold steel for self-sacrifice,” supplied a long-range rifle sighted for only six hundred paces. The generals justified their inefficiency by the old proverb: “A bullet is a fool, a bayonet a smart lad.” The Russian troops suffered heavily from the Turkish fire, while the Russian fire occasioned little damage to the Turks. The same was true of the artillery. Even as late as the ‘seventies the arsenals supplied the artillery with brass cannon of a small charge and a low muzzle velocity. The Turkish army was equipped with steel guns manufactured by Krupp. Confronted by an army of a far from modern country but trained and armed by modern countries, the Russia of Alexander II, like the Russia of Nicholas I, revealed the utter rottenness of her military might and of her social and economic system.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 completely exposed the sham of Russia’s military might. Whereas in the Crimean War the Anglo-French coalition had required a year to capture the fortress of Sevastopol, little Japan captured Port Arthur, which was equal in strength to six Sevastopols, in eight months.
“A whited sepulchre—that is what the autocracy has proved to be in the sphere of military defence.”(1)
Lenin wrote in January 1905.
Tsarist Russia was again unprepared when she entered the World War. The “far-sighted” heads of the War Department believed that the war would last not more than five or six months. The Minister of War and the Director of the Ordnance Department, General Kuzmin-Karavayev, were of the opinion that after military supplies had been fully assembled and dispatched to the army “a certain lull in the work would supervene.”(2) Supplies sufficed for only the first four months of war. The Russian army soon found itself without shells, rifles and cartridges, and with no hope of receiving any in the near future. There were not enough rifles for the training of new recruits. Reinforcements were dispatched to the front unarmed.
A short-sighted policy was not the only reason for this. The war could not be run on “stocks”; it required a steadily growing munitions industry. But the old tsarist bureaucrats, scared of any increase of power of the bourgeoisie, were loath to enlist industry in supplying the army. In the six years General Sukhomlinov had occupied the post of War Minister (1909-15), he had learnt nothing of military affairs. On the other hand, he had surrounded himself by a regular network of spies of the German General Staff. During five years of preparation for war and one year of actual war, the treachery that lay concealed in the very heart of the army remained undiscovered. Headed by such a Minister, the War Department could only contribute to the general disintegration. Sukhomlinov was nicknamed “General Defeat.”
Only in the summer of 1915, when the poorly-equipped army retreated in disorder from the front, did the autocracy decide to mobilise industry. A law was passed on August 17, 1915, setting up Special Councils for defence, transport, fuel and food. At the first inaugural session of the Councils held on August 22, Nicholas II, inviting the representatives of the bourgeoisie to take part in the work of supplying the army, said:
“This task is henceforward entrusted to you, gentlemen.”(3)
The Councils were headed by Ministers and were endowed with wide powers. The Defence Council was placed under the direct charge of the tsar.
“No government department or person could give it orders or demand account to it.”(4)
The Council was empowered:
“To sanction the production of war supplies in every possible way... and to any value.”(5)
But wide powers were not enough for the organisation of the munitions industry. According to General Manikovsky, Director of the Ordnance Department in 1915:
“the work of supplying our army with munitions nevertheless did not advance at the rate anticipated at the time of its (i.e., the Council’s—Ed.) inception, but, on the contrary, in many respects even deteriorated.”(6)
Despite the fact that Prince Shakhovskoi, Minister of Commerce and Industry, and two of his predecessors were made members of the Defence Council, this “regulating” body displayed its complete ignorance of the munitions industry and of the way it should be mobilised. The representatives of the big bourgeoisie on the Council used their position to secure large orders and to engage in “organised profiteering.”
“Three inch shrapnel was the choice titbit over which all the jackals licked their chops,”(7)
wrote General Manikovsky.
Equally sterile were the activities of the other Councils: the Fuel Council, the Food Council and the Transport Council. The representatives of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy on these bodies “assisted” the defence of the country by accusing each other of shady practices and by zealously taking bribes. The efforts to regulate production and consumption were obstructed by the rotten bureaucratic machine and its inefficient chiefs. In November 1915, A. F. Trepov, Minister of Ways of Communication, decided to make an effort to avert the impending famine by regulating railway traffic. A decision of the Ministerial Council suspended railway passenger traffic between Moscow and Petrograd for six days with the object of improving the supply of goods to the capital. But nobody took the trouble to organise the bringing of supplies to Moscow, with the result that, having suspended passenger traffic, the government kept rushing empty freight cars from Moscow to Petrograd. The attempt to organise the supply of the factories with fuel and raw materials met with no better success. The output of coal and oil was declining, and the dislocated transport system was unable to carry sufficient supplies of wood fuel. At the beginning of 1915 the munitions industry was already suffering from an acute fuel shortage. In October 1915 the Special Fuel Council decided to requisition fuel stocks. This decision was vigorously resisted by the bourgeoisie. Incidentally, on the Council itself it was adopted by only fourteen votes to ten. In the region of the North-Western Front attempts were made to requisition fuel with the aid of the military authorities. In response to this action the Council of Congresses of the Timber Industry threatened to stop lumbering operations.
While the bourgeoisie was sabotaging every measure to regulate production and consumption, and especially the measures to regulate incomes, Nicholas’s Ministers were looking for scapegoats, each department blaming the others for the economic dislocation. The shortcomings in the supply of coal, iron, and food to the army were discussed at a meeting of the Ministerial Council in June 1916, Stürmer, who was at that time Chairman of the Ministerial Council, testifies that at this meeting an altercation arose between Trepov, Minister of ways of Communication, and Shakhovskoi, Minister of Industry.
“Stocks of coal at the factories are inadequate,” the Minister of Ways of Communication declared.
Coal was in charge of Shakhovskoi.
“Yes, I have the coal, but you are not giving us railway cars,” Shakhovskoi retorted.
“I am not giving you cars because the Ministry of War has taken all my cars . . . and is not returning any.”
And the Chairman of the Ministerial Council himself comments on this altercation:
“The railways were so jammed with cars that in order to forward cars newly arrived, others had to be tipped over the embankment.”(8)
The Ministers wandered through their departments like blind men, without the slightest conception of what was going on around them and of what must be done to cope with the general dislocation.
It was even more difficult to mobilise the backward agriculture and the agricultural population of the country to the extent that the advanced capitalist countries were able to do. Russian agriculture was semi-feudal in character and in general run on a small scale. It was largely need that drove the peasants to sell any of their produce. The muzhik required money to pay for land rented from the landlord. Money was also squeezed out of the muzhik by extortionate taxation. The marketable surplus of peasant agriculture sharply declined during the war. All able-bodied peasants were recruited for the army. Sixteen million men, or 47 per cent of the adult male population of town and country, were drafted into the army. Bublikov, a bourgeois leader, declared that Russia was mainly fighting the war with the blood of its sons, and not with capital accumulated, or otherwise procured, for purposes of war. Agriculture lost a large part of its means of production with every year of the war. The government requisitioned horses, animals for slaughtering, and harness. The zealous officials managed to requisition supplies in such a way as to bring very little benefit to the army. The Governor of Orel reported at the beginning of 1916 that the government agents were requisitioning milch cows, while fat heifers were being used for profiteering purposes.
“They requisitioned whatever could be requisitioned most easily,” declared V. Mikhailovsky at a conference on the high cost of living. “Supplies which were skilfully concealed and which belonged to the economically more powerful circles were, apparently, not requisitioned at all.”(9)
The general disruption also manifested itself in the collapse of the economic foundation of the tsarist régime—the semi-feudal system of land ownership. There was a decline in the amount of land rented to the peasants— which was the most outspoken form of this system. At the very beginning of the war rents already dropped by about one-third.
Farming on the landed estates also declined. It suffered from the constant mobilisations for the army which deprived it of labour power. The employment of refugees and prisoners-of-war compensated for not more than one-tenth of the labour power lost as a result of mobilisation. In European Russia there was a shortage of agricultural labourers in 1914 in fourteen of the forty-four provinces, i.e., in 32 per cent of the provinces of European Russia, and in 1915 in thirty-six provinces, or 82 per cent, while in 1916 there was an acute shortage of labour power in all the forty-four provinces of European Russia. Before the war wages paid in the districts from which it was customary for members of peasant households to migrate in search of work were considerably lower than wages paid in the districts to which labour power flowed, but by 1915 they had almost reached the same level, which was indicative of a shortage of agricultural labour, even in the districts from which peasants formerly used to migrate in search of employment. The shortage of labour power resulting from the general economic dislocation accelerated the decline of the semi-feudal system of land ownership which was even more rapid than the general decline of agriculture.
But it was not only the semi-feudal system of land ownership that suffered from the dislocation; the war also affected industry.
Capitalist economy on a war-time basis presented a very complex picture. The destructive influence of the war was for a time concealed by a deceptive boom. The war resulted in an expansion of the industries producing military supplies, and this created an illusion of prosperity. Gross production increased from 5,620,000,000 roubles in 1913 to 6,831,000,000 roubles in 1916. The expansion of the war industries tended to conceal the decline in the basic industries. In 1916 the output of the factories not engaged on war production decreased by 21.9 per cent. But very soon the expansion of the war industries also ceased, chiefly owing to the shortage of fuel and metal. Two years after the outbreak of the war the output of coal in the Donetz coalfield was being maintained only with difficulty at the pre-war level, despite the fact that the number of workers had increased from 168,000 in 1913 to 235,000 in 1916. Before the war the monthly output of coal per worker in the Donetz coalfield was 12.2 tons; in 1915 and in the early part of 1916 it had dropped to 11.3 tons and in the winter of 1916 to 9.26 tons. Minister Shakhovskoi was obliged to admit that the decline in the productivity of labour was due to:
“the deterioration of the equipment of the mines, owing to the impossibility of carrying out timely repairs of the machinery and equipment required for the extraction of coal.”(10)
Factories came to a standstill owing to lack of fuel. Less bread was baked. The population used fences and furniture as fuel.
There was also a shortage of metal. Thirty-six blast furnaces were extinguished in 1916. Metal began to be rationed. Towards the end of 1916 the factories were supplying only half the metal required by the munitions industry.
The general dislocation of economic life was most vividly manifested on the railways. The railway crisis reflected the general development of militarised industry. There was a certain expansion at first, the amount of freight carried increasing. But this expansion was clearly insufficient to meet war demands. While the amount of freight carried increased, there was also a catastrophic increase in the amount of goods awaiting transportation, which at the beginning of 1914 already totalled 84,000 carloads and in the first half of 1916 had further risen to 127,000 carloads. On July 15, 1916, General Alexeyev, Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander, submitted a report to the tsar in which he stated:
“There is hardly a single branch of state and public life at present which is not suffering severe dislocation owing to the fact that demand for transport facilities is not being properly satisfied. . . . On an average, only 50 or 60 per cent of the transport requirements of the factories producing military supplies are being satisfied, and in the Petrograd District, according to the Minister of Ways of Communication, it is only possible to transport 8,000,000 poods of freight in place of the 18,500,000 poods required. In view of this, not only is any increase in the output of the factories unthinkable, but it will even be necessary to curtail the present scale of work.”(11)
The country was splitting economically into a number of more or less isolated regions. This counteracted the advantages of the social division of labour achieved by capitalist development and threw tsarist Russia back many decades. Thus, autumn prices for rye in the central industrial regions were on an average higher than the prices for rye in the neighbouring Central Black Earth Region by 19 per cent in 1914, 39 per cent in 1915 and 57 per cent in 1916.
By 1916, owing to the difficulty of transporting grain, the difference in prices had increased threefold.
The collapse of the transport system sharply aggravated the food crisis. The poor work of the railways had already created a food shortage at a time when the country still had stocks of grain from previous harvests. Nearly one billion poods of grain could not be dispatched to the consuming districts owing to lack of transport facilities. As a result, profiteering in grain rapidly spread. In the autumn of 1916, Rittich, Minister of Agriculture, even decided to adopt extreme measures, and instituted the compulsory requisition of grain. Rittich was a typical bureaucrat. He had received a first-class bureaucratic training, having been in charge of various agricultural and agrarian departments since the Revolution of 1905. However, his experience in carrying out Stolypin’s agrarian policy was of no help to him in the matter of grain requisitions. The attempt failed. Grain could not be procured this way. Stocks in the consuming regions rapidly declined. In the autumn of 1915 the cities were on starvation rations. The army was receiving only one half the regulation food supply.
The collapse of the market and the widespread profiteering helped to undermine the currency. Gold disappeared from circulation on the very outbreak of the war. Expenditures increased from year to year. State expenditures exceeded state revenues by 39 per cent in 1914, by 74 percent in 1915, and by 76 per cent in 1916.
Paper money was printed in increasing amounts. The value of the ruble declined. Credit was thoroughly undermined, and the disturbance of credit in its turn hastened the collapse of the market.
Facts quoted by bourgeois economists show that by the end of the war (1919) the “national wealth” of Russia had declined by 60 per cent as compared with 1913, whereas in Great Britain the decline amounted to 15 per cent, in France to 31 per cent, in Germany to 33 per cent and in Austria-Hungary to 41 per cent. Japan and America alone increased their “national wealth,” which, incidentally, in capitalist countries belongs just as little to the nation as the “national income” does.
Just as the destruction of wealth was greatest in Russia, so the dislocation of economic life proceeded much more rapidly in Russia than in any other country.
One consequence of the severe economic dislocation was a marked decline in the exchange value of currencies. The decline in the exchange value of the currencies of various countries in 1915 and 1918, compared with the U.S. dollar, was as follows:
| 1915 | 1918 | |
|---|---|---|
| per cent. | per cent. | |
| Japan | 0 | 1 |
| Great Britain | 3 | 2 |
| France | 8 | 12 |
| Italy | 16 | 20 |
| Germany | 16 | 23 |
| Austria-Hungary | 27 | 33 |
| Russia | 29 | 40 |
The rate of decline of the currencies was different in various countries. The currency of Japan remained at gold parity, and the currency of Great Britain remained very near to gold parity. Devaluation of the currency was greatest in Russia and Austria-Hungary. It was far less in Germany, Italy and France.
America, Japan and England fought the war entirely on foreign territory. Practically no fighting took place on Italian territory. The extent of German territory occupied by the enemy far exceeded the territory occupied by enemy forces in Austria and France, both in absolute size and in their general importance to the country.
Russia was distinguished by the enormous extent of her military front. Russia’s front was several times longer than the fronts of any of the other belligerent Powers. The huge armies of Russia and Austria-Germany swept back and forth several times over a vast tract of territory in the Eastern theatre of war. Owing to the fact that the war in this region was a war of manœuvres rather than of position, the destructive effects were considerable not only in the war area itself, but also in the adjacent regions, which suffered all the disastrous consequences of evacuation. Over 500,000 square kilometres of Russian territory, with a population of 25,000,000 persons, i.e., one-seventh of the population of the country, were at one time or another evacuated. Three million people were dislodged from their homes and transferred to the interior. The huge armies of refugees brought disorganisation, panic and disturbance of economic life in their train. Unlike France, where occupation and evacuation took place only once—in August 1914—and affected only a small area, Russia suffered continuously from the devastating effects of occupation and evacuation throughout the whole war.
Unable, owing to her technical backwardness, to mobilise the economic resources of the country for defence purposes, Russia was obliged to appeal for assistance to her allies.
The loans granted to Russia by her allies increased from month to month. Nearly 8,000,000,000 rubles flowed into the hands of the government. Russia’s debt almost doubled during the war, reaching 7,745,900,000 rubles, as against 4,066,000,000 rubles before the war. The loans were much larger than the value of the orders placed by Russia with her allies. In addition to orders, the interest on the State debt had to be paid, as well as orders placed in neutral countries, Japan and America.
The loans served to increase Russia’s dependence on her allies. England virtually determined how the loans were expended. The allies drew gold from Russia as security for the loans. In May 1916, Bark, the Minister of Finance, wrote:
“The very unfavourable terms of the credits now being offered by England show that with the development of military events it is becoming more and more difficult for Russia to obtain credits from the Allied Powers alone, and our complete financial dependence on the Allies is extremely burdensome.”(12)
Even this tsarist Minister was obliged to admit that Russia’s semi-colonial dependence became accentuated during the war. The old tsarist bureaucrat saw only one alternative, viz., to secure loans elsewhere, to apply to the American imperialists.
War with the Central Powers severely affected Russia’s foreign trade. Half of the goods Russia used to obtain from abroad were purchased in Central European countries and one-third of Russia’s exports were consigned to these countries. The relations of other countries with Germany and Austria were much less extensive and it is natural that the termination of these relations was far less devastating for England, France and even Italy. But it was not only Russia’s relations with the Central Powers that were disturbed; her relations with almost the entire world were suddenly broken off. Her European land frontiers, with the exception of the Norwegian and Swedish frontiers, and also the Rumanian frontier, which was of no commercial importance and which gave access only to Rumania, were closed. German submarines dominated the Baltic. A similar situation prevailed in the Black Sea after Turkey joined the war. In 1913 nine-tenths of Russia’s exports and five-sixths of her imports had passed through these frontiers.
During the war Russia’s contact with the external world depended on the thin thread of the Trans-Siberian Railway, five thousand miles long and with only one outlet to the sea—Vladivostok. The Murmansk Railway was not completed until the end of 1917. In addition, contacts were maintained in the summer months through Archangel, which was connected with Central Russia by a narrow-gauge railway, transformed into a wide-gauge railway only in 1916. Archangel could handle only a small quantity of goods. How limited the carrying capacity of this railway was is shown by the fact that horse cartage of goods was resumed just as in the days of Ivan the Terrible. Goods were carted by road from Archangel to Vologda, and thence to Petrograd, a distance of about 800 miles. Rodzyanko wrote:
“Already at the beginning of the war the Duma had begun to receive reports to the effect that transport of goods from Archangel by the narrow-gauge railway was experiencing great difficulty, and that the port was swamped with goods. Merchandise arriving from America, England and France was piled mountain high and was not being consigned to the interior. On the very outbreak of the war, Litvinov-Falinsky warned us that the port of Archangel was in a terrible condition. Large shipments of coal for the Petrograd factories were being expected from England, but there was nowhere even to unload the coal. Despite the fact that Archangel was the only military port connecting us with the Allies, it received practically no attention. It was found necessary to raise the question of Archangel at one of the very first meetings of the Special Council and to ask the Ministers what measures they proposed to take. The Ministers, in the persons of Sukhomlinov, Rukhlov and Shakhovskoi either put us off with excuses, or made promises without actually doing anything. Meanwhile, the amount of goods that had accumulated by the end of the summer of 1915 was already so great that cases lying on the ground had been literally pressed deep into the soil from the weight of the goods above.”(13)
The whole clumsy edifice of Imperial Russia was collapsing. The costs of the war proved too burdensome for it. In the first three months of the war Russia’s expenditure amounted to 167 per cent of her total revenues for the year 1913, whereas, in the same period France spent 105 per cent of her revenues in 1913, and England 130 per cent. Only in the case of Austria-Hungary were these expenditure as high as 160 per cent.
Russia suffered from war more than any other country. Thirty months of intense effort had resulted in the collapse of industry, the decline of agriculture, a transport crisis and famine.
“We in the rear,” wrote Guchkov in August 1916 to General Alexeyev, Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander, “are impotent, or almost impotent. Our methods of warfare are double-edged, and, in view of the excited mood of the people, especially the workers, may serve as the first spark to a conflagration the proportions of which nobody can foresee and which nobody will be able to localize.”(14)
It was the workers and peasants who bore the whole brunt of the war. The masses became increasingly affected by revolutionary unrest. The country was on the verge of an explosion. The imperialist war proved a powerful accelerator of the revolution.
[1] Lenin, “The Fall of Port Arthur,” Collected Works, Vol. VII.
[2] A. A. Manikovsky, The Supply of Munitions to the Russian Army in the World War, Vol. II, Moscow, 1930, p. 9.
[3] “Meeting in the Winter Palace. Ceremonial Opening of the Special Councils on Military Supplies,” Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word), No. 194, August 23, 1915.
[4] A. A. Polivanov, Diary and Reminiscences as Minister and Assistant-Minister of War, Vol. I, Moscow, 1924, pp. 154-5.
[5] Ibid., p. 155.
[6] A. A. Manikovsky, The Supply of Munitions to the Russian Army in the World War, Vol. II, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1930, p. 36.
[7] Ibid., p. 32.
[8] Fall of the Tsarist Régime. Stenographic Report of the Examination and Evidence Heard in 1917 by the Extraordinary Investigation Commission of the Provisional Government, Vol. I, Leningrad, 1924, p. 241.
[9] Proceedings of the Conference on Economic Questions Connected with High Prices and Military Supplies, Moscow, 1915, p. 261.
[10] Leningrad Branch of the Central Archives. Second Department of the Economic Section, VGAF, Folio 3.
[11] A. A. Manikovsky, The Supply of Munitions to the Russian Army in the World War, Vol. II, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1930, pp. 343-4.
[12] Essays on the History of the October Revolution, Vol. I, Moscow, 1927, p. 61.
[13] M. V. Rodzyanko, “The Collapse of the Empire,” Archives of the Russian Revolution, Vol. XVII, Berlin, 1926, p. 100.
[14] V. P. Semennikov, The Monarchy on the Eve of Collapse. Papers of Nicholas II and other Documents, Moscow, 1927, p. 282.
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