Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was written decades after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but in 1876 another of Tchaikovsky’s compositions rallied national pride and passion over a conflict that was unfolding even as he wrote. His Marche Slave is full of swelling Tchaikovskian emotion, but it had a very practical purpose. That year, the Balkan peoples rose up against the Ottoman Empire that had ruled them for four centuries, unleashing a wave of pan-Slav nationalism. Thousands of Russians volunteered to fight with their Serbian brothers against the Muslim Turks.fn1 Tchaikovsky wrote the Marche Slave as his contribution to the war effort and it was premiered at a concert to raise funds for the wounded.
The Balkan crisis of the 1870s led to a full-scale war between Russia and Turkey, the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–8, which ended with the liberation of Serbia, Bulgaria and most of the South Slav lands. The emergence of Russian-led pan-Slavism as a powerful force provoked Britain and Austria to action. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, they undid many of the Russian gains and decreed that Bosnia and Herzegovina should be administered by Vienna. The resentment caused by that decision culminated famously in June 1914 with the assassination by Bosnian Serb nationalists of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Vienna blamed Serbia for the assassination; Russia supported her Slav allies. Within weeks, treaties and alliances were invoked and Europe was at war.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel August 1914 (1971) is to the First World War what War and Peace (1869) was to the Napoleonic invasion – a vast swathe of history seen through the eyes of dozens of characters, fictional and real. The shattering defeats that decimated the Russian army in the first weeks of hostilities are described through the eyes of those caught up in the tumult of battle:
Information arrived that1 the whole Kashir Regiment had been destroyed at the village of Morken … The retreating forces were more like a confused and defenceless gypsy camp than an army … It was an extraordinary thing this mélée of units drawn up higgledy-piggledy with no one to tell them what to do or where to go … What was there left to do? … It was too late now, and no use … His dazed mind was clearing but Vorotyntsev could still not grasp the full dimensions of the catastrophe – it was immeasurable.
There is an echo here of Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov, wandering dazed through the Battle of Borodino. But Solzhenitsyn engages in a running polemic with Tolstoy about the nature of history: where Tolstoy believes individuals cannot shape history, Solzhenitsyn argues fiercely that they have a moral imperative to try. Writing in the late 1960s, he saw the failures of the First World War as a weakening in the moral resolve of Russian society that would pave the way for the triumph of the morally pernicious Bolsheviks. There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Solzhenitsyn says – greater determination and better leadership could have achieved a different outcome – and he castigates the Tolstoyan fatalism of the Russian generals:
Only now did Vorotyntsev notice2 the doomed look imprinted on General Samsonov’s face, the look of a 16-stone sacrificial lamb being led to the slaughter … He sat with his heavy body slumped wearily in the saddle, his cap dangling in his hand, the look on his face not one of authority, but of sadness and resignation … The army commander’s approach was extraordinary. He did not reproach the soldiers for deserting from the front line, he did not try to make them go anywhere, he made no demands on them … The disaster that had befallen the Second Army, indeed the Russian army as a whole, could still have been prevented … In a well-defended spot like this, why had the troops become little more than a gypsy rabble? Why were they trickling away in ineffectual little groups?
1914 offered a last opportunity for the tsarist regime to save itself. The war was popular. For a brief moment, peasant resentment and workers’ demands took second place to the imperative of defending the motherland. In the capital, now renamed Petrograd because Petersburg sounded too German, huge crowds cheered the tsar. Six million men enlisted in the first four months.
But the mood of national unity was soon to be shattered by political infighting and setbacks on the battlefield. The Battle of Tannenberg and the Battles of the Mazurian Lakes left 70,000 Russian casualties. Nearly 100,000 Russians were taken prisoner. The news had a devastating effect on public confidence, comparable to the catastrophe of Tsushima in 1905. Rather than report the rout of the Russian army to the tsar, Samsonov committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Poland, which had been part of the Russian Empire since the late eighteenth century, fell to the Germans in the summer of 1915, and Russian forces were obliged to retreat along the whole front, from Latvia in the north to Ukraine in the south.
The Russian army was made up of poorly trained soldiers led by incompetent officers. Guns were so scarce that many recruits went into battle without a rifle. General Anton Denikin, commanding the Galicia front in the southwest, wrote bitterly in his memoirs:
I shall never forget3 the tragedy of 1915. We had neither cartridges nor shells. We fought pitched battles and made gruelling marches. We were exhausted both physically and mentally. From initial hopes we were plunged into the depths of despair … The German artillery roared without cease, literally blowing away rows of our trenches with all who were in them. We barely replied at all, for we had nothing to reply with. Our totally exhausted regiments were beating off assault after assault with little more than bayonets. Blood flowed endlessly; our ranks were growing thinner and thinner; graveyards grew by the day …
At home, there were food shortages, profiteering and inflation. Discontent with the government and the tsar bubbled to the surface. In August 1915, the centrist parties in the Duma demanded the replacement of the tsar’s cabinet by a government appointed by parliament, a guarantee of workers’ rights, legal trade unions, full citizenship for the peasants and an amnesty for political prisoners.
But Nicholas II continued to believe in the values of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood, which had underpinned tsarist rule for generations. He rejected the parliamentarians’ demands, suspended the Duma and announced that he would personally take command of the army, directing the war from military headquarters. His decisions showed him to be hopelessly out of touch.
In a famous speech to the Russian parliament in November 1916, Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, denounced the tsarist regime, its ministers and the tsarina. The fact that the denunciation came from the moderate KaDety, who had previously supported the tsar’s ideas for a constitutional monarchy, revealed the depth of the country’s anger and disillusionment:
This regime does not have the wisdom4 or the capacity to deal with the current situation! … Gentlemen! This regime has sunk lower than ever before! The gap between it and us has become a yawning chasm that can never be bridged! … Throughout the Russian lands rumours are circulating of treachery at the highest levels of the state … of dark forces working in the interests of Germany, preparing the way for a shameful peace accord with the enemy … A handful of shady personalities are manipulating the affairs of state with treacherous intentions: the so-called ‘court party’ grouped around the empress … Are they motivated by treachery or by stupidity? You can take your pick – the results are the same!
Miliukov’s attack on the tsarina Alexandra reflected the repugnance she aroused in the Russian people. Her German origins, her rumoured desire to capitulate to the kaiser and her closeness to the religious charlatan Rasputin were damaging the monarchy. Alexandra had always been the dominant force in the royal marriage and, with Nicholas frequently absent at army headquarters at the front, she and Rasputin were widely believed to be running the country. For over a year Russia suffered the vagaries of ‘tsarina rule’. Alexandra made decisions based on whims or messages from God, mediated by Rasputin. Ministers were appointed and fired in an unpredictable game of cabinet leapfrog. The empress and her holy man got through four prime ministers, five interior ministers, five agriculture ministers and three each of foreign, war and transport. General Denikin complained of the ‘German-Rasputin clique’ that had ‘surrounded the emperor, brought about paralysis of the government and threatened to bring about the collapse of the army’. And Count Sergei Witte lamented the ‘craze of occultism5 … the mysticism complex with which Alexandra infected her husband’.
In December 1916, a group of right-wing noblemen led by Prince Felix Yusupov invited Rasputin to the Yusupovs’ palace on the Moika Canal in St Petersburg and plied him with wine laced with cyanide. The doctor who provided the poison assured them it was enough to kill several men. But Yusupov writes in his wonderfully over-the-top memoirs that Rasputin was a ‘diabolical figure’ and the only effect of the cyanide was to make him feel a little sleepy:
Rasputin stood before me motionless6, his head bent and his eyes fixed on the crucifix. I slowly raised the revolver. Where should I aim, at the temple or at the heart? A shudder swept over me; my arm grew rigid, I aimed at his heart and pulled the trigger. Rasputin gave a wild scream and crumpled up on the bearskin … The doctor declared there was no possibility of doubt: Rasputin was dead … Our hearts filled with hope; we were convinced that Russia and the monarchy would be saved from ruin and dishonour … Then a terrible thing happened: with a sudden violent effort Rasputin leapt to his feet, foaming at the mouth, rushing at me and sinking his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws …
The gothic horror of Rasputin’s death (the plotters eventually finished him off with more bullets, blows to the head with an iron bar and drowning in the icy canal) came too late to save the monarchy. The news from the front was grim, support for the war evaporated, and revolutionary mutterings grew louder. Workers at a key munitions factory, the Lessner plant in Petrograd, issued a proclamation of discontent, declaring they would not fight for Russia until the regime accepted their demands for civil rights and the redistribution of land. The talk in the streets was of impending insurrection.
fn1 Including Anna Karenina’s lover, Vronsky, in Tolstoy’s 1877 novel.