ON AUGUST 31, 1914, EMPEROR NICHOLAS II SIGNED A DECREE renaming the Russian capital from St. Petersburg, the name given to it by its founder, Peter the Great, to Petrograd. The reference to the saint was gone, replaced with the name of the tsar who had founded the city. More importantly, the German “burg” was replaced with the Russian “grad,” signaling that Russia was turning its back on its close links to Central Europe and embarking on a process of gradual isolation from the West. That process would gather strength in the 1920s, when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad to honor the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, and would reach its peak in the next decade under Lenin’s heir, Joseph Stalin.
The original change from the German to the Russian name was made in the early days of the World War I, which pitted Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and was inspired by an upsurge of Russian patriotism. It was made by Tsar Nicholas himself, without much consultation with his chief ministers. He was clearly responding to the expectations of the masses as opposed to those of his cabinet. The Great War was not the first military conflict with a Western power, of which there had been many in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but no one had suggested altering the name of the capital in those days. Times were changing. On both sides of the freshly drawn front lines, nationalism was on the rise, and nothing fed it better than war. This one was supposed to be short and victorious, but the change of name was by no means provisional and aroused jubilation among Russian nationalists. “A great historical fact has come to pass,” wrote a newspaper at the time. “The capital of the Russian Empire, Petersburg, which bore that name for more than two centuries, has been renamed Petrograd by imperial decree. That which the finest Slavophiles dreamed of has been realized in the great epoch of struggle against Germanism.”
A few weeks earlier, on August 2, tens of thousands of citizens had poured into the square in front of the Winter Palace, where the Revolution of 1905 had begun nine years earlier. This time they came not to protest and demand but to manifest their patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy. Russia’s world-renowned opera singer Fedor Shaliapin (Chaliapin) led the crowd in the hymn “God Save the Tsar.” People knelt when Nicholas II came onto the balcony to greet them and read his manifesto on the start of the war, which Russia had officially declared on Austria the previous day. Nicholas explained the government’s decision as a response to Austria’s attack on Serbia, a fraternal Slavic and Orthodox state. “True to its historical precepts, Russia, one in faith and blood with the Slavic peoples, has never regarded their fate with indifference,” read the manifesto. He then explained that with the German declaration of war on Russia, more was now at stake than Slavic solidarity. “WE unshakably believe,” continued Nicholas, “that all OUR faithful subjects will rise concordantly and selflessly to the defense of the Russian Land. Let internal disputes be forgotten at this terrible hour of trial. May the union of the TSAR with HIS people be consolidated even more firmly.”
The war was presented not as a struggle of one European empire against another but as a contest of the Russian people and the Slavic world they led with the Germanic race. The crowds in front of the palace, bearing banners and portraits of the tsar, were most receptive. At the very center were two banners, one calling for “Victory for Russia and all Slavdom,” the other demanding “Freedom for Carpathian Rus’.” Although war was declared in Petrograd under the pan-Slavic banner, the Russian question was profoundly involved from the start. Among the immediate war aims was that of taking under the tsar’s high hand the last remaining patrimony of Kyivan Rus’—the “Carpathian Rus’” of Austrian and Hungarian Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia. That would complete the reunification of the “Russian” lands.
On August 17, Russian forces crossed the Russo-German border into East Prussia. Official rhetoric focused on the need to crush aggressive Teutonic might. On the following day, Russian commanders led their troops across the border with Austria, proclaiming the goal of liberating long-suffering “Russians” oppressed by the Habsburgs. The war on the southern sector of the Russian front was supposed to solve the Russian question once and for all, uniting all Russians under the emperor’s rule. It also offered a unique opportunity to crush rising Ukrainian and Belarusian movements within the empire, ensuring the complete unity of the reconstituted Russian nation.
THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE WAR WITNESSED AN UNPRECEDENTED upsurge of Russian nationalism, fueling the high expectations of the leaders of Russian nationalist organizations. They had long argued for support of the Russophile movement in Austrian Galicia and fought against Ukrainian activists, who were branded as traitors to the Russian nation within the empire. Their time had finally come.
The manifesto issued by the Russian commander in chief, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Galicia in August 1914, presented the Russian advance as the liberation of a long-suffering branch of the Russian people. “Brothers!” read the manifesto. “The judgment of God is upon us! Patiently, with Christian humility, the Russian people languished for centuries beneath the foreign yoke, but neither cajolery nor persecution could break its hope for freedom. As an impetuous stream breaks rocks in order to merge with the sea, so there is no force that could stop the Russian people in its drive for unification. Let there be no more Subjugated Rus’!” The manifesto also sought to justify the Russian incursion in more traditional, historical terms: “May the domain of St. Vladimir, the land of Yaroslav Osmomysl and Princes Daniil and Roman, throwing off the yoke, raise the flag of Russia, one, great, and indivisible.” Finally, it appealed to the Ukrainian subjects of the Habsburgs, urging them to rebel against their government for the sake of a bright future in the Russian Empire. “And you, long-suffering fraternal Rus’, rise to greet Russian arms. Liberated Russian brethren! You will all find a place in the bosom of Mother Russia.”
The slogan of the unification, or, rather, reunification, of the virtual Russian nation divided by the border with Austria gained prominence during the early days of the war, serving to justify the conflict in ethnonational terms, mobilize public support for the war within the empire, and turn “Russians” abroad against the Habsburgs. If Austrian officials had ever doubted that Russia would play the Russophile card against them in the coming war, the Russian manifesto eliminated all doubt and provided formal justification for the roundup and detention of Russophiles.
In the first weeks of the war, thousands of real and alleged Russophiles—intellectuals, priests, and village leaders—were sent to Talerhof, a detention camp in an open field near the town of Graz in Styria. Out of its 20,000 inmates, some 3,000 would die of malnutrition and disease. Many of those who ended up in Talerhof and the other Austrian detention camp of Terezin were in fact not Russophile but Ukrainophile activists. In the commotion created by the war, those who were politically engaged often took advantage of the situation to denounce their opponents to the authorities. Ukrainian activists believed that they had been denounced by the Poles. Some were, while others were accused by their own, or were overheard saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The typical accusation was that someone had been heard claiming that living conditions would improve once the Russians came to the region. Most inhabitants of Galicia and Bukovyna would soon find out for themselves whether that was true or not. Many were disappointed.
To Russia, the first months of the war brought not only high expectations but also early disappointment. The bad news came from the northern sector of the front. After initial successes in East Prussia, one of the Russian armies there suffered a major defeat in late August 1914. Another army had to retreat as well. But in Galicia, on the Austrian front, Russian military operations met with continuing success. On September 3, Russian formations entered Lviv, which was renamed from the German Lemberg to the Russian Lvov. Later that month, Russian troops approached Peremyshl, an ancient Rus’ center with a strong fortress that was doggedly defended by the Austrian army for almost half a year. In March 1915, the exhausted Austrian garrison ran out of ammunition and was forced to surrender. Galicia and Bukovyna were now completely under Russian control. Plans were made for a major new offensive through the Hungarian plain to take Budapest and Vienna, knocking Austria-Hungary out of the war. Few people doubted that Peremyshl and the rest of Galicia would now be Russian forever. Transcarpathia, or, in the imperial parlance of the time, Subcarpathian Rus’—a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Hungarian rule—was to come next, completing the “gathering” of the Rus’ lands initiated, according to Russian historiography, in the fifteenth century by the first Russian ruler to call himself tsar, Ivan III.
In the fall of 1914, the newly conquered region was placed under the administration of the governor general of Galicia, Count Georgii Bobrinsky, an ethnic Russian who saw Russification as his main task. Upon assuming office, he declared, “I shall establish the Russian language, law, and system here.” The governor’s close assistant in promoting that agenda was his nephew, Vladimir Bobrinsky, a member of the Duma and a leader of the “moderate right.” Since 1907, Vladimir Bobrinsky had headed the Galician Benevolent Society, which supported the Russophile movement and publications in Galicia and Volhynia and lobbied the Russian government to do the same. He argued that by fighting for the Russian cause on the San River—a tributary of the Vistula and one of the main waterways in Austrian-ruled Ukraine—the government could successfully defend that cause on the Dnieper, as the collapse of the Russophile movement in Galicia would only strengthen Ukrainophile propaganda in Little Russia. Now Bobrinsky and his Duma allies, including Archbishop Evlogii (Georgievsky) of Kholm, who was placed in charge of the Orthodox mission in Galicia, gained a unique opportunity to put their ideas for the Russification of Galicia into practice.
Not only was the name of the city of Lemberg changed to the Russian Lvov, but the names of streets and squares in Galician and Bukovynian towns were also changed. They were now meant to popularize Aleksandr Pushkin and other Russian cultural and political figures. The Russian language was introduced into the educational system with the goal of replacing Ukrainian. Special courses were instituted for local “Russian” teachers to master the Russian language. Ukrainian newspapers were closed and the sale of books published outside the Russian Empire in the “Little Russian dialect” prohibited. Even Ukrainian-language correspondence was banned. Ukrainophile organizations were closed and dozens of their activists arrested. The head of the Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, was detained in September 1914 and exiled to central Russia, where he spent most of the war in an Orthodox monastery.
By contrast, Russophile leaders and organizations were supported. Vladimir Bobrinsky personally traveled from one prison to another in the newly occupied territories to release Russophile activists imprisoned by the Austrian authorities. Russophiles who avoided detention by the Austrians or were released from prison by Bobrinsky actively propagandized the population in support of the “White tsar” who had finally extended his protection to the long-suffering population of “Red Rus’,” the medieval name for Galicia. Russian philanthropic societies, which had been active in the region even before the war, now moved into Galicia and Bukovyna to provide assistance to the peasants in the name of the all-Russian idea.
But wartime conditions limited the Russification program of Vladimir Bobrinsky and his supporters. The military command, especially Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, whose popularity in the army did not sit well with the emperor himself, believed that Galicia and Bukovyna should be integrated into the empire right away. The government, for its part, wanted to postpone integration until the signing of the peace treaty. A compromise was reached whereby full integration was postponed until the end of the war, but the needs of the military were to take precedence until then. The authorities wanted stability behind their lines, not a radical reform that could produce discontent and resistance. Limits were therefore imposed on the Orthodox mission in the region, allowing Archbishop Evlogii to take over Greek Catholic parishes only if they lacked a Greek Catholic priest (many had fled the region or had been arrested by the Austrians) and if a clear majority (at least 75 percent) of the parishioners approved. That was a remarkable change from the first months of the occupation, when the media reported 30,000 converts to Orthodoxy from the ranks of the Uniate Church.
Among the Galicians who suffered the most from the policies of the occupying administration were the Jews. The espionage mania that engulfed the Russian army and society after the first defeats on the German front led the military to regard Jews as a major security risk and argue for declaring the Jews of Galicia and Bukovyna Russian subjects and deporting them from the area. Since the government refused to go along with appeals for the immediate incorporation of the region into the empire, the military command prohibited all movement by Jews in the zone adjoining the front, effectively putting a stop to Jewish commerce there and undermining the economic foundation of Jewish communities in the region. As the ill-supplied Russian army resorted to requisitions and even plunder to replenish its food reserves, Jews topped the list of victims. The property of those who had left before the arrival of the Russian army was confiscated, as was that of Austrians and Poles who had fled the region.
The Russian policy of playing the national card against Germany and Austria-Hungary was full of contradictions. In the case of Galicia, two sets of policies came into direct conflict—one that promised support for Polish national aspirations and another that treated Galicia as a primordially Russian land. The Poles were promised reunification of Polish ethnic territory and a state of their own, to be augmented by the Polish territories belonging to Austria. “Let the borders that cut the Polish people into pieces be wiped out. Let it reunite itself as a whole under the scepter of the Russian tsar,” read the manifesto addressed by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich to the Poles on the eve of the Russian invasion of Austria and East Prussia. “Under that scepter Poland will be reborn, free in its faith, language, and self-government.” As the Russian authorities in Galicia tried to show the Poles that they meant what they said, the Polish-controlled court system remained in effect in some places. The administration that had first closed all Polish schools in Galicia was forced to reopen them and allow the use of Polish as a language of instruction along with Russian.
The Galician Russophiles felt betrayed. They were not allowed to take positions in the occupation administration, which were often filled by unqualified officials from the Russian Empire. On top of that, the treasonous Poles were now allies of Russia, while the “Russian people” of Galicia were once again being treated as second-class citizens.
RUSSOPHILE CONCERNS WERE TAKEN SERIOUSLY BY THEIR ALLIES in the Russian nationalist camp and often aired in the Duma. Rightist and nationalist deputies saw the occupation of Galicia in Russian nationalist terms and opposed everything that did not correspond to their vision of that development as a reunification of the Russian land after a millennium of struggle against the hostile West, represented by Germans, Austrians, and Poles. By contrast, the Russian liberals, represented first and foremost by the Constitutional Democrats, saluted the tolerant attitude of government officials toward the Poles of Galicia and Bukovyna. They were divided on the Ukrainian question, as they had been before the war.
Petr Struve, an influential figure in the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, believed that the clampdown on the Ukrainian movement in Galicia spelled the end of the movement in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, disagreed with his party comrade, suggesting that he educate himself on the Ukrainian movement in Galicia and read the literature of the Ukrainian cooperative movement there—such phenomena could not be eliminated by means of military occupation. He presented a resolution to the Central Committee of his party demanding “an end to the anti-state system of Russifying occupied territory, the reestablishment of closed national institutions, and strict observance of the personal and property rights of the population.” But the resolution was never passed. Some scholars argue that Miliukov’s intention in sponsoring it was mainly to calm Ukrainophile supporters and allies of his party: if so, it proved futile.
In any case, Ukrainian activists in the Russian Empire could do little about the Russian nationalist offensive in Galicia. They were on the defensive, doing their best to prove their loyalty to the empire, which was questioned by their enemies in the Russian nationalist camp, who portrayed the Ukrainian movement as the product of a German-Polish-Jewish conspiracy. The Russian nationalists argued that Austrian Galicia was the center of the Ukrainian movement. Long before the war, the Russian nationalists in Kyiv had warned about the possibility of Ukraine leaving Russia and joining Austria-Hungary. With the start of the war, the authorities had acted on the worry and paranoia of the Russian nationalist camp, closing down Ukrainian-language publications such as the Kyiv-based newspaper Rada (Council) and harassing Ukrainian organizations and activists. Branded “Mazepists” by the government, they had little opportunity to express their views to the general public.
Symbolic of the fate of the Ukrainian movement on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border at the start of the Great War was the fate of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainians in Galicia and, in the eyes of the Russian nationalists, their main opponent. The Austrian authorities, who suspected him of pro-Russian sentiments (he never gave up his Russian citizenship), ordered him to go west, away from the front line, at the beginning of hostilities. In Vienna, where he spent some time, Hrushevsky was under police surveillance. He left Austria a few days after an order was issued for his arrest. Hrushevsky arrived in Kyiv in November 1914 only to be arrested by the Russian police on charges of pro-Austrian sympathies. The “proof” of his alleged guilt was found in his luggage, which included a Ukrainian-language brochure titled How the Tsar Deceives the People. But that was a mere formality—the order for Hrushevsky’s arrest had been issued soon after the Russian takeover of Lviv. There the authorities found photographs of Hrushevsky together with Ukrainian activists who, according to information received by the Russian police, were working for the Austrian government and against Russia.
Police officials considered Hrushevsky to be the leader of the Galician “Mazepists” and planned his exile to Siberia. Only the intervention of the Russian liberal intelligentsia—including such diverse figures as Aleksei Shakhmatov, one of the coauthors of the Academy of Sciences’ memorandum on the Ukrainian language, and Petr Struve, a liberal opponent of the Ukrainophiles—made the government change its mind. Instead of Siberia, Hrushevsky was exiled to the town of Simbirsk. The joke went that his supporters had slipped a few letters into the word “Siberia,” turning it into “Simbirsk,” a town on the Volga closer to Moscow but still far from Ukraine. Not only Hrushevsky but the entire Ukrainian movement was effectively silenced. The government and its “true Russian” supporters got a free hand to carry out their own nation-building agenda within the old imperial borders and beyond.
IN MARCH 1915, AS HRUSHEVSKY WAS SETTLING DOWN TO HIS Simbirsk exile, Emperor Nicholas II was planning his visit to the recently conquered Galicia. The fall of Peremyshl on March 9 gave him an opportunity to bask in military glory. It would not be his first visit to the vicinity of the front but his first wartime venture outside the old imperial frontiers—a fact that caused panic among his bodyguards. Also opposed to the idea of the tsar’s visit to Galicia was the military brass, run by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich—the Russian commanders were not sure that they could hold the freshly conquered territory, and the tsar’s presence in what the press hailed as part of the Russian land might force them to put politics ahead of military considerations in what they knew would be the difficult summer campaign of 1915.
But Nicholas insisted, and his bodyguards and the military went along. It was a media coup for the tsar, who was much less popular with the army than his relative, Nikolai Nikolaevich. The Russian nationalist press celebrated Nicholas’s visit to the “ancient Russian land” as a victory not only for Russian arms but also for the Russian national idea. The inspection of the occupation administration and troops in Galicia included visits to Lviv, Peremyshl, and Brody. It took place in early April, during the Easter season, when the emperor traditionally demonstrated his closeness to the people by exchanging Easter eggs (and kisses) with officers and rank-and-file soldiers and sailors of units attached to the court. He would present them with porcelain Easter eggs—not of Fabergé manufacture, which were reserved for members of the imperial family, but still a major luxury by the standards of the time—in exchange for red-colored boiled eggs offered by the soldiers. Now that same tradition was being brought to the troops in Galicia, extending the sacred space of the empire westward.
On his trip, Nicholas often felt as if he were at home, within the borders of the empire. “The farther we traveled, the more beautiful the country became. The appearance of the settlements and inhabitants strongly recalled Little Russia,” reads the tsar’s diary of the time. After visiting Lviv, he noted: “A very beautiful city slightly reminiscent of Warsaw, a wealth of gardens and monuments, full of armies and Russian people.” In the city, Nicholas was welcomed not only by the governor general of Galicia, Count Bobrinsky, but also by the principal Orthodox hierarch of the land, Archbishop Evlogii.
On the eve of the visit, Evlogii received a request from Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich not to bring up “politics” in his welcoming speech to the tsar. He was nonplussed. “Can I really not say, for example, ‘You enter here as the sovereign master of this land’?” he asked the chief military chaplain who delivered the request. “No,” came the answer, “the war is not over yet, and no one knows whether the tsar will remain the master of that land.” Evlogii refused to follow the grand duke’s advice. “Your Imperial Highness,” he said in addressing the tsar upon his arrival in Lviv, “you are the first to enter this ancient Russian land, the patrimony of the old Russian princes Roman and Daniil, where no Russian monarch has ever been. This subjugated, long-suffering Rus’, from which sighs and groans were heard for ages, now raises a triumphant hosanna to you.”
Nicholas was delighted by the speech. He was also impressed by the reception the local Russophiles gave him. During dinner at the governor general’s mansion, a group of Evlogii’s Orthodox parishioners broke through the security perimeter around the building and showed up on the adjacent square with icons and church banners, singing the “people’s song,” “God Save the Tsar.” Nicholas addressed the crowd from the balcony, as he had done on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg in August 1914. He thanked the crowd for the warm reception and concluded his brief speech with words dear to the heart of Evlogii and other Russian nationalists: “Let there be one mighty, indivisible Rus’!” The tsar’s sister Olga, who was in the city with the military hospital, remembered the reception offered to her brother in Lviv with great warmth. “For the last time I felt the mysterious bond that united our family with the people,” she wrote later.
NICHOLAS’S EASTER 1915 VISIT TO GALICIA WAS FILMED BY A Russian crew, and the celebration of Orthodox Easter in Galicia became a subject of paintings and postcards. It was a symbolic high point in the long campaign of Russian nationalists to gather the lands of the former Kyivan Rus’, construct a big Russian nation, including Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and bring together monarchy, religion, and nation in the service of the state. For anyone looking out of the governor general’s palace in Lviv on April 9, 1915, there would have been little doubt that the Russian Empire had finally succeeded in making its long transition to a Russian nation-state. Instead of succumbing to the rising ethnic nationalism that threatened to divide the empire, it had risen to the challenge by expanding its borders to incorporate all the Russias.
The hopes and dreams of the Russian “unifiers” were crushed even more quickly than they had been raised by the victories over the Austro-Hungarian forces. In May 1915, barely a month after the tsar’s triumphal entrance into Lviv, the Germans brought their divisions to the Austrian front and began their attack on the Russian armies in Galicia, retaking Peremyshl and forcing the imperial army out of Lviv. By the end of September the Russian armies had lost most of Galicia, a good part of Volhynia, all of Poland, western Belarus, and most of the Baltic provinces.
In August 1915, an indignant Nicholas assumed personal command of the army, helping to raise morale but also taking direct responsibility for the conduct of the war. The fighting continued to go badly, exhausting Russia’s economic and human resources. In the summer of 1915, soon after the spring and summer defeats of the Russian army in Galicia, the Russian nationalists in Duma had joined forces with Miliukov’s Constitutional Democrats and monarchists from the “Union of October 17” in a Progressive Bloc that demanded a government responsible to the people, meaning one composed of Duma deputies. The tsar refused to create such a government. For the rest of 1915 and all of 1916, as Russian troops exhausted themselves and the empire in a positional war with the Germans and Austrians, the court remained in conflict with the Duma.
February 1917 brought a food shortage in the capital, long bread lines, and popular protests, as well as mutiny in the army, which refused to suppress the revolt. The socialists created a soviet (council) that became the real power in the city, making the tsarist government all but irrelevant. The leaders of the Duma, who formed a government of their own, were unable to calm the masses and bring the situation under control. Eventually they decided that the only way to save the country was to engineer the resignation of the tsar. They got the support of the generals, who believed, as did many courtiers and Duma deputies, that the tsar had lost touch with reality and was a puppet in the hands of his German-born wife, Alexandra, who was in favor of signing a peace treaty with Germany without the participation of Britain and France, Russia’s Entente Allies.
The generals, led by Chief of Staff Mikhail Alekseev, believed that signing a separate peace would not only violate Russia’s duties as an ally but also lead to the dismemberment of the empire, as a good part of its prewar territory would remain under German control. They were also concerned about the morale of the army and potential revolts behind the lines. Now, with rebellion in the streets and a soldiers’ mutiny in Petrograd, they knew that Nicholas had to go. The leaders of the Duma agreed. On March 2, 1917, the Duma sent a delegation to Nicholas II, who was outside the capital, with the thankless task of telling the tsar that he was no longer welcome on the throne. The two men entrusted with the mission were the prominent Duma deputy Vasilii Shulgin and the newly appointed minister of the army and navy in the Duma-created government, Aleksandr Guchkov.
NICHOLAS II AND HIS ENTOURAGE, WHOM THE REVOLUTIONARY events in Petrograd found at army headquarters in the Belarusian city of Mahilioŭ (Mogilev), and who were now desperately trying to get back to the capital by rail via Pskov, learned of the Duma delegation beforehand. Some believed that Vasilii Shulgin’s presence in it was a good sign for the tsar and the future of the monarchy.
Shulgin was well known not only as a leading Russian nationalist ideologue but also as a devoted monarchist, and the monarchy needed all the support it could muster. A graduate of the Kyiv University law school, Shulgin had been born into the family of Vitalii Shulgin, the publisher of the newspaper Kievlianin (The Kyivan), a mouthpiece of the all-Russian party in Ukraine. He had been raised by the newspaper’s other editor, Dmitrii Pikhno, and had assumed its editorship himself in 1913. Shulgin’s first foray into politics had taken place during elections to the Second Duma in the fall of 1906. In the Duma, Shulgin had become one of the leaders of the Russian nationalists and rightists. He was also a leader of the All-Russian Nationalist Union, a mass organization created in early 1910.
In March 1917, Shulgin volunteered for the Duma mission to the tsar. He felt that by asking Nicholas to resign he would save the monarchy. His companion, Aleksandr Guchkov, shared that view. Like other members of the government, such as the new minister of foreign affairs, Pavel Miliukov, Guchkov believed that the tsar’s abdication in favor of his son and heir, the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Aleksei, would calm the people and allow the Duma and the Provisional Government to retake the initiative from the Petrograd Soviet. The monarchy would survive at the price of becoming constitutional.
Late in the evening of March 2, 1917, when Shulgin and Guchkov arrived in Pskov, where Nicholas and his entourage were stationed, they asked to see General Nikolai Ruzsky, the commander of the northern front. Chief of Staff Mikhail Alekseev had already consulted with the commanders of the military fronts and obtained their go-ahead for what amounted to a coup. Ruzsky, the master of Pskov, had been ordered to use his powers of persuasion to convince the tsar to resign. He was in close contact with the Duma leadership and, like other top generals, wanted the tsar to go. He succeeded admirably. Upon their arrival at the Pskov train station, Shulgin and Guchkov did not have a chance to see Ruzsky and were immediately ushered into the tsar’s train car. When Ruzsky joined the meeting, he whispered to Shulgin that the question of resignation was already resolved.
Calm and composed as always, Nicholas informed Shulgin and Guchkov that he had decided in favor of abdication, but not, as they expected, in favor of his son, Aleksei, whose serious health problems made it necessary for him to stay with his parents. Nicholas would relinquish power to his brother Mikhail. After some hesitation, the guests agreed to the tsar’s proposal. Shulgin even decided that it was a better solution, as the underage Aleksei could not legally swear allegiance to the constitution—an important element of Shulgin’s vision for the future of the Russian monarchy—while Mikhail, as an adult, could do so. Shulgin asked the tsar to make one amendment to the resignation manifesto, indicating that Mikhail would swear “to the whole people” to work with their representative institutions, meaning the Duma. Nicholas agreed but replaced “oath to the whole people” with “inviolable oath.” He was still struggling to define relations between the monarchy and the people.
The people, for their part—or, at least, those who had revolted in Petrograd—were more than clear about their attitude toward the monarchy. As Shulgin and Guchkov found out on their return to the capital, the people wanted neither Nicholas nor the monarchy. The government formed by the Duma had little choice but to accept the people’s will, as did the heir apparent, Mikhail. On the day after Nicholas’s resignation, Mikhail signed a document of his own, stating that he would accept the throne only if asked to do so by the Constitutional Assembly, which was to be elected by the people in order to decide Russia’s form of government. The resignation of a second Romanov in as many days had the desired effect. With the agreement of the Petrograd Soviet, the Duma government was installed as the Provisional Government of Russia and charged with organizing elections to the Constitutional Assembly. The government issued a decree declaring an end to political persecution, introducing democratic freedoms, and promising the abolition of “all estate, religious, and national restrictions,” which meant the equality of all Russian subjects in the eyes of the law. The monarchy was now gone in all but name.
Shulgin, his Duma colleagues, and the generals were disappointed, but they had to accept reality. More immediately important to them was the failure of the Provisional Government to say anything in its declaration about peace with Germany, separate or general. It became clear that the government was prepared to continue fighting the war in order to restore the territorial unity of the empire. It had the full support of those in the political and military elite who put the unity and indivisibility of Russia above all other values. They would soon learn that the main threat to the unity of the empire, and, indeed, of the hoped-for big Russian nation, was posed not so much by the German and Austrian armies as by revolutionary forces within the empire itself.
THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY AND THE VACUUM OF POWER IN Petrograd, which resulted from competition between the liberals in the Provisional Government and the socialists in the Petrograd Soviet, created an opening for the leaders of the national movements, which had been in retreat since the outbreak of the war. The first to take advantage of the new revolutionary situation were the leaders of nations that had experienced some form of self-rule in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus the Finns, who had enjoyed autonomy between 1809 and 1899, immediately demanded that their constitution be restored. The Provisional Government complied on March 20, 1917, less than three weeks after Nicholas’s abdication. Nine days later, the Poles were promised an independent state in military alliance with Russia. The final decision on the Polish and Finnish questions was postponed until the convocation of the Constitutional Assembly, although, in the case of Poland, this was merely pro forma. “Recognizing the independence of Poland is like granting independence to the moon,” people quipped in Petrograd in those days. The country had been lost in the summer of 1915 and was now under German occupation.
When it came to the western provinces of the empire, the Polish question had never existed in a vacuum. Each of the Polish uprisings, as well as Polish political achievements in the Habsburg monarchy, had chipped away at the imagined monolith of the big Russian nation by encouraging the Ukrainians and Belarusians to raise demands of their own. In the spring of 1917, the Ukrainians and Belarusians did not ask for independence, but they were eager to demand cultural and then territorial autonomy and the federal restructuring of the Russian state, which, according to the Provisional Government, now consisted not of imperial subjects but of Russian (rossiiskii) citizens.
The Provisional Government was reluctant to give the two lesser branches of the imperial Russian nation what they wanted. The reason was not only that it wished to postpone all decisions on the government and structure of the state until the Constitutional Assembly, but also that it was beholden to the Constitutional Democrats, the most influential party in the government in the early spring of 1917. Some of them, such as Petr Struve, still opposed the very idea of dividing a Russian nation held together by language and culture rather than by ethnicity. Others, like Pavel Miliukov, were prepared to grant the non-Russians personal autonomy, which allowed for the development of language and culture, but not autonomous territory or government.
But that was exactly what the Ukrainian leaders, and some of the Belarusian ones, were demanding from the Petrograd government. They would make their voices heard as never before and get further than they had ever dreamed as the political, social, and economic turmoil, known in history as the Russian Revolution, gained speed in the subsequent months of 1917.