ing rights. Even with a weakened franchise, the parliament proved too radical for the Czar, and as head of state, he dissolved the first two Dumas.
By the eve of World War I, the Czarist government’s failure to solve the country’s economic backwardness and the people’s physical suffering, along with their unfulfilled desire for democratic institutions as Russia industrialized and moved toward a capitalist economy, led Russians to a more revolutionary idea for achieving social justice: the overthrow of the Czarist regime. The pressure of World War I was the catalyst for undoing Russian autocracy. Though the Russian army enjoyed some initial successes against Austria-Hungary in 1914, it was no match for the German army which easily encircled and defeated the Russians at the Battle of Tannenberg in eastern Germany in late August 1914. As the war continued, Russia’s inadequacies in equipping and training soldiers, designing appropriate and reliable weapons, and replacing equipment losses speedily became more and more evident. Soldiers could not be supplied with food, shoes, munitions, or weapons due to Russia’s small and underdeveloped industrial base and poor infrastructure. By 1915, the Russian war effort was in danger of crumbling when Germany finally went on the offensive. German forces, with the efficient industrial might of Germany at their backs, their highly trained officer corps, machine guns, and heavy artillery, cut through the badly equipped, poorly trained Russian forces. Despite his complete lack of actual military experience, Nicholas no longer trusted the competence of his generals and insisted on taking direct command of the warfront in 1915, hoping that his semi-divine presence would inspire soldiers to fight more effectively. Despite her complete lack of political or administrative experience, he left his wife, the Czarina Alexandra (1872–1918), in charge of the government. Such a decapitation of the political power center and the exposure of the Czar’s incapacities simply compounded Russia’s paralysis, and reports of corruption, dissolution, and incompetence in the Imperial government circulated widely.
Nicholas’s presence at the front did not change Russian or German strategy or the arithmetic of war. By the end of October 1916, around 1.7 million Russian soldiers had been killed, 2 million had become prisoners of war, and 1 million were missing. The army’s morale broken by the continuing string of military defeats, mutinies became common, and Russian soldiers refused to fight. The elites represented in the Duma warned Nicholas in November 1916 that disaster would befall the country unless a constitutional form of government, like the one he promised in 1905, was put in place. By this point, most of the Russian people were losing patience with the pace of change; constitutional questions were only important insofar as they bore on existential ones. Nicholas and his Romanov dynasty came to represent failed and inept policies and were the obvious targets for popular discontent. The overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the popular seizure of power were on the horizon.
The February Revolution was the result of an acute economic and political crisis caused by an ossified political and economic system that was incapable of responding to the rigors of modern, industrialized warfare. The revolution, an unplanned event, was the outcome of years of strikes and street protests that had weakened the regime. When the people of the capital, Petrograd, staged huge rallies against the war and protested the massive food shortages in the city in February 1917, the demonstrations turned violent. Large numbers of city residents demanded change and clashed with police and soldiers. Reconstituted soviets called a general strike, the majority of soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd defected to the strikers, and the citizenry occupied the city’s most strategic places. Without the loyalty of his troops, people, and advisors and the legitimacy of his regime shattered, Nicholas abdicated, and the mighty Russian autocracy disintegrated