 World War I (1914–1918), deficient infrastructure became a massive problem, as general conscription removed skilled workers from railroads and food-processing industries and peasants from their farms, which only aggravated poor wartime harvests and created widespread famine. Factory workers had to endure terrible working conditions, including 12- to 14-hour days and low wages, as Russia’s industrial captains sought to catch up with Western European industry. Riots and strikes led by labor activists in the industrial centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg (the country’s capital) for better conditions and higher wages were frequent after 1900. Any wage increases were more than rescinded by the scarcities and inflation caused by the mobilization of economic resources for World War I. By 1916, declining real wages, scarcity of fuel, and starvation threatened Russia’s largest cities.
The social causes of the Russian Revolution had deep roots in centuries of the Czarist regime’s oppression of the peasantry, its more recent oppression of working-class aspirations, and its inability to prosecute Russia’s wartime mobilization successfully. Rural peasants ceased to be serfs bound to the soil in 1861, but they had to make redemption payments to the state, something they resented deeply, and they wanted village or communal ownership of the land they worked. In the latter part of the 19th century, peasant disturbances and occasional revolts, often inspired and directed by young urban activists of the Social Revolutionary and Populist (narodnik) parties, lit up the countryside; the goal was to securing small-scale peasant land ownership from the extensive holdings of the state and from the large estates of aristocratic landowners. In the cities, rapid industrialization led to urban overcrowding, slums and unsafe working conditions for the Russian proletariat. In 2 decades (1890–1910), the populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg nearly doubled. The cities were unable to accommodate such growth: apartments were overcrowded, hygiene was nonexistent due to lack of running water or toilets, and disease and death were common. World War I only exacerbated the social problems. The vast demand for war supplies caused even longer hours and worsening working conditions, which resulted in many more labor riots and strikes during the war. Conscription pulled skilled workers from the cities, and their unskilled peasant replacements could not keep production flowing. When urban famine became unbearable, workers left the cities in droves to look for food, and industrial production fell even further. Soldiers were ill-equipped to fight, had incompetent officers, died by the tens of thousands in battle, and finally deserted toward the end of 1916 to return home angry, hungry, and wanting to settle accounts with Russia’s autocratic leaders.
Russian peasants, workers, and middle classes had additional reasons to be dissatisfied with the despotic Russian political system. These classes had no representation in the government; Czar (or Emperor) Nicholas II (1868–1918) was an absolute ruler accountable to no one, and he remained intellectually and emotionally detached from the nation’s problems. Dissatisfaction with Russian autocracy culminated in the 1905 Revolution after the Bloody Sunday (January 9) massacre, in which the Czar’s troops shot thousands of unarmed protestors as they approached the Winter Palace to petition him to help end their strike on terms favorable to the picketing workers. Popular anger at the massacre crippled the nation with strikes and insurrections led by activists from workers’ soviets who wanted to overthrow the autocracy and create a socially just and democratic state. To placate the populace, Nicholas promulgated an October Manifesto, which promised a representative parliamentary government (Duma). After the urban working-class radicals were defeated and civil order restored, the Czar felt safe enough in 1906 to weaken his promises of representative government with Article 47 of the Fundamental State Laws, which restricted vot