GulMacet: How about the U-boats doing? Poorly.
The sortie into the North Sea was about as adventurous as I've gotten with the navy so far.
Kurt_Steiner: The Western Front has been eerily quiet this year. Aside from the aerial attacks, the British have repeatedly tried landing troops in Belgium.
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Chapter I - The Great War - Part VII
The winter of 1915-16 was a harsh time for Russia and the vast empire's people. It had all begun so well. All the looming problems facing the nation, so starkly revealed in the defeat and revolution of 1905, had for a time been swept aside and forgotten in the rush of war fever and patriotism. Such enthusiasm seemed to be well-founded; though hopes for a quick victory were ultimately disappointed, Russia's soldiers had acquitted themselves well against their Germanic foes. Pressing into Galicia and threatening even Hungary itself, the great bane of all Russia's Balkan ambitions, Austria-Hungary, teetered on the brink of total defeat. The Ottoman Empire's decision to ally with the Central Powers only expanded the horizons of the Russian pan-Slavic dreams. With Britain as an ally in this war, the long-sought hope of Russian arms standing astride the Bosporus was within reach.
All such hopes evaporated quickly, however, with the crushing defeats delivered to the Grand Duke Nikolai's forces in Poland. Stunned by the sudden reversal, the people struggled to find a reason for their defeat. Indeed, under the merciless assault of the German armies, the grave weaknesses of the Russian armed forces were exposed to light. For all the enthusiasm of the liberal middle classes, Russia's war was to be fought by a vast mob of illiterate peasants, hardly a generation removed from the era of serfdom. Poorly trained and hardly caring for the plight of distant racial cousins in Serbia - or, indeed, having little awareness of the nearest town - the soldiers of the Tsar's armies were unmotivated, save for the threat of punishment meted out all too frequently by arrogant, lazy, or inept, and sometimes all three, officers. Whatever luster there was to military life was soon scoured off by the sting of German machine guns and artillery.
Worse, Russia was ill-equipped to fight a modern war. Critical supplies and equipment, including guns, ammunition, and uniforms, were in short supply, and the infrastructure of the state was hardly prepared to cope with the increased demands placed on it by the needs of the front lines. The railroads, such as they were, could either supply the armies or supply the cities, not both. Naturally, the Tsar Nicholas II and his advisors chose the former. The results were predictable. Prices rose as goods became scarce. Wages for factory workers, already pitifully inadequate, were either frozen or slashed. The state did not even had a coherent policy for continuing the supply of the army. The need instead was filled by patriotic industrialists and middle class bourgeoisie who worked tirelessly to bring order to a chaotic mess. At the price of many new grey hairs and painful ulcers, the gap was filled. And so long the army continued to advance, the sacrifices were worth it.
Few were ready to admit that their nation was a ramshackle, backward state run by an inept buffoon of a man and a corrupt, indolent administration. They cheered when the Tsar vowed to travel to the front and assume personal command of his armies so carelessly handled by the Grand Duke. And when General Bruisilov's armies in Transylvania were subsequently encircled and destroyed, they raged all the harder. Accusations of treason and German sabotage began to fly, many aimed at the Tsar's German wife and the scandalous mystic Rasputin from some backwater of the Urals she had allegedly taken as a lover. Calls for drastic reform, reminiscent of those aired a decade earlier, were renewed. Sound, determined administration of the affairs of state, to say nothing of generals capable of leading the armies, was needed, and soon.
But to the common people of the Russian cities and countryside, and certainly for the common soldier, the solution was simple: end the war. Millions had already been killed or wounded on the battlefield, led to their doom practically unarmed, naked against the elements, only to be beaten and insulted by their officers when their mass charges against machine gun nests failed. At home, food grew increasingly scarce, disease began to emerge, and a continuation of the war seemed to promise only renewed or increased misery. Anger and frustration bred resentment for the regime, and civil unrest began to spread. With each passing day, Okhrana agents warned, the working classes became angrier and angrier, resulting in violent outbursts as mobs stormed bakeries suspected of hording food or workers went out on strike. In the countryside, peasants were now attacking conscription officers, and in a few incidents even attacked noble or zemstvo properties.
At atmosphere in Petrograd was tense as winter descended in late 1915, promising heightened suffering for the people unable to afford to heat their shabby homes. The demand for drastic action was becoming undeniable. Convinced, or rather deluded into believing, that the root of Russia's mounting crisis lay in the inordinate influence Rasputin held over the Tsarist administration, a cabal of aristocrats and conservative Duma members plotted to assassinate him. Invited to a party hosted by Prince Felix Yusupov, Rasputin was attacked by the conspirators on December 16, 1915. Though the precise details remain shrouded in uncertainty, by the morning the Russian monk was dead, the victim of a savage beating, multiple gunshot wounds, and perhaps even a drowning in the freezing Neva River.
If the cabal expected Rasputin's death to solve anything, they were soon disappointed. Emotionally devastated by the assassination, the Tsarina arrested the patriotic assassins and arranged for Rasputin to be buried at the Tsarist palace in Tsarskoye Selo. But the bottom had now fallen out of the regime. Unrest was still rising due to the terrible deprivations heaped upon the civilian population by the demands of a war they cared nothing for, but the assassination of Rasputin was the final straw. Factory workers throughout the city began to go out on strike on December 17, their numbers increasing en masse with each day, threatening both critical war production and supplies to the capital in the process. Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin, facing the crisis with neither grace nor skill, demanded the workers return to their posts. The workers responded by calling a general strike, which effectively shut down Petrograd on January 1, 1915. Faced with the defiance of the workers and the danger resulting from the practical isolation of the city from the outside world, Goremykin and the Tsarina agreed to send in troops to break the strikes and restore order on January 3.
The government's decision had the opposite effect. Presented with orders to disperse the strikers, with deadly force if needed, the soldiers in and around Petrograd wavered. Many of the units stationed in the capital were unreliable at best, having been pulled from the front to recuperate from combat or to stem the rise of dissension amongst the rank and file. Few, if any, relished the idea of marching with fixed bayonets on people, many of them women and children, who wanted little more than food and an end to the war. Indeed, far more agreed with the strikers. Fights broke out almost immediately, with beleaguered contingents and soldiers being swarmed by furious civilians, who heaped insults upon the men and attacked with improvised weapons; shots were fired, blood spilling in the snow. Riots erupted across the entire city and the streets were alive with the sound of gunfire, as soldiers, mounted Cossacks, and police snipers did what they could. The following day, the situation had spun completely out of control. Soldiers, many of who had simply fired harmlessly into the air the day before, refused to march out of their barracks for a second day of bloodletting. The Volinsky Guards Regiment was the first to mutiny, the soldiers arresting or shooting most of the higher ranking officers. A chain reaction followed, as more and more units either refused to obey the regime's orders or actively switched allegiance to the rioters, culminating the spectacular mutiny of the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base and their descent upon the capital.
With the army no longer to be relied upon, the regime toppled like a house of cards. The arsenal was sacked, police headquarters set alight, while monuments and symbols of Tsarist authority were torn down or vandalized. Government authority was now gone, as armed bands of workers and soldiers roamed the streets, flushing out the last pockets of government resistance. By the end of the day, the last army garrisons had switched sides. Liberal members of the Duma gathered together in the Tauride Palace to form a new, provisional government, claiming sovereign authority of the Russian state and demanding that Nicholas abdicate. At the same time, in the opposite wing of the palace, members from the various socialist and trade union parties formed the Petrograd Soviet, to oversee the administration of the newly liberated city and represent the workers and soldiers. News of the revolution swept through the army at the front like a tidal wave. Whole units, fed up with the war, threw down their guns and deposed their officers. Authority collapsed, and any thoughts Nicholas may have entertained about marching on Petrograd were rendered null by the wave of mutinies. Faced with the unanimous consensus of his general staff and ministers, Nicholas II abdicated on January 6, 1915 and was placed under arrest by the Provisional Government.
The Provisional Government that claimed to now govern Russia was a classically liberal collective, comprised chiefly of Duma representatives, land owners, and industrialists, and headed by the Georgy Lvov, a prominent provincial landowner who had done much in his years of tireless service to try and generate reforms from the local level upwards. Lvov and his new cabinet, a rickety hodge-podge of Kadets, or constitutional democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, and classical Marxists, the Mensheviks, had a monumental task before them of satisfying the demands of the vast majority of the Russian populace and restoring a semblance of order to the state. But for all its estimable liberal credentials proven from years of parliamentary opposition, the Provisional Government was sorely lacking in the one respect that mattered most: authority. Its ability to enforce its edicts beyond their wing of the Tauride depended solely on the compliance of the Petrograd Soviet and, moreover, the willingness of the populace to listen. And outside of the cities, no one at all held any authority, matters of life and death now in the hands of the unleashed peasantry.
Lvov was a decent, hardworking man, but he had little chance to prove his qualities as a leader. The Petrograd Soviet had little patience for the debating club that had set up camp in the opposite end of the palace. In the days immediately following the December Revolution, so-called because Russia still adhered to the Julian calendar, the Soviet rapidly organized the workers and soldiers and restored some semblance of normality to the city operations, all the while flouting the dictates of the Provisional Government. The Entente powers and the United States may have recognized Lvov and his cohorts as the legitimate government, but the Soviet had not; a wealthy landowner like Lvov, though his steadfast effort to save his family estate and local activism left the man with little in the way of money, could not possibly represent the will of the workers. A true champion of the working classes was needed. One man jumped at the chance: Alexander Kerensky, the vice-chairman of the Soviet and a brilliant orator. Swept up by the speeches he made promising an end to the people's misery and a true reworking of the nation’s social structure, the Soviet issued a demand that Lvov resign in favor of Kerensky. Even if Lvov had refused, it would have made no difference. So, on January 24, not even three weeks after the revolution, Kerensky became the second prime minister of the revolutionary government. Appointing himself supreme commander of the army for good measure, Kerensky now dominated the government.
With the cooperation of the Soviet, Kerensky's new government did better than the last. Quickly, he announced that a Constituent Assembly would be convened in six months to decide the ultimate form of government. Generals and officers were stripped of their authority, which was now to rest in the hands of soldiers' committees. The administration of the capital's essential services was improved, and contact was reestablished with some degree of reliability with the rest of Russia. But as Kerensky bounded from place to place and delivered an endless number of speeches, he continued to dance around the major issues that truly mattered. Nothing was said of land reform, the only issue that mattered to the vast multitudes of peasants, while rumors began to circulate of a renewed offensive in the spring to drive back the German armies, leaving the revolutionary soldiers feeling betrayed.
But so long as Kerensky enjoyed the endorsement of the Soviet, which was seen by most in the capital as the only legitimate authority, he would remain in control. That control, however, was soon put to the test when a train pulled into the Finland rail station in Petrograd just before midnight on January 30. The sealed, one-carriage train was from Switzerland, having traveled through Germany and through the front lines by special permission of the German Foreign Ministry. Its cargo was a political exile gone from Russia for nearly a decade: Vladimir Lenin. Greeted by a band of workers playing the
Marseillaise and a Menshevik representative of the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin turned to the gathered workers and declared, "The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe. The world-wide Socialist revolution has already dawned. Germany is seething. Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. Sailors, comrades, we have to fight for a socialist revolution, to fight until the proletariat wins full victory! Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!" Several of the workers booed Lenin while the rest looked on silently. No one wanted to fight the present war, let alone one global in scope. It was hardly the most auspicious start to a renewed political career, but it was a start nonetheless.
Back in Russia, Lenin quickly set about rallying the scattered, disorganized elements of the Bolshevik party structure and laying the groundwork for the revolution he deemed inevitable and imminent. After his initial stumbling, Lenin soon educated himself on the situation in the country after so long in exile. The weakness of the Kerensky government and the fragility of his popularity were laid bare as the Bolsheviks unleashed a campaign demanding 'peace, land, and bread,' simultaneously courting the soldiers, peasants, and workers. Against these attacks, Kerensky could offer no constructive policy, instead limiting himself to attacks on Lenin as a charlatan demagogue. Coming as it did from Kerensky, it had little impact on the populace. And with the opening of the campaign season and the threat of a renewed fight against the Central Powers, time was running out for the Provisional Government.
Matters finally came to a head on March 28, when rumors began to circulate that Kerensky had left the capital to rendezvous with several generals and officers formerly of the Tsarist regime in the city of Pskov in preparation for a march on Petrograd and a purge of the Bolsheviks. While Kerensky had indeed left the city, it was to motivate the army for one last, great offensive, not as part of any plot against Lenin and his cohorts. But when he failed to materialize the following day, the worst suspicions seemed confirmed. Already high-strung from over a month of bitter rhetorical duels with Kerensky, Lenin badgered the party's Central Committee into approving a seizure of power the following morning. On March 30, the Bolsheviks sprung into action, dispatching contingents of soldiers and armed workers who had switched their allegiance Lenin's cause to secure the city. While many might not have actively supported the Bolsheviks, almost none were willing to oppose it in favor of Kerensky by now. The March Revolution unfolded almost without a single shot being fired. The remnants of the Provisional Government were rounded up in the all-but abandoned Winter Palace and placed under arrest. Flush with victory, Lenin proclaimed 'all power to the Soviets.' The Soviet Union was born; the communist revolution had begun.
For Hindenburg and Ludendorff, looking on from their headquarters in Warsaw with no small degree of bewilderment, it made little difference if the Tsar, Prince Lvov, Kerensky, or a Bolshevik cabal controlled Russia. It was still an enemy that refused to give up the fight. The winter snows were melting. It was time to go on the offensive once again.