The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes

Author:Orlando Figes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Wiser men had tried to alert the tsar to the dangers of a war – among them Petr Durnovo, the interior minister, who in February 1914 had pleaded with him not to drag the country into a needless clash with Germany. This would be a long conflict, he had warned, a war of attrition, in which the main burden would be placed on Russia to break through the German defences. Economically the country was too weak to fight for long. The government would lose authority, and social revolution would follow:

The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters … The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.26

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