Appointments to positions of considerable authority were routinely assigned by the Tsar on the grounds of either naked favoritism or the authoritarian credentials of the candidate. Spy scares raged through society, with particular suspicion falling on any Russian general unfortunate enough to have a Germanic name.

The Russian armies may have been short of food rations, but they actually had priority in the allotment of the harvests; the result was increasing food shortages in the major cities. Production of agricultural food stuffs was generally in sharp decline. As the populations of the cities began to starve, popular discontent spread.

Inflation was soaring, but wages remained static, so the poor were priced out of the market for whatever food was available. In a severe winter there were also shortages of fuel. The result was food riots, widespread industrial strikes and open political dissent, with most participants unanimous in blaming the Tsar and his government for their suffering.

In January 1917, an agent of the secret police reported that ‘Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word. A revolution’, he concluded, ‘if it takes place will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.’

At the local level, the Zemstvo, a form of county council, became a vehicle for welfare activity and for the involvement of professionals in public service.

In the summer of 1915, as the Russian armies fell back, the Tsar agreed to reconvene the Duma, which so far had been restricted to the briefest of wartime sessions. The moderate intellectuals, businessmen and professionals coalesced in a Progressive Bloc and, under the umbrella of foreign policy and liberalism, demanded ‘the formation of a united government’ and ‘decisive changes in the methods of administration’.

Pavel Milyukov of the Kadet Party said, ‘we don’t seek power now... the time will come when it will simply fall into our hands, it’s only necessary at present to have a clever bureaucrat as head of the government’. That was not the Tsar’s vision. He saw the Duma not as a vehicle for national unity but as a threat to his power.

Dynastic duty impelled the Tsar to discontinue the session of the Duma just as it had already prompted him to transfer his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, to the Caucasus command and to take over the supreme command of the army himself. ‘God’s will be fulfilled,’ he wrote to his wife as he arrived at headquarters. ‘I feel so calm. A sort of feeling after the Holy Communion!’

In Petrograd, what loomed was not liberalization for the better conduct of the war, but socialism to end the war. The population of the city had increased by one-third between 1914 and 1917 as the war industries expanded. But output per worker fell, despite longer working hours. Skilled males were replaced by unskilled females, children and prisoners of war. Many under-performed because of weakness and hunger. Food was simply not getting into the capital in sufficient quantities.

In the early stages of the revolution, the competing bodies were able to adopt a modus vivendi, coexisting in a dual structure and, for the most part, putting aside their differences to protect their position from the prospect of a counter-revolution.

A system of Soviets came into existence, more or less spontaneously, throughout the country, made up of the men in army units and factories. In the end, the villages also set up such councils to safeguard the revolution and ensure its promotion.

Early in 1917, Russian generals were full of fight. The prospect of American intervention against Germany gave the Russians and western Powers alike a hope of final success in 1917. Nonetheless, there was to be little fighting in the east in 1917.

Workers marched through Petrograd, and tens of thousands did so in other Russian cities. Although most were doing so to protest their hunger, a significant minority bore banners which linked social distress to political calls: ‘Down with the war’ or ‘Down with the autocracy’. Revolutionary socialists wanted delay in order to coordinate these protests. But female textile workers took to the streets to demand bread. By the afternoon they had been joined by metalworkers from the war industries, and now the targets were the government and the war.

Nicholas had left for Stavka in Mogilev. During the next few days, some of his generals advised him that only his abdication could save the monarchy. He attempted to return to Petrograd. When his train arrived at Malaya Vishera, 100 miles from the capital, he was told that the line to Petrograd was blocked by troops with artillery and machine guns, but he could go east to Moscow or west to Pskov.

The North Front's headquarters were at Pskov, so he went there, to be met by the Front commander, General Nikolai Ruzsky, with the news that the entire Petrograd Garrison had mutinied, and four regiments sent to restore order had been stopped on the outskirts, and had then deserted en masse.

Ruzsky urged the Tsar to establish parliamentary government. Alekseyev, on whose advice the Tsar had depended but who had been sick in the period immediately preceding the revolution, endorsed Ruzsky’s view. But by now the situation was irrecoverable. The Duma had established a provisional committee which called on the monarch to abdicate; advice which Ruzsky seconded. Faced with the choice between loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the nation, the Russian army opted for the latter.

To attempt to sort out the continuing shortages of food and basic supplies, it was decided to reduce the size of the army by releasing all men over forty-three years old. Even so, desertions continued to rise, and soon the Russian Army was a rapidly shrinking force. In these circumstances, Alexeyev admitted that he would have to delay the promised May offensive.

The Soviet at once claimed authority over the Petrograd garrison. It issued 'Army Order Number One', proclaiming itself the 'Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies' and decreeing that in all political actions military units must obey only its orders. Discipline must be observed on duty, but off-duty standing to attention and saluting were abolished and titles were replaced by 'Mr General', 'Mr Colonel', etc. Company Committees must control all weapons, and in no circumstances issue any to officers.

The preamble made it clear that the order applied only to the Petrograd Garrison, but copies reached the front, and discipline crumbled in their wake. In April, two Duma members visited the front and concluded that the morale of the artillery and Cossacks appeared intact, but the cavalry's was unknown, and much of the infantry was 'shaken'.

Order Number 1 required that all units form committees of elected representatives of the lower ranks. Order Number 1 did not of itself demand that officers be elected, but that was its outcome. Officers had to court popularity, and some of those who did not were lynched, while others were arrested.

‘Between us and them is an impassable gulf,’ one officer wrote at the end of March. ‘No matter how well they get on with individual officers, in their eyes we are all barins. When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation; when they talk about it, they understand it as meaning only the democratic lower classes. In their eyes, what has occurred is not a political but a social revolution, which in their opinion they have won and we have lost.’

While Nicholas was travelling to Pskov, General Rodzyanko spoke to Alexeyev, who agreed that Nicholas must abdicate. He sent telegrams seeking all the Front commanders' opinions. Their replies all recommended abdication.

Nicholas named his only son, Alexei, the young boy with hemophilia, as his successor, with the provision that the Tsar’s brother, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, should be regent until the son came of age. He later altered the succession so that the crown was to go directly to his brother.

The Petrograd Soviet and the Duma agreed that the crown should pass to the Tsar’s brother, Mikhail, but Mikhail refused, at the urging of Alexander Kerensky and others of the Duma. Mikhail indicated he would serve if called by an official constituent assembly, but in the meantime he refused to assume the ‘Supreme Power’.

The decisive influence upon the Tsar had been the advice of his Chief of Staff, Alexeyev, who had cabled him in the following terms: ‘A revolution in Russia... will mean a disgraceful termination of the war... The army is most intimately connected with the life of the rear. It may be confidently stated that disorders in the rear will produce the same result among the armed forces. It is impossible to ask the army calmly to wage war while a revolution is in progress in the rear. The youthful makeup of the present army and its officer staff, among whom a very high proportion consists of reservists and commissioned university students, gives no grounds for assuming that the army will not react to events occurring in Russia.’

A direct military assault ran the risk of triggering the underlying patriotism of the Russian troops; far better to let them tear themselves apart from within.

On his arrival in Russian in April 1917, Lenin duly called for an end to the war and a socialist redistribution of land. The February revolution was over, but the troubles in Russia had just begun. Lenin traveled from Switzerland with the permission of the German authorities. Although his enemies used that fact to suggest that Lenin actually worked for the Germans, his trip had been funded by several Bolsheviks who had made fortunes using their underground connections to arrange the smuggling of western products into wartorn Russia.

When Lenin arrived in Petrograd, an enthusiastic crowd greeted him at the Finland railway station. After his impassioned speech, they seemed eager for him to seize power and install the proletariat revolution. Lenin, however, held back, seeking better timing.

Though General Erich Ludendorff later admitted that the German army 'had been fought to a standstill, and was utterly worn out', the Germans considered that they had done well enough in the east to transfer eight divisions to the west. They were somewhat surprised when in January-February 1917 the Russian army attacked, gaining some ground in Bukovina. However, at the end of February joint German-Austrian counterattacks recovered it all.

Alexander Kerensky, first as Minister of War and then as head of the Provisional Government, supported this strategy of restoring order. He launched an offensive in July, which failed, and then appointed the youthful and heroic Lavr Kornilov commander-in-chief, with a mandate to restore discipline. But he now feared the threat of counter-revolution more than that of revolution.

The Germans took Riga at the beginning of September, and when Kornilov began to push troops toward Petrograd for its defense they were seen to be the outriders for a counter-revolutionary coup, not the agents of the Provisional Government. Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet and its militia, the Red Guard, under Leon Trotsky, to check Kornilov.

It was not only domestic events which separated the army’s officers from their men. Kerensky hoped the war would unite the nation and the revolution. But the decision of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets to support a peace without annexations or indemnities made those who supported the war’s continuation seem imperialist. Moreover, peace promised land reform and redistribution. Peasants wanted to be at home when that happened. The rise in desertions was not immediate but the process of disintegration was now under way.

German and Austro-Hungarian propaganda played on the worries about land redistribution. Thus the pressures on the Russian army came not just from the rear, but from the other side of the line as well. The spontaneous truce of Christmas 1914 on the western front had had its eastern-front counterpart, albeit at Easter and in every year up to and including 1917. OberOst, the German commandment for the war in the East, now condoned such fraternisation. It was also supported by Russian revolutionaries, who hoped to spread the revolution westwards.

First appointed Minister of Justice, Kerensky became Minister of War, then Prime Minister, and at once set about a purge of the high command, which he regarded as defeatist. Alexei Brusilov, the army's most successful commander, became Chief of Staff, while Kerensky's own commissars were sent to the front with the mission of encouraging an offensive spirit among the common soldiers.

The February Revolution was not political in origin. It was initially a protest against material deprivation and became a revolution only because the military garrison of Petrograd refused to join in the repression of the demonstrators and then took their side against the gendarmerie and the Cossacks, the state's traditional agencies of police action.

The Soviet’s order on army matters decreed an end to officers’ authority. Henceforth that authority could, in most units, be enforced only through agreement with the unit’s council.

The division of power between government and Soviet was, in fact, artificial. The government had control of the bureaucracy, but increasingly it lost control of the armed forces, and it owed most of its power to the Soviet. But the Soviet did not know how to use its power yet. Most of its early leaders earnestly wished that the Provisional Government would do the job.

The Soviet had pledged itself, quite early on, to ‘peace without annexations or contributions’. But, as became increasingly clear, the German government was not interested in this, except from tactical motives, so that, unless the Soviet wanted to see Ludendorff invade Russia, it must go on fighting the war. In this event, power must be left to the generals. In the same way, the maintenance of the economy must be left to bankers and industrialists who understood these things.

It was only after Lenin’s return to Russia that the Bolsheviks adopted an out and-out revolutionary program: unremitting class-war in town and country, immediate peace, all power to the Soviets. It was not until September that the Soviets became, in majority, Bolshevik.

The system did not break down because of Bolshevik agitation alone. To begin with, the Bolsheviks were just as confused as the other parties. They too accepted that the revolution must be defended against German imperialism. After the March Revolution they were eager, to their subsequent embarrassment, to get back to normal — with Lev Kamenev and Stalin appealing for ‘order’ in the army and the factories, and Maxim Gorki telling people to get back to work.