But in February its commanders confessed that morale was so low, and desertion so general, that they could no longer rely on their troops. The morale of the army only reflected that of the country as a whole. Revolutionary agitation, common enough before the war but anaesthetized when hostilities began, was now almost unchecked. In March bread riots in Petrograd turned to revolution when the police and army made common cause with the rioters. The Czar was persuaded to abdicate. A regime of bourgeois moderates took over the machinery of government, but an alternative focus of power was established in the capital by a council (Soviet) of soldiers and workers, which established a network of alternative authority throughout the country and called for an immediate peace.
These events were at first welcomed in the West, not least in the United States. Czarist Russia had been an embarrassing ally in a war fought to make the world safe for democracy, and the new government under Alexander Kerensky declared its intention of continuing the war for the defence of the Russian homeland. In July Brusilov attempted to repeat his triumph of the previous year with a major offensive on the Galician front, with some initial success. Then the Germans counter-attacked in the north. The Russian defences crumbled. Retreat became a rout, and the speed of the German advance was determined only by their ability to keep up with Russian troops now ‘voting with their feet’ and going home. In September the Baltic fortress of Riga fell after a hurricane bombardment devised by the innovative genius of a certain Colonel Bruchmuller.
Meanwhile in Petrograd a revolutionary leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov Lenin, whose views had been regarded as too extreme by all but his closest colleagues and whose return from exile in Switzerland had been sagaciously facilitated by the German High Command, had been voicing the demands of the huge majority of his countrymen in three simple words: bread, land, and peace. In November he precipitated a second coup d’état. This created not a vacuum of power as had that in March, but a ruthless dictatorship whose immediate aims commanded the support of the Russian people even if its programme and ideology did not. Lenin immediately asked the German High Command for an armistice, and in December both sides met to discuss peace terms at Brest-Litovsk.
The Eastern Front in 1915
