Owing to the unrestrained orgy of power in which the successive rulers appointed at Rasputin's suggestion had indulged during their short terms of office, there was in 1917 no political party, no class upon which the Czarist Government could rely. Everybody considered that Government as the enemy of the people. Extreme Monarchists and Socialists, the united nobility, labour groups, Grand Dukes and half-educated soldiers--all were of the same opinion. I do not intend to examine the activities of the Government which led to the Revolution, its struggle against the people and against representative institutions. I will only draw a summary of the accusations which were justly levelled by the Duma against the Government on the eve of its downfall:
All the Institutions of the State and of society--the Council of the Empire, the Duma, the nobility, the Zemstvos, the municipalities--were under suspicion of disloyalty, and the Government was in open opposition to them, and paralysed all their activities in matters of statesmanship and social welfare.
Lawlessness and espionage had reached unheard-of proportions. The independent Russian Courts of Justice became subservient to "the requirements of the political moment."
[Illustration: Funeral of the first victims of the March Revolution in Petrograd.]
Whilst in the Allied countries all classes of society worked whole-heartedly for the defence of their countries, in Russia that work was repudiated with contempt, and the work was done by unskilled and occasionally criminal hands, which resulted in such disastrous phenomena as the activities of Sukhomlinov and Protopopov. The Committee "of Military Industries," which had rendered great services in provisioning the Army, was being systematically destroyed. Shortly before the Revolution its labour section was arrested without any reason being assigned, and this very nearly caused sanguinary disturbances in the capital. Measures adopted by the Government without the participation of social organisations shattered the industrial life of the country. Transport was disorganised, and fuel was wasted. The Government proved incapable and impotent in combating this disorder, which was undoubtedly caused to a certain extent by the selfish and sometimes rapacious designs of industrial magnates. The villages were derelict. A series of wholesale mobilisations, without any exemptions granted to classes which worked for defence, deprived the villages of labour. Prices were unsettled, and the big landowners were given certain privileges. Later, the grain contribution was gravely mismanaged. There was no exchange of goods between towns and villages. All this resulted in the stopping of food supplies, famine in the towns, and repression in the villages. Government servants of all kinds were impoverished by the tremendous rise in prices of commodities, and were grumbling loudly.