Crisis of Tsarism¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter dissects the terminal crisis of the Tsarist autocracy on the eve of the 1917 revolutions, arguing that the regime’s collapse was not a sudden accident but the product of irreconcilable social and political antagonisms reaching their highest tension. Drawing on Trotsky’s framework, it presents revolution as the inevitable outcome when the old ruling classes themselves find the situation unbearable. The core narrative traces the accelerating decomposition of the state through a cascade of evidence: military catastrophe, economic dislocation, and a strike wave of unprecedented scale. By 1916, official figures recorded 1,542 strikes involving 1,172,000 workers—surpassing the 1905 revolution—with political strikes doubling in number and participation. The chapter emphasises the shifting composition of the movement, noting that metal workers, the “heavy battalions of the proletariat,” displaced textile workers as the leading force, and that fraternisation at the front and peasant uprisings in Kazakhstan and Central Asia signalled the spread of insurgency beyond the urban centres.
The regime’s response—stepped-up repression, arrests, and a lockout that was broken by a general strike—only deepened the crisis. The chapter treats the assassination of Rasputin in December 1916 as a symptomatic episode, not a cause. The plot by the reactionary politician Purishkevich and a clique of noblemen, who hoped to save the monarchy by eliminating the Tsarina’s corrupt favourite and installing a constitutional monarch, is subjected to sharp polemic. The argument is that such palace intrigues rest on a fundamental delusion: that absolute monarchy can be separated from its court camarillas. The murder—a farcical sequence of cyanide-laced Madeira, multiple shootings, and a weighted corpse dumped in the Neva—achieved the opposite of its intended effect, leaving Nicholas more isolated and dependent on his wife. The chapter’s polemical thrust is directed against reformist illusions that a surgical operation at the top could salvage the autocracy. The real dynamic, it insists, lay in the depths of society: the eightfold increase in the money supply, the 47 per cent rise in rye prices, the 334 per cent increase in the cost of boots, and the spectacle of working women queuing forty hours a week for basic necessities. The regime was bankrupt not only economically but politically and morally, and the intrigues of dukes and field marshals were merely the antics of men dancing on the edge of a volcano.