To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [148]
It was the kind of upheaval in the ranks that every general in this war had always dreaded. By March 17 the Tsar had been forced to abdicate, a new Provisional Government was in power, and a few days later, at the palace where Milner had visited them the previous month, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were placed under house arrest. Petrograd's main prison and the secret police archive were set ablaze. Across the vast country, jubilant soldiers and civilians began ripping down flags and smashing statues and plaques with the double-headed eagle emblem of the Romanov dynasty. More than 300 years of Romanov rule were suddenly history.
The Germans were delighted, while the dismayed Allies took cold comfort when Russia's Provisional Government, under strong pressure from them, announced it would remain in the war. That promise meant little, however, for the very municipal government of Petrograd—in a process repeated in some other cities—came under the control of a much more radical soviet, or council, which began issuing its own orders to the army. Among them, men in all military units were to elect their own soviets, a dramatic break in the centuries-old chain of command. The already high rate of desertion only increased, sailors lynched dozens of naval officers, and on March 27, 1917, the Petrograd Soviet declared that the peoples of Europe should "take into their own hands the decision of the question of war and peace." It urged the workers of Germany and Austria-Hungary to join their Russian comrades in refusing to fight in the war of "kings, landowners, and bankers." A Russian War Ministry official confessed to the British military attaché that army discipline was collapsing: when replacement troops were sent forward, so many deserted that less than one man in four reached the front. The army was still fighting, but at this rate, how long would that last?
Radical opponents of the war across the continent were thrilled with the news from Petrograd. "The wonderful events in Russia," wrote Rosa Luxemburg from the German prison cell where her antiwar protests had landed her, "affect me like an elixir.... I am absolutely certain that a new epoch is starting now and that the war cannot last much longer." The conscientious objectors serving time in London's Wormwood Scrubs were delighted that as one of its first acts, the Provisional Government had granted amnesty to all political prisoners—including more than 800 war resisters in Russian jails.
Emrys Hughes, the future husband of Keir Hardie's daughter, was in prison in Wales when another CO furtively handed him a newspaper page wrapped in a handkerchief; he turned his back to the peephole in his cell door and read the electrifying news: "The old order was dead, a new society was being born ... the end of the war was in sight." Bertrand Russell hailed the upheaval in Russia as "a stupendous event ... more cheering than anything that has happened since the war began." As March ended, nearly 12,000 Londoners packed a rally in the Royal Albert Hall to show their support for the Russians who had overthrown the Tsar; 5,000 more were turned away at the door. It was the first time in over a year that a dissident public meeting in the city had not been broken up by patriot gangs. "I longed to shout at them at the end to come with me and pull down Wormwood Scrubs," wrote Russell. "They would have done it.... A meeting of the kind would have been utterly impossible a month ago."
"I remember the miners," the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan recalled years later, "when they heard that the Tsarist tyranny had been overthrown, rushing to meet each other in the streets with tears streaming down their cheeks, shaking hands." May Day gatherings brought more celebrations: a crowd one left-wing newspaper claimed at 70,000 in Glasgow, a big peace march in London, and a rally in Liverpool that featured actual Russians: 150 bewildered sailors who happened