S4 – Interview 3: Joshua Sanborn

writer Carl Nillis, covers so much more than that. His scholarship is a deep exploration of the connections between war and politics in the Romanov Empire and the way that the bloodshed rippled out across all of Russian society, from high to low. So it's a pleasure to offer you this conversation. But strap in because this train moves at one hundred miles an hour and we're headed for the Eastern Front of the Great War. This is the Unobscured

Interview series for season four. I'm Aaron Minky for Unobscured podcast. I'm Carl Nellis, and I'm joined today by Dr Joshua Sanborn. Dr Sandborn is professor of history at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. He has been recognized with numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, including a fellowship from the National

Endowment for the Humanities. In two thousand three, he published Drafting the Russian Nation, Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics from nineteen o five to and more recently he published Imperial Apocalypse, The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire with Oxford University Press. Dr Sanborn is fantastic, His writing is great. I hope you grated and check out his books if you're interested in really digging into the history of this period. Um, it's fantastic to have

you joined us on Unobscured. Dr Sanborn, welcome. Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So let's start kind of from that general picture of your work, UM, maybe with Imperial Apocalypse in particular, that you've written a fascinating book here on the internal dynamics of the late Russian Empire, especially the significance of the resistance to Russian control in the border countries, but all the ramifications of that as well, can you say a few things about

what brought you to this work in particular? Sure. Yeah, As as with many scholar careers, it sort of follows a certain kind of trajectory. UM. I got interested in Russia and in Russian history actually back in high school. I grew up at the very end of the Cold War, very interested in what was happening in terms of arms control, disarmament, as very concerned about UM, the way the world was headed and the possibility of of nuclear war between the

two superpowers. I was firmly convinced that UM better better relations between the two countries were necessary. By the time I graduated college in the Soviet Union was ending, and so when I was in graduate school in the middle

of the nineteen nineties, that same conflict wasn't present. But but I certainly had already caught the caught the Russia hug, and I did have this interest in UM in UH in thinking about security and thinking about UM military affairs, not from the perspective of a military practitioner, of an officer or people that that work in in in the defense departments saying, but from the perspective of someone that wanted to look at military affairs UH through through a

broader lens, through social, political, or cultural lenses. So UM, that's how I got onto the topic of military conscription. Of chapters in there not only about about conscription itself, but also about women and UH and women soldiers in World War One, about draft resistors and conscientious objectors. It allowed me to sort of think about a lot of the ways that that nationhood was constructed through the performance of violence. UM. And so that was what that that

book was about. And one of the things UM, as I was doing the research for that book, I realized that there was a real UM opening and a real potential UH to write a book about World War One. UM. The centennial World War One was coming up. I published this book on the Hunter the anniversary of the UH the start of the war, and there were other historians, many other historians who were who were also developing projects

at this time. UM and I began this project as sort of, UM yeah, a an investigation of life in frontline zones. I was really interested in the civilian experience, what happened to civilians that we're living in these occupied territories who were subject to deportations, millions of whom became refugees, um. Were tossed back and forth between these empires and had this really interesting political experience as nationalism really sort of

grew in the period too UM. And so I moved from that to to a larger conception of the war, not just as a lived experience, but also as this moment of decolonization. At this moment where European empires, UM, we're collapsing, the big Land empires were collapsing, the German Empire, the Austriungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. And what relationship did the did the war have to that? In other words, was it just sort of the final

blow or was it something more more substantial? And so that was that was what was beginning to govern the way I then structured and wrote the book m HM. And if someone who is not a historian or is not a specialist was to pick up Imperial Apocalypse, UM, what would you hope that they would take away from reading it? So, if if that was the idea coming in to discover, what would you hope that a reader would come away thinking about the relationship between the end

of European empires? And Yeah, so in the first place, it was an attempt to give especially English language readers, the possibility to learn more about the war looked like from the Eastern Front. Um. There have been many works actually written on the Eastern Front, but most of the ones that sort of had a um uh an ability to sort of look at the thing in the whole um uh. Many of those were quite dated back to the nineteen seventies, and the archives had opened since then.

There were a lot of new ways about thinking about Russian politics and the Russian Revolution um and so this is a relatively compact way for them to get to know what's going on on the Eastern Front. So I talked about the stical things that are going on and talk about these social experiences, but I also talk about the military events um and and and and all of

these are are tightly linked. As as I try to show in the book, that you can't actually understand um what's happening on the front without understanding what's happening in the home front and vice versa. So that's the first thing, this sort of compact understanding of of of the Eastern Front and World War One UM and the second thing is to understand this relationship between empires, wars and revolutions. UM. Empires are not just big states. There are states that

are built around the principle of inequality. Right, one political society is dominating other ones UM. And the metropolitan centers are privileged, whether you're in London or in St. Petersburg, And the colonial spaces are dominated, right, whether you're in Ireland or in Poland. Right, those are places that that you are not UM, you know, sort of experiencing equality in the in the years building up to DA fourteen.

And this domination is enacted by the state UM. And so when wars weakened states, as they sometimes do, and they definitely did in Eastern Europe at this time, you get opportunities for different kinds of political futures, including social revolutions which we see in the in the period, but

also nationalist bits for independence. Would you briefly describe the role in that imperial context that autocracy played in Russian life and maybe in Russian life and consciousness, or you know, kind of a cultural history approach to it UM at the end of the eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen dred How would you characterize the relationship between the czaars

and the people they ruled. And and this is a little curve of maybe on the question that I handed you, But would you want to make a distinction between the relationship between the oars and the people in the center of Russian and thestars and the people elsewhere? Yeah, no, this is a this is surprisingly difficult question to answer. Actually, it's it's hard to know what the relationship between that's

are and the people were. Um uh, in large part, I mean, if you were right, there no surveys, there are no polls, there are no there's no way to really get at this question. And so much of what we have is the representation of the autocracy itself for how it wanted that relationship to be, how it wanted it to look, and they had a lot of resources

in order to sort of have that happen. Indeed, in the years building up to World War One, there are a series of celebrations um that sort of Um yeah, they they they they heightened this um that they were intended to heighten this bond between the monarch and the people, and these build up to the um the term centenary, the anniversary of the Romanov dynasty itself in nt UM and so they have big celebrations that always always are trying to stress this bond between that's Are and the people.

And generations actually of historians have um have sort of accepted this in a lot of ways. Uh, you know, have accepted this notion that, yeah, there was this thing called, um, you know, popular monarchism where the peasants they loved That's Are. They might not like their landlord, but they love their It's Are. That's Are represented Russia for them, UM. And uh,

there's just not a lot of evidence to to support that. UM. There's not a lot of evidence to suggest that it wasn't there either, UM, other than what actually ends up happening in the war. And so my argument ultimately is that you know, when you see this revolt against it's Are, UM, you start to get these signals UM. And indeed these have been building for years that um. Uh that that peasants, who you know, the farmers, Russian farmers throughout the empire, UM,

are not satisfied with UM with That's Are. Do not look at him as a little god, do not look at them him as their as their little father. UM. And so you know, it's kind of hard to know that now the relationship between um that's are in ethnic Russians and and and those on the periphery UM that is certainly different um and and that's going to vary widely depending on where in the Russian Empire you are.

So nationalism uh and anti Russian nationalism is developing more strongly in certain places than in others, most notably in Poland um Uh, but also beginning to develop that by the time we get to the twentieth century in places like UH, like Ukraine and in the Baltic State it's uh and even to a certain extent, um more broadly into sort of the Asian territories of the Russian Empire too.

M um And I guess, you know, just finally, I guess if I were to characterize this relationship, I think the thing we have to remember is that this relationship is distant. That's are always wanted to see this as an intimate relationship, but but it was a distant one. You know, most people, of course never saw that's aar um And you know, they lived their lives in their local regions, in these local contexts, and that's oar was something that was was very far away, and they had

and they thought had very little impact, probably on their lives. Um. One movement in the prelude to the collapse of the Russian Empire was the process called Russification or Russianization. You write that it entailed assaults on churches, language schools. At the precise moment when the Great reforms from the eighteen sixties, we're creating conditions in which the social basis of nationalism

could develop. Would you give us kind of a brief overview of Ruscification, Um, it's relationship to nationalism maybe, and especially beyond the metropole of the Russian Empire. Yeah. Sure. Um. The first thing we have to keep in mind is that the Russian Empire was created before nations were born, including the Russian nation. UM. So nationalism is a fairly late development historically, not just in Russia but but everywhere.

We can see its early growth among elite educated populations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but it's not really until the late eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century that it begins to take off in Europe, in the America's and of course the Romanov dynasty had been founded in the seventeenth century. UM, and in the nineteenth century.

It's at the same time that we're seeing not only the great reforms in Russia, which you're intended to sort of create a more modern empire, um, but we see mass industrialization, we see the beginning of mass politics and Russia, and certainly it's wide expansion elsewhere in Europe. We see mass education take root, um, huge strides in literacy and the ability of people to be uh to be reading

newspaper articles about about what's going on. UM. Now, the political power of nationalism, including its ability to mobilize much stronger armed forces, was evident quite quickly to politicians UM. And so you have all of these pre national multi ethnic states, the Habsburg Empire, the romanof Dynasty, the Ottoman Empire, all of them are trying to nationalize themselves over the

course of the nineteenth century. And so their problem is in a multi ethnic state, as all of them are, as Russia certainly, is they either have to figure out how to fashion a multi ethnic national project, that is to say, a nation that is not founded on a single ethnicity, or to engage in building ethnic nationalism. In fact, Russia tried to do both, but it was this latter project defending the idea that the Russian Empire was for the benefit of ethnic Russians and could be defined by

Russian characteristics in terms of language and church. That caused the problems of Rucification. So, in concrete terms, what roots vacation is it's an attempt to uh to to limit let's say, um uh Polish participation in politics, UH to forbid the publishing of of Ukrainian language texts, UH to ensure that local schools, these new schools that are that are building, are being taught in Russian with a Russian sylla,

with Russian curriculum basically right. So that's on a concrete level, what what's happening is they're going into these regions and say, no, you have to go to a Russian language school. No, the Orthodox Church is the preferred church, not not not Catholicism or Lutheranism as it as it is for many the populations, especially in the west of the Empire or islam in in in the large squas of of of Asia.

They're going into all these regions and they're saying, no, Russian, this is the Russian Empire and you have to learn Russian. This um And you can see why imperial administrators might want to say, okay, well, look, Ukrainian nationalism is as a problem we have to figure out. Let's solve it by by teaching all these Ukrainian kids Russian history and the Russian language, and maybe we'll we'll sort of forestall it. But in fact, it was the visit that took place

at the very moment. Like people before the nineteenth century didn't think of themselves as Ukrainians, they didn't think of themselves as Russians. They thought of themselves as peasants or as Christians, but they didn't have these these strong ethnic identifications that that that linked them to these political projects.

So the very moment they're learning about this their their their earliest the earliest political experiences is one of imperial oppression basically, and so this helps to generate these ethnic nationalists on the periphery. They had long tried to say, hey, you guys are all Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians will be like, I don't know, I'm kind of a peasant, I'm kind of a Christian. And now they're coming along and now they finally have the proof. They're like, see, your Ukrainians,

the state is punishing for being a Ukrainian. Now they say, oh, yeah, now I see you mean like I can't go to the church I want to go to. My kids are speaking some weird language when they come home from school with a weird accent, right like that, all of that becomes too much more concrete for them. And so as a result, rusification, which is intended to to limit the spread of ethnic nationalism, actually helps to develop it, especially

in the western borderlands Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Lava Estonia. This is where a lot of the roots vacation is happening, and where you see this huge surge and nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. And you write this is later on in your work, especially in nineteen sixteen, about events in Central Asia. Um. Do we know much about how Siberia experienced specification? Um? Yeah, So Siberia is

an interesting case. UM. And you know what had happened over the course of conquest in Siberia Um, from the sixteenth into the into the seventeenth centuries. Basically, UM, is that there had been especially in the north. The further north you went, they tended to be very small communities that got conquered and sort of incorporated into into the

Russian Empire and also settled by by ethnic slaws. Again, there there wasn't a strong sense of there are a lot of sort of people we were now called ethnic Ukrainians. We are doing this colonizing work out in out in

Siberia and elsewhere. Um. The more you got on the big rivers in Siberia and and especially down towards towards Central Asia, you you had more a large scale and settled Muslim communities, the remnants of the Mongol Empire basically and um and and those were places where they had a much more complicated time um sort of dealing with these this question of russianists and honestly, especially from the early nineteenth century, Uh, the goal was, the goal over

the centuries of the Russian administration was let's let's not do things to make people upset. We don't have a rebellion. So if people want to go to their own church, fine, who cares if if Muslims go go to a mosque, We we're not going to force them to go to an Orthodox church. They go to a mosque, as long as they're paying taxes and they're not rebelling, um, you know, and their elites are basically on board. We're we're fine

with all of this and so. But you know, it's only in the nineteenth century again that you start to see these pressures towards um, towards greater assimilation in a

certain way. And this is more possible for the ones that are closer to or conceived of as more possible for for those who are closer to the to the Russian Empire and had been conquered much earlier, especially along the Volga, the so called tatars Um along the Vulgar River, than it is for the newly conquered territories in the middle of the nineteenth century and what's called Turkestan at the time, what's now Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, parts of Kyrkistan. So,

so this region is newly conquered, um. And and this is a very special it's it's it's a colonial territory. It's it's treated um as sort of you know, as sort of the British retreat a colony in Africa or in Asia. M Um. So starting to look a little more detailed towards war and revolution and war and revolution again. Um, would you say a few words about how the nineteen o four Russo Japanese War and the Revolution of nineteen o five. Well, in your book you say it transformed

the international balance of power. And we you know, when we're talking about World War One, when we're talking about the downfall of Russia, we have to understand the rest of Japanese War and what change in Russian life and governance in nineteen o five. Can you talk about how those things were linked and what happened beyond the borders

and of Russia. Right, Yeah, So, so the Russo Japanese War happens at a very let me start with the international question first, it happens at a very volatile moment internationally, Um, you're in the midst of this huge arms race which is going to culminate in in World War One, the rise of of new powers challenging sort of the pre eminence, let's say, of the of of especially of the British Empire.

That the story of sort of the German challenge to the British Empire is well known, and we're fully in the midst of that by by nineteen o four and in nineteen o five. But also you're seeing emerging powers elsewhere in the world. Most notably Japan UM which is striving to be sort of the first non European member of the Club of Great Powers UM. At this stage they're not quite there. They have they have established um UH dominance in in East Asia that in they want

to war against China. The Qing Empire is is certainly um in the midst of of fading on the verge of collapse, which we'll do in a couple of years UM. And so Japan is clearly um UH the most significant power and they want to be recognized as such. And what happens as China becomes a target of global imperial control UM you know, you start to have the push for concessions, not only among the British, who had had

concessions for a while, but also among the Russians. The Americans now are are are are are trying to take take take part in this scramble for China. Japan is really trying to assert itself as as a regional power and and hopefully as as a global power. And and this um UH. The European powers are generally unwilling to do this, and Russia is for a varide of reasons, especially unwilling to do this and part of this has

to do with Nicholas himself. Um. He had done a tour before he became sorrow when he Saraevitch in into Asia, had traveled through through Japan, held a series of quite openly racist views towards towards the Japanese um and and did not want to think about the Japanese as a potential um imperial threat to to Russian imperial power um And.

This leads to a series of diplomatic incidents and then finally to a surprise attack by the Japanese in nineteen o four upon the Russian political Pacific fleet in Port Arthur And this results in a disastrous war for Russia. They lose. They have three main naval fleets in the in the Pacific and the Baltic and in the Black Sea. They lose two of them. The third one is bottled up in the Black Sea because they can't get through

the Straits um but their Pacific fleet is sunk. Basically at the beginning of the war, they send their Baltic fleet all the way around the world. The Japanese sink it to in the Straits of Sushima. Um And they lose almost all these All the major land battles, and so it's it's a complete disaster. And what it triggers is this mass mobilization not only for for a military for the military, but also kind of a political mobilization.

At the same moment, you have a political crisis in nineteen o five, so it leads to revolution, or it helps lead to revolutionary events those have also social revolution has been developing on its own track basically in Russia at the same time, from the eighteen sixties onward. UM and so you have the culmination of this political mobilization around social issues, especially with the rise of of of

important Marxist parties UM. But also you have the this UM this international crisis, and this all explodes in this in this massive revolution in nineteen o five UM, which leads to very famous events one called Bloody Sunday in January nineteen o five and which um UH peaceful protesters are are shot by UM by by palace guards basically at the command of the Czar UM and and it leads very nearly to the UM to to the end

of the romanof dynasty in nineteen o five. And it's only because of the efforts of especially competent conservatives, especially one named seraghe Vitam, who both signs the peace treaty gets out of the war with Japan and the summer of nineteen o five and also convinces that's are to sign a new um UH basically set of agreements with society that allows for the formation of a parliament. That that begins UH sends Russia down the road towards potentially

a constitutional monarchy. It's only that that basically cools things off in the fall of nineteen o five. And once sort of the moderate and liberal opposition is appeased by these by these constitutional um quasi constitutional measures, then they can go after the left wing with in in earnestness and and and this is what Piotr Stelipin, who will eventually become Prime Minister, becomes famous for, is sort of helping to lead this repression against left wing groups who

do not want to UM see peace in nineteen o five. UM. Within Russia, you write that that year and those events that you just talked about, UH flip a switch in Russian politics. UM. And you've started to describe a little

bit about what those things were. UM, could you just give a little bit more of a sense, maybe from the lived perspective or or however you want to take it, what it felt like to live in Russia at that time before the establishment of the Duma and then after, Um, you know, obviously, like you said, Nicholas and and the government felt like they were making huge concessions, and maybe there were others who experienced a big shift. What did

it feel like? No, this and it it's very important moment because, um, look, the Romanov dynasty and the cyst autocracy, these were non mobilizational conservative regimes. That is to say, they did not want people, even their supporters, out on the streets right Their idea of what a public should do is that it should be quiet and satisfied. They did not want large numbers of people out on the streets,

um organizing for them. They didn't want political parties, even right wing political parties, and the early right wing political parties, the monarchist parties that form in Russia are almost I mean they say in sort of the organizing documents, we wish we didn't have to be a party, but now that we have a lament, we sort of have to play this game. And um, this is very important to

understand because it's so different from twentieth century politics. Right, we can there are plenty of military dictatorships and other and especially fascist dictatorships that rely on public mobilization, right, that have these big, you know, torchlight rallies. I mean you think about what Hitler is doing in the thirties. I mean, it would have made Nicholas a skin crawl to think of all those people out there being mobilized

for political ends. Um, that's not what you know. The only way he wanted them, as we see at the beginning of the war, is sort of praying with him at a moment and then saying, go do your thing. Right. So that's his vision of politics, is that power comes from him and he gives it to other people, not that it flows up from the streets, not that it flows up in and he and he's sort of sort of sort of part of that mobilizational process. Um. And

so they had consistently tried to thwart that mobilization. So what we see when we see in the nineteen o five that we see actually revolutionary activities many many cities in the Russian Empire. You have these mass demonstrations, You have pitched battles between revolutionaries and and policemen. You have large meetings pressing for constitutional change. You have people talking about elections and political parties and and you know, recruiting

people all that stuff. It's just a different mode of politics. It's modern politics, its mobilizational politics, and and that's completely different from what the Tsars had tried to had tried to have over the previous you know, not only previous three hundred years, but but but going going back even further of course. So so that's the switch that gets flipped.

Now we're in an era of mobilizational politics, and that's really going to inform what happens in World War one UM because immediately upon the declaration of war, most of the Tsars um people led by military men, who had been pushing for a mobilizational um UH structure for years for reasons I can go into if you'd like, but they had really wanted this sort of active mobilization and

enthusiasm on the part of the population. UM. Now, when war gets declared nineteen fourteen, they say, great, let's mobilize. We need to mobilize everybody. And so this old autocratic dream of just sort of controlling things from above UM is fundamentally just Troid in the very first day of the war, and the last person to come to realize this actually is Nicholas himself, and that's one of the things that that leads to the problems at the end

of the at the end of the regime. So you mentioned that one of the things that happens here is the establishment of the parliament, the Numa. Um, could you talk a little bit about what it was, how did it work, what, what's what's the numa when it gets

set up. Yeah, it's a very troubled early history in particular because again, you know, not only Nicholas, but many in the administration sort of have this belief that at heart, most people want to be uh, good subjects of that's are they They're gonna want to vote for parties that that that are supportive of them, that the people are behind them. In other words, that's that's what they want to believe. And there's just all these rabble rousing revolutionaries

out there. Um, there's a lot of anti Semitism. So they're saying, oh, all the rabble rousing Jewish revolutionaries out there, and once the true Russian people have their voice, you know, they're gonna they're gonna vote for us. They're still a little worried about it. They don't city dwellers very much. And so they create this system in which more power is given basically to rural areas, and those rural areas are also dominated by by the nobility, by landowners. It's

not one person, one vote. You vote in a certain curia in which you know, so you know, let's say the peasants in the region get one representative and the nobles in the region get get one representative. Well, you know, there's you know, peasants and five percent nobles, and so it's not an equal sort of relationship there, and so you end up with many, many more nobles. And there's

also an upper house of Parliament that is um. Half of it is appointed by that tsar and the other half is based on sort of jobs that are also basically highly sort Sara has driven so a guaranteed conservative upper house and and pro monarchist upper house as well.

With all of that said, they get the first doom elections and um the people vote for moderate or left wing parties overwhelmingly, and you have this huge conflict um over basic things like land form and lander form obviously is uh is just sort of code for saying, we're going to take the land from the landowners and give it to the peasants that are working it. UM. So the landowners hate that idea, but but the Duma wants to do it, so they disband the first Duma. The

second Duma they they do the same thing. Um. It doesn't get much better, even though they try to ban many of the parties at this time in the second Duma UM and and that also doesn't work. And so it's only with the third Duma. And this again is something that Piotr stileep In um accomplishes uh in in seven UM he says, Okay, we're gonna switch this the

electro system even more. We're gonna wait even more in favor of people that we know are going to vote for us, and then they get even then, you know, it's sort of a moderate system, sort of the the it's moderates that are that are that are at the heart of that system. And left wing parties are almost complete but not completely but almost completely marginalized, and right wing parties get get much more, get much more voice. In both the third and the fourth dumas UM and

and those again are gonna last all the way. The fourth Duma is the one that that is gonna be being played throughout the war. Well. And this speaks really to what you were saying earlier about uh, not knowing how what the people actually thought of the Czarre that when you when you finally get elections, the Duma ends up looking like people who want to take land away from the established. Yeah. Percent. When you ask people, um, do you want rich people to continue to run the lander?

Do you want to farm your own land? It's not it's not unclear clear what they're going to vote for, so they're they're definitely anti monarchist at that point. Let's talk a little bit more about sleep In you and and and and other historians have talked about him as the most important political figure of this period. Um, who was he and what was his role in governing the Russian Empire at this point? Yeah, I mean steleepan Ism

is a really interesting figure. Um. A lot of people end up becoming bureaucrats in the over the course of the Russian Empire of varying levels of talent, because this was not um, I mean, no sister as a pure meritocracy but the Russian imperial bureaucracy definitely wasn't. UM connections played a large role. UM. You know, whether you know you sucked up to the CSAR and I played a large role. All of these things over time meant that you had quite a hodgepodge of abilities. UH in that spectrum.

Stealipin was unusually talented, unusually competent UM and UH and this UM this helped account for for his importance in in the short period four or five years in which he's he's he's prime minister um in UH in this quasi constitutional system. Uh. He's assassinated in nineteen eleven UM. And I'll talk about that in just a second. He comes from the imperial borderlands. UM, he's uh, you know,

he's he has UM in Lithuania and Belarus. He has positions as he sort of moves around the UM the sort of UM system by which bureaucrats sort of moved from post to post. But he's actually in in in Russia and Sarata UH in the nineteen o five revolution. And he again distinguishes since off in nineteen o five not only by sort of competence but also his his

brutality against against left wing revolutionaries. And and so it's gonna be this mix for him of of on the one hand being sort of a competent bureaucrat, but also his reputation as being uh sort of especially anti left wing and willing to use force against them. That is gonna endear him in a certain way to the to

to the administration and briefly to the CSAR himself. And and this is going to allow him the ability to try to put forward reforms in the period from nineteen o seven to nineteen eleven, which are really quite important ones. STI leap In, at the end of the day, is a Russian nationalist UM. And nationalism is a mass mobilizational

structure of the kind that I talked about before. So stileep In is trying to figure out how can we incorporate nationalism into this empire, make it more participatory, um, but also not completely alienate all the non Russians. Um. It's a really difficult task. UM. But he knows, and he's a modern politician. He he builds, he solicits interest groups. You make sure he has their support at various times

for particular programs and and not others. So you know, he's trying to play this politics all the time, both with the Dooma and with other people within the Czarist administration. So, for instance, their educational reforms, he's moving towards the idea

of of universal mass education. The most famous one is an agricultural reform, in which he wants to break up the Russian Commune and build a system basically independent family farmers, sort of like the American Midwest in a certain way, um, you know, and and and break up the old Russian commune UH as a way of sort of stimulating agricultural

capitalism uh and strengthening Russians. But he also has a series, especially in Poland, of of attempts to make sure that that Polish nationalists and and also other kinds of nationalists don't get too much power. And so he's he's always forwarding a Russian nationalist line there um. And he's also the author of several military reforms that that are that that are also of of importance as he realizes the importance of of of the growing arm racing the likelihood

of of European war in the near future. So Stleapan is doing all of these things, um. And he he has already earned the hatred of the left, but he's also now earning the displeasure of that's are in many conservatives, because he is pushing a quite a different system than

the one that they are imagining. And he's also running a foul of entrenched interests within within the CSAR bureaucracy, right, these people that get sort of sweetheart deals in terms of state budgets, and he's pushing other budgetary budgetary priorities for instance. Um and so he begins to be seen as this sort of um as an outsider who's causing

more trouble than is necessary. And um, so he's already lost the faith of that ts are by the time that he's assassinated in Kiev at the Opera House in Kiev in in nineteen eleven, um and so and so there's sort of a side relief, almost on an audible side relief from the Tsar when he's when when he's assassinated, not that he wanted to seem assassinated, but um, there's a cide relief because now he can go back to sort of a much more traditional set of prime ministers

who are basically just going to be yes men for for him right, that are going to be traditionally sort of subservient in a way, and stileap It was clearly an independent political force that UM that made that star nervous. UM. So you mentioned that Stileapen's attempts not to alienate you know, non I think Russian to think about how to keep

the periphery functioning without revolution building. UM. That's contrasted with what Nicholas and Alexandra throw of the territories at the center of their vast domain, right versus say, Ukraine in Poland, Siberia to the earls and things westwards Europe. UM. If if Stileapen was really worried about not alienating people, what did Nicholas and Alexandra think, what do we know about? How how much of a contrast that was with the

way the ore stung. Yeah, you know, Nicholas and Alexander didn't want to UM didn't want to alienate people either. But again, in this traditional view, UM, people just should just be loyal subjects of their monarch, regardless of what ethnicity they were. UM. And and sort of organizing the monarchy around a national basis was um uh was kind of problematic for them in some ways I mean to be I mean in sort of racial terms ethnic, the racial ethnic term which people were increasingly using now by

their early twentieth center. Over the of course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, um, much of the Romanov family was was German. Uh. You know, virtually all of the stars over the course of the nineteenth century had chosen brides from from the German principalities and then and then from from Germany itself, and so many of them had had had had German mothers. And this has been going

back for again for for generations, um. And and this was starting to become a problem for them, right Alexander, it would eventually be sort of be criticized for being pro German because she had this German background. Um. But it's not the way that earlier dynasties thought. Of course, you would marry someone from another You wouldn't marry one of your own princes and princes or princesses because that

would just complicate your domestic affairs. You find royalty or elsewhere that that that's where you're gonna find your your bride if you are, if you're the heir to the throne. So it wasn't a problem, but but increasingly it is becoming a problem. And so again you're seeing this distinction. As Nicholas and Alexander think about um, Poland and Ukraine, they think, well, the polls should be grateful to us.

We're saving them from the Germans and and the Armenians, and the Georgians should be happy that that they're not overrun by Turks. And Ukrainians, in their view are just sort of Russians with a weird accent, you know, like that that was sort of their their view of the world. And and and and the notion that these um uh, you know, that there might be legitimate in certain senses national movements that you had to deal with as a politician, in the way that Stelipan was dealing with them was

um was problematic for them. So so again these are and and again it's not as if Stalepin was giving a lot of concessions, uh, you know, his his famous slogan was that, um uh, you need to build a great Russia. This was going to be Russian Empire with russianness at its center, but again with an administrative awareness that that other political forces were out there that needed to be built MH. You mentioned earlier the christ and Tenary celebrations for the romana Um. Can you say a

few more things about that? What did they think they were doing with that? How significant did they think it was? And but what do they actually signal to the various factions in Russian life at the time, whether we're talking about peasants or administrators or regional you know, or the people in their court internationally? How significant were the Chrishan

Tennery celebrations to the various parties of it? Yeah? Yeah, I think it was a an attempt, as I sort of mentioned earlier, there's an attempt to have their vision, their narrative of the relationship of it's are and the people, one that they believed in themselves, be enacted for them

in front of them. And and when much of this happened, you know, there's a great article by a historian, Richard Wartman called Invisible Threads about Um about these celebrations, in particular about the stars business to visit to customer Um a city not not too far from from Moscow in which you have these big celebrations and the nobility welcome

you and the crowds of cheering peasants. This is exactly what Nicholas wanted to see, and it's he's able to convince himself that that this is um uh, that this is the political reality. And so it's dangerous in a certain way right when you when you start using your own product. But he had always sort of used his own product, right, He he was always imbewing himself with this notion that he was a popular um Russian star, and that stars don't get their authority by being voted

or survey But but it's just this mystical thing. You're born with it, and then and then the peasants recognize it, and it helps to to reinforce that now there there is you know. Warman also points out in this article, you know that there are those that are critical of this and saying, you know, you need to you need to be have a more complicated sense of what politics actually looks like, um, if you're gonna understand this, because many people are not happy with this. Indeed, some some

of the nobility boycott the visit. They're not really visible uh to him at that moment, because you know, there are big problems and uh, and and sort of having these big parades is not solving them. And there's a point when King Hacken of Norway, who of course was irrelevant.

I think, you know, all those related to each other. Uh. And this is reported widely in the in the US press of the time, and I just found it so fascinating that one of his royal relatives was saying, if you want to stave off real trouble, you know, he's thinking revolution, You've got to let Poland have independence. You've got to let the little Russians, you know, Ukraine have independence, and you've got to institute these reforms. How would how

would Nicholas have received something like that? I mean, we kind of know he did nothing along those We kind of know how he received them, but it would be great to have you just say, how would Nicolas have received that from another monarch who's telling and hey, institute some democratic reforms. Yeah, you know this. I mean it's important to understand that when comes along, it's it's at you're already having sort of a early crest of this

decolonizing process. Uh, you're seeing it already in the Balkans um. Uh. You know, there are two Balkan wars that proceede UM World War one and and you see the Ottoman Empire being pushed out Uh, not only and not not in favor of other empires, but in favor of new nationalizing states like Serbia and Bulgaria. UM. So in you're seeing the same thing in Britain. The home rule debate over Ireland is feverish in the in the months leading up to fourteen. And this is the kind of thing that

was being proposed. And I think this is what Hawkins is saying, to write, give home rule, not necessarily independence to Poland and Ukraine, but home rule to them, and try to make some concessions to have UM something other than sort of a completely Russian dominated state, gives some voice to your to your stituents. And this fell on

UM welcome ears. Not not among the c's are UH and his family, but but among others in the Russian political system who did see this as and especially for centrist and left wings, centrist, the Cadet Party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, this was their vision that they're pushing what that would eventually call federalism UM, a federal solution to empire, which is to say, okay, we realize that people don't like the empire because Russia has dominated all of you.

But what if we had a multi ethnic state in which everybody had um sort of regional representation and authority within their own regions, some sort of federal solution. And this becomes the dream of many who don't want to give up on the idea of a of a large Russian state. But I want to acknowledge that there are legitimate political demands by by other ethnic groups within the state. And that's kind of the direction that I think Hacken

is suggesting. And again, that's not something that that that Nicholas is inclined to want to want to do. The difficulty is that Nicholas himself um, starting in nineteen fourteen, become begins to play a much larger role in developing ethno politics, to encouraging the idea that you should mobilize around your ethnicity and so um. He tries to do some of that in the midst of the war as well. So, and this is this is the toxic combination that explodes over the course of the war. Could you say a

few more words on that toxic combination? What's going through and why is it so bad? Yeah? So, the first thing many of these empires do, they're bordering each other, right, many of them have the same ethnic groups on either side of the Let's take Ukrainians for instance. They're Ukrainians, and the Austraungarian Empire their Ukrainians and the Russian Empire. Um, you know, there are Poles in the German Empire, there are polls in Austerngarian Empire, they're polls in the Russian Empire.

So the first thing they think of is, Okay, let's let's leverage this nationalism. Let's try to defeat our enemy by leading to revolutions. So we're gonna try to encourage Poles in the Russian Empire to push for independence if you're in Germany, and vice versa. The Germans tried to convince umh Islamic leaders all over the world that they need to launch a jahad against the British and Russian empires.

That doesn't go anywhere really, But but the idea is, let's stimulate nationalism ethno nationalism as a way of undermining empire. The problem is, of course, you are also in a multi ethnic empire at the polls are also living in Germany. So like if you're gonna have an independent Poland, you're also and the other side is also doing that, right, So pow camps get get aligned around ethnic groups and you send them back into their into their countries to

try to be subversives. And so they all of them mobilized nationalism. Um, and it helps, I mean, nationalism grows immensely over the course of the war, and all of these empires collapse at the end of the war. And they helped it happen because this is the exposure combination. They because they had to mobilize, and because they thought that nationalism was the most powerful mobilizational tool. They encourage nationalism, which is anti imperial at its at its core, and

that that helps break all these empires apart. Mhm um. Before you know, on the on the road to war, you note that Russian politicians wanted to avoid war. You include Nicholas and this of course you even right that he was kind of pr Marry among the people who thought war would be a bad thing. Um. Can you say a little bit about how each of these you know, maybe different levels of the blood of the state, of the Russian state, Duma, Nicholas, Um, why did they why

did they want to avoid war? Yeah, all of them thought that war was not in their interests, especially in the short term. There's no real lobby for war in in the Russian Empire. They're they're all very well, look, we've already discussed nineteen o five, the last war had almost led to the end of the regime. UM it caused a lot of problems. They all knew that it caused problems. They were trying. They had a large military

expansion plan that was just underway. Um they were going to be much more strong in five years than they were, you know, in nineteen fourteen. This was one of the reasons, by the way, that Germany wanted to launch war in nineteen fourteen, because they also knew that that that Russia was going to be much stronger as time went on. UM So they didn't want any they didn't want any any part of of the war. Uh So, the question is how how do they end up in a war

that they that that they don't want to see. And this is a very complicated and much studied process that called the called the July crisis uh in which in the month before the outbreak of the war, all of this, all of this wrangling happens. The short answer to this is that UM Russia believes that if it backs away, if it lets Serbia be conquered basically by Austria Hungary, then they will have lost their seat at the Club of Great Powers. They're gonna have shown fundamental weakness and

they have to show strength. Um. And they knew what happened to empires that that that fell out of the club. Look what happened to the Ottoman Empire, Look what happened to the Chinese Empire. These are places that are being you know, colonized and dismembered by by by the victors. And so you have to remain a member of that great power club. And they convinced themselves that they have to stand firm for for Serbia in order to do so.

So what they tried to do is they try to isolate Austria Hungary from Germany right to say, look, you know, if we can make this between Russian and Austria Hungry, they're going to have to back back down or we'll beat them one on one in a war. Um, we just don't want war with with Germany. At the same time, so what happens over the course of this um of this process is they want to they want to sort

of move from a position of strength. They want to say, look, we're gonna We're gonna forcefully say we're going to defend them, and that's gonna be a deterrent because Germany probably also doesn't want war, and Austria Hungary can't afford to fight us alone, so we're gonna try to divide that alliance. UM. So they're they're early partial mobilization is only mobilization on the border of the Austra Hungarian Empire. UM. Nicholas and uh sends telegrams to to to Wilhelm saying, look, I

don't want war. What can we do to avoid this? UM. Nicholas personally again doesn't want to see this, I think both for just he doesn't much like war, but he also, you know, sees the problems that that it can create. UM. But at the end of the day, they say, look, we can't back down at this moment, uh and and we have to. We have to mobilize because it's gonna take us longer to mobilize than than it's gonna take

Germany to mobilize. So UM, you know this this the logic of the end of this process is that they're going to move towards a general mobilization, which they continue to insist to Germany doesn't have to mean war. We're mobilizing, just don't invade us. But Germany insists throughout the July crisis any movement towards mobilization is a declaration of war. Um. Now, many historians after the fact have also accepted that. They said, look, Russia created the war because they mobilized, but it's not

mobilization isn't a declaration of war. Its only the Germans

said it. That's that that's the only reason that people are are taking it as a declaration of war, right, And this gets back to the larger question of why Germany wants war at that particular moment, and why Austria Hungary wants war at that particular moment, and and and that's you know, obviously there's been a lot of discussion about that, but but that's how Russia goes to war despite the fact that there's no constituency for it within

the Russian political system. And you've already said a few things about why you refer to World War One in your book as the Third Balkan War. Would you want to elaborate on that A little bit. Yeah, sure, it certainly begins that way. Um. As I mentioned before, there are two wars that are called the Balkan Wars um UH, that were the occasion for getting the Ottoman Empire out of the Balkan, out of the Balkan peninsula. These happened

in nineteen twelve and in nineteen thirteen. In nineteen twelve, you get all of these um regions, all these nationalists movements, many of which have support from Russia, being able to push the Ottomans off. So we're looking at you know, Serbia, um, we're a greater Serbia, who are looking at um Uh, Bulgaria, Greece, all of these countries, Macedonia. Yeah, while Macedonia is contested, Montenegro also being a part of this coalition, and they

win the war quite quickly against the Ottomans. And this is quite clearly an anti imperial war. That is to say, it's on the part of nationalist movements, and it's not saying we prefer one empire over another. We're saying that that imperial rule as such is something that ought to be contested. So that's that's why it's kind of a

decolonizing war. But as with many decolonizing wars. This just opens up a new question of regional power and you get these new nations states start to act like many empires themselves, most notably Serbia in this case, and this is what causes the second Balkan War between Serbia and Bulgaria over the question of Macedonia Um. And so already you see that de colonization isn't an and another words,

nationalism doesn't just come when the empire leaves. That just opens up at the more interesting phase of politics, honestly, and the more and the more violent phase frankly, of of the politics of the colonization. And so you have these first two Balkan wars, and the third wars, as we all know, is triggered in in the Balkans in Sarajevo with the assassination of the heir to the Austro Hungarian throne. This is an assassination that is not random.

H Franz Ferdinand is in Sarajevo to oversee military maneuvers um. They have just recently a next the territory uh they had occupied it since since eighteen seventy eight, and they're just recently formally next it in nineteen o eight, and you have these um uh, these young radicals who are inspired both by nationalism but also by the Russian revolution nary movement UM now looking to to change the dynamic on the ground. These are not the people that kill France.

Ferdinand are not sponsored by Russia, They're not even sponsored by the top Serbian leadership. They are sponsored by the head of military intelligence UM, who is trying to run his own sort of radical paramilitary revolutionary movement at the same time that he's that he's heading military intelligence. But Serbia has just had two wars in the last two years.

They're not in any position to fight Austro Hungary at this point, and so they really drive these events and and it's and it's for that reason that we have this as a third Balkan War. Christopher Clark and his well respected and and and and uh and really great book Sleepwalkers, talks also about how you have this bal Balkan inception scenario that that develops in France, England, Germany at the same time over the course of nineteen thirteen UM by which they begin to expect that war might

might happen, and which side they would take if it did. Um, and so all of these things sort of come together to have this third Balkan War, then metastasize into a broader European war, and then of course into a World War. M. So, in the as the Russian army mobilizes and conflict begins, you write that many Russian officers were already inclined to look at the world through ethnic lenses. In we We've

talked a bit about that already. Um, but you you didn't say that the war prompted the high command to almost universally deploy an ethnic grid of reliability. Would you say a few words about how ethnic suspicions fed fear of spies and overtime motivated violence even against civilian populations. How ethnic you know, reliability and ethnic lines and divisions became so crucial to Russia during the war in the

Russian military, Yeah, for sure. Um. The as I mentioned that they they were already well trained culturally as well as professionally to think of the world in ethnic term ms Uh. Virtually all of them were anti Semitic. That is to say, they held a wide range of beliefs about what, um, what Jews believed, what Jews did, and especially how Jews thought about the army um. They thought that on the one hand that they were um subversive in pro German and on the other hand that they

were all cowardly draft dodgers. So they had this wide ranging and very toxic view of of of Jews in the region, and they were they believed, not completely unreasonably that ethnic Germans, there are plenty of ethnic Germans living in the in the Russian borderlands, we're going to be sympathetic to the German armies that that we're moving in. By the same token, there pan Slavism inclined them to think that at the end of the day, the polls would rather be part of Russia than part of Austria,

Hungary or Germany. This was not true for the most case, but most of them believed it um And so what what they end up doing is um. And this was a lot of the archival work I did was looking through the sort of cases of of purported espionage in

these frontline zones. In the first couple of years of the war, they go through and counter intelligence agents, they will go through and they'll arrest all of the Jews, they will deport all the Germans, and then they'll be surprised that there are still spies there because they're the Germans Austerngarians. They're they're sending polls, but they're also just hiring local Russians there, you know, like the the espionage is not being conducted solely on on on ethnic terms.

But that's the sort of grid of reliability that I'm talking about here. So when the Russian army moves into these territories, and remember many of these territories are on the Russian side of the border, but you now have this massive amount of troops coming in there, and they need to requisition goods, they need to make sure there's no rebellions, they need need need to make sure there's no espionage. They start basically engaging in ethno politics and

this ranges from you know, suspicion to deportation to executions. Um, your your your political stances is assumed to be flowing from your ethnic belonging. So let's talk a little more about anti German sentiment. Um, how widespread was it? Say? In nine Yeah, Um, anti German sentiment really develops. Well, it has a history. Um, already before the war, the

German communities in the Russian Empire. UM. Many of them were UM UH, they retained their German nous, they lived in their their own villages UM, and they were often quite prosperous. Uh. They're stretched out across the Vulgar River. There's many of them in Ukraine. UM. And and also there are many UH German businessmen basically in the big cities UM who who control a lot of the UM, who control a lot of finance and control a lot of manufacturing honestly in in in the big cities in

the in the Russian Empire too. So there's already sort of this potential for UM for social antagonism by by ethnic Russians who say, why are these guys making all the money in our country when we're when when we're not able to why are they dominating us? This is the propaganda theme is German dominance, German dominance. How do we undo German dominance in our country? And this is gonna get linked, as I said before to Alexandra, eventually the UM because of her German upbringing, but it it

has its roots much much deeper in these social antagonisms. Now, when war gets declared and you have a massive propaganda campaign unleashed, all across Europe to sort of demonize your enemies. The same thing happens in Russia, and they're good reasons why anti Germanism is gonna spread quite quickly in the borderlands.

The Germans do come in and in a couple of notorious incidents, as they had in Belgium, they raised towns, they they execute civilians, They do UM a lot of brutal things, and and this leads um UH to rumors of German beast reality basically spreading throughout UM, spreading throughout

the big cities in the Empire too. This is gonna culminate UM at the very beginning of the big Russian defeats in nineteen fifteen, in a series of pogroms in Moscow in particular, in which UH not only German but virtually all are Many foreign stores um are are are attacked UH as as part of by popular mobs and looted UM by virtue of being German, and the state then moves or to also sequester this property or and sees land and factories and such from from from German

speakers and especially from people who remain German citizens. Mhm UM is also when we see a retreat from Poland UM by the Russian military. Can you talk a little bit about that and who was taking responsibility for strategic decisions during night? Yeah. So when the war begins, UM Nicholas considers briefly UM going to the front as commander in chief himself. There had been a long tradition of thinking about the autocrat as the military leader of the country.

But there was also a tradition, most notably in the Napoleonic Wars, of of of of delegating most of the command authority or near all the command authority to professional generals. And so UM He's persuad did at that point to UM to appoint a commander in chief UM. He commit uh appoints his his relative, the Grand Duke Nikola Nikolaevitch, who had had a military career UM who then assembles a staff, most notably his um UH his chief of

staff UM a guy named General Youanshkyevitch UH. And it's they are the head of the so called Stavka or or supreme headquarters. But there's significant um Uh. There's significant UM influence also for UM front commanders and individual army commanders. It's a huge army, and each front has several armies under it, and and then each of those commanders are are also going to have are gonna have significant authority. But ultimately it's going to be Grand Duke Nikola Nikolaevitch

and his in his chief of staff Youngshkevich. Um. This retreat happened, I mean, and much of the reason for this retreat um has to do with with mismanagement on the part of General Headquarters. Um. It begins near the uh sort of the north end of the Carpathian Mountains,

near the Polish towns of Garliza and tarnough Um. But then it's gonna spread all the way first actually kind of through through Ukraine before you have the big big blow into sort of Congress Poland or or the Russian Kingdom of Poland Um later on in the summer of nineteen fifteen. UM. And the basic problem is they're not able to mobilize reserves to to patch the holes in the line that get that get blown apart in a

couple of these battles. It's this is a consistent problem in World War One for all armies, which is that uh, they most of them believe that you have to could gather these enormous amounts of shells and break a hole in the enemy's line and then break through and force a retreat that way. But the problem is, once you consolidate all of that, they can see you doing that, and when you start bombarding, they know where you're gonna

hit it, and they retreat from it. And then you break through the lines, and then the reserves come up to to to push you back. So it's quite frequently the case, actually on all fronts, that that the first line of trenches is taken by by enemies. This notion that they never get across no man's land is simply

not true. Um But the problem is that reserves are usually um deployed with sufficient um uh skill that that you're unable to develop that breakthrough into something more strategically meaningful and um the difference in nineteen fifteen is that the Russians mismanage those reserves and they are able to achieve this breakthrough. And once you have this breakthrough, you know, once you get behind the lines, uh, it forces a retreat all across the line so that people don't get

pinned in between in between two forces. So most of the retreat happens um uh you know, not because you're being fought from uh, from the troops that are facing you, but you're worried about troops coming into the back of you, and you have to flee backwards, and then you get harassed and chased UM as you're being driven back. And this it's gets called the Great Retreat in Russia. They basically abandoned all of Poland, UM, much of Ukraine, UM, much of Lithuania, much of Belarus. UH. It's it's an

enormous retreat. It's the most significant um UH offensive in in in the European theater really throughout the war. I mean, you can make a case for nineteen eighteen and what happens on the Western Front, but but that actually is less territory than than then you're seeing here in nineteen fifteen mm hm. And you're right that this is also the real fracture of the imperial political system that occurs

during the summer of nineteen fifteen. What were those events that you know, So if nineteen o five is when that mass mass politics, that switch is flipped, but here's where we real fracture of empire. What what was it that happened here? So nineteen fourteen when the wars declared, there's an agreement made by virtually all political parties, excluding the far far left like the Bolsheviks, excluding them, but virtually everyone else enter what they call a sacred union.

They said, Okay, we're gonna quit politics, We're gonna disband the Duma. Um, We're gonna let the Sarus government run the war and we'll get back to our political questions when when the fighting is done. But we're gonna let that's our fight and run this war effort and his administration fight and run the war. In the space of uh less than a year, they've runned into the ground. Uh. You know, there are massive problems with supplies, there's massive

problems with treating wounded soldiers. There are you have this huge retreat. Um, you have the encirclement of the Second Army in nineteen fourteen and the suicide of its commander. I mean, it's just a disaster that that Thats administration has demonstrated that it's incapable of effectively running this war effort. And that's um, you know that that problem uh means the end of the sacred union. People as patriots have to say, look, we can't just sit here and watch

this happen anymore. We have to get involved, we have to do something. And they do this sort a wide variety of ways, um from forming you know, sort of relief agencies to building hospitals to um a wide variety ways. But they also do it politically. They started to say, okay,

we need to get more involved politically. We have to have um, you know, discussions between thats are and his administration and these other public figures, especially those prominent figures centrist figures in the Duma, who can bring the country along and we can maybe start to repair some of the some of the damage that's done. So this is the movement that happens over the course of the of the summer. At the same time, you're starting starting to

see a reinvigration of the strike wave. Strikes had basically ceased in nineteen fourteen, labor unrest had basically ceased, But now nineteen fifteen you're starting a number of big strikes again, many of them are being shot at by by policemen. UM. So you're starting to see that social unrest building again, and you you get what gets called the progressive block that is supposed to sort of help that's ours administration

sort of jointly now run the war effort. UH. And what happens in nineteen fifteen is this progressive block gets built from again on a spectrum from the left to the to the conservative right UM and they say, okay, we're gonna do this, and at the last minute that's our backs out and says, no, this is an aggregation of constitutional power. I'm going to disband the DOOMA, I'm gonna fire most of my ministers, and I'm going to run this war effort and I'm going to go to

the front personally to do it. So he completely rejects this at this political effort to um uh to work together. And now the people on the outside are left basically saying, okay, what what can we do to try to save our country? And that's that's the story of the next sort of year and a half is you know, how do they continue to try to run the government, how do they continue to try to help refugees while at the same time saying, look, we're not going to we're not going

to solve this problem until we get rid of the autocracy. M. And it's it's in October of fifteen, after all of these events that Nicholas rights to Stanley Washburn, we have no public opinion in Russia, and you've already talked a little bit about his kind of rejection of ground up politics and and the way that he thinks politics should run. But you know, so I've asked you here to describe what he meant by that. You've kind of already given

us a picture. Maybe instead, how could he still think this like after this summer, after so much clear popular opposition, whether it's strikers, whether it's you know, political parties opposing him his rule, how can he still think this way? Yeah? Yeah, I mean the capacity for self deception among humans is

quite high, you know. It's um and and this again, he's for him to recognize that that politics in Russia was modern politics, That you do have things like coalescing public opinion, that you do have pressure groups, that you do have constituencies rather than a passive population that you run by divine right. It is fundamentally something that if you were to accept that, it would mean he would have to accept that he's not a legitimate Sorry, he's

not a legitimate leader. Um And he's he's unwilling to do that. Um And and he doesn't understand it. Right that.

You know, earlier in this conversation with Washburn, Um, Washburn is expressing his his regret over American politics, and he says Nicholas sort of blinks and looks at him, says, I don't understand anything about your politics, Like he doesn't understand how electoral politics really work, even though he's had the doom over the last you know, he doesn't understand about sort of why, why why Wilson is is in trouble or not in trouble, like all of that stuff

is just um. He just says, I don't understand it. Um. It's it's not the way that um uh that that he thinks about politics, so um. And that's what he means by no public opinion. It's not that people don't have opinions. He knows people have opinions, and you know that that that there's no consolidation of this in a way that would represent the national will. Right, That's what

public opinion really means. And this is the distinction that begins to happen, is that that's a believes that he by definition represents the nation and what's happening over the course of the war is that Russians are understanding no, our national interests, our national identity, our national community is defined by us. It's not defined by that'sar. And in fact that SSAR is alien to that and and working

against its best interests. And when and when that finally gets realized, that of course makes it untenable for that's are to continue. M So you say Nicholas disbands the Duma at the time, this wasn't the first time, right, How is Nicholas thinking about the Duma relating to it? If you're saying, well, there's no there's no public opinion. He so, you know, kind of functionally he says, there's no Duma either, I'm just gonna run this war. Can you say a little bit more about how Nicholas dealt

with the Douma and and political functionaries below. Yeah, yeah, I mean fundamentally, the way he does it is by having his his prime minister at um deal with it and his other ministers deal with it um. Uh. He doesn't want to appear before the Dooma. When he does, he normally insults them and and there's sort of bad relations, and so he wants to have as little to do with them as possible, even the ones that the centrist ones UM, guys like Alexander Gutchkov UM, who are basically

working for to to try to stabilize the system. He dislikes them personally. He he doesn't you know, he doesn't want to have anything really to do with them, and so he kind of insists that his his, his ministers do that work. And that's one of the problems in nineteen fifteen is that is that the ministers have done that work, and and all but one of them basically agrees that, yeah, we have to work together with them.

And so nineteen sixteen, the doom is gonna meet a couple more times, briefly early in the year and then in a very um explosive section session late in the year, in in November leading up to December. UM that UM, they're they're going to sort of force their way back onto onto the agenda. UM. And so uh Nicholas contents himself with thinking, Okay, well, I'm going to be at the front. He's actually not doing a lot of the military leadership at that point. UM. That's his chief of staff,

a guy named Mikhail Alexeyeff, who's doing most of that work. UM. And um and frankly, um, most of the political work in the country is being done outside of the formal government itself. That is to say, if you're asking who's providing food to refugees, who's building hospitals for soldiers, it's actually not the government anymore. It's it's these it's these uh, it's these public organizations uh that that that are doing

a lot of this work. And so politics has moved out of the state and into these sort of paris statal organizations. You write that one concrete outcome of the offensives of nineteen sixteen was that progressive projects for social renovation and mobilization could be married to political demands forre dictatorship. Just say a few more words on that. Yeah, Um, you know there's this What I'm trying to describe in that chapter is the development of a kind of technocratic progressivism.

That is to say, this is not that that um progressivism defined by expertise. Um, that you're going to achieve progressive goals by having experts determine how to run an education system, a healthcare system, or military system for that matter. Right. So, um, so you don't need necessarily to have to deal with the messy politics of of of mass politics and elections

and all those sorts of things. And so you're seeing these efforts to say, Okay, we know best how to fix this war effort because we're experts where government experts were scientists or whatever, um and um, and these movements to try to fix the war through this, through this sort of progressive technocratic lens um lends itself in a certain way towards saying, okay, well let's think about how we would run the in wartime. And this is definitely

not the majority of you. I think most progressive um want to see something much more um democratic frankly um than uh than the autocracy or military dictatorship would be. But within the military itself and within Alex say for Alex say of himself as the chief of staff, the notion that look all of this, all of the Csars family, they're causing all these problems, um uh you know, so much sort of confusion, um, all of these sort of

groups running around, we're not coordinating them. Well, we're wasting a lot of money. If we just have a military dictatorship that is able to to consolidate the war effort, um, then we're gonna be able to win the war and then we can figure out the politics later. And so that's again sort of thinking about it in terms of

that competence. Now, this is an assumption of military competence that is not borne out at One of the points I try to make in the book is that throughout the military keep military keeps saying, oh, we we know best how to do this. If we run it, it's going to be orderly, because we're the military things that we orderedly. In fact, when the military takes over these state functions, they do a really bad job of it

and at least to chaos in many places. So this automatic assumption that the military means order, um, which is widespread not only Russia but obviously around the world, is sort of a dominant feature of the way that the military perceives itself, turns out not to be the case many times on the ground, and so, um, you know, I think a military dictatorship would have been um, quite disastrous.

You know, there was already kind of military dictatorship in the front line zones, and I described throughout the book about the problems that emerged there. So you write that on the surface, the period between the great retreat and the revolutionary crisis of seventeen was marked by statist But how would you sketch out the important changes occurring in Russian society? While attention was focused on scrutin, the kadok were led of ministerial appointments. He inspired Petrograd kind of

palace intrigue and suspicion of Germans. What was actually happening while the kind of intrigue was taking the focus UM, A number of of things are making the experience of people in the empire much worse. So if you're in the front line or near the front line, UM, you're experiencing a lot of personal insecurity in terms of violence. You're starting to see a breakdown of social order in many of these places, led in many cases by by

deserting or off duty soldiers. But even far away from the front um, one of the key things that happens over the course of the war is UM is a worsening standard of living driven by rapid inflation UM and UH. This is a problem that that curs government can't get around. It mismanages its monetary policy, but it also just fails to come to terms with the UM. Big changes in supply and demand for various things in the Empire over

the course of the war. Plus they attack many of the merchants and and and arrest them right because um, because they're suspicious of merchants, and especially of Jewish merchants. And so this, all of this leads to UM to on the one hand, inflation and on the other hand, um good shortages. And so you're starting to see by the especially by the time we get to the turn of the yr into nineteen seven and team um you

know breadlines, UM, the discussion of the need for rationing. UM, You're starting to see the supply situation deteriorate in terms of trains being able to to ship what they need to on time. Um. All of these things are are beginning to deteriorate, and social relations are also becoming more and more poisonous. Ethno politics has done its role there.

This wide sort of influx of of refugees and the difficulties of dealing with them has has helped poison the um UM, the social relationships and above all this feeling that the rich are doing okay in this war and the rest of us are bearing this burden. And look at how badly they're managing it. This is becoming more

and more dominant among all sectors of society. And so you know, kind of what who rest Putin thinks should be the Minister of you know, of whatever, you know, Minister of Interior, let's say, UM, that doesn't have a huge bearing on people's lives. You know, they're seeing things just just collapsing. And and it's not the result of a particular minister any thing. It's the whole structure. It's it's autocracy itself that has led them into this problem.

M Can you describe the class dimensions of women serving as sisters of Mercy during the war. We'll talk a little bit more about dealing with the wounded and how significant casualties were. Um, let's start with sisters of mercy? Who were they? And you write really meaningfully about the class dimensions of service. Yeah, So women are looking to get involved in the war quite early and and and

many of them quite earnestly, um throughout the war. And you know, there are a number of good um recent studies of nurses during the war, most notably by Laurie Staff, who has done the most extensive work on on them. UM. And so you you do end up getting people from UH, from UH, from a range of backgrounds serving in medical

services women UM UM throughout the war. But at first there's this expectation that you want to get aristocratic women to do it, that that you want to get um sort of well behaved, well born women to to do this had to do this uh dirty work with with

wounded and naked men frankly right, UM. And this notion that UM that you had to have a certain sort of UM social background in order to achieve this well UM was was was prominent UM early in the war for the Red Cross more than that necessarily than for UM sisters are mercy more broadly. But that's going over the course of the war. They're going to expand at the demand um um growth. It's going to expand more

and more. And so that that but that that question of the social background of these women UM, that is not quite so clear and classified mhm UM. In the first two years of the war, more than two point eight million men are wounded on the Russian side, two point five million of them require hospitalization. You've already talked a little bit about about hospitals and who was building them, and you write that the planned capacity of the medical response fell far short and the reality ease fell even

below the plans. Um. Can you just say a little bit more about how failures to treat the wounded contributed to political opposition. Yeah, and this was again, this was enormously widespread. What happens at the beginning of the war, Uh, the scale of casualties um surprises everyone. It shouldn't have surprised the Russians as much as it did. There were quite large casualties in the Russian research Japanese war. Uh.

They knew what industrialized warfare could do. But still it was you know, at a scale that um that they should have planned for more. But the fact was that that again that SARS administration was incapable um of getting the job done. They the structure didn't allow them to do it, the finances didn't allow them to do it. Um. And and as a result, you know, they just didn't have hospital beds. At the beginning of the war, you had trains filled with wounded and dying men that were

going nowhere. Basically there was no place for them to unload their their their human cargoes. Um. And this creates immediate crisis and uh, you know up to the very highest levels. You know, the royal family itself is besieged with with complaints by you know, aristocratic kids are dying in these train cards too. It's not just lower class people and so so people are complaining quite spaciferously, quite early,

and they still can't quite get it together. And this is when you get this public effort by the Union of Towns and Union of Cities. These are again sort of public organizations think about them, maybe a sort of NGOs or charitable organizations something like that. Um, they're the ones that run these fund drives. They they have these you know, they go around and people collect money to build a hospital and and they're the ones that that generate all these extra beds and indeed these these extra

hospital trains. And that's one of the things that gives them um uh sort of prestige moving forward. And indeed, the very first sort of um head of the provisional government after that start abdicates is the head of this Union of Towns of cities because he has this political um weight as a result of these efforts during the war. Um you've already said a little bit about food scarcity, food supply breadlines, um and and how that kind of put pressure on the Czar's government. So we can kind

of step by that, UM. But would you briefly sketch for us the events that finally did leave this lead these are to step down. Yeah, this is the so called February revolution. Um. You know, as as folks probably know, the calendar in Russia was was different up until nineteen eighteen, so many of these famous revolutionary days actually take place

in different months now. But in any case, um uh, this it begins on International Women's Day, which was a relatively new socialist holiday instituted in UH as a result of the Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City. UM and uh and and again driven by socialist parties and by labor movements as as a way to sort of

recognize women within within the socialist movement. And UM so International Women's Day is provides the the opportunity for many women across the city of Petrograd to UM to go out on marches and and what they want to protest at this point, um is a series of things, the war, UH, the Tsarist administration and the fact that their lives have

now been taken over by increasingly long breadlines. Many of them are having to wake up in the pre dawn hours to stand in line to maybe get a loaf of bread, and then going off to a ten hour shift and then bringing that loaf of bread home to their kids when maybe they're they're you know, their husband is also working or or their husband is off at the war. UH and you know, and and this has

become a completely untenable situation. And they're putting the blame for this where it actually belongs on the SAR and on the and on the war itself. They're they're not wrong about who has led them to this, to this situation. And so you actually have um marches of of working class women in the working class districts. You have marches of middle class women in the more middle class districts

of the city. But it's the one in the working class districts that that gets the most weight because they ask big um groups of workers from defense factories to join them, and when the defense factories also go out on strike and join them, it becomes a crisis for for the police in Petrograd. UH. They attempt to deal with this um by using UH by by blocking off bridges by doing a series of other things. They shoot into the crowd at several moments, but then they feel

that they have to call in the army. The army has several barracks in the city and they have to call those soldiers up to help them police the city. And when they do that, it turns out that the soldiers are on the on the side of the protesters. You have mass mutinies among the soldiers in the Petrograd garrison. They drive the police away, the police throw away their uniforms, they flee on trains, they hide um uh, they break open the jails, they start burning court records. All this

stuff is happening. That's are orders troops to be sent to from the front to put down the rebellion in the city, um, And the first groups of those when they arrive in the outskirts, their commanders quickly realized that UM that if they said troops into the city, those troops are also going to rebel and then they're going to have a real problem on their hands. So they

start to withdraw. And when they withdraw from um from from those suburbs, the high command um that CSAR is also coming back to to this suburb town where his family is living UM and Uh. They put his train on a siding in the city called Scoff and they convince him that he has to abdicate. UM. So it's at the final end of the day, it's his generals that that tell him he can can can no longer continue UM and that UM and that he has to find some and they have to find a way forward

to to fight the war to a victorious conclusion without him. Uh. They think about abdicating in favor of his sickly son UM that turns out not to be UM uh feasible, then in favor of his brother, who wisely says, this is not a job I particularly wanted this moment. And so at the end of the day he abdicates in favor of no one, and they're you know, in an autocratic system, there's no UM, there's no system in place to sort of ensure that a non monarch takes place.

The only group that has been elected nationwide at that point is the Duma, and they form what they call a provisional committee and eventually a provisional government that says, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna hold power until we can have a constituent assembly, that is to say, kind of a constitutional convention. Uh. Maybe we should wait to do that till the end of the war. Um. Things are kind

of crazy right now, Let's not have a constitutional convention. Uh. And that sets up the dynamic for nineteen seventeen, where you have, um, this provisional government without any legitimacy, UM, now having to deal with this massive wave of political demands from from all from all sides. Right, and instead of ending conflict, you know, rather than bringing stability the following years see revolution, a protracted civil war. UM. But I think we'll cover those just kind of in the script.

I'd like to get to the questions and and how you speak on the So UM, would you describe why and how the Eastern Front and the really significant events we've been talking about today right about, Um, why have they been overlooked in his streas of the Great War of World War One? Yeah? I think there's uh, there's a couple of reasons for that. Uh. First, first of all,

you know, we're talking largely about English speaking audiences here. Uh, And there weren't many English speakers fighting there, And you know, there's there's an element of that sort of parochialism, that that's always going to always going to slip in. Um, there's a desire to see where your boys were fighting

as the most important places. And that's true both of World War One and of World War Two, where you know where English speakers aren't fighting, those those are seen as not as as as consequential, when uh, in many cases they are. So that that's I think that's one reason, um, probably the largest reason why it's it's it's not known as well, um, there are no victors to write this war story on the Eastern front. Um all the empires lose all of your German Empire, the Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire,

as Ungarian Empire. That there's there's no victors to to write this history. And indeed in many of these places that uh there the system is is hostile to U to the regime that preceded it, most notably in the Russian Empire. Right, they don't want to tell a heroic tale of what happened in World War One, and it wasn't a particularly heroic tale. So it's it's not that hard for them, not not not not to have to do it. So and they do have this heroic moment

of the revolution that they can talk about. And so in Russia that the focus is going to be on the revolution UH. In Britain and America it's going to be on UH. And France obviously it's going to be on on the Western Front. And as a result, the Eastern Front um has traditionally been been talked about last, especially by English speaking audiences. And that's too bad, um, because as I tried to articulately in the beginning of the book, I think it's not just sort of another theater.

I think we see something really important happening here on the Eastern Front, which is this process of European d colonization, which you're not seeing on the Western front um, and and and which but but which is very very prominent as we see the rise of not only of social revolution, but also of nationalist independent movements and more generally of decentralizing movements, of efforts to think about, let's say, what a federal state might look like, or or these other

ways of thinking about a world after empire, and so all of those things make the Eastern front um, UH, you know, really really important. Do you think that the fall of imperial Russia and this this breakdown of empire was inevitable in some meaningful sense or is there a better way of thinking and talking about what happened? Yeah, this is there's a long standing debate within the field of of Russian history. That is to say, did uh

did the war? Uh? Did the war delay revolution? This is one argument is that revolution was about to happen and delayed it by a few years, or did it accelerate? Um, you know, revolution in the end of the empire. UM. I tend not to be a historian that thinks in terms of inevitability very much. It's it's not a very persuasive way for me to think about this, but it's you know, the question of of sort of likely outcome

I've thought about quite a bit um. And you know, once the war happens, I think there there are a relatively small set of of likely outcomes. Um. Uh. I think it's quite unlikely um that uh, that the Tsaris regime is gonna preserve itself in a sort of non constitutional monarchy, non constitutional monarch form, that is to say, it's not going to go back to the way it was uh. And you know, I think too much will

have changed over the course of that. Even if let's say no February revolution happens, let's say the Germans decide to sign a negotiate a piece in early nineteen seventeen, I don't think you're going to go back to that, to the status quo ante. I think the most likely outcome is is the one that happens throughout Eastern Europe after the war, which is a military dictatorship of some kind,

right wing military dictatorship of some kind. Um. That's that seems to be the most likely outcome in it very nearly happened in Russia as well. And in Russia, what what you end up having is, uh is a left wing military dictatorship along with the revolutionary program um. And that was obviously not not um uh not not inevitable, and it certainly wasn't likely. Um. You know, I don't know where you'd put the number at. You know, the

bullshwicks hit their number. Um. You know, sometimes it happens in history that that a non probable thing happens, and and I think that's what what happens. A number of things have to go quite right for the bulls shwiks to to to seize power. Over the course of nineteen seventeen. UM. But you know again, um, I don't think that sort of I don't see sort of an autocracy surviving into

the twenty one century. You know if if you know, you can see something like the British monarchy, although it two is in trouble right now, but you know, you can see something like the British monarchy, uh, you know, that kind of system. But that would be so completely different from what, um, what was present in Russian the beginning of twenty century. It's not really the same thing. Hmm. Yeah.

And then finally taking some of what you've written and thinking about some of the people we're gonna be talking about with this season of Unobscured in our program, you've written that state failure does not need to be brought

on by anti imperial revolutionaries. Imperial states can self destruct, either knowingly or unintentionally, and in popular history a lot of times, because the focus is on the person of Nicholas or Alexandra or resputen Um, the collapse of imperial Russia is credited to their personal actions, their personal limitations, blind spots, that kind of thing. So to what extent do you think any one of these people were directly

directly responsible for the end of ourist rule. Yeah, you know, the when I wrote that line, I guess I have two quick answers to that. So when I wrote that line, what I was thinking about actually was the institutional martial law at the beginning of the war, which I think breaks the back of imperial governance in the borderlands. So that's what the first couple of chapters of the book

are about. What happens. And you take these experience and perial administrators and you remove them, or they remove themselves, they flee in many cases, and you replace them with completely inept basically military officers to try to govern these territories. And what you end up with is economic disaster, um uh, ethnic deportations. You get a whole series of really terrible things that undermines society and state in these in these regions.

So that's the process of peril self destruction. I'm talking about the sort of modus vivendi. Even if it was an unpleasant one for Poles and Ukrainians, they were prepared to live with it for the long term. Many of them were talking about living with it for the long term in nineteen thirteen and and that was no longer the case by the time to get to nineteen fifteen. And that's largely the result of a series of really

bad mistakes that that are driven from above. Now Nicholas makes those decisions, He's not the only one making those those decisions about martial law, for instance. Now the question of sort of how important the royal family and dress putin is, you know, I I I don't see that. I mean, they certainly have importance. That is to say that Nicholas, at the end of the day does make these decisions, and the decisions he makes, um, quite frequently are are ones that are going to lead them down

the road to disaster. A better monarch, a monarch that let's say, had Stalepin isn't assassinated or if it isn't, um, you know, you can think of a series of quite talented Russian politicians, UM, who might have helped prevent this, uh, this situation from from from getting to where it did. Um. Yeah, Nicholas is responsible for not allowing that to happen, for not promoting that that that that from happening. UM. I think the sort of the criticism of Alexandra and then

by extension rasputin. A lot of it is wrapped up in quite um uh, I don't know the best way way to put it. I mean, a lot of it is wrapped up obviously in anti Germanism, a lot of it is wrapped up in in in sexism obviously. Uh. You know that that's a lot of the criticism that's

happening for them, um. But it also doesn't reflect the fact that I talked about before, which is that the decisions they're making in nineteen six after Nicholas leaps for the front in the nineties sixteen, let's say they're not that consequential. I don't think it actually matters that much to the Minister of Interior, Minister of Communications, It's right.

I just don't think it matters too much. Most of the actual work that's being done is being done by people that that they don't have control over, especially in the military, and so you know, I don't see them as that important now in terms of the loss of public faith on the part of the Petersburg elite, which is something important that the faith of your political elite is something important in a political system. It's obvious that they have an effect on that. So for sure, they

have an influence on that. And that's why the you know, that's why it's conservatives and and ultra right right wing people that assassinate rest Putin, right, is because they're the ones that are that are most affected by this right. It's it's not left wing terrorists that assassinate your ress Putin, right, He's irrelevant to them, you know. It's it's the right wing, uh, and the political elite that is that that is most

consumed by him. But to take a brief counterfactual, maybe if Resputin never existed, does the Russian Empire collapse as it does? And I think yes, I don't think even the timing shifted by that. Um. So it's it's hard for me to see that he has sort of a large macro effect, even if his micro effect on the way that people discussed the revolution and the collapse of the empire is quite large, both at the time and then afterwards. Because he's an interesting, um, salacious and um

and controversial figure. It's it's understandable why people want to read about and want to talk about him both at the time and now. Beautiful, that's great, that lines right up with the thesis. Good. Yeah, so that's what I have for us, and uh yeah, do you want to be respectful of your time and letting you get out of here? But terrific. It's a lot of fun. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in

store for next week. When I went away and looked and homed in and focused on the very end of their lives side pretty much from when they were imprisoned at the Alexander Palace, and then I I honed it in even closer to the last two weeks of their lives in a Kaschemberg in the Party of Haus. I suddenly realized it was a really interesting and exciting scenario there that had never been explored, which was looking at the family really close up. How were they what was

going through their minds? How did they deal with captivity? What were the tensions being trapped in a house in western Siberia knowing that probably the writing was on the wall. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Minky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thayne in partnership with I Heart Radio, with research by Sam l Bertie, writing

by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians, source materials, and links to our other shows over at grim and mild dot com, Slash Unobscured, and, as always, thanks for listening. Four