the incredibly rapid industrialisation of russia during the war, more capital investment since 1914 than the preceeding 100 years. constant bottlenecks in the production chain as new capacity comes on line but often can’t secure necessary inputs, requiring new plant. or reliance on allied materials from abroad ordered in 1914/15 but never delivered. massive increases in the industrial labour force which is often idle and poorly fed. creaking and outdating transport system simply can’t deliver inputs and outputs, transport the army, and meet civilian/commercial demand all at once. although a grand duke can always commandeer a train. massive government investment, raised by loans (not tax due to lack of administrative infrastructure and fear of revolution) leads to exponentially rising inflation. war, instability & attempts at price control encourage peasants to hoard food, groaning transport system wastes such food as can be found, food crisis in the cities and factories. finally, mass pleas for help, in good faith and led by priests in the very centre of the capital, met by raised swords and cossack charges, blood on the snow.

bitter factional disputes at the top between reactionary aristocratics and bourgeois liberals in both the government and the army command cripple the war effort. autocracy demands the tsar resolves all these conflicts, nicholas II though a convinced & ideological autocrat is simply is not capable of doing so and everyone knows it. so the system has no constructive way of resolving conflict or division.

all compounded by the horrendous reality of frontline warfare in WW1, napoleonic infantry tactics are expected to overcome 20thC mechanised defensive technology (germans and australians using rifle-light machine gun-mortar armed infantry squads, ie modern infantry tactics, finally find the answer in 1917/18, too late for the russians).

austro-german superiority in industrial supply and command control give the central powers the advantage in the east, but even for them the cost of advancing through a ruined landscape is monumental in lives and material. despite brusilov, morale collapses in the russian army due to total dysfunction on the front and behind it.

you have to return to the tsarist regime’s appalling bad faith towards its own people since 1905 and earlier, its self obsessed incompetence, its plain refusal to face reality, when looking at the revolutions of 1918

who was it that taught the bolsheviks that politics is a brutal game in which giving quarter is the fools path? the tsarist autocracy. flip it over and you have stalinism.

there’s not much here to inform western politics.

Shopping in the Ukraine often left me wondering.

COMRADE!!! Remember our tender moments…

No fault shall be found in me!

Vladimir Ilich does not get to Finland Station until April 3 or April 14 by our calendar. Comrade Lenin did not like revolutions to just spring up and happen! He was very disturbed to hear of the events in Petersburg. Comrade Trotsky said (before he changed his tune) that like the Jacobins, the Leninists feared mass “spontaneity.”

and we taught the band to play

now we’d like you all to sing along…

Firecracker, firecracker, siss-boom-bah!
Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny,
Rah, rah, rah!