The Hardship and Anger of World War I

In August 1914 Nicholas II committed his country to war with Germany and Austria. Russia had neither the economy nor the leadership to prevail, and so soldiers died by the millions. As men were drawn away to the front, women filled in on the farms and in the factories. Between 1914 and 1917, the percentage of female workers in the industrial labor force rose from 26 to 43 percent. More privileged women joined the war effort by collecting donations, making bandages, knitting socks, and converting their homes into temporary hospitals for the wounded. Thirty thousand women worked on committees organized by the zemstva to gather supplies for the army and care for displaced persons. Eighteen thousand served as army nurses. Others signed up to be clerks, military cooks, drivers, and laundresses. Feminists in Russia, as elsewhere, also lent a hand, hoping that their contributions would strengthen the case for women’s rights.³³

A smaller number of women–probably a few hundred–served in the army. Most got in by disguising themselves as men, and a few obtained permission to enlist by petitioning Nicholas himself. They came from all walks of life, peasants to princesses. These women gave various motives for putting themselves in harm’s way–defending their country, avenging relatives who had died in the war, going on a great adventure, getting away from the confines of being a woman. Male soldiers usually figured out the sex of those who were pretending to be men, but a few made it through the entire war undiscovered. Dozens received medals for heroism, and the exploits of a few were widely publicized by the press at home and abroad. Among these were two pioneers of Russian aviation, Evgenia Shakhovskaia and Nadezhda Degtereva, who took their biplanes into the skies to spy on German forces.³⁴

As the war ground on, women loyal to the regime did their best to strengthen morale. Empress Alexandra and her four beautiful daughters, dressed in starched white nursing uniforms, were photographed tending wounded soldiers. Nuns prayed for the health of the tsar’s family, as well as for the troops at the front. Church bells tolled to remind Russia of God’s eventual mercy. These appeals to faith could not still the laments of grieving mothers and wives or ease their burdens. At the front, the soldiers were dying: 3 million by the end of the war, 2.7 million more missing in action or captured.³⁵ At home, the mood darkened. In 1914 avant‑garde artist Natalia Goncharova published a book, Mystical Images of War, which celebrated Russian patriotism; in 1916, her friend Olga Rozanova publicized the horrors of the front in a series of fevered linotypes and collages titled simply War.

The anger, widely shared, led to strikes, which women joined, and to less conventional protests. In Central Asia, women who were usually sequestered in their homes came out to demonstrate against the conscription of their men to work at the front. In European Russia, peasant and working‑class women launched a campaign of market riots. The economy was straining to meet the demands of the war, causing consumer goods and food to grow scarce and prices to rise. Peasant and working‑class women did the shopping for their families, so they were the ones who came to the markets to find that prices had gone up overnight. Some paid quietly or went away disappointed. Others asked the merchants to cut prices. When they refused, women seized goods and sometimes beat up the merchants and wrecked the stores. In the town of Kineshma in Kostroma province in the early summer of 1916, a dispute that began in a shop escalated into a crowd of four thousand women charging through the market demanding that all the vendors lower their prices.³⁶

Soldatki, the wives of soldiers, were often instigators of and participants in these riots, because they felt particularly aggrieved. The government promised them benefits to make up for the loss of income they suffered when their husbands were drafted, then failed to come up with the funding and the clerical staff to get the payments out regularly. Standing around waiting to receive their money, soldatki grumbled to one another about a system that asked everything of them and gave them so little. Sometimes they decided to do something about it. In June 1916, a group of soldatki in the village of Morshansk, Samara province, asked a shopkeeper to sell them cloth at prewar prices. When he refused, they grabbed bolts of fabric, ransacked the shop, and surged off to attack another one.³⁷

In the fall of 1916, anger was also building among the privileged in Russia. The press and Duma delegates openly criticized the government, singling out for special condemnation the emperor and empress. Alexandra, Danish by birth, was a devoted wife and mother, but she had never been good at cultivating the support of her subjects, and so was perceived as aloof and foreign. She had worsened her reputation by becoming dependent on Grigori Rasputin, a scruffy, corrupt Siberian mystic. Widespread rumors accused the empress of being a spy for Germany and Rasputin’s mistress. In December 1916, cousins of the tsar tried to restore the reputation of the monarchy by killing the Siberian and dumping his body in the Neva River.

This desperate gesture did nothing to calm the unrest. Poor people in Petrograd³⁸ were hungry and bread, the staple of their diets, was growing scarce. Women queuing up at bakeries in the damp, dark mornings talked to one another about the hard times, spread rumors about bakers selling better loaves to rich families who could pay more, and cursed the emperor and empress for not taking care of the people. Sometimes when the stores ran out of bread, the women broke windows and threatened the shopkeepers. A worried police official reported to his superiors in January 1917, “One spark will be enough for a conflagration to blaze up.”³⁹ The spark was struck on February 23, when working women took to the streets en masse and set off the uprising that brought down the tsar.