Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/415

 The Revolution and Famine in Russia 395 On December 29th, 1916, the monk Rasputin was murdered at a dinner party in Petrograd, and a belated attempt was made to put the Tzardom in order. By March things were moving rapidly ; food riots in Petrograd developed into a revolutionary insurrection ; there was an attempted suppression of the Duma, the representative body, there were attempted arrests of liberal leaders, the formation of a provisional government tmder Prince Lvoff, and an abdication (March 15th) by the Tzar. For a time it seemed that a moderate and controlled revolution might be possible — perhaps under a new Tzar. Then it became evident that the destruction of popular confidence in Russia had gone too far for any such adjustments. The Russian people were sick to death of the old order of things in Europe, of Tzars and wars and of Great Powers ; it wanted relief, and that speedily, from unendurable miseries. The Allies had no understanding of Russian realities ; their diplomatists were ignorant of Russian, genteel persons with their attention directed to the Russian Court rather than to Russia, they blundered steadily with the new situation. There was little good will among these diplomatists for republicanism, and a manifest disposition to embarrass the new government as much as possible. At the head of the Russian republican government was an eloquent and picturesque leader, Kerensky, who found himself assailed by the forces of a profounder revolutionary movement, the " social revolution," at home and cold-shouldered by the Allied governments abroad. His Allies wotild neither let him give the Russian peasants the land for which they craved nor peace beyond their frontiers. The French and the British press pestered their exhausted ally for a fresh offensive, but when presently the Germans made a strong attack by sea and land upon Riga, the British Admiralty quailed before the prospect of a Baltic expedition in rehef. The new Russian republic had to fight unsupported. In spite of their naval predom- inance and the bitter protests of the great English admiral. Lord Fisher (1841-1920), it is to be noted that the British and their Allies, except for some submarine attacks, left the Germans the complete mastery of the Baltic throughout the war. The Russian masses, however, were resolute to end the war. At any cost. There had come into existence in Petrograd a body representing the workers and common soldiers, the Soviet, and this body clamoured for an international conference of socialists at Stockholm. Food riots were occmring in Berlin at this time, war