Russian children running from German soldiers. A pencil sketch on blank postcard field postmarked March 31, 1916.
Reverse:Message postmarked March 31, 1916
"In January, 1917, temperatures went down to more than forty degrees below zero, and the railway network upon which the cities utterly depended for their food and the army for its supplies were frozen to a standstill. The desire for food, warmth, and peace dominated the mind of the ordinary man, and you had only to join a bread queue to realize that the Russian worker, for all his docility, his famous capacity for enduring terrible hardships, was approaching one of his periodic outbursts of semimadness, when he could think of nothing but to smash and burn and destroy. This—not the Germans—was the danger which the 'official' classes really feared and tried desperately to impress upon the Czar."
The bitterly cold winter, the demands of the war, the coal shortage, transport failures, all were speeding the crisis around Russian Nicholas II to a head. If not indifferent, if not oblivious, he failed to act to protect those over whom he ruled, the army he commanded, the family he headed, and himself.
The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead, page 132, copyright © 1958 by Time, Inc., publisher: Carroll and Graf, publication date: 1989
1917-01-25, 1917, January, cold, hunger, Nicholas II, Russian Red Riding Hood