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La Domenica del Corriere (The Sunday Courier) of March 25 to April 1, 1917, an illustrated weekly supplement to Corriere della Sera, published in Milan, Italy. The front and back covers are full-page illustrations by the great Italian illustrator Achille Beltrame. The front cover depicts Russian troops cheering the deputies entering the Duma after what the paper calls, 'the Russian revolt for freedom and the war.' The secondary story was on the fall of Baghdad to British troops.
Central detail from a 1898 map of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, from a German atlas. Central St Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on the Neva River. Key landmarks include the Peter and Paul Fortress, which served as a prison, Nevski Prospect, a primary boulevard south of the Fortress, the Finland Train Station, east of the Fortress, where Lenin made his triumphal return, the Tauride (Taurisches) Palace, which housed the Duma and later the Petrograd Soviet.
Devastation of the zone German forces evacuated during Operation Alberich, the strategic retreat at the beginning of 1917. The retreating troops upended trees, destroying structures, poisoned wells, and left booby-traps behind.
German postcard map of the Romanian theater of war, with map labels in Bulgarian added in red. From north to south the labels are Russia, the Austro-Hungarian regions of Galicia and Bukovina, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and, along the Black Sea, the Romania region of Dobruja. Romania's primary war aim was the annexation of the Austro-Hungarian region of Transylvania, with its large ethnic Romanian population.
Russian soldier bearing the Imperial Russian flag, singing the Russia Hymn beginning 'God save the Tsar!'
"The Duma's failure to announce an official session was tantamount to committing political suicide at the very moment when its authority was at its height in the country and the army, and when it could have been of far-reaching benefit. This demonstrated the weakness of a Duma largely based on a narrow upper-class franchise, which had inevitably restricted its capacity to reflect the mood of the nation as a whole. By failing to take the initiative, the Duma became a private body on a par with the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, which was then just beginning to emerge. The next day, realizing his mistake, Rodzyanko made an attempt to revive the Duma as an official institution. But it was too late. By then there were already two centers of authority in the capital, both of which owed their existence to the Revolution. They were the Duma in unofficial session, with its Provisional Committee appointed as a temporary guiding body, and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, guided by its Executive Committee." ((1), more)
"Shortly afterwards, someone came to tell me that the Volhynian regiment of the Guard had mutinied during the night, killed its officers and was parading in the city, calling on the people to take part in the revolution and trying to win over the troops who stilled remain loyal. . . .One piece of bad news followed another. The Law Courts had become nothing but an enormous furnace; the Arsenal on the Liteïny, the Ministry of the Interior, the Military Government building, the Minister of the Courts' offices, the headquarters of the Detective Force, the too, too famous Okhrana, and a score of police-stations were in flames; the prisons were open and all the prisoners had been liberated; the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul was undergoing a siege and the Winter Palace was occupied. Fighting was in progress in every part of the city." ((2), more)
"As far back as the Siegfried Line, every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement blown up or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed, every telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable burned; in a word, we were turning the country that our advancing opponents would occupy into a wasteland." ((3), more)
"Colonel Ştefan Holban, commander of the 2nd ID, lamented on 14 March [1917], 'A multitude of our brothers have died, while the lives of others hang in the balance. I cried when I read the report of deaths and my heart breaks when I see how the flower of Oltenia perishes day by day.' A few days later Holban himself fell ill. The epidemic was less severe in the units of the 2nd Army at the front, which were farther from the apex of the contagion in or near Iaşi. Nevertheless, the Austro-German command was worried enough to implement preventive measures on its side of the line." ((4), more)
"In these decisive days in the life of Russia, we have thought it a duty of conscience to facilitate for our people a close union and consolidation of all national forces for the speedy attainment of victory; and, in agreement with the Imperial Duma, we have thought it good to abdicate from the throne of the Russian State, and to lay down the supreme power.Not wishing to part with our dear son, we hand over our inheritance to our brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and give him our blessing to mount the throne of the Russian State. We bequeath it to our brother to direct the forces of the State in full and inviolable union with the representatives of the people in the legislative institutions, on those principles which will by them be established." ((5), more)
(1) On Monday, March 12, 1917 (February 27, Old Style), Tsar Nicholas suspended the Duma, Russia's lower house, even as soldiers joined the protesters who had been thronging the streets of Petrograd, the capital, since the 8th. Our author, Alexander Kerensky, a leader of the left-wing opposition, argued for ignoring the Tsar's order and for holding an official session, but he and his colleagues were voted down. In the early afternoon, soldiers and civilian protesters arrived at the Duma looking to it for leadership. Kerensky led them into the building, the Tauride Palace, where the Soviet of Workers' Deputies also established itself before the day was out. A youthful, compelling orator, Kerensky served in the Duma and was elected to the Soviet, the only member of both. Mikhail Rodzyanko was President of the State Duma. By the end of the day, the Russian Revolution was a fact.
Russia and History's Turning Point by Alexander Kerensky, page 196, copyright © 1965 by Alexander Kerensky, publisher: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, publication date: 1965
(2) Two paragraphs from the entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Monday, March 12, 1917. The mutiny of the Volhynian (or Volinsk) Regiment, roughly 660 strong, would grow to nearly the entire Petrograd garrison of 170,000 men siding with the revolution. The looted Arsenal provided the revolution with weapons. The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, were feared and loathed. The Fortress of Peter and Paul, on an island in the Neva River, was an arsenal, fortress, and prison directly across the river from the Winter Palace, the Tsar's Petrograd residence.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 222 and 223, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(3) German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger describing the destruction German troops visited on the countryside they withdrew from as part of Operation Alberich, the German strategic retreat of 1917 to a shorter, well-entrenched defensive system. Covering the retreat, Jünger and his men passed through the results of weeks of devastation on March 13, 1917. The Siegfried, or Hindenburg, Line was actually a Siegfried Zone of four trench lines. Jünger thought the destruction was bad for the men's morale, and continues: 'Here, for the first time, I witnessed wanton destruction that I was later in life to see to excess; this is something that is unhealthily bound up with the economic thinking of our age, but it does more harm than good to the destroyer, and dishonours the soldier.'
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, page 128, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(4) Romania entered the war on August 27, 1916, and was overrun by Central Power forces by the end of the year, driven out of Wallachia and Dobruja and back to Moldavia where the Russians held the Allied line. Typhus, typhoid, dysentery, jaundice, and influenza sickened and killed a large part of the Romanian army, peaking in February and March, 1917.
The Romanian Battlefront in World War I by Glenn E. Torrey, page 175, copyright © 2011 by the University Press of Kansas, publisher: University Press of Kansas, publication date: 2011
(5) Excerpt from the abdication signed by Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, Nicholas Romanov, on March 15 (March 2, Old Style), 1917. Had Nicholas abdicated in favor of his twelve-year-old, hemophiliac son Alexis as called for by the abdication papers agreed by the Duma and Soviet of Workers Deputies, the transfer of the throne and continuity of the House of Romanov would have been clear. In changing the document to bypass his son, Nicholas handed the decision to his brother Michael who abdicated, saying he would accept the crown only if asked to do so by a constituent assembly.
Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie by Robert K. Massie, page 417, copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by Robert K. Massie, publisher: Random House, publication date: 2011
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