By the early 1914, the tsar was quite in control of the country but the outbreak of WW1 destroyed all that. When the Austrian-Hungarian invaded Serbia, the outcry from the public to defend their fellow slavs raised the tsars popularity to unprecedented height and this gave him hope that he could ride the storm that was brewing. Quite literary, following their hearts and not their heads, Russia again went into a was ill-equipped, and poorly managed (it seems lessons had not being learned from the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War), such was their inefficiency that 1/3 of the army had no rifles or lacked basics such as boots, medical suppliers and food, it wasn’t long before bad news started to spread of Russia’s defeats in places such as Tannenbury and the Musurian Lakes, and there was the Great Retreat which was claimed to be the result of shell shortage (about 3 shells to a tank a day), but the insiders blamed it on the quality of the commandeers.
War is a great boost for the economy as a creates a supply and demand for various goods which then have a multiplier effect as it creates jobs and maintains the circulation of money in the economy and the Russian industrial economy responded well to the extent that by 1916, the economy had grew 21.5% from the beginning of the war, but such is the frailty of the Russian economy that this level of growth couldn’t be maintained and the economy collapsed during the autumn of 1916 due to increasing inflation, food shortages and the overall effect of continuing a lengthy war with an inefficient economy.
As many farming peasants were conscripted into the army, this created a shortage of able labour to help produce and harvest the food and this resulted in food shortages in which proportion of total harvest marketed dropped from 25% in 19913-14 to 10% in 1916-17. When goods are in short supply, their prices spiral put of control and unless wages can keep up, which in itself increases cost of production, the public will find it hard to survive, increasing German army advances into Russia resulted in peasants fleeing into the cities thereby causing overcrowding and added to the strains of a densely populated area already witnessing food shortages for example, between 1914 and 1917, Petrograd population grew from 2.1 million to 2.7 million.
The length of the war also resulted in shortages in raw materials and some factory started to close down and this caused mass unemployment, this combined with the bad weather, food shortages, overcrowding, humiliation abroad, high inflation, wages not keeping up, Russia was in chaos.
All these factors combined amongst other to create the down fall of the tsar, one other factor was his persistent on autocracy when logic would have said otherwise. The patriotic formation of bodies such as the Union of Zemstva to provide medical facilities and the Congress of Representatives of Industry and Trade to coordinate production raised an old thorny question. How far should these groups be able to influence the war since the tsar was meant to be the sole operator? The tsar was unwilling to rescinded or share his power so these group, radical or not, where denied active roles in the conduct of the war. At a time when the country and its economy was falling apart, here was the tsar making political ideology more important than the effective prosecution of the war. By refusing to allow the public to help, direct and advise him, he inevitably placed a barrier between himself and the public who were the ones feeling the true negative effect of the war. This groups could surely have made the Russian offensive better organised, equipped and highly motivated as they would have seen that their fellow countrymen and women were all participating.
By refusing help, the tsar effectively made himself a scapegoat for all those looking for someone to blame, and as things both at home and abroad got worse, the tsar made the second most critical error to ended his reign, he assumed personal command of the war as the commander in chief of the armed force, however, he had no previous military experience and by doing this, left Petrograd and the ruling of the country at the hands of his incompetent wife and her maverick adviser, Rasputin.
The third major cause of the downfall of the tsar was the role of Rasputin at the period. The Tsarina trusted him wholeheartedly and he abused this privilege to admit and dismiss ministers as he like. Overall, although the tsar alienated the peasants, whilst he was out at war and even ordered the Dumas to stop meeting, Rasputin did his utmost to alienate those groups that were previously staunch tsar supporters to the extent that they too started to doubt the effectiveness of the tsar, the damage was already irreparable when a group led by Prince Yusopov murdered him.
With a severe winter, food shortage, rising prices and the war going badly, the government was under great pressure and by march 1917, the government had lost control. According to William H. Chamberlin, “The collapse of the Romanov autocracy was one of the most leadless, spontaneous, anonymous revolution of all time”. The initiative came primarily from the Petrograd workers who were worn out as 1917 opened, in January, some 150,000 workers demonstrated on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday and 80,000 had demonstrated support for the reopened Duma in February. International Women’s Day (8 March) brought tens of thousands of women onto the streets. The coincidence of this with a wage strike at the putilov works raised the number of demonstrators on that day to a high of 240,000, but the decisive anti-tsarist factor was the armed forces. The major difference between the events of 1917 and those of 1905 lay in the attitude of the Petrograd garrison. The shooting of 40 demonstrators on 11 March broke the morale of the many of the conscript soldiers, and regiment after regiment associated with, and then actively supported the strikers. Once you turn an army on its own people, then you lose the respect of every single citizen of that country sooner or later, even the dreaded Cossack (repressive forces used to suppress internal unrest) refused to obey their officers. By the end of 12 March, Petrograd was in the hands of a revolution without recognised leaders, at a cost of an estimated 1,300 civilian and military lives, according to N. N. Sukhanov, a socialist observer, “not one party was preparing for the great overturn”.
Realising the seriousness of the situation, the tsar tried to return home but his train was stopped outside the city and his general, Rodzianko adviced him to abdicate. Under orders from the tsar, the Dumas dispersed but transformed themselves into a provisional government and most of the members supported the general advice but only in the hopes of retaining the monarchy under a more popular, constitutional tsar, having originally dismissed the Dumas pleas for last ditch reforms, Nicholas then toyed with the idea of a military assault upon his own capital. He was dissuaded by the pleas of his more trusted generals who wanted constitutional reform, but Nicholas was unable to compromise his own autocracy and agreed to abdicate on 15 March, the following day, his brother Mikhail, refused the crown leaving Russia a republic after 304 years of Romanov rule.
What followed was anarchy with the revolution becoming one against authority and private property, and the provisional government found it hard to fight a war abroad and contain chaos at home. Lenin and Trotsky saw their chance and in the name of the soviets and an implied a socialist coalition, they seized power in oct/nov 1917 and on the orders of the bolsheviks, the royal family was killed in July 1918 and communist Russia began.
