In February 1914 the Interior Minister, Pyotr Durnovo, an extreme right-winger who as Police Director had ordered the destruction of entire villages after the 1905 Revolution, wrote a prescient memorandum to Nicholas warning that Russia and the monarchy were too weak to withstand a long war of attrition that would be likely in a conflict with Germany. He predicted with remarkable accuracy what was likely to happen: ‘The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitation throughout the country, with socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of the primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralised to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy; the issue of which cannot be foreseen.’

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 246