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Greeting Message of the Comintern (SH)
The 100th anniversary of the February Revolution 1917
The war worsened the lives of the workers and peasants even more. Many factories had to be closed because of the lack of raw materials and fuel.
Many fields lied idle, because the peasants were at the front and could not till the soil. The railways could not cope with the intensive traffic that was necessary in the war. In some parts grain was rotten, while the workers were hungry in the cities. The women, who were tired of work in the armaments factories, often had to wait for hours in front of the bakeries to get a piece of bread for the children.
The army and the people were hungry, and wearing torn clothes and shoes. The distress and dissatisfaction grew.
In the tsarist army there were no guns, no bullets. Three soldiers often had only one rifle. Czarist generals and ministers betrayed military secrets to the German imperialists . The tsarist army suffered one defeat after the other. Already in the first months of the war, she had huge losses of dead, wounded and prisoners.
The Bolsheviks created Bolshevik basic units in the army and navy, and spread flyers with appeals against the imperialist war. The work of the Bolsheviks was successful. As early as 1915 and 1916, individual troops refused obedience. Since the fall of 1915, the fraternizations had become increasingly frequent. The Russian soldiers crawled from their trenches to the Niemandsland, where they met with German or Austro-Hungarian soldiers.
During the war, the oppressed peoples of Russia began to fight against the tsarist government. The Tsar needed a great deal of money for the conduct of the war, and burdened the oppressed peoples with high taxes. In 1916, he ordered that the population of the non-Russian territories should be used for the construction of trenches and other work on the front. This happened at a time when important work in the fields had to be carried out. The Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghizs, and Turkmen refused to follow the Tsar's orders. The excited population stormed the district administrations and demanded the withdrawl of the tsarist order.
The insurgent Uzbeks destroyed railway lines, set fire to stations, and cut telephone wires to prevent troop transports. The Kirghizs captured military transports and thereby arms.
The tsarist authorities sent troops with guns, machine guns, and armored cars against the insurgents, , and struck down the revolts bloodily. Nevertheless, the collective struggle for workers, peasants and soldiers as well as the oppressed peoples grew for peace.
In the January and February days of 1917 food supply collapsed in many cities. The supply to Petrograd and Moscow came to a complete standstill. One factory after the other was closed. The conviction grew in the people that there was only one way out of the unbearable situation:
OVERTHROW OF THE TSARISTIC MONARCHY
The bourgeoisie also became dissatisfied with the Czar. She noted that the tsarist government was unable to win the victory. The bourgeoisie feared that the tsar would make peace with Germany. But they wanted to continue the war until they had reached their imperialist goals. The imperialist governments of England and France did not want to lose Russia as their ally, and supported the Russian bourgeoisie in the endeavor to eliminate Tsar Nicholas II, and to replace his rule with a government of the capitalists who should wage the war more determinedly than the Czar.
