stages of the First Revolution.
Conservatives and Moderates joined with Social Democrats and
Socialist-Revolutionists in opposition to the corrupt and oppressive
regime. Even the president of the Duma, Michael Rodzianko, a conservative
landowner, assailed the government.

One of the principal reasons for this unexampled unity against the
government was the wide-spread conviction, based, as we have seen, upon the
most damning evidence, that Premier Sturmer and his Cabinet were not loyal
to the Allies and that they contemplated making a separate peace with
Germany. All factions in the Duma were bitterly opposed to a separate
peace. Rodzianko was loudly cheered when he denounced the intrigues against
the Allies and declared: "Russia gave her word to fight in common with the
Allies till complete and final victory is won. Russia will not betray her
friends, and with contempt refuses any consideration of a separate peace.
Russia will not be a traitor to those who are fighting side by side with
her sons for a great and just cause." Notwithstanding the intensification
of the class conflict naturally resulting from the great industrial
development since 1906, patriotism temporarily overshadowed all class
consciousness.

The cheers that greeted Rodzianko's declaration, and the remarkable ovation
to the Allied ambassadors, who were present, amply demonstrated that, in
spite of the frightful suffering and sacrifice which the nation had
endured, all classes were united in their determination to win the war.
Only a corrupt section of the bureaucracy, at one end of the social scale,
and a small section of extreme left-wing Socialists, at the other end of
the social scale, were at that time anti-war. There was this difference
between the Socialist pacifists and the bureaucratic advocates of peace
with Germany: the former were not pro-German nor anti-Ally, but sincere
internationalists, honest and brave--however mistaken--advocates of peace.
Outside of the bureaucracy there was no hostility to the Allies in Russia.
Except for the insignificant Socialist minority referred to, the masses of
the Russian people realized that the defeat of the Hohenzollern dynasty
was necessary to a realization of the ideal of a free Russia. The new and
greater revolution was already beginning, and determination to defeat the
Hohenzollern bulwark of the Romanov despotism was almost universal. The
whole nation was pervaded by this spirit.

Paul Miliukov, le