Alexander Guchkov

Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov was one of the most colourful figures in Russian politics of the early 20th century: a Moscow financier, a volunteer in other people’s wars, a duellist and the leader of the moderately liberal Octobrist party. For years he fought for a modern army, controlled by parliament rather than by the court. During the war he headed the war-industries committees, which mobilised private industry to produce for the army and at the same time became a centre of opposition. The Empress wanted him hanged. In March 1917 it was he who brought back from Pskov the act of abdication of Nicholas II, and then, as war minister, he tried to save discipline in the army. After two months he concluded that he had failed, and left.

Before the war

He was born on 26 October 1862 (14 October in the Julian calendar) in Moscow, into a wealthy merchant family of Old Believer origin. His great-grandfather, a serf, bought his freedom and founded a textile factory in Moscow. Guchkov studied history at Moscow University and then law and economics in Berlin, Vienna and Heidelberg. He did not finish his studies, because during the famine of 1891–1892 he went to organise relief for the peasants of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. Later he was a member of the Moscow city board, deputy mayor and a bank director.

His real fame came from his adventures. He travelled through the Armenian lands of Turkey during the massacres, served in the guard of the Chinese Eastern Railway construction, and in 1899 went with his brother to the Transvaal to fight on the side of the Boers in the war against the British. Badly wounded in the leg, he was taken prisoner by the British and limped for the rest of his life. During the Russo-Japanese War he was a senior Red Cross official. After the Battle of Mukden he refused to leave the wounded and let himself be taken prisoner by the Japanese. He challenged opponents to duels many times.

After 1905 he became leader of the Octobrists, who wanted to cooperate with the monarchy on the basis of the October Manifesto. He supported Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and his reforms. In the Third Duma he chaired the state defence committee and formed close ties with reform-minded generals, especially Alexei Polivanov. In 1908 he publicly called on the grand dukes to give up their high posts in the army, which the court never forgave him. From March 1910 to March 1911 he was Chairman of the Duma, and he resigned in protest at Stolypin’s disregard for the chamber. He was succeeded by Mikhail Rodzianko. In 1912 he made a sharp speech in the Duma against Rasputin and made a lifelong enemy of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. That same year he fought a duel with Lieutenant-Colonel of Gendarmes Sergei Myasoyedov, whom he accused of spying on officers. In 1915 Myasoyedov was hanged as a German spy, although most historians today consider him innocent. In the 1912 elections to the Fourth Duma Guchkov lost in Moscow and was left without a seat.

The war-industries committees

When war broke out, Guchkov went to the front as a Red Cross plenipotentiary. He soon became convinced that the army was badly supplied and even worse led. In the spring of 1915, when the shell shortage came to light and the Russians were retreating from Galicia, he was among those who blamed War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov most loudly. After his dismissal Guchkov’s friend Polivanov became minister.

In the summer of 1915 a congress of industrialists elected Guchkov chairman of the Central War-Industries Committee. The war-industries committees were to bring together medium-sized and small factories that had not so far worked for the army and to distribute orders among them. Their contribution to munitions production was more modest than their propaganda claimed, but politically they mattered a great deal. Together with Prince Georgy Lvov’s Zemstvo Union and the Union of Towns they formed a network of “public organisations” that competed with the bureaucracy. In the autumn of 1915 Guchkov, re-elected to the State Council, brought elected workers’ representatives into the leadership of the committees. At court this was seen as open revolt. The Empress wrote to her husband that the committees were preparing “anti-dynastic questions” and asked whether Guchkov could not be hanged. His friendship with Guchkov cost Polivanov his post: in March 1916 he was replaced by Shuvayev.

Guchkov was one of the founders of the Progressive Bloc, which from August 1915 demanded a government of public confidence. Over time, however, he stopped believing that the Tsar would agree to it. In August 1916 he wrote to the chief of staff of the Supreme Commander, General Mikhail Alekseyev, that a flood was coming and that the “pitiful, wretched and flabby” government was preparing for the cataclysm as if for rain: putting on galoshes and opening an umbrella. Copies of the letter circulated in Petrograd and damaged the general in the Empress’s eyes. At the end of 1916 Guchkov was the centre of a plot for a palace coup. With a few politicians and officers he planned to stop the Tsar’s train on its way from Headquarters to Tsarskoye Selo and force him to abdicate in favour of his son, with Grand Duke Michael as regent. According to many historians the plot never went beyond talk, and in any case the revolution overtook it.

Pskov

During the February Revolution Guchkov joined the military commission of the Provisional Committee of the Duma. Together with Rodzianko he refused to meet the demands of soldiers who wanted their rights recognised. The next day the Petrograd Soviet issued Order No. 1. The Duma Committee decided that the Tsar had to abdicate in favour of his son and sent Guchkov and the monarchist Vasily Shulgin to Pskov. They arrived on the evening of 15 March. Guchkov argued to the Tsar that the movement in the capital had broken out spontaneously and might spread to the front, and that abdication was the only way out. Nicholas replied that he had already made his decision, but did not want to part with his sick son and was renouncing the throne in favour of his brother. The envoys agreed, although the law of succession did not provide for such an act. Before midnight Guchkov received the act of abdication and a decree appointing Lvov prime minister.

In Petrograd it became clear how much the mood had changed. When, in the early hours of 16 March, Guchkov raised a cheer for “Emperor Michael” at a meeting of railwaymen, the workers nearly lynched him. That same day, together with Pavel Milyukov, he alone urged the Grand Duke to accept the crown. He remained in the minority.

War minister

In the Provisional Government Guchkov took over the Ministry of War and Navy. He wanted an army that was modern, rejuvenated and loyal to the new authorities. Within a few weeks he removed many senior generals, regarded as incompetent or as men of the old regime. According to Anton Denikin, about 150 senior commanders left at that time, including about 70 division commanders. Among them was the commander of the Western Front, General Alexei Evert. He abolished religious and class restrictions on officers’ promotion and legalised some of the changes brought by Order No. 1, such as the ban on titles for officers and on addressing soldiers with the familiar “ty”.

He did not, however, restore discipline. As early as 22 March (9 March Old Style) he wrote to Alekseyev that the government had no real power and that its orders were carried out only to the extent the Soviet allowed, because it controlled the army, the railways, the post and the telegraph. Soldiers’ committees multiplied at the front, and a special commission chaired by the former minister Polivanov was preparing a declaration of soldiers’ rights that was to give servicemen full civil rights. Guchkov refused to sign it. When in May Milyukov provoked the April Crisis and the Soviet launched a campaign against both ministers, Guchkov resigned. This happened on 12 May (29 April Old Style), or a day later according to some sources. He declared that he could not share responsibility for a “grave sin” against the fatherland. The war minister’s departure settled the formation of a coalition government, in which his portfolio was taken over by Alexander Kerensky. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue noted that Guchkov’s resignation meant the bankruptcy of the Provisional Government and of Russian liberalism.

After leaving the government

Guchkov returned to the war-industries committees and looked for forces that could restore order in the country. According to Russian sources, in the summer of 1917 he founded the Liberal Republican Party together with Rodzianko. At the Moscow State Conference he said that the government was “ill with the fact that it does not exist”. He supported General Lavr Kornilov, and after the failure of his putsch he was briefly arrested. When General Alekseyev began forming the nucleus of a White army in the autumn, Guchkov gave him money.

After the Bolshevik coup he hid in the North Caucasus and then made his way to Denikin’s Volunteer Army. In 1919 Denikin sent him to Europe as his representative to the Entente governments. Guchkov held talks with Winston Churchill and sought arms for the Whites, including for General Nikolai Yudenich’s army on the Baltic. In emigration he lived in Berlin and Paris, kept up wide political contacts and joined no party. The émigré far right regarded him as a traitor to the Tsar. He died of cancer on 14 February 1936 in Paris, and the urn with his ashes was placed in the columbarium of Père Lachaise cemetery.

Assessment

For monarchists Guchkov was the chief culprit for the fall of tsardom: a man who for years had undermined the Tsar’s authority, conspired with generals and personally received his abdication. Soviet historiography saw him as a leader of the big bourgeoisie, which wanted to seize power in order to wage an imperialist war. Western historians such as Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes present him rather as a patriot who understood earliest and most sharply that the army could not win the war under the rule of the court, but also as an ambitious, hot-tempered politician given to conspiracy. His tragedy was that he wanted a revolution “from above” that would save the monarchy and the army, and lived to see a revolution from below that destroyed both. As war minister, some accuse him of having himself hastened the army’s disintegration with his purges and concessions to the committees, while others stress that he had no means to stop it and that he was the first member of the government to say so openly. After his death Milyukov wrote that Guchkov “died an enigma”.