9 June 1917. Winston Churchill

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

Winston Churchill

London, United Kingdom

The Provisional Ministers strutted about the Offices and Palaces and discharged in an atmosphere of flowery sentiments their administrative duties. These were serious. All authority had been shaken from its foundation; the armies melted rapidly to the rear; the railway carriages were crowded to the roofs and upon the roofs with mutinous soldiers seeking fresh centres of revolt and with deserters trying to get home. The soldiers’ and sailors’ Councils argued interminably over every order.

The whole vast country was in confusion and agitation. The processes of supply, whether for the armies or for the cities, were increasingly disjointed. Nothing functioned effectively and everything, whether munitions or food, was either lacking or scarce. Meanwhile the Germans, and farther south the Austrians and the Turks, were battering upon the creaking and quivering fronts by every known resource of scientific war. The statesmen of the Allied nations affected to believe that all was for the best and that the Russian revolution constituted a notable advantage for the common cause.

, and others

1 Like

Comment

✍ Also today

Nicholas II

Tsarskoye Selo, Russian Empire

Korovichenko just got here to say goodbye and bring with him his successor. None of us was sorry about his leaving and just the opposite; all were glad about the appointment of a new guard officer. The day became very nice. During the day I took a walk further in the park still looking for dry trees. See more

, and others

Comment

Edvard Munch

is working on a painiting “Woman in a White Dress”

Ekely estate, Norway

Alexander Zamaraev

Totma, Vologodskaya guberniya, Russian Empire

The commander in chief, General Alekseyev, and Minister of Trade and Industry Konovalov have resigned. The situation is dire. War and Navy Minister Kerensky incessantly travels around the front, he is a very popular minister.

, and others

Comment

Vasily Kravkov

7th Siberian army corps

Kerensky strikes me as a man not with a governmentally oriented mind, but only as a pompous juggler, an excellent speaker at demonstrations. In his meeting with the journalists, after his tour of the South-Western front, he told them, very naively, of a victorious rise in spirits among the soldiers, that everything in the army was going well, and that he found in it "healthy growth"... It is nothing like it in reality!

, and others

Comment

The New York Times

There has never been any reason to suppose that The Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council was Russia or represented Russia. Even if it represented the working classes, the working men in Russia are a minority, for it is not an industrial land; the real “proletariat”, to use the word in the Socialist sense of the masses, are the peasants.

, and others

Comment

8 June

"For all that, Petersburg is unusually beautiful"

Lenin on the World Revolution

Nicholas II continues to work in the garden

Nightmare before Christmas

Death of Rasputin. Murder conspiracy and its consequences

Map of the Royal dynasties of Europe

Romanovs dangerous liaisons

+16

in Petrograd

+17

in Moscow