In Saint Petersburg, an undercurrent was stirring. With defeats on the front lines, pressure on the Tsarist government was mounting, while anti-war sentiment among the people grew ever stronger.
On August 2, Saint Petersburg saw its eighteenth anti-war demonstration. The marchers cried, "We want bread, not war!" and surrounded City Hall and the Parliament Building, demanding an answer from the government.
In the end, the Tsarist government had to deploy military police to disperse the crowd, but the repercussions were far from over. Anti-war demonstrations soon erupted in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, and other cities.
There was no doubt that the forces orchestrating all this from behind the scenes were the peace faction within the Tsarist government—or rather, the pro-German faction.
At the same time, reports of frontline soldiers lacking guns and ammunition were sent back by war correspondents, accompanied by a great number of photographs and written accounts. They quickly caused a public sensation.
After all, a defeat in war always needed a reason, didn't it? The valiant Russian soldiers had continued fighting the enemy even after their ammunition and provisions had run dry. Though they had ultimately lost, it had still been a glorious defeat!
Russian public opinion denounced Britain and France for breaking faith, claiming that their failure to deliver the promised supplies on time had caused the Russian army's defeat at the front. Radical media outlets had already begun calling for withdrawal from the Entente.
And in the small corners of newspapers, accusations also emerged that Russian arms manufacturers produced poor-quality weapons and passed inferior goods off as good ones, though these had not yet drawn much public attention.
The events unfolding within Russia immediately attracted the attention of Britain and France. To them, Russia absolutely could not be allowed to leave the war at this