Time flew by, and the winter the Russians had been desperately waiting for finally arrived. Yet what came was not what the Tsarist government had wanted!
After winter set in, not only did the Alliance army refrain from launching an offensive, it actually withdrew a hundred li and built defensive lines, waiting for the Russian army to attack.
Without question, the winter counteroffensive the Russians had planned had become a phantom. Facing the Alliance forces standing ready in battle formation, they no longer had the strength to counterattack. The most critical issue was still surviving the winter.
Because of the war, military transport had commandeered vast numbers of railcars. According to Russian government statistics, Russia's transport capacity available for civilian use was now, at most, only two-thirds of what it had been before the war!
And that was under the condition that all unnecessary military supply shipments were halted immediately and every effort was made to transport civilian goods—yet even then, it could not meet civilian demand.
Take Saint Petersburg as an example. This meant that in the winter of 1916, if coal shipments from Donetsk to Saint Petersburg were reduced by one-third, then more than eighty percent of households would lack enough coal to heat their homes through the winter!
What? You say that figure is wrong? Then you simply do not understand. Do not forget that civilian transport had to meet not only people's daily needs, but also the needs of industrial production!
And industrial production belonged to the nobles and capitalists. Did ordinary people have the ability to compete with them for coal?
Clearly, even if the citizens of Saint Petersburg froze to death right in front of them, those people would never give up their own interests!
So the ones truly out of luck were still