ministerial leapfrog (ministerskaya chekharda)

The root of the word

In Russian, chekharda (чехарда) names a children's game in which participants take turns vaulting over their stooping companions. By figurative extension it means frequent, disorderly changes and reshuffles; the exemplary usage is ministerskaya chekharda itself. The phrase thus denotes, first, an abnormally rapid turnover of officeholders and, second, the mocking nickname attached to that turnover.

The documented record

In the final phase of World War I, over the seventeen months from September 1915 to February 1917, the Russian Empire went through four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. The number of changes was not the only problem. Because no one stayed in office long enough to master their responsibilities, the continuity of administration was broken and competent men were pushed out of power.

This turnover accelerated in the aftermath of the Great Retreat of 1915 and the accompanying defeats and losses of weapons and ammunition. As defeat at the front translated into instability at the centre, distrust of the military and political leadership spread through society and fed into spy-hunting scares and the so-called Rasputin question.

The phrase enters politics

The phrase ministerskaya chekharda was popularised by Vladimir Purishkevich, who in a State Duma speech on 19 November 1916 declared that the monarchy had become discredited on account of what he called the ministerial leapfrog. That the coinage came from a reactionary right-wing politician and co-founder of the Black Hundreds shows that the term originated not in republican criticism but in discontent within the establishment itself.

Political background

After Nicholas II left for the front and assumed personal command, the tsar and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna intervened conspicuously in government appointments. That influence should not be overestimated. Of twenty-eight appointments made between September 1915 and January 1917, the empress supported seven; seven of her proposed candidates were rejected; and there is no reason to suppose her opinion was decisive in any appointment. The root cause of the administrative breakdown lay not in a conspiracy by any individual but in the structure of autocratic power, which lacked the capacity to conduct the war.

Assessment

Narrowly, the phenomenon was a rapid succession of cabinet appointments; more broadly it was an index of an autocracy bankrupted by war and losing the capacity to govern. Popular discontent was directed at military defeat, food shortages and the war itself, and it culminated in the February Revolution of 1917. The ministerial changes were a symptom of that crisis, not its cause.