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the young Ukrainian Aleksandr Dneprovskiy execrated the patriotic press in the last months before the offensive as ‘tubs of printed slop … poured over the heads of long-suffering humanity’.

The old guard at the army’s top were deeply bitter at the direction of the war and the erosion of old nostrums.

The testeria of the reception was genuine, but it was neither deep nor lasting.

An uneasiness, a dangerous ill temper escalated among soldiers, workers, and, most dramatically, peasants. For the most part it did not, yet, take explicitly politicised forms, but it was protean, destructive and very often violent.