Although there are no equivalents of Pew or Zogby polls for this period, most of the evidence points to the fact that very little of the populace of the empire supported continuing the war in 1917. There was a burst of nationalism and a rally around the imperial flag in 1914, but this had swiftly dissipated by 1917. Much of the popular politics of the time reflected the war weariness of the population. When the Provisional Government's Kadet Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov publicly reaffirmed Russia's war commitments, mass demonstrations in Petrograd forced his resignation. The disintegration of the Russian Army also pointed to a great deal of war weariness among what had been one of the cornerstones of the imperial state: the military. Attempts by the Provisional Government to raise funds through a voluntary "Victory Loan" in the summer of 1917 fell quite flat. Proposing a continuation of the war in 1917 was simply bad politics; even a platform of continued belligerence for continuing the revolution was a dicey proposition as evidenced by the split between the SRs.

Although the Russia had faced massive invasions before (1812) and again (the Second World War), the internal condition of the empire in 1914-1917 was quite different than either past or future precedents. Unlike the Napoleonic period, the tsarist economy of the twentieth century was ill-suited for fighting a modern war. The war fostered a mass economic hardship among Russia's peasantry. Russia's transportation system fell apart during the war, creating food shortages in Russia's cities and adding further grievances for Russia's urban workers. It is also noteworthy that despite German military successes in the First World War, the forces of the Central Powers did not really make much of a headway into Great Russian territory itself until after the military collapse in 1917. For many Russian peasants, the war was a distant abstraction that took both food and young men with little in return. For the empire's many ethnic minorities, who collectively outnumbered the total number of ethnic Great Russians, the war asked much of them and offered them very little in exchange. In the empire's Western Provinces (basically Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Baltics) where most of the fighting occurred, the war created a massive refugee crisis and a breakdown of society. Behind the lines, the war exacerbated the tsarist state's leeriness of non-Russian elements and led to greater supervision and state control of movements of non-Russians as well as popular violence against convenient scapegoats like the Jews in the Pale of Settlement. The tsarist state's attempts to impose conscription in Central Asia in 1916, revising the imperial arrangement with its Muslim population, led to massive riots in urban centers like Tashkent. Although the Provisional Government rescinded the conscription order and promised amnesty, it found it quite difficult to mobilize any real enthusiasm in Central Asia for the war. Rather than creating imperial solidarity, prolonging the war only hastened the collapse of imperial structures and engendered a sense of social anomie.

Lenin's somewhat disingenuous promise of "land and peace" was a reflection of his astute reading of the political situation in 1917/18. Many Bolsheviks recognized that the remnants of the old order were imploding and that one of the few umbrella issues was ending the war. Although the excessive demands of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk shocked many inside the former empire (and many of the Bolshevik negotiators as well), the Bolsheviks gambled that Germany would never be able to consolidate these gains. Ending the war gave the Bolsheviks time to consolidate their power and marshal their forces to deal with the emerging civil war.