In August 1914, the First World War started, and 300,000 Bessarabians were mobilized and enrolled in the army of the Russian Empire, the majority in the immediate wake of Russian defeat. By March 1917, the military actions on the Eastern Front came to a stalemate. Conferences of soldiers in the rear of the front line dominated. Many called for a Republic; the Tsar had abdicated in March 1917, but the Russian Provisional Government that took his place had not proclaimed the Empire a Republic until September 1917. They wanted social and economic changes, such as annulment of the privileges of the nobility, and an agrarian reform that would give the peasants the land they worked on.