February Revolution

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The February Revolution began not with a declaration or a manifesto, but with women in bread lines. On the 23rd of February 1917 by the old Russian calendar, working women in Petrograd stepped out of those queues and into the streets. Within eight days, a dynasty that had ruled Russia for three hundred years was finished.

  The tsar who would lose it all was Nicholas II, stranded on a train in the city of Pskov, unable to reach his own capital. The man who arguably sealed his fate was a mid-level railway commissioner named Alexander Bublikov, whose telegraph message told all of Russia that the old regime had already fallen before it quite had. And the institution that emerged from those eight days was not one government but two, sharing power in an arrangement that would unravel into civil war and eventually produce the Soviet Union.

  How did a bread riot become a revolution? Who were the actors who shaped it? And why do historians still argue about what caused it?

• 2. A Century of Pressure

  ›

  Richard Pipes, one of the most prominent historians of the Russian Revolution, wrote that the incompatibility of capitalism and autocracy struck all who gave thought to the matter. That tension had been building for more than a century before the bread lines in Petrograd.

  Imperial Russia had failed, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to modernize its social, economic, and political structures. Peasants endured harsh treatment from landowners. Industrial laborers worked under punishing conditions. Western democratic ideas spread through underground political networks. These grievances converged in 1905, when the massacre on Bloody Sunday and Russia's humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War produced an earlier revolution.

  Historian Alexander Rabinowitch summarized the accumulated pressure this way: the February Revolution grew out of pre-war political and economic instability, technological backwardness, and fundamental social divisions, coupled with gross mismanagement of the war effort, continuing military defeats, domestic economic dislocation, and outrageous scandals surrounding the monarchy. Every one of those elements was in place before the first protester stepped into the street in 1917.

• 3. The War That Broke Everything

  ›

  In August 1914, virtually every class in Russia supported the war. The declaration produced a surge of nationalism that temporarily quieted internal tensions. Early victories in Galicia in 1915 and the Brusilov Offensive in 1916 fed that feeling. Then came the catastrophes.

  Tannenberg in August 1914 was a devastating defeat. The Winter Battle in Masuria in February 1915 followed. Then Russia lost all of Russian Poland between May and August 1915. By early 1917, the military had suffered approximately 1.7 million killed, 4.95 million wounded, and around 2.5 million missing or captured. The total casualty figure reached roughly 9.15 million. Desertions ran at about 34,000 a month.

  Tsar Nicholas made things worse in the summer of 1915 by announcing that he personally would take command of the army, against nearly universal advice. This move damaged him on three fronts simultaneously. It tied the monarchy directly to an increasingly unpopular war. It placed Nicholas himself at the front, where he irritated his own commanders. And it left the reins of government in Petrograd to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, who was widely accused of being a German spy and was herself under the influence of Grigori Rasputin.

  Rasputin's assassination by members of the nobility in December 1916 did not restore confidence in the crown. It confirmed, in the public mind, how close the Tsarina's hold on power had become. As Mikhail Rodzianko, the Duma president, later put it, Alexandra exerted an adverse influence on all appointments, including even those in the army.

• 4. Ministerial Leapfrog

  ›

  In the seventeen months between September 1915 and February 1917, Russia cycled through four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport, and four Ministers of Agriculture. This pattern came to be called ministerial leapfrog. Each reshuffle removed experienced people from office and left their successors unable to master their responsibilities before being replaced in turn.

  Nikolai Golitsyn, appointed Prime Minister as the crisis deepened, had begged the Emperor to cancel the appointment, citing his own lack of preparation for the role. Mikhail Rodzianko, the British ambassador Buchanan, and even Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna joined calls for Alexandra to be removed from power. Nicholas refused.

  On the 26th of February 1917 by the old calendar, Rodzianko sent the Tsar a telegram warning that the capital was in a state of anarchy, that transport, food, and fuel had completely broken down, and that any procrastination was tantamount to death. Nicholas dismissed the message as nonsense from the fat Rodzianko that he would not even deign to answer. Edward Acton, writing on this period, argued that by stubbornly refusing any modus vivendi with the Progressive Bloc of the Duma, Nicholas undermined the loyalty of even those closest to the throne.

• 5. Eight Days in Petrograd

  ›

  On the 18th of February by the old calendar, workers at the Putilov Factory, Petrograd's largest industrial plant, announced a strike. Heavy snowstorms had left tens of thousands of freight cars stranded on the rails, trapping food and coal. When the government began rationing flour and bread, rumor spread faster than the rations.

  On the 23rd of February, female factory workers marched to nearby plants and recruited over 50,000 additional workers for the strike. The following day, nearly 200,000 protesters filled the streets. By the 25th, with some 250,000 people on strike, nearly all industrial enterprises in Petrograd had shut down despite an absolute ban on public gatherings.

  The Tsar's response was to wire garrison commander General Khabalov ordering him to disperse the crowds with rifle fire. What followed instead was the garrison's collapse. On the 26th of February, the Fourth Company of the Pavlovsky Reserve Regiment broke from their barracks after learning that another detachment had clashed with demonstrators. This was the first open mutiny in the Petrograd garrison. By the morning of the 27th, soldiers from rebellious regiments moved toward the city center, seized the Arsenal, and released prisoners. About 40,000 rifles collected at the Peter and Paul Fortress were dispersed among workers.

  General Khabalov tried to organize resistance with a combined force of up to 1,000 men under Colonel Alexander Kutepov. By the end of the 27th, facing an enormous numerical disadvantage and severed communications, Kutepov went into hiding. The only effective attempt to suppress the revolution from within Petrograd had ended. In all, more than 1,300 people were killed during the protests.

• 6. The Telegraph That Made a Revolution

  ›

  On the morning of the 28th of February 1917, Alexander Bublikov was appointed by Rodzianko to the Ministry of Ways of Communication. Bublikov immediately grasped that whoever controlled the railways controlled the revolution. He sent a telegraph to railway workers across the country, calling on them to maintain train traffic with redoubled energy and framing the Provisional Committee of the State Duma as the legitimate new authority.

  Shortly after, a second order went out prohibiting trains from traveling within 265 kilometers of Petrograd. This made it extraordinarily difficult for loyalist troops to reach the capital by rail. According to Yury Lomonosov, by the morning of the 1st of March, every railway station from the battlefront to Vladivostok, from Murmansk to the Persian border, had received word that a revolution had taken place. Lomonosov concluded that after Bublikov's telegram, the abdication of Nicholas II seemed like a mere secondary formality.

  Bublikov's own account was blunter. He had adjusted reality to fit the narrative. In doing so, he rendered an enormous service to the revolution while distorting its natural course by surrounding the Duma with an undeserved aura of legitimacy. At 08:25 on the same morning, General Khabalov sent a telegram to the military high command reporting that the forces remaining loyal had decreased to 600 infantrymen and 500 cavalrymen, with 13 machine guns and 12 artillery pieces and only 80 shells each.

• 7. Abdication and Its Aftermath

  ›

  Nicholas had left Mogilev at five in the morning on the 28th of February, trying to reach Petrograd. He never got there. Revolutionaries controlled the railway stations around the capital. Around midnight his train was stopped at Malaya Vishera, turned around, and by the evening of the 1st of March he arrived in Pskov instead. There, Army Chief Nikolai Ruzsky and Duma deputies Vasily Shulgin and Alexander Guchkov came to advise him to abdicate.

  At three in the afternoon of Thursday, the 2nd of March by the old calendar, Nicholas abdicated on behalf of himself and his son Tsarevich Alexei, nominating his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich to succeed him. The following day, Michael declined the crown, stating he would accept it only as the consensus of a democratically elected Russian Constituent Assembly. The three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty ended with that refusal on the 3rd of March.

  On the 8th of March by the old calendar, the former tsar, addressed with contempt by his sentries as Nicholas Romanov, was reunited with his family at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. The Provisional Government placed him and his family under protective custody there. Meanwhile, Bublikov was among the four Duma members who guarded Nicholas during his journey from Mogilev to Tsarskoye Selo, controlling the tsar's route as he had controlled the railway network itself.

• 8. Dual Power and Its Failure

  ›

  On the 3rd of March 1917, the Provisional Government published its manifesto proposing civil and political rights and a democratically elected Russian Constituent Assembly. It said nothing about the two issues driving the revolution: continued participation in World War I and the redistribution of land. At the same time, the Petrograd Soviet had already issued Order No. 1, stating that orders from the Provisional Government's military commission would be executed only when they did not conflict with orders from the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

  This arrangement was called dual power. In the spring of 1917, 700 soviets were established across Russia, collectively representing roughly a third of the population. In a short period, 3,000 deputies were elected to the Petrograd Soviet alone. The Soviet held the real power through its control of workers and soldiers; the Provisional Government held formal authority but lacked popular support. The initial Soviet executive chairmen were Menshevik Nikolay Chkheidze, Matvey Skobelev, and Alexander Kerensky.

  Vladimir Lenin arrived in Petrograd from Zurich on the 3rd of April by the old calendar, having been exiled in neutral Switzerland. He immediately began undermining the Provisional Government through his April Theses, published the following month. His slogans, including Peace, bread and land and All power to the Soviet, were designed to win proletariat support. During the July Days, approximately half a million soldiers, sailors, and workers came into the streets of Petrograd in protest, but the demonstrators lacked leadership and eventually dispersed. Lvov was replaced as head of the Provisional Government by Alexander Kerensky.

  Kerensky abolished the monarchy formally on the 1st of September by the old calendar and proclaimed the Russian Republic, but he could not resolve food shortages, military desertions, or the war's mounting losses. The Kornilov Affair in August 1917, in which General Lavr Kornilov's march on Petrograd was reversed after Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet for help, fatally weakened both the right and the center. The dual power arrangement instigated by February ultimately collapsed in October, when the Bolsheviks seized control in the October Revolution.