The February Revolution

On Monday 12 March 1917 the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on demonstrators and, weapons in hand, joined the striking workers. Petrograd was then the name of the Russian capital: in August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of war with Germany, the too German-sounding Saint Petersburg had been renamed. For four days the city had been gripped by strikes and marches of hungry people, but it was the mutiny of the army that sealed the fate of the government. By evening the insurgents controlled most of the capital, and in the Tauride Palace two new centres of power had come into being: the Provisional Committee of the Duma and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Three days later Tsar Nicholas II renounced the throne, and his brother declined the crown. More than three hundred years of Romanov rule had come to an end.

Why “February”

Russia still used the Julian calendar, which in the 20th century ran 13 days behind the Gregorian. By Russian dates the disturbances began on 23 February, the garrison mutinied on 27 February and the Tsar abdicated on 2 March. That is why events which, by the calendar used in the rest of Europe, took place between 8 and 16 March went down in history as the February Revolution. Russia did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until February 1918.

A country weary of war

By March 1917 Russia had been at war for two and a half years. It had lost millions killed, wounded and taken prisoner, and in 1915 it had also lost the Kingdom of Poland, Lithuania and part of Latvia. The Brusilov Offensive in the summer of 1916 brought a great victory over Austria-Hungary, but it cost hundreds of thousands of men and did not end the war. On the home front inflation was eating away at wages, and the overburdened railways could not keep up with deliveries of food and fuel to the cities. There was no shortage of grain in the country, but the peasants were unwilling to sell it for roubles that were worth less and less, and what was bought up got stuck at railway stations. The bitter winter of 1916–1917 immobilised hundreds of locomotives. In the capital people queued outside bakeries through the night, and rumours of bread rationing went round the city.

The supply crisis was compounded by a crisis of confidence in the government. Since September 1915 Nicholas II, as Commander-in-Chief, had mostly stayed at General Headquarters in Mogilev, while in Petrograd appointments to office were influenced by the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, behind whom stood the Siberian “holy man” Grigori Rasputin. Prime ministers and ministers changed so quickly that Russians spoke of “ministerial leapfrog”. In November 1916 the leader of the liberal Kadets, Pavel Milyukov, asked from the rostrum of the Duma whether the government’s policy was “stupidity or treason”. The murder of Rasputin by aristocratic conspirators at the end of December changed nothing. The Tsar refused to accept a government enjoying the confidence of the Duma, and Alexander Protopopov, loathed by the opposition, remained Minister of the Interior. The President of the State Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, warned the emperor at audiences that the country was on the brink of upheaval. He failed to convince him.

The army proved decisive. The capital’s garrison numbered some 160,000 soldiers, but they were not the pre-war guardsmen, most of whom had fallen at the front. The reserve battalions of the Guards regiments consisted of recruits and convalescents, crammed into overcrowded barracks and waiting to be sent to the front. Officers were few, and the police numbered only a few thousand men. The authorities’ plans in case of unrest assumed that order would be kept by precisely these units.

From Women’s Day to the shooting on Znamenskaya Square

On 7 March the Tsar left Tsarskoye Selo for Mogilev, assured by Protopopov that the capital was calm. The same day the management of the Putilov Works, where a pay dispute had been going on for weeks, announced a lockout. The next day, 8 March (23 February by the Julian calendar), International Women’s Day, women workers at the textile mills of the Vyborg Side downed tools and marched to neighbouring factories, calling on the men to join them. No one had planned a strike, yet according to police reports some 90,000 people stopped work. The crowds shouted “Bread!”, and on some banners the slogans “Down with the war!” and “Down with the autocracy!” appeared.

Over the following days the protest grew. On 9 March more than 200,000 workers were on strike, and demonstrators whom the police had blocked from the bridges crossed to the centre over the ice of the Neva. The Cossacks, on whom the authorities had counted most, were reluctant to disperse the crowds and at times behaved in a friendly way towards them. On 10 March almost the whole city came to a standstill: by various estimates some 300,000 people were on strike. In the evening the Tsar, who only then learned the scale of the unrest, sent the commander of the Petrograd Military District, General Sergei Khabalov, a telegram ordering him to put an end “tomorrow” to the disorders in the capital, which were inadmissible in wartime. Khabalov understood it as an order to use firearms.

On Sunday 11 March the troops fired on demonstrators in several parts of the city. The bloodiest scene was on Znamenskaya Square, where a volley was fired by the training detachment of the reserve battalion of the Volhynian Guards Regiment. According to Russian studies, some 40 people were killed there. In the evening a company of the reserve battalion of the Pavlovsky Regiment mutinied and opened fire on the police, but the mutiny was quickly put down. The Prime Minister, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, prorogued the Duma until April, using a decree the Tsar had signed in advance. Rodzianko telegraphed to Mogilev that anarchy reigned in the capital and begged for the immediate appointment of a government enjoying the confidence of the country. According to accounts from the emperor’s entourage, Nicholas dismissed the telegram with the remark that “that fat Rodzianko” had written him more nonsense. By the evening the authorities could believe they had the situation under control.

The garrison mutinies

The shooting of unarmed people, however, had shaken the soldiers. During the night the NCOs of the Volhynian Regiment’s training detachment agreed that they would not go out onto the streets in the morning. At dawn on 12 March (27 February by the Julian calendar), led by Senior NCO Timofei Kirpichnikov, the soldiers refused to obey orders, killed the detachment’s commander and left the barracks under arms. They drew after them the neighbouring reserve battalions of the Preobrazhensky and Lithuanian Regiments and the sappers. On Liteyny Prospekt the soldiers joined the strikers. The French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, watched from a window as a crowd with red banners met an approaching regiment. He expected a clash, but the two groups merged.

The insurgents seized the Arsenal and handed out rifles, set fire to the District Court building and, on the Vyborg Side, threw open the capital’s largest prison, Kresty. Both criminals and political prisoners went free, among them activists of the workers’ group attached to the Central War Industries Committee, who had been arrested a few weeks earlier. Police stations went up in flames, as did the building of the Okhrana, the tsarist political police. Policemen who tried to defend themselves, and often those who surrendered too, were killed on the spot. According to Russian calculations, some 25,000 soldiers had joined the uprising by the morning, and some 67,000 by the evening.

Khabalov tried to resist. He placed a detachment made up of companies that were still loyal under the command of Colonel Alexander Kutepov, a front-line officer on leave in the capital. Kutepov’s soldiers, however, melted away into the crowd, and by evening the detachment had ceased to exist. The general shut himself up in the Admiralty with the remnants of his troops and telegraphed to General Headquarters during the night that he could not carry out the order to restore order, because one unit after another was going over to the mutineers. The government met in the evening at the Mariinsky Palace. The ministers persuaded Protopopov to declare himself ill and leave, and asked the Tsar to dismiss the entire cabinet. Then they dispersed, and some of them went into hiding in the city. In practice this was the end of the last tsarist government.

Two centres of power

In the morning the Duma deputies learned that the Tsar had prorogued them. In the afternoon thousands of soldiers and workers came to the Tauride Palace, where the chamber sat. Unwilling to defy the decree openly, the deputies gathered for a “private meeting” and set up the Provisional Committee of the Duma “for the restoration of order in the capital”. Rodzianko became its head, and its members were mainly leaders of the liberal Progressive Bloc, Milyukov among them, together with two deputies of the left, the Menshevik Nikolay Chkheidze and the Trudovik Alexander Kerensky. Milyukov later wrote that the Duma’s involvement gave the street revolt a centre, a banner and a slogan, and thereby turned it into a revolution.

In another wing of the same palace socialist activists, most of them Mensheviks, formed a Provisional Executive Committee and called on the factories and regiments to elect delegates. In the evening the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies met for the first time; soldiers sat in it from the outset. Chkheidze became chairman, and Kerensky one of the deputy chairmen – the only man who belonged to both new bodies. The Bolsheviks played a minor role in these days: their leaders were in emigration or in exile, and Vladimir Lenin learned of the revolution in Zurich, Switzerland, several days after it broke out.

Late in the evening Rodzianko and Golitsyn urged the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, to take power himself as regent. Michael refused to act without his brother’s consent but telegraphed to Mogilev asking for the immediate appointment of a government enjoying the confidence of the country, headed, for instance, by Prince Georgy Lvov. The Tsar replied that he would settle the question of the government on his return. He decided to send a detachment from the front against the capital under General Nikolai Ivanov, and himself to return to Tsarskoye Selo. During the night of 12–13 March the Duma Committee announced that, in view of the government’s resignation, it was taking power.

The collapse of the old order

On 13 March the last points of resistance fell: the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress. Khabalov was arrested, Protopopov gave himself up to the revolutionaries, and one minister and dignitary after another was brought to the Tauride Palace. The deputy Alexander Bublikov took over the Ministry of Communications in the name of the Duma Committee and sent a telegram to every railway station in the empire announcing that the Duma had taken power. The revolution quickly spread to Moscow and to the fleet’s bases. In Kronstadt and Helsingfors (Helsinki) sailors murdered dozens of officers, including the Governor of Kronstadt, Admiral Robert Viren, and the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral Adrian Nepenin.

The greatest danger to the new authorities was the chaos within the garrison itself. Soldiers who had killed their officers feared that once order was restored they would face courts martial, while the Duma Committee was calling on them to return to barracks and obey their superiors. On 14 March the Soviet issued Order No. 1. It called for soldiers’ committees to be elected in all units, placed weapons under their control and laid down that in political matters the soldiers would obey the Soviet, carrying out the orders of the Duma’s military commission only if they did not conflict with the Soviet’s resolutions. It also abolished saluting off duty and the old forms of address for officers. Formally the order applied only to the capital’s garrison, but within a few weeks it had reached the whole army and undermined obedience to commanders.

The abdication

The imperial train, which left Mogilev early on 13 March, never reached Tsarskoye Selo. During the night of 13–14 March, at Malaya Vishera station, the Tsar was told that the stations ahead were in the hands of mutinous soldiers. The train turned back and by a roundabout route reached Pskov, the headquarters of the Northern Front, on the evening of 14 March. Ivanov’s detachment, meanwhile, had reached the outskirts of Tsarskoye Selo, but in view of the disintegration of its own troops and new orders from General Headquarters it withdrew without a fight.

In Pskov the front commander, General Nikolai Ruzsky, spent many hours urging the Tsar to accept a government responsible to the Duma. Late at night Nicholas gave way, but it was already too late. In the early hours of 15 March Rodzianko told Ruzsky over the telegraph that hatred of the dynasty had reached its utmost limits and that the only way out was abdication in favour of the Tsar’s son. The Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, General Mikhail Alekseyev, circulated the record of this conversation to the front commanders. All of them, and the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, advised him to renounce the throne. The generals hoped that the emperor’s departure would calm the capital and allow the war to go on. In the afternoon Nicholas agreed to abdicate in favour of his son. In the evening, however, he changed his mind: a doctor had confirmed to him that the heir to the throne, Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia, was incurable, and the Tsar did not want to be parted from him.

Late in the evening of 15 March (2 March by the Julian calendar) envoys of the Duma Committee, Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin, arrived in Pskov. At around 11.40 p.m. Nicholas II handed them an act in which he renounced the throne for himself and his son in favour of his brother Michael. The document was dated 3 p.m., so that it would not appear that the Tsar had yielded under pressure from the deputies. That same evening he also signed decrees appointing Prince Lvov Prime Minister and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich Commander-in-Chief. In his diary he wrote: “All around is treason, cowardice and deceit!”

In Petrograd the news that Michael was to take the throne caused uproar. The Soviet and the street demanded a republic. On the morning of 16 March members of the Duma Committee and of the new government came to the Grand Duke at the flat on Millionnaya Street where he had been hiding since the night of 12–13 March. Most of them, including Rodzianko and Kerensky, advised him to refuse; only Milyukov and Guchkov argued that without a monarch the new government would not stay afloat on a stormy sea. When Rodzianko admitted that he could not guarantee his safety, Michael signed an act declaring that he would accept power only if it were entrusted to him by the people through a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage. Until then he called on citizens to obey the Provisional Government. Both acts were published on 17 March. Russia had ceased to be a monarchy, although formally its system of government was to be determined only by the Constituent Assembly.

The Provisional Government and dual power

The composition of the new cabinet was agreed during the night of 14–15 March by representatives of the Duma Committee and of the Soviet’s Executive Committee. The socialists believed that Russia must first go through a “bourgeois” revolution and did not want to join the government, but they set conditions: a full political amnesty, civil liberties, the abolition of restrictions based on estate, religion and nationality, the replacement of the police by a militia, and the swift convening of the Constituent Assembly. On 15 March Milyukov announced the composition of the Provisional Government in the Tauride Palace. Prince Lvov became Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior; he was chairman of Zemgor, the organisation of local self-government bodies which during the war had supplied the army and cared for the wounded. Milyukov took foreign affairs, Guchkov the Ministry of War and the Navy, and Kerensky, the only socialist in the cabinet, the Ministry of Justice. When someone in the crowd asked who had elected them, Milyukov replied that the revolution had elected them.

The government had formal authority but no force. The workers and the mutinous garrison followed the Soviet, and its people controlled the railways, the telegraph and the printing presses. The Soviet announced that it would support the government “insofar as” it carried out the agreed programme. This arrangement became known as dual power. In the capital no order of the government could be carried out without the Soviet’s consent, while in the provinces and in the army soviets and committees multiplied that answered to no one.

The revolution itself was not as “bloodless” as it was later called. According to Zemgor’s figures, some 1,440 people were killed or wounded in Petrograd during the days of the upheaval, more than 850 of them soldiers. Russian historians put the number of dead at around 300.

The first weeks

Within a few weeks the new authorities turned Russia into one of the freest countries in the world of the time. They proclaimed an amnesty and freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly, abolished the death penalty and restrictions based on nationality, and announced elections to the Constituent Assembly in which women would vote. On 30 March the government recognised the right of the Poles to an independent state, which was to be bound to Russia by a “free military alliance”. Nicholas II, arrested in Mogilev, was brought back under guard to Tsarskoye Selo, where he was held under arrest with his family. The government was recognised by the United States, Britain, France and Italy. In London and Paris it was hoped that a democratic Russia would fight more vigorously than a discredited court, and Washington, which was preparing to enter the war, could now present it as a struggle of democracy against autocracy.

Berlin calculated differently. The Germans hoped that the revolution would weaken the Russian army, and in April they let a railway carriage carrying Lenin and a group of other revolutionaries pass through their territory to Sweden. On arriving in Petrograd the Bolshevik leader declared that the revolution could not stop at the “bourgeois” stage and that all power must pass to the soviets.

The long shadow of the February Revolution

The February Revolution overthrew the monarchy but did not give Russia a stable government. The Provisional Government wanted to fight the war to victory alongside the Allies and postponed the questions of land and of the constitution until the Constituent Assembly. Soldiers, peasants and workers wanted peace and land at once. As early as May, Milyukov’s note on war aims provoked the first crisis, and Kerensky’s July offensive ended in defeat and the further disintegration of the army. Order No. 1 and dual power left the state with nothing to defend itself with when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917. Thus a revolution that was meant to make Russia a democracy gave rise to civil war, to the dictatorship of Lenin and later of Joseph Stalin, and to the Soviet Union.

The fall of tsarism also changed the map of Central and Eastern Europe. The disintegration of the old army and state allowed Poland to be reborn and the Baltic states and Finland to come into being, and the Provisional Government’s appeal to the Poles was the first recognition by a Russian government of the Poles’ right to independence. Bolshevik Russia, however, never reconciled itself to the loss of these lands. The Polish–Bolshevik War of 1920 and, in 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet aggression against Poland, the Baltic states and Finland were to a large extent an attempt to recover what the empire had lost after March 1917. In Germany, for its part, the memory of how quickly revolution had shattered a mighty army and then brought the far left to power fed a fear of Bolshevism that Hitler later knew how to exploit.