In February 1917 a monarchy more than three hundred years old fell in about a week, almost without a fight. Few of the professional revolutionaries saw it coming; Lenin, in exile in Zurich, had told an audience in January that his generation might not live to see the decisive battles. To see how it happened, start with the war.
A note on dates
Russia still used the old Julian calendar, which by 1917 ran 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the West. That is why the February Revolution began in March by Western reckoning, and the October Revolution took place in November. This course gives Russian dates, as most histories do. The Bolsheviks switched Russia to the Western calendar in February 1918.
The strain of total war
Russia mobilized millions of men in 1914 and suffered enormous losses. In 1915 German and Austrian offensives pushed the Russian army out of Poland and Lithuania in the Great Retreat. That autumn Nicholas II took personal command of the army and moved to headquarters at Mogilev. From then on, every defeat was his defeat. In Petrograd (the capital, renamed in 1914 to sound less German), government passed largely to Empress Alexandra, who was distrusted for her German birth, and to her adviser Grigory Rasputin, a Siberian holy man she believed could ease her son's hemophilia. Ministers rose and fell so quickly that the shuffle was nicknamed "ministerial leapfrog."
The economy buckled. Prices rose several times over during the war, while wages lagged. Railways were overloaded with military traffic, so grain and fuel failed to reach the cities even when harvests were adequate. Women stood in bread lines for hours in winter. In November 1916 the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov listed the government's failures in the Duma and, after each, asked whether this was stupidity or treason. In December a group of aristocrats murdered Rasputin, hoping to save the monarchy. It was too late.
Five days in February
On 23 February 1917, International Women's Day, women textile workers in Petrograd walked out to protest bread shortages and called on men in nearby factories to join them. Within two days more than 200,000 people were on strike, with crowds demanding bread, an end to the war and an end to autocracy. On 26 February troops fired on demonstrators. The next morning, soldiers of the Volynsky Regiment refused to shoot again, killed an officer and went over to the crowds. Other units followed. The garrison, made up largely of peasant recruits who dreaded being sent to the front, dissolved as a force for order.
Two new bodies appeared in the same building, the Tauride Palace. Leaders of the Duma formed a committee that became the Provisional Government. Socialists and workers formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Generals at the front, eager to keep the army fighting, advised the tsar to step down. On 2 March Nicholas abdicated, and his brother Michael declined the throne the next day.
Dual power
The new order became known as dual power: the Provisional Government shared authority with the Petrograd Soviet. The government, headed by Prince Georgy Lvov, had legal standing and the support of educated society. The Soviet had the loyalty of workers and soldiers, which meant real force. Its moderate socialist leaders, mostly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, believed this was a bourgeois revolution and refused to take power themselves, but promised to support the government only so far as it served the revolution. The Soviet's Order No. 1 to the garrison went further: soldiers should obey officers only when their orders did not conflict with the Soviet's decisions.
The Provisional Government did a great deal at first. It freed political prisoners, allowed free speech and assembly, abolished the death penalty, and ended legal discrimination by religion and nationality, lifting the restrictions on Jews. In July it adopted universal suffrage, including women, for the coming Constituent Assembly, making Russia one of the first major states where women could vote. Yet it postponed the two decisions people wanted most: land reform and peace. Both, it said, must wait for the Constituent Assembly, whose election was delayed until November.
Worked example: Order No. 1
On 1 March, before the Provisional Government was even announced, the Petrograd Soviet issued Order No. 1 to the garrison. It told every unit to elect a committee. It put the Soviet's decisions above any officer's command. It abolished the requirement to salute off duty and banned officers from addressing soldiers rudely, with the familiar form of "you" used for servants and children.
Read from a soldier's point of view, the order was a charter of dignity: men who had been treated as serfs in uniform were now citizens. Read from an officer's or a minister's point of view, it split the chain of command and left the government without a reliable army. Both readings are true, and that is the problem of dual power in miniature. The government held office, but the men with rifles listened first to the Soviet. Any government that tried to keep fighting the war would depend on soldiers who increasingly wanted to go home.