The February Revolution

The Crisis of Tsarism

By 1917, Russia was in the third year of a war that had already consumed over a million of its soldiers. The scale of the losses on the Eastern Front was staggering — hundreds of thousands killed, wounded or taken prisoner in catastrophic engagements that had exhausted the army’s manpower and shattered its morale. Behind the front lines, the Russian economy was breaking down. The railways were overwhelmed, food supplies to the cities were collapsing, and inflation was destroying the purchasing power of workers who were already among the poorest industrial labourers in Europe.

Tsar Nicholas II had made a catastrophic political error in 1915 when he assumed personal command of the Russian armies. This meant that every subsequent military failure was now directly associated with him in the public mind. His absences at the front left the government in Petrograd in the hands of the Empress Alexandra, whose dependence on the mystic healer Rasputin had become a national scandal. Ministers were appointed and dismissed with bewildering rapidity — four different Prime Ministers served between 1915 and 1917 — and the Duma, Russia’s parliament, found itself increasingly marginalised from meaningful decision-making even as the crisis deepened.

The assassination of Rasputin by conservative aristocrats in December 1916 was itself a symptom of how desperate the situation had become. Even those who had most to lose from revolution — the nobility and the officer class — could see that the regime was heading towards catastrophe. For a deeper historiographical survey of why the Tsarist system failed, see our article on the causes of the Russian Revolution.

February 1917: Revolution from Below

The revolution began not with a dramatic act of political will but with a bread queue. In the last days of February 1917, shortages of bread in Petrograd triggered demonstrations that quickly grew into something far larger. Women textile workers at the Putilov factory walked off the job on 23 February — International Women’s Day by the revolutionary calendar — and within two days the strikes had spread across the city. By 25 February, an estimated 200,000 workers were on the streets of Petrograd.

The Tsar’s response was to order the garrison to fire on the crowds. On 26 February, soldiers did shoot into demonstrators, killing dozens. But this proved to be the last exercise of Tsarist coercive power. The following day, the Volynskii regiment mutinied rather than fire again on the workers. Within hours the mutiny had spread to regiment after regiment across the Petrograd garrison. Soldiers joined the crowds, opened the armouries, and freed political prisoners from the jails. The government lost control of the capital in a matter of hours.

Nicholas II, still at military headquarters at Mogilev, attempted to return to Petrograd by train but found the railway lines blocked. Isolated, with no loyal troops and no political options remaining, he abdicated on 2 March 1917. His brother Grand Duke Michael refused the throne the following day. Three centuries of Romanov rule ended not in a dramatic final confrontation but in a railway carriage, with a tsar who seemed not fully to understand what had happened to him.

The Provisional Government and the Soviet

What emerged from the Russian Revolution was not a single new government but an unstable arrangement of dual power that contained within it the seeds of future conflict. The Duma politicians who had been pressing for reform quickly organised a Provisional Government, led initially by Prince Lvov and including the lawyer Alexander Kerensky. This body claimed legitimate authority as the successor to the Tsarist state and sought recognition from Russia’s allies in the war.

But simultaneously, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd organised a Soviet — a council of elected delegates from the factories and military units — that held real power on the ground. The Petrograd Soviet controlled the railways, the telegraph system and the loyalty of the garrison. Without its cooperation, the Provisional Government could not function. Soviet Order Number One, issued on 1 March, established that soldiers should obey their officers only when those orders did not conflict with those of the Soviet, effectively placing military authority in the hands of a body outside the official government.

This dual power arrangement — what Lenin would call dvoyevlastiye — was inherently unstable. The Provisional Government needed to maintain the war effort to keep Allied support and loans flowing. But the Soviet’s working-class and soldier base wanted peace, land reform and an immediate improvement in their conditions. Every month the government failed to deliver on these demands strengthened the hand of those who argued that the Provisional Government was incapable of meeting the revolution’s needs. When Lenin arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, he arrived with a programme precisely designed to exploit this gap. The story of how he and the Bolsheviks built the Soviet state that followed is one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century.

Why It Matters Now

The February Revolution is a masterclass in how apparently stable authoritarian regimes can disintegrate with terrifying speed once the coercive apparatus fractures. The moment the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds, the Tsarist system lost its essential mechanism of control. This pattern — of authoritarian regimes collapsing not when they are militarily defeated but when the security forces switch sides — has repeated itself throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 to the Arab Spring of 2011. The February Revolution also raises enduring questions about reform versus revolution: could the Tsarist system have been reformed before it was too late? And what responsibility do moderate reformers bear when they prove unable to deliver fast enough for the people they claim to represent?

Key Figures

• Tsar Nicholas II — The last Russian Emperor, whose decision to assume personal command of the army in 1915 made him personally responsible for Russia’s military failures. He abdicated on 2 March 1917.
• Alexandra Feodorovna — The Tsarina, whose reliance on Rasputin and reactionary political advice isolated the monarchy even from its natural supporters in the aristocracy.
• Alexander Kerensky — Socialist lawyer and Duma member who became the dominant figure in the Provisional Government, serving as Minister of Justice before becoming Prime Minister.
• Prince Georgy Lvov — First Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, a liberal reformer who proved unable to navigate the mounting pressures of war and revolution.
• Mikhail Rodzianko — Chairman of the Duma, who desperately telegraphed the Tsar warning him that power was slipping away — and received no meaningful response.

Timeline of the February Revolution

Listen to more episodes on this period: Best Podcasts on the Russian Revolution & Bolshevism | Best Podcasts on Stalin and the Soviet Union