Russia on the Brink: The Winter of 1917

By February 1917, Russia had been at war for two and a half years. The human cost was staggering — over a million dead, several million more wounded or captured, and an army that had been defeated, reorganised, and bled dry in a succession of catastrophic offensives. The supply system was collapsing. Trains that should have been carrying food to Russia’s cities were requisitioned for military use. In Petrograd, the capital, bread queues stretched around the block. The temperature stood at thirty degrees below zero. Workers who had stood in line all night were being told that the bread had run out.

The Tsar, Nicholas II, was at army headquarters in Mogilev, hundreds of miles from the capital, exercising personal command of forces he lacked the military training to direct. In his absence, the Empress Alexandra — under the influence of Rasputin until his murder in December 1916 — had presided over a chaotic rotation of ministers and a government paralysed by faction and incompetence. The Duma, the Russian parliament, was in session but powerless. Liberal politicians warned the government that it faced disaster; the government ignored them. The aristocracy had murdered Rasputin and was still in shock at how little difference it had made.

The Spark: International Women’s Day, 23 February

The revolution began not with a planned uprising but with a bread queue. On 23 February 1917 (8 March in the Western calendar) — International Women’s Day — women workers in Petrograd’s textile mills walked out on strike, marching through the streets demanding bread. They were joined by workers from the giant Putilov munitions factory, which had locked out its workforce the previous day over a wage dispute. By the end of the day, 90,000 workers were on the streets. The Cossack cavalry sent to disperse them did not fire. In some accounts they smiled. The mood in the city had crossed a threshold.

Over the next two days, the strikes spread and the crowds grew. By 25 February, approximately 200,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd. The city’s police — the normal instrument for suppressing disorder — were overwhelmed and in some cases attacked. Shops were looted. The government ordered the military to use force. On 26 February, troops opened fire on demonstrators at Znamenskaya Square, killing perhaps fifty people. It seemed, for a moment, as if the standard pattern of repression would work again.

The Army Mutinies: The Point of No Return

The turning point came on 27 February, when soldiers of the Volynsky Regiment — the same unit that had fired on demonstrators the previous day — shot their commanding officer and refused further orders. The mutiny spread with extraordinary speed. Regiment after regiment in the Petrograd garrison joined the revolution. By the end of the day, over 60,000 soldiers had gone over to the side of the crowds. The distinction between the revolution and the army had collapsed. Workers and mutinous soldiers together seized the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Winter Palace’s gateway, the main telegraph office, and the railway stations.

Without the army’s loyalty, the government had nothing. Ministers met in emergency session at the Mariinsky Palace and found they had no means of enforcing their authority. The Tsar, still at Mogilev, ordered the suppression of the “disorders” but the troops he dispatched from the front never reached Petrograd. On 2 March 1917, Nicholas II signed his abdication. He abdicated not only for himself but — breaking all precedent — for his son Alexei as well, passing the throne to his brother Grand Duke Michael. Michael declined it the following day. Three hundred years of Romanov rule had ended in four days of bread riots and a soldiers’ mutiny.

The Provisional Government and Dual Power

Two institutions claimed authority in the wake of the Tsar’s fall. The Provisional Government, formed from liberal and moderate socialist members of the Duma, was led initially by Prince Georgy Lvov and later by Alexander Kerensky. It claimed to be the legitimate government of Russia, pending the election of a constituent assembly that would determine the country’s constitutional future. The Petrograd Soviet — a council of workers’ and soldiers’ delegates, meeting in the same building — claimed to speak for the revolutionary masses and held the practical loyalty of the city’s garrison.

This was “dual power” — a phrase coined by Lenin to describe an inherently unstable situation in which formal authority and real power were held by different bodies. The Provisional Government could issue decrees; the Soviet could decide whether they were carried out. The arrangement depended on cooperation, and it was inherently temporary. Any serious crisis — and the continuation of the war guaranteed that serious crises would come — would force a choice between the two.

The Provisional Government’s fatal decision was to continue the war. Russia’s Western allies needed her on the Eastern Front. Kerensky, who became War Minister in May, believed that a successful offensive would unite the country and give the government the legitimacy it lacked. The June 1917 offensive — the Kerensky Offensive — was a military disaster. The army, already disintegrating under the pressure of three years of losses and the radicalising effect of the revolution, fell apart. The failure of the offensive strengthened the Bolsheviks, who alone among the major parties offered an immediate, unconditional peace.

Why It Matters Now

The February Revolution illustrates one of the most consistent patterns in the collapse of autocratic regimes: they tend to fall not when they are at their weakest, but when expectations have risen and been disappointed. Russia’s government had survived far worse crises in previous decades. What made February 1917 different was the combination of military failure, economic breakdown, and the total loss of moral authority — the sense, shared across Russian society from the highest nobles to the factory floor, that the system was not simply failing but was rotten at its core.

The revolution also illustrates the unpredictability of political collapse. No one — not the Bolsheviks, not the liberals, not the Tsar — expected the dynasty to fall in four days. History’s greatest turning points often appear, in retrospect, to have been inevitable; lived through, they are almost always surprises.

Key Figures

Nicholas II — The last Tsar of Russia; his combination of personal stubbornness, political incapacity, and absence from the capital made him unable to respond effectively to the crisis that ended his dynasty.

Prince Georgy Lvov — First head of the Provisional Government; a well-intentioned liberal who lacked the decisive authority the situation demanded.

Alexander Kerensky — Socialist lawyer and later Prime Minister; the dominant figure of the Provisional Government after July 1917; his insistence on continuing the war was the decision that destroyed his government.

Pavel Milyukov — Kadet leader and Foreign Minister in the first Provisional Government; forced to resign in May after it emerged he had secretly promised Russia’s allies that the war aims — including territorial gains — remained unchanged.

Timeline

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