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February Revolution
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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

More than three centuries of Romanov dynastic rule came to an end in late February 1917 when striking
workers and mutinous soldiers in Petrograd forced tsar Nicholas II to abdicate the throne. The Revolution
began on February 23 (March 8 NS) when working-class women, observing the socialist holiday of
International Women’s Day, took to the streets of the capital to protest against food shortages and high
bread prices. This was not the first of such protests during the war, but over the next several days,
encouraged by calls from activists in the revolutionary underground (including Bolsheviks), crowds of
both men and women swelled and marched to the center of the city. There, units of the regular police as
well as Cossacks and soldiers from the Volhynian regiment attempted to disperse them but with limited
success. Indeed, by February 27, with Petrograd at a virtual standstill, key military units went over to the
side of the crowds, seized arsenals of weapons, and on the following day placed the tsarist ministers
under arrest. The tsar, who had taken personal command of the army, sought to return to Petrograd to
restore the status quo ante, but was persuaded by his own generals and a delegation of politicians from
the State Duma that only his abdication could achieve social peace.

On March 2 the provisional committee of the State Duma, consisting of leading moderate and liberal
politicians, declared itself a Provisional Government. When the crowd outside the Tauride Palace taunted
Pavel Miliukov, the leading politician of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party and the first Minister
of Foreign Affairs in the Provisional Government, with cries of “Who elected you?” his response was “We
were elected by the Russian Revolution.” But as suggested by its very name, the new government’s
authority was limited, and from the outset it was acknowledged that only a popularly elected Constituent
Assembly could decide the political structure of the country. Moreover, simultaneous with the
government’s formation, the socialist parties (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries)
called upon workers and soldiers to elect deputies to soviets. In Petrograd the Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies formed an Executive Committee which met in almost continual session. Initially
dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Executive Committee determined its main
purpose to be the defense of “democracy” for which it extended support to the “bourgeois” Provisional
Government on a conditional basis. Soviets soon emerged in other cities and eventually in rural areas as
well.

The overthrow of tsarism was greeted with popular acclaim. The loss of effective state authority gave the
public unprecedented freedom of assembly and expression and resulted in the establishment of new
newspapers, political organizations, trade unions, and other institutions of civil society. These, the halcyon
days of the revolution, lasted about a month. During this time, the Provisional Government, guided by the
spirit of political liberalism, issued a stream of decrees covering education, labor relations, religious
affairs, and other spheres of public life. With respect to food shortages, it felt compelled to establish a
state grain monopoly to be administered by elaborate hierarchy of provisioning committees under a
Ministry of Food Supply. However, on the main, “burning” questions of Russia’s continued participation in
the war, and land reform, the government either confined itself to setting up committees to study the
question or deferred any decision until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. In retrospect, it is
easy to see this relative inaction as having fatally undermined the Provisional Government.

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1917
EVENTS
February Revolution

Formation of the Soviets

April Crisis

Revolution in the Army

July Days

Kornilov Affair

Bolsheviks Seize Power

First Bolshevik Decrees

Constituent Assembly

Treaty of Brest Litovsk

FOUR KINDS OF STATES

Communist Party Building

Economic Apparatus

Building the Soviets

Red Guard into Army

State Security

DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD SOCIETY

Depopulation of the Cities

Food Supply

Conflict with the Church

Death of the Old Culture

Destruction of the Left

The Empire Falls

CREATION OF A NEW SOCIETY

New Letters and Dates

Culture and Revolution

The New Woman

Workers Organization
Peasant Revolution

Organs of the Press

Raising Socialist Youth

Matrix Macalester College

National Endownment for the Humanities

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