In February 1917 the bread queues in Petrograd grew longer, then louder. Within eight days the street, the barracks and the Duma were all asking the same question: was the Tsar still in power?
The end of winter, the bread queue
In February 1917 Petrograd was living through its third winter of war. Flour, fuel and coal sent to the front had shrunk the city's share; in the working districts of the Vyborg side the queue outside the bakeries began in the dark and by noon had curled around the street. More than two million people lived in the city, and the rumour of bread cards was reborn at the head of every queue.
On 18 February workers at the Putilov works downed tools and demanded a pay rise. When the management locked the strikers out, thousands spilled into the street; day by day the strike spread to the largest enterprises in the city. Tsar Nicholas II, meanwhile, left the capital on 22 February for headquarters at Mogilev, leaving Petrograd in the hands of the governor and the garrison.
Women and teenagers had taken the places of the men called up from the factories; for a worker coming off a shift the bread queue was a second job. The winter cold, the coal shortage and the death notices from the front merged into the same rumours.
23 February: the women lead
23 February (8 March by the new calendar) was International Women's Day. Women workers in the textile mills of the Vyborg side set out in procession, carrying banners that read 'Bread!' Towards noon they reached the gates of the workshops where the men worked and called them out on strike. Most of these women had husbands at the front; their demands did not stop at bread.
Towards evening the crowd came down to Nevsky Prospekt. The police intervened; the Cossacks did not ride their horses into the crowd. By night Nevsky was empty; the next morning the crowd was larger. In the Duma the subject under discussion was still the supply of bread.
24–25 February: the strike spreads across the city
By 24 February the strike was no longer the business of individual factories: the trams stopped, shops pulled down their shutters, and the crowd marched towards the centre under banners of 'Bread' and 'End the war'. On the morning of 25 February the largest gathering formed on Znamenskaya Square; mounted police tried to break up the crowd, and once again some of the Cossacks held back.
That day the Duma was suspended and processions and meetings were banned. The commander of the capital, Khabalov, was ordered to put down the disturbances the following day; the warnings of the Duma's chairman, Rodzianko, found no hearing at the palace. By evening rifle fire was heard in the squares.
26–27 February: rifles turned around
On Sunday 26 February troops opened fire on the crowd; people were killed on Nevsky and in the squares. The same day a company of the Pavlovsky Regiment refused the order to fire on the people and returned to barracks. That was the first crack in the army's discipline.
On the morning of 27 February the training company of the Volynsky Regiment mutinied; taking their rifles, they sent word to the Preobrazhensky and Litovsky regiments. Towards noon the mutinous soldiers opened the arsenal, and then the Kresty prison. Crowd and soldiers marched on the same target: the Tauride Palace. The Duma set up a Provisional Committee there; in a wing of the same building the Petrograd Soviet of workers' and soldiers' deputies assembled.
By the end of the day the Petrograd garrison had effectively slipped out of the government's hands. Officers surrendered their weapons, and some units began electing committees in their barracks. The Duma's committee could not have stood without those soldiers.
28 February – 1 March: two powers
On 28 February the last points of resistance in the capital fell: the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, the Peter and Paul Fortress. Khabalov and his staff were arrested at the Admiralty; the government no longer existed, and there was no authority left to give orders. The Soviet's newspaper, Izvestia, brought out its first issue that same day.
On 1 March the Petrograd Soviet published Order No. 1 for the army: soldiers' committees were to be formed in every company, and weapons were to be under the control of those committees rather than the officers. The order shook the officers' authority overnight. That same day the Tsar's train was coming from Mogilev; finding the line blocked, it turned towards Pskov and stopped there in the evening.
The generals regarded the order as the most dangerous document of the revolution; as the chain of command at the front loosened, carrying on the war became harder. In Petrograd the Duma's Provisional Committee was preparing to install itself as the government; the clerks in the ministries did not know what they were supposed to do.
2 March: the signature at Pskov
In the afternoon of 2 March, in his railway carriage at Pskov, Nicholas II signed the act of abdication. He had first considered abdicating in favour of his son Alexei; then, for himself and his son, he passed the throne to his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The pressure of the front commanders was decisive: the generals were afraid the army would come apart.
That same day in Petrograd the list of the new government was completed. The backbone of the cabinet was the liberal wing of the Duma; the only socialist in it was Kerensky.
- Prime Minister: Prince Georgy Lvov
- Foreign Affairs: Pavel Milyukov
- War: Alexander Guchkov
- Justice: Alexander Kerensky
- Agriculture: Andrey Shingarev
3 March: the throne stands empty
On the morning of 3 March, Grand Duke Michael appeared before the politicians gathered in a flat in Petrograd. He did not accept the throne: the Constituent Assembly would decide. The Romanov dynasty had thus withdrawn by its own hand.
At the end of eight days Petrograd had two centres: the Provisional Government born of the Duma, and the workers' and soldiers' Soviet. In the street there were officers without uniforms, soldiers electing committees, revolutionaries out of prison. In Moscow Nestor Makhno, held in the Butyrka, had been released on 2 March; in Siberia Maria Spiridonova, in the Akatuy prison, was freed by the news of the February Revolution. Through March political prisoners were released on Kerensky's signature, and the death penalty was abolished.