The February Revolution begins

The Russian revolutionary movement, derailed by the outbreak of World War, had gradually revived, until by February 1917 the flood of opposition was threatening to engulf the Tsar's regime. “History was picking up the ends of the revolutionary threads broken by the war, and tying them into a knot" [Chapter Seven of the ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ ¹⁵ ]

The accumulated effects of class oppression, the high cost of living, the crisis in villages, the bread queues, factory closures, and, with increasing importance, the war, had been building up changes in the consciousness of the masses - what Trotsky calls the "molecular process of revolution". Now the gradually rising pressure was about to suddenly shatter the old order.

The first two weeks of February saw massive struggles of the working class in Petrograd. Strikes and meetings went on continuously. The re-opening of the Duma on the 14^th coincided with a strike of around 90,000 in Petrograd, with several factories also stopping work in Moscow too.

On the 16^th, the authorities decided to introduce cards for bread rationing in Petrograd. On the 19^th, masses of people, especially women, gathered around the food shops demanding bread. The next day several bakeries were looted and wrecked. The Tsar fled from Petrograd to escape from the disorders.

It's far easier to recognise a potential revolutionary situation after the event than before it. On the 22^nd, even the most militant of the Petrograd District Committees - in the solidly working-class industrial area of Vyborg - had cautioned against mass strikes. They knew that a general strike would have to pose the question of power, that the masses in the streets would come into open conflict with the police and army, and that there might be no turning back. The Vyborg committee felt that the time was not yet ripe, the Bolsheviks too weak and the attitude of the soldiers to the workers too uncertain. However, the textile workers had other ideas:

“The 23^rd of February was International Women's Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches and leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. The fact is that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat - the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers' wives. The overgrown breadlines had provided the last stimulus.” [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ]

When the women textile workers, despite all directives, began to strike and appeal for the big battalions of the metalworkers for support, the Vyborg committee saw that they had to agree to action. In the words of Kayurov, one of the leading worker Bolsheviks in Vyborg: “With reluctance, the Bolsheviks agreed, and they were followed by the workers - Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike, one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead … The idea of going into the streets had long been ripening among the workers; only at that moment nobody imagined where it would lead.” [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ]

Trotsky explains that the first day of the February revolution was not, therefore, a planned attack on Tsarist rule, but just a demonstration with indefinite, but certainly limited, perspectives. About 90,000 workers went on strike, centred on the Vyborg district. There were a few encounters with the police, but the demonstrations passed off without any real victims, giving the workers more confidence for the next day.

On the 24th the movement doubled. 200,000 workers went on strike, about one half of the industrial workers of Petrograd. The workers went to the factories but to hold meetings, not work, then led marches to city centre. Yesterday's chief slogan of ‘Bread!’ was now crowded out by directly political demands: ‘Down with Autocracy!’ and ‘Down with the War!’.

Winning over the state forces

The workers’ leaders on the streets were faced with a key question - could the state forces sent to put down the demonstrations be won over? And, if so, how?

The reactionary and hated police were met with a hail of stones and pieces of ice when they tried to attack the demonstrators - winning them over was out of the question. On the other hand, marking a new stage in the revolution, the soldiers were treated differently. Men and women approached them in a friendly manner, trying to bring them over to the workers' side. Gaining confidence from these exchanges, the feeling grew that the mounted Cossacks would not shoot at the crowds - and they didn't.

In a famous incident outside the Erikson factory in Vyborg, 2,500 workers were trapped in a narrow street by the Cossack cavalry. But the horsemen, without openly breaking discipline, rode through the crowd in lines without actually trying to disperse them. As Kayurov recalled: "Some of them smiled and one of them gave the workers a good wink.” [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ]

The Cossacks, for years one of the most feared sections of the Tsar's forces, were among the first to crack. The effect of the war had even taken hold on the Cossacks’ consciousness. They’d had enough of being driven against the people and were prepared to stand aside.

The Secret Service had based their plans on belief that patriotism was too strong for any insurrection to occur while the war lasted. Military command had worked out a detailed plan for crushing an uprising which they slowly began to put into effect, but with two major defects. Firstly, like the workers' leaders, they underestimated the speed at which events were developing and perhaps resorted to their harshest measures, like ordering direct shootings at the crowds, too late. Secondly, and critically, their plan was based on the entire garrison of 150,000 soldiers. In reality, much of this force was made up of reserve units, virtually untrained and open to the agitation of the demonstrators. Perhaps only 10,000 troops could be relied on by the Generals, largely the officer cadets in the military training schools.

By the 25^th the strike movement had broadened and become practically general. Around ¼ million workers participated that day, the advanced layers joined by more backward, as small establishments closed too. The battles became more serious with shooting from the mounted police being answered with shots from the crowd itself, and even a volley from the Cossacks directed, not at the workers, but at the police.

The heroic Kayurov related how he and several other workers approached the Cossacks for help, with a marvellously calculated appeal to these proud horsemen, caps in their hands.“Brothers - Cossacks, help the workers in a struggle for their peaceable demands!" [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ]. A few minutes later the crowd were tossing in their arms a Cossack who had cut down a police inspector with his sabre before their very eyes.

Along with these attempts to neutralise the Cossacks, the workers, especially the women, again tried to fraternise with the soldiers, particularly the infantry, often to great effect. However, these promising episodes were matched by other reports of soldiers shooting and killing demonstrators.

Success or failure in the balance

As for the Bolshevik leadership, its Executive Committee didn't make up its mind to issue a leaflet calling for a General Strike until the morning of the 25^th. By the time the leaflet was issued, if indeed it ever was, the movement had gone beyond its demands. The movement had now reached a level where things could not be solved just by strikes and protests but by force of arms. The leaders did not lead, they dragged behind the movement.

The uprising could not, however, afford to lose momentum for, as Trotsky explains: "A revolutionary uprising that spreads over a number of days can develop victoriously only it case it ascends step by step, and scores one success after another. A pause in its growth is dangerous; a prolonged marking of time, fatal. But even successes by themselves are not enough; the masses must know about them in time, and have time to understand their value. It is possible to let slip a victory at the very moment when it is within arm's reach. This has happened in history" [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ].

The government knew that they had to send troops into action in deadly earnest. The advanced workers understood it too. The mood of anxiety was added to by the arrest of around 100 revolutionaries during the night of the 25/26^th, including five members of the Petrograd Bolshevik committee.

The militant Vyborg Bolshevik leaders were now left, perhaps luckily for the revolution, effectively in control of the Bolsheviks. In fact, Vyborg was effectively in the hands of the insurrection already, the police stations wrecked, the officers fled. Other districts were reaching the same point with the police headquarters beginning to lose contact with the rest of its forces in the capital.

February 26^th began relatively quietly, falling on a Sunday so that the demonstrating workers could not assemble in the factories as they had done previously. Slowly the workers had begun to assemble at the city centre until tens of thousands were in the streets. The police report on the day's events, if misrepresenting the workers' friendly attitude to the rank-and-file soldiers, gives a flavour of the demonstrators' defiant mood: "In the course of the disorders it was observed as a general phenomenon, that the rioting mobs showed extreme defiance towards the military patrols. When preliminary shots were fired into the air, the crowd not only did not disperse but answered these volleys with laughter. Only when loaded cartridges were fired into the very midst of the crowd, was it found possible to disperse the mob, the participants in which, however, would most of them hide in the yards of nearby houses, and as soon as the shooting stopped come out again into the street ” [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ].

Despite the shots from both police, often now acting as hidden snipers, and from the troops, often the trainee officer squadrons now with strict orders to fire on the crowds, the masses would no longer retreat. At least 40 were killed, many more wounded, but the workers continued to press forward counting on victory at any cost.

The authorities were putting ever greater pressure on the soldiers to attack - but on the other hand the counter-pressure of the workers' appeals was also mounting. The garrison could no longer keep up a friendly neutrality - the choice was to shoot or to mutiny. “Thus in the streets and squares is waged a ceaseless struggle ... for the heart of the soldiers. In these sharp contacts between working men and women and the soldiers the fate of the govt., of the war, of the country, is being decided” [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ].

A small incident on the evening of 26^th marked a qualitative development in the struggle. Indignant about reports that its own trainee officers had fired on the workers, a company of the Pavlovsky regiment under the command of a non-commissioned officer had marched to the city centre to recall its training squad. As Trotsky points out, this was no mere mutiny but an act of high revolutionary initiative. The officer, whose name is unknown to history, was one of the many nameless heroes of the February days. However, most of the mutineers were arrested later that night. Now only the victory of the revolution could save them.

Victory of the February revolution

On that evening of the 26^th, only hours before victory, the Vyborg leaders were tense. Some even wondered whether it would now be better for the workers to retreat. Even the best of leaders, like Kayurov, can find it hard to judge the balance of forces precisely and, weighed down with a feeling of responsibility for the whole movement, fear making a grave error of judgement.

Amongst the rank-and-file workers, however, there was less reflection, simply a mood that the revolution had begun, that the army would not, or could not, stop them, and that a decisive victory was at hand. The shootings and deaths had not been enough to discourage the revolutionary masses. On the 27^th, to the surprise and alarm of the Government, the workers once more streamed to the factories and in open meetings resolved to continue the struggle. But now that would have to mean armed insurrection.

In Kayurov's house, over 40 workplace representatives gathered, the majority, but not all, also speaking for continuing the uprising. In fact, the workers need not have worried so much. Most of the work of the revolution had already been done - the steady pressure of events had now reached the point where the mass of the soldiers was now prepared to side with the revolution.

The soldiers had no feelings of attachment to the monarchy; they had no wish to fight the Germans, still less the Petrograd workers. They just wanted to go home to their villages. But unlike the workers, the revolutionary soldiers could not hold demonstrations to judge the depth of opposition in the barracks. The soldiers had to wait for the moment when it seemed that they could be sure of victory, certain that the workers were ready to fight to the end and that mutineers would never have to return to the barracks to the retribution of their officers. This moment had now been reached. The Bolshevik meeting at Kayurov's house was interrupted by the intoxicating news that a soldiers’ insurrection was under way and that the main gaols had already been opened.

The Volynsky regiment were the first to revolt, in the early morning. Even the training squad, the most reliable section for the reaction, had refused to march out and their commander killed. With only the revolution to rely on, the soldiers rushed to neighbouring barracks ‘calling out' other regiments like a flying picket might call out workers to support a strike. The soldiers linked up with the Vyborg workers and outlined a plan of action - to seize remaining police stations, disarm the police, free the workers from the police cells and political prisoners from the gaols, defeat the remaining loyal troops in the city centre, and link up with the inactive troops and workers in other districts.

With surprisingly little inner struggle, the mutiny of the regiments began to become an epidemic. A few shots rang out, sometimes from youths excitedly firing one of the many guns seized from the arsenals, but there were few major encounters with armed opposition. The monarchist command either hid or tore off the Tsarist braid and joined the mutiny, usually out of fear but also, for some younger officers, out of genuine hatred for the cruelty and incompetence of the old regime.

Joyful reports of victory flooded in. By noon, even armoured cars flying red flags had come over to the revolution and were spreading terror amongst any remaining opposition. General Khabalov, who had desperately gathered together a regiment of 1,000 ‘reliable’ troops, later explained with dismay: "Something impossible began to happen on that day. The regiment starts, starts under a brave officer but there are no results" [Chapter Seven ¹⁵ ]. In the white-hot atmosphere of Petrograd, even these resolute troops soon drowned in the insurrection. By nightfall, the garrison of 210,000 had melted away. It no longer existed. The whole fabric of the regime had decayed to nothing.