In the latest in Dominic Alexander’s series on great revolutions, he looks at how Russia went from bloody imperialist war to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime

By 1916, the horrors of the war had driven Russia to crisis. Early advances against the Austrians were reversed in 1915 by a German counterattack, which overwhelmed the poorly armed Russian troops. By the time new defensive lines were established well within Russian borders, the country had suffered casualties of two million troops, with a further million taken prisoner. Russian soldiers were so poorly supplied with arms and ammunition that they were often reduced to using agricultural instruments instead, or taking guns from the fallen. The incompetence and corruption of the high command, not least Tsar Nicholas II himself, undoubtedly fuelled contempt for the monarchy and the state in general, but it was the strain the war placed on the economy that was decisive.

Although war production improved after 1915, there was a chronic shortage of raw materials, and agricultural production was hit hard by the death toll at the front, and the conscription of so many young men, and horses too. Civilian industry and transport sectors declined towards collapse. Inflation had hit 200% by 1916, and as prices rose, peasants lost incentives to sell produce to the cities. This exacerbated shortages of food which sapped any remaining support for the war effort, replacing it with desperation. The bitterness of the 1916-17 winter collided with collapsing morale in the army, leading to a wave of desertions and many units heading to the edge of mutiny. The government itself descended into chaos and dysfunction, with the Tsar finally surrounded by a corrupt clique including the notorious Rasputin. Members of the elite, even within the Imperial family, began talking about a military coup to resolve the crisis, but no one dared to put such a plan in motion.¹ Later, the British ambassador recalled that revolution ‘was in the air, and the only moot point was whether it would come from above or from below.’²

The paralysis at the top of society was finally broken by an explosion at the base. On 9 January, 140,000 workers went on strike for the anniversary of 1905’s Bloody Sunday. Then, at Petrograd’s  Putilov works again, on 18 February, workers demanded a 50% pay rise (in the context of drastic inflation), and the management responded with a lockout. This put 30,000 workers on the street, at the same time as the strike movement was still spreading in Petrograd, and only ten days’ supply of bread flour remained in the city. Disturbances over food shortages began to occur on a regular basis.

On 23 February, International Women’s day, (in the old Russian calendar), huge crowds of women, many of them textile workers, demonstrated for bread, accompanied by red flags and slogans such as ‘down with the autocracy’.³ The factories in the Vyborg district went on strike by midday, also calling for bread. The army was not able to control them until the evening. The strike resumed and spread the next day, and by 25 February, the authorities had become alarmed that troops, even Cossack units, were showing unwillingness to act against the crowds. It was rumoured that Cossacks had even turned on the police when a policeman had attacked a woman.⁴ Orders came from the Tsar to fire upon the crowds, and on one occasion, a machine gun was used, killing about forty people. This seems to have sparked a mutiny in one company, which the next day spread to other units, including the one which had fired the machine gun on the crowd.⁵

Crowds, particularly the women among them, doggedly tried to fraternise with the soldiers, and this soon bore fruit.⁶ Troops now declared they wouldn’t fire upon the crowds, and some officers who tried to enforce action against the crowds were shot.⁷ On 27 February, some 70,000 soldiers were reported to have joined the demonstrations, while the Petrograd Soviet had already been reconstituted by factory elections.⁸ The February revolution is often described as ‘spontaneous’, but this really hides what was happening. It was leaderless, certainly, in the sense that it was not driven by any particular political figures or parties, but it did depend upon a host of lower-level organisers in the factories and military units. Trotsky quotes the prominent Kadet Pavel Milyukov saying that owing ‘to the fact that none of the revolutionary leaders with a name was able to hang his label on the movement, it becomes not impersonal but merely nameless.’⁹ One could put this in another way: it was not so much spontaneous as the result of rank-and-file organisation.

The Tsar abdicates

The state Duma, which had vacillated up to this point, now somewhat reluctantly formed a provisional committee and declared itself the government. On 28 February, the Peter and Paul fortress capitulated to mutineers and striking workers, and the weapons it held were distributed to the people. Scores of people, from ministers to secret policemen and army officers, were ‘arrested’ and held in the Tauride Palace.¹⁰ The Tsar attempted to return to Petrograd, but was prevented from proceeding by the actions of the railway workers.¹¹ Soon, military leaders and members of the Duma advised the Tsar to abdicate. There was an effort to install his brother as a new Tsar, but he in turn refused, seeing that he faced active hostility rather than any support.

Thus, the monarchy ended at the hands of the crowds of workers and rank-and-file soldiers. Trotsky observed that: ‘We must lay it down as a general rule for those days that the higher the leaders, the further they lagged behind.’¹² Trotsky’s rule holds good not just for February, but became characteristic of many elements of even socialist and soviet leadership in the course of 1917.

The Duma deputies established a provisional government under Prince Lvov, a leading liberal, who remained prime minister until July. Meanwhile, after the Petrograd Soviet had come back into being, other soviets very rapidly appeared in towns and cities, and among soldiers and peasants, across Russia, and by 22 March, 77 of them were in contact with the Petrograd organisation. This was the period of ‘dual power’, where the bourgeois Provisional Government nominally held power, but the soviets had the support and capacity actually to organise matters. Workers who had seized the telegraph, the railroad stations, printers and so on recognised only the soviet as an authority capable of giving them orders.¹³ The only issue was whether the soviet delegates would be willing to make use of their potential power.

Initially, ‘moderate’ socialists among the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were the dominant forces in the soviets. The Mensheviks, even the more left-wing ones like Nikolai Sukhanov, on the internationalist wing and a founder member of the Petrograd Soviet, were dogmatically convinced that the revolution was necessarily a wholly bourgeois one. The bourgeoisie could not be pressured, lest it turn counterrevolutionary and re-embrace Tsarism. In ‘these circumstances, a socialist seizure of power would mean the inevitable and immediate failure of the revolution’, Sukhanov wrote.¹⁴ A worse case of ‘always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse’ could hardly be imagined. With the bourgeoisie so lacking social power and political will, this position in fact laid the path entirely open to counterrevolutionary forces to gather their strength and end the revolution in a bloodbath.

A supporter of the Provisional Government lamented that if ‘we only had machine guns. But we could not have any … If we had even a single regiment on whom to depend, a single general with determination, the situation might have been different.’ Sukhanov wrote about the tacit accommodation between the soviet and the Provisional Government that this was ‘a formal marriage to the petty-bourgeois soviet majority. Love was absent … but it was a question of the dowry. And as a dowry, the soviet would bring the army, the real power, immediate confidence and support, and all the technical means of administration.’¹⁵ The Social Revolutionaries, in their own terms, saw matters similarly to the Mensheviks. The SRs’ support in the soviets was strong due to the overrepresentation of soldiers (peasants in uniform) compared to workers.

Despite the soviet leaders’ determination to hand power to the Provisional Government, members of the latter could perceive the situation clearly. The Minister of War wrote to a general on 9 March that ‘the provisional government has no real power at its disposal and its decrees are carried out only to the extent this is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.’¹⁶ Nonetheless, the Petrograd Soviet was a nexus of contradiction. On the one hand, it was propelled by the revolutionary drive of workers and soldiers, and yet it tended to reflect the positions taken by the less active majority, than the militant minority. Particularly in the early months of the revolution, it was not yet clear to most how the largest socialist parties, the Mensheviks and the SRs, were likely to conduct themselves when in authority.

Finally, among the less politically experienced, particularly the soldiers, it was easy for more middle-class-aligned individuals, or army officers, to become delegates. Indeed, officers in particular flocked into the SR party in part as cover from revolutionary sentiment. For all these reasons, the soviets tended to lag behind the political mood of the masses. This tendency was further concentrated in the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the Petrograd Soviet, which was dominated by the right-wing Mensheviks and SRs, so the Soviet ‘remained silent about the peace, about the land, even about the republic.’¹⁷

Workers and soviets

Nonetheless, pressure from workers and soldiers frequently affected the Petrograd Soviet’s decisions. Hence, it initially banned the pro-monarchist press, before giving up this power to the government, and then prevented the Romanovs from fleeing Russia. Most importantly, since the government made no effort to deal with the food shortages, the Soviet found that it had ‘to control speculation and organise a market’, including seizing all grain stores, setting bread prices, and regulating commodity trade with the peasants.¹⁸ This was all against the inclinations of the quite right-wing economists and statisticians advising the Soviet, as well as the CEC itself, and was also resisted by the state apparatus, although local and provincial soviets were able to institute such measures on their own initiative.

There was also tension between the workers and the Soviet over the eight-hour day, for which the general strike leading to the February Revolution had begun, and which carried on afterwards. The degree to which some Mensheviks had moved right is measured by their leaders’ expectation that the workers would obediently return to work at their command. Their leader, Plekhanov, had even written in a US newspaper that strikes would be a crime in revolutionary Russia.¹⁹ ‘A struggle on two fronts – against the reaction and against the capitalist – is too much for the proletariat’ was the Menshevik line.²⁰ They feared above all that continued class struggle would drive the bourgeoisie into support for reaction, and the revolution would be defeated. In this, they were clearly wrong, since, in the face of the workers’ actions, the Manufacturers’ Association announced on 10 March its willingness to accept the eight-hour day. The struggle for the eight-hour day dented the authority of the Mensheviks and made workers more careful to consider the politics of the Soviet leaders, and more willing to listen to the Bolsheviks.

In Moscow, a similar struggle took place, with the Soviet there ordering strikers back to work, the latter refusing by an overwhelming vote. By 21 March, the Soviet had ordered the eight-hour day instituted. These events did, however, show the superiority of soviets as representative systems to bourgeois parliaments; the delegates of the Soviet understood that their authority rested on the organised power of the working class, and were necessarily responsive to working-class pressure in a way that a bourgeois parliament simply will never be. Trotsky explained that ‘any other representative system, atomising the masses, would have expressed their actual will in the revolution incomparably less effectively, and with far greater delay.’²¹

Until Lenin arrived back in Russia at the end of March, the Bolshevik leaders in the country were content largely to allow the uncertain situation to continue. All along the way, as Trotsky wrote, ‘they hesitated, they lagged – in other words, they did not lead. They dragged after the movement.’²² Despite rank-and-file Bolsheviks taking a leading role in the street fighting in February, they were not strongly represented in the Petrograd Soviet. Nonetheless, it was the Bolshevik-dominated Vyborg district which had initially called for a soviet, its committee having briefly taken over direction of the party in the city after the Petersburg committee had been mostly arrested on 26 February. Despite Vyborg’s militant stance, leading elements of the Bolsheviks voted to support the Provisional Government.²³ Worse, when Kamenev and Stalin returned from Siberia, they reinforced the stance of supporting the government, and even declared that the war must go on, to the disgust of Vyborg.²⁴

Despite the right turn of the Soviet CEC and even of the Bolshevik leadership, mass discontent continued to rise. The Vyborg Bolshevik Committee began to call for the soviets to seize power. In the army, officers were deeply resented, and conflicts over discipline could be fierce. The process of disintegration within the army continued apace, with severe shortages of food, and diseases like typhus and scurvy killing more men than the fighting.²⁵ The Soviet’s most important act, Order No. 1, gave soldiers the right to form elected committees (soviets), that weaponry be controlled by these committees, that in political acts, the soldiers should obey the Soviet’s orders, and that soldiers should have civilian rights when off duty. Various attempts to backtrack on this Order were resisted, both by the soldiers themselves and in one instance, by printers refusing to typeset an appeal. Order No. 1 stood, despite the efforts of the Soviet CEC itself.

Lenin’s April Theses

On his return to Russia, Lenin immediately began the task of turning the Bolshevik Party around, explaining in his April Theses that ‘the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the proletariat, is in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.’²⁶ Lenin insisted that there must be a complete break from all capitalist and imperialist interests, so that there should be no concessions to ‘revolutionary defencism’, that is, the fiction that the war was being continued to defend Russia’s revolution, rather than in the interests of imperialism.

However, Lenin warned that the party remained a minority in the soviets, and that the broad masses of people still trusted in the socialist parties to fulfil the promise of the February Revolution. Lenin acknowledged the ‘dual power’ situation in February: the ‘material force was in the hands of the proletariat, but the bourgeoisie was conscious and ready’.²⁷ Lenin faced considerable shock and dismay among leading Bolsheviks for his broadside against existing party policy and the leadership, even being accused of having taken over in its entirety Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution (narrowly, that the Russian revolution would immediately move over from the bourgeois to the socialist stage).²⁸ While their positions were still somewhat distinct, Lenin and Trotsky’s views had indeed converged over the war years. Lenin, at this point was relying on the revolutionary, militant attitude of the worker-Bolsheviks for support.²⁹

From the beginning of the revolution, as factory committees proliferated, there had been a growing push for workers’ control coming from shop floors. The committees became increasingly assertive, insisting on controlling an increasing number of management functions. The ‘moderate’ socialists objected to the moves towards workers’ control, with Skobelev, a former associate of Trotsky, arguing that, because the revolution was at a bourgeois stage, what was needed was state regulation instead. However, such objections did not curb the militancy. The First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees on 30 May contained 568 delegates representing over 330,000 workers and was dominated by the Bolsheviks.³⁰ 

The pace of mass disillusionment with the Provisional Government accelerated when its  Foreign Minister, and the founder of the Kadet Party, Pavel Milyukov, outlined annexationist war aims, including the conquest of Constantinople. In the face of very hostile public reaction, these were disavowed, but then apparently reasserted in a leaked note of 18 April which Milyukov sent to the Western allies. This note, of course, pleased Russia’s allies, which now included the United States, as confirming the country’s commitment to the war, but outraged the mass of workers, peasants and soldiers, whose sufferings would have to continue if the war was to go on. The Soviets’ stated positions on the war were designed to both appease anti-war sentiment and avoid creating a confrontation with the Provisional Government. This ‘compromising’ stance led to Lenin’s condemnation of its policy as failing to demand an end to Russia’s involvement in imperialist war.

Despite the apparent disavowal of Milyukov’s note by both the government and the Soviet, Milyukov pressed on with his plan to seize Constantinople, and tried to undermine the Soviet’s position that the war was purely defensive.³¹ Amid the various manoeuvrings, soldiers made their opinion felt on 20 April with mass, armed demonstrations of soldiers and workers adorned with slogans demanding the resignation of Milyukov. Around 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers and sailors were involved in the protest in Petrograd alone.³² Milyukov’s intention to mount an assault on Constantinople foundered because there simply weren’t reliable troops available for it.

Growing realisation of the duplicitous manoeuvres of the leaders of the revolution led more and more factories and regiments to adopt Bolshevik slogans on the peace policy, and against the Provisional Government. Against rising, if premature, demands that the Soviet overthrow the government, Soviet leaders argued that it would be futile and lead to civil war. Disarmingly, one even declared: ‘Who will take the place of the government? We? But our hands tremble’.³³ A new round of anti-government demonstrations by workers and soldiers was met on 21 April with Kadet-organised pro-government protestors, including outright counterrevolutionary groups, which led to shooting and casualties, clearly instigated by the right.³⁴ By this point, the Bolsheviks were regularly being accused of working in the pay of the Germans.

General Kornilov started moving cannons into the centre of the city, while reassuring the government that he had sufficient forces to put down the anti-government demonstrations. However, the Soviet ordered all troops back to the barracks, and Kornilov was left embarrassed. The officers were keen to obey him, but the soldiers were loyal to the Soviet. Despite this demonstration of its authority, the Soviet did not demand Kornilov’s removal, confirming, as Trotsky put it, that ‘their hands trembled’.³⁵ The Soviet did, however, command an end to street demonstrations for two days.

Socialists enter the government

The Bolsheviks were still in a minority in the Petrograd Soviet and were well short of carrying a vote of no confidence in the Provisional Government. The upshot of the April crisis was thus effectively a return to the status quo, since the revolutionary masses were not yet strong enough to force the issue, the Soviet leaders were temporising, and even the Bolshevik Party was still divided and uncertain after Lenin’s bombshell April Theses. Lenin himself was aware that demands for the overthrow of the Provisional Government were premature while the Bolsheviks were still a minority. Nonetheless, Milyukov and the war minister Guchkov were forced to resign on 2 May, and a coalition government with socialist involvement was agreed. Alexander Kerensky, originally non-party, but recently aligned with the SRs, was promoted to War Minister. The SR leader Chernov and the Menshevik Tsereteli, also on the Soviet CEC, among four other socialists, joined the cabinet.

The administrative role of the soviets in general was further consolidated at this point. They removed reactionary officials, banned counter-revolutionary newspapers, requisitioned food supplies, managed transport issues, and intervened in economic disputes. And yet, Menshevik and SR leaderships of the soviets angrily rejected the Bolshevik call for ‘all power to the soviets’.³⁶ Moreover, Tsereteli and others in the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet moved notably rightwards, now adopting a ‘patriotic’ position regarding the war.³⁷ Thus, there began to be a serious contradiction between the practice of the soviets in reality and the political stances adopted by their leaderships. A number of provincial soviets, including Moscow and Odessa, objected outright to the coalition government, but the danger of the situation was not so clear to workers and soldiers at this point. Soldiers in particular hoped that the presence of socialists in government would bring the war to an end.

Trotsky, after a period of British internment on his way back to Russia from exile, arrived on 4 May. He delivered a pointed and discomfiting speech to the Soviet, just as its leaders were asking it to support the new coalition government. He celebrated the February Revolution but pointed out that the coalition would not end the period of dual power, but ‘transfer it into the Ministry itself’.³⁸ Sounding very much like Lenin, he argued that the next move should be to transfer the whole power to the soviets. Grudgingly, he was given a seat on the CEC, but without voting rights.

Afterwards, Trotsky met with his own small revolutionary group, the Mezhrayonka, or Inter-District Organisation, and then with Lenin and leading Bolsheviks. Despite their history of bitter polemic, there was no rancour now. Still, despite the closeness of Trotsky’s politics to that of the Bolsheviks, the immediate merger of the Mezhrayonka with the Bolshevik Party took some time to accomplish.³⁹ To those ‘moderate’ socialists outside that negotiation, however, Trotsky’s group and the Bolsheviks appeared indistinguishable. Trotsky, in any case, operated very closely with Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership. Sukhanov noted that it was being said that Trotsky ‘was worse than Lenin’.⁴⁰ Trotsky’s tireless oratory at countless meetings, at the Soviet and elsewhere, arguing the case for the soviet left gained him tremendous popularity, particularly at the Kronstadt naval base.⁴¹

The hopes invested in the coalition were to be disabused quite soon. Within weeks, the new Minister of Labour, Skobelev, was suppressing strike action and calling on the workers to exercise ‘restraint’.⁴² The expectation was that the coalition would mark a turn to the left, but, divided between liberals concerned to restore state authority and moderate socialists afraid of pushing the liberals into the arms of reaction, the effect was deadlock on domestic matters. If anything, there was a turn to the right, on the basis that the government could now hope to marshal popular support, with the largest socialist parties on board.

¹ ibid. pp.67-9, 73, Sumner, Survey, p.62.

² Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.75.

₃ Trotsky, History of The Russian Revolution (London: Sphere Books 1967), p.110.

⁴ ibid. p.112.

⁵ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.81.

⁶ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.116.

⁷ Ulam, Lenin, p.410.

⁸ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.82.

⁹ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.151.

¹⁰ ibid. p.137.

¹¹ ibid. p.92.

¹² ibid. p.125.

¹³ ibid. p.165.

¹⁴ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, pp.87-8.

¹⁵ ibid. p.91.

¹⁶ ibid. p.94.

¹⁷ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.228.

¹⁸ ibid. p.230.

¹⁹ ibid. p.220.

²⁰ ibid. p.233.

²¹ ibid. p.236.

²² ibid. p.118.

²³ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.99.

²⁴ ibid. pp.104-5.

²⁵ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.250.

²⁶ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.96.

²⁷ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.289.

²⁸ Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.212.

²⁹ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.304.

³⁰ Cliff, Power to the Soviets, p.230.

³¹ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, pp.317-8.

³² ibid. p.319.

³³ ibid. p.322.

³⁴ ibid. p.331.

³⁵ ibid. p.326.

³⁶ ibid. p.336.

³⁷ ibid. p.330.

³⁸ Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.210.

³⁹ ibid. pp.213-14.

⁴⁰ Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.341.

⁴¹ Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.215.

⁴² Trotsky, History Russian Revolution, p.341.