The February Revolution
Eight Days that Brought Down a Dynasty
The February Revolution did not look like a revolution on its first morning. It looked like another bread queue. Yet between Thursday 23 February and Thursday 2 March 1917 (Old Style), the Romanov dynasty — which had ruled Russia for more than three centuries — fell apart in eight days. Nicholas II was abdicating in a railway carriage at Pskov before most of the country knew that anything had begun. The speed of the collapse is the central historical puzzle of the February Revolution: why did three hundred years of autocratic rule end in little over a week?
February Revolution timeline (Old Style 1917): 23 February — International Women’s Day strikes; 25 February — general strike across Petrograd; 27 February — Petrograd garrison mutinies and the Petrograd Soviet is formed; 2 March — Nicholas II abdicates at Pskov.
23–25 February: The Strikes Spread
23 February (Old Style) was International Women’s Day. Around 90,000 women textile workers walked out of factories on the Vyborg side of Petrograd, marching for ‘Bread!’ The Putilov works had already been locked out two days earlier after wage talks broke down, throwing 30,000 men onto the streets. The two streams joined. By 25 February the strike had become general — about 240,000 workers, roughly half the city’s industrial workforce, were out, and slogans had moved from ‘Bread!’ to ‘Down with the Tsar!’ and ‘Down with the war!’
Crucially, this was not a Bolshevik-led rising. Lenin was in Switzerland and would later write that he had not expected to see another revolution in his lifetime. The leadership came from inside the factories — Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and unaffiliated militants — and from the streets themselves.
Students often collapse February and October into one event led by Lenin. They were two distinct revolutions eight months apart, with different leaders and different aims. In February the Bolsheviks were a minority faction in Petrograd; their senior figures, including Lenin and Zinoviev, were abroad. The rising was largely spontaneous, driven by women textile workers, Putilov machinists and factory committees, and shaped on the streets rather than from a single party headquarters.
26–27 February: The Garrison Refuses to Fire
Nicholas, at Stavka in Mogilev, telegraphed orders on 25 February to the Petrograd district commander General Khabalov: stop the disorder by morning. On Sunday 26 February troops fired on protesters in Znamenskaya Square, killing about forty people. The order broke the regime, not the protest. That night and the next morning soldiers of the Volynsky Regiment, sickened by what they had been ordered to do, mutinied. The Pavlovsky and Litovsky regiments followed. By the evening of 27 February, around 66,000 soldiers of the Petrograd garrison had joined the protesters. They opened the Kresty prison, set fire to the law courts and seized the Arsenal.
The army loyalty Nicholas had counted on for three centuries had collapsed in 48 hours. The military reasons were specific: most of the Petrograd garrison were not professional soldiers but raw conscripts, often older reservists, kept in barracks rather than sent to the front. They had no appetite for shooting working women they recognised from their own neighbourhoods.
Two Bodies Step Into the Vacuum
On 27 February two rival authorities were forming in the same building — the Tauride Palace, home of the Duma. Liberal Duma deputies, refusing the Tsar’s order to disband, set up a Provisional Committee under Mikhail Rodzianko. In the next room, factory delegates and mutinous soldiers elected the Petrograd Soviet, modelled on the 1905 St Petersburg Soviet. The Soviet’s Executive Committee was dominated at first by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The two bodies negotiated a deal: the Duma Committee would form a Provisional Government; the Soviet would not oppose it as long as the new government delivered civil liberties, an amnesty for political prisoners and democratic elections.
There was no popular vote to remove the Tsar. Nicholas was forced out by his own generals. On 1 March his train, trying to return from Stavka, was diverted to Pskov. There, his Chief of Staff General Mikhail Alekseev polled the front commanders by telegram. Every one of them — including the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich — recommended abdication. They told him the army would not fight on for a regime that had lost the capital. It was a generals’ coup dressed up as a constitutional formality.
2 March: The Abdication
On the evening of 2 March 1917 (Old Style) Nicholas II signed his abdication in his railway carriage at Pskov. He abdicated not only for himself but also for his haemophiliac son Alexei, on the grounds that he could not bear to be parted from him; the throne therefore passed to his brother Grand Duke Michael. The next day Michael refused the crown unless a Constituent Assembly endorsed it — which it never did. Three centuries of Romanov rule ended without a coronation, in a railway siding, with no successor.
The Tsar fell in days, not months, because the Petrograd garrison’s mutiny on 27 February took away his last instrument of power and his own front commanders advised him to abdicate. Without the army, three centuries of autocracy had nothing left to stand on.