By the beginning of 1917, tsarism was rotting from within. The spark that ignited the February Revolution came from an unlikely source. Nevsky Prospekt, the main boulevard of St Petersburg, now dotted with chic boutiques and expensive restaurants, was then the home of butchers, bakers and fishmongers. It was at bread shops on the Nevsky and in the streets nearby that discontent turned into revolt. By the third year of the war, the civilian economy had collapsed and chronic food shortages forced women to spend hours every day queuing for bread that often never came. Some set up improvised beds on the pavement outside the bakeries. On 23 February 1917, International Women’s Day, thousands of women left their places of work in a spontaneous protest. On the streets, they joined forces with the bread queues and with strikers from the giant Putilov engineering works. The women organised themselves into groups to go around factories all over the capital and urge the workers to down tools. Their demands were not specifically formulated, but bread, freedom and an end to the war is a fair summary. Dr E.M. Herbert, a foreign visitor to Petrograd, witnessed the explosive consequences:
There were riots and disorder in the streets, and I think this is the best description of a revolution: people were smashing up shops, looting bread-shops; women, particularly. Tramcars were being overturned, barricades were being built out of wood blocks and paving stones. Obviously something was imminent …
Like the great peasant revolts of Stenka Razin and Pugachev in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the February Revolution of 1917 was a spontaneous uprising against a hated regime, driven by an avalanche of grievances: peasants demanding the land, workers sick of exploitation, soldiers disgusted by the war, ethnic minorities jostling for independence and almost all enraged by food shortages and spiralling prices. It was unplanned, uncoordinated, and it left the professional revolutionaries trailing in its wake. In his novel Lenin in Zurich (1975), Alexander Solzhenitsyn mockingly describes how Lenin, observing events from the safety of his Swiss exile, refuses to believe a revolution has broken out. ‘A revolution in Russia?1’ he exclaims, ‘What rubbish!’ and goes on eating his boiled beef, making sure he gets a good slice of the fatty bit.
Daily demonstrations in the streets of Petrograd grew more violent; Russians died in the streets. The police had used clubs and rifle butts to beat back demonstrations on the Nevsky Prospekt. On Sunday 26 February, a quarter of a million people converged on the centre of the capital: workers from the big engineering plants chanting ‘Long live the revolution!’; women protesting at the bread shortages; and thousands of students waving banners, singing ‘La Marseillaise’ with ferocious Russian lyrics:
We renounce the old world!
We shake its dust from our feet!
We hate the golden idols,
We hate the palace of the tsar!
Arise, arise, you labouring masses!
Rise against the foe!
Forward! Forward!
Let the people’s cry of vengeance go!
The greedy rich exploit your work,
They take your last piece of bread.
The tsar, the vampire, drinks from your veins;
The tsar, the vampire, drinks the people’s blood.
Arise, arise, you labouring masses!
Against thieves, the dogs – the rich,
Against the evil vampire tsar!
Kill the cursed the criminals!
Bring on the dawn of a better life!
In late afternoon, faced with escalating chaos and an absence of orders from their political masters, the troops opened fire. The Cossacks, always the most ruthless of the tsarist forces, sent volleys of rifle shots into the crowd, killing about 200 men, women and children. Nearly 200,000 would die before the uprising was over. Osip Yermansky, a Menshevik journalist, witnessed one of the clashes, when soldiers intercepted a column of demonstrators near the Moika Canal:
As the masses approached2, the soldiers were ordered to kneel and aim their rifles. The crowd saw what was happening and stopped. But those at the back of the march, unaware, continued to push them onwards. There was a moment of hesitation. Then the troops fired two volleys. The front row of marchers fell to the ground, with many dead. The demonstration broke up in panic. People fled, slipping in pools of blood, stepping across the bodies of the dead and dying sprawled in the roadway. Their faces were full of bitterness and anger.
The massacre disgusted many of the soldiers who’d been rushed back from front-line combat to put down the uprising. The sailors’ regiments in particular were close to mutiny. By Sunday evening hundreds of troops had defected to the demonstrators. Within a couple of days the whole Petrograd garrison was in open mutiny against the tsar, murdering those officers who tried to restrain them. Tsarist insignia were torn down, prisoners released and police arsenals looted, with the guns handed out to the crowds. Even the Cossacks began to desert to the revolutionaries.fn1
With angry crowds on the streets and the army divided, Petrograd was descending into anarchy. The State Council, the conservative upper house of the Duma, wrote to Nicholas II to warn him of the danger. Nicholas seemed strangely detached. His letters to his wife Alexandra barely mention the revolution:
Military Headquarters, 24 February4. My sweet, darling sunshine! My brain is resting here – no ministers, no troublesome questions demanding thought … I got your telegram telling me of Olga and Baby having measles. I could not believe my eyes – this was so unexpected … At dinner I saw all the foreign generals – they were very sorry to hear this sad news … For all the children, and especially for Alexei, a change of climate is absolutely necessary after their recovery … We shall think this out in peace on my return home … I greatly miss my half-hourly game of patience every evening. I shall take up dominoes again in my spare time. Your loving little hubby, Nicky.
The tsar’s advisers were at their wits’ end. The Duma and the British ambassador, George Buchanan, had been urging him for weeks to make concessions to placate the mob. Even Nicholas’s own brother Mikhail warned him that cataclysm was at hand (‘The monarchist system is tottering5. Loyal defenders of the idea that Russia cannot exist without a tsar are seeing the ground cut out from under their feet.’) But all the warnings and entreaties were dismissed with disdain. When the chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, had gone to warn the tsar that revolution was imminent, Nicholas answered: ‘My information is completely different6. And if the Duma allows contentious debates to be held on the subject, I shall dismiss the Duma.’ When Rodzianko tried to explain that he had the tsar’s interests at heart, Nicholas waved his hand and said, ‘Hurry up! The grand duke is waiting to have tea with me.’
On 27 February, with the tsar away at army headquarters, Rodzianko sent him a last despairing telegram:
The situation is growing worse7. Measures must be taken at once; tomorrow will be too late. The hour has struck in which the fate of the country and the monarchy is being decided. The government is powerless to stop the disorders. Troops of the garrison cannot be relied upon. The reserve battalions of the Guard regiments are in the throes of rebellion; their officers being killed. They have joined the mobs and the revolt of the people; they are marching on the Interior Ministry and the Duma. Your Majesty, do not delay! If the agitation reaches the army … the destruction of Russia and the dynasty is inevitable.
Nicholas’s response was to order the dissolution of the Duma and a military crackdown.
The idiocy of such a course was so evident that the parliamentarians ignored his command and dispatched a delegation of deputies, led by the former Duma chairman Alexander Guchkov, to try to reason with him. With the tsar’s train stranded in a siding near the city of Pskov, it was late on the evening of 2 March when they reached him. In the meantime, Alexandra had been sending telegrams playing down the seriousness of the situation in the capital and urging her husband ‘not to sign any paper or constitution8 or other such horror’. But the deputies told Nicholas he had no choice: only his abdication could now defuse the revolutionaries’ anger.
Struggling to remain impassive as he listened to their accounts of the bloodshed and chaos, the tsar finally accepted the end: ‘There is no sacrifice I would not bear9 for the salvation of our Mother Russia,’ he told them. ‘I am ready to abdicate the throne.’
The Romanov dynasty that had begun in 1613 and celebrated its third centenary with great pomp just four years earlier came to an end in a provincial railway siding.
The announcement of the abdication was delayed while discussions were held on who should take Nicholas’s place. The natural successor would be the tsar’s son, the haemophiliac tsarevich Alexei. But Nicholas feared for his son’s health and insisted instead that the crown go to his brother, Mikhail. The tsar’s abdication decree was hastily typed out and transmitted back to the Duma in Petrograd:
In the days of the great struggle10 against the foreign enemies, who for nearly three years have tried to enslave our fatherland, the Lord God has been pleased to send down on Russia a new heavy trial … In these decisive days in the life of Russia, We believe it Our duty to facilitate for Our people the closest union possible and a consolidation of all national forces … In agreement with the Imperial Duma, We have thought it well to renounce the Throne of the Russian Empire and to lay down the supreme power. As We do not wish to part from Our beloved son, We transmit the succession to Our brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich … We direct Our brother to conduct the affairs of state in full and inviolable union with the representatives of the people in the legislative bodies on those principles that will be established by them … We call on the faithful sons of the fatherland to fulfil their sacred duty, to obey the [new] tsar in the heavy moment of national trials, and to help Him, together with the representatives of the people, to guide the Russian Empire on the road to victory, prosperity and glory. May the Lord God help Russia!
But the last Romanov tsar would never rule. Mikhail didn’t want the throne. A Duma delegation, led by Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a moderate liberal and a founder member of the Constitutional Democrats, failed to convince him to do other than sign a document saying he might accede to the throne when things calmed down. Nabokov would later lament the lost chance of a constitutional monarchy:
Mikhail stressed his resentment11 of his brother’s ‘thrusting’ the throne upon him without even asking his consent … When he signed the document I had prepared, he seemed somewhat embarrassed and disconcerted. Perhaps he did not fully realise the importance of the step he was taking … Now, standing before the ruins of a broken, dismembered, defiled Russia; having experienced all the abominations of the Bolshevik nightmare, I ask myself if there would not have been a better chance of a happy outcome if Mikhail Alexandrovich had accepted the crown…fn2
On 3 March, the Petrograd Soviet’s newspaper, Izvestiya, reported: ‘Nicholas II has abdicated12 the throne in favour of Mikhail Alexandrovich, who has in turn abdicated to the people. Great rallies and ovations are taking place in the Duma. The rapture defies description.’ In the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, Nicholas’s portrait was ripped from the wall of the Duma chamber. Tsarism was dead. The Duma deputies announced that a new ‘Provisional Committee’ would run the country.
The men who formed the Provisional Government were liberals and moderate socialists, Constitutional Democrats and others, who had agreed to collaborate with the tsar’s ideas for a constitutional monarchy. This made them deeply untrustworthy in the eyes of the people. The new prime minister was a prince – Georgy Lvov – which didn’t go down well at workers’ rallies, as the Provisional Government minister Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov discovered to his peril:
Guchkov had been addressing13 a rally of railway workers, when a shop steward took the floor. ‘What do we think of this new provisional government, comrades? Does it have representatives of the people in it? Fat chance! Look, it’s led by Prince Lvov. I ask you – why did we bother making a revolution at all? We’ve all suffered at the hands of these princes and counts … All these new ministers are rich landowners. Maybe we shouldn’t let Alexander Ivanovich out of here, comrades!’ The crowd responded to the speaker’s demands by shutting all the doors. It was becoming most unpleasant …
But another centre of power, untainted by compromise with the old regime, was also emerging. By 1917, the Tauride Palace, the former mansion of Potemkin and Catherine the Great, had been converted to accommodate two great assembly chambers, and in the months after the February Revolution they would become home to Russia’s competing seats of power. In the right wing of the palace, in the magnificent Duma chamber, the constitutional democrats tried to create a liberal, parliamentary democracy. A short walk down a corridor lit by gold chandeliers and lined with white marble columns, hundreds of workers, soldiers and peasants gathered in the left wing with a very different plan for Russia’s future. Here the people proclaimed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the direct heir of those organs of workers’ power that sprang up after Bloody Sunday in 1905 (see here). Peasants across Russia had elected local councils, or soviets, to seize the land from the landowners and run the villages themselves, sometimes murdering their former masters and burning down their manor houses. Workers in factories and workshops had named their soviets. And in most army units soldiers had done the same: many allowed their officers to take command in actual combat, but some insisted on nominating their own officers and, on occasion, murdering their predecessors.
All of these soviets sent representatives to the Tauride Palace: this was direct democracy par excellence, reminiscent of the ancient veches in Kievan Rus. The meetings were noisy and disorderly; votes were fiercely, sometimes violently contested. The revolutionary groups that had refused to cooperate with the tsar were all represented here – Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and a handful of Bolsheviks. All agreed that the ultimate goal must be workers’ power and a revolutionary dictatorship, but they were disorganised, divided and surprisingly cautious. After some debate they decided that for the moment they would cooperate with the Provisional Government ‘as long as it didn’t hinder14 a democratic revolution’. The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet had the might of the people behind them, but seemed reluctant to use it.
This became known as the period of dvoevlastie (dual power), when the Provisional Government feared the raw strength of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, but the Soviet apparently feared the responsibility of governing. The liberal government was in office, but constantly looking over its shoulder for the approval of the revolutionary Soviet, which could exercise at least a modicum of control over the rampaging masses and feral soldiers who terrified the country’s supposed leaders.
The situation cried out for someone to seize the initiative. Unbeknown to the majority of those who sat and argued in the Tauride Palace, he was already on his way.
fn1 As the Bolshevik worker Ivan Gordienko noted, it was again the women of Petrograd who took the situation in hand: ‘The working women took the initiative3. They surrounded the Cossacks in a sort of solid wall. “Our husbands and fathers and brothers are all at the front!” they shouted, “and here at home we are hungry, insulted and humiliated. Think about your own mothers and wives and children! Come and join us – we’re demanding bread and an end to the war!” The officers were alarmed how the men might react, so they ordered them to charge. The Cossacks rode forward and people were preparing to defend themselves, but the Cossacks rode past and didn’t touch us … Some of them smiled and one actually winked at us. Cries of “Long live the Cossacks!” rose from a thousand throats.’
fn2 When he got home from the negotiations, Nabokov explained the momentous events he had been involved in to his 17-year-old son, also called Vladimir. Nabokov Junior would become one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors and his autobiographical writings pay homage to the deep affection he felt for his father. He speaks of his father’s devotion to ‘humane, heroic, liberal’ values, his subsequent ‘resolute plunge into anti-despotic politics’ and his championing of freedom and democracy. When called upon to speak against Bolshevism in a Cambridge Union debate during his time as a student in England, the younger Nabokov says he simply memorised verbatim a speech his father had given on the same theme. As we will see, his father’s untimely death would reverberate throughout Nabokov’s work.