The February Revolution

By the beginning of 1917 war-weariness and heavy losses had affected the soldiers' spirits, but the army was still a cohesive fighting force. There was resentment against the tsaritsa, Rasputin's alleged influence, and to a degree against the tsar himself although the old belief in the essential goodness of Batyushka died hard. The people could not have known that Nicholas, dominated as ever by his wife, was ending his letters to her 'your poor weak-willed hubby'. Tsar Nicholas was certainly in no position to learn about the food shortages in Petrograd (which had been renamed from the German sounding Petersburg in 1914), given the optimistic drivel which Alexandra fed him from the city.

In December 1916 Rasputin was murdered by Prince Felix Yusupov, a relative of the imperial family, and some friends who had found his pretensions intolerable. The circumstances were quite extraordinary. Rasputin was invited to a party and duped into eating a considerable number of cakes filled with cyanide. Then, while a gramophone played 'Yankee doodle dandy', the conspirators waited for the massive dose of the poison to kill him as it would have any normal mortal. When the cyanide didn't seem to be working, the conspirators panicked. Yusupov then shot the starets, and the conspirators began to celebrate when, to their horror, he revived, telling the prince that he would 'tell the tsaritsa'. A second volley of shots was needed to dispatch Rasputin, whose body was then dropped into the Neva.

A rough translation of Rasputin into English comes out as 'the disreputable one', and popular history has attempted to link him intimately with the fall of the Romanovs. This is almost certainly an illusion. One of Rasputin's biographers (de Jonge) believes that 'most of his misdeeds were no more than errors of judgement, and much of his so-called influence was based on bluff'. The starets was a convenient scapegoat for the failings of the autocracy when the real answer lay elsewhere.

Most crucial in the short term was the presence in Petrograd of a garrison of 300,000 raw conscripts, who were affected by the discontent in the civilian population over bread shortages (a result of a breakdown in the chaotic supply system). The turning point came on 26 February 1917 when a mutiny took place in the Pavlovsky regiment of the imperial Guard, and spread the following day even to the Semyonovsky regiment which had brutally crushed the 1905 Moscow uprising. By the end of 27 February 'the tsarist garrison could scarcely be said to exist' (Joel Carmichael, A Short History of the Russian Revolution). Nicholas II continued to live in a fool's paradise at army headquarters. When he tried to return to his capital he could find no loyal troops, and he learned that all his ministers had been arrested by a 'Provisional Committee of the Duma'. There was a general strike in St Petersburg and soldiers' soviets were being set up on the 1905 model.

On 2 March Nicholas abdicated in-favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, but this could not save the dynasty. A Provisional Government was set up and, seeing the hopelessness of the situation, Michael himself abdicated on 3 March. Political prisoners were freed, and on 8 March Nicholas II was arrested at Mogilev. Three hundred years of Romanov autocracy were over.

This article is based on material taken from A Traveller's History of Russia and the USSR (© Peter Neville), published by The Windrush Press, and is by kind permission of its author Peter Neville.

Recommended reading

The Russian Revolution
Pipes, Richard — £15.00 —