The Russian revolutions of 1917

The Russian revolutions of 1917 were two upheavals which, in less than eight months, swept away the Romanov monarchy and raised the Bolsheviks to power. In March the Petrograd garrison mutinied, Tsar Nicholas II renounced the throne, and power passed to the Provisional Government, which had to share it with the soviets. The government gave the soldiers no peace and the peasants no land, and a failed offensive and the Kornilov affair stripped it of its last authority. On 7 November 1917 the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin seized power, soon dispersed the parliament elected by the whole nation, and on 3 March 1918 concluded a peace with the Central Powers at Brest and took Russia out of the war.

Russia at war (1914–1916)

Russia entered the war at the beginning of August 1914. By the end of that month the Germans had encircled and destroyed the Russian Second Army at Tannenberg, although in Galicia the Russians beat the main Austro-Hungarian forces and took Lviv. On 2 May 1915 the armies of August von Mackensen broke through the front at Gorlice and the Great Retreat began. Over the summer Russia lost Galicia, the Kingdom of Poland and part of Lithuania, and on 5 August the Germans entered Warsaw. A wave of refugees, known as the bezhenstvo, moved east. Over the whole war Russia lost, by various estimates, between 1.7 and 2.25 million soldiers.

On 5 September 1915 the Tsar arrived at General Headquarters near Mogilev and took supreme command himself. He did so against the advice of almost all his ministers, and from then on he was personally answerable for every defeat. The monarchy’s authority was undermined by constant changes of ministers and by rumours about the influence of Grigori Rasputin and the “German” Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. In November 1916 the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov listed the government’s failures and abuses from the rostrum of the Duma, asking: “Is this stupidity or treason?” The murder of Rasputin on 30 December 1916 changed nothing, and the Tsar handed the government to Nikolai Golitsyn, who did not want the office himself.

The war was also ruining the economy. Inflation ate up wages, and failing transport meant that the cities lacked bread and fuel, although there was no shortage of grain in the country. The army could still win: on 4 June 1916 the Brusilov Offensive began, the greatest victory of the Russian army in this war. In the following, ever bloodier attacks, however, the Russians lost hundreds of thousands of men. When the Allies met at the Petrograd conference in February of the next year, they left uneasy, but not convinced that revolution was near.

The February Revolution

On 8 March 1917, International Women’s Day, women workers at several Petrograd textile mills downed tools and marched to the neighbouring factories. Thus began the strikes and demonstrations that engulfed the city for four days. On 12 March, the day after soldiers had fired on the crowds, the garrison mutinied. In the morning the training detachment of the reserve battalion of the Volhynian Guards Regiment killed its commander, and then regiment after regiment went over to the workers. The garrison numbered about 160,000 soldiers, mostly recruits and convalescents, and the police a mere 3,500 or so. By evening the insurgents held most of the capital, had taken the arsenal and opened the prisons.

That same day two centres of power arose in the Tauride Palace: the Provisional Committee of the Duma, headed by Mikhail Rodzianko, and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, convened by socialists, mainly Mensheviks. Thus “dual power” was born. On 14 March the Soviet issued Order No. 1, which told every unit to elect soldiers’ committees, placed weapons under their control and subordinated the soldiers to the Soviet in political matters. On 15 March Milyukov announced the make-up of the Provisional Government, headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. The government was to hold power until a Constituent Assembly decided the form of the state. Meanwhile the Soviet administered and legislated on its own account, often without even informing the government.

The Tsar tried to return from Mogilev to Tsarskoye Selo, but his train was turned back and stopped at Pskov. There General Nikolai Ruzsky urged him to accept a government answerable to the Duma, and the chief of staff, Mikhail Alekseyev, asked the front commanders for their views. All of them, including Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich and General Aleksei Brusilov, came out for abdication. Late in the evening of 15 March Nicholas II renounced the throne for himself and his son in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. The next day Michael declined the crown until the Constituent Assembly had decided, and more than three hundred years of Romanov rule came to an end. On 14 September the Provisional Government proclaimed a republic.

The Provisional Government and the war

What divided the government and the Soviet most was the war. Since the spring the Soviet had proclaimed the slogan of peace without annexations or indemnities, while the government wanted to keep its commitments to the Allies. On 9 April the government approved a compromise declaration of war aims, which renounced the seizure of foreign lands. But when on 3 May the newspapers printed Milyukov’s note to the Allies, assuring them that Russia wanted to carry the war on “to a decisive victory”, armed units of the garrison took to the streets. The April Crisis forced out Milyukov and the war minister Alexander Guchkov, and on 18 May the first coalition government with socialist participation was formed. Its minister of war was Alexander Kerensky.

Meanwhile, on 16 April, Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, returned from exile to the Finland Station in Petrograd. He had crossed Germany with Berlin’s consent in a carriage later called “sealed”, because the Germans hoped that this implacable opponent of the war would weaken Russia from within. The next day he presented his programme, known as the April Theses: no support for the Provisional Government, all power to the soviets. Most socialists, including many Bolsheviks, considered this madness. At the time Lenin led a small party that was in the minority in the Petrograd Soviet.

The government believed that victory would strengthen revolutionary Russia and restore discipline in the army. On 1 July the Kerensky Offensive began in Eastern Galicia. At Zborów the Russians and the Czechoslovak brigade fighting at their side routed two Austro-Hungarian divisions, and the Eighth Army of General Lavr Kornilov took Halicz and Kałusz. By the middle of July the attack had petered out, as Russian units increasingly refused to advance. On 19 July the Germans and Austrians struck from Złoczów, and within a dozen or so days the Russians lost almost all of Eastern Galicia. On 25 July, the day Tarnopol fell, the government restored the death penalty at the front.

In those same days riots broke out in the capital. On 16 July soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment took to the streets with their weapons, followed by thousands of workers and by sailors from Kronstadt, under the slogan “All power to the soviets!”. The July Days had no clear aim and no firm leadership, and by 18 July it was all over. The government announced that the Bolsheviks were acting on Germany’s orders. Lenin went into hiding and in August slipped across to Finland, while Leon Trotsky ended up in prison. On 21 July Kerensky became prime minister, and on 31 July he gave the supreme command to Kornilov.

The general demanded the death penalty in the rear as well and a curb on the soldiers’ committees, while the prime minister, who had to reckon with the soviets, procrastinated. On 3 September the Germans took Riga, and a few days later the quarrel between the commander-in-chief and the prime minister turned into open conflict. On 8 September Kerensky took the demands brought to him from Mogilev by a go-between as an ultimatum and dismissed Kornilov during the night. The general refused to give up the command, and the cavalry of General Krymov, sent towards the capital earlier, did not halt. Thus began the Kornilov putsch.

The revolt collapsed without a fight. Railwaymen tore up the tracks and diverted the cavalry trains onto sidings, and agitators from the soviets waited at the stations. On 14 September Alekseyev arrested Kornilov in Mogilev. The biggest winners were the Bolsheviks. They had organised the defence of the capital most effectively, and the Red Guard kept the weapons issued to fight Kornilov. Within a few weeks the Bolsheviks took over the soviets of both capitals, and Kerensky lost the confidence of both right and left.

The Bolshevik coup

From the end of September Lenin insisted in letters to the Central Committee that power had to be seized at once. On 23 October the Committee resolved that an armed uprising was on the agenda. By then Trotsky was chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and the instrument of the coup was its Military Revolutionary Committee (PL), which he directed in practice. The committee’s commissars took control of the barracks, so the government was left without troops in the capital before a shot was fired.

During the night of 6–7 November the committee’s units, the Red Guards, garrison soldiers and sailors, seized the bridges, stations, telegraph office and State Bank almost without a fight. At ten in the morning of 7 November the committee announced that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. Kerensky left to look for troops at the front, and his ministers, shut up in the Winter Palace, were arrested at about 2.10 a.m. The storming, which Soviet films later showed as a mass battle, was in fact a long, chaotic siege of an almost defenceless building. The Cossacks with whom Kerensky marched back on the capital withdrew after a fight at Pulkovo, and the deposed prime minister escaped from Gatchina disguised as a sailor.

On 8 November the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which the Mensheviks and Right SRs had walked out of in protest, passed the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. It also set up the Council of People’s Commissars with Lenin at its head, and Trotsky became People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Decree on Peace proposed to all the warring nations immediate negotiations for a peace “without annexations and without indemnities”. The Decree on Land abolished landlords’ ownership of land without compensation. It was in essence the agrarian programme of the SRs, and it sanctioned what the peasants in many provinces were already doing.

In keeping with the promise of the February Revolution, elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly began on 25 November. They were the first universal elections in Russia’s history, and women voted in them too. They were won by the SRs, the peasants’ party, who took about 38 per cent of the vote, while the Bolsheviks received about 23–24 per cent. The Constituent Assembly met on 18 January 1918 and sat for less than thirteen hours. Early on 19 January the commander of the guard broke up the session, and Lenin’s government dissolved the assembly. It was the end of the Russian parliamentary democracy born in the February Revolution.

Brest: leaving the war

Lenin took the Decree on Peace seriously. During the night of 20–21 November the Council of People’s Commissars ordered the high command to propose a cessation of hostilities to the enemy. General Nikolai Dukhonin, who refused, was dismissed, and on 3 December, when the new commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko arrived at General Headquarters in Mogilev, a mob of soldiers and sailors killed him on the station platform. On 15 December an armistice was signed at Brest-Litovsk with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, which for Russia meant leaving the war in practice. On 22 December the peace negotiations began.

From January the Soviet delegation was led by Trotsky. The talks stalled over the question of the border, and in February Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered that Russia be required to give up not only Courland and Lithuania but also Livonia and Estonia. On 9 February 1918 the Central Powers concluded a separate peace with the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The next day Trotsky announced the formula of “neither war nor peace”: Russia was ending the war and demobilising its army, but would not sign a treaty on German terms. General Max Hoffmann greeted this with the cry “Unheard of!”.

On 18 February the Germans moved east. The disintegrating Russian army offered almost no resistance, and during Operation Faustschlag small detachments, carried by rail from station to station, took within a few days towns that had been fought over for months in 1915–1917, among them Pskov and Reval. During the night of 18–19 February Lenin and Trotsky agreed to sign the peace, but they had to accept terms far harsher than those they had rejected in January. On 3 March 1918 Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It renounced sovereignty over Poland, Lithuania and Courland, agreed to evacuate Livonia, Estonia, Finland and Ukraine, and to cede the districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batumi to Turkey. According to frequently cited figures, about 56 million people lived in the lost territories, roughly a third of the population of the empire’s European part.

The dispute over peace nearly split the Bolshevik party, but it strengthened the position of Lenin, the only one who had foreseen this turn of events from the start. For fear of a new German blow the Soviet government moved to Moscow. In mid-March the treaty was ratified by a congress of soviets, and the Left SRs left the Council of People’s Commissars in protest. The peace lasted less than nine months. In the armistice of 11 November 1918 Germany had to renounce it, and on 13 November the Soviet authorities declared it null and void.

The beginning of the civil war

The Bolsheviks’ opponents gathered in the south, on the Don, where the Volunteer Army was formed. On 22 February 1918 Kornilov ordered the evacuation of Rostov-on-Don, and so began the Ice March, a legend of the Whites. The Bolsheviks built a force of their own: on 28 January 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars adopted the decree founding the Red Army, and as early as 20 December 1917 it had set up the Cheka, the commission for combating counter-revolution, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky.

The turning point came with the revolt of the Czechoslovak Corps. Its soldiers were travelling across Russia to Vladivostok, intending to sail from there to France. On 25 May 1918 Trotsky, by then commissar for military affairs, ordered them disarmed, but within a few days the Czechoslovaks seized the key sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In Samara, which they had taken, a group of deputies from the dispersed Constituent Assembly formed an anti-Bolshevik government, Komuch. During the night of 16–17 July, as the Czechoslovaks approached Yekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks murdered the former tsar there, together with his wife, their five children and four people who had shared their captivity.

On 30 August 1918 in Moscow shots were fired at Lenin, and the SR Fanny Kaplan was detained at the scene. On 5 September the government adopted a resolution on the Red Terror. On 18 November 1918 in Omsk full power was seized by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who took the title of Supreme Ruler. The country sank into a civil war that claimed more than seven million lives.

Consequences for the war and for Poland

For the Entente the Bolshevik coup meant the threat that its eastern ally would leave the war, and for Germany the hope of moving divisions from east to west. After the peace with Russia and the winter transfer of divisions from the east, the Germans assembled 63 divisions for the spring offensive. The victory in the east proved illusory, however. The occupied lands had to be garrisoned and guarded, the grain from Ukraine turned out to be far less than expected, and dozens of divisions remained in the east that were missing from the spring offensive in the west.

For the Poles the fall of tsarism was a breakthrough. On 27 March 1917 the Petrograd Soviet declared that Poland had the right to full independence. On 30 March the Provisional Government, in its proclamation to the Poles, for the first time officially recognised their right to an independent state formed from all the lands inhabited by a Polish majority. That state, however, was to be joined to Russia by a “free military alliance”. As long as the alliance with the Tsar lasted, France and Britain had treated the Polish question as Russia’s internal affair. Now Britain assured the Provisional Government that it fully supported the principle of an independent and united Poland.

The revolution also opened the way for a Polish army in Russia. A Polish rifle division stood in reserve during the Kerensky Offensive, and on 24 July 1917 Polish uhlans charged at Krechowce. In the summer, on the initiative of the Supreme Polish Military Committee, the I Polish Corps of General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki was formed, which by mid-January 1918 numbered about 29,000 men. When the Bolsheviks ordered it disbanded, on 25 January it took up arms against them. Part of the II Brigade of the Legions broke through at Rarańcza to the II Polish Corps, which the Germans crushed at Kaniów on 11 May.

February or March? Dates and historians’ debates

Russia used the Julian calendar, which in the twentieth century ran 13 days behind the Gregorian. That is why the revolution that broke out in March by our calendar is called the February Revolution: by the Julian calendar the garrison mutinied on 27 February and the Tsar abdicated on 2 March. For the same reason the Bolshevik coup of 7 November, 25 October Old Style, went down in history as the October Revolution. Soviet Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in February 1918: 31 January was followed directly by 14 February. On this site all dates are given according to the Gregorian calendar, with Julian dates added in brackets.

The February Revolution is less disputed. Its catalyst was above all the empire’s part in the war: the situation at the front, food shortages and rising prices. It was later called “bloodless”, but it was not. According to the figures of Zemgor, the union of zemstvos and towns, about 1,440 people were killed or wounded in Petrograd during the days of the upheaval. The historian Piotr Osęka holds that the events of November 1917 were a typical coup d’état, and that the real revolution took place in February, when the tsarist regime was overthrown.

Historians have argued about October for more than a hundred years. In communist Poland it was usually called the “Great October Socialist Revolution”, while the Bolsheviks’ opponents spoke from the outset of a one-party coup d’état. As Alicja Kulecka of the University of Warsaw writes, historians ask above all whether October was a social revolution, the result of mass discontent, or a coup d’état by a narrow party elite gathered around its leader. The Russian historian Boris Sokolov stresses that it cannot be reduced to a mere military coup, because in October 1917 the Provisional Government had no mass support, and that decided its overthrow.

The July Days are judged in a similar way. According to Richard Pipes they were a failed attempt at a coup, while most historians, such as Alexander Rabinowitch and William Chamberlin, believe rather that the movement came from embittered soldiers and workers. Pipes also held that in a sense the Bolsheviks took over the government of Russia not so much in October 1917 as in January 1918, because only by dispersing the Constituent Assembly did they show that they had no intention of heeding the will of the voters. The verdict on that October night is also shaped by what came after it: the Cheka, the Red Terror and the civil war.