The February/March Revolution, 1917: The Fall of the Tsar (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• By early 1917, total war had pushed Petrograd into crisis, with bread shortages, soaring prices and mass strikes

• The revolution began with strikes and the International Women's Day march on 23 February

  • Within days, this grew into a citywide rising

• The decisive turning point came on 27 February

  • The Petrograd garrison mutinied

  • Soldiers joined the crowds rather than firing on them

• Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March for himself and his son Alexei

  • His brother Grand Duke Mikhail refused the throne

  • The rule of the Romanovs ended after 304 years

• Power passed to two rival bodies:

  • The Provisional Government

  • The Petrograd Soviet

    • This arrangement became known as 'dual power'

• Historians debate whether tsarism collapsed because of long-term weakness or because the First World War made survival impossible

  • D. Christian emphasises the destructive pressures of long-term modernisation

  • D. Volkogonov emphasises wartime failure and the autocracy's self-destruction

Causes of the February/March Revolution, 1917

• The collapse of tsarism had deep roots reaching back decades, but the First World War triggered that long-standing weakness into a fatal crisis

Long-term causes: the deep weaknesses of tsarism

• Autocracy:

  • Nicholas II treated any sharing of power as a betrayal of his sacred duty

    • He granted an elected Duma only under pressure in 1905, then limited its powers

• No popular base:

  • The regime had failed to win the loyalty of any major social group

    • Workers, peasants and liberals all carried grievances the regime left unanswered

    • This meant that when crisis came, almost no one rallied to defend the Tsar

• Social strain:

  • Rapid modernisation created tensions the regime could not control

    • Fast industrial growth produced a large, discontented working class in cities like Petrograd

Medium-term causes: missed chances, 1905 to 1916

• The wasted lessons of 1905:

  • The regime survived revolution but failed to reform in any lasting way

    • The October Manifesto calmed the unrest of 1905 but satisfied few in the long run

• The alienation of moderates:

  • Even loyal elites turned against the Tsar during the war

    • In 1915, Duma parties formed the Progressive Bloc, asking for a government the public could trust

    • Nicholas II refused, leaving moderate opinion shut out and resentful

Short-term and trigger causes: the First World War and February 1917

• Military defeat:

  • Repeated losses shattered the army's morale and discipline

  • The failures at the Battle of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes were particularly prominent

  • By the end of 1916 the army had suffered around 1.5 million desertions

• Nicholas becomes commander-in-chief:

  • The Tsar tied his own name to every defeat at the front

    • This left the unpopular Tsarina and Rasputin shaping government in the capital

• Economic breakdown:

  • The war damaged the economy that fed the cities

  • Railway collapse left grain rotting in the countryside while Petrograd went hungry

  • The cost of living had risen by around 300% by January 1917

• February triggers:

  • Bread shortages and strikes brought huge crowds onto the streets

    • In January 1917, around 145,000 workers were already on strike in the capital

• The garrison mutiny:

  • The decisive trigger was the soldiers refusing to fire on the crowds

  • Once the army joined the people, a major pillar of tsarism collapsed, and the regime had nothing left to defend it

Events of the February/March Revolution

• The revolution unfolded in Petrograd over a single week in late February

Timeline of key events

The abdication of Nicholas II, March 1917

• With Petrograd lost, the Tsar's own generals concluded he could no longer hold the throne

• Nicholas II tried to return to Petrograd but never reached it

  • Striking railway workers diverted his train, forcing it to stop at the town of Pskov

• His senior commanders, led by General Alekseev, urged him to abdicate

  • They believed only his removal could save the war effort and restore order

• Nicholas abdicated on 2 March

  • He stepped down for himself and for his son Alexei, whose haemophilia made a regency unworkable

  • He named his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, as the new Tsar, although Mikhail had not been consulted

• Mikhail refused the throne the next day

  • With no one willing to rule, 304 years of Romanov rule came to an end

The creation of dual power: Provisional Government & Petrograd Soviet

• The revolution produced not one but two rival authorities sharing power uneasily

Provisional Government

• The Provisional Government grew out of the Duma's committee and claimed to govern Russia

  • It was led by Prince Lvov

  • It based itself in the Tauride Palace in Petrograd

• Its ministers were drawn mainly from liberal and moderate elites

  • They included:

    • Pavel Milyukov as Foreign Minister

    • Alexander Guchkov as War Minister

    • Alexander Kerensky as the Minister of Justice (the only socialist and its key link to the Petrograd Soviet)

• Its authority depended on the old institutions agreeing to accept it

  • Grand Duke Mikhail's blessing led the civil service, army officers and police to recognise it

• It saw itself as a temporary, caretaker government (hence, provisional)

  • It promised free elections to a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution

    • Until those elections, it claimed no permanent right to rule

Petrograd Soviet

• The Petrograd Soviet was a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies

  • It met in another wing of the same building as the Government, the Tauride Palace

  • It had grown to 3,000 members by 10 March

• It was dominated by moderate socialists, not by the Bolsheviks

  • Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries led it, with only a small number of Bolsheviks

  • Most deputies were socialist intellectuals

    • Only 7 of the first 42 committee members were workers

• Ordinary people trusted the Soviet far more than the Provisional Government

  • They saw the government as a self-appointed committee of the wealthy, tainted by links to Tsardom

• Through Order No. 1, the Soviet held the loyalty of the capital

  • Soldiers agreed to obey the Provisional Government only when the Soviet approved

  • The Soviet also controlled the railways, communications and food supply

Dual-power system: an unstable partnership

• The two bodies agreed to work together in an arrangement known as dual power

  • The Soviet backed the government in return for a programme of reforms

    • These included an amnesty for political prisoners, civil liberties and the right to strike

• Real power was split between the two bodies

  • The Provisional Government could pass laws, but the Soviet controlled the people who carried them out

• Kerensky was the only man who sat in both bodies at once

  • He became the human link holding the fragile partnership together

• The arrangement was unstable from the very start

  • Neither body could govern without the other, storing up conflict for the months ahead

What caused the collapse of tsarist Russia by 1917?

• This is one of the most common essay questions on this topic, with many different wordings

• The evidence below summarises the long-term/short-term debates, but refer to the specific information in the sections above for further detail

The collapse was long in the making

• On this view, tsarism was fatally weakened well before 1914

  • The regime had nearly fallen once already, during the 1905 Revolution

  • It had failed to win lasting support from workers, peasants or liberals

• The war is seen as the occasion of collapse, not its underlying cause

  • It exposed and accelerated weaknesses that would probably have proved fatal in time

Key historian

• Christian argues that decades of social change had already destabilised tsarism, and he points to 1905 as evidence that the regime was vulnerable long before the war

The war was the decisive trigger

• On this view, tsarism was not doomed and might have survived without the war

  • It had recovered after 1905, and the economy was still growing before 1914

• The specific pressures of total war brought the regime down

  • Defeat, food shortages and the discrediting of the dynasty all flowed from the war

  • The collapse came suddenly in 1917, rather than as the end of a long, steady decline

    • Volkogonov even suggests a surviving February settlement could have made Russia a lasting democracy

Key historian

• Volkogonov links the collapse directly to the war, and his belief that a lasting democracy was possible suggests the outcome was not fixed in advance