![]() ![]() “The war also helped give Lenin a platform for his coup in October,” Fowler says.Īlexander Kerensky, the final head of the provisional government, didn’t help his side by leading what turned out to be a disastrous offensive against the Germans and Austrians in July of 1917. Found in the collection of Moscow's State History Museum. The new government tried to continue the war and honor the alliances made by the monarchy, while it searched for an exit strategy. The czarist regime was replaced by the Provisional Government, composed of moderate Duma deputies, socialists and liberals who bickered among themselves as they tried to get Russia under control again. The war had led to Nicholas losing his grip on power, but the February Revolution (which has that name because under the old Russian calendar, its events occurred in February) was just the start. READ MORE: Why Czar Nicholas II and the Romanovs Were Murdered Germans Arrange Return of Vladimir Lenin Three days later, Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Michael, who refused the crown. Czar Nicholas’ generals convinced him to step down. And on the next day, soldiers joined the demonstrators. The ensuing violence, says Harnett, claimed the lives of nearly 100. Three days into the protests, the czar’s officials ordered the military and policy to break up the proests-using any means. “This led to the beginning of the end of the Romanov autocracy,” Harnett says. Rather than meeting the workers’ demands, he says, the factors responded with a lock out, prompting thousands of workers to continue the strike.Ī few days later, on International Women’s Day, tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of Petrograd, with striking factory workers joining forces with mothers who demanded food for their children.Ī Russian bread line guarded by the Imperial Police, March 1917.įine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images At the massive Putilov factory in Petrograd, workers went on strike in the early days of March, demanding higher wages to compensate for the high price of food. “Breadlines grew in many cities and most notably in the capital of Petrograd,” Hartnett explains. Even so, “prominent members wondered aloud if the recent decisions made by the czar’s government were the consequence of stupidity or treason,” Hartnett says.īy early 1917, Russia was in throes of a crisis so severe that Nicholas could no longer ignore it. The Duma, Russia’s elected legislature, couldn't do much about Nicholas’ mismanagement of the country, since he had the power to dissolve it if members dared to disagree with him. “The problem was not production,” Miner notes, “but rather distribution and transport, which led to periodic shortages.” The inefficiency of the czarist state began to hollow out political support. Wartime Russia still produced sufficient food during the war to feed its population, but even so, Russians still went hungry. And Russia’s output of bullets initially was just 13,000 rounds a day, so they had to make every shot count. Some soldiers had to go into battle unarmed, until they could pick up a rifle from another soldier who had been killed or wounded. Cockfield’s 1999 book, With Snow on Their Boots. At the start of the war, the Russians had 800,000 men in uniform who didn’t even have rifles to train with, and those who did often had to make do with obsolete weapons that were nearly 40 years old, according to Jamie H. That made Russia vulnerable in a war, because its factories simply couldn’t produce enough arms and ammunition to equip the Czar’s 1.4 million-man army. ![]() The antiquated czarist regime’s determination to hang onto power hindered modernization efforts, as a result, “the Russian Empire trailed behind the rest of Europe in terms of economic and industrial strength,” says Lynne Hartnett, an associate professor of history at Villanova University and an expert on the Russian Revolution. To make matters worse, Nicholas II was starting to roll back the limited democratic reforms that he had agreed to in 1905. ![]() But as he notes, the Czarist regime faced plenty of threats to stability, from dire urban working conditions to labor strife that the Czar’s soldiers tried to put down by massacring gold miners in Siberia in 1912. “Some argue that Russia was slowly evolving more modern political and social institutions, that it had a vibrant culture, a highly educated elite, that it had survived the upheaval of the 1905 revolution, and that it had the fastest-growing economy in the world before 1914,” Miner says. Prior to the war, Russia was at a crucial crossroads. ![]()
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