Women Lead Revolution: St. Petersburg Protests Topple the Tsar

Thousands of women textile workers walked off their jobs in Petrograd on March 8, 1917, demanding bread and an end to the war. Their protest, launched on International Women's Day, triggered a chain of events that toppled the Romanov dynasty within ten days and ended three centuries of tsarist rule in Russia. No one — not the workers, the police, the army, or the revolutionaries — expected the demonstrations to bring down an empire. Russia in early 1917 was breaking apart under the combined weight of military defeat, food shortages, and political incompetence. The Eastern Front had consumed nearly two million Russian soldiers. Bread lines in Petrograd stretched for blocks in subzero temperatures. Tsar Nicholas II had assumed personal command of the army in 1915, leaving day-to-day governance to his wife Alexandra and her advisor Grigori Rasputin, whose assassination in December 1916 had solved nothing. The women's march on March 8 (February 23 on the Julian calendar still used in Russia) drew workers from the textile mills of the Vyborg district. They marched to neighboring factories, calling men out on strike. By the next day, over 200,000 workers were on the streets. The demands escalated from bread to political change: "Down with the autocracy!" Cossack cavalry units, normally reliable instruments of repression, refused to charge the crowds. Some were seen winking at the demonstrators. Nicholas, at military headquarters in Mogilev, 600 miles away, ordered the garrison to suppress the uprising. On March 11, soldiers of the Volynsky regiment opened fire on protesters, killing dozens. That night, members of the same regiment mutinied, killing their commanding officer and joining the demonstrators. By March 12, the entire Petrograd garrison of 170,000 soldiers had gone over to the revolution. The Duma, Russia's parliament, formed a Provisional Committee to restore order. Nicholas attempted to return to Petrograd by train but was stopped by railway workers who had joined the revolution. On March 15, he abdicated in favor of his brother Michael, who declined the throne the following day. The February Revolution was the only successful popular revolution in Russian history — and it lasted barely eight months before Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in October.