February Revolution

 The Power of the Streets It all began with bread. For several weeks the bakeries in Petrograd had been running out, especially in the workers’ districts, and long bread queues were beginning to appear. The problem was not shortage of supplies. According to Balk, the city’s governor, there was enough flour in the warehouses to feed the population for at least a week when what had started as a series of bread riots turned into a revolution. True, the shops were not full. This was the end of the war’s third winter and there was a general feeling of austerity. Buns, pies, cakes and biscuits were no longer baked. ‘The shops are not carrying such a full line of articles and provisions,’ an Englishman wrote home on 13 February. ‘Restaurants no longer have the big fine pastries, owing to the scarcity of sugar.’ This, moreover, was the coldest winter Russia had experienced for several years. In Petrograd the average February temperature was fifteen degrees below zero. ‘It’s as cold here as in Lapland,’ Gorky wrote to Ekaterina on the 4th. Arctic frosts and blizzards had brought the railways to a virtual standstill. Factories closed. Thousands of laid-off workers milled around the streets. 1 It was this that turned the supply problem into a crisis. Because of the breakdown of the transport system, Petrograd was starved of regular supplies of flour and fuel. For want of the one or the other, bakeries were frequently forced to close. Women would queue all night for a loaf of bread, only to be told in the early hours of the morning that there would be none for sale that day. This constant interruption to the bread supply naturally gave rise to rumours in the queues. People said that ‘speculators’ and ‘capitalists’ — which in the xenophobic wartime atmosphere usually meant German or Jewish merchants — were deliberately forcing up the bread prices by withholding stocks. Many people blamed the government (wasn’t it also full of Germans?). Even educated liberals were inclined to see the shortages as the evil doing of a treasonable government. On 19 February the Petrograd authorities announced that rationing would start from 1 March. Rumours spread that there would soon be no bread stocks at all and the unemployed would be left to starve. In the panic buying that followed the shelves were laid bare, scuffles broke out, and several bakeries had their windows smashed. 2 On Thursday, 23 February, the temperature in Petrograd rose to a spring like minus five degrees. People emerged from their winter hibernation to enjoy the sun and join in the hunt for food. Nevsky Prospekt was crowded with shoppers. The mild weather was set to continue until 3 March — by which time the tsarist regime would have collapsed. Not for the first time in Russian history the weather was to play a decisive role. February 23rd was International Women’s Day, an important date in the socialist calendar, and towards noon huge crowds of women…