An Essay · Open Questions
A queue for bread brought down an empire, and every gesture made to save the old order hastened its end. Five days in Petrograd, read through Solzhenitsyn's March 1917.
On Thursday, 23 February 1917 (8 March in the West), the women of the textile mills on the Vyborg side of Petrograd came off shift and did not go home. It was International Women's Day, and it was cold, and they had been standing in bread queues for a week. When the bakeries ran out they walked to the metalworks across the district and shouted the men out, and by evening tens of thousands of people were in the streets. Nobody had planned it. The Bolshevik committee for the district had told the women not to strike that day, because the party was saving its strength for May Day. Five days later the Tsar's ministers had dissolved into the night, the State Duma had ceased to exist, and a committee of deputies and a council of workers were sharing a palace neither of them had the right to occupy. Nine days later Nicholas II signed his abdication in a railway carriage at Pskov. The bread line is the first thing in Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 and it is the thing a reader keeps coming back to: the most elementary need there is, met by the most elementary form of order there is — people standing in a row, waiting their turn — and out of it, the end of three hundred years of Romanovs.
Start with what the bread line was not. Petrograd was not starving in February 1917. Russia had grain; the 1916 harvest was adequate, and there was flour in the capital. What had broken was the way the grain moved. The winter was one of the worst in memory, and in the first weeks of February blizzards buried the lines into the city; locomotives failed by the hundreds as water froze in their boilers, and freight stood stranded in the snow for days. Deliveries to the capital fell well short of what it needed. Then, around the third week of the month, word went round that bread would be rationed from the beginning of March. The announcement was meant to steady things — fair shares, no hoarding — and it did what such announcements do everywhere. Everyone with money tried to buy ahead of the cards. Bakeries that had sold out by noon began to sell out by mid-morning, and the queue stopped being an inconvenience and became a fixture: women who stood in the frozen dark from four in the morning and went away with nothing.
The queue, in other words, was not hunger. It was anticipated hunger, manufactured in part by a measure against hunger. Historians argue over the proportions — how much real shortfall, how much panic — and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who has studied those days more closely than anyone, gives the shortfall real weight. But the mechanism matters more than the ratio. A queue is a crowd that has already assembled, that has time on its hands and a grievance in common, and that has been taught by the act of waiting that the authorities cannot be trusted to deliver. It is also, and this is the part Solzhenitsyn sees, a form of order. People in a bread line know the rules. They keep their place and police the line themselves. Of all the institutions in Petrograd that week — the Council of Ministers, the General Staff, the Duma, the garrison — it was the only one that could organize itself, keep its own discipline, and say exactly what it wanted.
Over the next three days the queues merged with the strikers and the strikers became a demonstration, and the demonstration learned that the Cossacks would not charge. On Saturday the 25th the Tsar, at headquarters in Mogilev, telegraphed General Khabalov, the commander of the military district: I command you to put an end tomorrow to the disorders in the capital. On Sunday the 26th the troops fired, on Znamenskaya Square and elsewhere, and the crowds went home; and that evening a company of the Pavlovsky regiment mutinied. On Monday morning the Volynsky regiment's training detachment killed its officer rather than fire again, and by nightfall the garrison was no longer the Tsar's. Nothing in that sequence had been willed by anyone. (Why the garrison fired once and then refused is a story of its own: see The Second Order.) Then the men with authority began to act, and that is where the story turns.
Alexander Protopopov was the Minister of the Interior, and there was no more hated man in the government. The hatred had a history. Protopopov had been an Octobrist deputy and the deputy chairman of the Duma itself; in 1916 he had led the Duma's delegation to the Allied capitals and come back with the Tsar's favour. When Nicholas made him interior minister that September — with Rasputin's blessing and the Empress's enthusiasm — his old colleagues took it as desertion, and he never recovered their good opinion. His ministerial record did not help. In November he persuaded the Tsar to transfer the food supply from the Agriculture Ministry to his own, and the uproar was such that within weeks it was handed back; the bread question already had his name on it. He was grandiose and erratic, a patient of the Tibetan healer Badmaev, and his colleagues thought him unbalanced; the Empress thought him the one minister who understood. And he was the man who, through February, kept assuring the Tsar that the capital was in hand, because General Khabalov had a plan.
It is a mistake, and an easy one for a reader of the novel, to think of him as a competent man made to carry the blame. Solzhenitsyn writes Protopopov from the inside, drawing on Protopopov's own long and rambling testimony to the Provisional Government's investigating commission, and from the inside Protopopov always felt effective. The record is that nearly everyone who dealt with him thought otherwise. That matters for what follows, because a scapegoat has to be plausible, and Protopopov was the most plausible culprit in Russia.
On the evening of Monday the 27th (12 March), with the garrison in revolt and the Tauride Palace filling with soldiers, the Council of Ministers met at the Mariinsky Palace under its chairman, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn. Golitsyn was in his late sixties, had begged the Tsar not to appoint him, and had been asking since January to have Protopopov removed; he had been refused. Now the ministers did the one thing that was within their own power. They asked Protopopov to leave the government by declaring himself ill. He agreed, said something about there being nothing left but to shoot himself, and went out alone into the city. The ministers then did the thing that was not within their power: they telegraphed the Tsar asking to be dismissed as a body and replaced by a ministry the Duma could accept. Grand Duke Michael, the Tsar's brother, came to the palace that night and put the same proposal to headquarters by telephone. The answer came back from Mogilev before midnight. No changes in personnel were permissible under present conditions; General Ivanov was being sent with troops; the Tsar would return himself. By the next day the Council of Ministers had ceased to exist, and its members were being brought to the Tauride under arrest.
Consider what the scapegoating was meant to do and what it did. The ministers offered Protopopov to the Duma — the Duma that had hated him for six months — as a sign that the government would now listen. But the Duma had been prorogued the night before, on the government's own order, and the street had never cared about the Duma's grievances in the first place; the women in the queues had not been demanding the dismissal of the interior minister. A sacrifice works, when it works, because a community can believe the victim carried the sickness and his removal purges it. Protopopov's guilt was so universally assumed that nobody learned anything from his departure. The gesture was aimed at an audience that had left the room, and it told the audience that remained nothing it did not know. And the second gesture — the cabinet's offer of itself — was the one that might have mattered a week earlier, and it needed the consent of the one man who would not give it. The ministers tried to scapegoat themselves, and the Tsar refused to accept the offering.
Protopopov's end is the story's grim coda. Having wandered the city for a day, he walked into the Tauride Palace on the evening of the 28th, went up to a student standing guard, and said who he was. Kerensky arrived and escorted him through the crowd shouting that no one was to touch him. He had surrendered himself to the only authority left, and it was not one anybody had elected.
The Duma's end is stranger, and it is the part a reader is likely to get slightly wrong. The Tsar did not dissolve it in a fit of temper. Weeks earlier, at Golitsyn's request, Nicholas had signed blank, undated decrees — one proroguing the Duma, one dissolving it — so that the government could use them at need without a courier to Mogilev. On the 26th, with the shooting in the squares, Golitsyn dated the prorogation decree and sent it to the Duma's chairman, Mikhail Rodzianko, late that night: the session was suspended until April. The theory behind it was the Empress's, repeated in letter after letter through the winter: the Duma was the megaphone. Silence it and the street would have no one to shout for. It had worked before. The Duma had been sent home in 1915 and again in 1916, and each time the agitation had gone quiet.
Rodzianko had telegraphed the Tsar that same day: the capital was in anarchy, the government paralysed, the transport of food in disorder, and a person who enjoyed the country's confidence must be charged at once with forming a new government; any delay, he wrote, would be death. Nicholas's remark on reading it, to his court minister, has become famous: that fat Rodzianko had written him some nonsense again, to which he would not even reply. He did not reply.
What the Duma did on the morning of the 27th is the hinge of the whole week. The deputies obeyed. The Council of Elders met, considered defying the decree and holding a session regardless, and decided against it: a Duma that sat in defiance of the Emperor's order would be an illegal assembly, and these were lawyers, landowners and professors who had spent eleven years insisting that Russia must be governed by law. So they did not convene. They walked out of the White Hall, where the Duma sat, into the Semicircular Hall next door, and held what they called a private meeting of members. That afternoon the private meeting elected a Provisional Committee of the State Duma — Rodzianko, Milyukov, Kerensky, Chkheidze, Shulgin and the rest — to restore order and to deal with institutions and persons. Within two days the Committee had become the Provisional Government. The State Duma as an institution never met again. It had died of legalism, of respect for the Tsar's decree, on the same afternoon that its members took power as individuals.
And the prorogation did not remove the symbol. It emptied it. The mutinied regiments and the crowds behind them did not know or care that the Duma had been suspended; they marched on the Tauride because it was the Duma's house, and they filled its halls with soldiers and rifles. Into the empty rooms, that same evening, moved the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies, convened by a handful of socialist deputies and labour organizers, some of them released from prison that morning. The Tsar had sent the Duma home so that there would be no rival authority in the capital. Within twenty-four hours there were two, in the same building, and neither was the Duma.
Put the gestures in a row and the pattern is hard to miss.
I. The cabinet gives up Protopopov to placate a Duma it had itself prorogued the night before. The Duma is not there to be placated, and the street never wanted him.
II. The cabinet offers to give up itself. The Tsar refuses to take the offering, and within a day there is no cabinet to dismiss.
III. The Tsar gives up the Duma to save the throne. The Duma gives up its own existence to keep the law. The deputies take power without it, and the Soviet takes the rooms it left.
IV. On 2 March (15 March) the Tsar gives up the throne to save the dynasty, abdicating for himself and — against the Fundamental Laws, which made no provision for it — for his son, in favour of his brother Michael. On the morning of 3 March, Michael, in a flat on Millionnaya Street with Rodzianko and Kerensky telling him he could not be protected, gives up the throne pending a Constituent Assembly that will never be allowed to decide. The dynasty ends in a sitting-room.
Each sacrifice is offered to preserve an entity that cannot be preserved, and each is addressed to an authority that is no longer there to receive it: a Duma that has been sent away, a Tsar who will not answer, a dynasty with no one left willing to wear the crown. Each one also removes the last mediating body between the throne and the street. Dismiss the Duma and there is no one lawful to negotiate with; refuse the cabinet's resignation and there is no one to form the government that the generals will, three days later, beg the Tsar to grant. By 2 March, when Nicholas finally conceded a responsible ministry, it was a concession to a government that already existed without him.
Against all of this stands the queue, which made no gesture, offered nothing, and preserved nothing, and which was the only actor in the week whose wants were met. There is a further irony that a reader who knows what comes next cannot keep out of mind. Petrograd did not starve in February 1917. It starved in the winter of 1918–19, under the government the bread line had summoned, when the ration fell to a few ounces a day and the city lost more than half its people. The bread line brought on the famine it was afraid of.
March 1917 is the third knot of The Red Wheel, and it is the longest: in the Russian edition four books and more than six hundred chapters covering the days from 23 February to the middle of March, assembled from the testimony of the Provisional Government's investigating commission, the memoirs of ministers, generals and deputies, the newspapers, and the historian George Katkov's Russia 1917, whose view of the February days as a leaderless accident the novel largely shares. Solzhenitsyn's method is the one he used for Bogrov and Stolypin in August 1914: a documented skeleton, a dramatized interior, and whole chapters of montage that are nothing but the record itself.
The argument of this essay is close to his, but it is not his, and the difference is worth stating. For Solzhenitsyn the February days are not a story of misdirected action. They are a story of absence. The Wheel rolls because nobody with authority will put a hand on it: the Tsar is at headquarters and will not decide, the ministers meet and disperse, Khabalov sits in the Admiralty with a shrinking band of loyal troops, Rodzianko telephones, Milyukov calculates. The sacrifice of Protopopov, in the novel's telling, is not a mistaken act; it is a gesture made in place of an act, by men who have nothing else. His contempt is distributed evenly. The ministers are paralysed, the Tsar is passive, and the Duma liberals, who for a decade had demanded power and undermined every government that would not give it to them, flinch when power is handed to them in the street and will only take it from a side room, in the name of a committee.
This essay gives the actors more credit than that, and so, I think, does the record. Golitsyn's cabinet did not do nothing on the 27th; it did two things, one empty and one that needed the Tsar, and the Tsar's refusal is a decision, not an absence. The Duma's compliance with the prorogation was not cowardice alone; it was a principle, held by men who believed a lawless Duma would be worth nothing, and it was wrong. The abdication for Alexei was a father's decision made against the law he was sworn to, and it was a choice. Where Solzhenitsyn sees a vacuum, it is possible to see a sequence of gestures, each intelligible, each made in good faith to preserve something, and each fatal. That version is less bleak than his and, which is more to the point, it can be tested against the documents.
Two cautions for the listener. The first is Protopopov, already discussed: the novel's interior monologue is sympathetic-ironic, and it can leave a reader more generous than his contemporaries were. The second is the Duma. Solzhenitsyn's dislike of the liberal opposition is a settled conviction, formed long before he wrote these chapters, and it colours everything Rodzianko and Milyukov do. The facts of 27 February are not in dispute — the decree, the decision not to defy it, the Semicircular Hall, the Committee — but the motives he assigns are his.
Three questions to ask of any dramatized scene:
Who could have recorded this? The cabinet session of the 27th was reconstructed afterwards from the ministers' testimony to the commission that was then holding them. Protopopov's walk through the city has one witness, Protopopov.
Who benefits from this version? Every minister who testified in 1917 had reason to say he had wanted Protopopov gone and had wanted to resign. Most of them probably had. But the record was made by men explaining themselves to their captors.
Does it match the documents? The prorogation decree, Rodzianko's telegram, the Tsar's reply to Golitsyn, the abdication manifesto and Michael's declaration are all texts and can be checked. What anyone felt in the Semicircular Hall cannot.
It did not cause the revolution, if by cause one means the thing that explains it. The causes are the usual long list — the war, the losses, the inflation, the Rasputin scandal, the hollowing-out of the ministries, a monarch who could neither rule nor let others rule — and any of a dozen sparks would have found that tinder. What the bread line did was simpler and, for a reader of the week's events, more instructive. It presented the old regime with a problem that could be solved only by competence, and the old regime responded with gestures. The queue wanted flour and an end to the shooting. It was offered the resignation of a minister it had not asked about, the suspension of a parliament it had never looked to, and, in the end, a change of Tsar it had not demanded, to a Tsar who declined. None of the offerings was addressed to the people in the line; all of them were addressed to institutions that were, by the time the offering was made, already gone. That is the shape of the thing, and it is why the bread line stays in the mind after the book is closed: the simplest need in the world, met by the simplest order in the world, and the whole elaborate apparatus of the state unable to find the right person to apologize to.
For the assassination that removed the one minister who might have made the apparatus competent, see The Ticket to Kiev; for the man himself, The Wager on the Strong.
Further reading: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (1981; expanded edition, Brill 2017 / Haymarket 2018), the standard day-by-day account and the source for most of the sequence above; George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution (1967), the account Solzhenitsyn worked from and the view he is arguing; Semion Lyandres, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford, 2013), interviews with the principals taken in the spring of 1917; Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), chapters 8–9; Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (1996), part two; M. V. Rodzianko, The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire's Collapse (1927); Padenie tsarskogo rezhima (7 vols., 1924–27), the stenographic record of the Provisional Government's Extraordinary Investigating Commission, on which Solzhenitsyn drew heavily; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 1, tr. Marian Schwartz (Notre Dame, 2017), with Books 2–4 following.
A note on certainty: The sequence of events — the Women's Day strike, the Tsar's telegram to Khabalov, the shooting of the 26th and the mutinies that followed, the prorogation decree and Rodzianko's telegram, the cabinet session of the 27th and Protopopov's departure, the Tsar's refusal, the formation of the Provisional Committee and of the Soviet in the Tauride, Protopopov's surrender, the abdication and Michael's refusal — is firmly documented and agreed across the literature. Dates are Old Style, with the Western date given at first mention of each. Two things are less settled. The balance between genuine shortfall and panic in the bread crisis is disputed; this essay follows Hasegawa in giving the shortfall real weight while stressing the role of the rationing announcement, and the figures on stalled locomotives and deliveries vary between accounts and are given only in round terms. The motives attributed here to Golitsyn's ministers and to the Duma's leaders rest on their own later testimony and memoirs, which were composed by men explaining themselves, and the pattern of "offerings" is this essay's reading, not a claim found in the sources. The description of Solzhenitsyn's chapters comes from the reading and from published accounts of the novel, not from a passage-by-passage check of the text. Protopopov's medical condition is a matter of contemporary rumour, not diagnosis, and is left aside. This piece was drafted with Claude's help from the sources listed and has not been verified line by line.
Reads alongside The Second Order, on the same five days seen from the barracks; The Ticket to Kiev and The Wager on the Strong, on the Stolypin years and the Red Wheel's method; and Was Death Preferable to the Gulag?, on reading Solzhenitsyn as a witness. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.