Russian Republic

At a glance

How did the February Revolution begin?

With bread protests and a women's march. On 23 February (8 March) 1917 crowds of women marching for equal rights in Petrograd were joined by women textile workers protesting the shortage of bread. By 25 February (10 March) there was, in the words of the historian Siobhan Peeling, "effectively a general strike".

On 26 February (11 March) police, Cossacks and soldiers of the Volynskii Life Guards Regiment fired on demonstrators on Znamenskaia Square; according to a BBC Russian reconstruction published for the centenary, about 40 people were killed and as many wounded. The next day the garrison rose. Power in the city, the BBC piece concludes, "actually changed hands on 27 February".

On 27 February (12 March) two new centres of authority took shape in the Tauride Palace, the seat of the State Duma: the Duma's Provisional Committee and a Soviet of Workers' Deputies, soon renamed the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. As the historian Christopher Read notes, "from the outset soldiers and sailors made up its main component".

Was the February Revolution bloodless?

No. The idea of a "bloodless" February has been repeated ever since 1917, but the contemporary counts differ widely and none is small:

• On 23 March (5 April) 1917, 184 victims of the revolution were buried in four mass graves on the Field of Mars.
• The Provisional Government's investigator Martynov counted 1,315 "killed, wounded and bruised" on both sides, without giving the dead separately.
• On 24 March 1917 the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns reported 1,443 killed and wounded in Petrograd. Trotsky later repeated the figure, "including 869 military, of them 60 officers".
• On 29 March the city administration's gazette reported 266 dead and 988 wounded, plus 42 unidentified bodies and 64 missing.

The figure of 1,443 is often quoted as the number of dead; it is the total of killed and wounded. The historian Andrei Nikolaev argued in 2017 that even these counts are too low: the Duma's own sanitary commission found 60 officers killed in Petrograd, almost six times the Union of Towns figure, and 2,421 wounded or sick were registered in the Tauride district alone. He concluded that February "can be called neither peaceful nor bloodless", and argued that the Duma leaders, who took charge of the rising from the afternoon of 27 February, also took responsibility for its victims.

Why did Grand Duke Michael refuse the throne?

Because he would accept it only from the people. Nicholas II signed his abdication at Pskov on 2 (15) March 1917, for himself and his son Aleksei, in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Michael (Mikhail Aleksandrovich). The next day, 3 March, Michael issued an act declining to "assume supreme power" unless "such be the will of our great people", expressed through a Constituent Assembly elected by universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage. Until then he asked all citizens "to submit to the Provisional Government", which had arisen "on the initiative of the State Duma" and was "invested with all the fullness of power".

The act was drafted in Prince Putiatin's flat at Millionnaia 12 in Petrograd by the lawyer Vladimir Nabokov and Baron Boris Nol'de. Nabokov recorded in his memoir that the words "invested with all the fullness of power" were his own, meant to confirm the government's authority and its continuity with the Duma, although legally a man who had not accepted supreme power could not bind anyone.

Siobhan Peeling adds a practical motive: Michael declined when the government's leaders told him "they could not guarantee his safety in the event of a violent uprising". Either way, the monarchy was suspended, not abolished, and the form of the state was left to the Constituent Assembly. The background is told in the entry on the Russian Empire.

What was the Provisional Government?

The cabinet that ruled Russia from March to October 1917, meant to govern only until a Constituent Assembly decided the country's future. The Duma's Provisional Committee formed it on 2 (15) March 1917 after negotiations with the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

Prince Georgii L'vov, former head of the Union of Zemstvos, became Minister-President and Minister of the Interior; Pavel Miliukov of the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) Foreign Minister; Aleksandr Guchkov Minister of War and the Navy. The only socialist was the lawyer Aleksandr Kerensky, who took the Ministry of Justice although the Soviet Executive Committee, of which he was a vice-chairman, had voted against joining. Read calls it a government "based on the Progressive Bloc", the liberal coalition in the wartime Duma.

The declaration of 3 (16) March promised a full amnesty for political and religious offences; freedom of speech, press, association, assembly and strikes; the abolition of all restrictions of estate, religion and nationality; a people's militia in place of the police; democratic local elections; and "immediate preparation" of a Constituent Assembly, elected by universal, equal, secret and direct vote, "which will establish the form of government and the constitution of the country". The revolutionary units were not to be disarmed or removed from Petrograd.

According to Ilia Rat'kovskii, a decree of 12 March 1917 abolished the death penalty, and a study of religious policy dates the decree abolishing religious and national restrictions to 20 March; these decrees are known here only through scholarship.

What was dual power?

The split of authority between the Provisional Government, which had formal power, and the Petrograd Soviet, which had the loyalty of the capital's soldiers and workers and gave the government only conditional support.

The clearest statement of the Soviet's power was Order No. 1 of 1 (14) March 1917 to the Petrograd garrison. Every unit was to elect committees from the lower ranks and to obey the Soviet in all political actions; orders of the Duma's military commission were to be carried out only if they did not contradict the Soviet's; weapons were to stay under the committees' control and "in no case" be handed to officers. Peeling cites Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's argument that even the Soviet "could not be certain of its authority".

Who led the Provisional Government?

Two men in turn: Prince L'vov until July 1917 and Kerensky until October. The table also lists the bodies that later claimed the republic's authority.

What went wrong in the spring and summer of 1917?

The war, above all. Peeling calls it "both the midwife and executioner of the Provisional Government": it had brought down the monarchy, and the government's decision to keep fighting destroyed its own support.

The April crisis. Lenin returned to Petrograd on the night of 3 April 1917 and next day read his April Theses: "No support for the Provisional Government", a republic of Soviets rather than a parliamentary one, and the "confiscation of all landlords' estates". On 18 April (1 May) Miliukov's note to the Allies spoke of "guarantees and sanctions" for a lasting peace. Street demonstrations followed; Guchkov resigned on 30 April and Miliukov on 2 May.

The first coalition. On 5 (18) May the Soviet leaders entered the government. Kerensky became Minister of War, and Viktor Chernov of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the Mensheviks Irakli Tsereteli and Matvei Skobelev joined the cabinet.

The June offensive. On 16 (29) June Kerensky ordered the South-Western Front to advance. In the American historian Frank Golder's summary of 1927, the first few days "all went well"; then the offensive collapsed. One study calculates that desertions, about 6,300 a month before the revolution, rose fivefold between March and August 1917.

The July Days. On 3–5 (16–18) July armed demonstrations in Petrograd demanded "All power to the Soviets"; Izvestiia reported 400 killed or wounded on 16 and 17 July (New Style). Golder judged that the Bolsheviks had "put themselves at the head" of a movement begun by others. Of those Kerensky later listed as "ordered arrested as traitors", all were arrested except Lenin and Zinov'ev, who went into hiding.

L'vov resigns. Prince L'vov left the government in July; Golder's collection dates it 21 July (New Style). He refused the socialist ministers' demand for the "immediate proclamation of a republican form of government", calling it "an usurpation of the supreme power of the Constituent Assembly". Kerensky became Minister-President and on 24 July (6 August) formed a second coalition.

On 12 July 1917 the government restored the death penalty at the front "for the duration of the war". Rat'kovskii shows that artillery had already been turned on mutinous regiments that morning, so that the decree partly legalised existing practice.

How did the government deal with Finland, Ukraine and Poland?

By insisting that the final settlement belonged to the Constituent Assembly, which satisfied neither side.

Finland. On 7 (20) March 1917 the government restored the Grand Duchy's full constitution. When the Finnish Diet passed a Law on Supreme Power on 5 (18) July, by 136 votes to 55, the government dissolved it on 18 (31) July; the historian Irina Novikova calls this "one of its fatal mistakes". The Diet and Senate declared independence on 6 December 1917, and according to the 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica the Soviet government told the Finnish Senate on 4 January 1918 that this conformed with its policy; see the Republic of Finland.

Ukraine. In June 1917 the Central Rada proclaimed autonomy "without separating from Russia". L'vov pleaded: "Do not tear yourselves away from our common native land." When the cabinet accepted an agreement with the Rada on 2 (15) July, the Kadet ministers resigned. See the Ukrainian People's Republic.

Poland. The government's "Appeal to the Poles", published on 17 March 1917, promised an independent Polish state in a "free military union" with Russia, to be confirmed by the Russian Constituent Assembly.

What was the Kornilov affair?

A clash in late August 1917 between Kerensky and his commander-in-chief, General Lavr Kornilov, which fatally weakened the government. Kerensky had appointed Kornilov to the South-Western Front on 8 (21) July and ten days later to the supreme command. Kornilov pressed for the death penalty in the rear as well as at the front and for martial law on the railways and in defence plants.

Messages passed between the two through a go-between, the former minister Vladimir L'vov. On 27 August (9 September) Kerensky ordered Kornilov to hand over his command and placed Petrograd under martial law, to save "the country, freedom, and the republican form of government". Kornilov's troops were already moving on the capital. The reports collected by Golder show the movement falling apart: track was torn up, delegations talked to the soldiers, and by 29 August (11 September) the troops had "come to a standstill", General Anton Denikin had been arrested with his staff, and Kornilov's headquarters were surrounded. The Kadet ministers resigned during the crisis.

Historians still disagree. Peeling sets out three readings: "a carefully planned coup, an effort by Kerenskii to manipulate the simple-minded general to strengthen his own power, or a botched attempt at cooperation in an authoritarian direction". Kerensky's own Prelude to Bolshevism (1919) presents a conspiracy. Either way, the government had beaten Kornilov only with the help of the Soviet's armed supporters.

When was Russia proclaimed a republic?

On 1 (14) September 1917. A decree signed by Kerensky and the justice minister Aleksandr Zarudnyi invoked the "unanimous and enthusiastic recognition of the republican idea" at the Moscow State Conference, declared "that the state order by which the Russian State is governed is a republican order", and proclaimed the Russian Republic. It also handed power to five ministers headed by Kerensky.

This Directorate (Kerensky, Tereshchenko, General A. I. Verkhovskii, Rear-Admiral D. N. Verderevskii and A. M. Nikitin) governed until a third coalition was formed on 25 September (8 October).

Was it legal? Michael's act and the March declaration had left the form of government to the Constituent Assembly, and L'vov had called a premature proclamation a usurpation. The legal historian A. P. Garanzha argues that Russia therefore remained formally "a monarchy without a monarch" until 6 January 1918.

The Democratic Conference called by the Soviet leadership, which sat from 14 to 22 September, voted for coalition in general, then against coalition with the Kadets, then against the motion as a whole. From it came the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, or Pre-Parliament, of 555 members, seated in the Mariinskii Palace.

It opened on 7 (20) October, and the Bolsheviks walked out at once. With 497 members left, it remained advisory. On 24 October, asked by Kerensky for support against the rising, it took six hours to pass a vague vote; on 25 October a commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee ordered it out of the palace.

Did Germany pay for the Bolshevik revolution?

German money reached Russia, but how much, when and to whom remains disputed, and the most famous "proof" was forged.

Fritz Fischer found in 1961, from German Foreign Office files, that of 382 million marks spent on propaganda and "special purposes" up to 30 January 1918, 40,580,997 went to Russia, and estimated the Bolsheviks' share before and after October at 80 million gold marks. V. I. Levin notes that the basis of that estimate is unknown, argues that most of it came after 25 October 1917, and writes that "direct evidence" of German financing before the seizure of power "has not yet been found".

The "Sisson documents", published in 1918, were forgeries: George Kennan showed in 1956 that the journalist Ferdynand Ossendowski had made them. Gennadii Sobolev, following Semion Lyandres, argues that the Parvus–Fürstenberg trading business was "purely commercial", and accuses Richard Pipes of quoting a letter from Lenin to Inessa Armand out of context. The debate continues; the claim that Germany "overthrew" the Provisional Government is not supported.

How did the Provisional Government fall?

In a rising planned by the Bolsheviks. On 10 (23) and 16 (29) October their Central Committee decided to prepare an armed seizure of power, with Kamenev and Zinov'ev voting against. The Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, set up on 12 (25) October, became its headquarters. On 24 October Kerensky ordered its members arrested, but the order was not carried out, and that night the rising began.

By the morning of 25 October (7 November) the whole city except the Winter Palace was in insurgent hands. Kerensky left to find loyal troops. In The Catastrophe he described driving out in his own open touring car, in "my customary semi-military uniform", with a car flying the American flag following at a "respectful distance" at the Allied envoys' request.

That evening the cruiser Aurora fired a single blank shot at 9.40 p.m., after which the taking of the Winter Palace began; the ministers were arrested and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Second Congress of Soviets, which opened at 10.40 p.m. and which all socialist parties except the Bolsheviks and Left SRs left in protest, adopted decrees on peace and land and created the Council of People's Commissars. Its founding decree called it a provisional government, to rule "until the Constituent Assembly is convened".

Kerensky's attempt to retake the capital failed when General Petr Krasnov's Cossacks, checked at Pulkovo on 30 October, agreed on 1 November to stop fighting. An underground Provisional Government under S. N. Prokopovich met until 16 November, and on 17 November several ministers signed an appeal "To all citizens of the Russian Republic". The Soviet state that followed is the subject of the entry on the Republics of the Soviet Union.

Who won the Constituent Assembly elections?

The Socialist Revolutionaries; the Bolsheviks came second. Postponed by a decree of 9 August, voting began on 12 November 1917, with the Assembly due to meet on 28 November. The electoral law gave the vote to all citizens "of both sexes" aged 20 and over, with proportional representation. In remote districts and at the front voting took weeks.

There is no single official result, and two sourced reconstructions are commonly used:

Protasov's figures are given here from a detailed scholarly review of his book; Lenin's are his own arithmetic from an SR statistician's partial count. Both agree on the outcome. Lenin stressed where the Bolsheviks were strong, in Petrograd, the Baltic Fleet and the Northern and Western fronts, and concluded that "the armed forces were half Bolshevik".

On 28 November only about 50 deputies, mostly SRs, gathered in the Tauride Palace. In December SRs were arrested in Moscow and elsewhere, among them Avksent'ev, the former chairman of the Pre-Parliament, and Lenin's "Theses on the Constituent Assembly" set out why a Soviet republic stood above it.

What happened at the Constituent Assembly on 5 January 1918?

It met for a single day and night, and even its size is uncertain. According to the historian O. N. Znamenskii, "by incomplete counts" 715 deputies were elected, at least 410 sat in the Tauride Palace on 5 January, and the registration book lists 463 names. The US ambassador reported "something over 400".

That day a peaceful march through Petrograd in support of the Assembly was fired on by Latvian riflemen on Bolshevik orders, according to A. I. Iur'ev's 2019 study; "by various estimates" between eight and 21 people died, and in Moscow six were killed. The Bolsheviks denied the shooting, and Ambassador Francis cabled that casualties were "unknown, but not thought great".

The Assembly opened at 4 p.m. The Bolshevik Iakov Sverdlov read out the "Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People"; the majority refused to discuss it, 237 votes to 146, and elected Chernov chairman. After midnight the Bolsheviks and then the Left SRs walked out, and the rest passed three acts in the early hours of 6 January:

• a Basic Law on Land, which declared that "the right of property in land within the Russian Republic is abolished henceforth and for ever";
• a Law on Peace, calling for democratic peace terms to be worked out jointly with the Allies and for an international socialist conference;
• a resolution on the form of state: "In the name of the peoples composing the Russian State, the All-Russian Constituent Assembly resolves: the Russian State is proclaimed the Russian Democratic Federative Republic, uniting in an indissoluble union peoples and regions, sovereign within limits set by the federal constitution."

The Soviet Central Executive Committee adopted a decree dissolving the Assembly on the night of 6 (19) January; it was published on 7 (20) January, which is why some authors give that date. Protasov found that almost one deputy in ten later died in the Civil War and more than a hundred emigrated.

A few weeks later a decree "on the introduction of the Western European calendar in the Russian Republic", as its title still put it, made the day after 31 January 1918 into 14 February.

Who claimed the republic's legacy after 1918?

Several anti-Bolshevik governments, each further from the Assembly in whose name they began.

Komuch. On 8 June 1918, the day Czechoslovak legionaries took Samara, a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), founded by five SR deputies, took power there. It governed until the Red Army retook the city on 7 October 1918.

The Ufa Directory. A State Conference at Ufa (8–23 September 1918), uniting the Assembly members, Komuch, the Siberian and Urals governments, Cossack hosts and national governments, handed "the whole fullness of supreme power" over the Russian State to a five-man Provisional All-Russian Government. Its act bound this government to help reconvene "the Constituent Assembly of the present composition" and obey it "as the only supreme authority in the country", to reject Brest-Litovsk, to continue the war against Germany and to rebuild Russia on federal lines: the clearest documentary claim to continuity with 1917.

Kolchak. On 18 November 1918 a coup in Omsk replaced the Directory with Vice-Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, proclaimed Supreme Ruler of Russia. Whether his government continued the republic is a matter of interpretation: it claimed authority over the whole Russian state but ended the subordination to the Assembly of 1917. On 7 February 1920 Kolchak was shot in Irkutsk on the orders of the local Military Revolutionary Committee.

Elsewhere the empire's borderlands went their own way: Estonia's independence manifesto is dated 21 February 1918 (see the Republic of Estonia), and Georgia declared independence on 26 May 1918. By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 Estonia and Livonia were to be held by the police of the German Empire.

How is the Russian Republic remembered?

For decades it was overshadowed by the Soviet image of October. Russia's State Archive (GARF) notes that the picture of the storming of the Winter Palace comes from Maiakovskii, from Eisenstein's October (1927) and Romm's Lenin in October (1939): "There was no single stormy and bloody assault", but a long, sluggish siege with ultimatums and disarmings. The palace's defence chief Petr Pal'chinskii noted that its fall was "the result not of the strength of one side but of the weakness of the other".

Kerensky, "the knight of the revolution" of the 1917 press, became a figure of ridicule. The story that he fled dressed as a nurse first appeared in the far-right paper Groza on 5 November 1917; his biographer S. V. Tiutiukin found it "had no basis". He left Russia in 1918 and died in New York in 1970.

In post-Soviet Russia, 7 November was renamed the Day of Accord and Reconciliation in 1996 and ceased to be a holiday at the end of 2004. The centenary in 2017 was framed as "the Great Russian Revolution 1917–1921" and its "lessons"; Kolonitskii and Matskevich found that only 2% of respondents to an open FOM question named it among the year's main events.

The legal historian Garanzha argues that the Assembly's resolution of 6 January 1918 proclaimed not only a republic but a democratic regime, a decision he sees repeated in Article 1 of the Russian Federation's constitution "75 years later".

Common myths about the Russian Republic

Timeline of the Russian Republic

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1919; at 1918 on the map it covers the former empire's lands still claimed as a single Russian state. Its predecessor appears at Russian Empire. The Soviet state that replaced it is shown at Republics of the Soviet Union and, from 1922, at Soviet Union. Among the former provinces that broke away, see Republic of Finland and Republic of Latvia.