The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 1, A Violent Revolution

In my last post, I challenged two myths of Russia’s 1917 February Revolution which removed Tsar Nicholas II from power: that it was “spontaneous” and “leaderless”.

Over the next two posts, I’ll put forward two rather different interpretations. Both are commonly overlooked when teaching the Russian Revolution. Both, however, deserve serious attention.

In this first post, I’ll examine the case for the February Revolution being a violent event. This directly challenges a common myth that February was peaceful, especially when compared the previous outbreaks of revolutionary unrest, such as 1905’s Bloody Sunday massacre or the 1912 Lena Goldfields massacre.

In fact, February 1917 witnessed considerable violence. This took several forms, including killings of protestors; bloody reprisals against military officers and police; public disorder and mob justice; and iconoclasm.

 

Repression

The February Revolution witnessed the astonishingly rapid collapse of Tsarist power. Largescale protests broke out in the Russian capital, Petrograd, on 23 February 1917 (International Women’s Day, dated to the Julian Calendar). By 27 February, soldiers had joined protests en masse and the regime had lost all power on the streets.

Between these dates, however, huge violence was unleashed on protestors. On 26 February, after being given orders to fire directly on protestors, soldiers inflicted appalling casualties on almost unarmed crowds. Figures for deaths are generally rather vague, often running from “hundreds” up to around 1,500.

Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa draws attention to the bloodiest instances of soldiers firing into crowds, in which one source indicated at least 170-200 protestors were killed. “If his calculation is correct,” Hawegawa concludes, “the ‘massacre on the Nevskii’ was a major event comparable to the Bloody Sunday of 1905, the Lena [Goldfields] massacre of 1912, and the Ivanovo-Voznesensk massacre of 1915”.

Students and soldiers fire towards Tsarist police during the February Revolution. Credit: public domain via Wikipedia.

Revenge

At the same time, in Petrograd and elsewhere, some protestors took the opportunity to mete out revenge against hated symbols of Tsarist autocracy, including individuals associated with it.

While the great majority of violence during protests in the capital was directed against protestors by soldiers and officers on 26 February, there were multiple instances of police and military officers being killed over the main days of protest.

Violence against military officers seems to have been better documented than that against police. In some cases, this violence was carried out by soldiers themselves. Most famously, the Volynsky regiment, which had fired on protestors on 26 February, mutinied on the morning of 27 February, killing their commanding officer before pouring onto the streets to join the protests.

The worst of the violence against military officers was committed by Baltic Sea sailors at Helsingfors (Helsinki) and Kronstadt naval bases. In Kronstadt, an island town and naval base just off the coast of Petrograd, the bloodletting was particularly savage. Its first victim, the town’s governor, Admiral Robert Viren, was marched to Anchor Square before being executed by firing squad. A wave of killings followed, according to historian of Kronstadt, Israel Getzler, claiming “A total of fifty-one officers…, the majority of them from the navy. To their number must be added close to thirty gendarmes [political police], policemen and police spies.” In the aftermath, over 200 officers of different ranks were thrown into Kronstadt’s dungeons, along with over 250 Tsarist policemen and police accomplices.

Robert Viren, the admiral executed in public by mutineering Kronstadt sailors, February 1917. Credit: public domain via Wikipedia.

In general, revolutionary events in the Russian provinces seem to have been rather more well-mannered, with less violence than Petrograd and Kronstadt. Many towns and cities, as a I mentioned in my previous post, saw local revolutionaries coordinate rapidly to bloodlessly overthrow Tsarist authorities. But a peaceful revolution was certainly not guaranteed in the provinces. In the city of Tver, savage reprisals were carried out against Tsarist officials, leading to many deaths.

What explains these reprisals? For soldiers, ordered to fire on protestors by their commanding officers, killings were a way of exacting revenge for the terrible acts they had already been made to commit against protestors and to remove the main obstacle to their own joining of protests. In Kronstadt, the killing of officers and officials was directed especially against those associated with the brutal treatment of sailors.

 

Public Disorder and Mob Justice

Not all violence committed by revolutionary protestors was intentional (or, at least, took the forms they anticipated).

After 27 February, as soldiers melted into crowds of protestors, military discipline broke down and weapons fell into the hands of civilians. Prisons and arsenals across Petrograd were attacked and broken open, delivering yet more weapons onto the streets. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa vividly relates:

Soon the streets were filled with crowds holding newly acquired weapons like children with Christmas gifts. An English eyewitness saw a hooligan with an officer’s sword fastened over his overcoat, a rifle in one hand and a revolver in another. A worker was standing by, holding an officer’s sword in one hand and a revolver in another. A young boy was walking with a large butcher’s knife on his shoulder. One man had a rifle in one hand and a tram-line cleaner in the other. A student was walking with two rifles and a belt of machine-gun bullets around his waist. And even a quiet-looking businessman held a large rifle and wore a cartridge belt around his business suit.

Youths, handling weapons for the first time, caused carnage by throwing cartridges onto open fires, where they detonated, or by loosing control of their guns and shooting those around them.

Protestors joined by soldiers on Petrograd's Nevsky Prospekt. Credit: public domain via Wikipedia.

In the longer term, however, a much more dangerous development was underway: the collapse of law and order. With prisons emptied, criminals on the streets, and the Tsarist police out of the picture, violent crime rapidly increased. Lacking institutional means to prevent crime, ordinary people began to take matters into their own hands through mob justice, known by the Russian word samosudy (literally: self-made trials). Criminals caught by mobs were often given swift justice, beaten to death on the streets.

	1914 (total)	1915 (total)	March-October 1917
			March-April	May-June	July-August	Sept.-Oct.	Total
Murders	14	19	13	21	30	26	90
Armed Robberies	0	3	23	26	24	14	87
Samosudy	0	0	1	12	29	33	75

Table 1: Crimes and Mob-Justice Instances (samosudy) in Petrograd, 1917. From Hasegawa, "Crime, police and mob justice in Petrograd during the Russian revolutions of 1917"

Iconoclasm

One of the more intriguing violent aspects of the February Revolution was a wave of iconoclasm, destruction of symbols of the old regime. This was symbolic violence, rather than murderous bloodletting. But its destructive nature means it should be very much considered part of revolutionary violence, too.

Once Tsarist authorities had lost control of the streets, especially after 27 February 1917, Tsarist symbols were torn down and destroyed. Chief among them was the Tsarist double-headed eagle. According to historians Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, “roasting eagles” – that is, burning and melting down Tsarist insignia – had already begun by 28 February. Alongside Tsarist eagles, other insignia was also caught up in the destruction, including American eagles. Some worried foreigners hung signs above their statues and property declaring, for example, “This eagle is Italian” (which apparently did nothing to stop the crowds).

"Roasting Eagles": Crowds in Petrograd burn Tsarist insignia. Credit: public domain, via Wikipedia.

Portraits and statues also became targets of popular violence and destruction. In Petrograd, statues of the Tsars in the Circuit Court Building were trashed by riotous crowds, who then set the building on fire. In Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine, a statue of Prime Minister (1906-1911) Peter Stolypin was brought down in front of crowds of protestors.

One of the most remarkable acts of symbolic destruction came in the military, where soldiers increasingly refused to acknowledge officers who wore Tsarist insignia on their epaulettes (shoulder-boards). In some cases, officers had epaulettes torn from their uniforms by angry soldiers on the streets.

 

Conclusions

Overall, far from being a “peaceful” revolution as is sometimes suggested, February 1917 unleashed a wave of violence against person and property.

The involvement of the military – intended by authorities to brutally crush protests, enabled not only the mass killing of protestors, but also the subsequent retribution killings of officers. Meanwhile, the protests themselves enabled further violence to take place – both in the short and longer term – by releasing weapons and criminals onto increasingly lawless streets. Symbolic violence spread rapidly, as ordinary people sought to uproot the symbols of the fallen autocracy.

 

Selected Further Reading

Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, Yale University Press (1999)

Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy, Cambridge University Press (1983)

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “Crime, police, and mob justice in Petrograd during the Russian revolutions of 1917”, in Rex A. Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches, Routledge (2004), pp. 46-71

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power, Brill (2017)

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press (1989)

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, Oxford University Press (2017)