Two Revolutions in One Year: Russia in 1917

Russia had two revolutions in 1917, eight months apart, and they need separate explanations. The first, in February by the Russian calendar, ended the monarchy and was not planned or led by any political party. The second, in October, was the Bolshevik seizure of an authority that had been divided since February. Between them lies a period in which the outcome was genuinely undecided, and compressing the year into a single arc — tsar falls, Bolsheviks rise — deletes precisely the part that explains anything.

The calendar trap, resolved

Before the sequence, deal with the thing that confuses every reader once: the October Revolution happened in November.

Russia was still using the Julian calendar in 1917 and changed to the Gregorian in 1918. The United States Naval Observatory sets out why the two diverge: the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, "introduced a simple leap year rule: insert an extra day every four years", and the observatory notes that this "does not produce a precise match to the solar year", so "the date of the astronomical vernal equinox slowly drifted". The Gregorian reform of 1582 corrected the accumulated drift and changed the rule, dropping the leap day in century years not divisible by 400.

The consequence is arithmetic you can do yourself. The 1582 reform opened a ten-day gap. The Julian calendar then kept leap days in 1700, 1800 and 1900 that the Gregorian dropped, widening the gap by one day each time. By the early twentieth century it stood at thirteen days. That is why Russian dates from this period are given Old Style and New Style, and why 25 October and 7 November name the same day. Our guide to how calendars and dating systems work covers the general mechanism; the point here is only that nothing mysterious is happening.

February: a collapse nobody organised

The February revolution began with bread queues, strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd in a winter of acute shortage, in the third year of a war going badly. What turned protest into revolution was the garrison. Soldiers ordered to suppress the demonstrations refused and joined them, and at that point the state had no instrument of coercion left in its own capital.

Nicholas II abdicated. Two bodies emerged with competing claims: a Provisional Government drawn largely from the existing parliamentary elite, and the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies. This is the arrangement usually called dual power — the government had legal authority, the Soviet had practical authority over the soldiers, the railways and much of the industrial workforce.

Note what is absent from this account. No party organised February. The Bolshevik leadership was largely in exile or abroad. Reading October back into February — treating the first revolution as the opening act of the second — is the single most common distortion in popular narratives of the year.

The eight months in between

The Provisional Government made one decision that shaped everything after it: continuing the war.

That choice is defensible on its own terms — treaty obligations, the expectation of Allied credit, fear of German terms — and it was fatal, because the demands driving the February crisis were peace, land and bread, and continuing the war made all three harder to deliver. A summer military offensive failed. Inflation accelerated. Peasant seizures of land proceeded without waiting for legislation. An attempted move against the government from the military right in the late summer was defeated with the help of the very forces the government most feared, which armed and legitimised them.

By the autumn the Provisional Government had very little support left to lose, and the Bolshevik slogans mapped directly onto the unmet demands. The October seizure of power in Petrograd was, at the moment it happened, a comparatively small operation. What followed — a civil war lasting years — was not.