February revolution in Russia

© keypix Minister of Justice Alexander Kerenski (r.)

The First World War has aggravated the deep-seated economic and social crisis in Russia even more. Military defeat seems unavoidable. The people are starving. Worker’s uprisings and mutinies by soldiers take place all over the country. On 28 February 1917, the bourgeois parties in parliament, the Duma, form a provisional government under the leadership of Alexandr Kerenski. Shortly afterward, on 11 March, Tsar Nicholas II decrees the dissolution of parliament and issues orders to shoot the insurgents. However, the soldiers refuse to obey. Four days later, after his brother refused to assume the crown, Nicholas II abdicates. On 21 March he is arrested and exiled to Siberia with his family. The „February Revolution“ of 1917 ends tsarist rule in Russia. According to the conventional Gregorian calculation of time in Western Europe, in contrast to the Julian calendar then in effect in Russia, the uprising did not begin in February but rather in March.