A Try-Out of the February Revolution?

The question about the causes and actors of the February revolution can be understood only in the context of previous events. In this connection, of great importance is the analysis of the causes and circumstances of a strike wave that swept through Petrograd in October 1916. Up to 100 thousand strikers (together with locked-out workers) were involved in these labor unrests that were accompanied by demonstrations and clashes with the police. In many ways (bread shortage as the main motivation, bakeshops pillage, spontaneity, suddenness, involvement of adolescents and women, Cossacks' refusal to shoot into the crowd, solders' desertion to the side of people), these events recall those of February 23-28, 1917. The American historians L. Haimson and E. Brian called them "a try-out of the February revolution". Short information about these strikes is available in the papers of a number of Soviet authors; however, it is presented to some extent tendentiously, based on the desire to show the directing and organizational role of the Bolshevik party. In this regard, it seems important to restore the actual course of the events and give them an objective interpretation. The study shows that the October strikes were the first reaction of Petrograd workers to the emerging food crisis, whereas the February revolution was the reaction to the second, a much more acute phase of this crisis. The mechanism of these events was similar: in the both cases, famine was the major factor pushing for protests. In the both cases, protests were spontaneous and massive, externally similar to a hunger riot. The food crisis determined the army's position as well: both in October and in February, Cossacks and soldiers sympathized with the starving population and refused to use weapons to crackdown demonstrators.