ysis, and reports of corruption, dissolution, and incompetence in the Imperial government circulated widely.
Nicholas’s presence at the front did not change Russian or German strategy or the arithmetic of war. By the end of October 1916, around 1.7 million Russian soldiers had been killed, 2 million had become prisoners of war, and 1 million were missing. The army’s morale broken by the continuing string of military defeats, mutinies became common, and Russian soldiers refused to fight. The elites represented in the Duma warned Nicholas in November 1916 that disaster would befall the country unless a constitutional form of government, like the one he promised in 1905, was put in place. By this point, most of the Russian people were losing patience with the pace of change; constitutional questions were only important insofar as they bore on existential ones. Nicholas and his Romanov dynasty came to represent failed and inept policies and were the obvious targets for popular discontent. The overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the popular seizure of power were on the horizon.
The February Revolution was the result of an acute economic and political crisis caused by an ossified political and economic system that was incapable of responding to the rigors of modern, industrialized warfare. The revolution, an unplanned event, was the outcome of years of strikes and street protests that had weakened the regime. When the people of the capital, Petrograd, staged huge rallies against the war and protested the massive food shortages in the city in February 1917, the demonstrations turned violent. Large numbers of city residents demanded change and clashed with police and soldiers. Reconstituted soviets called a general strike, the majority of soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd defected to the strikers, and the citizenry occupied the city’s most strategic places. Without the loyalty of his troops, people, and advisors and the legitimacy of his regime shattered, Nicholas abdicated, and the mighty Russian autocracy disintegrated overnight.
In a nearly bloodless transition of power, a provisional government was formed. Its members believed that their main task was to rule as an interim government until a constitutional convention could establish a new democratically based governmental system for Russia. By June 1917, the driving personality behind the provisional government was a social revolutionary (i.e., agrarian socialist) named Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970). He continued Russian participation in a war it could never win, refused to redistribute large estates to land-hungry peasants, could not supply the cities with food, and would not expropriate factory owners to permit workers’ control. Between February and October, Bolshevik activists worked to foment change through the Petrograd and Moscow soviets and other mass organizations. In his April Theses, N. Lenin (1870–1924), the leader of the Bolsheviks, opposed the government’s policies with the slogans “All Power to Soviets” and “Land, Bread, and Peace.” These catchphrases appealed to Russia’s peasantry, urban proletariat, and soldiers. “All Power to Soviets” was Lenin’s way of making grassroots participatory democratic organs the font of political power in Russia, rather than the Provisional Government, which was based on a Duma elected by restricted franchise under the old autocracy. Lenin recognized that there were two parallel systems of government operating (dual power) and encouraged Russian activists in the soviets to challenge and ultimately take state power away from the elite classes and put it in the hands of the urban and rural working classes for the benefit of the Russian people. “Land, Bread, and Peace” referred to specific Bolshevik proposals to end people’s suffering, exploitation, and oppression: organize the distribution of land tied up in large aristocratic estates to the peasants who worked them (and were already seizing the land), give urban workers bread (food), establish workers’ control in industry, and withdraw Russia from an imperialist war so soldiers co