"Women's Day" as a pretext for the beginning of the revolution

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The beginning of the February Revolution coincided with the celebration of International Women's Day: women played an important role in the revolutionary coup.

On February 23, 1917, or March 8 according to the Gregorian calendar, women took to the streets of Petrograd early in the morning. The rally began on the Vyborgskaya side, where the factories were located, the workers of which became the first participants in the action.

Their demands were understandable, women came up with the slogan "War, high prices and the position of women workers." “Something is starting to happen! There were big riots on the Vyborg side because of the grain difficulties,”the Russian artist Alexander Benois wrote at the time in his diary.

The atmosphere in the city was tense. Petrograd was covered with snow, which caused problems with the supply of grain. Brought was immediately swept off the shelves, not everyone was enough, so from early in the morning long queues lined up in front of the shops.

The women, who were in the majority in these lines, easily picked up the motto of the workers who had come out and joined the demonstration. In addition to bread, they demanded that their husbands, sons and brothers be returned from the protracted war, which by that time had lasted for several years. The departure of Emperor Nicholas II to Mogilev also added fuel to the fire: the head of state left the capital on February 22.

"Women's Day" as a pretext for the beginning of the revolution

In general, by 1917, the Petrograd workers already had the experience of celebrating Women's Day. For the first time in the Russian Empire, it was celebrated back in 1913, but after that it was celebrated irregularly. In the capital of the empire at the beginning of the 20th century, special organizations appeared that tried to achieve equal rights with women and men. These included, for example, the Russian Women's Mutual Benevolent Society, the Women's Equality Union or the Women's Progressive Party.

Initially, a small demonstration, which began on the Vyborg side, gathered more and more participants. Shouts began to be heard: "On the Nevsky!" So women pushed the Petrograd revolutionaries to take action. In his work History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky even noted that during the riots, women workers acted more selflessly than men: they, in the words of the "demon of the revolution", tried to grab their arms and persuade the soldiers to join the demonstrators.

In total, according to historians, almost 130 thousand workers from 50 enterprises took part in protest actions that day in the capital. Thus, practically every third worker in Petrograd took part in the demonstration. The women set an example - they rushed to the very center of the city. The police prevented this by blocking the roads. However, the protesters still found ways to get through: someone walked on the frozen ice, and someone was able to slip through the cordons of the mounted police one by one.

Revolutionary Petrograd, seized by unrest

Nicholas II himself did not seem to be worried about the events in the capital. On that day, he wrote in his diary: “I read all my free time a book about the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar. Dined with all the foreigners and ours. In the evening he wrote and drank tea together. While the emperor was in Mogilev, workers joined the women in Petrograd - in the evening the crowd was on the outskirts of the very center of the city - on Suvorovsky Prospect.

People walked towards Nevsky, ignoring the demands of the police to stop. The slogans, despite the orderly change in the composition of the rally, sounded the same - the protesters demanded to establish food supplies and end the bloody war. Then the demonstrators dispersed peacefully, but such a large-scale action gave impetus to new performances.

During a meeting of the State Duma, a deputy from the moderate wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party Matvey Skobelev, in particular, said: “These unfortunate half-starved children and their mothers, wives, mistresses, for more than two years meekly stood at the doors of the shops and waited for bread, finally got out of patience and, perhaps, helplessly and still hopelessly, peacefully went out into the street and still hopelessly cry out for bread and bread."

Events developed catastrophically for the government: at a meeting held on the day of the first meeting, the Petrograd mayor, realizing the scale of popular demonstrations, transferred part of his powers to the military, who were now supposed to maintain order in the city.

The demonstrations, as one might assume, were not limited to one day - a general strike began in Petrograd, in which more than 200 thousand workers took part. Enterprises in the city stood up, spontaneous rallies arose everywhere, which were immediately joined not only by workers, but also by students from the capital.

The police were inactive, while the military threw their forces to guard important administrative buildings. The mass of dissatisfied people who were ready to defend their rights on the street was growing. The government was forced to resign and resign, and a few days later Nicholas II abdicated the throne. "Women's Day", as the prominent Soviet diplomat Fyodor Raskolnikov later wrote, was destined to become the first day of the revolution.

Emancipation of women: the Provisional government makes concessions

Petrograd women workers, I must say, did not stop there: on the very day of the abdication of the Russian emperor, several women's organizations in the city sent a statement to the Provisional Government: it said that women should participate in the work of the Constituent Assembly. Having received no answer, women again took to the streets of Petrograd on March 19 to declare their demands - now they were about civil liberties and universal suffrage.

The 40,000-strong demonstration came to the Tauride Palace, where the Provisional Government was located. The Chairman of the State Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, had to promise that he would soon take up the solution of the “women's issue”. In the summer of 1917, the government passed a law that allowed all women over the age of 21 to vote in elections. Russia turned out to be the first major power in the world in which women received the same voting rights as men.