What were the causes of the February Revolution?
Many events occurred during the lead up to the Revolution; one of the key events was when the Tsar was abdicated. Many Russian people were not happy with high prices, food shortages and the disastrous war. Russian workers demanded higher wages, but when the Tsar refused to increase them, they went on strike at the Putilov engineering works in the capital of Russia, Petrograd. As three days passed more and more workers went on strike and 40, 000 workers began to demand for higher wages. The factory soon shut down and the strikers were soon attacked by the army, ending in some of the strikers being viciously murdered. The Tsar also angered the Russian people by ending the Duma, which although was not very powerful, it was the only parliament that could vaguely help the country. On March 12th soldiers refused to serve the Tsar, they joined them instead and demanded a new government. The Tsar realised that he was unwanted as a ruler so he abdicated on the 15th of March, 1917.
Most of Russia was a rural country and over 90% of the population were peasants that worked on the land. Although the peasants were the people that looked after the land, very rarely did they own any of it and they barely could scratch a living of what wages they received. All of the profits were taken by the landowners (aristocracy), who never actually visited their property but took the money from the peasants slaving work. The farming was also in great need of modernisation as all the peasant worked with old farming tools and used the same method of farming as they did centuries ago, which was a very ineffective system. Compared to other large countries in Europe Russia as economically backwards, until industrialisation began to occur and factories began to be built. A range of industries began to form like no other European country, iron and steel, textiles and coal mining began to emerge in Russia. These industries needed workers so peasants began to move to the towns and work in the factories, these peasants were know as the proletariat. More and more peasant began to move to the larger cities to fill the job vacancies, with too many workers crowded into one city, living and working conditions became appalling. There was economic depression spreading through the towns as there had been bad harvest and food shortages, strikes and violence began to break out. The Tsar simply would not listen to his people and sent his army to get rid of the protests, which only increased peoples despair. Lives of the poor in Russia didn’t seem to be improving vastly. Through the protests and violence the Tsar realised that some small changes had to be made, he introduced the October manifesto which granted the freedom of speech. He also agreed to the election of a parliament by the people named Duma. Though the Russian people were extremely pleased with these changes, the joy of it was short lived. People soon realised that the Duma had no real power, as the Tsar could dissolve any laws that he was not in favour of and the voting was always in the support of the landowner (there votes were worth 600 times more than a peasant).The Tsar had given the peasants false hope that autocracy had ended but this was not the case.
