Tag: Tsar Nicholas II

Demonstration by Women Textile Workers Starts Russian Revolution

8th March 1917

On this day in Petrograd, women textile workers began a demonstration demanding ‘Bread and Peace’ and an end to World War I, to food shortages and to Tsarism. Their action marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Seven days later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. After the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks began to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March as it marked the beginning of the revolutionary changes, but it was not officially declared as such for some time. When the United Nations started marking the event in 1975, the date of 8th March was considered to be the most appropriate.

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Start of the First Russian Revolution

22nd January 1905

On this day a peaceful procession of workers was fired upon by Tsar Nicholas II’s guards outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg in what would later be known as ‘Bloody Sunday‘. It was the start of the First Russian Revolution and was followed by a series of demonstrations and strikes which were all brutally repressed by the tsar’s troops. In June, sailors on the battleship Potemkin undertook a famous mutiny, and in October, a strike by railway workers turned into a general strike in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. However, after some temporary concessions, the tsar’s autocratic rule was restored by June 1907. Lenin later described the Revolution of 1905 as the “dress rehearsal” without which the “victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible.”

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