What is my point?

Russian peasant soldiers, and not Petrograd’s workers influenced an outcome of the February Revolution of 1917.

Specifically:

Whenever I hear official versions of the events that led to the February Revolution of 1917, they tend to say how the proletarian forces joined by peasant soldiers took down Russian monarchy. While an overall process might have looked somewhat similar, an analysis of available social and statistical data conducted by Tony Ashworth  suggests a different scenario.

There were around 390,000 workers in Petrograd and 330,000 soldiers stationed in the Petrograd military district on the eve of February Revolution of 1917. So if we trust available historical data, about 20% of Petrograd’s workers were organized on the first day, 41% on the second and 54% on the third day. In other words, there were roughly 78,000 workers actively participating in various events. At the same time, almost 95% of soldiers from the Petrograd Military District were active or passive mutineers in about 24 hours since the first events took place. We are talking about 313,500 riflemen here.

Sure, majority of soldiers represented passive mutineers, however, they restrained from using the force against fellow riflemen who experienced the horrors of trench warfare. So we have 60,000 active mutineers who realize that 250,000 rifles will not fire on them from behind. There is no loyal military force to suppress mutineers when their numbers are really small in the early hours of the first day. The momentum is gaining traction – next stop is the October Revolution of 1917.

Any other ideas?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.