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Russia 1917: From Bread to the Cheka

Summary. In February 1917, women in Petrograd's bread lines helped bring down a 300-year-old monarchy. By December 1917, a new government had created a secret police authorized to punish its enemies by, among other things, taking away their ration cards. This article follows that ten-month road with dates and documents.

About the dates

Russia used the Julian ("Old Style") calendar until February 1918, which ran 13 days behind the Western calendar. Dates below are written Old Style (New Style). That's why the "February" Revolution happened in March by Western reckoning, and the "October" Revolution in November.

1. The bread lines (February 1917)

By early 1917, Russia was two and a half years into the First World War. The war had cost millions of casualties and badly strained the railways, food supply and fuel supply. Heavy snowstorms left thousands of freight cars of food and coal stuck on the rails.1

  • Feb 18 (Mar 3): Workers at the Putilov Works, Petrograd's largest factory, announce a strike.1
  • Feb 23 (Mar 8), International Women's Day: Women angry about bread shortages and rationing march with the strikers. Within a day, crowds swell to nearly 200,000.1
  • Feb 27 (Mar 12): Most of the Petrograd garrison mutinies and joins the crowds. The same day, Duma members form a Provisional Committee, and socialist parties revive the Petrograd Soviet of workers' and soldiers' deputies.1
  • Mar 1 (14): The Soviet issues Order No. 1, telling soldiers to obey the new government's military orders only when they "do not conflict with the orders and resolution of the Soviet."1 From then on, the new government held authority on paper while the Soviet held the soldiers.
  • Mar 2 (15): Nicholas II abdicates. The next day his brother Michael declines the throne, and a Provisional Government is announced. It promises civil liberties and a democratically elected Constituent Assembly.1

The Provisional Government abolished the death penalty, freed political prisoners and declared freedom of the press.1 It also stayed in the war, and it never solved the bread problem.

2. "Peace, Land, Bread" (April–September 1917)

  • Apr 3 (16): Vladimir Lenin returns from exile in Switzerland and issues his April Theses: no support for the Provisional Government, and "All power to the Soviets." Bolshevik slogans promise peace, bread and land.1
  • July 1917, the "July Days": Armed soldiers, sailors and workers pour into Petrograd's streets. The uprising fizzles. The government issues warrants for leading Bolsheviks, and Lenin flees to Finland. Alexander Kerensky becomes head of government.1
  • Aug 27 (Sep 9), the Kornilov Affair: General Lavr Kornilov's troops move toward Petrograd. Kerensky turns to the Soviet for help, and the Bolsheviks and other socialists persuade the troops to stand down. The episode boosts the radical left's standing.1
  • Sep 1 (14): Kerensky proclaims Russia a republic.1

3. The seizure of power (October 1917)

  • Oct 25 (Nov 7): The Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd in the name of the Soviets. On Oct 26 (Nov 8), the Congress of Soviets issues its Decree on Peace and Decree on Land.2

4. The first casualty: the press (October 27, 1917)

Two days after taking power, the new Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), chaired by Lenin, issued the Decree on the Press. It explained that the "bourgeois press" was a weapon that, "in such moments it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine-guns."3

The decree let the government shut down any publication that called for "resistance or insubordination to the Workers' and Peasants' Government" or that would "sow sedition through demonstrably slanderous distortion of facts." It also promised to be temporary:

"The present ordinance is of a temporary nature and will be repealed by a special decree as soon as normal conditions of social life set in."3

Takeaway: the government decided for itself what counted as "slanderous," and "normal conditions" never came.

5. The people vote, and lose (November 1917)

The Constituent Assembly election that every party had promised was held starting Nov 12 (25). Historians usually call it the first free nationwide election in Russian history.4 The Bolsheviks did not win. In the most-cited compiled tallies:4

Party Share of vote Seats
Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) 37.6% 324
Bolsheviks 23.3% 183
Ukrainian SRs and allies 12.7% 110
Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) 4.6% 16
Mensheviks 3.0% 18

Results are incomplete. Voting was interrupted in some districts, and different historians' totals vary somewhat.4

6. "Enemies of the people" (November 28, 1917)

Before the Assembly could meet, Lenin signed a decree aimed at the Kadets, the main liberal, constitutionalist party:

"Members of leading bodies of the Cadet Party, as a party of enemies of the people, are liable to arrest and trial by revolutionary tribunal."5

The decree also ordered local Soviets to "exercise special surveillance over the Cadet Party."5 Takeaway: an elected party's leaders were declared enemies of the people, and the decree took effect "from the time of signing."

7. The Cheka (December 7, 1917)

On Dec 7 (20), 1917, Sovnarkom created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known as the Cheka, under Felix Dzerzhinsky.6 Its approved methods included:

"confiscation, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people etc."6

That brings the story full circle. A revolution that began in the bread lines now had a political police that could take away a citizen's bread. The Cheka started with about 40 officials. By the end of the Civil War, it had at least 200,000 personnel.6

8. The Assembly's thirteen hours (January 1918)

The Constituent Assembly finally met on Jan 5 (18), 1918. It sat for about 13 hours, from 4 p.m. to 5 a.m., and was then dissolved by the Bolshevik-controlled Central Executive Committee.4 Russia's first freely elected national assembly never met again.

Epilogue: 1918

  • Spring 1918: Grain requisitioning begins. Armed "food detachments" are sent into the countryside to seize grain declared "surplus." This escalated into the prodrazverstka quota system in January 1919.7
  • Sep 5, 1918: The Red Terror is formally launched after the attempt on Lenin's life.6
  • Dec 10, 1918: Sovnarkom Decree No. 933, "On the Surrender of Arms," orders the entire population to hand in "rifles, machine guns and revolvers of all systems, cartridges for them, and sabres of every pattern." All existing permits are declared void. Hiding a weapon is punished by one to ten years' imprisonment, and informers who find a hidden working rifle are paid 600 rubles.7

Why it matters today (opinion)

Today's American socialists are not the Bolsheviks, and most of them work through elections. The 1917 record is still worth remembering whenever anyone promises bread, peace and fairness in return for more power:

  1. "Temporary" emergency powers over speech are rarely temporary.
  2. Elections are honored only when they come out right. The Bolsheviks got 23% and closed the Assembly anyway.
  3. Labels come before arrests. "Enemy of the people" came first, and the tribunals followed.
  4. The armed citizen comes last. The Party disarmed the people by decree in 1918, and its own members were allowed to keep a rifle and a revolver each.7

The Founders wrote the opposite into law. Freedom of the press and the right to keep and bear arms are listed in the Bill of Rights, beyond the reach of an ordinary majority's mood.

  1. "February Revolution," Wikipedia (secondary; cites Browder & Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, 1961; Curtiss 1957; Smith 2002; Steinberg 2017): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution. The quoted text of Order No. 1, point 4, is via Browder & Kerensky, p. 40. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  2. First Decrees of Soviet Power (Marxists Internet Archive; table of contents dates the Appeal of Nov 7 (Oct 25) and the Decrees on Peace and Land of Nov 8 (Oct 26), 1917): https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1917/firstdecreesofsovietpower.pdf ↩

  3. Council of People's Commissars, "Decree on the Press," Oct 27 (Nov 9), 1917, from Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 24–25, reproduced by Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (Michigan State University): https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/organs-of-the-press/organs-of-the-press-texts/decree-on-the-press/, and in First Decrees of Soviet Power (link above). ↩↩

  4. "1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election," Wikipedia (secondary; table compiled from Radkey 1989, Spirin 1987 and others; covers dissolution of Jan 5–6 (18–19), 1918): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election ↩↩↩↩

  5. V. I. Lenin, "Decree on the Arrest of the Leaders of the Civil War Against the Revolution," Nov 28, 1917, published in Pravda No. 23 and Izvestia No. 239, Nov 29, 1917; Lenin Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/nov/28.htm ↩↩

  6. "Cheka," Wikipedia (secondary; cites Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police, 1981; Mozokhin; Sovnarkom protocol of Dec 7, 1917): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka ↩↩↩↩

  7. Sovnarkom Decree No. 933, "On the Surrender of Arms" («О сдаче оружия»), Dec 10, 1918, published in Izvestiia VTsIK No. 272, Dec 12, 1918; text (Russian) at Istmat: https://www.istmat.org/node/31996 and the Presidential Library's Electronic Library of Historical Documents: https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/348841-dekret-soveta-narodnyh-komissarov-o-sdache-oruzhiya-10-dekabrya-1918-goda. Our English rendering of the arms list is a translation. On food detachments and prodrazverstka (SNK decree of Jan 11, 1919), see the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library (prlib.ru) collection on the decree, as cited in the Colofornia Dreaming research file The Jackalope: Mythology and Liberty (2026). ↩↩↩