Welcome to this custom tailored deep dive. We
are really thrilled to have you with us today.
You know, we spend a lot of time unpacking massive
historical events on this show, but today's mission
is something incredibly special. Yeah, it really
is. We are exploring the February Revolution
of 1917, and we're looking at how, in the span
of just eight chaotic days, a 300 -year -old
I mean, the mass of Romanov Empire just completely
collapsed. It's a staggering sequence of events
when you actually sit down and look at the timeline.
It's one of those rare historical moments where
decades of intense pressure suddenly release
all at once. Exactly. And our goal today isn't
to give you that dense, overwhelming history
book feeling. We really want to extract the real
aha moments about how empires actually collapse
in practice. Right, the mechanical failure of
an empire. Yes. all of our insights today from
a highly comprehensive Wikipedia article on the
February Revolution. It details everything from
the street -level protests over bread all the
way up to the high -level military blunders that
just doomed the monarchy. And what makes this
particular source material so compelling is that
it captures the sheer unpredictable chaos of
those eight days perfectly. It really shows how
fragile seemingly permanent power structures
truly are. OK, let's unpack this, because right
off the bat, we need to set the stage. The event
is called the February Revolution. But if you
look at a modern calendar, it actually happened
in March. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
that naming quirk is actually a perfect metaphor
for how disconnected Russia was from the rest
of the world at that time. Oh, how so? Well,
modern Europe was using the Gregorian calendar,
which is the one we use today, making the events
fall in March. But the Russian Empire was still
stubbornly using the archaic Julian calendar,
making it February. Just literally living in
the past. Exactly. And that temporal disconnect
is just the tip of the iceberg. This isn't just
a story about a king losing his crown. It is
a master class and what happens when leadership
becomes fatally disconnected from reality. Let's
talk about that disconnect starting with the
deep roots of the conflict. You have imperial
Russia relying on completely archaic social structures.
The vast majority of the population were peasants
who were treated incredibly harshly by a very
small class of landowners. Right. And then working
conditions for the rapidly growing number of
industrial laborers in the cities were just.
abysmal and all the while you've got western
democratic ideals. quietly spreading through
those lower classes. The structural foundation
of the country was fundamentally incompatible
with the modern world it was trying to compete
in. You had this rapidly growing political and
social consciousness among the working class,
the proletariat, that they are trapped in an
autocratic system that stubbornly refused to
modernize or share any real power. I like to
think about it for you, the listener, like this.
Imagine trying to run a sleek, high -demand 20th
century nation using a buggy century operating
system. That's a great way to put it. It might
hold together for a little while if you just
leave it alone, but the moment you put it under
serious stress, run too many intensive programs
at once, the whole system is going to crash.
And that ultimate stress test arrived in the
form of World War I. And what a devastating catalyst
it was. When the war started in 1914, there was
actually a massive surge of nationalism. It temporarily
united the country. People rallied behind the
czar. But they didn't last long, did it? Not
at all. That initial burst of patriotic unity
evaporated rapidly under the sheer weight of
the catastrophic losses they began to suffer
on the Eastern Front. The statistics from the
source are almost hard to comprehend. By early
1917, the Russian military had suffered 9 .15
million casualties. It's just a staggering number.
I really want that number to sink in for a moment
for everyone listening. That is 1 .7 million
killed, almost 5 million wounded. and 2 .5 million
missing or taken prisoner. 9 .15 million people
removed from the workforce from their families,
from the economy. With losses on that unimaginable
scale, morale didn't just dip, it plummeted into
the abyss. Mutinies became incredibly common,
largely due to simple, grinding war -weariness.
Because they were just exhausted. Completely
exhausted. And the troops that were left were
dealing with incompetent commanders and severe
logistical failures. I mean, they didn't have
enough rifles, they didn't have enough boots,
they didn't even have enough food. By the time
we get to the eve of the revolution, the desertion
rate was running at around 34 ,000 soldiers every
single month. So the military is physically fracturing.
The operating system is crashing. And right at
this moment, Tsar Nicholas II makes a decision
in the summer of 1915 that becomes a catastrophic
PR and strategic blunder. Oh, this was a massive
mistake. He announces that he is leaving the
capital to take personal command of the army
at the front lines. What's fascinating here is
how universally he was advised against doing
this by his own ministers. It was disastrous
on three distinct levels. First, it tied the
monarchy directly and personally to every single
unpopular military defeat. Right, before he could
just blame his generals. Exactly. Now, if the
army lost, it was explicitly the Tsar's fault.
Second, he was simply a poor military leader
who constantly irritated his own commanders by
interfering with their strategies. And what's
the third level of that disaster? I mean, he
physically leaves Petrograd. Precisely. Because
he was physically away at a military headquarters
hundreds of miles from the capital, he wasn't
there to actually govern the country during a
massive domestic crisis. Leaving a massive power
vacuum. So who steps in to fill it while he's
off playing general? That responsibility fell
to his wife, Zarina Alexandra, and her closest
confidant, the highly controversial mystic Grigori
Rasputin. Oh boy. And you have to remember, the
Tsarina was incredibly unpopular to begin with.
She was born German and Russia was currently
fighting a brutal war against Germany. So rumors
were constantly flying that she was actively
working as a German spy to sabotage the war effort.
Which is just a terrible look for a leadership
team. There's this amazing historical detail
from the article during her oversight known as
the ministerial leapfrog. The turnover rate is
unbelievable. Just listen to this. In 17 months
of the Tsarina managing the domestic government,
Russia went through four prime ministers, five
ministers of the interior and three war ministers
in just 17 months. It's the equivalent of a modern
corporation completely replacing its entire C
-suite every few weeks during a bankruptcy. Nobody
was in office long enough to even learn the basic
functions of their job, let alone govern effectively
or solve the mounting logistical nightmares.
And the domino effect of that incompetence is
immediate. The railways, which were the lifeline
of the empire, became completely overstretched
and disorganized. Because the trains couldn't
run efficiently, massive food and fuel shortages
hit the cities. Right. Inflation skyrocketed,
making the money people did have worthless while
their wages completely stagnated. The situation
in the capital Petrograd was becoming an explosive
powder keg. Which brings us to a moment of warning
that is honestly hard to look at in hindsight.
The president of the Duma, which was essentially
Russia's version of a parliament, a man named
Mikhail Rodzyanko, sees the writing on the wall.
He really did. He sends a desperate pleading
telegram directly to the Tsar at the front lines.
He warns him that the capital is descending into
total anarchy. The government is paralyzed, transport
and food supplies are completely disrupted, and
people are freezing and starving in the streets.
Razyanko ends the telegram by begging the Tsar
to form a new government immediately, stating,
Any procrastination is tantamount to death. A
crystal clear, undeniable red flag from one of
the highest placed, most loyal officials in the
empire. So how does the czar react to this dire
warning? He reads it, gets irritated and says,
again, This fat Rodzianko has written me lots
of nonsense to which I shall not even deign to
reply. He calls him fat and ignores it. He doesn't
just ignore it. He literally orders the Duma
to dissolve itself instead of listening to their
advice. It is the ultimate example of a leader
completely isolated in his own echo chamber.
He fundamentally misunderstood the reality outside
of his military headquarters. utterly failing
to grasp the severity of the crisis happening
in his own streets. I really want you to think
about that dynamic for a second. Think about
times in your own life, maybe in your career,
or in organizations you've been a part of, where
leadership ignored glaring red flags simply because
they were too comfortable in their isolated bubbles.
It happens all the time. When leaders dismiss
the very people trying to save them, it's just
writing nonsense. Structural collapse isn't just
a possibility. It becomes inevitable. And that
collapse finally arrives on the freezing streets
of Petrograd. So you have this czar isolated
in his echo chamber, ignoring red flags. But
you can only ignore starting citizens for so
long. The breaking point finally arrives on February
23 in the old Russian calendar, which is March
8, International Women's Day. It's crucial to
note that it was the women of Petrograd who truly
sparked this revolution. The government had recently
begun rationing flour and bread. The winter had
been incredibly harsh, the rail lines were failing,
and rumors of even worse food shortages were
rapidly circulating. People were desperate. Women,
many of whom were exhausted industrial workers
themselves, had been standing in these endless
freezing bread lines for hours on end. And on
that day, they finally had enough. They started
marching. They protested the bread rationing,
but they didn't just wander aimlessly. They marched
directly to the nearby factories. They actively
called out to the metal workers, the mechanics,
recruiting over 50 ,000 workers to drop their
tools and join them in a massive strike. They
were demanding an end to food shortages, an end
to the brutal war and an end to the autocracy
entirely. This wasn't a small localized riot
that the police could easily break up. It was
an avalanche. Within a single day, nearly 200
,000 protesters filled the streets of the capital.
The sheer mass of humanity completely overwhelmed
the local authorities. Faced with this massive
uprising, the Tsar makes another deeply flawed
decision from afar. He wires General Khabalov,
the military commander in Petrograd, and orders
him to suppress the impermissible rioting with
rifle fire. He decides the solution is to shoot
his own starving people to clear the streets.
But there was a massive problem with that order,
right? A critical logistical problem. The battle
-hardened, fiercely loyal troops that usually
enforce the Tsar's will are all away fighting
at the Eastern Front. The military garrison left
behind in Petrograd is massive, over 150 ,000
men, but they are mostly war -weary conscripts.
Just regular guys. Yeah, these are young men,
fresh from the villages or older reservists.
They have zero desire to go to the front lines
and they have even less desire to fire on their
own neighbors and fellow citizens protesting
for bread. Which leads to the critical turning
point of the entire revolution. On February 26,
after some initial deadly clashes in the streets
where soldiers did fire on crowds, the psychological
toll breaks the military. Specifically, the fourth
company of the Pavlovsky Reserve Regiment learns
that another detachment had clashed with demonstrators,
killing civilians. The realization of what they
are being asked to do really sets in. And they
snap. They do. Instead of following orders to
suppress the crowds, they break out of their
barracks, they mutiny, and they actually open
fire on the mounted police who are trying to
control the protesters. That is the moment the
power dynamic permanently shifts. The military,
the ultimate enforcer of the state, had officially
switched sides. Over the next day, the bulk of
the entire Petrograd garrisoned mutinies. They
seized the arsenal. grab 40 ,000 rifles and start
openly distributing them to the striking workers.
The police are hunted down, government buildings
are set on fire, and the authority of the Tsar
in the capital simply evaporates. Here's where
it gets really interesting because revolutions
aren't just about winning chaotic street battles.
They are about controlling the infrastructure,
the flow of information and the resources. Absolutely.
And that brings us to a brilliant, quiet, strategic
move by a man named Alexander Bublykov. Bubakov
was acting as a commissar for a newly formed
group called the Provisional Committee of the
State Duma. These were the politicians desperately
trying to establish some semblance of a new government
amidst the absolute chaos of the mutiny. While
everyone else is focused on the street fighting,
Bubakov, with the support of a few mutinied soldiers,
physically takes over the Ministry of the Ways
of Communication. The railway ministry. Why is
the transportation building the most important
piece on the chessboard right now? Because in
1917, Russia The railways were the central nervous
system of the entire empire. Controlling the
trains meant controlling all military and supply
transport. But even more importantly, controlling
the railways meant controlling the railway telegraph
system. Which is huge. The telegraph was essentially
the Internet of 1917. It was the only way information
moved faster than a train or a horse. And Bublikov
uses that telegraph system to send a message
that literally changes the course of history.
He broadcasts a telegram to every single railway
station across the vast Russian Empire from the
battlefront all the way to Vledovostok. He announces
that the old government has fallen and the Duma
is now in charge. There's a brilliant insight
regarding this moment. By sending this telegram,
Bobikov basically adjusted reality to fit the
narrative he wanted. He told the entire country
that the revolution was already a total success,
a done deal, before the Tsar had even officially
abdicated. Fake it till you make it, but on a
massive geopolitical scale. He forces everyone
to accept the new reality. And then Bublyakov
does something even more tactically impactful.
He issues a strict order prohibiting any trains
from traveling within 265 kilometers of Petrograd.
That 265 kilometer exclusion zone is arguably
the biggest tactical aha moment of this entire
event. The Tsar, finally realizing the capital
was actually falling, had dispatched a heavily
armed loyalist force under General Ivanov to
crush the rebellion. But he couldn't get there.
Right. Because Bublikov controlled the rail dispatchers
and the tracks, Ivanov's troops were literally
physically blocked from reaching the capital.
Think about that 265 kilometer exclusion zone.
General Ivanov has all the guns, all the trained
soldiers, and all the royal authority. But because
Bublikov controls the train tracks and the telegraph
wires, Ivanov is stuck in the mud. His trains
are diverted, stalled, and left sitting on the
tracks. It completely redefines what power means
in a modernizing society. You don't need to defeat
an army in open battle if you can just cancel
their train ticket. The loyalist army had weapons.
but they couldn't get to the fight. And with
his reinforcements completely blocked and his
own royal train halted and diverted by rebellious
railway workers, the Tsar was effectively neutralized.
Which brings us to the surprisingly anti -climactic
fall of the Romanovs. Stranded on a train in
the city of Skav, completely cut off from his
capital and surrounded by generals who realize
the situation is hopelessly lost, Nicholas II
finally faces reality. On March 2, he abdicates.
He steps down. signing away the throne for himself
and his young son. The next day, the crown is
offered to his brother, Grand Duke Michael. But
Michael looks at the absolute chaos, the armed
workers and the mutinied soldiers, and wisely
realizes he would have zero support. He refuses
the crown unless it is offered by a democratically
elected constituent assembly in the future. And
just like that, it's over. Without a grand final
battle over a single weekend, a 300 -year -old
dynasty simply evaporates into thin air. But
taking down an empire is one thing. Figuring
out who is actually in charge the day after is
much messier. And it was incredibly messy. The
immediate aftermath of the February Revolution
is defined by a strange political concept known
as Devoe Evlasti, or dual power. I want to give
you an analogy for this dual power situation
because it is a wild way to try and run a country.
Imagine a massive corporation where the board
of directors has all the legal titles, the fancy
corner offices and the checkbooks. Okay. But
the workers union has actually seized the factory
floor. They hold the keys to the machinery and
they control the shipping docks. The board can
write all the memos they want, but absolutely
nothing gets built or shipped unless the union
agrees to it. That is precisely the dynamic that
took hold in Russia. You had two completely separate
factions claiming authority, operating in parallel.
On one side, you had the provisional government.
They're mostly made up of those bourgeois or
middle to upper class members of the old Duma.
The polity. Yes. They held the formal legal titles.
They sat in the government buildings and they
held the international recognition from Russia's
allies. The board of directors in our analogy.
Right. But on the other side, you had the Petrograd
Soviet. Now a Soviet is essentially a democratically
elected council. This massive council represented
the actual workers and the rank -and -file soldiers.
They didn't want to get bogged down in formal
government administration, but they held the
actual practical power on the streets. And the
Soviet proved exactly who was really boss on
March 1st by issuing something called Order No.
1. This is an incredible document. It basically
commanded the military soldiers to only obey
the orders of the Provisional Government if those
orders did not conflict with the Soviets' decisions.
It was a brilliant paralyzing move. It completely
stripped the formal government of its military
authority. The Provisional Government had the
fancy titles, but the Soviet had the loyalty
of the men with the guns. So you have this incredibly
fragile balancing act. And the provisional government,
which eventually comes to be led by a man named
Alexander Kerensky, makes a massive fatal flaw.
They are trying to balance this impossible dual
power situation. And what do they decide to do?
They decide to try and keep Russia in World War
I. It was political suicide. They chose to honor
their international alliances rather than listen
to the desperate cries of their own people. The
war was the incredibly unpopular, devastating
catalyst that caused the revolution in the first
place. And on top of that, they failed to solve
the domestic food shortages or the land disputes.
They failed to deliver on the very things the
people had marched and died for in February.
And by failing to address those root causes,
peace and bread, they left the door wide open
for radical elements to exploit the continued
misery of the population. which sets the stage
perfectly for a radical Marxist faction known
as the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin. He
returns from exile with a simple, incredibly
effective slogan, peace, bread and land. Very
catchy. He capitalized entirely on the provisional
government's failures, ultimately leading to
the October Revolution later that same year,
where the Bolsheviks violently seized total control
and dismantled that fragile dual power system.
So how do we actually make sense of all this
chaos? Because history is highly subjective,
it's really useful to look at how different schools
of thought view these exact same eight days.
There are three main lenses historians use to
make sense of the February Revolution, starting
with the communist view. This raises an important
question about how we interpret history. And
just to be clear, we are simply reporting on
what the source material outlines here without
taking any political stance. Absolutely. Just
laying out the perspectives from the article.
Right. So communist historians generally interpret
the February Revolution as an inevitable organized
movement driven by the modernizing masses and
the peasants. They see it fundamentally as a
class struggle. a deliberate push to overthrow
an oppressive bourgeois and aristocratic class
to bring about an era of industrialization and
proletarian freedom. In this view, they actually
place very little emphasis on World War I as
the main cause. They see the war as incidental
to the larger class conflict. It's fascinating
that they downplay the war so much. But if you
look at the liberal historians, they take almost
the exact opposite stance. They see the external
pressure of the war as everything. Exactly. The
liberal view acknowledges World War I as the
absolute main catalyst that finally turned public
opinion completely against the Tsar. They argue
that the revolution's ultimate driving goal was
simply to establish a Western -style democracy.
And it was the profound trauma and logistical
failure of the war that finally pushed a moderate
population to demand a new government. And then
you have the third lens, the revisionist view.
Revisionist historians take a broader approach.
They argue that the revolution wasn't just an
inevitable product of World War I, nor was it
a sudden, perfectly organized leap toward industrialization.
They track the pressure much further back. How
far back? They see it as the boiling over of
a massive, deep -rooted institutional crisis,
heavily focused on unresolved land ownership
issues that stretched all the way back to the
era of serfdom in the 1800s. To them, the government
was already rotting from the inside out. The
war was just the final heavy straw on a camel's
back that had been breaking for decades. So what
does this all mean for you? Why does this historical
debate matter today? When you look at massive
paradigm shifts, whether it's the fall of a 300
-year -old empire, a sudden disruption in your
own industry, or a major shift in a market, they
almost never have a single simple cause. They
really don't. They're usually the violent collision
of long -term structural failures, like those
archaic social structures or unresolved land
disputes, meeting a sudden acute crisis like
the devastation of a global war. When an outdated
system that stubbornly refuses to adapt is subjected
to an unprecedented stress test, Collapse isn't
an anomaly. It's the expected result. To quickly
summarize this incredible journey, we've gone
from desperate women protesting freezing bread
lines to a snowballing strike of hundreds of
thousands of workers. We watched the military
fundamentally break and mutiny rather than fire
on their own people. We saw the brilliant tactical
seizure of the railway telegraphs that completely
paralyzed a royal army. An incredible story.
And all of it was fueled by an isolated leader
who dismissed his own people's pain as nonsense.
In just over a week, a dynasty that had ruled
since the 1600s vanished. But before we wrap
up today, I want to leave the listener with one
final, deeply provocative concept from the source
material to mull over. It goes back to Vladimir
Lenin's strategy when he returned to Russia during
that messy period of dual power. The concept
of revolutionary defeatism? Right. When Lenin
returned from Switzerland, he didn't just ask
for a peaceful end to the war. He pushed a highly
radical idea called revolutionary defeatism.
He told his followers that the real enemy wasn't
the foreign German armies they were fighting
in the freezing trenches. He argued that the
real enemy was actually their own domestic leaders.
He was essentially saying the people who govern
you are more dangerous to you than the people
shooting at you. Exactly. He argued that the
domestic leadership was sending the working class
to die in an imperialist war simply to protect
the wealth and capital of the elite. Therefore,
the proletariat's goal shouldn't be to win the
war for their country. Their goal should be to
see their own imperialist government defeated
so that a true socialist revolution could rise
from the ashes. It completely flips the traditional
narrative of patriotism and warfare on its head.
I really want you to ponder that. As you go about
your day, think about how incredibly profound,
how deep a societal collapse must be for a population
to be convinced that their own government, their
own leaders, are a significantly greater threat
to their everyday survival than a literal invading
foreign army. It requires a total fundamental
breakdown of trust between the governed and those
governing them. It really does. Thank you so
much for joining us on this deep dive into the
February Revolution. We hope you pulled some
amazing aha moments out of this history to apply
to the systems, structures, and leadership dynamics
in your own world. Keep questioning the narratives,
keep looking for those long -term structural
cracks, and we will see you on the next deep
dive.