TRANSLATOR�S NOTE
EARLY in March, 1917, the two and a half years of war against the Central Powers, Russian defeats, appalling casualties, administrative chaos, food shortage and rising prices, culminated in a series of riots and strikes in Petrograd, which rapidly spread to other Russian cities.
By 9th March the number of strikers in the capital had increased to nearly 200,000 and in a collision between the strikers and the police, a force of Cossacks called out to support the latter fraternized with the strikers. This marked the actual beginning of the March Revolution.
Forty-eight hours later Petrograd was in a state of anarchy and the President of the Duma, Rodzianko, telegraphed to the Tsar begging him to dismiss his unpopular ministers and to replace them by men enjoying the trust of the nation.
Influenced by the Empress, Nicholas II ignored the appeal and instructed the commander of the Petrograd garrison to suppress the revolt by force. Attempts to carry out these orders led to a general mutiny of the troops in the capital and to a massacre of officers by the sailors in Kronstadt.
On the night of 13th March the Tsar left Mogilev for Tsarskoe Selo against the advice of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The imperial train was stopped at Pskov, where the Emperor was met by the emissaries of the Duma. The concessions which he then offered to
make came too late and the outbreak of the Revolution forced Nicholas II to abdicated on 14th March in favour of his brother the Grand Duke Michael who, however, refused the throne for personal reasons which are recorded in chapter xvii, where the author reproduces the personal papers of the Grand Duke which were entrusted to him for publication.
A Provisional Government—the actual composition of which varied almost every day—was forthwith nominated by the Duma from representatives of all its political parties. The leader of the Labour Party, Kerensky, was the most prominent member of this Provisional Government which was only intended to remain in being until such time as a National Assembly of properly elected representatives of all Russia could meet and decide on the form of constitution to be adopted.
The seat of the Provisional Government was the Mariinsky Palace in Petrograd.
The �Council of Solders� and Workers� Deputies� (or Soviet) was an assembly nominally consisting of elected delegates from the army and every section of the working classes and was not a legislative body. Soviets were first established in Russia during the short-lived Revolution of 1905, and that which met in the Taurid Palace in March, 1917, was representative of the Left Wing political parties of the entire country, as opposed to the local Soviets simultaneously formed in every village, town and district of Russia. The Petrograd Soviet included representatives of the armies at the front and all the Left Wing members of the Provisional Government itself
which thereby came under its control and lost its own authority.
This was the situation when the Author, Colonel B.V. Nikitine, arrived in Petrograd from the front on 20th March 1917.