Historical Babes: Women's March on Petrograd, 1917

I do feel bad about my delinquency in posting recently especially since March is women’s history month – it’s literally a month dedicated to historical babes. Lately, things like being a teacher of human children and being an adult human person have prevented me from putting my butt in my chair and writing a post. The posts can take a few hours from start to finish, depending on how much research I do, and grading a hundred or so essays has a way of making one hate words. But an incident this week at school inspired me…

As you may know – and I must admit that I had forgotten – the UN declared March 8^th to be International Women’s Day in 1975. In my school district, we have had a long, long warm winter without any snow! If you have ever been a teacher you know how valuable and refreshing the occasional snow day can be. If you have never been a teacher, don’t begrudge us our snow days until you have spent at least a week teaching.

ANYWAY, when I walked into work on Wednesday morning, some of my male coworkers were discussing the fact that another local school district had cancelled school because so many teachers had put in for leave to participate in the Day Without A Woman protest in Washington, DC. Without enough substitutes to fill the vacancies, the district, and a few others in our area, had no choice but to close for the day. (Don’t feel too bad for them: they were able to put a good spin on it and make themselves look very magnanimous.) My male co-workers (all in good fun) proceeded to tease one of my female coworkers and me for not taking the day off of work so that the school district would close, and not even having the decency to wear red – which one was apparently supposed to do in solidarity with the march. I didn’t know. My female coworker, being a good history teacher, decided to look up the history of International Women’s Day, and this is what we learned:

Wednesday, March 8^th, 2017 was the centennial of the beginning of the Russian Revolution.

Yes, that Russian Revolution. And it was sparked by a protest of women – not men. (Okay. There were men there too.)

International Women’s Day, although not declared until 1975, has its roots in protests of the early 20^th century, mostly organized by socialists. (Gasp! Not socialists!) The goals of these protests included improved working conditions, rights for women workers, political and voting rights for women and eventually were also used to protest World War I – you know, just a random silly little conflict that socialists tended to be against, viewing it as a needlessly destructive capitalist, imperialist game. I could easily write a whole other post about the role of women in World War I (in fact I probably will) but for now it is important to remember that NOT ALL WOMEN HAVE THE SAME OPINION. Women, like men, tend to relate more closely with their race, ethnicity, and/or social class than their gender. What this means for World War I is that a woman’s social role, age, race, ethnicity, culture, or religion was more likely to influence her opinion on the war than her mere femaleness, a fact easily demonstrated by the variety of women’s different beliefs about and responses to the war. In this post, I happen to be writing about the women who were against it.

I actually misled you with the pictures of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. There were two Russian Revolutions in 1917: one in February (by the Gregorian calendar) and the other in October (by the Gregorian calendar). The Bolsheviks came to power after the October Revolution (or November – depending on who’s counting) and the women’s march started the February (March???) Revolution that led to the Czar’s abdication.

While World War I was not a picnic for anyone, it was particularly difficult in Russia, a vast country with plenty of men to send to the frontlines to die, but with a decrepit, ineffective, autocratic government and an underdeveloped industrial sector. World War I was a war between industrial giants. Russian industry could not keep up with military demand in part because the sea routes through which Russia usually received raw materials were cut off. Due to the size of Russia’s population, the empire could raise a large enough army, but the problems in the industrial sector made it impossible to adequately supply this army. The large army took workers away not only from factory jobs, but also from agricultural production, leading to food shortages. In case the shortages of food and supplies weren’t bad enough, whatever supplies did exist were distributed at a glacial pace by Russia’s inadequate rail system. Undersupplied, underfed soldiers mutinied and deserted at alarming rates, while underfed, undersupplied industrial workers mutinied in their own way. (You can see how it would be difficult to fight a war under these circumstances, right?)

Like other belligerent nations of World War I, Russia mobilized its economy by opening vacant factory jobs to women and encouraging women to work in order to support the massive, industrial war effort. In 1917, close to one million working women lived in the urban centers of Russia. One million may not sound like a lot by today’s standards, but they were being paid half of what their male counterparts earned, living in squalid conditions, and they were hungry.

On March 4, 1917 (Julian calendar), there were bread riots (carried out mostly by women) in response to an announcement that bread would soon be rationed in Petrograd (St. Petersburg – these nutty Russians with their different city names and different calendars). On March 8, female workers in Petrograd went on strike in recognition of International Women’s Day, which had been established by the Socialist Party several years earlier. The strike turned into a march through Petrograd (100,000 strong) protesting the war, the czar, and the scarcity of bread.

The Russian royal family misread the protest, viewing it as a sort of urban intestinal gas that would soon pass. However, after several days when the protests had not abated, Czar Nicholas ordered the troops stationed in Petrograd to disperse the protesters. The troops chose not to fire on the crowd, and instead, joined the march.

If you are an authoritarian leader and your soldiers refuse to shoot protesters, it is always a bad sign for you.

On March 15, 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated. (As a learned Englishman once said: Beware the Ides of March.) A provisional government came into power and ruled Russia for eight months until Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik buddies crashed the party. Despite the role that women had played in getting the Czar to resign, they had to have a whole other march before the provisional government gave them the right to vote.

The moral of the story? Never underestimate the power of hungry (oops, I mean angry) women.