A strike by female
textile workers celebrating International Women’s Day begins the February Revolution.
The Women’s Day observance had been created in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America
to commemorate a strike by the Ladies Garment Workers the previous year.
The want of bread
continued to be an issue. Though the Bolsheviks had not called for strikes, the
women asked the metal workers of the Vyborg district to support theirs. Soon,
with the Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Social Revolutionary party machineries
behind them, 90,000 workers were in the streets. The demonstrations began on
the mainly industrial Vyborg side of the frozen Neva River. Later they poured
over to the Petersburg side, which held the imperial palace and the seats of
government.
Meanwhile, the
tsar Nicholas II is at the front with his marshals. He is not sent word of the
strikes until the third day.
At this time,
Lenin was an émigré in Berne, Switzerland, Trotsky in New York. Stalin, having
flunked the physical for induction into the Russian army, was held a political
prisoner in Krasnoyarsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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