ABSTRACT
The February revolution began in the streets of Petrograd. Witnesses had no doubt of the importance of the masses. Their memoirs capture the drama. Sympathisers like Nikolai Sukhanov, a leading member of the Petrograd Soviet, recalled that, on the critical day of 27 February, when crowds and soldiers fraternized:
military detachments were going past, no one knew where to, some with banners and some without, mingling and fraternising with the crowd, stopping for conversation and breaking up into argumentative groups. Faces were burning with excitement. The exhortations of countless street orators to stand with the people and not to go against it to the defence of Tsarist absolutism were received as something self-evident and already assimilated. But the excitement on the soldiers’ faces reflected chiefly perplexity and uneasiness. What are we doing and what may come of it? 1
