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“Bread and herring”: the revolution that began in food queues and ended by overthrowing Tsarism

November 25th 2024

Months before the Russian Revolution, there was another one that ended a centuries-old regime. It was organized by women, fed up with hunger and war. That is what “The workers who overthrew the Tsar” is about.

By Olga Viglieca Strien

I came across this story diagonally because all the stories of the Russian revolution talk about the October Revolution. What's more, the February one is hardly a younger sister, a somewhat sloppy essay. Although it ended with centuries of Tsarism.

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But let us begin at the beginning. For the Russian people, Tsarism was as immemorial and eternal as the onion domes of Orthodox churches, as the endless steppe, as the fragile birches that resist the snow storms, as obedience to the whims of the priests. As the love for the Tsar-father.

However, the World War I shook those certainties that seemed immutable. On March 8, 1917 (February for the Gregorian calendar), the textile workers who participated in the act for the Working Women's Day In Vyborg, the district of the big factories and the working class of Petrograd, they called for a general strike. Fed up with the war that had taken their men, fed up with hunger, fed up with the endless days of work.

Russian women with guns

The leading authority of the day, the Bolshevik metalworker Vasily Kaiurov, tried to dissuade them. It was premature, the general strike had to be prepared for May 1st, a defeat would be difficult to reverse. The murmuring made Kaiurov impatient, who, with some annoyance, as he himself would later say, asked them for more discipline. They were emotional, impulsive… and depoliticized, he told them.

Years ago I came across a book, Midwives of the Revolution, in which the English feminists Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar devoted themselves entirely to those hot days. They told me that the girls did not say anything. But when they returned to the factories they voted for a general strike and went out to find the workers in the other factories to join them.

Hours later, tens of thousands of women were marching to the cry of “bread and herring,” the food of the poor. In this February Revolution, which many consider spontaneous, women were forging an exquisite articulation, probably planned with the Bolsheviks who from the beginning of the war sought them out at the factory gates, determined to recruit them into the revolutionary ranks.

It's a wonderful story that has been told little, which must be rebuilt by scattered chronicles and testimonies. Although the textile workers in February not only prevailed over the vacillations of the Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd. They also had armed detachments of girls capable of going factory by factory until they aroused their peers.

They were able to control public transport: since men had been sent to the front, women were allowed to drive the buses. trams. Then the drivers were able to reorganize the routes so that it was only possible to go to the center of political power and not the other way around.

The most shocking thing was that in the previous months they had won the trust of the soldiers of the regiments that were supposed to protect Nicholas Romanov. So much so that when the Tsar ordered the garrisons stationed in Petrograd to suppress the mobilizations, they laid down their arms.

Even the Cossacks, known for their cruelty, did not agree to shoot those who told them: My son is at the front, my father is at the front, join usBy then, the demand for peace had been added to the bread and herring. And the next day, the crowd resounded with the most daring cry: “Down with autocracy.”

Abandoned by the army, Nicholas, emperor and autocrat, the twentieth Romanov to occupy the throne of all the Russias, abdicatedThe most unlikely thing had happened: a revolution led by women had overthrown Tsarism, and dawn had broken in the most backward country in Asia.

When men were mobilized for the war, the prohibitions that excluded women from many jobs had to be lifted so that they could take their place. Many learned to read and write. By 1917, they were half the working class, but they were still women: after working a thousand hours they had to go from queue to queue. trying to get food for the elderly and for children.

It was there, in those endless queues at 15 degrees below zero, says a chronicler of the time, that women “began to insult God and the Tsar, but more the Tsar.” And the evolution was meteoric until achieving the extraordinary synthesis: “Down with war: peace, bread and land.”

I think I wrote The workers who overthrew the Tsar to share a wonder. That all contemporary revolutions begin for the fury and weariness of women faced with the most intolerable thing: the hunger of their children. This common thread unites the illiterate Slavic women with the teacher who, climbing onto a bus, calculates whether she will be able to pay the rent. Dark feelings that illuminate when they explode.

Source: INFOBAE

One thought on ““Bread and herring”: the revolution that began in food queues and ended up overthrowing Tsarism”
  1. Beautiful article! Once again, women are the only ones who safeguard life and human dignity when the world has become a destructive chaos. That is what I experienced in Argentina starting in 1976 when the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were the only ones who called on the Military Dictatorship for the forced disappearances of people. There are many more examples, no doubt.
    Enrique Recabarren

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