Word: petrograd
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...only the estimated 6,000,000 Russian dead and wounded in the trenches. At home, the winter had been cruelly severe even by Siberian standards. Russia's rickety railroads were no longer able to funnel sufficient food into the cities, and bread lines in the capital of Petrograd (now Leningrad) grew longer each day. The orgies and intrigues of the Czarina's mad mystic Rasputin had riven Nicholas II's court. It was in this chill ambiance of discontent and deprivation that, 50 years ago this week, a revolution that began almost casually in Petrograd swept...
...Give Us Bread!" The first sign of spontaneous combustion occurred when workers in Petrograd's giant steelworks demanded a 50% wage increase. They were turned down and promptly went on strike; 40,000 of them fanned out through the city urging other workers to strike as well. Thousands of women were demonstrating outside the empty food stores, wailing "Khleba!" (Give us bread!) Each day the number of people milling through the streets increased until, active or acquiescent, nearly the whole population was involved. Cossacks and police blossomed on bridges and corners to keep order, but they were hardly needed...
...city's military authorities to dissolve the Duma, the elected parliament that he had created. The leaders of the Duma, among them a fiery lawyer and orator named Alexander Kerensky, defied the Czar and sat down to form a coalition provisional committee to take charge. The garrison of Petrograd backed up the Duma, and it was the commander of Petrograd, with the support of all the other army commanders, who sent word to the Czar demanding that he abdicate. Surprisingly, the Czar meekly obeyed...
...more difficult. The Duma committee had included every shade of political color, from socialists to disaffected aristocracy. To head the first provisional government that followed. Prince Lvov, a liberal nobleman, was chosen. The Bolsheviks soon withdrew their tacit support from this "bourgeois" government, and Lenin hurried back to Petrograd to organize his attack. By July 2 he had mounted a sufficiently impressive uprising of sailors and workers to cow Prince Lvov into resigning...
...returned instead to the Sociology department he had founded at the University of Petrograd. Among the daily auditors in his classes, Sorokin says, were two spies from CHEKA (the new government's secret police) who reported his lectures as ideologically objectionable...