From the autumn of 1915 the cities of the north began to experience growing food shortages. Long queues appeared outside the bakeries and meat shops. After a ten-hour shift in their factories women would set up stools and benches to wait in line for pitifully small amounts of bread or sugar. By the following autumn they were bringing their beds to sleep outside the food stores, often because, with so many local shops closed for lack of provisions, they did not have the time to walk across town and return home in one evening. On the eve of 1917 the average working woman in Petrograd was probably spending around forty hours per week in various queues for provisions.78 The bread queues, in particular, became a sort of political forum or club, where rumours, information and views were exchanged. It was in these queues that the streets began to organize themselves for the coming revolution. The February Revolution was born in the bread queue. It began when a group of women textile workers on the Vyborg side of Petrograd became impatient with waiting in line and went off to rally their menfolk in the neighbouring metal factories for a protest march to the centre of the city.
The economic crisis had the worst effect on the lowest paid. Skilled metalworkers, in great demand at munitions factories, enjoyed an average rise of 30 per cent in their real wages up to 1916. But unskilled workers and petty officials on fixed salaries, such as teachers, clerks and policemen, found their wages falling further and further behind the rising costs of food and housing. Between 1914 and 1916 the calorie intake of unskilled workers fell by a quarter; infant mortality doubled; crime rates tripled; and the number of prostitutes increased by four or five times. From Petrograd, where he had been living since the start of the war, Gorky wrote to Ekaterina in November 1915:
We will soon have a famine. I advise you to buy ten pounds of bread and hide it. In the suburbs of Petrograd you can see well-dressed women begging on the streets. It is very cold. People have nothing to burn in their stoves. Here and there, at night, they tear down the wooden fences. What has happened to the Twentieth Century! What has happened to Civilization! The number of child prostitutes is shocking. On your way somewhere at night you see them shuffling along the sidewalks, just like cockroaches, blue with cold and hungry. Last Tuesday I talked to one of them. I put some money into her hand and hurried away, in tears, in such a state of sadness that I felt like banging my head against a wall. Oh, to hell with it all, how hard it has become to live.79
After a year of industrial peace the war between labour and capital resumed in the summer of 1915 with a series of strikes. To begin with they were mostly minor stoppages over pay and conditions, but they gradually grew into larger political strikes as workers came to understand that the only way to end their economic plight was to end the war and change the government. The main anniversaries in the revolutionary calendar — Bloody Sunday on 9 January, International Women’s Day on 23 February and Labour Day on 18 April (1 May) — became set dates for strikes and rallies across the country. They usually began with calls for bread, but went on to demand an eight-hour day, an end to the war and the overthrow of the Tsar.
The revolutionary parties played only a secondary role in these strikes. True, some of the biggest and most militant strikes of 1916, at the New Lessner factory in the spring for example, were largely due to the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, whose organization was slowly gaining in strength. Shliapnikov, who returned to Russia in autumn 1916, estimated that the party had as many as 10,000 members at the beginning of 1917, with as many as 3,000 in Petrograd itself. Gorky’s apartment on the Kronversky Prospekt was a ‘unique central point’ of the underground revolutionary organization and Shliapnikov visited it daily for the latest information. The real strike leaders, however, were the skilled and literate workers on the shopfloor, daring young men in their twenties and thirties, such as Kanatchikov, though, unlike him, most of them did not belong to any political party. Although many had seen their real wages rise in the war, they resented the huge war profits of their employers,fn3 and this increasingly defined their sense of class solidarity with the unskilled workers, many of them fresh from the countryside, who followed them into industrial battle.80 Here were those unnamed leaders of the crowd during the February Days in Petrograd.
