Revolution
Further information: February RevolutionOn the night of 27–28 February 1917, Michael attempted to return to Gatchina from Petrograd, where he had been in conference with Rodzyanko and from where he had telegraphed the Tsar, but revolutionary patrols and sporadic fire prevented his progress. Revolutionaries patrolled the streets, rounding up people connected with the old regime. Michael managed to reach the Winter Palace, where he ordered the guards there to withdraw to the Admiralty, because it afforded greater safety and a better tactical position and because it was a less politically charged location. Michael himself took refuge in the apartment of an acquaintance, Princess Putyatina, on Millionnaya street. In the neighbouring apartments, the Tsar's Chamberlain Nikolai Stolypin and the Procurator of the Holy Synod were detained by revolutionaries, and in the house next door General Baron Staekelberg was killed when his house was stormed by a mob.
On 1 March, Rodzyanko sent guards to Putyatina's apartment to ensure Michael's safety, and Michael signed a document drawn up by Rodzyanko and Grand Duke Paul proposing the creation of a constitutional monarchy. The newly formed Petrograd Soviet rejected the document, which became irrelevant. Calls for the Tsar's abdication had superseded it.
Read more about this topic: Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word revolution:
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Talk of Columbus and Newton! I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs. But you must have the believing and prophetic eye.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There was never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than Petrograd, and for all that period of my life I lived another and braved the ice of winter and the summer flies in Vyborg while across my adopted country of the past, winds of the revolution blew their flame, and all of us suffered hunger while we drank at the wine of equality.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)