Why did the February Revolution occur?
(a) A Social Revolutionary view
Neither the Bolsheviks, nor the Mensheviks, nor the Workers' Group, nor the Social Revolutionaries, either separately or collectively, led the workers of Petrograd on to the street. It was someone mightier than they: Tsar Hunger.
It began with ordinary food riots. The bakeshops lacked sufficient bread. Long queues, at first chiefly of women and boys, took out their resentment on the bakers, suspecting them of hoarding flour for purposes of speculation. The police restored order. They were greeted with hostile shouts. The people demanded 'Bread!' Then ) naturally they began to shout, 'Down with the police!'But as soon as the thousand-voiced echo caught this up, there appeared the old slogans, 'Down with the autocracy!' and 'Down with the war!' There were disorders, there was still no revolution. There was no leader, but every revolutionary and democratic group, organized i or unorganized, rushed headlong into the movement, trying to attract as many people as possible and to inspire it with definite and militant political slogans.
by Chernov, p 101
(b) A communist view
Before the revolution the liberal leader had declared every thought of revolution a suggestion of the German Staff. But the situation was more complicated after a revolution which had brought the liberals to power. Miliukov's task was now not to dishonor the revolution with a Hohenzollern origin, but on the contrary to withhold the honor of its initiation from revolutionists. Liberalism therefore has whole-heartedly fathered the theory of a spontaneous and impersonal revolution. Miliukov sympathetically cites the semi-liberal, semi-socialist Stankevich, a university instructor who became Political Commissar at the headquarters of the Supreme Command: 'The masses moved of themselves, obeying some unaccountable inner summons . . .' writes Stankevich of the February days. 'With what slogans did the soldiers come out? Who led them when they conquered Petrograd, when they burned the District Court? Not a political idea, not a revolutionary slogan, not a conspiracy, and not a revolt, but a spontaneous movement suddenly consuming the entire old power to the last remnant.' Spontaneousness here acquires an almost mystic character.
by Trotsky, in The Russian Revolution, pp 142-3
(c) British views
During the attempts at revolution in 1906 I wrote: 'Speaking of the Russian Empire which Nicholas II received from his father, Alexander III, one may say with as much certitude as such contingent judgements admit, that it could have been governed at least for another forty or fifty years without a constitution. But on condition that it was governed. The Prussians of the days of Frederick the Great were much more intelligent than the Russians of today, yet they enjoyed absolutism and throve under it. But then although absolute it was really government, and justice was its basis. The Russians of today - the masses of benighted peasantry - are unfitted to govern the Empire, and for that reason a strong autocracy might have long continued in power. But even peasants will not endure starvation by inches, which was what absolutism offered to many of them. Like the worm, the mooshik will turn when trodden on. The Russian people now demand a constitution, not because the bureaucracy is no longer capable of carrying on the system of absolutism.... To the will of the nation the government can oppose only the bayonets of the troops, and even the tempered steel of bayonet will not long support a throne devoid of all other props. And that is now the relative position of the autocracy and the army.
by E. J. Dillon, in The Eclipse of Russia (1918) pp 386-7