Petrograd Soviet

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was a revolutionary assembly formed on 27 February 1917 (Julian calendar) by delegates from the city's factories, trade unions, and garrison regiments amid the spontaneous uprisings of the February Revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas II. Initially comprising around 600 members, it rapidly expanded to over 2,000 deputies, reflecting the influx of soldier representatives disillusioned with the war and tsarist rule.

The Soviet's Executive Committee, dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who favored a transitional bourgeois-democratic phase before socialism, coexisted uneasily with the bourgeois Provisional Government, engendering a dual power dynamic that paralyzed effective governance and allowed radical forces to erode central authority. Its most consequential act was Order No. 1, issued on 1 March 1917, which democratized the military by mandating elected committees in units, stripping officers of arbitrary power, and subordinating the Petrograd garrison directly to the Soviet—measures that empowered enlisted men but precipitated widespread indiscipline, mutinies, and the army's collapse as a cohesive fighting force.