Bread Queues (Khlebnye Khvosty)

Origins: A Transport and Fuel Breakdown

The exceptionally cold winter of 1916–1917 (means of −26.5°C, locally to −43°C) disabled hundreds of locomotives, and with millions of men at the front there were too few hands to clear the snowdrifts. About 57,000 freight cars stood idle, and in Petrograd there was flour but not enough fuel for the bakeries. The ration levy (razvyorstka) decreed on 2 December 1916 yielded only 170 million puds against a planned 772.1 million; that month front bread norms were cut from 3 to 2 funts a day (1.5 in the front zone), bread cards appeared in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and other cities, and in places such as Vitebsk, Polotsk and Kostroma people began to go hungry.

Card Rumours, Hoarding, and the 'Khvosty'

As city authorities discussed bread cards at one funt (about 400 g) per person per day, the rumour leaked and people began hoarding bread, so 'khvosty' formed outside bakeries. The queues were thus a reaction to expected rationing and panic buying rather than to a single announced norm. In the Russian Empire cards were introduced from spring 1916 (sugar), and the Provisional Government on 25 March (7 April) 1917 introduced the grain monopoly and bread cards, after which cards were extended to groats in June and meat in July.

Where the Queues Ripened: February 1917

Spending whole nights in line was, even under wartime conditions, a new and humiliating experience for Petrograders and provoked indignation. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue wrote in his diary that he was struck by the angry expression on the faces of the poor people standing in the queue at a bakery on the Liteiny, most of whom had spent the whole night there. On 21 February (O.S.) 1917 bread riots began: shops and bakeries on the Petrograd side were wrecked and crowds surrounded bakeries shouting 'Bread, bread'. As the supply crisis deepened, strikes became more frequent, striking workers 'removed' neighbouring plants by force, and once the garrison rose the same method was widely used by mutinous soldiers.

From Bread Queues to Insurrection

On 23 February (O.S.) = 8 March (N.S.) 1917, International Women's Day, thousands of women workers came out with 'Bread!' and 'Down with hunger!', and about 90,000 workers of fifty enterprises struck. The sequence runs from the strikes of 18 February and the tsar's departure for the front on 22 February to roughly 200,000 strikers on 24 February and the telegram to Khabalov on 25 February to 'put an end to the disorders in the capital tomorrow'. The demand shifted from bread to 'down with autocracy'.

The Debate: Famine or a Transport Collapse?

Until the very end the tsarist authorities and some memoirists insisted Petrograd's flour stocks were sufficient, but the documented data contradict them: in December 1916–April 1917 the Petersburg and Moscow districts received 71% less than planned grain freight, 80% of the shortfall because there was no cargo at all and only 10% because of a lack of wagons. The transport and fuel breakdown should be recorded as fact and the question of famine treated as a dispute.

The Response of the Working Class: October's Prospect

Segments of the working class did not accept the card and queue regime passively. Speaking in the Petrograd Soviet in October 1917, Trotsky described the unskilled worker who had arrived from the countryside and stood for hours in the 'khvosty' as becoming filled with hatred of the better-dressed and richer, who obtained all products without cards, and argued that the Bolsheviks understood such workers rather than wanting to shoot them.