When this failed and the army collapsed the power of the Mensheviki became shadowy but Minister Kerensky as the outstanding Menshevik leader assumed the Premiership which he held for four months. Kerensky became War Minister, and in May he began an extraordinary oratorical campaign which so far restored the morale of the army that it launched a last desperate offensive against Germany in June. Troops ordered to shoot down the mobs flung away their guns and embraced the rioters. Russians were all but stupefied that the Tsarist regime was so rotten at the core as to topple after four days of disorder in Petrograd.

Next day representatives of the Duma obtained the abdication of the Tsar. Between March 8 and March 12 these leaderless disorders reached such a pitch that the Duma found the Tsarist authority had vanished and set up a Temporary Governing Committee which two days later became the Cabinet of Prince Lvov in which M. Menshevik Kerensky was present in Petrograd when there began a curiously leaderless and random series of riots and disorders among the people and local soldiery. Here’s how TIME summed the whole thing up in a 1927 profile of Alexander Feodorvich Kerensky, the man who had held power in between the two uprisings:ġ917. What happened was that a pair of revolutions in 1917 had removed Tsar Nicholas II and his family from power, and then put the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, in charge. The goings-on this season are the result of that history, even though the Crawley family hasn’t discussed it much in the interim. Fans may remember that back in Season Two, when Branson’s revolutionary urges were more active, he mentioned in a 1917-set episode that the Tsar had been denounced and was imprisoned by the people, though he was then sorry when the Tsar was killed. The reason can be traced back several seasons in Downton-time.

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