On what was March 8 by the Gregorian calendar (February 23 in Russia's Julian calendar), tens of thousands of women in Petrograd marched through the capital chanting for bread and peace. The demonstration snowballed within days into strikes that toppled Tsar Nicholas II, and the date was later adopted worldwide as International Women's Day.
The women who marched that morning were mostly textile workers and soldiers' wives, exhausted by three years of war shortages and standing for hours in bread lines through a brutal winter. They had not planned a revolution. Organizers of the day, meant to mark working women's struggles, had actually urged caution, fearing a premature uprising. The women ignored them.
By afternoon, crowds swelled past 100,000, converging with striking metalworkers from the Putilov plant. Cossack cavalry sent to disperse them instead let the marchers pass, an early sign the regime's coercive machinery was crumbling. Within a week, Nicholas II abdicated.
The Bolsheviks, once in power, formally established March 8 as International Women's Day in 1917, though it took until 1975 for the United Nations to adopt it globally. Clara Zetkin, the German socialist who had championed a women's day since 1911, lived to see her idea permanently tied to this specific, unplanned, furious morning in Petrograd.
Key people: Nicholas II, Clara Zetkin