Exercise 1: Why the Army's Refusal to Fire Was the Decisive Moment — Possible Solution
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This exercise is asking you to identify why one specific event, out of
several that happened during the same week, was the actual turning
point, rather than treating the whole February Revolution as a single
undifferentiated wave of unrest.

WHY THE ORIGINAL PROTESTS ALONE WERE NOT ENOUGH TO END THE MONARCHY
Bread riots and demonstrations, even large and sustained ones, had
happened before in Russian history without bringing down the
government - the Tsarist state had real coercive tools (police,
military garrisons) it could and did use to suppress unrest, including
during the 1905 Revolution. Protests alone put pressure on the
government, but they don't remove its actual capacity to respond with
force.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED ON 12 MARCH 1917
The decisive shift came when soldiers stationed in Petrograd, ordered
to fire on the crowds, refused to do so - and in some cases turned
their weapons on their own officers instead, joining the protesters.
This was categorically different from the protests themselves: it
meant the government's own coercive instrument, the force it would
normally rely on to restore order, was no longer willing to act on its
behalf.

WHY THIS SPECIFIC EVENT MADE COLLAPSE UNAVOIDABLE
Once the army in the capital sided with the revolution rather than
suppressing it, the government had no remaining practical means of
reasserting control. It wasn't simply facing angry crowds anymore - it
had lost the one tool that had reliably ended earlier crises. Nicholas
II's own abdication followed within days, a direct consequence of that
loss rather than a response to the bread riots on their own.

ANSWER: The army's refusal to fire was the decisive moment because it
removed the government's actual capacity for coercive control, not
just its popularity - protests alone had been contained before, but a
government that can no longer rely on its own military to enforce
order in its own capital has lost the practical means to survive a
crisis, regardless of how the crisis itself began.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It distinguishes between popular unrest (which the state had survived
before) and the loss of coercive capacity (which it had not), and
explains why the second, not the first, is what actually determines
whether a government facing a crisis can survive it.