The events that took place in Petrograd in February 1917 cannot be called a people’s revolution either by the composition and number of participants, by the stated political aims, or by the actual scale of what happened. In essence, it was a palace coup prepared and carried out by the leaders of the political elite of the Russian Empire. This assessment is offered by I. L. Solonevich—a well-known publicist, a participant in the White movement, who in 1934 managed to escape from the Gulag to the West. When analyzing the workings of this “coup,” he first of all debunks the idea of hidden intrigues that supposedly led to it, and sharply criticizes everyone involved: both left-wing utopian theorists, and the right-wingers whom he regards as traitors, as well as helpless “staff generals” who, at the beginning of World War I, had cleared the army of honest and country-devoted officers. Solonevich warns that the truth about February will be bitter, and shows how Russia was being destroyed both from the right and from the left—and how the circumstances actually unfolded.