Russian Revolution Russian Provisional Government failed. This, in part, triggered the political transition of the October Revolution and the Civil War that followed in its aftermath. The Bolsheviks executed the tsar and his family on 16 July 1918. In early March, the Provisional Government placed Nicholas and his family under house arrest in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, south of Petrograd. In August 1917 the Kerensky government evacuated the Romanovs to Tobolsk in the Urals, to protect them from the rising tide of revolution. However, Kerensky lost control after the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, and the conditions of
Georgia within the Russian Empire sense that independence was within reach began to grow among the population. In 1917, as the Russian war effort collapsed, the February Revolution broke out in Saint Petersburg. The new Provisional Government established a branch to rule Transcaucasia called Ozakom (Extraordinary Committee for Transcaucasia). There was tension in Tbilisi since the mainly Russian soldiers in the city favoured the Bolsheviks, but as 1917 went on, the soldiers began to desert and head northwards, leaving Georgia virtually free from the Russian army and in the hands of the Mensheviks, who rejected the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in