Summary

• By the summer of 1917, there was little support left for the Provisional Government. Food supplies were chaotic in the towns and although the government granted an eight-hour day, real wages fell rapidly in 1917 as prices rose. 
•  In January 1917 prices were 300% of 1914 levels, by October they were 755%. 
• The continuation of the war and the government's failure to redistribute land also lost it support in the countryside. The government claimed that such an important issue had to be left until after Russia had a democratically elected assembly; however the peasants took the law into their own hands and simply seized land anyway.
• Although an electoral commission was established in May, to arrange elections for November, suspicion that the 'bourgeois' government was deliberately delaying a move to greater democracy in order to preserve its own power was rife. The group that benefited most from this widespread disillusionment was the Bolsheviks.