Russian Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Revolution was not a single moment but a period of political and social upheaval that began in 1917 and remade an empire. Within a few years, Russia abolished the monarchy it had held for centuries, fought a devastating civil war, and became the world's first socialist state. The questions this story raises are as urgent now as they were then: how does an empire collapse? Who fills the vacuum? And what happens to ordinary people when the ground shifts beneath them? To understand the revolution, we have to begin not in 1917 but in 1905, when a massacre on a winter Sunday set everything in motion.

• 2. The World Before the Storm

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  Bloody Sunday, the massacre of unarmed protesters by Tsar Nicholas II's troops in January 1905, sent shockwaves through Russian society that never fully subsided. Workers responded with a general strike so crippling it forced Nicholas to publish the October Manifesto, establishing a democratically elected parliament called the State Duma. He then dismissed the first two Dumas when they proved uncooperative, and accepted the 1906 Fundamental State Laws only to immediately work against them.

  Nicholas was a deeply conservative ruler who governed by an ironclad belief in Divine Right. He assumed the Russian people were devoted to him with unquestioning loyalty. This belief left him unaware of the state of his country and unwilling to allow the progressive reforms that might have eased the suffering of his subjects.

  The suffering was real and widespread. Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, and 1.5% of the population owned 25% of the land. Between 1890 and 1910, the population of Saint Petersburg nearly doubled from 1,033,600 to 1,905,600, with Moscow experiencing similar growth. One 1904 survey found an average of 16 people sharing each apartment in Saint Petersburg, with six people per room, and no running water.

  Workers faced a 10-hour workday six days a week on the eve of the war, with many working 11 to 12 hours a day by 1916. By 1914-40% of Russian workers were employed in factories of more than 1,000 workers. The concentration of so many workers in the same spaces made strikes far more likely than they had been in previous generations. The number of annual strikes rose from an average of 6 per year in the period from 1862 to 1869 to an average of 176 per year from 1895 to 1905. The revolution had a long prologue.

• 3. War and the Breaking Point

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  Russia's first major engagement of World War I set the tone for what followed. At the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914, over 30,000 Russian troops were killed or wounded and 90,000 were captured, while Germany suffered just 12,000 casualties. The losses never stopped mounting. By the end of October 1916, Russia had lost between 1,600,000 and 1,800,000 soldiers, with an additional 2,000,000 taken prisoner and 1,000,000 missing.

  Tsar Nicholas made his situation worse by taking personal command of the Imperial Russian Army in 1915, a responsibility well beyond his abilities. He was now held personally responsible for every defeat. Back in Petrograd, Tsarina Alexandra, who was German-born and already suspected of collusion with the enemy, relied heavily on the controversial mystic Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin's influence led to disastrous ministerial appointments and corruption that worsened conditions across the empire.

  The government financed the war by printing roubles, and by 1917 inflation had driven prices to four times what they had been in 1914. Farmers hoarded grain and retreated into subsistence farming. Working-class women in Saint Petersburg reportedly spent roughly forty hours a week in food lines. Shops closed early or entirely for lack of bread, sugar, and meat.

  A report by the Okhrana, the security police, in October 1916 warned bluntly of the possibility of riots by the lower classes in the near future. The State Duma issued its own warning to Nicholas in November 1916. He ignored both. As historian Allan Wildman argued, the crisis in morale among soldiers was rooted fundamentally in the feeling of utter despair that the slaughter would ever end or that anything resembling victory could be achieved.

• 4. February and the Collapse of the Tsar

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  On a day in February 1917, women workers marching for International Women's Day brought out over 50,000 workers on strike at Petrograd's factories. Within days, virtually every industrial enterprise in the city had shut down. Students, white-collar workers, and teachers joined them in the streets.

  The Tsar turned to the army to quell the unrest. At least 180,000 troops were available in Petrograd, but historian Ian Beckett estimates around 12,000 could be regarded as reliable, and even these proved reluctant to move against a crowd that included so many women. When Nicholas ordered the army to suppress the rioting by force, troops began to revolt instead.

  Nicholas prorogued the Duma that same morning, leaving it with no legal authority to act. The Duma responded by forming a Temporary Committee. The socialist parties formed the Petrograd Soviet. Russia suddenly had two rival governing bodies meeting in the same building, the Tauride Palace.

  The Tsar's royal train was stopped by revolutionaries at Malaya Vishera. When Nicholas finally reached Pskov, Army Chief Nikolai Ruzsky and Duma deputies Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin urged him to abdicate. He did so on behalf of himself and then, after taking advice, on behalf of his son the Tsarevich. He nominated his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich to succeed him, but the Grand Duke declined, saying he would only accept the crown if that was the consensus of democratic action. Six days later, Nicholas was reunited with his family at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and placed under house arrest. The monarchy was finished.

• 5. Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and October

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  Vladimir Lenin had been living in exile in neutral Switzerland when the February Revolution opened the door for his return. German officials, hoping his activities would weaken Russia or lead to its withdrawal from the war, arranged for Lenin to pass through Germany in a sealed train. He arrived in Petrograd in April 1917 with the April Theses already prepared, demanding that the Soviets take all power and forbidding cooperation with the Provisional Government.

  In February 1917, the Bolshevik Party had only 24,000 members. By September 1917, that number had grown to 200,000. The Bolshevik-controlled Moscow Regional Bureau of the Party also controlled the party organizations of the 13 provinces around Moscow, which held 37% of Russia's population. Their slogan promising peace, land, and bread cut through to workers, soldiers, and peasants who had gained nothing from the February Revolution.

  The Provisional Government's decision on the 18th of June to launch a new offensive against Germany, which failed, and then to order soldiers back to the front, broke whatever patience remained. The July Days followed, with sailors, soldiers, and Petrograd workers taking to the streets. The revolt was disowned by Lenin and collapsed within days, forcing Lenin to flee to Finland. But the Bolsheviks' rise could not be stopped.

  The Bolshevik Central Committee voted 10 to 2 to draft a resolution calling for the dissolution of the Provisional Government in favor of the Petrograd Soviet, with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev as the prominent dissenters. The October Revolution unfolded in 1917 largely without human casualties in its initial assault on Petrograd. Leon Trotsky chaired the Revolutionary Military Committee that organized the insurrection. Though Lenin had secretly entered Petrograd and attended a private gathering of the Bolshevik Central Committee on the evening of the 23rd of October, Bolshevik figures including Anatoly Lunacharsky, Moisei Uritsky, and Dmitry Manuilsky later agreed that the insurrection itself was carried out according to Trotsky's plan, not Lenin's.

• 6. Civil War and the Red Victory

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  The October Revolution was not the end of the fighting. Liberal and monarchist forces organized into the White Army immediately went to war against the Bolsheviks' Red Army in what became known as the Russian Civil War. Leon Trotsky built the Red Army out of workers' militias, eventually raising a force of around five million active soldiers during the conflict.

  The Whites had broad international backing from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Japan. The Reds held control of a smaller land area, faced supply shortages, and lacked professional officers. Despite this, the Red Army prevailed. Bolshevik propaganda portrayed the Red Army as liberators of the poor, and Lenin's initiatives to distribute land to the peasantry and end the war with Germany built domestic support that proved more durable than foreign weapons.

  The Bolsheviks established the Cheka, a secret police force charged with uncovering and punishing enemies of the people in campaigns called the Red Terror. Revolutionary tribunals handled upwards of 200,000 cases investigated by approximately 200 tribunals at the civil war's peak. The Kronstadt Rebellion, a naval mutiny by Soviet Baltic sailors and former Red Army soldiers, presented a late challenge. When delegates arrived in Petrograd with 15 demands pertaining to freedom, the government suppressed the revolt by force and suffered ten thousand casualties before entering the city of Kronstadt.

  The Bolsheviks eventually reached the eastern Siberian coast at Vladivostok, four years after the war began. The last White Army holdout, the Ayano-Maysky District, fell when General Anatoly Pepelyayev capitulated in 1923. Historians consider 1922 the end of the revolutionary period, when the civil war concluded with the defeat of the White Army and separatist factions, leading to mass emigration from Russia.

• 7. Murder of the Romanovs

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  On the 16th of July 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family. After his abdication, Nicholas and his family had been held under house arrest at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, 24 km south of Petrograd. In August 1917, the Provisional Government had moved them to Tobolsk in the Urals to protect them from the rising tide of revolution.

  After the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, the conditions of their imprisonment grew stricter. In April and May 1918, as the looming civil war intensified, the Bolsheviks moved the family to the stronghold of Yekaterinburg. During the early morning of the 16th of July, Nicholas, Alexandra, their children, their physician, and several servants were taken into the basement and shot.

  According to historians Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitrii Volkogonov, the order came directly from Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov in Moscow, though this claim has never been confirmed. The murder may have been carried out on the initiative of local Bolshevik officials, or it may have been an option pre-approved in Moscow as White troops were rapidly approaching Yekaterinburg. Radzinsky noted that Lenin's bodyguard personally delivered the telegram ordering the killing and was then ordered to destroy the evidence. Whatever the precise chain of command, the killing closed any possibility of a Romanov restoration.

• 8. Legacy and Interpretation

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  The hammer and sickle debuted as a representation of the October Revolution in 1917 and became the official symbol of the USSR in 1924. The Soviets began commemorating the October Revolution with a military parade and a public holiday starting in 1919, a tradition that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  Historians have divided the revolution's interpretation into three schools: the Soviet-Marxist view, the Western totalitarian view, and the revisionist view. The totalitarian historians described the Bolshevik revolution as a coup carried out by a minority that turned Russia into a dictatorship. The revisionists stressed the genuinely popular nature of the revolution. Since the revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Western totalitarian view has again become dominant.

  Following Lenin's death in 1924, Leon Trotsky was defeated in a power struggle, expelled from the party in 1927, stripped of citizenship in 1929, and sent into exile. He settled in Mexico City, and in 1937 at the height of the Great Purge he published The Revolution Betrayed, arguing that Stalin had subverted the 1917 revolution. He was assassinated in 1940 on Stalin's orders.

  The RSFSR left a complicated social record. It was the first country to decriminalize abortion and to allow women to be educated, which had been forbidden under the Tsar. It also decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults, seen as radical for the time. At the same time, conservative historian Robert Service wrote that Lenin aided the foundations of dictatorship and lawlessness and had practiced terror and advocated revolutionary amoralism. The Bolshevik Party reconstituted itself into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and remained in power for six decades. George Orwell's Animal Farm, published in 1945, captured the revolution's trajectory in allegorical form; the pig Napoleon, representing Stalin, overthrows the pig Snowball, representing Trotsky, and eventually becomes a tyrant who uses force and propaganda to oppress the very animals the revolution was meant to free.