Russian Revolution

Russia in early 1917 was a state barely holding together. Tsar Nicholas II's decision to lead the army personally during World War I left his wife Alexandra in charge, a move that handed power to the inept and corrupt Grigori Rasputin. The war was going catastrophically-Russia had lost roughly 2 million soldiers by 1917, and the empire was hemorrhaging resources. Food shortages in Petrograd sparked bread riots on March 8, 1917 (February 23 by the old Julian calendar Russia was still using). Workers abandoned factories. Soldiers refused orders. Within days, the Tsar abdicated.

What followed wasn't one revolution but two. The February Revolution established a Provisional Government, which made the fatal mistake of keeping Russia in World War I. By October, soldiers were starving, peasants wanted land, and workers wanted change-conditions the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, knew how to exploit. On October 25, 1917 (October 12 on the Julian calendar), Lenin's party seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd and took control of the government. It was remarkably swift: accounts suggest fewer than 100 people died in the actual takeover. But what came after was anything but swift or bloodless.

The Bolsheviks faced immediate opposition from multiple fronts. The White Army, composed of anti-Bolshevik forces, launched the Russian Civil War that would last until 1922 and kill roughly 5 to 9 million people. Lenin consolidated power ruthlessly-he dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, established the secret police (the Cheka), and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, surrendering huge chunks of territory to Germany to exit World War I. By 1921, the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but the economy was in ruins.

The revolution's global significance was immense and immediate. For communists worldwide, it proved that revolution was possible. For Western powers-Britain, France, the United States, and others-it was an existential threat they tried to snuff out through military intervention and later diplomatic isolation. The Russian Revolution didn't just change Russia; it split the world. By the 1920s, the international order had a new kind of state actor, one that explicitly rejected capitalism and promised a different future. Whether you saw that as salvation or catastrophe depended almost entirely on where you stood.

What Stalin's USSR became is a separate story. What matters about 1917 is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks proved a determined revolutionary party could seize control of a vast empire and hold it, even against overwhelming odds. They showed that the old rules-aristocracy, monarchy, capitalist order-could be broken in a matter of weeks. That possibility, more than any specific policy, is what reverberated around the world for the rest of the 20th century.