Background
The Russian Empire entered the 20th century as one of Europe’s last absolute monarchies. Nicholas II (reigned 1894–1917) had inherited from his father Alexander III a substantially repressive autocratic system that had only modestly modified itself in response to the 1905 Revolution. The October Manifesto of 1905 had granted a limited consultative parliament (the Duma) but had not produced effective constitutional government.
The empire’s structural problems — substantial peasant land hunger, slow industrialization in a still-overwhelmingly agrarian economy, ethnic-national tensions across an empire of approximately 150 million people speaking dozens of languages, the unresolved revolutionary tradition dating back to the Decembrists of 1825 — were all aggravated by the First World War. Russian military casualties exceeded 5 million by early 1917 (approximately 1.7 million dead). The war produced catastrophic food shortages in the cities, sustained inflation, the collapse of imperial fiscal-administrative capacity, and broad political alienation across every class except the Romanov court itself.
The February Revolution
The February Revolution (8–16 March 1917 by the Gregorian calendar; 23 February – 3 March by the Julian calendar still used in Russia) began with bread riots and a strike by women textile workers in Petrograd on International Women’s Day (8 March / 23 February). The strike grew over the following week into a general uprising; the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on the demonstrators and began joining them. Nicholas II, returning to Petrograd from military headquarters at Mogilev, was forced to abdicate aboard his imperial train at Pskov on 15 March 1917. His brother Grand Duke Michael declined the throne the next day. The Romanov dynasty was over.
A Provisional Government under a sequence of moderate-liberal premiers (Lvov, then Kerensky from July) and a parallel Petrograd Soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies emerged as the dual structures of the new political order. The Provisional Government’s commitment to continuing the war and its postponement of substantial land reform progressively alienated soldiers, peasants, and the urban working class through the summer and autumn of 1917.
The October Revolution
The Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin — returned to Russia from Swiss exile in April 1917 via the German “sealed train” — had been the most radical of the socialist factions in the early months of the revolution. It progressively gained majority support in the Petrograd Soviet through September and October.
The Bolshevik seizure of power on the night of 7 November 1917 (25 October Old Style) was a tightly organized military operation: Red Guard and pro-Bolshevik military units occupied the major government buildings, communications centres, and railway stations in Petrograd; the Provisional Government, meeting at the Winter Palace, was arrested in the early morning of 8 November. The Bolshevik-dominated Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the seizure of power immediately afterward.
The new Soviet government — the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) under Lenin — immediately issued the Decree on Peace (proposing immediate armistice on all WWI fronts) and the Decree on Land (legalizing the ongoing peasant seizure of landed estates). The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) ended Russian involvement in WWI on harsh German-imposed terms (Russia lost Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland, and substantial Polish territory). The dissolution of the briefly-convened Constituent Assembly (January 1918) ended the multiparty character of the new revolutionary regime and inaugurated the Bolshevik single-party state.
The Civil War
The Russian Civil War (1918–1922) was the longest and bloodiest of the immediate post-revolutionary European civil wars. The Bolshevik Red Army under Leon Trotsky fought against a heterogeneous coalition of White forces (former tsarist officers, monarchists, liberals, moderate socialists, regional separatists, Cossack hosts) supported by Allied military intervention (British, French, American, Japanese, Czech, and other forces operating in Murmansk, Archangel, the Black Sea, Vladivostok, and along the Trans-Siberian railway). The war ranged across the entire former Russian Empire.
The Bolshevik victory by 1922 was substantially the result of internal lines of communication, control of the central industrial regions, and the political-organizational coherence of a single-party movement against a fragmented opposition. Cost: approximately 7–12 million dead, of which approximately 2 million from direct military action, 5–10 million from famine and disease (particularly the 1921–1922 Volga famine that killed approximately 5 million), and the rest from typhus, cholera, and the systematic violence of both sides.
The Romanov family — Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and four servants — was executed at Yekaterinburg on the night of 17 July 1918 by Bolshevik authorities on Lenin’s order, to prevent the family from becoming a rallying point for the advancing White armies.
The Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally established on 30 December 1922 by treaty among the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian Soviet republics. Lenin died in January 1924. The internal Bolshevik factional struggle of the mid-1920s produced Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power by 1929 and the subsequent Stalinist political-economic order — the collectivization of agriculture (which produced the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, approximately 3.5 million dead), the Five-Year Plans of forced industrialization, and the Great Purge of 1936–1938 (approximately 750,000 executed, several million in the Gulag).
The Soviet state would survive until December 1991. Its formative political-economic moment was the 1917 revolution; its dissolution would inaugurate the second great political-territorial reorganization of 20th-century Russia.
Legacy
The Russian Revolution produced the first communist state, the political model that would shape communist movements across the 20th century from China to Cuba to Vietnam, and the geopolitical opposition (the Cold War) that would structure global politics for nearly half a century. It also produced the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII (which killed approximately 27 million Soviet citizens — approximately half of all WWII deaths globally) and the institutional-political legacy that continues to shape post-Soviet Russian politics in the early 21st century.