The Russian Revolution
The Tsar abdicated on a Thursday. By Friday, two governments claimed to rule Russia. By October, neither did.
Open
You have seen the storming of the Winter Palace. Soldiers pouring over the gates, rifles raised, a fortress taken by force.
That footage is real film, shot in nineteen twenty, three years after the fact, staged for the cameras.
The actual night had fewer than twenty casualties and no storming at all.
The myth became more real than the event it was pretending to show.
Scene 1Vyborg, February
The twenty third of February, nineteen seventeen, by the old calendar. Women textile workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd walk off their jobs. It is International Women's Day.
By afternoon, one hundred thousand workers have joined them. Two days later the whole city is paralyzed.
Tsar Nicholas the Second is four hundred miles away at his military headquarters. He sends a telegram to the Petrograd garrison commander.
Scene 2A pen for routine correspondence
The second of March, nineteen seventeen. In a railway car at Pskov, Nicholas signs his abdication. He uses the same pen he uses for routine correspondence.
His brother, Grand Duke Michael, refuses the throne the next day. Three hundred years of Romanov rule end inside one week.
No organized party led any of this. The Bolsheviks have twenty four thousand members in a country of one hundred and seventy million. Lenin is in Zurich, reading about it in the newspapers.
Scene 3Two governments, one man in both
Within days, two authorities claim to run Russia. The Provisional Government forms out of Duma liberals and promises a constituent assembly, civil liberties, and continuing the war.
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies is elected straight from the factories and the barracks. On the first of March, before Nicholas has even abdicated, it declares soldiers need obey their officers only when the Soviet's own orders do not contradict them.
The Provisional Government governs on paper. The Soviet controls the garrison.
One man, Alexander Kerensky, sits in both bodies. He is the only one who does.
Scene 4The sealed train
The third of April, nineteen seventeen. Lenin arrives at the Finland Station in a sealed train, provided by the German General Staff, who calculate a Bolshevik revolution would take Russia out of the war.
His April Theses reject any support for the Provisional Government and demand immediate peace, land for the peasants, all power to the Soviets. His own party thinks he has gone mad. Kamenev and Zinoviev publish their dissent in print.
In August, General Kornilov marches troops on Petrograd in a bungled coup. It drives moderate officers into exile, and arms the Bolsheviks with forty thousand rifles.
Scene 5The night of the twenty fifth
Bolshevik Red Guards and sympathetic soldiers occupy the telephone exchange, the telegraph office, the State Bank, and the railway stations.
At nine forty in the evening, the cruiser Aurora fires one blank round at the Winter Palace.
The ministers of the Provisional Government are arrested in the Malachite Room at ten past two in the morning. Kerensky left that morning in a car borrowed from the American Embassy.
While the palace is still being taken, the Second All Russian Congress of Soviets convenes at the Smolny Institute.
Lenin rose and told the delegates what came next.
· Address to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets · October 26, 1917
“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.”
Five accounts
Five accounts of the same thirteen months.
victorBolshevik
The Bolsheviks
The first account is the winner's, and it starts with a number. Russia's industrial working class was three point six million people in a country of one hundred and seventy million, packed into enormous factories. The Putilov Works in Petrograd alone employed thirty thousand workers.
Those factories worked like political schools. Strike committees became soviets. The Bolsheviks grew from twenty four thousand members in February to two hundred thousand by August, in this account, because their program of peace, land, bread, and all power to the soviets matched what workers already wanted.
Lenin's own case for seizing power, made before it happened, was blunt.
“History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.”
The Decrees on Peace, Land, and Workers' Control that followed were not ideology handed down from above. They ratified what the base of the revolution had already started doing for itself.
Read the full account
Narrative
Lenin's analysis was structural: Russia's war was an imperialist war, the Provisional Government was a bourgeois holding action, and the soviets were the embryonic organs of proletarian power. His April Theses, rejected by most of his own party when he read them on April 4, reframed the political question. The issue was not whether the revolution was "premature" (as the Mensheviks argued, citing Marx's stages of development) but whether the revolutionary situation would last. "There is not the slightest doubt that our revolution would have perished long ago had power not been seized," Lenin wrote later.
The Bolshevik narrative emphasizes the class logic of 1917. Russia's industrial working class (3.6 million in a country of 170 million) was concentrated in massive factories. The Putilov Works in Petrograd employed 30,000 workers. These factories functioned as political schools: strike committees became soviets, shop-floor disputes became political education. The Bolsheviks grew from 24,000 members in February to 200,000 by August 1917, not through conspiracy but because their program (peace, land, bread, all power to the soviets) matched what workers, soldiers, and peasants already wanted. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties lost support precisely because they refused to break with the Provisional Government and end the war.
The October insurrection itself was, in Trotsky's telling, an act of precise organizational execution. The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, chaired by Trotsky, deployed Red Guards and sympathetic garrison units to seize control of the city's infrastructure in 48 hours. Casualties were minimal; perhaps six people died during the taking of the Winter Palace. John Reed, the American journalist present, described the scene in Ten Days That Shook the World (1919): soldiers wandering through the palace, marveling at the furniture, pocketing silverware, while commissars set up offices in the servants' quarters.
The Decree on Peace (October 26) called for immediate negotiations without annexations or indemnities. The Decree on Land abolished private ownership of land and transferred it to local land committees, ratifying what peasants had already done across the countryside since the summer. The Decree on Workers' Control gave factory committees supervisory authority over production and finances. These were not abstract ideological impositions but responses to the actual demands of the revolution's base.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on January 6, 1918 (after its first and only meeting) is the hardest moment for the Bolshevik narrative to justify. The Assembly was elected in November 1917 on universal suffrage. The Socialist-Revolutionaries won 370 of 707 seats; the Bolsheviks won 168. Lenin dismissed the Assembly as an artifact of bourgeois parliamentarism that had been overtaken by soviet democracy. The Assembly sat for 12 hours before Red Guards cleared the hall. Lenin's argument, that direct democracy through soviets was more representative than parliamentary elections, would be tested by the subsequent centralization of power in the party, the Cheka, and eventually Stalin.
Arguments
- The October revolution was the logical culmination of class conflict, not a coup by a minority
- Bolshevik growth from 24,000 to 200,000 reflected genuine working-class support, not conspiracy
- The Provisional Government fell because it refused to end the war or redistribute land
- Soviet democracy was more direct and representative than bourgeois parliamentarism
Sources
- The State and Revolution
- History of the Russian Revolution
- Ten Days That Shook the World
vanquishedWhite Russian / Monarchist
The Whites
The second account starts with a number the winners do not like to say. Russia in nineteen thirteen was the world's fifth largest economy. Stolypin's reforms had created a class of independent peasant farmers, and the Trans Siberian Railway, finished in nineteen sixteen, was the longest railway in the world.
What this account mourns is not a political system. It is, in its own word, a civilization, destroyed not by inevitable historical force but by the weakness of one Tsar and the ruthlessness of one party.
The Constituent Assembly election of November nineteen seventeen proves the point, in this telling. The Bolsheviks won twenty four per cent of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries won forty. Lenin dissolved the Assembly after one day.
Patriarch Tikhon, addressing that same defeat, put it to his own side.
Read the full account
Narrative
The imperial family was moved to Tobolsk in August 1917, then to Yekaterinburg in April 1918. On the night of July 16-17, 1918, Yakov Yurovsky and a squad of Bolshevik and Cheka operatives woke Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei, aged 13), the family physician Dr. Botkin, and three servants. They were told to dress and go to the basement for a photograph. Yurovsky read a brief statement, then the squad opened fire. The execution took 20 minutes; some of the children survived the initial volley because of diamonds sewn into their corsets. The bodies were driven to an abandoned mineshaft, doused in acid, and buried in a forest road. They were not found until 1991.
The monarchist and White narrative frames the revolution as the destruction of a legitimate state by an armed minority exploiting wartime chaos. The February Revolution (spontaneous, leaderless, driven by bread riots and military mutiny ) was one thing. The October seizure was another: a planned coup by a disciplined cadre that never won a democratic mandate. The Constituent Assembly election of November 1917 proved it: the Bolsheviks won 24% of the vote; the SRs won 40%. Lenin dissolved the Assembly after one day.
The White movement that coalesced in 1918 was never unified. Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, General Denikin in the south, General Yudenich near Petrograd, and Baron Wrangel in the Crimea fought separate campaigns with separate supply lines. They shared anti-Bolshevism but agreed on little else: Kolchak wanted to restore the Assembly; monarchists wanted the Romanovs; Cossack atamans wanted autonomy; national minorities wanted independence. The Whites' inability to articulate a positive political program (beyond "not Bolshevik") cost them peasant support. Denikin's forces committed pogroms in Ukraine that killed an estimated 50,000 Jews in 1919-1920, driving Jewish communities toward the Bolsheviks by default.
The emigre diaspora that followed defeat numbered 1.5-2 million. Russian communities formed in Paris, Berlin, Prague, Harbin, and Shanghai. They maintained schools, churches, newspapers, and military organizations. The Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) continued to regard itself as the legitimate Russian armed forces in exile. Emigre writers, Ivan Bunin (Nobel Prize 1933), Vladimir Nabokov, Nina Berberova, produced a literature of exile and loss. The Orthodox Church Abroad, founded in Sremski Karlovci in 1921, did not reconcile with the Moscow Patriarchate until 2007.
What the monarchist perspective mourns is not a political system but a civilization. The Russian Empire of 1913 was the world's fifth-largest economy. Its agricultural output was the highest in Europe. Stolypin's reforms (1906-1911) had created a class of independent peasant farmers. The Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in 1916, was the longest in the world. The Silver Age of Russian culture (Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Diaghilev, Blok, Akhmatova) was in full flower. All of this was destroyed not by inevitable historical forces but by the contingency of war, the weakness of one Tsar, and the ruthlessness of one party.
Arguments
- October was a coup by a party that won 24% of the vote and dissolved the elected assembly
- The execution of the imperial family, including five children, was a premeditated crime
- White movement failed due to internal disunity, not Bolshevik popular mandate
- Russia in 1913 was modernizing and culturally flourishing; revolution was not inevitable
Sources
- A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
- Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime
- The Russian Revolution
indigenousPeasant / Worker
The peasants and the soldiers
The third account has the least to do with any party's program. In nineteen fourteen a pound of bread cost twelve kopecks. By January nineteen seventeen it cost thirty two kopecks, when it could be found at all, and workers' wives spent entire nights in the bread lines.
From April onward, village communes began seizing gentry land on their own, cutting timber, dividing fields, redistributing by household. By October, much of European Russia's farmland had already changed hands by peasant action, and the Decree on Land mostly ratified what had already happened.
Fifteen million men had been mobilized, roughly half the male agricultural workforce. Desertion rose from about thirty four thousand a month in nineteen sixteen to two hundred thousand a month by September. A soldier who deserted went home to his village, and usually brought his rifle.
Read the full account
Narrative
By February 1917, a factory worker in Petrograd earned approximately 5 rubles a day. A pound of bread cost 12 kopecks in 1914; by January 1917, it cost 32 kopecks when it was available at all. Workers' wives spent entire nights in bread lines. Temperatures in February 1917 dropped to -30 Celsius. The women who walked out of the Vyborg textile mills on February 23 were not following a revolutionary program. They wanted bread.
The peasant experience of 1917 is documented not in party manifestos but in the resolutions of village communes (miry) and the volost (township) assemblies that multiplied after February. The Provisional Government promised land reform but delayed action until a Constituent Assembly could be convened. Peasants did not wait. From April 1917 onward, village communes began seizing gentry estates: cutting timber, grazing livestock on landlord meadows, dividing fields. By October, much of European Russia's agricultural land had been redistributed by peasant action, not Bolshevik decree. The Decree on Land of October 26 ratified a fait accompli.
The soldiers' experience was inseparable from the peasant experience because Russian soldiers were peasants in uniform. By 1917, 15 million men had been mobilized, roughly half the male agricultural workforce. Casualty figures for the Eastern Front are imprecise: approximately 1.8 million Russian soldiers were killed and 2.5 million wounded between 1914 and 1917. Desertion rates rose from approximately 34,000 per month in 1916 to 200,000 per month by September 1917. When soldiers deserted, they went home to their villages, often bringing their rifles.
What the revolution meant at the village level is captured in ethnographic studies and the surviving minutes of commune assemblies. Aaron Retish's Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War (2008) documents Vyatka province: peasants initially welcomed the fall of the Tsar as an end to conscription and requisitioning. They formed land committees that redistributed gentry estates roughly along traditional communal principles: redistribution by household size, periodic re-allotment. The Bolshevik Decree on Land used Socialist-Revolutionary language because Lenin understood that the peasants' revolution was not Marxist. It was communal, egalitarian, and deeply local.
The civil war destroyed what the revolution had offered. War Communism (1918-1921) reimposed grain requisition, now by Bolshevik prodrazverstka squads instead of tsarist tax collectors. Peasants who resisted were shot. The Tambov Rebellion of 1920-1921, the largest peasant uprising against Bolshevik rule, was suppressed by Red Army forces under Tukhachevsky using artillery, hostage-taking, and (according to some accounts) poison gas. The rebellion was erased from Soviet history for 70 years. By 1921, the peasantry that had made the revolution found itself governed by a party that requisitioned its grain, conscripted its sons, and arrested its village leaders. Lenin's New Economic Policy (1921) was a retreat from War Communism, allowing limited market activity, but the direction was set. Under Stalin, collectivization (1928-1933) would finish what requisitioning started.
Arguments
- February began as a bread riot, not a political revolution; hunger drove the uprising
- Peasants redistributed land on their own initiative; the Decree on Land ratified existing facts
- 15 million mobilized soldiers were peasants whose war experience radicalized them
- War Communism and civil war destroyed the revolution's promises to the people who made it
Sources
- Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922
- Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917-1921
- Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921
bystanderWestern / Interventionist
The Western powers
The fourth account starts with what Russia's exit from the war cost the Allies. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk, in March nineteen eighteen, handed Germany Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Finland, about a third of Russia's farmland and eighty per cent of its coal and iron. Germany moved fifty divisions west, enabling a Spring Offensive that nearly broke the Allied line before the Americans arrived.
The Allied intervention that followed could not agree on its own purpose. Britain sent forty thousand troops. Japan landed seventy two thousand in Vladivostok, the largest contingent of anyone, and stayed on in Siberia pursuing its own territorial aims. The United States sent thirteen thousand, and two hundred and thirty five Americans died fighting Bolshevik forces near Archangel that winter.
It failed on every count the account names. The White armies collapsed, the war material was mostly lost, and the intervention handed the Bolsheviks a propaganda story about capitalist encirclement that outlasted every man who ordered it.
Winston Churchill, the most aggressive advocate for that intervention, wrote afterward what the Allies had tried and failed to do.
Read the full account
Narrative
Russia's exit from the war was a strategic catastrophe for the Allies. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918) gave Germany control of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Finland: approximately 1 million square miles, 56 million people, a third of Russia's agricultural land, and 80% of its coal and iron production. Germany transferred 50 divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front between November 1917 and March 1918, enabling the Spring Offensive of 1918 that nearly broke the Allied line before American reinforcements arrived.
The Allied intervention of 1918-1920 was driven by three motives that the intervening powers could not agree on, even among themselves. First, the recovery of war materiel: the Allies had shipped enormous quantities of munitions to Russian ports (especially Archangel and Vladivostok) that they feared would fall to the Germans or be seized by the Bolsheviks. Second, the support of White forces as a way to reopen the Eastern Front and relieve pressure on France. Third, a less articulated fear of Bolshevik contagion, the prospect that a communist government in the world's largest country would inspire revolutions in war-weakened Europe.
Britain deployed 40,000 troops across three theaters: Archangel (North Russia), the Caucasus, and the Trans-Caspian region. France sent two divisions to Odessa and the Crimea; they mutinied in April 1919 and were withdrawn. Japan landed 72,000 troops in Vladivostok (the largest single contingent) and occupied portions of Siberia until October 1922, pursuing territorial objectives that had little to do with the White cause. The United States deployed 13,000 troops: 5,000 to Archangel under British command and 8,000 to Vladivostok. President Wilson authorized the deployment reluctantly and without clear objectives. American troops fought skirmishes against Bolshevik forces in the Archangel sector through the winter of 1918-1919; 235 Americans were killed.
The intervention failed on every count. The White armies collapsed. The war materiel was mostly lost. The intervention gave the Bolsheviks a propaganda narrative, capitalist encirclement, that Lenin, Stalin, and their successors exploited for 70 years. Winston Churchill, who as Secretary of State for War was the most aggressive proponent of intervention, later wrote that the Allies had tried to "strangle Bolshevism in its cradle" but lacked the will to commit sufficient forces. Woodrow Wilson, who had declared self-determination as a universal principle, found himself unable to apply it consistently: the fourteen points said nothing about what happened when a people chose communism.
The Western narrative of 1917 has oscillated between horror and fascination. George Kennan's Russia Leaves the War (1956) and The Decision to Intervene (1958) established the liberal-realist framework: the revolution was a disaster, the intervention was a blunder, and the Cold War was the consequence of both. Richard Pipes's The Russian Revolution (1990) argued that Bolshevism was totalitarian from its inception, that Lenin's vanguard party, conspiratorial methods, and contempt for democracy made Stalinism inevitable, not aberrant. The policy implication was containment: the Soviet system could not be reformed, only outlasted.
Arguments
- Russia's exit from WWI via Brest-Litovsk was a strategic disaster that nearly lost the war for the Allies
- Allied intervention (1918-1920) failed militarily and gave the Bolsheviks a lasting propaganda tool
- Wilson's self-determination principle could not accommodate a people choosing communism
- Western policy toward Soviet Russia oscillated between containment and engagement for 70 years
Sources
- Russia Leaves the War
- The Decision to Intervene
- The Russian Revolution
academicRevisionist / Social History
The revisionist historians
The fifth account, built decades later by historians reading factory minutes and village records instead of party manifestos, asks a different question. What did ordinary people actually do, and how much of the outcome did any party truly control.
Petrograd's metalworkers, two hundred and fifty thousand of them in a city of two point four million, radicalized in stages. In February they wanted bread and an end to the war. By April they wanted the right to inspect the books and veto firings. By September, many had concluded that only the soviets taking power could guarantee it.
The Kornilov Affair, in this account, is the hinge nobody planned. Railway workers refused to move his trains, his own troops were talked into disobeying him, and the collapse handed the Bolsheviks forty thousand rifles and, within weeks, majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Without it, October might not have happened at all.
Orlando Figes gave the account its harshest line about the party it studies.
Read the full account
Narrative
The "revolution from below" school, associated with Ronald Grigor Suny, Steve Smith, Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg, and others, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a challenge to both the Soviet orthodoxy (revolution as the triumph of the party) and the Cold War liberal narrative (revolution as a Bolshevik conspiracy against democracy). These historians asked what ordinary people did in 1917, what they wanted, and how their actions shaped outcomes that no party fully controlled.
Steve Smith's Red Petrograd (1983) reconstructed factory life from workers' memoirs, factory committee minutes, and trade union records. Petrograd's metalworkers (250,000 in a city of 2.4 million) radicalized in distinct stages. In February, they wanted bread and an end to the war. By April, they demanded workers' control of production: the right to inspect management books, veto firings, and set work rules. By September, many had concluded that only the transfer of state power to the soviets could guarantee these gains. Smith argued that Bolshevik support grew not because Lenin manipulated workers but because Bolshevik positions tracked worker radicalization in real time.
The contingency question is central to revisionist historiography. Was October inevitable? The Kornilov Affair of late August 1917 was a turning point that no structural analysis predicted. General Lavr Kornilov marched troops on Petrograd; whether to impose a military dictatorship or to restore order at Kerensky's invitation is still debated. Kerensky panicked and armed the Bolsheviks to defend the city. The coup collapsed when railway workers refused to move Kornilov's trains and agitators persuaded his troops to disobey. The incident discredited both Kerensky and the military, left the Bolsheviks with 40,000 rifles, and swung the Petrograd and Moscow soviets to Bolshevik majorities in September. Without Kornilov, the Bolsheviks might not have had the weapons or the political mandate for October.
Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy (1996) synthesized the social-historical approach with narrative ambition. Figes followed six individuals through the revolution and civil war, from a peasant soldier to a provincial noble to a Bolshevik commissar. His argument was that 1917 was a cascade of interconnected revolutions (workers', soldiers', peasants', and national minorities') that the Bolsheviks rode but did not create. The party's genius was not in starting the revolution but in being the only organization willing to take power when the alternative was anarchy. Their tragedy was that the methods required to hold power (the Cheka, grain requisition, the suppression of dissent) destroyed the democratic promise that had given the revolution its moral force.
Recent scholarship has incorporated the experiences of non-Russian nationalities. The revolution triggered independence movements across the empire: Finland declared independence in December 1917; Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic states all declared independence in 1918. The Bolsheviks, who had endorsed national self-determination in theory, reconquered most of these states by 1921. Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia were incorporated into the Soviet Union by force. Only Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland maintained independence, and only because the Red Army was defeated at Warsaw in August 1920. The revolution that promised liberation from the Romanov empire created a new empire under a different name.
Arguments
- The revolution was driven from below by workers, soldiers, and peasants whose actions no party fully controlled
- Bolshevik support grew because their program tracked organic radicalization, not because of manipulation
- Contingency mattered. The Kornilov Affair was an unplanned turning point that armed the Bolsheviks
- The methods required to hold power destroyed the democratic promise of the revolution
Sources
- Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918
- A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
- The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States
The turn
And here is what each account cannot afford to say.
The Bolshevik account calls its growth organic and leaves out the forty thousand rifles a coup it did not stage handed it, and the Constituent Assembly it dissolved after a single day.
From the record
Dissolution of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918Red Terror and the Cheka's extrajudicial killings from 1918 onwardGerman financial and logistical support for Lenin's return to RussiaSuppression of rival socialist parties (Mensheviks, Left SRs) within months of OctoberThe White account is right that October was a minority seizure, and leaves out that the minority inherited a state the Whites had spent three centuries running by autocracy, censorship, and exile.
From the record
Tsarist autocracy's political repression, censorship, and exile systemBloody Sunday (1905) and military suppression of the 1905 RevolutionWhite movement's pogroms against Jewish communities in UkraineStructural crises of the Russian Empire (land hunger, illiteracy, industrial exploitation)The peasant account is right that the land was seized before any decree, and leaves out that the party issuing that decree would spend the next four years taking the grain back at gunpoint.
From the record
Bolshevik organizational skill and Lenin's strategic visionUrban intellectual and professional contributions to revolutionary politicsInternational dimensions (German sealed train, Allied intervention)Constitutional and institutional achievements of the Provisional GovernmentThe Western account explains why the Allies were furious and never asks why an intervention meant to smother Bolshevism handed it its founding grievance for free.
From the record
Domestic Russian dynamics that drove the revolution (bread prices, land hunger, war casualties)Allied governments' own wartime repression (censorship, conscription, strikes)Japanese territorial ambitions in Siberia that had nothing to do with anti-BolshevismWorkers' and soldiers' genuine support for soviet democracyAnd the academic account, which spares no one else, is least willing to say plainly that a revolution made from below can still end up in a single party's hands.
From the record
Lenin's strategic brilliance and the role of individual leadershipInternational revolutionary significance and the Comintern projectGenuine idealism and self-sacrifice among Bolshevik rank-and-fileSoviet achievements in literacy, industrialization, and public health under NEP
Close
The Kronstadt sailors who helped bring the Bolsheviks to power in nineteen seventeen rose against them in March nineteen twenty one. Trotsky's forces crossed the ice of the frozen bay to put them down.
The Constituent Assembly the Socialist Revolutionaries had actually won sat for twelve hours before Red Guards cleared the hall.
The bodies of Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children were driven to an abandoned mineshaft, doused in acid, and buried under a forest road. Nobody found them until nineteen ninety one.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1917-1922revolution
- Killed
- ~9Mcivil war 1917-1922, including famine and epidemic
- Displaced
- 170MRussian subjects; global communist movements for 74 years
- Place
- Russia
Key figures
- Tsar Nicholas IILast Emperor of Russia, abdicated March 2, 1917, executed July 17, 19181868 to 1918
- Vladimir LeninLeader of the Bolshevik Party, first head of Soviet Russia1870 to 1924
- Leon TrotskyChairman of the Petrograd Soviet, organized the October insurrection, created the Red Army1879 to 1940
- Alexander KerenskyHead of the Provisional Government, July-October 19171881 to 1970
- Alexandra FeodorovnaEmpress consort, executed with the imperial family1872 to 1918
- Grigori RasputinMystic, advisor to the imperial family, murdered December 30, 19161869 to 1916
- Joseph StalinBolshevik organizer, later General Secretary and dictator of the Soviet Union1878 to 1953
Primary sources
· Address to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets · October 26, 1917
“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.”
· History of the Russian Revolution · 1930
“The revolution does not choose its paths. It made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack's horse.”
· The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power, a letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees (ledger extract src-lenin-19170914.secopening) · September 12-14, 1917
“The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands.”
· The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (the April Theses), thesis three, as published in Pravda (ledger extract src-april-theses-en.sec3) · April 7, 1917
“No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations.”
· Decree on Peace, read by Lenin in his Report on Peace (ledger extract src-decree-peace-en.secopening) · October 26, 1917
“The workers' and peasants' government, created by the Revolution of October 24-25 and basing itself on the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, calls upon all the belligerent peoples and their government to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace.”
· Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, on which the enacted decree was based (ledger extract src-lenin-dissolution-1918.secresolve) · January 6, 1918
“Accordingly, the Central Executive Committee resolves that the Constituent Assembly is hereby dissolved.”
· Manifesto of abdication, signed at Pskov, in Golder's Documents of Russian History (ledger extract src-nicholas-manifesto-golder.secmichael) · March 2, 1917 (March 15, New Style)
“Not wishing to be separated from our beloved son, we hand down our inheritance to our brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and give him our blessing on mounting the throne of the Russian Empire.”
· Act declining the throne except by the will of a Constituent Assembly, in Golder's Documents of Russian History (ledger extract src-michael-golder.whole) · March 3, 1917 (March 16, New Style)
“I have decided to accept the supreme power, only if that be the desire of our great people, expressed at a general election for their representatives to the Constituent Assembly”
· The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power, a letter to the Central Committee (ledger extract src-lenin-19170914.secelections) · September 12-14, 1917
“We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing.”
· Telegram to the Secretary of State from Petrograd, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (ledger extract src-frus-poole-19180915.whole) · September 15, 1918
“Unknown number, reported 1,700, mostly former officers, are held as hostages for lives of commissars”
· Decree on Land, article four, adopting the Peasant Mandate (ledger extract src-decree-land-en.secmandate1) · October 26, 1917
“Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated.”
· Order No. 1, to the garrison of the Petrograd District, point four, in Golder's Documents of Russian History (ledger extract src-order1-golder.art4) · March 1, 1917 (March 14, New Style)
“The orders of the military commission of the State Duma shall be executed only in such cases as do not conflict with the orders and resolutions of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.”
· The History of the Russian Revolution, volume one, chapter Five Days (ledger extract src-trotsky-eastman-1932.secfrombelow) · 1930
“the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations”
· The Petropavlovsk resolution, Kronstadt, as Berkman prints it in The Kronstadt Rebellion (ledger extract src-berkman-1922.secres3) · March 1, 1921
“To secure freedom of assembly for labor unions and peasant organisations;”
· Aide-memoire on intervention in Russia, Foreign Relations of the United States (ledger extract src-frus-aidememoire-19180717.secjudgment) · July 17, 1918
“military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her”
· Aide-memoire on intervention in Russia, Foreign Relations of the United States (ledger extract src-frus-aidememoire-19180717.secjudgment) · July 17, 1918
“be merely a method of making use of Russia, not a method of serving her.”
· Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, article three, as Foreign Relations of the United States prints it (ledger extract src-brest-litovsk-1918.art3) · March 3, 1918
“The territories lying to the west of the line determined by the contracting powers and which formerly belonged to Russia will no longer be under her sovereignty.”
· Telegram to the Secretary of State from Petrograd, in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (ledger extract src-frus-francis-19180120.whole) · January 20, 1918
“Central Committee of Commissaries issued a decree dissolving Constituent Assembly because counterrevolutionary bourgeois influenced and not acknowledging result of October revolution”
· The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (ledger extract src-radkey-1950.p18) · 1950
“would not raise the total conservative vote above 3,500,000 out of a grand total of nearly 42,000,000.”
· Results of the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, in the symposium A Year of the Russian Revolution, rendered by Void from the Russian (ledger extract src-svyatitsky-1918.secbolsheviks.en) · 1918
“In all the Bolsheviks received 9.023.963 votes, which makes 25%”
· The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (ledger extract src-lenin-ca-elections-1919.secreturns) · December 16, 1919
“The total number of votes polled in the 54 constituencies in November 1917 was 36,262,560.”
· The Extraordinary Commissions for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution, rendered by Void from the Russian (ledger extract src-latsis-1921.p9.en) · 1921
“In the first half of 1918, the first half-year of the existence of the Extraordinary Commissions, they shot in all 22 people.”
Threads
- The Industrial RevolutionIn 1750, a Bengali weaver earned more than his English counterpart. By 1830, the looms of Dacca were silent. Britain had made sure of it.
- World War IThree years of war and more than 1.7 million Russian dead broke the Tsarist state. In February 1917 the monarchy fell; by October the Bolsheviks had seized a country the war had already emptied.
- The HolodomorGareth Jones walked through Ukrainian villages counting bodies. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for saying there was no famine.