What was the Russian Revolution?
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was actually two revolutions: the February Revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and established a provisional government, and the October Revolution in which Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power and established the world's first communist state. It transformed Russia into the Soviet Union and reshaped global politics for the rest of the 20th century.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the pivotal events of modern history — it destroyed a 300-year-old dynasty, created the world's first state built on Marxist ideology, and launched an experiment in communist governance that would define global politics for seven decades.
The revolution grew from deep structural crises. Tsarist Russia was an autocracy ruling over a vast, multi-ethnic empire with a largely peasant population, a small but rapidly growing industrial working class concentrated in cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow, and a political system that resisted meaningful reform. Russia's entry into World War I exposed the regime's weaknesses catastrophically — military defeats, massive casualties, food shortages, and economic collapse eroded whatever remaining loyalty the population felt toward Tsar Nicholas II.
The February Revolution of 1917 was largely spontaneous. Bread riots in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) escalated into a general strike; soldiers refused to fire on protesters and joined them instead. Nicholas abdicated on March 2, and a Provisional Government led by moderate liberals took power. But this government made the fateful decision to continue the war, while failing to address demands for land reform, bread, and peace.
Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party exploited this vacuum. Lenin, who had spent years in exile developing his theory of a disciplined revolutionary vanguard party, returned to Russia in April with German assistance. His slogan — 'Peace, Bread, Land' — captured exactly what the exhausted population wanted. On October 25 (November 7 by the Western calendar), the Bolsheviks seized government buildings in Petrograd in a nearly bloodless coup. Lenin immediately began negotiating an exit from the war and redistributing land.
What followed was anything but bloodless. A brutal civil war (1918–1921) between the Red Army (Bolsheviks) and White Army (a loose coalition of monarchists, liberals, and foreign interventionists) killed millions. The Bolsheviks won but at enormous cost, establishing a one-party state, suppressing opposition, and centralizing power in ways that would intensify under Stalin. The Russian Revolution demonstrated that Marxist revolution was possible — and its consequences, for better and worse, would reverberate through every subsequent decade of the 20th century.