The Russian Revolution

By 1917, three years of World War I had wrecked Russia. Soldiers died by the millions, peasants were conscripted off their land, and city workers faced bread shortages and brutal hours. When women textile workers in Petrograd walked out over bread prices in February 1917, the strike spread, soldiers sent to suppress it mutinied instead, and the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled since 1613, simply had no force left to defend it. Nicholas II abdicated within days, not because the empire was crushed from outside, but because it had rotted from within.

What followed was not one government but two, pulling against each other. The Provisional Government, made of liberal and moderate politicians, claimed legal authority but had no deep popular base. The Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies, held the real loyalty of the army garrisons and factories. This split, called dual power, meant the Provisional Government could not act without the Soviet's cooperation, and it kept failing on the issues people cared about: it stayed in the war, delayed land reform, and could not fix food supply. Into that vacuum, the Bolsheviks offered peace, land, and bread, a slogan that promised exactly what soldiers, peasants, and workers each wanted most, while rivals still defended the war or gradual change.

October 1917 was not a repeat of February's crowds. It was a small, disciplined Bolshevik and Red Guard operation that seized key points of Petrograd with little fighting, then presented the takeover to the Soviet as already finished. That narrow seizure of power set up the civil war and the consolidation of one-party rule that follows this topic.