I.

Introduction

Russian Revolution, political upheaval in imperial Russia culminating in 1917 with the establishment of the world’s first self-proclaimed communist state, later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922-1991). Two distinct political revolutions resulted in a rapid change of regimes in 1917. The first, which began on March 8 to 12, 1917 (February 23 to 27 in the Julian, or Old Style, calendar, then in use in Russia), overthrew the autocratic monarchy; it is frequently called the February Revolution. The second, an armed insurrection on November 6 and 7 (October 24 and 25), organized by the Bolshevik Party against the Provisional Government, brought a Soviet regime to power, and it is usually designated the Bolshevik, or October, Revolution. The political revolutions of 1917 were accompanied by a peasant revolution in the Russian countryside. Additionally, the imperial Russian state included many nationalities which sought greater autonomy or independence during the upheaval. The Russian Revolution saw a major re-casting of Russia’s relationship with its closest neighbours. (The Gregorian calendar was adopted by the Soviet government on January 31, 1918; all references to dates in this article are made in accordance with the new calendar.)

II.

Background to the Russian Revolution

A.

Russia Under Autocracy

A long period of instability preceded the Russian Revolution. In 1917, 80 per cent of the population of imperial Russia belonged to the peasantry, subsistence farmers who until 1861 had been serfs. Their emancipation under Tsar Alexander II was accompanied by great reforms that modernized the legal system, introduced local self-government, and promoted education. Peasants were still tied to meagre land parcels by obligations to their village commune. They also paid redemption payments to compensate their former owners until 1905. After 1861, rural life continued to follow traditional patterns. A growing peasant population experienced land hunger, and primitive agriculture barely met the needs of the countryside and towns.

Reform stimulated demands for more political change, especially from young educated radicals. Frustrated in the 1870s by failure to arouse the peasantry to rebellion, radicals assassinated Alexander II in St Petersburg in 1881. His son, Alexander III, came to the throne determined to root out subversion. He presided over a mixture of authoritarian and economically beneficial policies. “Temporary” military rule suspended local government in large parts of the Empire, and the secret police largely suppressed terrorism, while the educated, public-spirited “intelligentsia” devoted itself to “small deeds” of quiet opposition to autocracy. Under Alexander III, forcible Russification of the smaller nationalities of the Empire began to deflect demands for national self-expression. Protectionist economic policies fostered industry. Many peasants moved to the towns, became workers, and formed a restive working class.

Dying unexpectedly in 1894 at the age of 49, Alexander left the throne to his 26-year-old son, Nicholas II. The new tsar re-affirmed the principle of autocracy and his father’s “temporary” police measures. Economic growth also continued: investment expanded Russia’s cities, and soon after 1900, major projects, such as the Trans-Siberian Railway, were complete. Russia entered the global economy as French and British investors seized opportunities for profit in its burgeoning industries.

Urbanization and industrialization brought significant social stress; living conditions in workers’ suburbs were intolerable. Intelligentsia and workers revived revolutionary sentiment. Their movements were influenced by the Russian populism of the 1870s, which looked to the peasants as a source of revolutionary potential, and to the European socialism of Karl Marx, which focused on the industrial working class as the motor of change. Illegal parties, notably the populist Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist party, appeared as the new century dawned. Both parties conducted terrorism and organized robbery to fund political activities. In 1903, the RSDLP split into Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who favoured a small membership of professional revolutionaries devoted to leading the working class to socialism through violent revolution, and the Mensheviks, who favoured evolution towards socialism through parliamentary democracy. Both branches of the RSDLP encouraged illegal strikes to draw attention to worker discontent and political hopes.

B.

The Revolution of 1905 and its Consequences

The autocracy tried to unite Russia around a war with Japan that began in February 1904 (see Russo-Japanese War). Defeats and the PSR’s assassination of the hard-line minister Vyacheslav von Plehve in July only fed discontent, which Nicholas unsuccessfully tried to arrest with a decree promising minor reforms in December 1904. Outrage erupted after the January 22, 1905, “Bloody Sunday” massacre of workers in St Petersburg, and the government lost control during what became the 1905 Revolution.

Strikes spread in the cities; in the countryside, peasants seized noble land and declared local self-rule. Mutinies erupted in the army and navy (see Potemkin Mutiny). Middle-class groups formed the Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets), which sought a parliamentary democracy. Kadets allied with the PSR and the RSDLP and backed the foundation of “soviets” or councils of workers. In October 1905 a general strike, led by the St Petersburg Soviet, paralysed the Empire. On October 30, Nicholas was forced to issue his October Manifesto promising a parliament, the State Duma, and granting political liberties. The revolutionary movement subsided as middle-class Russians resolved to work within the new arrangements, while the army and courts martial quelled violent resistance from the soviets and peasants.

The restoration of the tsar’s authority did not solve underlying social and political questions. Elections to the first two Dumas (1906, 1907) yielded fractious parliaments and were rapidly closed; and a decree of June 16, 1907, altered the voting system to favour the most conservative parties and shut out anti-tsarist opposition. Nicholas and his advisers failed to rally enough creative and intelligent support to their side. They covertly fostered nationalist “Black Hundreds” to launch pogroms against Jews and socialists. Russification policies continued. Educated Russians increasingly divided into an alienated opposition, disappointed with the Duma and frustrated by government incompetence, and an “official” Russia that supported the autocracy and government, but worried that Nicholas was an unsuitable ruler.

The peasant revolution of 1905 was the only upheaval that stimulated the autocracy to constructive measures. Redemption payments for ex-serfs were abolished. To modernize agriculture and build support for private property among peasants, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin inaugurated a scheme to convert communal landholding into individual farms. This transformation of millions of small rural households would have required a long period of stability to achieve the intended result. It had only just begun by 1914.

After 1905 the socialist parties still tried to undermine the state. PSR tactics fragmented. Disputes raged between those who promoted terror, and those who wanted to enter the Duma; PSR peasant supporters were demoralized after 1905. The RSDLP attempted to heal the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (although this rift was permanent from 1912), and grassroots pressure compelled both factions to contest Duma elections. Social Democrats in parliament called for workers’ rights; they also exploited legal trade unionism to organize at grassroots level.

Strike activity increased dramatically from 1912, when troops killed striking gold miners on the River Lena in Siberia. The RSDLP profited by this upswing to advance its ideas among educated and skilled workers. On the eve of World War I, in July 1914, another general strike brought St Petersburg to a standstill. Only the declaration of war ended the unrest in displays of patriotism similar to those witnessed elsewhere in Europe. The strike collapsed as workers apparently joined other sections of society to back the war.

III.

Russia and World War I

Tsar Nicholas joined the war on the side of the Entente, with Britain and France, against the Central Powers, the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. Imperial Russia’s forces seemed to offer the Entente a “steamroller” that would press Germany and Austria with overwhelming force on the eastern front. Yet, early Russian victories were rapidly reversed and the Central Powers took Russia’s Polish territory, plus its Baltic lands (today’s Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) by the summer of 1915. One million Russian soldiers were dead and four million injured. Nicholas took over from his uncle as commander-in-chief and left Petrograd (as St Petersburg was renamed, in 1914) for the front.

The Duma met twice in 1915 but in September Nicholas closed it, rejecting its calls for a government of public confidence chosen from its deputies. At the front he was indelibly associated with military disaster. Peasant conscripts replaced experienced soldiers and the army of 1916 confronted supply shortages, matched by inflation and shortages in the cities. The tsarist ministries refused to listen to experts in industry and science seeking to help the war effort. Refugees and injured troops flooded into the cities, and aid failed to match the scale of the suffering.

Rumours that Empress Alexandra, by origin a German, was a traitor, circulated widely among the troops. Government was largely in her hands and she took advice from Grigory Rasputin, a holy man whose disreputable behaviour damaged the monarchy’s prestige irreparably. Scandals in government prompted a rapid succession of ministers, and liberal Duma politicians openly denounced “treason in high places”. When a member of the royal family and a nationalist politician murdered Rasputin, on December 29-30, 1916, the tsar’s isolation from his last supporters was exposed. Many expected a palace coup to replace Nicholas.

IV.

The February Revolution

Strikes and work stoppages in Petrograd accelerated in the first weeks of 1917, triggered by war-weariness, extreme cold and privation, and growing worker activism. Police judged the strikes to be increasingly “political” because of anti-war demands. On Wednesday, March 7 (or February 22 Old Style) a strike and lock-out began at the huge Putilov metal works in the south-west industrial quarter of Petrograd. It was followed the next day (International Women’s Day, March 8) by women’s marches to the centre of the capital demanding bread. Crowds continued to demonstrate on Friday March 9, again moving from outlying industrial districts into the heart of the city, where the ministries and Duma were concentrated. Troops sought to repel the crowds without using force. On Saturday March 10 the capital was brought to a standstill by a general strike; moreover, individual police were killed and there were incidents of Cossack troops refusing to help police clear streets of demonstrators.

Having by now received reports from Petrograd, Nicholas ordered the immediate suppression of disorders by any means necessary. Military commanders planned a show of force for Sunday March 11. That day saw commanders ordering troops to fire on the crowds. The Volynsky regiment of trainee officers killed dozens of demonstrators at Znamenskaya Square and machine gunners shot at crowds from rooftops. Hundreds died that day.

The effect that the violence had on the soldiers of the Volynsky regiment turned the disorders into a revolution. On the morning of Monday March 12 they disobeyed orders, killed their commander, and dispersed to other barracks to muster support. During the day, rebellious soldiers, workers, and students commanded the streets. By nightfall, 70,000 government troops had mutinied. The tsar’s forces in the capital lost all authority.

On Sunday and Monday (March 11 and 12), members of the Duma met privately at the Tauride Palace, where parliament sat, to discuss the crisis. Reluctant to be seen as initiators of a revolution these leaders nevertheless recognized the need “to take responsibility for restoring state and public order”. They established a “Temporary Committee of the State Duma” (or Duma Committee) that soon formed the Provisional Government.

Simultaneously, leaders of the moderate socialist parties, including many with experience of the 1905 Revolution, discussed the revival of the St Petersburg Soviet, or council of workers’ deputies. By Monday afternoon a group of Mensheviks and others, meeting in another wing of the Tauride Palace, established a committee to organize elections among workers and soldiers for a new soviet. That evening a gathering of some 250 intellectuals, workers, and soldiers constituted itself as the new Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (two days later, “Soldiers” was added to the title). Throughout that night and during Tuesday March 13, the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma Committee struggled to restore order in the streets, take command of the city’s troops and police force, and safeguard its infrastructure. Elections to the Soviet took place and new delegates, including soldiers’ delegates, streamed to the palace.

On Wednesday March 14 soldiers reacted stormily to the Duma Committee’s attempts to return them to barracks. Their representatives flooded the Petrograd Soviet and compelled the moderate leadership to accept Order No. 1, a decree subordinating soldiers only to those orders endorsed by the Soviet, and permitting soldiers to set up committees inside the army to monitor decision-making. With command of the armed forces in the balance, the moderate Soviet leadership and the Duma Committee agreed that the latter should form a Provisional Government, without recalling the Duma. That parliament was now seen as irreparably compromised by the undemocratic electoral system; instead, the new government pledged to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly to settle Russia’s political future. By Thursday March 15, the Provisional Government began operations, with liberal Prince Lvov as prime minister.

On the same day, in transit from the front to Petrograd, the Army High Command confronted Tsar Nicholas and advised him to abdicate. He did so for himself and in the name of his haemophiliac son, Alexei, in favour of his brother Grand Duke Michael. After talks with the Provisional Government on Friday March 16, Michael abdicated, and the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end. Soon Nicholas and his family were under arrest. News of the Petrograd events spread rapidly via rail and telegraph around the Empire, and the revolution arrived in provincial Russia. Local authority mirrored arrangements in the capital, with “temporary committees” assuming leadership, shadowed by local soviets.

Russia’s new government was a “dual power” compromise between the Provisional Government, a collection of Kadet and other liberal politicians who saw themselves as assuring continuity with the tsarist state, and the Petrograd Soviet, whose moderate socialist leaders monitored government decisions without themselves wishing to assume power. The new government quickly abolished censorship and the hated tsarist police, gave women the vote, and revoked discriminatory laws based on religion and nationality. It also reassured Britain and France that it would continue the war, although the aims of the new Russia were to become a source of deep division. The Soviet’s moderate socialists proclaimed their adherence to “revolutionary defencism”—the principle that the war’s sole legitimate purpose was to defend the revolution from invaders, and that no victorious nation should annex territory.

A.

Lenin’s Return and the April Crisis

The Bolsheviks played a minor role in the February revolution. Their leaders in Petrograd followed the moderate socialist compromise of dual power and deference to the Provisional Government, including the “defencist” war aims. The Bolsheviks’ paramount leader, Vladimir Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland when the revolution broke out. He travelled to Russia after negotiating passage by “sealed train” across Germany with a group of radicals, arriving at Petrograd’s Finland Station on April 16. The next day he launched a drive to realign the Bolsheviks as the radical alternative to moderate socialism with his April Theses.

Lenin attacked the Menshevik and SR leaders’ revolutionary defencism, demanding an immediate end to the war, no socialist cooperation with the Provisional Government, and a turn to the “second stage” of the revolution, when the Soviets themselves would take power. Such ideas failed to match the mood of optimistic unity most Russians, including many grassroots Bolsheviks, felt after the February Revolution, but Lenin’s ideas would attract support once disappointment with dual power grew.

The first significant challenge to the dual-power system came within weeks (in April according to the Julian calendar, hence the label “April Crisis”) when the Soviet and Provisional Government clashed over Russia’s aims in the war. Britain and France had quickly recognized the Provisional Government in a bid to keep Russia in the war. Secret treaties had promised tsarist Russia the city of Constantinople, a prize offering unfettered access to the Mediterranean.

Kadet Pavel Milyukov, the government’s foreign minister, opposed Soviet attempts to impose its defencist war aims in a diplomatic note being prepared for the Allies. On May 1 (April 18 old style) the Provisional Government sent a “defencist” declaration largely authored by the Soviet, covered with a note written by Milyukov affirming tsarist aims and hinting that annexations were still anticipated.

When, on May 3, Milyukov’s note was published, anti-war demonstrators poured into the streets to denounce the foreign minister. A counter-demonstration, defending Milyukov, by middle-class supporters of the Provisional Government took place the following day; violence resulted in the loss of lives. The stark class division implicit in dual power was exposed. Confidence in the Provisional Government’s ability to speak for the whole country plummeted.

Soviet leaders Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli and SR Vasily Chernov feared that popular pressure could topple the Government and ignite civil war. They were persuaded to enter the Provisional Government, as ministers of post and telegraphs, and of agriculture, respectively, in a Cabinet of “all the vital forces” of the country, along with other members of the Soviet, including Aleksandr Kerensky, a right-wing socialist who moved from the ministry of justice in the first government, to become minister of war. A young, left-leaning industrialist, Mikhail Tereshchenko, became foreign minister. This first coalition of liberals and socialists lasted from May 18 until July 15. Coalition with the Provisional Government’s liberal ministers diluted the moderate socialists’ ability to satisfy their supporters. Meanwhile radical Bolsheviks, Left SRs (who would later split from the PSR), and anarchists now seemed to offer the clearest opposition to the Government and its policies.

B.

A Deepening Revolution

The social tensions that ignited revolution were scarcely soothed by coalition in the Provisional Government. As in 1905, peasants, workers and soldiers spontaneously, and with encouragement by political activists, embarked on a transformation of their own lives.

Emboldened by the Socialist Revolutionary Chernov’s rise to the post of agriculture minister, peasants began seizing lands belonging to the gentry, crown, and church, as well as those of the independent farmers of the Stolypin reform. Setting up village committees to redistribute land according to traditional egalitarianism, by summer many rural areas were effectively under self rule as in 1905. While the pace of land seizures accelerated, manor houses were burnt down, modern machinery destroyed, and the local intelligentsia attacked. The share-out of the land exerted a significant pull on peasant soldiers, tempted to desert their posts rather than miss out on gains in their villages. The PSR leadership in the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government, committed to deferring land reform until the Constituent Assembly met, could not arrest the slide into peasant revolution.

Workers enjoyed some gains from the February revolution, but deep divisions with industrialists soon re-emerged. In the spring, the Provisional Government accepted in principle the eight-hour working day and minimum wages; it implemented the rationing of key foodstuffs. Factory committees elected by the workforce enforced workers’ control, reviewing and sometimes making production decisions. Some factory committees assisted owners with supply bottlenecks and labour disputes, but most committees were centres of revolutionary agitation especially by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the left wing of the SRs. Factory meetings gave socialist activists opportunities to hear popular grievances and channel them into committee decisions. As 1917 wore on, economic conditions deteriorated and worker discontent increased. Inflation rose dramatically and by the summer many factories closed due to shortages, unprofitability and desertion by owners. Workers experienced unemployment and their demands grew more radical.

Soldiers and sailors were disaffected by the Provisional Government’s determination to continue the war to a “decisive victory”. The fever for committees swept through the ranks after the February revolution, and the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1 endorsed a radical revision in military relations. On March 25 the Provisional Government abolished capital punishment, removing the ultimate disciplinary measure in the army. The army committee network helped to circulate the revolutionary defencism of the Menshevik-SR leadership to the grassroots soldier. The struggle between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government for clear war aims was reflected at the front by a virtual truce as all parties waited to see if the Soviet’s early peace efforts would bear fruit. Mutinies and violence against unpopular officers proliferated. When the first coalition Provisional Government, including Menshevik-SR ministers, redefined “revolutionary defencism” to justify a new offensive against the Germans, soldiers would turn against moderate socialists and find the immediate peace offered by Bolsheviks and the Left SRs more palatable.

Sailors of the Imperial Baltic Fleet, with bases in Helsinki and on the island fortress of Kronshtadt near Petrograd, were among the most radical revolutionaries of early 1917. The Provisional Government quickly lost control of Kronshtadt. Sailors organized committees—eventually, a soviet—that governed there, as well as setting up the usual committees aboard their ships, and at naval ports. By April-May the Baltic Fleet was under the authority of Tsentrobalt, the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet, an executive body dominated by Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and radicals. The proximity of Tsentrobalt to Petrograd gave radical socialists a powerful base from which to operate.

C.

National Revolutions Within the Russian Empire

The many nationalities of the multi-ethnic Russian Empire responded to the fall of the tsar in varying ways. Revolution came at different speeds to the “national”, ethnic, and religious communities on the periphery of empire. The Kadets and most moderate socialists were unsettled by the strongest demands from non-Russian national movements, and they intended to preserve “Russia one and indivisible”.

Poland was a special case. Germany occupied Russia’s Polish territory before the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government quickly recognized Poland’s right to self-determination. This concession made later demands for national freedom difficult to refuse, but the Provisional Government argued that such questions must be left to the Constituent Assembly.

Ukraine presented a complexity that prevailed, to varying degrees, in many other national homelands. Ukraine was the largest embryonic nation in the empire aside from Russia (22 per cent of the population) and a major economic and geopolitical asset. The Ukrainians were torn between political movements for socialism and those promoting a nationalist change to Ukraine’s relationship with the Russians.

The February Revolution in Ukraine resulted in the establishment of a Ukrainian Rada (council) composed of local parties (Ukrainian Social Democrats, Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, Socialist Federalists, and others). On June 23 the Rada issued its first “Universal” or proclamation, stating that Russia should become a federation within which Ukraine should have its own government to promote its language and culture.

In Petrograd the Provisional Government was alarmed by this development and Tereshchenko (a Ukrainian), Kerensky, and Tsereteli were sent to Kiev, to talk with the Rada. On July 14 they agreed to allow the Rada authority to govern provisionally in Ukraine and to defer the status of Ukraine to the decisions of the Constituent Assembly. Even this compromise went too far for Petrograd’s Kadet ministers, and they resigned on July 15, prompting the collapse of the first coalition and a prolonged government crisis.

Nationalists, aware of Ukraine’s complex demography, did not call for outright independence. Ethnic Ukrainians were primarily peasants, while in towns, Russians and Jews predominated in industry, the professions, and among the educated groups normally responsive to nationalism. Russians in Ukraine, like Petrograd politicians, generally wanted a unitary Russian state rather than a federal one rendering them a minority in an autonomous Ukraine. Ukraine’s peasants were uninterested in nationalism but eager to seize land like their Russian counterparts. Land hunger in the countryside mobilized Ukraine’s peasantry, and the allegiance of this group would fluctuate during the Civil War before Ukraine fell to Soviet power.

Other regions displayed similar reactions to February. Finland ultimately declared its independence on December 19. Estonia and Latvia achieved full independence, along with Lithuania, after the Bolsheviks came to power. In the Caucasus region, the ancient nations of Armenia and Georgia yielded distinct vehicles for national self-rule: the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun and Georgia’s Mensheviks. Bolshevik forces would eventually defeat both movements. Meanwhile in oil-rich but ethnically diverse Azerbaijan religious and ethnic divisions favoured Russian—eventually, Soviet—domination.

Turkistan (today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) had cities run by Russian settlers dominating Muslim townspeople while the countryside was populated by Muslims. Turkistan’s Russians replicated the February Revolution in Toshkent and other towns, while the Muslim leadership divided between modernizing Jadid and traditionalist Ulāma movements. A single Islamic response to revolution did not emerge in 1917, but the rupture ignited a series of confrontations between Russian settlers and Muslim “natives” that turned on religion, social aspirations, and ethnic tensions. These conflicts were only settled after years of civil war.

D.

Kerensky’s Offensive and the July Days

The first coalition Provisional Government decided to launch a new offensive against Germany. The new war minister, Kerensky, toured the front to persuade troops that the offensive was necessary to save the February Revolution. On July 1, the Russian army moved against the Germans in Galicia and initially overwhelmed them with superior firepower. However the Russians did not sustain the attack, with many units returning to their trenches, holding meetings to debate the offensive, or deserting. The offensive—and with it the Provisional Government’s revived war effort—was already collapsing when on July 15 the news of the agreement on Ukrainian autonomy prompted the resignation of Kadet ministers and Prime Minister Lvov. The first coalition of the Provisional Government ended over the national question, but its end coincided with the collapse of the Kerensky offensive and with days of violence and disorder in Petrograd, the “July Days”.

From July 16 to 18 popular discontent and political agitation in Petrograd fed a series of anti-war demonstrations and calls for a socialist government based on a national Congress of Soviets. Late on July 16, regiments due to be transferred to the front combined with striking workers to move on the city centre. Tens of thousands surrounded the Tauride Palace, demanding a Soviet government, but the moderate socialist leadership rebuffed the demonstrators and the meeting ended inconclusively. The Bolshevik leadership, initially hesitant, gave qualified support to continued street action for Soviet power. On July 17 the demonstrators again surrounded the Tauride Palace and berated Soviet leaders for refusing to take the power being handed to them. The July Days came to a halt because of moderate socialist refusal to seize power, the Provisional Government’s denunciation of the Bolsheviks as German agents, and the arrival of loyal troops, who dispersed the demonstrators at a cost of 400 lives.

E.

The Final Crises of the Provisional Government

The Provisional Government, in chaos because of the collapse of the first coalition, and reeling from the failure of the Kerensky offensive, distracted attention from these disasters thanks to the July Days. Blaming the Bolsheviks for attempting a seizure of power, on July 25 the Provisional Government closed the party’s newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and outlawed its leaders, sending Lenin into hiding. A second Provisional Government coalition eventually formed under Kerensky as prime minister and war minister, on August 7 (it was to last to September 9). The government—again composed of Kadets and moderate socialists—sought allies on the right.

Kerensky had appointed General Lavr Kornilov supreme commander of the army before the formation of the second coalition and Kornilov quickly called for more authoritarian discipline at the front and in the rear. Kerensky hesitated, unwilling to offend Soviet leaders. At the Moscow State Conference, held on August 23-26 by the Provisional Government to rally support, affluent Russia’s representatives hailed Kornilov as a saviour who might overcome national disintegration by a military dictatorship.

During negotiations between Kerensky and Kornilov over the preservation of order in the capital, a misunderstanding between them in a teletype conversation erupted on September 9, cementing Kerensky’s mistrust of the general. Immediately, Kerensky announced the removal of Kornilov as commander-in-chief, and the outraged general ordered his troops to march on Petrograd. To defend the “revolution in danger” Kerensky turned to the Soviet and volunteer armed workers, the Red Guards. Railway workers halted Kornilov’s troops outside Petrograd, and agitators persuaded them to desert. By September 13 Kornilov’s coup attempt was over. Kerensky’s authority and that of the moderate socialists in his government was in tatters; the army endured further desertions and violence against all officers; and the radical socialists were now in the ascendant as defenders of the revolution.

Kerensky formed a “Directory” (September 14 to October 10) under intense pressure from the discredited Menshevik and SR Soviet leaders to call the Provisional Government to account for the Kornilov fiasco. Eventually, a third coalition of Kadets and moderate socialists emerged on October 10, only to be deposed on November 7 by the Bolsheviks. During its short life it tried to reconcile Kadets and moderate socialists in the so-called Pre-Parliament that opened on October 20.

However by now the Petrograd Soviet and many other local soviets around the country were dominated by radical, not moderate, socialists, with a majority of Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and radical Menshevik delegates. The Provisional Government’s partners in “dual power”, the mainstream Menshevik and SR leadership, lost command of the Soviet, and authority over troops in the capital. Moreover, Lenin was now campaigning aggressively within his own party for a seizure of power in the name of the Soviets.

V.

The Bolshevik Seizure of Power

From Finland, still an outlaw, Lenin argued with more cautious Bolsheviks in Petrograd, including Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, that the time to take power was at hand. Many in the Party saw the forthcoming Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets as the best place to proclaim Soviet power, in the name of all the socialist parties. Disgusted with the record of the moderate socialists, Lenin scorned the idea of sharing power with them, but among rank and file Bolsheviks, among radicalized workers, and among the Left SRs (who soon separated from the PSR) the idea of socialist pluralism was attractive. Lenin returned to Petrograd on October 23, and persuaded Bolshevik leaders to back a seizure of power. Little planning took place in the following week, but thanks to the deferral of the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets to November 7, more time for preparation remained.

On November 2, Leon Trotsky, now chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, set up a Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet (MRC), and it began to assert its control over the city garrison and over the Red Guards, mobilizing units loyal to the Soviet and replacing moderate socialist commanders with radicals. In response, early in the morning of November 6, Kerensky denounced the MRC and sought to close newspapers and defend the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace by calling in loyal troops.

That day saw the Bolshevik-led MRC take key targets in Petrograd, and the seizure of the Winter Palace that was launched with a shot from the cruiser Aurora. Kerensky managed to escape before the government’s ministers were arrested. On November 7, Lenin and Trotsky announced the seizure of power to the Second Congress of Soviets; Mensheviks and SRs walked out rather than endorse the coup, leaving only the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left SRs. The Congress passed decrees proclaiming Soviet power across all of Russia, calling for peace, land reform, and the self-determination of nations. It approved the formation of a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, composed entirely of Bolshevik ministers, led by Lenin.

VI.

Consolidating Soviet Power

An immediate attempt to overturn the Soviet government was made by moderate socialists united with Petrograd city councillors, who formed a Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and Revolution, and General Pyotr Krasnov, who led troops in a bid to re-take the capital for Kerensky. Bolshevik-led forces quickly defeated Krasnov’s assault, the Committee was crushed, and the Bolsheviks established their hold of Moscow by November 15. Negotiations with the socialist parties to enter a coalition in the Soviet government took place but moderate socialists effectively demanded a return to the Provisional Government, rejected by Lenin. Later, on December 25, hoping to restrain the excesses of the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs did accept a junior role in the Council of People’s Commissars, and they remained in the government until March 1918.

Lenin found it necessary to proceed with elections to the Constituent Assembly, which began on November 25. They produced a rout for the Bolsheviks who received only 25 per cent of the vote, while the peasant-oriented PSR got 38 per cent. When the Assembly was finally allowed to meet on January 18, 1918, Bolsheviks demanded endorsement of Soviet government measures; when this was rejected, they walked out. Soldiers sent the deputies away that night and a Soviet decree abolished the Assembly.

The Bolsheviks significantly strengthened their rule on December 20, 1917 by founding a new security police force, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (called the Cheka after its Russian acronym), a forerunner of the KGB. Led by a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, it conducted terror against enemies of Soviet rule. Its brutal summary justice would lie beyond the scrutiny of courts or other bodies in the new government. By 1919 it had about 37,000 men under command, and it became a major instrument of Soviet authority during the Civil War (see also Red Terror).

The Soviet government negotiated an armistice with Germany and Austria-Hungary that began on December 15, 1917. Talks to end the war commenced, led by Trotsky as Soviet commissar of foreign affairs. When talks failed in February 1918, the Central Powers resumed fighting and rapidly took much of the western periphery of the old empire, including Ukraine. Alarmed Bolsheviks argued bitterly over whether to fight the invaders or sign a punitive peace treaty, as Lenin argued they should. In March 1918 they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding enormous territory to Germany. The losses proved temporary when the Central Powers were defeated in November 1918. The peace satisfied popular anti-war feeling, and allowed the Bolsheviks to prepare for the coming Civil War by organizing the new Red Army.

VII.

International Dimensions of the Russian Revolution

Before 1914 the RSDLP looked to Germany’s Social Democrats as the world socialist movement’s strongest party, and participated in the Second International, a union of socialist parties. When this International collapsed in 1914 with the outbreak of war, Lenin, Trotsky, and radical socialists of other nations insistently tried to organize a new International based on opposition to the war. Only after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik victory did a Third, Communist, International arise in March 1919.

Before this, in April 1917 Lenin’s well-known anti-war stance made him an asset to Germany when its authorities let him return to Russia, but he was always a revolutionary acting according to his own impulses, and hardly the “German agent” that Kerensky’s post-July Days rhetoric claimed. Recently, historians have shown how many countries during World War I used propaganda, secret subsidies, and agents inside Russia in 1917 to foster or suppress anti-war sentiment. They had minimal influence on events. The tide of genuinely revolutionary feeling mobilizing Russia’s population in 1917 was too overwhelming to be the product of foreign spies or money.

Negotiations from November 1917 to February 1918 leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were accompanied by direct Soviet appeals to the peoples of Germany and Austria-Hungary to rise up against capitalism and join the Soviet revolution. Fraternization between Russian and Central Power troops during these months bore some fruit: Soviet “self-determination of nations” appealed to the restive nationalities of the weak Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in early 1918, Vienna and its troops experienced mutinies inspired by the Russian Revolution. A short-lived Soviet republic in Hungary in 1919 supposedly heralded the coming world revolution. Yet spreading revolution to neighbouring countries proved harder than expected.

After the success of 1917, Bolsheviks believed that revolution was imminent in the more developed nations of Central and Western Europe. Russia was underdeveloped, and Marxists argued that its revolutionary leap into socialism would be premature without the assistance of a revolution in highly industrialized Germany. In 1920, during the Russian Civil War, Soviet forces invaded Poland in a fruitless bid to reach Germany and spread revolution (see Soviet (Russo)-Polish War). By 1921 it was obvious that world revolution was years away and the Soviet government largely turned its attention to consolidating its power at home.

VIII.

Historians and the Russian Revolution

Historians have regarded the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the most momentous event of the 20th century, and they have disagreed violently about its interpretation. Political developments during the century significantly influenced the views of 1917 which emerged. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 significantly changed how historians see the events of 1917.

The Soviet view of 1917 presented it as the dawn of a new era in human history, the first chapter in the story of the triumph of socialism. In the official Soviet view that evolved under increasingly sinister political changes during the 1920s-1950s, scholarship and critical inquiry withered. The story of the Russian Revolution of 1917 became a fable in which Lenin and his far-sighted Bolsheviks overcame all obstacles, in particular the moderate socialists, (now designated enemies of the people), to win power for the proletariat. At the height of his power, the modest role of Joseph Stalin in the events of 1917 was exaggerated to make him appear as Lenin’s chief helpmate, while the role of Stalin’s arch-rival Trotsky was erased. After the death of Stalin, and the denunciation of his cult of personality, Soviet historians resumed scholarly inquiry about 1917, within carefully defined limits. The role of the Bolsheviks, the continued erasure of Trotsky, and the use of a mandatory Marxist-Leninist ideological framework, could not be questioned. Yet from the 1960s to the 1980s, Soviet historians conducted more detailed work about the social roots of revolution.

A related, but usually overlooked, perspective on 1917 was propagated by leftists in the democratic West who rejected the USSR’s claim to lead the world socialist movement. This view was sometimes called libertarian, after its leftist and anarchist origins. It celebrated the mass impulse to self-government in 1917. This impulse yielded the liberating experiments of factory and army committees, workers’ control of industry, the Red Guards, and peasant committees in rural Russia. In this interpretation Bolshevism was an elitist philosophy that ultimately built a bureaucracy to exploit workers and peasants. This view of 1917 had most influence among political activists of the New Left of the 1960s-1970s, and less impact on scholarly study or public opinion in the West. Soviet historians ignored it.

Western historians generally proposed a classically liberal view of the Revolution. The liberal view denied Marxist claims to know the laws of history, doubted the rigid division of humanity into classes acting in their own interests, and stressed the role of individuals and ideas in history. Liberal historians argued that the intentions and decisions of Nicholas II, Lenin, Kerensky, and other political actors were paramount in 1917. This view demoted social processes at work in 1917 to causes of the second rank; thus the revolution was ultimately a political event, the product of the tsar’s incompetence, the Provisional Government’s political inexperience, and the cunning of the Bolsheviks under Lenin. The undemocratic results of 1917 demonstrated Lenin’s ruthlessness, and the Stalinist and post-Stalin Soviet system with its disregard for liberty and humanity were the logical consequence of Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat. Many observers labelled this school of interpretation “totalitarian” for its emphasis on the totalitarian features of the Soviet system. This view of 1917 dominated public opinion in the Western world during the Cold War and framed most scholarly research until the 1960s, when improving access to Soviet archival sources inspired Western scholars to ask new questions about the revolution’s social origins.

Revisionist scholarship emerged during the 1960s-1980s, from this new focus on social history. When considering 1917, revisionists challenged the Soviet emphasis on Bolshevik leadership and the liberal claim that the key decisions were made by political actors at the summit of society. Detailed research on peasant action, on factory committees, on popular petitions and demonstrations, and other features of the revolution from below, was undertaken using gradually more accessible Soviet archives (although major restrictions remained until 1991). Revisionists also re-examined collections of revolutionary documents long held in Western libraries. They emphasized the importance of long-term social divisions in tsarist society, divisions that were crucial to understanding popular action in the revolutionary year. For this generation of social historians, 1917 was a genuinely popular revolution, but one that gave way to an authoritarian party that arrested, at tragic cost, the breakdown of the state.

Since 1991, with the death of the official Soviet view, and much freer access to Russia’s archives and libraries, research on the revolution has tended to deepen understanding of the profound social processes underlying 1917. At the same time, certain aspects of the story of individuals (Nicholas and Alexandra’s political naivety, Lenin’s cruelty) have found new confirmation in archival revelations. Previously understudied political actors (the Mensheviks, the PSR, the Provisional Government) have been re-examined in light of new sources, refreshing the political history of 1917 by restoring the diversity of voices heard in that year.

In Russia, academic and popular historians have embraced a sceptical anti-communist view of this history, and the social forces which late-Soviet historians had to present as signs of dawning socialism are now studied as symptoms of a national tragedy. In the West, the debates which raged during the 1980s in academic journals between advocates of the totalitarian school and the revisionists have cooled. Scholars have not reached a consensus about the significance of 1917, but the Cold War that shaped old historical views of the Russian Revolution has ended. In the 21st century, with Russia emerging as an energy superpower, the economic and international impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is likely to attract more new research.