What Was the Russian Revolution? From Tsar to Soviet Power in One Year

Nicholas II inherited an empire that was industrialising fast and governing slowly. A revolution in 1905, after defeat by Japan, had forced him to concede a parliament, the Duma, which he then spent a decade ignoring. The First World War broke the system. Russia mobilised fifteen million men, lost several million of them, ran short of rifles, and by the winter of 1916 was short of bread in the cities because the railways could not move both grain and troops. The Tsar had taken personal command of the army in 1915, so every defeat was his, and the government in the capital was left to the Tsarina and her adviser Rasputin, a peasant faith healer whose influence was a public scandal until aristocrats murdered him in December 1916.

On 23 February 1917, by the old calendar, women in Petrograd marking International Women's Day marched for bread, striking workers joined them, and within days the crowds filled the city. The garrison, ordered to fire on them, refused and joined them instead. With no troops to rely on, Nicholas abdicated on 2 March, and three hundred years of Romanov rule ended in a week.

Power passed to two bodies at once. The Duma politicians formed a Provisional Government, liberal and committed to elections for a constituent assembly that would decide Russia's future. Alongside it the workers and soldiers of Petrograd revived the soviet, or council, of 1905, which controlled the factories, the garrison and the railways and could paralyse the government whenever it chose. The government had legitimacy and no force; the soviet had force and no wish, at first, to govern. Both agreed on one fatal thing: that Russia should keep fighting the war.

In April Lenin arrived at the Finland Station from exile in Switzerland, carried across Germany in a sealed train by a German government that hoped he would take Russia out of the war. He announced that his Bolshevik party would give no support to the Provisional Government and demanded all power to the soviets, peace at once, land to the peasants and bread to the cities. His own party thought him mad. Within six months the slogans had made the Bolsheviks the largest party in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, as a failed summer offensive, a failed military coup and the collapse of the countryside into land seizures destroyed every alternative.

On the night of 24 to 25 October, by the old calendar, Bolshevik Red Guards and sympathetic troops, organised by Trotsky from the Petrograd soviet, occupied the bridges, the telegraph, the stations and the power plants, and the following night took the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was sitting. Fewer than a dozen people died. Lenin announced the new government to the Congress of Soviets that night, and its first decrees were for peace, land and the workers' control of factories. The elections for the constituent assembly went ahead in November, the Bolsheviks won a quarter of the vote, and when the assembly met in January 1918 they closed it after one day. The sequence of the year:

• •February: bread riots in Petrograd, the garrison mutinies, the Tsar abdicates
• •April: Lenin returns and demands all power to the soviets
• •July: a failed uprising; Lenin flees to Finland
• •August: General Kornilov's attempted coup fails, and the Bolsheviks who helped stop it are armed and legitimised
• •October: the Bolsheviks seize Petrograd and form a government
• •January 1918: the elected constituent assembly is dissolved after a single sitting
• •March 1918: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk takes Russia out of the war at the cost of a third of its population

Taking power was easy; keeping it took three years of civil war. The Bolsheviks' Red Army, built by Trotsky from nothing, fought the White armies of former imperial officers, Cossacks, national independence movements and interventions by Britain, France, the United States and Japan, and won by 1921 through ruthlessness, interior lines and the Whites' inability to offer the peasants anything better. The war killed perhaps ten million, mostly through famine and disease; the Tsar and his family were shot in a cellar in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The secret police, the Cheka, and the Red Terror of 1918 established the pattern of rule by fear that Stalin, after Lenin's death in 1924, would expand into the Gulag and the purges.

What the revolution made was the Soviet Union, founded in 1922: a state that abolished the market, collectivised farming at the cost of millions of lives, industrialised in a decade, defeated Hitler, put the first satellite and the first man into space, and held half of Europe until 1989. It dissolved in 1991, and Russia has spent the years since arguing over what 1917 was.

Soviet historians called October a popular uprising led by a party that expressed the will of the working class; their opponents called it a coup by a disciplined minority against a democratic revolution that had already happened in February. Both have evidence. The Bolsheviks did seize power with a few thousand men, and they did shut the only freely elected assembly Russia had ever had; they also had majorities in the soviets that mattered, and the alternative governments had lost the army, the peasantry and the cities. The most durable judgement is Lenin's own, made in 1917 when his comrades hesitated: that power was lying in the street, and that the question was only who would pick it up.

The dates in accounts of 1917 can be confusing because Russia was still using the Julian calendar, which by the twentieth century ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used in most of Europe. The Julian system, introduced under Julius Caesar, adds a leap day every four years without exception, which makes its average year slightly too long, so over the centuries it drifted against the seasons. Catholic countries corrected this in 1582 and Protestant countries followed over the next two centuries, but the Russian state and the Orthodox Church kept the old reckoning.

So the February Revolution began on 8 March by the Western calendar, which is why it coincided with International Women's Day, and the Bolshevik seizure of power on 25 October fell on 7 November. The new government switched to the Gregorian calendar early in 1918, so that 31 January was followed directly by 14 February. For the rest of the Soviet period, the anniversary of the October Revolution was marked with parades in Red Square every 7 November, a date that only makes sense once you know the calendar changed.

For decades after the killings in Ekaterinburg, the fate of the bodies was a state secret, and the uncertainty fed rumours that one of the children had escaped. The most famous claimant, a woman known as Anna Anderson, insisted for more than sixty years that she was the youngest daughter, Anastasia, and attracted both believers and lawsuits. In 1979 two amateur investigators found a shallow grave in woodland outside the city but kept it hidden until the last years of the Soviet Union, and the remains of nine people were officially exhumed in 1991.

DNA analysis in the 1990s identified the Tsar, the Tsarina and three of their daughters. Mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, linked the Tsarina's remains to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a grandson of her sister, who supplied a blood sample. Tests on preserved tissue from Anna Anderson, who had died in 1984, showed she was no Romanov. Two children were still missing until 2007, when burned bone fragments found nearby were identified as Alexei and one of his sisters, confirming that the whole family had died together in July 1918.

One of the most famous accounts of the October Revolution was written by an American journalist, John Reed, who was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks took power. His book Ten Days That Shook the World, published in 1919, describes the meetings, street scenes and speeches of those days with vivid immediacy, and it was praised by Lenin, who wrote an introduction to one edition.

Reed was openly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, so historians read the book as a passionate eyewitness record rather than a neutral history. He died of typhus in Moscow in 1920 and was buried by the Kremlin wall, one of very few Americans honoured that way. His story, and the book, were later told in the 1981 film Reds, which brought his account to a new generation.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 came in two stages: in February bread riots and a mutinous garrison forced the Tsar's abdication and produced a liberal Provisional Government that kept fighting the war, and in October Lenin's Bolsheviks, having won the Petrograd soviet with the promise of peace, land and bread, seized the capital almost without bloodshed, dissolved the elected assembly, and won a three-year civil war to found the Soviet Union.