Two revolutions in one year, and a civil war after both
The February Revolution of March 1917 forced Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication after military mutiny and widespread unrest in Petrograd, producing a period of dual power in which a Provisional Government controlled military and foreign affairs while local councils, or soviets, held much of the loyalty of workers and soldiers. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party overthrew the Provisional Government in the October Revolution that November, and a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and a loose anti-Bolshevik White coalition followed from 1918 until the Bolsheviks’ eventual victory in 1922, when the revolutionary period is generally considered to have concluded with the Soviet Union’s formal establishment.
Decrees on peace, land and bread, and the treaty that ended a war
The Bolshevik platform of peace, land and bread, translated into early decrees on those same subjects once they took power, and Russia formally exited the First World War through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, ceding substantial territory to the Central Powers in exchange for ending the fighting. Earlier disagreement among European socialists over the war itself had surfaced at the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference, whose manifestos document the split between socialists supporting their own nations’ war efforts and those, including Lenin, opposed to the conflict on internationalist grounds. That earlier split anticipated the deeper divisions that would separate Bolsheviks from more moderate socialist parties once revolutionary power was actually at stake in 1917.
Wartime inflation, military defeat, and a Tsar who commanded his own army into disaster
Wartime inflation drove prices to roughly four times their 1914 level by 1917, as the government printed money to finance the war effort and farmers, facing fixed prices, hoarded grain rather than sell it, producing severe urban food shortages that fed public unrest. Military failures against Germany compounded the crisis, worsened directly by Tsar Nicholas II’s 1915 decision to personally command Russian forces, which tied his own reputation to the army’s continuing defeats, while the influence of the mystic Grigori Rasputin over the Tsarina Alexandra, acting as regent during the Tsar’s absence, produced a series of unpopular ministerial appointments that further eroded confidence in the monarchy even among its traditional supporters.
Structural collapse or contingent decisions: how historians weigh the causes
Historians differ over how much weight to give structural economic causes, wartime inflation and food shortages chief among them, as against more contingent political decisions, including specific leadership choices and military mistakes, in explaining why the monarchy collapsed when it did rather than surviving the strain as it had during the earlier 1905 revolution. That 1905 uprising is nonetheless treated as an important precedent, since it established the soviet council structure and protest organisation that reappeared, considerably more effectively, in 1917. Historians treat this continuity between the two uprisings as evidence that 1917 was less a sudden rupture than the culmination of organisational lessons and grievances that had been building for over a decade.
A monarchy ends, a Union begins, and independent states emerge at its edges
The revolution ended the three-century Romanov dynasty and established the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as the first state to practise soviet-based governance, extending Soviet authority over subsequent years to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Georgia and Ukraine, which together with Russia formed the Soviet Union. At the same time, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania achieved independence in the revolution’s aftermath, a redrawing of the region’s borders that persisted, with later Soviet reincorporation of the Baltic states, for the rest of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union itself would not attempt to reincorporate the Baltic states until 1940, more than two decades after they had first separated from the collapsing Russian Empire.
A revolution worth reading in its full two-stage, then-civil-war sequence
The Russian Revolution rewards attention as a genuinely two-stage event, a February collapse driven substantially by wartime economic and military failure followed by an October seizure of power by a comparatively small, disciplined party, with a subsequent civil war that determined the revolution’s actual outcome as much as either 1917 event did on its own. Readers interested in the mechanics of political collapse will find real substance in the interplay between economic crisis and military failure; readers interested in revolutionary strategy will find in the Bolsheviks’ organisation and messaging a case study in how a minority faction converted broad popular discontent into a lasting seizure of state power.