The Russian Revolution

The story

A tired empire

At the start of the 20th century Russia was the largest country in the world, ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, an absolute monarch: there was no parliament with real power, and he decided the laws himself. The great majority of Russians were poor peasants, often with no land; in the cities factories were growing, where workers laboured long hours for very low pay, in crowded neighbourhoods. In 1905, during the war with Japan, and after the army fired on a peaceful crowd asking for bread and rights outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, a revolt broke out. The tsar granted a Duma, a parliament without much power, but things changed little.

When Russia entered the First World War in 1914, things got worse. Millions of soldiers, badly equipped, were killed or wounded. In the cities bread and coal were scarce, prices rose and the queues outside the shops grew longer. The tsar had gone to the front to command the army in person, leaving the government in the hands of his wife Alexandra, who was very unpopular.

February 1917: the tsar falls

At the beginning of March 1917 (in February, according to the calendar then used in Russia), strikes broke out in Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was now called. They began with women workers, on International Women's Day, protesting for bread. In the following days tens of thousands of people filled the streets. The soldiers sent to put down the revolt joined the demonstrators. On 15 March the tsar, now without support, abdicated: after three hundred years the Romanov dynasty no longer ruled.

A Provisional Government of liberal and moderate politicians was formed, which promised elections and freedom, but decided to carry on the war. Alongside it arose the “soviets”, councils of workers and soldiers, which had a great deal of real power in the cities and in the army. The country thus had two rival powers.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

In April 1917 Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile. He was the leader of the Bolsheviks, a Marxist group that wanted a revolution of workers and peasants. Germany, which was at war with Russia, helped him to get back from a long journey in a special train, hoping he would cause disorder. Lenin demanded immediate peace, land for the peasants, bread and power to the soviets: these were the slogans the weary people wanted to hear. Support for the Bolsheviks grew month by month, while the Provisional Government, led by Alexander Kerensky, lost support.

The night of the Winter Palace

On 6–7 November 1917 (24–25 October by the old calendar, which is why people speak of the “October Revolution”), the Bolsheviks, organised by Leon Trotsky, occupied the key points of Petrograd: stations, bridges, post offices and the telegraph. On the evening of 7 November the cruiser Aurora aimed its guns at the Winter Palace, where the ministers of the Provisional Government were, and fired a blank shot. In the night between 7 and 8 November (25–26 October) the palace was taken and the ministers were arrested with little resistance, with almost no fighting. Kerensky managed to escape.

The next day Lenin announced the new government, the Council of People's Commissars, and approved two decrees: one on peace and one on land, which took estates away from the big landowners to give them to the peasants. In March 1918 Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, losing very large territories just to get out of the war.

The civil war

The Bolsheviks were not safe: between 1918 and 1922 a terrible civil war set the Red Army against the “Whites”, a mixture of tsarist officers, nationalists and liberals backed by foreign powers. They were years of hunger, epidemics and violence, with millions of deaths. In July 1918 the tsar and his family were killed at Yekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks won, and in 1922 the Soviet Union, the USSR, was born.