The Russian revolution
On March 8, 1917 (or February 23 by the Julian calendar), a street demonstration in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) turned into a riot, as Russians rose up against their autocratic Tsarist government and the depredations of World War I. With its troops mutinying, the government fell, and Tsar Nicholas II, last of the Romanov line, abdicated. Russia became a republic.
Imperial Russia’s Tsarist rulers had entered World War I to win territories and influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Instead, the stresses of war broke the rigid Tsarist state, with Russian troops surrendering en masse. The war became immensely unpopular, and the regime with it: few were ready to defend it against revolution.
Power passed to a provisional government drawn from the old Duma (parliament). Press freedom, replacement of police by popular militias, and other liberal reforms were passed; in the wave of enthusiasm, political exiles were invited back to Russia, including the radical Communist Bolsheviks. The veteran Bolshevik Vladimir Ilich Lenin returned from Switzerland with the help of the Germans, who hoped that he would weaken Russia militarily. Lenin called for an immediate end to hostilities, while the provisional government continued the unpopular war policy. Bolshevik propaganda, funded secretly by Germany, was so effective that moderate socialists like Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky could not stop the Russian army’s disintegration. Bolshevik infiltration of workers’ soviets and military units gave Lenin forces close to Petrograd, which outweighed the greater popularity of his moderate rivals, the Mensheviks. But in July imminent disclosure of his dealings with the Germans forced him to flee to Finland.
Kerensky, prime minister from July, lost authority when an abortive right-wing coup forced him to call on the Bolshevik Red Guards for help. At a stroke, he sacrificed the loyalty of the army and brought some 40,000 armed Bolsheviks into Petrograd. Lenin slipped back into Russia early in October, and a well-organized coup d’état on the night of November 6 (October 24 by the Julian calendar) caught the government ministers in the Winter Palace; the famous “storming of the Winter Palace” was in fact the seizure of an undefended and virtually unguarded building. Lenin and his Bolshevik clique legitimized their coup by linking it to a stage-managed Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets. The discipline and unscrupulousness of the Bolsheviks had won them power.
The provisional government had proposed elections for a new assembly in late 1917; Lenin had seen that the Bolsheviks must act before this democratically elected government convened, but once in power, he allowed the elections to proceed. In the November 1917 polls, Bolshevik candidates won just under 25 per cent of the vote, while the moderate socialists polled over 40 per cent. Lenin sent his loyal troops to close down the constituent assembly the day after it convened. Russia was about to enter a bloody civil war, from which it would emerge into Leninist and Stalinist tyranny.
