The Russian Revolution

“Revolution” is a term that’s often misused to lend the appearance of popular support to the simple overthrow of a government—an episode that can be very short and have the support of no one except a would-be strongman and a line of tanks outside the presidential palace.

This was emphatically not the case with the nation-wide Russian revolution that in 1917 swept away the country’s 304 year-old Romanov monarchy, and ushered in a Communist regime with shattering consequences for the whole world.

The path to the triumphant “Red October” was more than a quarter century long and so complex that it’s easy to lose track of before reaching the climax.

What follows is an attempt to make the story more lucid by putting together the revolt’s anatomy. Here are the main events that a century ago preceded one of the most dramatic and consequential upheavals in European history:

The Great Famine of 1891 

In 2014 Orlando Figes, a leading British historian, published Revolutionary Russia, a book that attributes the start of the collapse of the Russian monarchy to a brutally severe weather in 1890-91.

In southeast Russia, he wrote, “the seeds planted the previous autumn had barely time to germinate before the frosts arrived. There had been little snow to protect the young plants during the severe winter. Spring brought with it dusty winds that blew away the topsoil… There was no rain for 100 days. Wells and ponds dried up… forests turned brown, and cattle died by the roadside.”

In an area twice as large as France, 36 million Russians were starving. They lived on bread made with rye husks and bark of trees, and weakened by their diet, half a million of them died of typhus and cholera.

The czarist government’s first response was to warn the newspapers against describing the catastrophe as “famine.” The eventual food deliveries were so slow and clumsy that millions of peasants lost their faith in their unwritten bargain with the monarchy: The czars provided for their subjects’ most urgent needs, and the subjects gave them their blind loyalty.

It was this crisis, Figes wrote, that “set [the Russian people] for the first time on a collision course with the [Romanov] autocracy.”

Disdained Czar

In 1894, Czar Alexander III died of heart attack and was succeeded by his 26 year-old son, Nicholas II, who proved to be totally incapable of ruling a continent-sized empire with 126 million people. Roy Medvedev, a Russian historian, is one of several authors scathingly critical of the new czar. In his book The October Revolution, he described him as “lazy, sluggish, unintelligent, distraught, and lacking in character and audacity.”

Nicholas tried to hide his weakness by keeping aloof of his subjects and by being unflinchingly stern and autocratic. As if that did not make him unpopular enough, he married Alexandra, a domineering German princess who fell under the influence of a devious and dissolute monk called Grigori Rasputin.

Absurd as it sounds, Rasputin became the imperial couple’s most influential adviser on how to rule Russia, and even when to go to war. The monk, who was murdered in December 1916 by a group of nobles, was in Medvedev’s judgment “a manifestation of the moral decay, mental degradation, and impotence” of Nicholas and his court.

Changing Russia

Ironically, the arch-conservative, inflexible Nicholas presided over more than two decades of remarkable progress: increased social mobility, literacy and higher education in Russia.

Between 1860 and 1914, tens of thousands of freed Russian serfs fled their poverty by migrating to Russian cities. Many of them became merchants and tradesmen, sent their children to school, and the results were startling:

The number of Russian university students—almost half of them women—had increased from 5,000 to 69,000;

The number of daily newspapers soared from 13 to 856;

The number of public institutions—such as schools, public libraries, workers’ unions and cooperatives—rose from 250 to over 16,000;

And by 1914, literacy in Russia rose to 40 percent from 21 percent in 1897.

According to Figes, it was during these years that Russian “intelligentsia” (writers, engineers and other educated people) for the first time in the country’s history, “formed professional bodies and began to demand more influence over public policies,” a prerogative that used to belong exclusively to the czars.

The Marxist Doctrine

Some of these political leaders and opinion makers embraced an illusory scheme set forth in The Communist Manifesto, an 1848 pamphlet by German philosopher Karl Marx. It called for a global “class struggle” between the poor and the wealthy, and as interpreted by Russian radicals, the establishment of the “dictatorship of a proletariat.”

This rule by ordinary workers, peasants, and soldiers was to become the first stage of a process that would culminate in a nirvana—a stateless world where “each person would work according to his ability and receive according to his needs.”

In 1903, eight Russian proponents of this piece of fantasy, led by a brilliant and ruthless revolutionary named Vladimir Lenin, founded a socialist party in Minsk that became known as the “Bolsheviks.”

Nicholas II’s Blunders

Liberal members of Russian nobility responded to the dramatically radicalizing political atmosphere by repeatedly appealing to Nicholas to authorize some reforms and the formation of the Duma, an elected parliament. His answer, time and again, was a flat “Nyet—No!”

Totally convinced that his authority came directly from God, Nicholas continued to lose the much needed support of the traditionally czarist allies: the peasants, who hated his oppression; the moderate elites, who resented his rejection of the parliament; and even of some of his generals, who were critical of his blundering into wars that revealed Russia’s weakness.

Thus in 1900, Nicholas quarreled with Japan over the control of Manchuria, a Chinese province, whereupon Japan sank one of the imperial fleets and routed the Russian army. The ink on the embarrassing peace treaty of 1905—negotiated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt—was still wet when Nicholas’ guards fired on a peaceful procession in Petersburg pleading for a few modest reforms.

The “Black Sunday” massacre, as it came to be known, triggered a nation-wide uprising; confirmed the czar’s reputation as “Bloody Nicholas”; and made him authorize the founding of the Duma – but he refused to give it any real authority.

In 1914, Nicholas ordered the army to enter the First World War as an ally of Great Britain and France, but his poorly equipped and demoralized troops suffered defeat after defeat.

The czar’s final blunder was to take personal command of the soldiers, who by then were the prime target of Lenin’s propaganda and mutinous, in 1916. Instead of fighting, tens of thousands of them joined the revolutionary “Soviets” – Bolsheviks-led councils that were taking control of Russian towns and villages.

In February 1917, these rebels launched a week-long revolt in Petersburg that neither Nicholas, nor the Duma, were able to stop.

On March 15, 1917, the czar abdicated his throne and was arrested—together with Alexandra, their five children, their private physician and three servants—by the Provisional government elected by the Duma.

On July 21, 1917, Alexander Kerensky, a moderate politician, was elected chairman of the Duma-chosen Provisional government. It was the last successful attempt to stop Lenin’s drive for power.

In November, the Provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks; Kerensky fled to exile; and at the age of 89 died in New York. Nicholas and all ten members of his family and household were savagely murdered by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918.

Lenin and the Red October

Formally, Russia remained the ally of Britain and France until March 1918, when the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Until October 1922, in some parts of Russia there continued scattered skirmishes between the “Whites” (a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces and monarchy supporters that fought the Bolsheviks), and the Bolshevik’s Red Army.

But what really mattered from 1917 on were Lenin’s frantic, furious, and successful efforts to make the vast Russian empire an example of Marxist class struggle and dictatorship.

A fiery orator, masterful organizer and a prodigious writer of propaganda pamphlets, Lenin was born to a wealthy family and as a child was a diligent student and obedient church goer. Unexpectedly, he grew into an Alpha-male leader that dominated individuals and groups by the sheer force of his steely will, volcanic emotions, and overbearing personality. A shadowy, friendless fanatic with no private life to interfere with his work, Lenin rammed through and imposed his agenda on Russia with a total disregard for morality. 

Dmitri Volkogonov, a Russian historian and former Red Army general wrote in Lenin, his exhaustive biography, that despite his access to Kremlin’s secret archives, he was unable to resolve mysteries that shrouded Lenin’s life. For example, there were no records of who financed Lenin’s 17 years when he lived in European exile; presided over Bolshevik congresses; organized hundreds of Russian “Soviets” and, after the German government sent him to Russia in April 1917 in a sealed train coach, toured the front lines to harangue the remaining army units to mutiny.

What is amply documented in scores of Lenin’s letters were his vicious orders aimed at spreading the “dictatorship of the proletariat” throughout Russia and beyond. For example, he urged one of his Soviets:

“Comrades! …Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks [well-off farmers], rich men, bloodsuckers…Take all their grain away from them… Do this so that for hundreds of miles around people can see, tremble, know and cry: ‘they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks.’ Cable that you have received this and carried out [instructions].”

What is also well known are the results of Lenin’s brutal leadership. According to Medvedev, by October 24, 1917, the Winter Palace headquarters of the Provisional government had no more than 3,000 defenders, and the fight they put up against the attacking 20,000 Red Guards, sailors and soldiers was so halfhearted that there were no more than 15 fighters killed on both sides, and 60 were wounded.

“During these critical hours,” Medvedev wrote, “…Petrograd continued on the whole to go about its normal business. Most of the soldiers remained in their barracks, the plants and factories continued to operate, and in the schools none of their classes were interrupted. There were no strikes or demonstrations…”

Until his death of brain hemorrhage in 1924, Lenin had the power and fervent following that no czar had achieved. He launched a Communist system that created the totalitarian USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), enslaved Baltic states and Eastern Europe, and for seven decades kept the world in fear of World War III.

And yet, in Volkogonov’s opinion, Lenin’s life ended in failure. His dream of a global revolution—“an instant onslaught on the capitalist citadels,” as the historian wrote—never came near to reality, and collapsed totally by the end of the Cold War.

In a competition with Marxism and class warfare, free votes and exchange of political ideas emerged far more powerful than brutality and empty promises of a paradise.