REVOLUTION

February to November 1917 constituted ten months which shook Russia. Heavy military setbacks in the war, and hunger, poverty and freezing cold in the cities led to increasingly angry demonstrations on the streets. On 27 February, the tsarist Guards, who had struggled to ‘keep order’ until now, refused to fire on demonstrators, a Soviet was formed in Petrograd and on 2 March the tsar abdicated. A Provisional Government was formed. But the revolution was only just beginning.

On 3 April Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile abroad, and less than three weeks later, in the ‘April Days’, there were mass demonstrations against the Provisional Government's plan to continue the war. Two governments were vying for power, the Soviet and the Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov. Whose policies and laws should prevail? Massive demonstrations in the ‘July Days’ demanded ‘all power to the Soviets’. Lvov was forced to step down and Alexander Kerensky took over. In August came the ‘Kornilov Mutiny’ when General Kornilov led his troops towards Petrograd, aiming to seize power. He was defeated, and on the night of 25–26 October Lenin's Bolsheviks seized the initiative. They occupied most of Petrograd's strategic buildings, and the Congress of Soviets was summoned to approve the formation of a Bolshevik government. Kerensky fled. Lenin took charge.

But those who opposed Bolshevism were not done, and a brutal and bloody civil war consumed Russia for four more years. This was not simply a struggle between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. All sorts of independence movements and breakaway regimes in far-flung parts of the Empire rose against Russian dominance, opportunistic bandits took their chances, and things were further complicated by various groups of monarchists, democrats and foreign interventionists. In January 1918 the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly and obligated the Cheka, the secret police, to enforce their rule, by means of terror if necessary. In March they moved the capital to Moscow and also signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. In July the tsar and his family were shot. By 1919 the centre of resistance was Omsk, where Admiral Kolchak established an alternative Government. General Pyotr Vrangel in the south wanted to move his White forces to join Kolchak but his fellow general, Anton Denikin, wanted to march on Moscow.