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The Russian Revolution took place in 1917, during the final phase of World War I. It removed Russia from the war and transformed the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), replacing Russia’s traditional monarchy with the world’s first Communist state. The revolution happened in stages through two separate coups: the February and October Revolutions. The new government, led by Vladimir Lenin, would solidify its power in 1920 after three years of civil war.
Although the events of the Russian Revolution happened swiftly, the causes can be traced back nearly a century. The Russian monarchy had become progressively weaker and increasingly aware of its own vulnerability (and therefore more reactionary). Tsar Nicholas II—who led Russia in the years before the revolution—had personally witnessed how his father, Tsar Alexander III, had responded when revolutionary terrorists assassinated his own father, Alexander II, in 1881: brutal repression of the Russian people. When Nicholas II became tsar in 1894, he used similarly severe measures to subdue resistance movements, which were becoming bolder and more widespread every year. As Nicholas’s newly imposed restrictions incited still more unrest, he was forced to make concessions after each incident, with each concession weakening Nicholas II’s grip on power. Some of these concessions included Russia’s first constitution and its first parliament.
As Nicholas II grew weaker, Vladimir Lenin rose to power. Although he led the October Revolution, he was not even in Russia for the February Revolution, returning only in April 1917. Whatever history’s judgment of him, few other Russian revolutionaries possessed Lenin’s decisiveness and strength of vision for Russia’s future. Born in 1870 in the provincial town of Simbirsk, the young Lenin was profoundly affected by his older brother Alexander’s 1887 execution for his involvement in a plot to assassinate the tsar. As a young adult, Lenin joined the resistance movement himself and swore to be more careful than his brother.
The revolution that Lenin led marked one of the most radical turning points in Russia’s 1,300-year history: it affected economics, social structure, culture, international relations, industrial development, and most any other benchmark by which one might measure a revolution. Although the new government would prove to be at least as repressive as the one it replaced, the country’s new rulers were drawn largely from the intellectual and working classes rather than from the aristocracy, which was a considerable change in direction for Russia.
The revolution opened the door for Russia to fully enter the industrial age. Prior to 1917, Russia was a mostly agrarian with limited industrial development, in contrast to its highly industrialized neighbors. After the revolution, new urban-industrial regions appeared quickly, becoming increasingly important to the country’s development as the population was drawn to the cities in huge numbers. Education also took a major upswing, and illiteracy was almost entirely eradicated.
The Russian Revolution also had considerable international consequences. Lenin’s government immediately pulled Russia out of World War I, changing the balance of forces for the remaining participants. During the ensuing civil war in Russia, several nations, including the United States, sent troops in hopes of keeping the chaos from spreading beyond Russia’s boundaries. Over the next several decades, the Soviet Union would actively sponsor and assisted Communist movements and revolutions around the world, as well as playing a fundamental role in the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Threatened by the possibility of revolutions in their own lands, the governments of many Western nations viewed Communism as a spreading threat and moved to isolate the Soviet Union as much as possible. Following World War II and the advent of the nuclear age, a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States took center stage, with a protracted nuclear arms race between the two superpowers lasting until the USSR finally collapsed in 1991.
