The Collapse

By the autumn of 1917, the Russian Empire had been bleeding for three years. Some two million soldiers were dead; millions more were wounded, captured, or missing. The February Revolution of March 1917 — named for the old calendar — had swept away the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three hundred years, replacing it with the Provisional Government of liberal politicians and moderate socialists who promised to continue the war and postpone social reform until a Constituent Assembly could be elected. That decision — to keep fighting — proved fatal. The soldiers were done with war. The peasants wanted land, now. The workers wanted bread and power. The Provisional Government offered none of these things, only patience and promises. Into this void stepped Lenin. Returning to Petrograd in April 1917 in the 'sealed train' provided by Imperial Germany (which correctly calculated that a Bolshevik revolution would knock Russia out of the war), he issued his 'April Theses' — a radical program demanding an immediate end to the war, transfer of all power to the soviets, and nationalization of land without compensation. At first, even veteran Bolsheviks thought it too extreme. Within months, it was the platform of a mass movement.

The October Revolution — which by the new Gregorian calendar fell on November 7, 1917 — was the most consequential political event of the twentieth century, and it was nearly bloodless. Leon Trotsky, as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, had spent weeks quietly placing Bolshevik loyalists in control of the garrison units one by one, so that by the time of the coup the soldiers simply did nothing when Red Guards occupied the railway stations, telegraph offices, and bridges. The Winter Palace fell to a handful of Red Guards and sailors; the cannon shots of the cruiser Aurora were blank. Prime Minister Kerensky fled. The ten cabinet ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested, not executed. Lenin appeared before the Congress of Soviets to announce that 'the workers' and peasants' revolution has been accomplished.'

What came next would plunge Russia into catastrophe. The new Soviet government immediately issued decrees: peace (to be negotiated), land (distributed to the peasants), and workers' control (of the factories). But peace meant surrendering to Germany, and the terms Germany imposed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 were punishing: Russia lost Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, and part of the Caucasus — territories containing 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its agricultural land, and 54 percent of its industrial plant. It was the most humiliating peace treaty in modern European history. Lenin accepted it anyway, gambling — correctly — that the German Empire would itself collapse before the year was out.

The peace of Brest-Litovsk had one further, unintended consequence: it convinced the Allies — Britain, France, the United States, and Japan — that the Bolsheviks were German agents who had stabbed them in the back. This conviction, partly sincere and partly a pretext for the anti-Bolshevism many Allied leaders felt instinctively, led to foreign military intervention that would fuel and prolong the civil war. Allied forces landed at Murmansk, Archangel, Vladivostok, and the Caucasus, providing weapons, money, and some troops to the emerging White movement. The intervention never became a serious military effort — the Allied populations were exhausted from the World War and unwilling to fight another — but it provided the Whites with enough support to sustain resistance for four more years while giving the Bolsheviks a priceless propaganda advantage: they were fighting foreign imperialists, not just Russian counter-revolutionaries.