Russian Revolution

A regime survives while the men with rifles obey. The Petrograd garrison was full of recent conscripts who had no wish to fire on bread queues containing their own families, and when they refused the autocracy had nothing left. Everything else about February follows from that single fact about coercion.

His generals told him to go and he went, which locates where power had moved. Nicholas had spent two years at headquarters making himself personally responsible for defeats, and the army command concluded the war would go better without him. Authority ended when the men who commanded troops withdrew it.

The Soviet's Order Number One placed the garrison's weapons under soldiers' committees, which meant the Provisional Government held office while the Soviet held the guns. Two authorities cannot occupy one state for long. Everything from March to October was a slow clarification of where force actually resided.

Germany transported Lenin across its territory in a sealed train because a Russia in chaos was worth more to Berlin than a Russia fighting. It was a cheap, deniable operation with an enormous return. States sponsor their enemies' internal opponents when the arithmetic favours it, and here it did.

A government with no army worth the name ordered an offensive to prove it deserved allied credit, and the army dissolved. The decision is intelligible only as a bid for external support that the internal situation could not sustain. Commitments beyond one's means destroy the regime that makes them.

A disciplined minority took the telegraph, the bridges and the stations while a discredited government sat in the Winter Palace with almost no one willing to defend it. October was less an insurrection than a demonstration of how little force is required to displace an authority nobody is prepared to fight for.

Trotsky tried neither war nor peace and the Germans resumed advancing, so Lenin took terms that surrendered a third of the empire's population. He was right and almost alone in being right: a regime that cannot fight must pay whatever price keeps it alive, and reckon on outliving the payment.

The union assembled the territory the Red Army had reconquered, dressed as voluntary federation. Four republics signed a treaty that the same party controlled in each capital. The federal form cost nothing and bought a great deal, because it made reconquest describable as association.

Three years of industrial war against Germany had consumed a state whose economy could not sustain it: railways failing, grain undelivered, casualties beyond counting. The system punishes states that cannot generate what modern war requires, and in Russia the punishment took the form of collapse from within.

Three centuries of dynasty ended in a railway carriage and the war continued unchanged, which is the point. The pressures that had produced the collapse, German armies in the west and an unsupplied front, were untouched by who ruled. Regime change does not alter a state's position.

Neither body could destroy the other and both feared the German army more than each other, so an unstable equilibrium persisted for months. Internal balances of this kind are as real as international ones and usually shorter-lived, because the units share a territory and cannot simply avoid each other.

Peace, land and bread was a programme that acknowledged Russia could no longer sustain the war. Every other faction promised to continue fighting while lacking the means. Lenin's advantage was alignment with the state's actual capacity, and a programme that ignores capacity loses to one that does not.

Russia was bound to allies who needed the eastern front held and had no interest in a separate peace, and those obligations pushed a collapsing state to act against its own survival. Alliance commitments constrain the weak partner most, and here the constraint killed the government honouring it.

The Provisional Government had been hollowed out by Kornilov's attempted coup, which forced Kerensky to arm the Bolsheviks to defend Petrograd. Having distributed weapons to your only serious rival, you have already lost. The distribution of armed capability in the capital decided the outcome weeks in advance.

Germany extracted everything the balance permitted, and eight months later lost the war in the west and had to disgorge all of it. Gains that depend on a temporary advantage vanish with the advantage. Brest-Litovsk was the harshest treaty of the war and the shortest-lived.

Whatever its ideology, the new state occupied the position of the old one: the same landmass, the same borders to defend, the same rivals. Within twenty years it was pursuing spheres of influence in eastern Europe that any tsar would have recognised. Position outlasted revolution.

The Duma had been demanding a government responsible to it for a decade and was refused, so when the crisis came no legitimate institution existed to absorb it. Autocracies that decline every reform remove the mechanisms that could have saved them, and are then surprised by the suddenness of the end.

The Provisional Government was formed from Duma members and immediately promised civil liberties, amnesty and a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage. It was among the most liberal governments in Europe on paper. It lasted eight months, because legitimacy requires more than a good programme.

The Soviet was elected, in a rough way, by workers and soldiers; the Provisional Government was appointed by a Duma chosen on a restricted franchise. Each could dispute the other's mandate, and neither could settle the question without the constituent assembly both kept promising and postponing.

He returned under an amnesty issued by the government he intended to overthrow, spoke freely, published a newspaper and organised openly. The Provisional Government's liberalism was genuine and it was fatal. Extending rights to those who reject the system that grants them is the permanent dilemma of open regimes.

Soldiers' committees debated orders before obeying them, and after July many stopped obeying at all. An army that votes cannot attack. The Provisional Government had extended democratic procedure into the one institution that cannot function with it, and then required that institution to perform.

The constituent assembly finally met in January, gave the Bolsheviks a quarter of the seats, and was dispersed by soldiers the next day. That sequence is the whole argument. A movement that had demanded elections while out of power abolished representation within weeks of winning it.

The Central Powers used self-determination as an instrument, detaching Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states as nominally independent entities under German protection. The principle was genuine and its application was cynical, and both facts were visible at the time to everyone involved.

The constitution granted each republic the right to secede and a party structure that made secession unthinkable, and the contradiction sat in the text for sixty-nine years. In 1991 the clause was used. Dormant rights written into founding documents can be activated when the power holding them down weakens.

Petrograd was not short of grain in the country; it was short of grain in the city, because the transport and distribution system had broken down. Bread riots of this kind are usually logistical failures rather than absolute scarcities, and states are overthrown by the difference between the two.

Michael declined the throne pending a constituent assembly, so the state's continuity now rested on a promised election that was repeatedly postponed. A government whose entire authority is provisional cannot make commitments that bind, and every party bargaining with it knew this from the first week.

Dual power is a coordination failure with a formal name. Ministries issued orders that committees could veto, and committees passed resolutions that ministries ignored, so nothing requiring sustained execution could be done. Institutions with overlapping and unresolved jurisdiction do not merely work slowly; they cannot act.

All power to the soviets proposed to route authority through bodies that already existed and already commanded loyalty, rather than building new ones. That was an institutional shortcut of great value. Capturing a functioning structure is faster and cheaper than constructing an alternative from nothing.

Allied loans and supplies were conditional on continued fighting, so the government faced a straightforward incentive problem: the payment required an action that destroyed the payee. Conditionality only works when the conditions are within the recipient's capacity, and nobody in London or Paris asked whether they were.

The Second Congress of Soviets was convened to ratify what had already been done, providing a legal form for an act of force. New regimes need a procedure that makes them look like the continuation of something rather than a rupture, and the Congress supplied one within hours.

The treaty is the standard example of what a peace looks like when one side has no leverage at all: no reciprocity, no mechanism, no provision for revision. Its terms were dictated rather than negotiated, and dictated settlements last exactly as long as the power behind them.

Federation solved a real problem: how to govern an empire of many nationalities without provoking the resistance that had helped destroy the tsarist state. National republics, national languages and national institutions were conceded in form while authority ran through a single unitary party.

Russia was an ally in a coalition war, and Britain and France watched an autocracy fall with mixed feelings: relief that the alliance now had cleaner credentials, alarm at what might follow. A revolution in one great power is immediately the business of all the others.

Britain declined to offer the family asylum for fear of domestic reaction, an unusual instance of a monarchy weighing its own subjects' opinion against dynastic solidarity. The old European rule that sovereigns protect one another had been quietly replaced by domestic political calculation.

The Allies dealt with the Provisional Government because it was the recognised state, and that recognition was worth something: loans, supplies and standing. External legitimacy propped up an authority the domestic balance did not support, which is a common and usually temporary arrangement.

The Theses rejected the war as imperialist on both sides and called for revolution across Europe, which repudiated the entire framework of relations between states. This was not a bid for a better place within international society but for its replacement, and the Allies understood it as such.

Refusing a separate peace was treated as an obligation of honour among allies, and Kerensky accepted it as such. The pull of that norm is easy to underestimate. It kept a doomed government fighting a war it could not fight, against the plain interest of the state it governed.

The new government published the Allies' secret treaties and repudiated tsarist debts, attacking the conventions on which relations between states rested. No power recognised it for years. Refusing to accept a state's membership is international society's sharpest instrument, and it was used here for a decade.

The Allies cited Brest-Litovsk for years as evidence of what German victory would have meant, and used it to justify their own terms at Versailles. A treaty becomes a precedent in the argument about legitimate peacemaking, and this one was invoked against its authors within a year.

A state committed to world revolution nonetheless took a seat, signed treaties, exchanged ambassadors and behaved as a sovereign, and international society eventually recognised it. The society of states absorbs revolutionary powers by giving them membership, which is the most effective form of domestication.

The demonstrations began on International Women's Day, led by textile workers whose grievance was bread and whose slogans became political within hours. What started as a claim about food acquired, in the telling and the marching, a meaning about the war and the throne that nobody had planned.

The tsar was not merely a ruler but the little father, an object of religious and paternal feeling for a peasant majority. When that figure vanished without resistance, the vacancy was not only administrative. A whole structure of meaning about authority in Russia was left without an occupant.

Both bodies claimed to speak for the revolution, and the argument was about which one it belonged to. That contest over ownership of a word decided practical questions about land, bread and war, because whoever could plausibly claim the revolution could claim the obedience of people acting in its name.

Most Bolsheviks initially thought the Theses absurd, since Marxist orthodoxy required a bourgeois stage before a socialist one. Lenin won by redefining what the moment was. The reinterpretation preceded the seizure of power and made it thinkable to the people who would carry it out.

After July the war stopped being defensible in the language the revolution had adopted. Once soldiers understood themselves as citizens with rights rather than subjects with duties, continuing to die for allied war aims became unintelligible, and no appeal the government could make reached them.

Eisenstein's storming of the Winter Palace, filmed a decade later with more participants than the original, is the image the world retains. The regime constructed its own founding as an epic because the actual night was small and confused, and the myth was needed to carry what followed.

Bolshevik negotiators addressed the German and Austrian peoples over the heads of their governments, treating diplomacy as public argument rather than confidential bargaining. It failed completely and it announced a new practice: that the audience for negotiation might be populations rather than cabinets.

The new state was named for a form of government rather than a nation or a territory, the only major state ever so titled. That naming asserted that it was the beginning of something universal rather than the successor to Russia, and the claim shaped how everyone dealt with it for seventy years.