The Russian Revolution: Two Revolutions in One Year

Revolutions are often remembered as a single event, but 1917 in Russia was two separate revolutions eight months apart, and the second overturned the government the first one had installed.

The February Revolution began with bread riots and army mutinies in Petrograd amid catastrophic wartime shortages, and within days it forced Tsar Nicholas II's abdication, ending three centuries of Romanov rule and installing a Provisional Government that promised eventual elections. That government's decision to continue fighting the First World War cost it what popular support it had, and in October the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin occupied government buildings in Petrograd and seized power in a second, far more organised revolution, establishing a government committed to ending the war and radically reorganising Russian society and the economy along socialist lines.

The October Revolution led directly to the founding of the Soviet Union, but it did not establish the government that holds Russian territory today: the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and the Russian Federation that emerged as its successor state traces its own founding to that later date rather than to 1917, even though the Bolshevik seizure of power and the one-party state it built shaped Russian politics for the seven decades in between.