The revolutions of February and October 1917 began with the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and ended with the establishment of a communist soviet state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In October Bolshevik workers and sailors, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, seized government buildings and gain power.

The roots of the Russian Revolution are in the arbitrary, autocratic, and repressive czarist political and social system that evolved in the 16th 18th centuries, in the course of Russia's massive territorial expansion and rise into the ranks of the great European powers. Russia's geographical and often self-imposed cultural isolation from the West helped to shield Russia from the liberalizing influences of the French Revolution. Consequently, absolutism and the existing organization of Russian society survived virtually intact during the political convulsions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that shattered the traditional order throughout much of the European continent.

After Russia's...