The revolution of 1917 broke out in the middle of the first world war, in which Russia, although belonging to an eventually victorious coalition of powers, suffered the heaviest defeats. The revolution may therefore appear to have been merely the consequence of military collapse. Yet the war only accelerated a process which had for decades been sapping the old order and which had more than once been intensified by military defeat. Tsardom tried to overcome the consequences of its failure in the Crimean War by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 was immediately followed by an annus mirabilis of revolution. After the military disasters of 1915–16 the movement started again from the points at which it had come to a standstill in 1905: the December rising of the workers of Moscow had been the last word of the revolution in 1905; its first word in 1917 was the armed rising in St Petersburg. The most significant institution created by the revolution of 1905 had been the ‘council of workers' deputies’ or the soviet of St Petersburg. After an interval of twelve years, in the first days of the new upheaval, the same institution sprang into life again to become the main focus of the drama that was now to unfold.

When the events of 1917 are compared with the great French revolution or the English puritan revolution, one is struck by the fact that conflicts and controversies which, in those earlier revolutions, it took years to resolve were all compressed and settled within the first week of the upheaval in Russia.