Russia has been in ‘crisis’ for as long as anyone can remember. Several generations became accustomed to viewing the tsarist system as fundamentally dysfunctional, and for many no less illegitimate. The imbalance between the claims of the autocracy to undivided power and the demands of an increasingly dynamic society for a share in that power was partially resolved after the 1905 revolution with the creation of the constitutional monarchy. The principle of popular sovereignty and representative government came into contradiction with the continuing claims by the autocracy in the person of Nicholas II that sovereignty resided in the crown. The crisis of power ultimately provoked the overthrow of the monarchy in February 1917. The Provisional Government was in permanent crisis, and overshadowed by the demands of war. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 began the experiment of Communist governance that lasted seventy-four years, and was marked by no less intense structural contradictions. The new social order claimed to give power to the people, but instead a political elite claimed tutelary rights over the nation in the name of the higher ideals of building socialism, and became an ever more corrupt and self-aggrandising group. Despite Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform the communist order during perestroika from 1985, the system collapsed in 1991. Since then, Russia has been engaged in the no less grandiose experiment of attempting to build a capitalist democracy from scratch.