First meeting of Russian representative assembly...

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Three years after his party's successful coup d'état in 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin referred to the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the events of 1917. In 1905, Russian society was torn asunder by the Bloody Sunday (22 January) shootings of unarmed workers demonstrating for a redress of their grievances and by a costly and unsuccessful war with Japan. In the midst of rising urban and rural lawlessness, strikes, and civil unrest came calls for a constitutional state with guaranteed civil rights and representative institutions...

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The reasons for the collapse of the Provisional Government in November 1917 and its replacement by Bolshevik rule are the subject of a contentious debate among historians of revolutionary Russia. After the fall of the tsarist government in March of that year, the largely self-appointed Provisional Government took temporary charge of national affairs, expressing its commitment to the full democratization of Russia and implementing important reforms in justice and civil liberties. It also continued Russian involvement in World War I. Like its tsarist predecessor, however, the Provisional Government could not mobilize the troops, gather the resources, or marshal the people's resolve to prevail against Germany and its allies. By late 1917 the Provisional Government had lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian people and was easily replaced by a communist regime that promised to end Russian participation in the conflict...

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World War I officially ended in Paris and its palatial suburbs, in a series of treaties signed between 1919 and 1923. Formally ending hostilities fell against the backdrop of dramatic events in Russia, which experienced its continuing revolution and civil war in those years. This chapter assesses whether Russian developments had any meaningful impact on what was happening at the close of the "war to end all wars."
One argument maintains that this influence was profound. Allied policymakers plainly could not ignore the challenges of the Bolshevik Revolution. Its determination to export revolution to Europe, revisit the earlier peace settlement between Russia and Germany, and create other obstacles for European diplomacy demanded their attention, as did the appearance of representatives of anti-Bolshevik White forces, who successfully agitated for military, financial, and material support in their battle against the Reds. Forming a new world order demanded careful consideration of the nascent Soviet state and its emerging role in the new international order...

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Last Russian tsar, whose failures as a leader combined with the deep problems of his country to bring on revolution in 1917...

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Emperor of Russia known as the "tsar liberator," who emancipated the serfs in 1861 and instituted the first legal and political reforms in an effort to modernize Russia...

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Promulgation of a decree creating a constitutional government in Russia...

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Russia, officially called the Russian Federation, was by far the largest republic of the former USSR. Its estimated 2002 population of 145 million accounted for slightly more than half the Soviet total. Its 17 million square kilometers (6.6 million square miles) comprised 76% of the territory of the USSR, stretching across Eurasia to the Pacific across 11 time zones. Russia also inherited the lion's share of the natural resources, industrial base, and military assets of the former Soviet Union. Much of its territory in the north and Far East, however, is sparsely populated. Although Russia is nearly twice the size of the United States, its population is only a bit more than half the U.S. total...

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The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 set off not just a brutal civil war in Russia but also a determined international effort to aid anti-Bolshevik forces. Beginning in the spring of 1918, the Allies sent troops eventually numbering 150,000 men from fifteen nations, including Britain, France, the United States, and Japan. In most cases these forces had been withdrawn by 1920, but Japan kept troops on the mainland Far East until 1922 and on the Russian part of Sakhalin Island until 1925. This intervention cast a long shadow over Soviet Russia and its relations with much of the rest of the world...

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The appointment of Petr Arkadevich Stolypin as premier of the Russian Empire in 1906 brought with it the promise of reform. Although Stolypin became infamous for his use of political repression to stabilize Russian society in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, he also implemented major initiatives intended to deepen that stabilization. Chief among these reforms was a measure that allowed peasants to depart from the traditional mir (commune), the institution to which most of them had belonged for centuries, and create their own private farms. Meant to instill values of proprietorship and private property, this legislation was intended to give Russian peasants a stake in the preservation of the established order. Hoping to attract people of initiative and responsibility, Stolypin characterized the measure as "a wager on the strong." By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, millions of peasants had embraced his idea and left the commune. Millions of others left overcrowded central Russia for new lives in Siberia, where, in another reform, the state made lands available to colonists.

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