48 Fun Facts About Russian Revolution

The city where Russia's 1917 revolutions played out regained which name in 1991?

Saint Petersburg. Its German-sounding name gave way to Petrograd when war broke out in 1914, it became Leningrad in 1924, and residents voted the original back in 1991.

Why is the March 1917 uprising called the February Revolution?

Russia still used the Julian dates, by then 13 days behind the West's Gregorian calendar; the Bolsheviks made the switch in 1918, when 31 January was followed by 14 February.

Lenin was a revolutionary alias; what surname was the Bolshevik leader born with?

Ulyanov. He adopted the alias Lenin in 1901, and his birthplace Simbirsk, also the home town of Kerensky, the man he overthrew, was later renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour.

What did Nicholas II's own generals press him to do in March 1917?

Abdicate. With the rail line to the capital blocked, the imperial train was diverted to Pskov, where his generals and two envoys from the capital pressed him to give up the throne.

Nicholas II nominated which relative to succeed him, who then declined the throne?

Nicholas first meant to pass the crown to his young son Alexei, then named his brother Michael instead; Michael declined within a day, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.

Which body shared "dual power" with the Provisional Government in 1917?

The Petrograd Soviet held the stronger hand: the government had formal authority, but the capital's garrison answered to the Soviet, so real power lay there.

What did Alexander Kerensky do in summer 1917 that backfired?

Kerensky continued the war and launched a new offensive, touring the front to rouse the troops himself; it collapsed within weeks and soldiers deserted in droves.

Which three-part slogan won the Bolsheviks popular support in 1917?

Peace, land and bread. Lenin moved on the first two at once, issuing decrees on peace and on land within a day of the Bolsheviks taking power.

What does the name Bolsheviks, taken by Lenin's faction in 1903, mean?

The majority. Lenin claimed the label after winning key votes at the 1903 congress, though his rivals, tagged the minority, had actually won the vote on who could join the party.

Which Lenin pamphlet of 1902 helped bring on the split with the Mensheviks?

What Is to Be Done? argued that workers left to themselves would stop at trade-union demands, so a tight party of professional revolutionaries had to lead them.

How did Lenin return from Swiss exile in spring 1917?

In a supposedly sealed train through Germany, laid on by the German government in the hope that Lenin would undermine Russia's war effort.

Which programme, announced on Lenin's return in 1917, refused all support for the Provisional Government?

The April Theses. Lenin attacked fellow Bolsheviks who had been backing the Provisional Government and demanded that power pass to the soviets instead.

What is the mass Petrograd demonstration of midsummer 1917, put down by the Provisional Government, called?

The July Days. The government blamed the Bolsheviks for the armed marches and struck back: Trotsky was jailed and Lenin fled to Finland.

Which general's attempted march on Petrograd in August 1917 forced Kerensky to seek Bolshevik help?

Lavr Kornilov's troops never reached the capital: railway workers held up their trains and Bolshevik envoys talked the soldiers round, and he surrendered within days.

What title did the Bolsheviks give the ministers of the government they formed in 1917?

People's Commissars. Trotsky recalled proposing the title after Lenin dismissed 'minister' as a vile, hackneyed word; Lenin chaired their council himself.

Which cruiser reportedly fired the blank shot signalling the assault on the Winter Palace?

Aurora. Her guns fired only a blank, yet the noise helped demoralise the palace's few defenders, most of whom gave up with very little resistance.

Alongside officer cadets, which unit helped defend the Winter Palace on the night the Bolsheviks took it?

The Women's Battalion surrendered after a half-hearted defence, and within weeks the Bolsheviks ordered every women's unit disbanded.

How did Kerensky flee Petrograd during the October rising?

In a car borrowed from the American embassy, Kerensky drove to the front to find loyal troops; too few came, and he died in exile in New York in 1970.

Leon Trotsky, who built the Red Army, was assassinated in 1940 in which country?

He had lived in all three of the other countries in exile before settling in Mexico, where Ramón Mercader struck him with an ice axe, it is widely believed on Stalin's orders.

Which American journalist wrote the 1919 October Revolution account Ten Days That Shook the World?

John Reed never left the revolution he chronicled: he died of typhus in Russia in 1920, aged 32, and was given a hero's burial beside the Kremlin wall.

Which party won the largest vote share in the late-1917 Constituent Assembly elections?

The Socialist Revolutionaries topped the poll on the strength of the peasant vote, while the Bolsheviks, who had seized power only weeks earlier, won less than a quarter.

What did the Bolsheviks do to the Constituent Assembly in January 1918?

The Bolsheviks dissolved it following a single day: outvoted at the opening session, they walked out, and deputies who came back the next day found the doors locked.

Why did the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 last only eight months?

Germany lost the war that November, and the Armistice voided the treaty; the Bolsheviks later won back Ukraine, but Finland and the Baltic states stayed independent.

Stalling at the Brest-Litovsk talks in 1918, Trotsky summed up his policy in which formula?

Neither war nor peace. Trotsky meant to stop fighting without signing anything, but the gamble failed within days and the Bolsheviks had to accept harsher terms than those he had refused.

Why did Lenin move the capital to Moscow in March 1918?

A German advance that February threatened Petrograd, so Lenin's government left for Moscow, which stayed the capital for the rest of the Soviet era.

The Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, was founded in December 1917 under which "Iron" leader?

Felix Dzerzhinsky, the son of a Polish nobleman, knew prisons from the inside: he spent years in the tsar's jails and was freed only by the February Revolution. Admirers called him Iron Felix.

Which Cheka campaign of mass arrests and executions followed the shooting of Lenin in August 1918?

The Red Terror. Fanya Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck and shoulder as he left a factory, and the Cheka answered with mass executions of former officers, the wealthy and rival socialists.

The Romanov family were murdered on the night of 16–17 July 1918 in a house in which city?

Yekaterinburg. With White forces closing on the city, the family were led down to the cellar of the Ipatiev House and shot so that they could not be rescued.

Which of Nicholas II's children was long rumoured to have survived the 1918 shooting, inspiring impostors, books and films?

Anastasia, the youngest daughter. The best-known claimant, Anna Anderson, turned out to be a Polish factory worker, and DNA tests later confirmed that all seven Romanovs died in the cellar.

Rasputin's hold on the imperial family came from apparently helping tsarevich Alexei, who had what?

Haemophilia, which reached Alexei through his mother, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria; so many of Victoria's descendants inherited it that it was nicknamed the royal disease.

Rasputin was murdered in December 1916 at the palace of which prince?

Felix Yusupov's own tale of cyanide cakes and a drowning is mostly legend: the autopsy found no poison, only three bullet wounds, one fired into the forehead at close range.

Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905, began as a peaceful march to the Winter Palace led by which priest?

Georgy Gapon's marchers carried icons and portraits of the tsar to show their loyalty; troops fired on them anyway, and the massacre set off the 1905 Revolution.

Which battleship's June 1905 mutiny was later immortalised in film by Sergei Eisenstein?

Potemkin. The mutiny began when the crew refused borscht made with maggot-ridden meat; they killed the captain and several officers, raised the red flag and ran the ship by committee.

The tsar's October Manifesto of 1905 pledged to create what?

A legislative assembly, the Duma, without whose approval no law was to pass. Nicholas kept a veto and the right to dissolve it, and sent the first Duma home when it demanded land reform.

Which 1915 decision by the tsar left the tsarina and Rasputin in charge?

He took personal command of the army, dismissing Grand Duke Nicholas, his father's cousin, so every defeat from then on was laid at the tsar's own door.

Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet in March 1917, put what under elected committees?

Army units and their weapons. Soldiers were to obey the Provisional Government only where its orders did not clash with the Soviet's, which undercut the new ministers' hold on the army from the start.

The Bolshevik-organised workers' militias that later became the core of the Red Army were known as what?

Trotsky organised the militias into the Red Army once civil war broke out.

The White movement united around which admiral, who styled himself Supreme Ruler?

Alexander Kolchak, a polar explorer before the war, ruled from Omsk in Siberia; when the Red Army took the city he fled east, fell into Bolshevik hands at Irkutsk and was shot in February 1920.

Which foreign unit's May 1918 revolt overthrew Bolshevik rule in the Urals and Volga?

The Czechoslovak Legion, Czechs and Slovaks who had quit the Austro-Hungarian army, were leaving Russia by rail when Trotsky ordered them disarmed; they refused and seized the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Which port, among the last in White hands, fell to the Red Army in October 1922?

Vladivostok was shielded by Japanese troops; once they sailed home in October 1922 the Red Army took the city, two years after the Whites had been driven out of Crimea.

The Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921 was an uprising by whom against the Bolshevik government?

Soviet sailors and their supporters at the naval base wanted new soviets elected by secret ballot and freedom of speech; the Red Army attacked across the ice before the thaw could protect them.

The suppression of Kronstadt accelerated which change of course, replacing war communism?

The New Economic Policy ended grain seizures: peasants paid a tax, at first in kind, and could sell whatever was left, while the state kept heavy industry, banking and foreign trade.

With wartime harvests holding up but paper money losing value, what did Russia's peasants do with their grain?

Hoarded it. The wartime harvests had not failed, but prices raced ahead of anything roubles could buy, so growers held their grain back and the bread queues in the cities grew.

Nestor Makhno's peasant army fought Whites and Reds alike across Ukraine under the black flag of which creed?

Anarchism. Makhno's men helped the Red Army drive Wrangel's Whites out of Crimea in November 1920; days later the Bolsheviks shot his commanders and turned on him, and he died an exile in Paris.

Which 1945 George Orwell allegory of the revolution recasts Stalin as a character named Napoleon?

Animal Farm, in which the pig Snowball, chased off the farm, stands for Trotsky. Several publishers turned it down first: Orwell wrote it in 1943-44, while the Soviet Union was Britain's wartime ally.

Rallies for which annual observance in early 1917 helped turn Petrograd's strikes into revolution?

International Women's Day fell on 23 February by Russia's old calendar: women from the capital's textile mills walked out over bread, other factories followed, and a week later the tsar abdicated.

Government troops wrecked the offices and presses of which Bolshevik newspaper after the July Days of 1917?

Pravda, Russian for truth, was used to it: the tsar's police had shut it again and again, and each time it came back under a different name. Soldiers smashed its presses on 5 July 1917.

Which book did Lenin work on while hiding in Finland between the July Days and October 1917?

State and Revolution was never finished. In a postscript Lenin said the events of October had interrupted him, and that it was more pleasant and useful to go through a revolution than to write about one.