Russian Revolution Trivia
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98 free Russian Revolution trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In 1917 Russia went through two revolutions in eight months, toppling a 300-year-old dynasty and installing the world's first socialist state, then fought a civil war that did not end until 1922. This quiz covers the whole arc: the 1905 rehearsal and Bloody Sunday, Rasputin and the tsarina, the bread riots that became the February Revolution, the abdication at Pskov, Kerensky and the Provisional Government, Lenin's sealed train and April Theses, the July Days and the Kornilov affair, the storming of the Winter Palace, Brest-Litovsk, the Constituent Assembly, the Cheka and Red Terror, the murder of the Romanovs, Kronstadt and the birth of the USSR. Easy questions ask who led the Bolsheviks and which palace fell in October; harder ones cover Order No. 1, the cruiser Aurora's blank shot, and why the February Revolution happened in March. It suits history students and teachers, readers of Orlando Figes and John Reed, and quiz nights that want a modern-history round with real depth. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the revolutions and the people, treaties and institutions involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The city where Russia's 1917 revolutions played out regained which name in 1991?
Saint Petersburg
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.
Q 02Why is the March 1917 uprising called the February Revolution?
Russia still used the Julian dates
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.
Q 03Lenin was a revolutionary alias; what surname was the Bolshevik leader born with?
Ulyanov
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.
Q 04What did Nicholas II's own generals press him to do in March 1917?
Abdicate
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.
Q 05Nicholas II nominated which relative to succeed him, who then declined the throne?
His brother Michael
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.
Q 06Which body shared "dual power" with the Provisional Government in 1917?
The Petrograd Soviet
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.
Q 07What did Alexander Kerensky do in summer 1917 that backfired?
Continued the war and launched a new offensive
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.
Q 08Which three-part slogan won the Bolsheviks popular support in 1917?
Peace, land and bread
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.
Q 09What does the name Bolsheviks, taken by Lenin's faction in 1903, mean?
The majority
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.
Q 10Which Lenin pamphlet of 1902 helped bring on the split with the Mensheviks?
What Is to Be Done?
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.
Q 11How did Lenin return from Swiss exile in spring 1917?
In a supposedly sealed train through Germany
In a supposedly sealed train through Germany, laid on by the German government in the hope that Lenin would undermine Russia's war effort.
Q 12Which programme, announced on Lenin's return in 1917, refused all support for the Provisional Government?
The April Theses
The April Theses. Lenin attacked fellow Bolsheviks who had been backing the Provisional Government and demanded that power pass to the soviets instead.
Q 13What is the mass Petrograd demonstration of midsummer 1917, put down by the Provisional Government, called?
Q 21Which party won the largest vote share in the late-1917 Constituent Assembly elections?
The Socialist Revolutionaries
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.
Q 22What did the Bolsheviks do to the Constituent Assembly in January 1918?
Dissolved it following a single day
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.
Q 23Why did the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 last only eight months?
The July Days
The July Days. The government blamed the Bolsheviks for the armed marches and struck back: Trotsky was jailed and Lenin fled to Finland.
Q 14Which general's attempted march on Petrograd in August 1917 forced Kerensky to seek Bolshevik help?
Lavr Kornilov
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.
Q 15What title did the Bolsheviks give the ministers of the government they formed in 1917?
People's Commissars
People's Commissars. Trotsky recalled proposing the title after Lenin dismissed 'minister' as a vile, hackneyed word; Lenin chaired their council himself.
Q 16Which cruiser reportedly fired the blank shot signalling the assault on the Winter Palace?
Aurora
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.
Q 17Alongside officer cadets, which unit helped defend the Winter Palace on the night the Bolsheviks took it?
The Women's Battalion
The Women's Battalion surrendered after a half-hearted defence, and within weeks the Bolsheviks ordered every women's unit disbanded.
Q 18How did Kerensky flee Petrograd during the October rising?
In a car borrowed from the American embassy
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.
Q 19Leon Trotsky, who built the Red Army, was assassinated in 1940 in which country?
Mexico
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.
Q 20Which American journalist wrote the 1919 October Revolution account Ten Days That Shook the World?
John Reed
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.
Germany lost the war
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.
Q 24Stalling at the Brest-Litovsk talks in 1918, Trotsky summed up his policy in which formula?
Neither war nor peace
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.
Q 25Why did Lenin move the capital to Moscow in March 1918?
A German advance
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.
Q 26The Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, was founded in December 1917 under which "Iron" leader?
Felix Dzerzhinsky
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.
Q 27Which Cheka campaign of mass arrests and executions followed the shooting of Lenin in August 1918?
The Red Terror
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.
Q 28The Romanov family were murdered on the night of 16–17 July 1918 in a house in which city?
Yekaterinburg
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.
Q 29Which of Nicholas II's children was long rumoured to have survived the 1918 shooting, inspiring impostors, books and films?
Anastasia
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.
Q 30Rasputin's hold on the imperial family came from apparently helping tsarevich Alexei, who had what?
Haemophilia
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.