Any understanding of what transpired in Russia during and after 1917 must begin with a study of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (1870-1924), who took the name of Lenin. Russia had a large revolutionary movement dating back to the mid-1800s, and Lenin adopted many of its traditions and ideas in his own works. Above all, however, Lenin was influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, and he attempted to translate Marx's ideas into a Russian context. In his most important theoretical work, What Is to Be Done? (the same title as N. Chernyshevsky's vastly influential 1862 revolutionary novel), Lenin sketched the specifics of a new Marxist revolutionary party. Lenin's Bolshevik Party, founded in 1903, adopted the model he outlined.

In February 1917, in the midst of the First World War, spontaneous demonstrations broke out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg, renamed at the start of the war to sound more Russian). A combination of workers, women, and soldiers took to the streets to protest the lack of bread in the capital. Within a week, the revolt had grown, and the tsar, Nicholas II, under pressure from Russia's legislative body, the Duma, abdicated his throne. Three hundred years of Romanov rule had ended suddenly and surprisingly. Most Russians were jubilant at the news, as this poem by a private in the infantry reserves indicates.

The February Revolution also prompted the formation of Soviets, or councils, modeled on groups of workers and revolutionaries that had first appeared during the Revolution of 1905. After the abdication of the tsar in 1917, the Soviets, along with the Provisional Government composed of Duma members, made competing claims to the authority to rule Russia. With their strong base of support in Russia's major cities, the Soviets claimed legitimacy based on their appeal to "the people." The Petrograd Soviet, the most famous and powerful of the councils, issued its Order Number 1 to Russian soldiers in March 1917, seeking to gain support from the frontline troops.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 led to the outbreak of Civil War in Russia, a conflict that lasted from 1918 to 1920. Bolshevik forces under the command of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) fought against a number of former tsarist officers and peasants (the two sides are often referred to as the Reds and the Whites, respectively). Dmitry Moor's poster "Have You Volunteered" was one of the most famous and enduring images of this period in Russian history. Moor, a Bolshevik supporter during the Civil War, depicted a Red Army soldier standing in front of a factory--a symbol of the "new society" the Bolsheviks promised--imploring his countrymen to defend the Bolshevik regime.

The writings of Isaac Babel (1894-1940) provide some of the most illuminating tales of the early years of the Russian Revolution. In this account, taken from his observations in Petrograd in 1918, Babel describes the mounting death toll resulting from the Revolution. Russians, weary from war, would suffer even more violence over the next two years. Babel's account helps to capture the experience of these years and their costs.

Alexander Apsit's poster celebrating the first year of the Revolution remains one of the most famous images of the event. In this work, a worker and a peasant proclaim the dawn of a new world, complete with happy Russians and a smoothly running factory.

Ekaterina Olitskaia grew up on her father's estate outside Kursk, in southern Russia. Although wealthy, she soon joined the Russian revolutionary movement and greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm. By the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, however, Olitskaia had become despondent about the fate of the revolution and regretted the tactics employed by Lenin's party. Her reminiscences of this period are excerpted below.

The Bolshevik seizure of power and the new regime's policies produced considerable opposition. Lenin dealt with these matters swiftly and ruthlessly, as this cable to local Bolsheviks in the provinces indicates. Peasant resistance to grain requisitioning was treated by Lenin as the beginnings of class warfare and violently repressed.

In the early 1920s, Lenin suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. Both Lenin and other Soviet leaders began to think about the question of who would succeed the only leader the Bolshevik Party had ever known. In 1922, Lenin composed the following letter, which he intended to be read at the Central Committee. In it, he discusses the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and finds most of his potential successors wanting. The letter, which has often been referred to as "Lenin's testament," intensified a bitter rivalry between Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) and Leon Trotsky. After Lenin's death in 1924, a succession struggle dominated the Bolshevik Party until Stalin emerged as undisputed leader.

Lenin's death generated not only a political crisis, but also a debate on how to bury the Bolshevik leader properly. Lenin's remains were preserved, and eventually a tomb was built to house them. The tomb became the focal point of the cult of Lenin that grew after 1924, one that Stalin promoted and then used as a model for his own personality cult. Visitors to Moscow, much like pilgrims to holy sites around the world, could enter Lenin's tomb and see the preserved body of the leader of the Revolution.

The mostly bloodless coup of October 1917, in which the Provisional Government essentially collapsed without a fight, was not sufficiently dramatic for the Bolsheviks. In the years following, artists, writers, and other cultural figures set out to construct a mythical version of the "people's revolution" of October. Perhaps the most famous example of this version of history was Sergei Eisenstein's film October, made in 1927 as part of the official celebrations of the Revolution. In this scene, Eisenstein portrays a fictional storming of the Winter Palace in 1917--the scene was later used in countless documentaries and other films about the Revolution.

With his position as leader of the Soviet Union secure, Stalin launched his "revolution from above" in the late 1920s. Stalin's plan called for rapid collectivization of farms, forced industrialization, and a simultaneous "cultural revolution" aimed at making Russia into a truly socialist state. In this 1931 speech, Stalin explains why his program, which led to countless deaths and hardships, was necessary.

Socialist realism promoting an idealized view of the Soviet countryside became the hallmark of Soviet culture in the 1930s. Supervised by local Soviets, peasant men and women (who look well-fed despite the famine ravaging the region) increase their productivity in this poster.

The collectivization program launched in Stalin's "revolution" aimed at forcing peasants throughout the Soviet Union onto large, state-run farms. Once these collective farms had been established, the planning of harvests and grain quotas could be controlled more easily from the center. Ultimately, Stalin needed grain from the farms to export abroad for the hard currency necessary for his industrialization program. The result in Ukraine was famine on a massive scale. In this party circular, Soviet officials blamed this famine on kulaks, or so-called rich peasants, and claimed that peasants throughout the country, particularly kulaks, were pretending to be hungry in an effort to ruin Stalin's program.

Vera Mukhina's monumental sculpture of a worker and a collective farm girl is one of the most famous examples of Stalinist culture. Designed for the 1937 Paris international exhibition, Mukhina's statue was conceived as an image of Soviet industrial progress. It visually represented the words of the 1936 Soviet Constitution (known as the Stalin Constitution), which defined the USSR as "a state of workers and peasants."

In 1934, Stalin announced in a speech that "life was getting better" as a result of his program and encouraged artists to promote the "better life" of the Soviet Union. One of the best-known songs of these years was the 1936 "Life's Getting Better," written by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, founder and leader of the Red Army Ensemble.

Stalin's claim that "Life is getting better" prompted an outpouring of novels, films, images, and songs devoted to depicting this adage. Stalin demanded that all culture reflect "socialist realism": that is, it should imagine the future shape of socialist Russia in the present. A. Lavrov's poster, "The People's Dreams Have Come True," features a Russian grandfather with his grandson. The two look out a window at the "new civilization" Stalinism has created.

In fact, life for most residents of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was far from easy. Stepan Podlubnyi (1914- ), born in Ukraine to wealthy peasants, reveals his extraordinary life under the Stalinist regime in his diary, excerpted below. After 1917 his father was stripped of all but a part of his land because of his "kulak" origins. From 1932 Podlubnyi was an informer for the Secret Police. In this passage, he recalls the year 1937, the beginning of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, and the arrest of Podlubnyi's mother.

By the middle of the 1930s, the cult of Stalin within Soviet culture had begun. The following poster depicts the Soviet leader as larger-than-life, inspiring the various ethnic groups within the Soviet Union forward toward communism.

The 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party leader, prompted Stalin to order a wave of purges within the Communist Party. In the most dramatic episode of these purges, Stalin had many of the Old Bolsheviks arrested, imprisoned, tried in show trials, and then executed. The wave of arrests soon expanded beyond the party, however, and touched thousands of people throughout the Soviet Union. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), one of the leaders of the October Revolution and a staunch supporter of Stalin throughout the 1920s, fell victim to the terror. In this letter written to Stalin on the eve of his execution, Bukharin appeals to his former comrade.

Historians have engaged in heated debate over the nature of 1917 ever since, a debate colored by the ideological debates of the Cold War. Sheila Fitzpatrick, one of the most prominent historians of the USSR, discusses in this passage from her history of the revolution the difficulties in studying 1917 and in determining when the Russian Revolution ended. Her periodization has become the most influential way of viewing the Russian Revolution as a twenty-year process.

Richard Pipes presents a powerful, uncompromising indictment of the Russian Revolution, its violence, consequences, and the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism.

Historians have struggled to understand Stalinism and particularly the Great Terror, which reached its peak in 1937. Perhaps the last voice should be Anna Akhmatova's (1889-1966). Akhmatova, a poet, saw her husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, arrested and shot by Soviet authorities in 1921. Her son, Lev, was arrested in 1937. The poem "Requiem," reproduced below, offers her testimony of the Stalin era.