The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest event in modern history. Between February and October, Russia passed from the overthrow of the Tsar, through a short episode of bourgeois rule, to the conquest of power by the Bolshevik Party and the establishment of the first workers state. To mark the centenary, the WSWS is publishing a weekly feature, This Week in the Russian Revolution, which provides a kaleidoscopic view of the Russian Revolution and the global events of 1917, an epochal year in world history.
The chronology uses the Gregorian calendar—the same calendar in common use today and in most of the Western world in 1917. In Russia at the time, the Julian calendar (Old Style or O.S.) was still in use, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian. This WSWS feature will include the Julian dates for events that took place within Russia, by placing them in parentheses after the modern date.
As part of our focus on 1917, the WSWS will suspend, for the remainder of the year, its regular feature, This Week in History.
February 20-26: War deepens crisis of Tsarist regime
20 February 2017
By the winter of 1916-1917, the World War on the Eastern Front had brought Tsar Nicholas II’s armies to the verge of collapse. Casualties for the Russian Empire approached six million dead, wounded, missing and captured. The army was woefully undersupplied. Mutinies proliferated against an incompetent officer corps indifferent to the suffering of the overwhelmingly peasant army. In Russia, as well as in Germany and even the United States, food prices grew rapidly, provoking increasing social unrest.
February 27-March 5: American imperialism prepares for world war
27 February 2017
As the Tsarist Russian Empire buckled under the weight of World War I, the United States government prepared to enter the battle. From the eruption of war in 1914 between Great Britain, France and Russia, on one side, and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other, the US maintained a position of formal neutrality—partly owing to mass anti-war sentiment among American workers and farmers. The neutrality became increasingly fictitious as the war dragged on, with Wilson’s diplomacy “a mixture of knavery and democratic piety,” in Trotsky’s words. Ever more openly, Washington supported Britain and France as American industry armed the soldiers of the Allies, and its banks financed their war. By 1917, the question of US entry was a matter of when, not if.