The Russian Revolution

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In 1919, John Reed, a young American journalist fervently committed to socialism, published a stirring eye-witness account of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks late in October 1917. Reed had traveled to Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire, in September that year to report on the progress of the revolution that had erupted in February and already toppled the authoritarian tsarist regime, leaving the country’s political system in a state of uncertainty. The liberals who took control of the government were incapable of coping with the enormous problems they faced: the defeats the army was suffering at the hands of German troops in what seemed to be an endless war, the widespread industrial strikes, the peasants’ unauthorized seizure of land, and the growing pressure of nationality groups to secure independence. Instead of bringing about a democratic and more just society, the dethronement of the unpopular Tsar Nicholas II had led to unprecedented economic, social, and political instability that threatened to thrust the Russian Empire into chaos.

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