What happened in 1917?

Historian David Rainbow writes:

Photo courtesy of David Rainbow.

In 1917 two revolutions took place in Russia that have affected the world ever since. In February, a 300-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end. What started with women marching in the streets of St. Petersburg demanding bread ended eight days later with the tsar’s forced abdication of his throne. Then in October, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party seized power in the name of the people. Lenin created the world’s first Marxist socialist state, but not before having to fight and win a three-year-long civil war that ravaged—and eventually reconstituted—the Russian empire. More than ten million people were killed from 1917-1922, and millions more fled into exile abroad. The years of revolution and civil war that began in 1917 utterly transformed the lives of 200 million former subjects of the Russian tsar. The Soviet Union was being born. It was a country built to eliminate injustice forever.
 
If you want to learn more, come on our trip to Russia in May 2017. While in St. Petersburg and Moscow we will visit several of the most significant revolutionary sites.

For more information on the trip and on Dr. Rainbow's fall 2017 Russian history course, see here and here.

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