HookTwo revolutions, one year, opposite characters
On 15 March 1917 — 2 March by Russia's old calendar — Nicholas II sat in a railway carriage at Pskov and signed away three hundred years of Romanov rule in a few flat sentences, and almost nobody had planned it. There was no charismatic leader in charge, no party directing the crowds; the monarchy simply dissolved under hunger, mutiny and abandonment in the space of five days. Eight months later, on the night of 24–25 October (6–7 November in the West), a disciplined party of a few thousand seized the Russian state in a single night that was planned almost to the hour. The same year contains two revolutions with completely opposite characters, and the depth study constantly asks you to hold both in view at once.
That contrast is also where the historians fight. October is the most argued-over event in modern history: coup or popular revolution? Liberal historians of the 'totalitarian' school, such as Richard Pipes, present it as a conspiratorial seizure by a ruthless minority; revisionists such as Sheila Fitzpatrick argue the Bolsheviks rode a genuine wave of worker and soldier radicalisation. Your job in this section is not to pick the reading you like the sound of, but to weigh each interpretation against evidence you can control — the skill AQA calls AO3, and the reason 1917 rewards precise dates far more than confident opinions.
ContextA brittle autocracy: Russia under Nicholas II before 1917
Nicholas II inherited in 1894 an empire of some 165 million people spread across a sixth of the globe, roughly four-fifths of them peasants, governed as a personal autocracy with no national parliament. Sergei Witte's industrial surge in the 1890s built railways and factories, but it also concentrated a radicalised urban working class in cities like Petrograd. The 1905 Revolution — sparked by Bloody Sunday and defeat by Japan — forced the October Manifesto and Russia's first parliament, the Duma, but Nicholas promptly gutted its powers with the 1906 Fundamental Laws and leaned on Pyotr Stolypin's mixture of land reform and repression (the hangman's noose was nicknamed 'Stolypin's necktie') until Stolypin was assassinated in 1911.
The First World War then broke the system. Mobilising some fifteen million men, Russia suffered catastrophic defeats — Tannenberg in 1914 — and in September 1915 Nicholas made the fatal decision to take personal command at the front, tying himself to every future defeat and leaving government in the hands of the unpopular Empress Alexandra and the discredited faith-healer Rasputin, murdered by nobles in December 1916. By the start of 1917 Petrograd was quietly starving: military inflation, a collapsing rail network and fuel shortages had emptied the bread shops in the capital.
CourseThe February/March revolution and the Tsar's abdication
The February Revolution (old-style; March by the Western calendar) was organised by no party at all. It began on International Women's Day, 23 February 1917, when women textile workers and bread-queue crowds poured onto Petrograd's streets, joined within days by strikers locked out of the giant Putilov works. What turned protest into revolution was the garrison: ordered to fire on the crowds on 26 February, the regiments mutinied the next day and joined them, handing the capital to the streets.
Two bodies filled the vacuum on 27 February — a self-appointed committee of Duma politicians and the reborn Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. With his own generals concluding he could no longer be saved, Nicholas abdicated on 2 March 1917 at Pskov, first for himself and then, extraordinarily, for his haemophiliac son Alexei as well, in favour of his brother Grand Duke Michael — who declined the throne the following day. Three hundred years of Romanov rule ended not in a planned coup but in a matter of days, brought down by hunger, mutiny and the desertion of the elite. This is why examiners treat the two 1917 revolutions as opposites: February was a collapse, not a seizure.
StructureDual authority: the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet
What emerged from February was dvoevlastie — 'dual power'. The Provisional Government, led first by Prince Lvov and dominated by liberals and Kadets, held formal authority but had no democratic mandate and, crucially, no control over the armed forces or the railways. Facing it stood the Petrograd Soviet, which commanded the loyalty of the very soldiers and workers who had made the revolution. Soviet Order No. 1, issued on 1 March, told military units to obey the Provisional Government only when the Soviet agreed — real power without formal responsibility, held by a body that at first chose not to govern outright.
The Provisional Government then made the decisions that destroyed it. It continued a deeply unpopular war, launching the disastrous June Offensive (the Kerensky Offensive) that collapsed in weeks; and it postponed the two things that might have legitimised it — land redistribution and elections to a Constituent Assembly. Alexander Kerensky, who rose to head the government by July, embodied the trap: too liberal to seize peace and land for himself, too weak to enforce order against those who would. Every month the government delayed, the Soviet's slogans looked more attractive, and the space for a party that promised exactly peace and land grew wider.
CatalystLenin's return and the April Theses
Until April 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority even on the left, and their own leaders inside Petrograd had been cautiously supporting the Provisional Government. Lenin detonated that consensus. Transported from exile in Switzerland by the German government in a sealed train — Berlin gambling that he would pull Russia out of the war — he reached the Finland Station in Petrograd on 3 April 1917. His April Theses, published in Pravda within days, stunned even his own party: no cooperation whatsoever with the Provisional Government, an immediate end to the 'imperialist war', and the demand 'All Power to the Soviets'.
Distilled into three words — 'Peace, Bread, Land' — this was a programme aimed with brutal precision at what soldiers, workers and peasants actually wanted, and it separated the Bolsheviks cleanly from every rival still yoked to the war and the government. The road was not smooth: the failed July Days drove Lenin briefly into hiding in Finland and left the Bolsheviks discredited. But the Kornilov Affair of late August rescued them — when a general's attempted march on Petrograd panicked Kerensky into arming the Bolshevik Red Guards, the party emerged rearmed, rehabilitated and cast as the defenders of the revolution at exactly the right moment.
SeizureThe October/November 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power
By September 1917 Trotsky chaired the Petrograd Soviet, and its Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) gave the Bolsheviks a military instrument wrapped in Soviet legitimacy. On the night of 24–25 October 1917 (6–7 November by the Western calendar), Red Guards and MRC forces seized the bridges, telegraph offices, railway stations and power stations of Petrograd with almost no fighting, and in the early hours arrested the ministers of the Provisional Government inside the Winter Palace. The next day the Second Congress of Soviets ratified the new government, which at once issued the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land.
How you characterise that night is the depth study's central interpretation battle, and Section A hands you three historian extracts to weigh. Take a 'coup' interpretation — the tradition associated with liberal historians such as Richard Pipes, who present October as a conspiratorial seizure by a disciplined minority exploiting a power vacuum, with the masses as bystanders. Now set against it a 'social history' interpretation — associated with revisionists such as Sheila Fitzpatrick — arguing the Bolsheviks succeeded because they rode a genuine wave of worker and soldier radicalisation. The AO3 skill is not to choose the one you prefer; it is to test each against evidence you control. The near-bloodless takeover and the Bolsheviks' failure, weeks later, to win a Constituent Assembly majority both strengthen the coup reading; the collapse of support for the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet strengthen the popular reading. A top-band answer states what each extract stresses and omits, then reaches a supported judgement — perhaps that October was a planned seizure made possible by mass disillusion, which is exactly why it held when a mere conspiracy would have failed.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Component 2 (the depth study) is assessed by AO1 and AO3, and Section A is the giveaway. It is the compulsory 30-mark question on three extracts from the work of historians, testing AO3: do not treat the extracts as sources to fact-check for accuracy. Identify the argument each historian is making, decide what it emphasises and what it plays down, and then judge how convincing it is against your own knowledge. The 'coup versus popular revolution' debate is the classic 1917 frame, and the strongest answers explain why an interpretation is persuasive rather than just labelling it right or wrong.
Sections B and C are 25-mark AO1 essays, where the depth study rewards precise, dated detail and a sustained line of argument. In a causation essay, rank your factors and signpost the ranking: an answer that argues the Provisional Government's decision to continue the war mattered more than Bolshevik organisation — and then defends that hierarchy against the counter-case — outscores a balanced list every time. Throughout, deploy the Old Style/New Style distinction correctly; sloppy chronology is exactly the tell examiners use to separate a secure candidate from a vague one.