Breaking Points

CHAPTER 8 · 1917 · The Great War, 1914–1918

Three years in, the war starts breaking the societies fighting it — and 1917 is the year of fractures. It opens in a bread queue: in March (February by Russia’s old calendar), Petrograd’s women textile workers strike over flour, the strike becomes a rising, and the garrison — peasant conscripts who have had enough — refuses to fire. In a week the Romanov dynasty is gone. The Provisional Government makes the fatal choice: honor the alliance, continue the war. Its June offensive collapses; soldiers vote with their feet by the hundred thousand; and in November Lenin’s Bolsheviks — a party of perh

The turn: The October Revolution, 7 November 1917.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.