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We can show you where every important control lives — the map, timeline, chapters, modes, search and your notes. Nothing advances until you choose Next.
This is a situation map of the Russian lands, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, across the seventy years between defeat in the Crimean War in 1855 and the death of Lenin in 1924. It opens on the largest land empire on earth, painted in charcoal: an autocracy that still owned its peasants as serfs. The charcoal first spreads, down the Amur to the Pacific and south into Central Asia, while the Tsars free the serfs and then fear what they have freed. It then comes apart, turning the pale blue of a Provisional Government in 1917 and red at its heart that October, and finally the red floods back out to the old frontiers under a new name.
Fourteen chapters argue the revolution rather than merely recount it: why reform from above did not save the autocracy, why the strongest monarchy in Europe fell in five days, how a coup became “Soviet power,” why the outnumbered Reds won, what the victors then did to the people they had freed, and what exactly had been made by 1924. Every reform, rising, treaty, army and atrocity is drawn where it happened. Take the guided tour, or scrub the timeline and interrogate the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
This is one of twenty-one atlases — the ★ at the top left returns to the library at any time.