Dual Power

CHAPTER 3 · MARCH–SEPTEMBER 1917 · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

For eight months Russia was governed by a paradox. The Provisional Government had the legal authority and the ministries; the Petrograd Soviet had the loyalty of the workers, the garrison and the railwaymen — “power without authority” facing “authority without power.” On the map nothing changes color, because the deadlock was invisible to cartography and fatal to the state. Into it, in April, stepped Lenin, carried across wartime Germany in a sealed train by an enemy that hoped he would wreck Russia’s war. On the platform of the Finland Station he stunned even his own party with the April Thes

The turn: The Kornilov affair, late August 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.