Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-25 0

On the night a government fell in Petrograd, much of the city carried on as usual: trams ran, restaurants served dinner and the theaters stayed open. A few streets away, armed workers and sailors were walking into the Winter Palace. How did a party that was small and scattered in February take power by October, and why did the hopes of 1917 for peace, land and freedom end in one of the harshest dictatorships of the century?

The cast includes peasants freed from serfdom but still hungry for land, exiles arguing over a single line in their party rules, soldiers who stopped saluting and sailors who rose against the government they had helped create. Along the way you will learn to read the evidence the way historians do, to tell a popular revolution from a coup and to see where both descriptions fit, and to judge for yourself whether Stalin was the heir of 1917 or its betrayer. Above all, you will see why the freedom to vote, speak and organize decides what any revolution becomes.

Levels

  1. 1 1. The Old Regime: Autocracy and the Land Question 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Revolutionaries: Populists, Marxists and the Split of 1903 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. 1905: The Dress Rehearsal 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. War and the February Revolution 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. From February to October 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Power and Civil War, 1917 to 1921 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Kronstadt, NEP and the Contest to Succeed Lenin 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Legacy: Revolution from Above and the Historians' Debate 5-question quiz

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