98 Fun Facts About Russian Revolution

The city where Russia's 1917 revolutions played out regained which name in 1991?

Saint Petersburg. Its German-sounding name gave way to Petrograd when war broke out in 1914, it became Leningrad in 1924, and residents voted the original back in 1991.

Why is the March 1917 uprising called the February Revolution?

Russia still used the Julian dates, by then 13 days behind the West's Gregorian calendar; the Bolsheviks made the switch in 1918, when 31 January was followed by 14 February.

Lenin was a revolutionary alias; what surname was the Bolshevik leader born with?

Ulyanov. He adopted the alias Lenin in 1901, and his birthplace Simbirsk, also the home town of Kerensky, the man he overthrew, was later renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour.

What did Nicholas II's own generals press him to do in March 1917?

Abdicate. With the rail line to the capital blocked, the imperial train was diverted to Pskov, where his generals and two envoys from the capital pressed him to give up the throne.

Nicholas II nominated which relative to succeed him, who then declined the throne?

Nicholas first meant to pass the crown to his young son Alexei, then named his brother Michael instead; Michael declined within a day, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.

Which body shared "dual power" with the Provisional Government in 1917?

The Petrograd Soviet held the stronger hand: the government had formal authority, but the capital's garrison answered to the Soviet, so real power lay there.

What did Alexander Kerensky do in summer 1917 that backfired?

Kerensky continued the war and launched a new offensive, touring the front to rouse the troops himself; it collapsed within weeks and soldiers deserted in droves.

Which three-part slogan won the Bolsheviks popular support in 1917?

Peace, land and bread. Lenin moved on the first two at once, issuing decrees on peace and on land within a day of the Bolsheviks taking power.

What does the name Bolsheviks, taken by Lenin's faction in 1903, mean?

The majority. Lenin claimed the label after winning key votes at the 1903 congress, though his rivals, tagged the minority, had actually won the vote on who could join the party.

Which Lenin pamphlet of 1902 helped bring on the split with the Mensheviks?

What Is to Be Done? argued that workers left to themselves would stop at trade-union demands, so a tight party of professional revolutionaries had to lead them.

How did Lenin return from Swiss exile in spring 1917?

In a supposedly sealed train through Germany, laid on by the German government in the hope that Lenin would undermine Russia's war effort.

Which programme, announced on Lenin's return in 1917, refused all support for the Provisional Government?

The April Theses. Lenin attacked fellow Bolsheviks who had been backing the Provisional Government and demanded that power pass to the soviets instead.

What is the mass Petrograd demonstration of midsummer 1917, put down by the Provisional Government, called?

The July Days. The government blamed the Bolsheviks for the armed marches and struck back: Trotsky was jailed and Lenin fled to Finland.

Which general's attempted march on Petrograd in August 1917 forced Kerensky to seek Bolshevik help?

Lavr Kornilov's troops never reached the capital: railway workers held up their trains and Bolshevik envoys talked the soldiers round, and he surrendered within days.

What title did the Bolsheviks give the ministers of the government they formed in 1917?

People's Commissars. Trotsky recalled proposing the title after Lenin dismissed 'minister' as a vile, hackneyed word; Lenin chaired their council himself.

Which cruiser reportedly fired the blank shot signalling the assault on the Winter Palace?

Aurora. Her guns fired only a blank, yet the noise helped demoralise the palace's few defenders, most of whom gave up with very little resistance.

Alongside officer cadets, which unit helped defend the Winter Palace on the night the Bolsheviks took it?

The Women's Battalion surrendered after a half-hearted defence, and within weeks the Bolsheviks ordered every women's unit disbanded.

How did Kerensky flee Petrograd during the October rising?

In a car borrowed from the American embassy, Kerensky drove to the front to find loyal troops; too few came, and he died in exile in New York in 1970.

Leon Trotsky, who built the Red Army, was assassinated in 1940 in which country?

He had lived in all three of the other countries in exile before settling in Mexico, where Ramón Mercader struck him with an ice axe, it is widely believed on Stalin's orders.

Which American journalist wrote the 1919 October Revolution account Ten Days That Shook the World?

John Reed never left the revolution he chronicled: he died of typhus in Russia in 1920, aged 32, and was given a hero's burial beside the Kremlin wall.

Which party won the largest vote share in the late-1917 Constituent Assembly elections?

The Socialist Revolutionaries topped the poll on the strength of the peasant vote, while the Bolsheviks, who had seized power only weeks earlier, won less than a quarter.

What did the Bolsheviks do to the Constituent Assembly in January 1918?

The Bolsheviks dissolved it following a single day: outvoted at the opening session, they walked out, and deputies who came back the next day found the doors locked.

Why did the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 last only eight months?

Germany lost the war that November, and the Armistice voided the treaty; the Bolsheviks later won back Ukraine, but Finland and the Baltic states stayed independent.

Stalling at the Brest-Litovsk talks in 1918, Trotsky summed up his policy in which formula?

Neither war nor peace. Trotsky meant to stop fighting without signing anything, but the gamble failed within days and the Bolsheviks had to accept harsher terms than those he had refused.

Why did Lenin move the capital to Moscow in March 1918?

A German advance that February threatened Petrograd, so Lenin's government left for Moscow, which stayed the capital for the rest of the Soviet era.

The Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, was founded in December 1917 under which "Iron" leader?

Felix Dzerzhinsky, the son of a Polish nobleman, knew prisons from the inside: he spent years in the tsar's jails and was freed only by the February Revolution. Admirers called him Iron Felix.

Which Cheka campaign of mass arrests and executions followed the shooting of Lenin in August 1918?

The Red Terror. Fanya Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck and shoulder as he left a factory, and the Cheka answered with mass executions of former officers, the wealthy and rival socialists.

The Romanov family were murdered on the night of 16–17 July 1918 in a house in which city?

Yekaterinburg. With White forces closing on the city, the family were led down to the cellar of the Ipatiev House and shot so that they could not be rescued.

Which of Nicholas II's children was long rumoured to have survived the 1918 shooting, inspiring impostors, books and films?

Anastasia, the youngest daughter. The best-known claimant, Anna Anderson, turned out to be a Polish factory worker, and DNA tests later confirmed that all seven Romanovs died in the cellar.

Rasputin's hold on the imperial family came from apparently helping tsarevich Alexei, who had what?

Haemophilia, which reached Alexei through his mother, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria; so many of Victoria's descendants inherited it that it was nicknamed the royal disease.

Rasputin was murdered in December 1916 at the palace of which prince?

Felix Yusupov's own tale of cyanide cakes and a drowning is mostly legend: the autopsy found no poison, only three bullet wounds, one fired into the forehead at close range.

Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905, began as a peaceful march to the Winter Palace led by which priest?

Georgy Gapon's marchers carried icons and portraits of the tsar to show their loyalty; troops fired on them anyway, and the massacre set off the 1905 Revolution.

Which battleship's June 1905 mutiny was later immortalised in film by Sergei Eisenstein?

Potemkin. The mutiny began when the crew refused borscht made with maggot-ridden meat; they killed the captain and several officers, raised the red flag and ran the ship by committee.

The tsar's October Manifesto of 1905 pledged to create what?

A legislative assembly, the Duma, without whose approval no law was to pass. Nicholas kept a veto and the right to dissolve it, and sent the first Duma home when it demanded land reform.

Which 1915 decision by the tsar left the tsarina and Rasputin in charge?

He took personal command of the army, dismissing Grand Duke Nicholas, his father's cousin, so every defeat from then on was laid at the tsar's own door.

Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet in March 1917, put what under elected committees?

Army units and their weapons. Soldiers were to obey the Provisional Government only where its orders did not clash with the Soviet's, which undercut the new ministers' hold on the army from the start.

The Bolshevik-organised workers' militias that later became the core of the Red Army were known as what?

Trotsky organised the militias into the Red Army once civil war broke out.

The White movement united around which admiral, who styled himself Supreme Ruler?

Alexander Kolchak, a polar explorer before the war, ruled from Omsk in Siberia; when the Red Army took the city he fled east, fell into Bolshevik hands at Irkutsk and was shot in February 1920.

Which foreign unit's May 1918 revolt overthrew Bolshevik rule in the Urals and Volga?

The Czechoslovak Legion, Czechs and Slovaks who had quit the Austro-Hungarian army, were leaving Russia by rail when Trotsky ordered them disarmed; they refused and seized the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Which port, among the last in White hands, fell to the Red Army in October 1922?

Vladivostok was shielded by Japanese troops; once they sailed home in October 1922 the Red Army took the city, two years after the Whites had been driven out of Crimea.

The Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921 was an uprising by whom against the Bolshevik government?

Soviet sailors and their supporters at the naval base wanted new soviets elected by secret ballot and freedom of speech; the Red Army attacked across the ice before the thaw could protect them.

The suppression of Kronstadt accelerated which change of course, replacing war communism?

The New Economic Policy ended grain seizures: peasants paid a tax, at first in kind, and could sell whatever was left, while the state kept heavy industry, banking and foreign trade.

With wartime harvests holding up but paper money losing value, what did Russia's peasants do with their grain?

Hoarded it. The wartime harvests had not failed, but prices raced ahead of anything roubles could buy, so growers held their grain back and the bread queues in the cities grew.

Nestor Makhno's peasant army fought Whites and Reds alike across Ukraine under the black flag of which creed?

Anarchism. Makhno's men helped the Red Army drive Wrangel's Whites out of Crimea in November 1920; days later the Bolsheviks shot his commanders and turned on him, and he died an exile in Paris.

Which 1945 George Orwell allegory of the revolution recasts Stalin as a character named Napoleon?

Animal Farm, in which the pig Snowball, chased off the farm, stands for Trotsky. Several publishers turned it down first: Orwell wrote it in 1943-44, while the Soviet Union was Britain's wartime ally.

Rallies for which annual observance in early 1917 helped turn Petrograd's strikes into revolution?

International Women's Day fell on 23 February by Russia's old calendar: women from the capital's textile mills walked out over bread, other factories followed, and a week later the tsar abdicated.

Government troops wrecked the offices and presses of which Bolshevik newspaper after the July Days of 1917?

Pravda, Russian for truth, was used to it: the tsar's police had shut it again and again, and each time it came back under a different name. Soldiers smashed its presses on 5 July 1917.

Which book did Lenin work on while hiding in Finland between the July Days and October 1917?

State and Revolution was never finished. In a postscript Lenin said the events of October had interrupted him, and that it was more pleasant and useful to go through a revolution than to write about one.

Which future US president headed the American relief agency that fed millions of Russians during the 1921 famine?

Herbert Hoover ran the American Relief Administration, which at its peak fed 10.5 million people a day in Soviet Russia. It employed 300 Americans and more than 120,000 Russians.

Which British marque built the car Lenin kept at his Gorki estate, later converted into a half-track?

Rolls-Royce built the Silver Ghost that still stands in the museum at Gorki, the nationalised estate Lenin used as his dacha from 1918. He died there in January 1924.

In which city was Leon Trotsky living and writing for an émigré newspaper when the February Revolution broke out?

New York was his home for just over two months: he lived in the Bronx and wrote for the Russian-language paper Novy Mir. The Royal Navy intercepted his ship home at Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Which British king, a first cousin of Nicholas II, opposed giving the overthrown tsar's family asylum in 1917?

George V feared that sheltering the Romanovs would look inappropriate and might bring revolution to the British Isles, so his government's offer lapsed. He was also a first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The last tsarina of Russia, born Princess Alix of Hesse, was a granddaughter of which British monarch?

Queen Victoria was the mother of Alix's mother, Princess Alice. Alix signed her letters to the queen as a loving child instead of a grandchild, and wept openly at her memorial service in 1901.

The Winter Palace, seized by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, now houses which world-famous art museum?

The Hermitage has been open to the public since 1852. The museum itself came through the revolution undamaged, and the palace's state-room treasures had already been sent to Moscow for safety.

Which English children's author covered the Russian Revolution and married Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Shelepina?

Arthur Ransome grew so close to the Bolshevik leaders that he passed information to British intelligence while MI5 suspected him of being a Soviet spy. Swallows and Amazons was published in 1930.

Which aircraft designer fled Bolshevik Russia in 1918 and went on to build America's first viable helicopter?

Igor Sikorsky left after the Bolsheviks threatened to shoot him as a friend of the tsar. He founded his own aircraft company in the United States in 1923 and flew the VS-300 helicopter in 1939.

Which court jeweller made the jewelled Easter eggs that Nicholas II gave his wife and his mother?

Fabergé made 50 imperial eggs between 1885 and 1917, a tradition begun by Nicholas's father. Two more were designed but never delivered.

Joseph Stalin, who studied for the priesthood before turning to revolution, was born in which present-day country?

Georgia belonged to the Russian Empire when he was born into a poor family in the town of Gori. He left the Tiflis seminary in 1899 after he began attending secret workers' meetings.

Smolny, Lenin's headquarters during the October Revolution, was founded under Catherine the Great to educate whom?

Noble girls had been its pupils since 1764, when it opened as the first school for women in Russia. Lenin picked the building as Bolshevik headquarters immediately before the uprising.

Which horsemen, long the tsars' mounted riot police, showed sympathy for the Petrograd crowds in February 1917?

Cossacks had been counted among the groups most loyal to the Romanovs, and their isolation from local people was thought to make them immune to revolutionary appeals.

What does soviet, the Russian name for the workers' bodies first set up during the 1905 Revolution, literally mean?

Council is the plain meaning, though the word can also suggest advice or harmony. Official Soviet history placed the first one in Ivanovo, north-east of Moscow, in May 1905.

Which reforming prime minister of Nicholas II was shot at the Kiev Opera in 1911 with the tsar in the audience?

Pyotr Stolypin paired agrarian reform with repression: his special courts sent thousands of suspects to the gallows, which one deputy mockingly called his necktie.

Which fellow revolutionary was allowed to join Lenin in Siberian exile in 1898 on condition that they marry?

Nadezhda Krupskaya had been arrested in 1896, as he had, and her mother made the journey east with her. She went on to shape Soviet schools and libraries as a deputy education chief.

Which woman shot and badly wounded Lenin as he was leaving a Moscow factory in August 1918?

Fanny Kaplan fired three shots, two of which hit him, and refused to name any accomplices. Her sight had been damaged during years of hard labour under the tsar, and she was executed four days later.

Which Bolshevik ran social welfare in Lenin's first government and was later promoted to ambassador in Sweden?

Alexandra Kollontai is counted as the first woman in history to serve as a cabinet minister. She soon resigned in protest at the treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk.

Which socialist song served as the Soviet national anthem until a new one replaced it in 1944?

The Internationale came from France, with words written in 1871 and a tune from 1888. Arturo Toscanini orchestrated it for a 1943 American radio broadcast marking the October Revolution's anniversary.

Where in Moscow was Lenin's embalmed body placed on public display shortly after his death in 1924?

Red Square had a wooden tomb ready just six days after he died, on the day his coffin arrived. The architect Alexey Shchusev had been handed the job only four days earlier.

A humiliating defeat by which country in 1904–05 fed the unrest that became Russia's 1905 Revolution?

Japan destroyed Russia's Baltic Fleet at Tsushima after the ships had sailed for more than seven months to reach the Pacific. Losses in a failed war deepened anger at the autocracy.

Which Boris Pasternak novel of the revolution and civil war was refused publication in the USSR and smuggled to Milan?

Doctor Zhivago came out in Italy in 1957 and won its author the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, an award that embarrassed and enraged the Communist Party.

The Red Army's 1920 drive to carry revolution into Europe ended in defeat outside which capital city?

Warsaw was saved in August 1920 by a counterstroke that Poles call the Miracle on the Vistula. Observers had been predicting a decisive Soviet victory until Tukhachevsky's armies fell apart.

Alexander Kerensky, who led the Provisional Government in 1917, had made his name before the war as what?

A defence lawyer in the political trials of revolutionaries, he became one of the best-known speakers against the monarchy. He lived until 1970, spending his last decades in the United States.

From which peninsula did the White commander Pyotr Wrangel evacuate over 145,000 people in November 1920?

Crimea was the Whites' final foothold in the south. Wrangel had been elected to command their shattered forces there in April 1920, and won early successes before the Red Army broke through.

Which English novelist met Lenin in 1920 with the help of Maxim Gorky and then wrote Russia in the Shadows?

H. G. Wells rejected Marxism on principle, yet argued that while the rest of Russia was apathetic, violent or afraid, the Communists were prepared to act. His articles first ran in the Sunday Express.

Which composer used an offer of ten Scandinavian recitals as his excuse to leave revolutionary Russia for good in 1917?

Sergei Rachmaninoff crossed the border with his family that December, covering part of the journey on an open sled. He had given his final concert in Russia at Yalta in September.

Which painter of floating lovers and fiddlers ran the arts in his home town of Vitebsk after the October Revolution?

Marc Chagall founded an art museum and a People's Art College in the town and invited famous avant-garde artists to teach there. He had earlier refused a post in the central government.

Which reform did the Provisional Government's head promise in March 1917 after some 40,000 people marched for it?

Votes for women were promised two days after the march, which the League for Women's Equality had organised. A decade of lobbying had won equal inheritance rights but never the ballot.

Brest-Litovsk, where Soviet Russia signed its 1918 treaty with the Central Powers, lies in which present-day country?

Belarus counts Brest among its oldest cities. The treaty was signed in the fortress on the western outskirts, and the old Russian name simply meant Lithuanian Brest.

Which August 1914 battle in East Prussia destroyed Russia's Second Army and drove its commander, Samsonov, to suicide?

Tannenberg left the Russian force encircled within a month of the war beginning. Its general had pushed north-west while his superior meant him to strike north, and neither knew where the enemy stood.

Which general's 1916 offensive against Austria-Hungary was the Russian Empire's greatest feat of arms in the war?

Aleksei Brusilov, a nobleman, later sided with the Bolsheviks and helped organise the early Red Army. In 1920 he publicly urged former tsarist officers to forgive past grievances and join it.

Which tsarist secret police force, notorious for its agents provocateurs, was abolished after the February Revolution?

The Okhrana, formed in 1881, placed its agents deep inside the revolutionary parties. One of them, Jacob Zhitomirsky, was a leading Bolshevik and a close associate of Lenin.

Which label did the Bolsheviks give better-off peasants, denounced by Lenin as profiteers who grew fat in famines?

Kulaks proved hard to define: the legal criteria kept shifting, and both peasants and Soviet officials were unsure who counted as one. In theory they were class enemies of the poorer villagers.

Which organisation did Lenin found at a Moscow congress in March 1919 to promote revolution worldwide?

The Comintern took the place of the Second International, which had collapsed during the First World War. Stalin wound it up in 1943 as a gesture to his wartime allies.

Which long-serving finance minister framed the October Manifesto for Nicholas II during the unrest of 1905?

Sergei Witte went on to head the tsar's first cabinet, in effect as Russia's first prime minister. He resigned once he saw that the tsar never meant to honour the concessions.

Which White general's 1919 offensive drove to within 350 kilometres of Moscow before collapsing at Orel?

Anton Denikin, whose father had been born a serf, ordered the advance in his Moscow Directive of June 1919. It proved the high-water mark of the White movement.

Which Volga city, which Joseph Stalin helped defend during the civil war, was renamed Stalingrad in 1925?

Tsaritsyn was where he had been sent simply to obtain grain for Moscow, but he joined the local command and was soon quarrelling with Trotsky. The city's stand was later nicknamed the Red Verdun.

The Provisional Government ministers captured in the Winter Palace were imprisoned in which island fortress?

Peter and Paul had held political prisoners since the early 1700s. Hours earlier its own guns had fired about 30 shells at the palace and scored just two hits.

Which prince, known nationally for his wartime relief work, became the first head of the Provisional Government in 1917?

Georgy Lvov held the post for four months before Kerensky took over. Arrested by the Bolsheviks after October, he escaped and reached France by way of the United States.

Lenin and Alexander Kerensky, opponents in 1917, were both born in which town on the Volga river?

Simbirsk made friends of the two families: Kerensky's father taught the young Lenin and even secured him a place at the University of Kazan.

Nicholas II attended a French diplomatic ball hours after a deadly crowd crush at which Moscow field in 1896?

Khodynka had drawn huge crowds on rumours of coronation gifts, and well over a thousand people were crushed to death. A grand duke warned the new tsar not to go dancing that night, but he went anyway.

Which country did the White general Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, nicknamed the Mad Baron, occupy for five months?

Mongolia was to be the base for his dream of reviving the Mongol Empire, since he claimed descent from Genghis Khan's grandson. He held its capital through fear and brutal violence.

Riflemen from which Baltic nation formed the first regular division of the Red Army during the civil war?

Latvia's riflemen had swung behind the Bolsheviks out of resentment at the tsar and his generals. Their colonel Jukums Vācietis became the Red Army's first commander-in-chief in September 1918.

Which Petrograd building, the Provisional Government's first home in 1917, later hosted the Constituent Assembly?

The Tauride Palace was built for a prince who threw lavish festivities there to win back Catherine the Great's affections. In early 1917 the new government and the city's soviet sat in opposite wings.

Which churchman was chosen by lot in November 1917 as the first Patriarch of Moscow in about 200 years?

Tikhon's name was drawn from three candidates less than two weeks after the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd. He had earlier led the Russian Orthodox diocese in North America.

Troops shot striking gold miners in 1912 beside which Siberian river, bringing Alexander Kerensky to public notice?

Lena goldfield workers, more than 6,000 of them, had struck at a company partly owned by British investors. The shooting did much to stir revolutionary feeling across Russia.

Leon Trotsky, who reportedly borrowed his alias from a jailer in Odessa, was born with which surname?

Bronstein was the name of his family, wealthy farmers in a village that is now part of Ukraine. He kept using it until 1902, when he first went abroad.

Under the alias Jacob Richter, Lenin obtained a reader's ticket for which London institution during his exile?

The British Museum drew him back to its Reading Room in 1908, when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-criticism there. The book attacked the philosophy of a rival within his own party.

Mathilde Kschessinska, a former mistress of Nicholas II whose mansion the Bolsheviks seized in 1917, was famous as what?

A ballerina of the imperial stage, she had been involved with the future tsar for three years until his marriage in 1894. She later married his cousin, Grand Duke Andrei.

In which Swiss city had Lenin been living for a year when the February Revolution broke out in Russia?

Zurich had been his base since February 1916, when he and his wife moved there from Bern. It was also the starting point for his party of exiles when they set out for Petrograd.