The Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the Soviet Union

World War I brought Russia huge military losses, food shortages, and economic collapse. In the February Revolution of 1917 (March by the Western calendar), protests and mutinies forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, but the new Provisional Government kept fighting the war. In the October Revolution (November by the Western calendar), the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin with the slogan "Peace, Land, and Bread," seized power. They took Russia out of the war with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, giving up large territories, and won a brutal civil war against the anti-Bolshevik "Whites," creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin took control and built a totalitarian state: his Five-Year Plans forced rapid industrialization, and forced collectivization of farms caused famines that killed millions, including the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933, while purges and a vast system of Gulag labor camps imprisoned and killed millions more.

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