Russian Revolution

The Bolshevik Red Army faced the loose coalition of White Armies — monarchists, liberals, Socialist Revolutionaries, and foreign-backed forces. The Whites' fatal weakness: they could not unite behind a single leader or program. The Reds had a single ideology, a single command, and Lenin's ruthless will.

Trotsky built the Red Army from almost nothing to 5 million soldiers in three years. He traveled the front in his famous armored train, personally rallying troops, shooting deserters, and turning defeats into victories. Without Trotsky, the Bolsheviks would likely have lost the Civil War.

Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, and four servants were shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House as White Army forces approached Yekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks feared the Tsar becoming a rallying symbol for the Whites. The bodies were buried in secret and not identified until 1991.

Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and 10 other nations sent troops and massive supplies to support the White Armies. The intervention was ultimately half-hearted and poorly coordinated, but it allowed Bolshevik propaganda to frame the Civil War as a patriotic struggle against foreign imperialism.

To feed the Red Army, the Bolsheviks instituted "War Communism" — armed detachments forcibly seized grain from peasants. Industry was nationalized and money abolished. The result was economic catastrophe and famine that killed 5 million people in 1921–22. Lenin was forced to reverse course with the NEP.

Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka secret police waged systematic terror against "class enemies" — aristocrats, priests, landowners, and political opponents. Estimates of executions range from 100,000 to 500,000. Thousands more died in concentration camps. The precedent for Stalin's later mass terror was established here.

Intellectual architect of the revolution. Spent years in Siberian exile and European emigration refining Marxist theory, building the Bolshevik party, and waiting for his moment. Returned in April 1917 and within seven months had seized power. Built the Soviet state and the Communist International before dying of strokes in 1924.

Brilliant orator, military genius, and theorist of "permanent revolution." Second only to Lenin in 1917. Built the Red Army that won the Civil War. Outmaneuvered by Stalin after Lenin's death, expelled from the party in 1927, exiled in 1929. Assassinated in Mexico City in 1940 by a Stalinist agent with an ice axe.

A bank robber and underground organizer before 1917, Stalin used his role as party secretary to build an unassailable bureaucratic empire. After Lenin's death, he outmaneuvered Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin through shifting alliances. By 1929 he was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union.

A devoted family man catastrophically unsuited to rule a vast empire in crisis. Weak-willed, isolated from reality, and constitutionally opposed to reform, he was outpaced by every challenge he faced. Canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. Executed with his family in 1918.

A socialist lawyer who briefly held Russia's fate in his hands as head of the Provisional Government. His fatal decision to continue the war and delay land reform left him without a political base. Ousted by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, he fled to Paris and eventually the United States, dying in 1970 at age 89.

Polish revolutionary known as "Iron Felix." Lenin chose him to found the Cheka (secret police) in December 1917, making him the father of the entire Soviet security apparatus. His organization evolved into the OGPU, NKVD, and ultimately the KGB. His iron statue stood outside KGB headquarters until 1991.