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In April 1917 Germany sent Vladimir Lenin across Europe in a sealed train, hoping he would knock Russia out of World War I. The Romanov dynasty was already cracking: Nicholas II believed he ruled by divine right, St. Petersburg workers lived 16 to an apartment, Tannenberg in 1914 cost 30,000 killed and 90,000 captured, and in 1915 the tsar took personal command of the army. Printing money drove inflation to 400 percent, peasants hoarded grain, and February bread riots in Petrograd became a revolution when the garrison refused to fire. Nicholas abdicated on March 15.

Dual power split authority between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, and Lenin’s April Theses demanded all power to the Soviets under the slogan peace, land and bread. When General Lavr Kornilov attempted a coup, Alexander Kerensky armed the Bolshevik Red Guards, and in October Leon Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee seized Petrograd’s telegraph offices, railway stations and bridges in a largely bloodless takeover. The Bolsheviks won about 25 percent in the Constituent Assembly election, shut the assembly after one day in January 1918, and won the civil war by 1922.

• Women marking International Women’s Day began the protests that hundreds of thousands of workers joined.
• Bolshevik railway workers refused to move Kornilov’s troop trains.
• The Socialist Revolutionaries won a clear majority of 58 percent in the assembly vote.
• In July 1918 the Bolsheviks executed the tsar and his family in Yekaterinburg and built the Cheka secret police.
• Soviet Russia became the first country to decriminalize abortion.