An illustrated account of one of the most pivotal events in modern history - the Russian
revolution of 1917. In the early years of the twentieth century Imperial Russia was an
ethnically diverse empire stretching from Ukraine and Belarus in the west to the Bering Sea
and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East. At the head of this profoundly dysfunctional polity was
Tsar Nicholas II whose Romanov successors had ruled Russia since the start of the seventeenth
century with a lethal mixture of domestic cruelty expansionist energy and reactionary
incompetence - interspersed with occasional reformist spasms. By early 1917 Russia was
unreformable and the tsar's authority irreparably damaged. In March of that year Nicholas II
abdicated and the tsarist system was overthrown. The provisional government installed in its
stead to organise democratic elections lasted just eight chaotic months before being ousted by
Lenin's Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. Writing with crisp immediacy Sebestyen narrates
an unprecedented era of political and social convulsion. The Russian Revolution changed the
course of history and more than a century later their backwash continues to be deeply felt
across the world.
