Chronology
From a faction vote to a doctor’s plot
Fifty years, in the order they happened. Open any year for the longer note. The Holodomor and the Cheka also have pages of their own.
1903
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split
The name “Bolshevik” began as a vote count at a small congress, not as a description of Russia.
Before October
1905
The 1905 revolution
A dress rehearsal: a soviet, a manifesto, an uprising, and a defeated party that learned to wait.
Before October
February–March 1917
The February Revolution
The monarchy fell in the capital because a war government lost the streets, not because a Bolshevik plan succeeded.
1917
25–26 October 1917 (old style)
The October coup
A disciplined minority seized the capital and announced that it was the working class.
1917
January 1918
The Constituent Assembly is dispersed
Russia did hold a national election. The Bolsheviks lost it, and then ended it.
1917
March 1918
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
To keep power, Lenin signed away territory and food and took the argument to a gun.
Civil war and terror
1918–1921
The civil war
A war of armies, requisitions, pogroms, and typhus, which the Reds won because they held the center and were willing to be harsher.
Civil war and terror
16–17 July 1918
Murder of the Romanov family
A household was killed in a basement so that a restoration would have no living banner.
Civil war and terror
September 1918
The Red Terror is declared
Mass shooting stopped being something the Cheka did and became something the government ordered.
Civil war and terror
January 1919
Decossackization
An entire military-social estate was marked for elimination, not for defeat in battle.
Civil war and terror
Winter 1920–21
The Crimean massacre
After the last large White army evacuated, registration became a death list.
Civil war and terror
March 1921
Kronstadt
The sailors who had been called the pride of the revolution rose against the party, and the party shelled them.
The state hardens
March 1921
NEP, and the ban on factions
The market was allowed back into the shop. It was not allowed back into the party.
The state hardens
1920–21
Tambov, and the order to use poison gas
A peasant war was crushed with hostages, camps, and a written order to gas forests.
The state hardens
1921–22
The Volga famine
Drought hit a countryside that War Communism had already stripped.
The state hardens
1929–1933
Collectivization and dekulakization
The party decided to abolish the independent peasant, and it set quotas for how many to ruin.
Famine and collectivization
1930–1933
The Kazakh famine
Sedentarization and meat quotas destroyed a nomad society. About a third of Kazakhs died.
Famine and collectivization
1932–1933
The Holodomor
A man-made famine in Ukraine, enforced by quotas, blacklists, and a ban on leaving.
Famine and collectivization
1 December 1934
The Kirov murder
A single assassination in Leningrad became the door to a terror that did not need another assassin.
The Great Terror
1936–1938
The Great Terror
Public show trials for the famous, secret quotas for everyone else.
The Great Terror
23 August 1939
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The anti-fascist state signed a deal with Nazi Germany and a secret map.
War and the last years
Spring 1940
Katyn
The Politburo approved the shooting of about 22,000 Polish prisoners, then blamed Germany.
War and the last years
1941–1944
Deportations of nations
Whole peoples were loaded into freight cars and removed, as peoples.
War and the last years
1952–53
The Doctors’ Plot, and the death of Stalin
The last campaign Stalin set in motion was an antisemitic purge, cut short because he died.
War and the last years