ABSTRACT
If there was a single cause for the Russian Revolution of 1917, it was undoubtedly the First World War. The war’s defeats and inevitable demoralization were the primary source of all the disruptive changes in Russian society, in the Russian economy, and in Russian politics which contributed to the upheavals of February and October 1917. To ascribe such a decisive significance to the war is not to ignore the century-old Russian revolutionary tradition: the Decembrist rebels of 1825, the utopian terrorists of the Narodnya Volya who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, or any number of lesser known revolutionary groups of the 19th century. Nor is there any desire to slight the agrarian movements of the half-century before 1917, nor the glorious Revolution of 1905, which nearly toppled the throne of the Romanovs. Indeed, it is with full consciousness of these tendencies and events—and particularly of the 1905 Revolution—that one must assign primary importance to World War I in determining the shape and character of the 1917 Revolution. For, as a result of the events of 1905 and the social processes then set in motion, Russia on the” eve of the war was well advanced on the path of evolution toward a modern democratic state. Had the war not intervened, she could have advanced much further, peacefully, through the pressures of the growing labor movement, the liberal middle classes, and the socially-conscious intelligentsia.
