It was exactly a century ago that the new Bolshevik government, having seized power with promises of peace, bread, and land, took Russia out of a catastrophic war that had frayed society to the breaking point. The Bolsheviks accepted harshly punitive terms, ceding vast territories to the Central Powers while clinging to the hope that, before long, revolutionary forces would topple governments across Europe and usher in a new era. As it happened, Russia’s withdrawal freed Germany to launch a final offensive on the western front that ultimately failed, but so too did the communist revolutionary wave in Europe.
The selections in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review were drawn from a series of special issues of the translation journal Russian Studies in History marking the centennial of the First World War. Readers are referred to that series, which can only be sampled here, for a rich assemblage of recent scholarship on the wartime conditions in several realms of Russian life in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1917.
—P.A.K.