According to Martin Malia “no nation has ever prepared its revolution for longer and with greater

awareness than Russia”. In order to assess what happened in Russia in 1917 it is essential to retrace the
historical process matured in the last fifty years of the tsarist Empire. By common consent of
historiography, the origin of the Russian revolution is traced back to the abolition of serfdom (1861). During
this fifty years the internal life of the country was characterized by many novel elements as the passage
from a feudal agrarian condition to a more advanced and bourgeois one. Concerning the development of
society the first signs of progress were evident after 1905, though all this occured within the framework of
an official policy of the regime aimed at stifling all freedoms. In 1855 Alexander II advanced to the imperial
throne. His name is linked to the important reform of the abolition of serdom which although it marked a
civil progress of an immeasurable scope, it disappointed those who should have benefited from it, whose
protests were repressed with the army. Starting from the seventies the dominant reason of internal Russian
politics was the launch of an expansion programme in the industrial sector, a process not free of
contradictions and drawbacks. In the years at the turn of the century alongside the rapid development of
the society there was the rise of the first political parties. The political and social protest in tsarist Russia
ended in a revolutionary movement that reached its peak in January 1905 with the “bloody sunday” in
Saint Petersburg. As a result of this event new revolutionary organisms were born called the “soviets”
which forced the tsar to promise political freedoms and representative institutions such as the “Duma”.
Pëtr Stolypin was the main architect of the restoration and he was also the author of an agrarian reform
which was intended to create a rural lower middle class that was at the same time a factor of medrnization
and political stability. In a difficult situation thus we arrive at the entry of the Russian Empire into the World
War in 1914. Soon the whole system began to lean into a situation of progressive disintegration of
istitutional structures and the economic and social fabric. The revolution arrived on the wave of
spontaneous movement of Petersburg’s exasperated citizens and consequently the tsarist regime fell. The
emptiness left by tsarism was total and the history in the following months is that of struggle between
political forces to succeed to the leadership of the country. In April 1917 Lenin returned to Russia and with
a document (the “April Theses”) he spread the problem of the “seizure of power”. This was a key document
in the history of Soviet Communism and the Russian revolution.