The peace talks that opened at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917 turned within three months into a surrender that cost Russia a third of its imperial territory. In between came Trotsky's experiment of 'neither war nor peace', the German offensive, and a harsh reckoning inside the Bolshevik camp itself.
The party that took power in October 1917 was not the country's largest party. The civil war grew straight out of that gap: the lines shifted within months, friends became enemies, and the same village changed sides three times in two years.
In 1917 Kerensky was the most powerful man in Russia: justice minister in March, prime minister in July, a fugitive in October. Within a single year he was both the hope of the revolution and its disappointment.
Russia's only free election of 1917 produced an SR majority. The Assembly met on 5 January 1918, sat for a day, and the next morning the doors did not open. It is the clearest photograph of the civil war to come.
In April 1917 a train pulled into the Finland Station and shook the politics of a country at war. The man who stepped down from the carriage forced his party to accept, within three weeks, a programme it had judged wrong that very day.
In February 1917 the bread queues in Petrograd grew longer, then louder. Within eight days the street, the barracks and the Duma were all asking the same question: was the Tsar still in power?