Russian Revolution
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The Russian revolution of 1917 destroyed the empire in two stages and brought the Bolsheviks to power. In February, strikes and bread queues in Petrograd turned into demonstrations; the garrison refused to fire, and Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March, leaving a provisional government shared with the soviets of workers and soldiers. The government's decision to continue the war lost it support, and Vladimir Lenin, returned from exile in a sealed train, published the April theses demanding peace, land and bread and all power to the soviets. In July an uprising was crushed and Lenin fled to Finland, but General Kornilov's attempted coup in August drove the soviets into the arms of the Bolsheviks. On the night of 7 November the cruiser Aurora fired on the Winter Palace, and the provisional ministers were arrested; a second congress of soviets ratified the seizure the next morning. The Brest-Litovsk treaty took Russia out of the war in March 1918, and a civil war between reds, whites and foreign interventionists followed until 1921, costing millions of lives and leaving the Bolsheviks in control of the former empire. The soviets, councils of workers and soldiers, had appeared spontaneously in 1905 and again in 1917, and their fate decided the revolution.