ABSTRACT
In the eight months between the “February” and “October” Revolutions Russia jumped two centuries of political history. From the rule of a monarch whose type belongs to the eighteenth century she passed to the domination of the most extreme socialistic doctrines known to the twentieth. It has been impossible to follow the process except in bare outline. There is still no generally agreed interpretation even of the main facts. The kaleidoscopic march of events, the motives and characters of the chief actors, the emotions and arguments which affected opinion, still await analysis at the hands of someone ready to give his life to the task of sifting the vast mass of available material. The same can be said for the period with which we have still to deal, the period which saw the Bolsheviks seize power, and keep it, against all logical expectation, despite all efforts to dislodge them. But some intelligible conception of what actually happened must be formed if the advent of the Soviet State is to be understood.
