"The Russian Revolution" gets talked about as one event, but 1917 in Russia was two separate revolutions, months apart, with two entirely different casts, methods, and outcomes. The first toppled a three-hundred-year-old monarchy in about a week and replaced it with an elected, multi-party government. The second overthrew that government eight months later, in an armed seizure of power by a single revolutionary party — and it's the second one that shaped the next seventy years.
Two revolutions in one year, with two very different outcomes
The February Revolution (dated by Russia's old calendar; March by the modern one) began with women textile workers in Petrograd marching for bread on International Women's Day, and grew within days into strikes, mutinies among troops ordered to fire on crowds, and the collapse of Tsar Nicholas II's government. He abdicated within a week. What followed was a Provisional Government sharing uneasy power with the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies — an arrangement historians call "dual power," where neither body had full control and the war Russia was still fighting kept draining what legitimacy either had.
From revolution to one-party state
The October Revolution wasn't a mass uprising in the same sense — it was a comparatively small, tightly organised armed seizure of key buildings in Petrograd by the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin, timed to pre-empt a national congress of soviets and present it with a fait accompli. The Bolsheviks had spent months building support with the promise of "peace, land, and bread," and by autumn had won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, but they took power through insurrection, not an election — and when an election did happen weeks later and the Bolsheviks lost it, they dissolved the resulting assembly by force after a single day. A civil war followed, and by its end the Bolsheviks, renamed Communists, had eliminated their rival socialist parties and built the one-party Soviet state.
What we're still unsure about
Historians remain genuinely divided over how inevitable the Bolshevik outcome actually was — whether the Provisional Government's collapse made some form of authoritarian seizure of power close to unavoidable given the war, economic collapse, and weakness of Russia's democratic institutions, or whether more contingent choices, by Lenin and by his opponents, at several specific junctures could plausibly have produced a different outcome. Soviet-era archives that opened after 1991 clarified many factual details but didn't settle this interpretive question, which is less about missing evidence than about how much weight to give structural forces versus individual decisions in a fast-moving crisis.
This sits inside The Russian Revolution & the Soviet State, one of eight topics in Modern History, one of seven domains in History, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.