Why Did The Tsarist Regime Collapse In 1917?

In 1913 the Romanov dynasty celebrated three hundred years on the throne of Russia. Four years later the same family was under arrest and the monarchy was gone for good. How did an empire that stretched across a sixth of the world, ruled by a Tsar who claimed God-given authority, fall apart in barely a week of strikes and mutiny? The answer is not a single event but a long build-up of pressure: a backward economy, a furious peasantry, an autocrat who would not share power, and finally a war that broke the army, the cities and the throne all at once.

This lesson traces that build-up from the 1905 Revolution and Bloody Sunday, through the half-promises of the October Manifesto and the Dumas, into the catastrophe of the First World War and the March 1917 revolution that forced Nicholas II to abdicate. You will learn to weigh long-term weaknesses against the short-term spark of war, exactly the balanced judgement the Cambridge examiners reward.