Outline of the Russian Revolution

Terror

The Cheka, established in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky, served as the first Soviet secret police and was the main instrument of the Red Terror. Its internal-defense troops numbered at least 200,000 by 1921. Lenin's hanging order of 11 August 1918, a telegram to Penza, called for no fewer than 100 kulaks to be hanged in public, though it was not carried out as such. The Red Terror, from September 1918 to 1922, involved political repression and execution by the Cheka, with execution estimates ranging from 50,000 to 200,000, and an additional 400,000 deaths attributed to prisons and suppression of local revolts.

Culture and society

Numerous works of literature and history address the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–1940) is Sholokhov's four-volume novel about the Don Cossacks, with a hero who changes sides repeatedly. Byzantium Endures (1981) is Moorcock's novel narrated by an unreliable Russian émigré recalling the revolution and civil war. Coup de Grâce (1939) by Yourcenar is set among German forces fighting the Bolsheviks in Courland.

Doctor Zhivago (1957) by Pasternak, first published in Italy after being refused at home, follows a physician-poet. How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) by Ostrovsky is a socialist realist novel of a young Bolshevik fighter, a fictionalised autobiography. R.V.S. (1926) by Gaidar is a short novel of two boys sheltering a wounded Red Army officer in a Ukrainian village. The Road to Calvary (1918–1941) by Aleksey Tolstoy is a trilogy on the Russian intelligentsia before, during and after the 1917 revolution.

The Samovar Girl (1921) by Frederick Ferdinand Moore is a romance-adventure novel set at Chita in eastern Siberia, drawing on his service as a US Army intelligence officer during the Allied intervention. The White Guard (1925) by Bulgakov depicts the Turbin family in Kiev from late 1918 as rival armies fight over the city. The Winter Road (2015) by Yuzefovich is a documentary novel about the Yakut revolt and its opposing commanders, Pepelyayev and Strod.

Cursed Days (1936) by Bunin contains diaries kept in Moscow and Odessa in 1918–1920, banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s. Other notable works include The Twelve, 1905 (book), A People's Tragedy, Russia in Flames, Russia in Revolution, The House of Government, The Russian Revolution: A New History, Ten Days That Shook the World, and various works by Trotsky such as History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, and Terrorism and Communism.