Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
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To move the map on a touch screen, drag it. Pinch to zoom, or double-tap to zoom in.
In 1855, after defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire was the largest land empire on earth. On this situation map it appears in charcoal, stretching from Warsaw to Vladivostok, and its autocratic rulers still owned peasants as serfs. Over the next seventy years, the empire expanded down the Amur to the Pacific and south into Central Asia. The Tsars freed the serfs, yet came to fear what they had freed. In 1917 the empire broke apart: the Provisional Government appears in pale blue, and in October Soviet power takes the red heartland. By Lenin’s death in 1924, red had spread back toward the old frontiers under a new name.
How did reform from above fail to save the autocracy, and why did Europe’s strongest monarchy fall in five days? The fourteen chapters follow those questions through the revolution: how a coup became “Soviet power,” why the outnumbered Reds won, what the victors did to the people they had freed, and what they had made by 1924. Reforms, risings, treaties, armies and atrocities are drawn where they happened. Follow the guided tour, or move through the timeline and question the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.