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Silvertown Explosion
50 tonnes of highly explosive TNT, being produced for the war effort, exploded in a munitions factory in West Ham killing 73 people and severely damadging 70,000 houses and destorying 900 of them. -
International Women's Day
On Woman's day, the 8th of March demonstrators, mostly women, who were fed up of the long bread queues and lack of food marched on the streets of Petrograd (now known as St. Petersburg). After two days this marching over 250,000 people were on strike and mobs of angry workers had attacked police stations. -
February Revolution: The Soldiers Join In
By the 11th of March the Tsar gave orders for the Petrograd garrison to fire on the protesters, but by the next day many of the soldiers had joined the protesters attaching red banners onto their guns. -
Order Number 1
On the 14th of March, after the taking over of the Military Commission and the Food Commission by the provisional government from the Petrograd Soviet the Soviet issued an order stating their terms for dual power sharing, the most important one being: 'Orders of Military Commission of the Duma are to be carried out only if they do not conflict with the orders of the Petrograd Soviet', a term that basically put the Soviet in charge of the army. -
Nicholas Abdicates
On the 15th of March, before even reaching his capital of Petrograd, Nicholas the second abdicated the throne for himself and on behalf of his hemophiliac son Alexei. Russian Generals had been calling for this since 1916 to help the war effort. Nicholas originally gave over his throne to his brother Michael, who rejected it. -
The Provisional Government is created
After the abdication of Nicholas and his brother rejecting the throne, members of the Duma created the provisional government run by Georgy Lvov. The problem was that from the start the provisional government had share power with the Petrograd Soviet -
The US declares war
After a speech to congress, on the second of April by President Woodrow Wilson urguing the US to declare war on Germany, the Senate voted 82 to 6 for war and the house voted 373 to 50. At 1:11 pm President Woodrow signed the declaration. -
April Theses
In a speech on the 17th of April Lenin condemmed the Bolsheviks for betraying socialism by siding with the Provisional Government who he condemmed as bourgeois. The Theses were later published in Pravada, a newspaper edited by Stalin, where Lenin stated that land and power should be given to the poor and made demands for the nationalisation of the banks and to cap the wages of government officials. -
July Days
After the Russian army's faliure in the June offensive Lenin tried to lead a Bolshevik takeover of the provisional government on the 16th of July. However Lenin had made a severe miscalculation about the number of soldiers that would be on his side and because of this the coup was crushed seeing many Bolshevik leaders arrested and Lenin fleeing to Finland. -
Kornilov Putsch
(The Date is a guess, I couldn't find a definite date) Kornilov, a Russian general attempted to take Petrograd saying that his objective was to destroy the Soviet. Kerensky, however feared that a military coup was about to happen and therefore released and armed many Bolsheviks who defended the city of Petrograd from Kornilov's forces. Now the Bolsheviks had an army. -
October Revolution
On the 6th of November the Bolshevik revolution started with the Red Guards taking over many bridges and the telephone exchange in Petrograd. On the following day the red guards took over banks government buildings and the railway stations. On that day Lenin announced that the Soviets had taken controll. Later on the cruiser Aurora Shelled the Winter palac and in the evening the Red Guards stormed it, taking over Russia. -
Election of the Constituent Assembly
On the 25th of November an election was held in Russia with the Socialist Revolutionaries winning and the Bolshevik Party coming only second place. Lenin tried to argue that the new Assembly was counter- revolutionary. Later on the Bolsheviks presented terms to the Assembly which would've taken away most of its power, the assembly refused them. Lenin said that this was counter-revolutionary and therefore used it as an excuse to disband it by force.
