Extract from the Preface of The Bolsheviks Survive The Russian revolutions of 1917, together with the ensuing long, devastating Russian civil war and foreign interventions, were seminal events in modern world history. The initial February 1917 revolution in the Russian capital city, Petrograd (former-ly St. Petersburg) ended three hundred years of Romanov rule and replaced the incumbent emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, with a Western-oriented, predominantly middle-class Provisional Gov-ernment. This temporary governing body, composed initially of Westernized liberals--and, after April 1917, also of moderate so-cialists--was projected to hold power until a representative em-pire-wide elective Constituent Assembly designed a permanent democratic political system for a new and free Russian republic. The October 1917 revolution that upended the Provisional Gov-ernment and brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks (or Communists) to power derailed this alternative and, together with the brutal civil war that followed, set a path toward the formation of the ma-ture, ultra-authoritarian Soviet political system that lasted for the better part of the twentieth century. Beyond this, it can be argued that the failure to establish the basis for some sort of moderate Russian democratic political and social system in 1917 following the implosion of the tsarist regime haunts the world to this day.