The black swan of the Russian revolution.

• Author: Gregory, Paul R.

A black swan is a metaphor for an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is understood only with the benefit of hindsight. The metaphor fits the Russian Revolution as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Great Depression, and the French Revolution. We cannot anticipate black swans because they require that a confluence of events come together in a particular time and place. The combination of events is so complex and unanticipated that they can be understood only in hindsight.

One hundred years ago Russia experienced two revolutions in the course of a single year--1917. The February Revolution was a popular uprising centered in St. Petersburg that grew out of general strikes and their repression by czarist forces. With surprisingly little resistance, the demonstrators took the Winter Palace, the czar abdicated, and a provisional government was fashioned from a panoply of political parties, including socialists previously aligned with the Bolsheviks. The parties of the Provisional Government agreed to a national election of representatives to a constituent assembly, whose task it would be to draft a constitution to govern a postczarist Russia.

The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin (who arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1917, courtesy of the German secret service), was a relatively small party. At Lenin's insistence, the Bolsheviks had split off from the Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 to form a party of professional revolutionaries devoted to the goal of socialist revolution. From underground and exile, the Bolsheviks had recruited workers, peasants, and soldiers to their side. As word of the February Revolution spread, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party hastened from abroad or from exile within Russia to what was now called Petrograd.

Leftist parties formed an alternative government, the Petrograd Soviet, which competed with the Provisional Government. Some Petrograd Soviet leaders wished to cooperate with the Provisional Government, including some leading Bolsheviks, but the Bolsheviks in general--As the presumptive representatives of workers, peasants, and soldiers--withheld their support from what they considered the "bourgeois" Provisional Government. They instead battled to gain control of the Petrograd Soviet and succeeded. The Provisional Government issued arrest warrants for leading Bolsheviks, who went underground. Lenin fled abroad. As one Provisional Government after another faltered due to bickering and diverse motives, the Bolsheviks saw their opportunity. With a relatively small armed force, they occupied government buildings, routed the defenseless Provisional Government from the Winter Palace, and took power in Petrograd. Armed resistance from the Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and the Kadets in Moscow was greater, but the Bolshevik forces eventually took the Kremlin, and Moscow belonged to them.

Despite objections within the party, Lenin agreed to participate in the election to the...