A century ago, a new world power emerged. The October Revolution (taking place on October 25th in the old Julian calendar but on November 7th, 1917 in the modern Gregorian calendar) led to the formation of the Soviet Union.

In 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist, the Great War (later known as World War I) began. The warring sides were the Allied Powers (led by France, Britain, Russia, and later the United States) and the Central Powers (led by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire).

As World War I ravaged Europe, Russia was having its own domestic issues. Russians were experiencing over 1,000,000 casualties, a bleak economy (due to the high cost of war), and food shortages. This dissatisfaction culminated in the masses of Russian people that formed the February Revolution of 1917. The revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate the throne. Nicholas II’s family was taken captive while the democratically-minded Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky, took over the country. Kerensky continued advancing Russia’s role in the war, which furthered food shortages and Russian civil unrest.

In an attempt to completely remove Russia from the battlefield (which would allow the Central Powers to focus on the Western front), the Germans smuggled Vladimir Lenin, along with many other anti-war socialists, back into Russia.

In his return to Russia, Lenin called for “peace, land, and bread.” He quickly gained political support and the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s Marxist supporters and the precursor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) overthrew Kerensky’s provisional government during the October Revolution.

This revolution became the foundation for one of the world’s most dominant hegemonies of the twentieth-century and the United States’ most formidable rival: the Soviet Union.

Lenin’s government withdrew from World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. Brest-Litovsk was a very controversial treaty, as Russia gave up large portions of its territory to Germany. Many Bolsheviks and Russians were alienated by this agreement. This spiraled Russia into a Civil War. The new Leninist government faced resistance from alienated Marxists, Mensheviks, and the Allied Powers. The warring sides came to be known as the reds (communists) vs. the whites (anti-communists).

Ultimately, the reds prevailed through the Leninist government’s campaign of “Red Terror” and brutality. One of the first victims of this terror was the family of Nicholas II. As the whites advanced through Siberia, the Soviets feared the former Tsar and his family could be liberated. In Yekaterinburg, on the night of July 16, 1918 and under the direct orders of Lenin, the whole family (including Nicholas II's wife and all five of his children) was murdered by a Cheka (the Soviet secret police) firing squad. The death of the family was the most prominent snapshot of the vast amount of violence carried out by Lenin’s government.

Lenin enabled the violence under the guise that "the end justifies the means." He wanted the communist revolution by any means necessary. However, looking back a century later, how much of the Marxist promise was truly realized through the revolution?

Not much, I would suggest.

After narrowly avoiding an assassination attempt by Fanya Kaplan in August of 1918, Vladimir Lenin's health was never the same. He suffered two serious strokes in 1922 and another one in 1923. His fourth stroke on January 21, 1924 proved fatal.

Lenin never really had a chance to achieve his ideal vision for the Soviet Union. He was too busy fighting a ruthless civil war, murdering dissenters, and recovering from assassination attempts as well as strokes.

Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, did no better of a job at bringing about a true Marxist state. Additionally, Stalin was even crueler than Lenin. His personal paranoia for power trumped what was best for the state. Through a process of collectivizing land, Stalin created a famine in Ukraine which killed (at its height) 25,000 people per day. The famine led to the death of nearly 25% of the population.

With the failure of both Stalin and the Soviet Union as a whole, one must question if a true Marxist regime can ever be realized?

I would suggest no. I'd also assert that the ends don't justify the means. Looking back on the October Revolution and its aftermath, I see a lot of violence, brutality, and inhumanity. What was the gain other than an escalation of tensions between America and a near nuclear holocaust? The Russian people were right to riot and overthrow their government in February, but their problems were left unsolved and unanswered by overthrowing their provisional government in October.

One can only imagine what Kerensky's Russia could have become.....