“We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution,” warned Lenin in a presentation to a group of Swiss youth on the twelfth anniversary of the defeated 1905 Revolution. The juxtaposition of his remarks and Tsar Nicholas II’s downfall just six weeks later set the stage for a classic joke of the Marxist movement: “Don’t be late to the protest cause the revolution might start!”

But it was clear in his work at the time that Lenin knew the political situation in his home country could boil over at any moment. For three hundred years, the Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia, then a sprawling empire in which Russian speakers were a minority, with an iron fist.

Far from languishing in isolation, the tsars branded their reactionary mark on Western Europe, providing vast peasant armies to back up monarchy and reaction in the face of democratic and nationalist movements from the French Revolution of 1789 onward. The Romanovs even earned top billing in the roll call of mortal enemies in the opening line of the Communist Manifesto. Yet at the dawn of the twentieth century, the empire’s foundations were riddled with holes.