In 1917, the October Revolution saw the Bolsheviks, a radical militant far-left revolutionary movement

based in Russia, overthrow a provisional government that was running Russia in the wake of

the former Emperor, Nicholas II, abdicating his throne following a mass uprising,

stoked by issues related to World War I and food rationing by the government

Those things led to armed clashes between citizens and government forces and a great deal of popular discontent with the monarchy

And that early 1917 uprising led to a transitional government and that transitional government was overthrown

later the same year by the Bolsheviks, who had a fairly novel theory of economics and governance

predicated on ideas posited by Karl Marx and stirred up into revolutionary practical ideology by Vladimir Lenin.

The main consequence of this sequence of revolutionary happenings was that the Russian monarchy

was overthrown and replaced by a Bolshevik-led communist government, which became known

as the Russian Soviet Republic.

The government was then taken over by a man named Joseph Stalin when Lenin died, and Stalin reorganized things, so that all internal political

opposition was suppressed, and essentially every aspect of the economy was planned in a top-down fashion.

The central government decided how many bags of flour

and how many nails of a given length were to be produced each year.

And the theory was that they could divvy out the requisite work

required to make that optimal number of every single thing

a nation might make to the factories and farms

and people capable of making such things. And they would thus reduce wastage, optimize the

application of labor, and eventually be capable of rapid industrialization throughout their society,

over time reducing the amount of work that each person

needed to do, and then someday bringing a higher level of equality and equitability to everyone.

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