Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korthorn.

Welcome to another episode in our everything you wanted to know series,

where we tackle a historical topic through popular internet search

queries combined with the questions that you've sent in via social media. Today

we're exploring the Russian revolutions of 1917 in the company of the historian Robert service.

Putting the questions to him was BBC History magazine editor Rob Atta.

Today I'm joined by Robert Service, who is a meritus professor of Russian history at

St Anthony's College University of Oxford and also he's a Hoover Institute Senior Fellow. He's a world

leading expert on communism and Russia's revolutionary age. Among his many books on

the subject are biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, as well as the last of the

Tsars, Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution. So Robert, thank you for joining us today.

Oh, it's pleasure to be here.

Now, to begin with with there were actually two Russian

revolutions in 1917 and I suppose it would make sense to begin with the first one

in February. So could you please tell us how does this uprising actually begin?

Well there have been a lot of problems through the First World War, the Great War in Russia,

actually there were in most of the belligerent countries, but they were particularly bad in Russia because the strikes in 1915 and 1916 at the end of both those years were pretty

devastating so it was a very brittle situation already

industrially and added to this there was the problem of food supplies to the big cities,

because the peasants weren't getting what they thought was a fair return for their crops.

And there was a political element to all of this

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