(2) October Revolution: the world war and the revolution

John Kenneth Galbraith does a good job of placing the October Revolution in the context of the First World War in this episode of his 1977 ducumentary, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing:

The First World War was a massive, shattering event that left a very different world in its wake. And, of course, it didn't create a stable peace.

Galbraith's segment explains the prewar Social Democratic determination to resist an "imperialist" war and how that determination gave way depressingly quickly to patriotic support of the war. And so the workers of the world united in slaughtering each other for the benefit of the ruling classes. Although the latter were deeply shaken in many places. Especially in Russia.

How critical Russian opposition to continued Russian participation in the Great War was for the October Revolution is explained this way by Rex Wade in The Russian Revolution (1917):

One of the first acts of the new regime had been the Decree on Peace, which included a call for an immediate armistice. With one stroke the new leaders bought for themselves broad popular support, especially among soldiers, and moved decisively on the issue that more than any other had undermined their predecessors. Vivid descriptions come down to us of the reactions in the hall at the Second Congress of Soviets as Lenin read the peace decree. The American journalist, Albert Rhys Williams, was there and recalled that “a burly soldier stood, tears in his eyes as he embraced a worker who had risen and was clapping furiously ... A Viborg man [Vyborg district worker], his eyes hollow from lack of sleep, his face gaunt beneath his beard, looked around the hall, dazed, and, crossing himself, muttered: ‘Pust budet konets voine!’ (‘May it be the end of the war!’).” Still, popular support would quickly wither unless peace could promptly be made a reality. [my emphasis in bold]

Galbraith notes that the Bolsheviks' initial seizure of power involved "much excitement but little bloodshed." The bloodshed would come during the civil war that would soon commence, with massive encouragement from Britain and the US. The initial takeover was the "kicking in of the rotten door."

Galbraith in the 1977 companion volume to the documentary series of the same name framed the historical significance of the First World War this way:

People of the World War II generation, my generation, will always think of their conflict as the great modern watershed of change. Hitler was defeated, fascism destroyed. For the great colonial empires just discussed, it was either the end or the beginning of the end. The nuclear age arrived. The two superpowers emerged. Soviet influence and power advanced into Eastern Europe, American into Western Europe. The Chinese Revolution came. What greater change could there be than this?

We should be allowed our vanity, our personal rendezvous with history. But we should know that, in social terms, a far more decisive change came with World War I. It was then that political and social systems, centuries in the building, came apart - sometimes in a matter of weeks. And others were permanently transformed. It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began. World War II continued, enlarged and affirmed this change. In social terms World War II was the last battle of World War I. [my emphasis]

There is a line of historical argument that the First World War was effectively the only reason for the Russian Revolution. This is not a convincing argument, though it turns out to be convenient for some ideological positions. But there is no question that the real events of 1917 in Russia very intimately connected with the effects and the politics of the war.