Bolshevik Party led by Lenin seized power in Petrograd, overthrowing provisional government and establishing world's first communist state that abolished private land ownership and redistributed property to peasants. The revolution initiated civil war, war communism with grain requisitioning from peasants, and eventual collectivization that transformed rural Russia while creating totalitarian state apparatus controlling all aspects of economic and cultural life.

October Revolution polarized Russian writers, with early enthusiasm from Mayakovsky and Blok giving way to disillusionment as revolutionary ideals conflicted with Bolshevik authoritarianism. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak navigated censorship and persecution, creating poetry that preserved humanistic values against state coercion, while émigré writers like Nabokov explored exile and loss, making Russian literature's response to revolution central to twentieth-century literary history.