Revolution did not emerge naturally out of the war, nor was the particular scope and direction of 1917 a given without the First World War. Instead, the two events were deeply intertwined; the war exacerbated existing political tensions within the empire and strained an imperial state edifice that was crumbling. As the historian Dominic Lieven put it at a LSE lecture, "without the war it would still be possible for the Bolsheviks to seize power, but it is difficult to imagine a scenario where they would have kept it."

Although standard convention is to refer to 1917 as the Russian Revolution, there were actually two separate revolutions. The February Revolution was prompted by street protests in Petrograd and the state's failed attempt to use force to subdue them. This first revolution directly led to the creation of the Provisional Government under the leadership of the liberal constitutionalist Kadets and the abdication of the tsar. The new Russian state was to be a democracy, but the Kadets also committed themselves to continuing the war against the Central Powers. This was an enormously unpopular decision among the radicalized urban workers, who formed groups called Soviets, and the Provisional Government's increasingly anti-democratic tone gave activists an issue to rally around. This was where the Bolsheviks came in and they took advantage of the situation and their importance in Russian politics grew. The Provisional Government replicated the mistakes of their predecessor and tried to shut down the Bolsheviks through force. This seemingly authoritarian turn made the Bolsheviks the de facto champions of the revolution, even though most Soviets were affiliated with the SRs. The Bolsheviks capitalized on their opportunity and seized power in the October Revolution under the slogan "all power to the Soviets."

One of the political advantages the Bolsheviks possessed was that their leadership recognized the incredible unpopularity of the war and positioned themselves as the foremost advocate of peace. Ideologically, as good Marxists, the Bolshevik leadership cared little for sundry gains like the Straits or other territorial arrangements of great power politics. In contrast, the Provisional Government continued in its support of keeping Russia in the war and promised victory would achieve the goals of the February Revolution. Lenin's calculated risk was that leaving the war, either unilaterally or through negotiation, would give the Bolsheviks much needed time to hold onto power and stoke hopes for a global revolution among the world's industrial proletariat. At the time, this was a somewhat contentious move at the time as while Russian popular opinion was against the war, there still was considerable anti-German sentiment. One of the Bolshevik's chief ideological competitors, the more populist bent Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), split between left and right factions over continued belligerence. The famous "sealed train" (it was not really sealed, passengers were free to buy beer and newspapers at German stops) through Germany, which Lenin and Soviet state propaganda played up after the Revolution and civil war, was done at the behest of Lenin and his compatriots because they did not want contemporaries to perceive them as the German's handmaiden. When Lenin left Switzerland, a number of his fellow would-be revolutionaries hectored the train with catcalls of "pig" and "traitor." The less-radical Menshevik emigres in Switzerland were initially reluctant to take the German offer up as they thought that the taint of German collusion would hurt their political fortunes in the post-February milieu. Lenin was much more of a gambler, but his sojourn through Germany did pose political problems. Upon his return to Russia, Lenin would spin the lax security measures into a hermetical seal because it simultaneously prevented the Provisional Government from locking the Bolsheviks up for treason while emphasizing the Bolsheviks' political importance in the grand scheme of things.

As for who fought the Germans between February and the messy peace negotiations after the November Revolution, well, it was pretty much the same group of people that were fighting the Germans since 1914: the Russian Army. February launched a process of gradual desertions and indiscipline as many in the ranks began to feel the war was not worth fighting. But the war against Germany continued at a fitful pace and the threatened advance of German troops towards Petrograd in early 1918 was one of the chief reasons why the Bolsheviks relocated the capital to Moscow. By March 1918, the Bolsheviks had entered into negotiations to end the war, during which the chief Bolshevik negotiator Trotsky declared "no war, no peace" in which the Bolsheviks would unilaterally remove themselves from the war. This prompted a renewed round of negotiations culminating in the famous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, with Lenin again gambling that Germany would choke on the concessions.

After Brest-Litovsk and the emergence of the Civil War it became really unclear as to who was fighting the Germans, even in a sporadic fashion, as much of the Western borderlands of the former Russian Empire splintered into various political factions and armed camps. The chief German occupation authority charged with carrying out the Brest-Litovsk provisions, Ober Ost, alternated between backing some factions in the area and entertaining its own vision of a German empire dominating the Eastern marches. Desire to have access to German war material was another inducement to complex politics in this period as the old Russian army disintegrated and the war factories were in disarray. Things became even more complicated with the end of the war, and German formations in the Western provinces filtered into stateless armies, the Freikorps, and acted at times like mercenaries to various White factions, but also maintained their own agenda to carve out a Germanic state on the Baltic, meaning the Freikorps at times fought both Red and White forces in the Civil War.

Thank you for responding, that was really cool to read. Do you know if there are any good books/documentaries about the Russian revolution and later ussr?