The article is devoted to the analysis of the key moments of the strategy of the Bolshevik party in 1917, aimed at armed seizure of power. The purposeful implementation of this strategy in the context of a world war and the revolutionary situation that arose in February made the Civil War in Russia inevitable. The collapse of the Russian monarchy was the result of interweaving a host of objective and purely subjective circumstances, among which radical Bolshevik politics played a decisive role. It was the situation of the Civil War that largely predetermined the nature of Russia's modernization in the twentieth century. Her dramatic experience clearly shows that it is much easier to decree democratic institutions than to develop the political conditions and practices necessary to create a stable system of democratic governance.