The political upheaval of the 1990s has focussed the world's attention on the Russian empire. This book tells of the last time its working masses called their rulers to account. In Year One, the year that followed the victorious Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, the Tsar was in prison, the country divided by civil war - and mass meetings on street corners and in factory canteens debated how a better, more just, more equal society could be created. This extraordinary book shows the many new possibilities released by the workers' revolution of 1917.