Unlike most published works on the Russian Revolution, this book analyzes it as a hundred-year cycle. Mira Milosevich offers a multi-faceted analysis (political, ideological, cultural, socioeconomic changes, wars) to answer five fundamental questions: how and why the Revolution erupted in 1917; how the Bolsheviks came to power and established their regime; how and why this regime evolved into extreme forms of totalitarianism; how the Soviet system endured for sixty-nine years and why it collapsed; and finally, what kind of political and economic system has emerged from the ruins of the USSR.

A Brief History of the Russian Revolution demonstrates that the Bolshevik state was sustained by terror, the ideological autocracy of the one-party state, an ultra-centralized administration, legal nihilism, and the absence of individual freedoms and private property. But it also shows that communist totalitarianism was not a system based solely on terror, but enjoyed a high degree of collaboration and acceptance from Soviet citizens, and that the revolutionary cycle has not yet ended.