Revolution Again
Review of the Oneworld Publications paperback (March 6, 2014)

I read this Beginner's Guide as part of my continuing research into the 1905 Revolution in Tsarist Russia which in hindsight has been seen by many as a precursor to the eventual 1917 Revolution. I'm doing this mainly for the events in the Baltic Provinces (Estland, Livland, Kurland) which became the independent countries of Estonia and Latvia after the disintegration of the Tsarist Empire. Lithuania, the 3rd Baltic country, was associated with the then Russian territory of greater Poland before its independence.

See photograph at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Stormningen_av_vinterpalatse...
Despite its appearance of historical veracity, this photograph is from a 1920 reenactment of the Storming of the Tsar's Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

This was quite an excellent overview of the 1917 events and even the brief summary of 1905 was useful. Ascher does seem to have some sort of curious bias against the Estonians though. He completely excludes Estonia from his listing of the various nationalist movements which were part of the causes of the overall uprisings against Tsarist and Russian rule:

Finally, in some regions - most notably Finland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Transcaucasia, and Poland - national movements demanded autonomy or complete separation from the empire.

Trivia and Links
One interesting bit of trivia to me was that the origin of the two factions which split the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into "Bolsheviks" (Russian: Majority) and "Mensheviks" (Russian: Minority) was a vote at a Party Congress in 1903. The Bolsheviks later became known as the Communist Party of Soviet Union.

Despite its rather fearsome association with the later Soviet Union, the word "soviet" is Russian for "council".

Not from this book, but something I came across separately was that the Estonian Bolshevik takeover in Tallinn in October 1917, led by Jaan Anvelt aka the writer Eessaare Aadu, took place on October 23, 1917, 2 days before the Russian Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, the original Germanic name was changed due to the war against Germany 1914-1918) on October 25, 1917 (dates are according to the Julian Calendar which was 13 days later in the rest of the world which had adopted the Gregorian Calendar). ( )