I accidentally forgot to start the Soviet Union in this excellent free game about the Russian Revolution

Boris Kustodiev's painting, 'The Bolshevik'. The Bolsheviks, derived from bol'shinstvo, 'majority', were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903. The Bolsheviks were the majority faction in a crucial vote, hence their name. They ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and founded the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic which would later become the chief constituent of the Soviet Union in 1922. The Bolsheviks, founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov, were by 1905 a major organization consisting primarily of workers under a democratic internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism, who considered themselves the leaders of the revolutionary working class of Russia. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism.

If there's one thing I've learnt from my time with sims like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and that one game that gave me the historic opportunity to be the first person to write "Rudolf Hilferding" on this website, it's that I wouldn't cut it in a time of crisis. Material conditions would slam-dunk me into the dustbin of history like Kobe Bryant. I just don't have the mettle that let figures like Napoleon, Alexander, or Caesar steer the ship of state so effortlessly in periods of tumult.

The latest game to remind me of this? Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917, another incredibly me-coded, free, and browser-based gem from the same dev—Autumn Chen—who made the aforementioned Rudolf Hilferding sim. Where Chen's last game had you try (and fail, in my case) to keep the German Social Democratic Party alive and thriving in the chaos of the late Weimar Republic period, Petrograd puts you in charge of one of several competing parties in the months leading up to the Russian Empire's October Revolution in 1917.

Choose your fighter. (Image credit: Autumn Chen)

On a first playthrough, you can take charge of either the Kadets (capitalists), Mensheviks (nerds), or the Socialist-Revolutionaries (like if Tom and Barbara from The Good Life ran a bombing campaign). You can't play the Bolsheviks—the game keeps them for a second playthrough—which is like making a Justice League game where you can't play Batman, but fine.

My attempt to guide the Mensheviks to some kind of rapprochement with the Bolsheviks, its estranged sister party, kind of hit the rocks when the latter launched an armed uprising and didn't even think to call me about it.

My attempt to commit the Socialist-Revolutionaries to a truly internationalist policy on WW1 (an immediate end to the war even at the risk of revolution or civil war at home) was scuppered by fully half of my party suddenly starting their own party.

(Image credit: Autumn Chen)

Even playing as Bolsheviks—which really ought to be easy mode—didn't go well. I just, uh, kind of forgot to do the October Revolution? I got really into fiddling with the party makeup of the Petrograd Soviet and someone went and convened a government without me.

It's great fun if you're the same kind of nerd I am, and does an excellent job capturing just how chaotic, unpredictable and fractured this precise era of history was. You will constantly have to divide your attention between multiple concurrent crises—peasant revolts, the first world war, famine, inflation, attempted coups by left and right alike. It's amazing anyone managed to seize control of things at all.