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But what was that truth? Some of it, despite her rosy vision, was not so glorious. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, the country had chosen a new legislature in the first real election Russia had ever had. The Bolsheviks won just under a quarter of the vote. But when the legislature met at the Tauride Palace in Petrograd in January 1918, the Bolsheviks and some allies walked out. Troops loyal to them then surged into the meeting hall, turned out the lights, and broke up the gathering. The lights remained out: it would be some 70 years before Russia had another democratically elected legislature. Some radicals in other countries, impatient with the elected parliaments that had embroiled Europe in war, thought little of it, but for many, the euphoria with which they had greeted the Russian Revolution evaporated. In her prison cell in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was outraged, and railed against Lenin's "rule by terror.... Freedom only for the supporters of the government ... is no freedom," she wrote. "Freedom is always for the one who thinks differently."

Meanwhile, with a surprising absence of fanfare, another legislative body took a step that, if it had occurred before the war, would have been the news story of the year. Britain gave women the vote.

Emmeline Pankhurst was delighted, although she had little to do with getting this particular bill through Parliament. The great step forward, which so many women had worked for, gone to jail for, and in a few cases died for, was part of a comprehensive electoral reform. Among other things, the new law enfranchised almost all men over 21—over 19 if they were in the armed forces. However, given that some half-million British soldiers had so far been killed, many MPs worried that enfranchising all women would make them a majority of voters—something clearly unthinkable. How could that be avoided? Very simply: the new bill enfranchised only women over 30. Nor was even that unconditional: property and other qualifications excluded about 22 percent of these older women.

The women's franchise clause of the bill passed the House of Commons by an astonishing seven-to-one margin. In a Parliament that had long resisted women's suffrage, how could this be? For one thing, giving the vote to almost all men taking part in the war effort made it hard to deny it to women, for so many were making munitions for the front or filling the jobs of men gone off to war, even serving as members of the Ladies' Fire Brigade (albeit discreetly clothed in dresses). And hadn't so many suffragettes, like Mrs. Pankhurst, proved their loyalty to their country in its hour of need? Finally, there was the ominous example of the Russian Revolution. Who knew what pent-up discontents might burst forth violently in Britain after the war? Giving most women the vote would eliminate one of them.

For the people of Russia, the chain of events ignited by their revolution would bring a far bloodier future than the sunlit one its supporters had first imagined. But for the dispossessed in Western countries, wringing concessions from reluctant elites, the specter of that revolution, as an example of what could happen if justice was too long denied, would prove an enormous boon. The women of Britain were among its first beneficiaries.

Ever since the Battle of Omdurman twenty years earlier, Winston Churchill had had a knack for being present at moments that would find their way into the history books. On March 21, 1918, he was using his role as minister of munitions as an excuse to visit the front, and was spending the night at a divisional headquarters in northern France when the long-expected German attack came at last. On high ground, the headquarters overlooked many miles of the front line. "Exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear," he wrote. The German barrage "swept around us in a wide curve of red leaping flame ... quite unending in either direction."

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