The Russian Revolution of 1917 unfolded in two stages: the February revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and the October revolution that brought the Bolsheviks under Lenin to power, founding the world's first avowedly socialist state. The new regime abolished private ownership of land and nationalised major industry, placing the economy under state direction. Civil war and reconstruction followed through the early 1920s. The upheaval reordered property, governance and ideology across the former empire.
It inaugurated centralised state planning and collective land ownership on a national scale, removing the land market as a constraint on design. This seeded distinctive Soviet ideals of the planned socialist city, the microdistrict and large-scale standardised mass housing that later spread across the Eastern Bloc.
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