Congratulations, Russia.

[The Mikado]

In 1917 the Russian Empire was a great power, with the potential to be a superpower rivaling or even surpassing the USA. In 2017, Russia now has a GDP roughly the same as Australia and it's population drinking itself to death with a first world birth rate and 3rd world death rate.

It's been a rough 100 years.

In 1917 it was the weakest of several European powers, have being most recently beaten by Japan. It was a backwards agrarian economy where most people's lives had hardly advanced from the Middle Ages. Today it's the world's second most powerful country, with a growing population and the 6th highest GDP in the world. To be sure, it could have done better had it switched immediately to liberal, Western democracy, but it was going down the drain under the Czars.

Um...You are acting like they didn't lose 23% of their territory, over half of their population, and over half of their GDP 25 years ago and are struggling to try to crawl their way back to where they were 30 years ago while the rest of the world has moved on.

[The Mikado]

Not really. If the Kerensky government had negotiated peace with Germany, it could have survived. The Russians were sick of WW1, that is why it happened. Let's not forget it was the Czar who started and bungled the war in the first place. Without the Czar, we would have been spared both WWI and WWII and communism!

Like it was at all possible for a government that was heavily in debt to the Entente to peacefully break out of the war and not become a hated pariah. It's more likely that the British and French would've subsidized Kornilov couping the state to turn it into a military dictatorship to keep it in the war than that they'd have allowed it to peacefully leave the war.