The first soviet ("council") of workers is set up in St Petersburg, introducing a word of great significance in Russian Communist history

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg found the radical Spartacus League, named after the gladiator

The rebel leader Patrick Pearse stands under the portico of Dublin's General Post Office to announce the birth of the Irish republic

Roger Casement is arrested after returning secretly to Ireland three days before the Easter Rising

Patrick Pearse and his fellow Irish rebel James Connolly are executed by firing squad

A mutiny by soldiers, in support of Petrograd demonstrators, proves a turning point in Russia's February revolution

Crowds demonstrating in Petrograd are fired on after tsar Nicholas II sanctions the use of force

An uprising in Petrograd brings the Peter and Paul fortress into the hands of the rebels

Lenin expounds in Petrograd the new theory of his April Theses, predicting the possibility of imminent revolution

Trotsky hurries back to Russia from exile in the United States

An armed uprising in Petrograd disperses after Lenin declines to give support

Trotsky is imprisoned and Lenin flees to Finland as Russia's Provisional Government cracks down on the Bolsheviks

Trotsky, released from prison, stages a coup to win Bolshevik control of the Petrograd Soviet

Lenin, in disguise, returns from Finland to Petrograd, where he hides in the flat of a party worker

Lenin persuades the Bolshevik central committee to vote for an armed insurrection

The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison mutiny on being ordered to the front

The Peter and Paul fortress is taken, giving the Bolsheviks control of Petrograd

Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace in Petrograd and arrest the ministers of the Provisional Government

The British viceroy in Dublin imprisons 73 Sinn Fein leaders, including Eamon de Valera, on allegations of a German plot

The Spartacus League proclaims a rival German republic on soviet lines

The Sinn Fein members elected to Westminster establish their own parliament in Dublin, the Dáil Eireann (Assembly of Ireland), soon declared illegal by Britain

Michael Collins springs de Valera from Lincoln gaol, with the help of a duplicate key

The Spartacus League transforms itself into the Communist party of Germany

A vast crowd, assembling in Berlin, calls for a revolution and begins to seize public buildings

After ten days of street fighting in Berlin, Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg are captured and shot