Revolution and its aftermath are the paramount social issues Pasternak explored in Doctor Zhivago.A multitude of internal and external forces had brought on Russia's convulsions in 1917 which provide the backdrop to Part I of the novel, Zhivago's early life.

The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War marked liberal demands for the establishment of a Russian duma (legislative assembly), but those reforms granted reluctantly by the largely ineffectual Nicholas II proved transitory.

When war with Germany erupted in August 1914, the Russian Army was badly led, ill-equipped, and consumed with unrest, just as the Russian population as a whole was beset by inflation and food shortages and the strains of a foreign-financed, expanding industrial growth.

Part II of Doctor Zhivago, centering on the lyrical love story of Yuri Zhivago and Lara, takes place in the harrowing years after the February Revolution of 1917, when the...