The revolutions of 1917–1923 were a revolutionary wave that included political unrest and armed revolts around the world inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution and the disorder created by the aftermath of World War I. The uprisings were mainly socialist or anti-colonial in nature. Most socialist revolts failed to create lasting socialist states. The revolutions had lasting effects in shaping the future European political landscape, with, for example, the collapse of the German Empire and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.

World War I mobilized millions of troops, reshaped political powers and drove social turmoil. From the turmoil outright revolutions broke out, massive strikes occurred, and many soldiers mutinied. In Russia, the Tsar Nicholas II abdicated during the February Revolution. The short-lived liberal Russian Provisional Government was formed, but it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, which triggered the bloody Russian Civil War. Many French soldiers mutinied in 1917 and refused to engage the enemy. In Bulgaria, many troops mutinied, and the Bulgarian Tsar stepped down. Mass strikes and mutinies occurred in Austria-Hungary, and the Habsburg monarchy collapsed. In Germany, the November Revolution led to the end of the German Empire. Italy faced various mass strikes. Turkey experienced a successful war of independence. Ireland was partitioned and the Irish Free State was created. Across the world, various other protests and revolts occurred.

In war-torn Imperial Russia, the liberal February Revolution toppled the monarchy. A period of instability followed, and the Bolsheviks, a radical faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks, seized power during the October Revolution (1917). The ascendant Bolsheviks soon withdrew from the war with large territorial concessions by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) and fought their political rivals during the Russian Civil War, including the invading forces from the Allied Powers. In response to Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the emerging communist state of Soviet Russia, anti-communist forces from a broad assortment of ideological factions fought against the Bolsheviks, particularly by the counter-revolutionary White movement and the peasant Green armies, the various nationalist movements in Ukraine and other would-be new states like those in Soviet Transcaucasia and Soviet Central Asia, the anarchist-inspired Third Russian Revolution and the Tambov Rebellion.

By 1921, exhaustion, the collapse of transportation and markets and threats of starvation made even dissident elements of the Red Army revolt against the communist state, such as during the Kronstadt rebellion. However, the anti-Bolshevik forces were uncoordinated and disorganised, and all operated on the periphery. The Red Army, operating at the centre, defeated them one at a time and regained control. The Menshevik party was banned after the Kronstadt rebellion of the same year. The complete failure of Comintern-inspired revolutions was a sobering experience in Moscow, and the Bolsheviks moved from world revolution to socialism in one country: Soviet Russia. Lenin moved to open trade relations with the United Kingdom, Weimar Germany, and other major Western countries. Most dramatically, in 1921, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed private individuals to own small and medium-sized enterprises. In that process of revolution and counter-revolution, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially created in 1922.

Following the February Revolution, the Social Democratic Party of Finland organized the Red Guards, made up of a motley crew of labor union activists, anarchists and left-wing activists. The Social Democrats had won an absolute majority in the Finnish parliament with 103 of 200 representatives in the parliamentary elections in July 1916. The spring of 1917 was relatively peaceful, although there was a serious food shortage and severe inflation, that angered both businesses and the working class. The anti-socialist political and social groups, especially the nationalists in the Young Finnish Party had funded and secretly supported the Finnish Jäger Movement, where hundreds of young Finnish students covertly enlisted in the German Army to fight the Russian Army on the Eastern Front. The July Days in Petrograd aggravated the situation in Finland, and there were tens of thousands of Russian troops in Finland as coastal defence forces, who had organized their own workers', sailors' and soldiers' councils across Finnish coastal cities like Helsinki, Turku and Viipuri.

Contrary to the Finnish left, the political Finnish right and anti-socialist politics were split into several factions, with tenant farmers, rural folk and the agrarian base supporting the Agrarian Union, teachers and the liberal city middle class supporting the Young Finnish Party, more conservative and appeasement-minded Finns (regarding the Russification policies), some with many financial ties to Petrograd and Russia supporting the Finnish Party and Finnish Swedes and some nobles supporting the Swedish Folks' Party.

Following Alexander Kerensky's rise to the premiership in the summer of 1917, the end of the Romanov monarchy and chaos in Petrograd, the Finnish parliament tried to establish a law known as "valtalaki", "powers act", which would formally move the role of the now abolished Russian monarch and the Governor General as the Supreme Executive of the Finnish State to either a three-man parliamentary executive council or the Finnish Senate (essentially the Cabinet of the Parliament). The law was debated intensely and no consensus could be established. The more pro-revolution Social Democrats were split before October 1917. Some wanted the law to pass so that the Social Democratic majority in the Finnish Parliament could establish Finland as an independent socialist state, but the problems persisted, such as the Russian military presence, of which thousands were pro-Bolshevik.

In August 1917, the Kornilov Coup severely shuffled the pack in terms of the Helsinki-Petrograd relations. A consensus between the social democrats and the bourgeoisie blocks was established, and they decided to hold new elections in October 1917 as a sort of "first elections" following the abolishment of the Romanov monarchy. In the October elections, the bourgeoisie coalition united and won the majority in parliament. This splintered the internal divide within the SDP even more, as the October revolutions was within weeks of happening and several pro-revolution Finnish Social Democrats were in active conversations with the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, such as Otto Wille Kuusinen, Kullervo Manner and Karl Wiik. The Parliament declared confidence for the bourgeoisie Svinhufvud Senate, which would later ratify Finland's declaration of independence on December 6, 1917. The speech for the declaration was already given by Svinhufvud to the parliament on December 4.