Troops on the streets At the end of October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power. Vladimir Raffe's father watched the revolution unfolding on the streets of Moscow: "A young guard walks up and down by the Kremlin gates, bayonet in hand, cigarette in his mouth. Round the corner, in Nikolskaya Street, revolutionaries push a cannon past the Muir and Merrilees department store. The Kremlin gates close. The guards disappear.

"That’s how my father remembered the start of the revolution in Moscow.

"He’s the boy on the right in this photo, which was taken in 1907."

Russians fight Russians Not everyone welcomed Russia's new rulers. Mikhail Solovyev's great-uncle Victor Bakhmurin was a student at the Imperial Russian Army Artillery school: "A month after the revolution, Viktor and his fellow students joined a volunteer force fighting the Bolsheviks in southern Russia. He was badly injured and ended up in a Russian hospital in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in Turkey.

"This photo was taken in Constantinople and sent to my grandmother. She tore off the top, so if the police searched her house they couldn't tell who was in the picture."

Upheaval and chaos In the upheaval of the revolution and ensuing civil war, many people became separated from loved ones. Fereydoun from Iran shared the story of his grandfather, Hassan-gholi, who fell in love with a Russian girl while working in a Moscow factory: "This is a picture of me and my grandfather. Just before the revolution he went back to Iran to visit his parents. When he returned, Russia was in chaos and he couldn’t find the girl or her family.