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The Revolutions of 1917-23 formed a revolutionary wave precipitated by the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the end of World War I. Some authorities date the wave as ending in 1919 or 1921.

In war-torn Imperial Russia, the February Revolution toppled the monarchy while the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. The ascendant communist party soon withdrew from war with Imperial Germany on the Eastern Front and then battled its political rivals in the Russian Civil War. In response to Lenin and the emerging Soviet Union, anti-communists fought for counterrevolution, particularly through the White movement, through a broad ideological assortment of factions in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution and through the anarchist-inspired Third Russian Revolution. The fighting spilled over the borders of the collapsing Russian Empire, as the Bolshevik regime virtually directed the formation of the People's Republic of Mongolia and the short-lived Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic.

The Leninist victories also inspired a surge by the World Communist Movement: the German Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Biennio rosso in Italy, in addition to various smaller uprisings, protests and strikes. They also provoked a severe backlash, including the First Red Scare in the United States and the collapse of liberalism and democracy in most nations of Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe over the subsequent decade or so. The Bolsheviks sought to coordinate this new wave of revolution in the Soviet-led Communist International, while new communist parties separated from their former socialist organizations. Despite ambitions for world revolution, the far flug Comintern movement had more setbacks than successes through the next generation, until Soviet victory at the close of the Second World War brought a rapid multiplication of communist states.

In Imperial China, the non-communist 1911 Revolution had toppled the monarchy but failed to secure the new Republic of China. With Soviet approval, the nationalist party Kuomintang allied with the Chinese Communist Party to struggle throughout most of the warlord era for Chinese reunification (1928), until victory allowed the Chinese Nationalists to turn on their former partners, precipitating the Chinese Civil War.

In Ireland, then ruled by the United Kingdom along with Great Britain, the secessionist Easter Uprising of 1916 anticipated the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and subsequent Irish Civil War (1922-1923) within the same historical period as this first wave of communist revolution. The Irish republican movement of the time was predominantly nationalist and populist, and although much of its orientation could be described as far Left, it was not communist.

The same was true of the Mexican Revolution, which had broken out in 1910 but had devolved into factional fighting among the rebels by 1915, as the more radical forces of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa lost ground to the more conservative "Sonoran oligarchy" and its Constitutional Army. The Felicistas, the last major group of counterrevolutionaries, abandoned their armed campaign in 1920, and the internecine power struggles abated for a time after revolutionary General Alvaro Obregon had bribed or slain his former allies, but the following decade witnessed the assassination of Obregon and several others, abortive military coup attempts and a massive right-wing uprising, the Cristero War.

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