APWH
Russian Revolution of
1917
In the Revolution of 1905, Czar Nicholas II's priest, Father Gapon led a
protest march of tens of thousands of workers over the conditions in St.
Petersburg. On January 22, 1905 troops fired on the crowd, killing
hundreds on "Bloody Sunday." Worker strikes and feudal peasant
uprisings called for change. The czar promised reform and a Duma to
represent all classes. A Duma (parliament) was elected that was boycotted
by the Marxists, who urged revolution. Rasputin, "the mad
monk," influenced the czar's wife Alexandra by claiming to have cured the
czar's only son of hemophilia. Rasputin was murdered and the czar delayed
reform.
In February, 1917, in Petrograd, now St.
Petersburg forces revolted on International
Women's Day, February 23. An organized march of women-workers, mothers,
and wives demanded food, fuel, and political reform. Demonstrations and
strikes swept through the country. At a mass strike, tsar Nicholas II
sent in police and military to halt the riot. 60,000 Petrograd
troops mutinied and joined the revolt. Nicholas II abdicated
the throne on March 2.
After the overthrow of the tsar's autocracy, two centers of power
emerged. The provisional government led by leaders in the Duma
(parliament) was composed of middle class liberals. Kerensky headed the
provisional government, distorting the grievances of the lower classes.
The new government system was established under constitutional rule. It
set up a national election for a constituent assembly to grant and secure civil
liberties, release political prisoners, and redirect power to local
officials. The other center of power was with the soviets, local
councils elected by workers and soldiers. Soviet councils claimed to
be true representatives of the people.
Leon Trotsky claimed to be the legitimate political power in Russia.
He pressed for social reform, redistribution of land and negotiated settlement
with Germany
to get out of the war. The provisional government refused to desert the
allies or concede defeat militarily. War was unpopular and
unsupported. Many deserted the army. The transitional, provisionary
government was in chaos.
The Bolsheviks, a majority branch of Russian social democracy movement
overthrew the provisional government. Marxixt leadership of the Russian
Social Democrats took revolutionary steps toward socialism. The
Bolsheviks, radical members of the majority, favored a centralized party of
active revolutionaries. Revolution alone would lead directly to a
socialist regime. The Mensheviks, members of the minority, wanted
socialism gradually.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Bolsheviks revolutionary
leadership was Vladamir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin, a member of the
middle class, expelled from University for engaging in radical activity, and
spent three years as a political prisoner in Siberia.
From 1900-1917 he wrote as an exile in Western Europe.
Lenin believed the development of Russian capitalism made socialist revolution
possible. The Bolsheviks needed to organize the new class of industrial
workers, to bring revolution. Factory workers needed party leadership to
accomplish the goal of revolution. Russian revolutionary tradition and
Marxism could achieve their goals immediately. The Bolsheviks demanded an
end to the war with Germany
and Austria,
improvement in working and living conditions for workers, and redistribution of
aristocratic land to the peasantry.
Lenin condemned imperialist war policies and opposed the bourgeoisie
government. He called for "Peace, Land, and Bread Now" and
"All Power to the Soviets," winning Bolshevik support from
workers, soldiers, and peasants. Unemployment, starvation, and chaos in Russia - the
Bolsheviks power was rising fast. Lenin and the Bolsheviks attacked the
provisional government and took over the Winter Palace
on October 25, 1917. They moved against all political competition,
beginning with the Soviets, and expelled opposition parties, creating a new
Bolsheviks government.
When the Bolsheviks did not win a majority in the elections, they dispersed the
Constituent Assembly by force, and Lenin's Bolsheviks ruled socialist Russia and the Soviet Union
as a one party dictatorship. Peasants took over land they had worked for
generations now rightfully theirs. Bolsheviks redistributed the nobles'
land to peasants. Bolsheviks nationalized banks, and gave workers control
of factories.
Taking Russia out of the
war, a separate treaty with Germany
was negotiated by Trotsky, and signed at Brest-Litovsk in March,
1918. The Bolsheviks surrendered Russian agricultural territories of Ukraine, Georgia,
Finland, Poland, and the Baltic
states. The treaty ended Russia's role in the fighting,
saving the communist regime from certain military defeat by the Germans.
The Revolution allowed the Germans to win the war on the Eastern Front.
The socialists held power in what many considered a backward country. The
Russian revolution, "the ten days that shook the world," was a
political transformation that set up future revolutionary struggles. The Bolshevik
takeover in October, 1917 began revolutionary events in Russia. Under Lenin's
leadership, the Bolsheviks seized internal political power, and withdrew from
the war. This polarized Russian society and set off a civil war.
The enemies of the Bolsheviks, those associated with the ousted tsarist regime,
began to attack the new government. Known collectively as "Whites,"
the Bolsheviks opponents had the common goal of removing the "Reds"
from power. The Whites military force came from reactionary monarchists,
the old nobility, the provisional government, and anarchists, or "Greens"
who opposed all centralized state power and joined the Whites.
The United States, Great Britain, and Japan threatened
intervention. Outside support for the Whites was no threat to the
Bolsheviks, who used the intervention as propaganda claiming the Whites were
assisting foreign powers in invading Russia. The Bolsheviks
mistrusted the capitalist world powers which in the Marxist view, naturally
opposed the existence of the world's first "socialist" state.
The Bolsheviks eventually won the civil war, gaining greater support and
acceptance from the population, and were better organized for the civil
war. The Bolsheviks quickly mobilized to fight. Leon Trotsky
became the new commisar of war, and his Red Army of 5 million defeated White
armies in 1920 and put down the Nationalist uprisings in 1921. The
country suffered one million combat casualties, several million deaths from
hunger and disease caused by the civil war, 1-300,000 executions, and permanent
hatreds among ethnic minorities engendered by the barbarism of the war that
brutalized society under the new Bolshevik regime.
The civil war shaped Bolshevik economic "socialism." Taking
power in 1917 Lenin expected to create a state capitalist system that
resembled successful European wartime economies. The Bolsheviks took
control of large scale industry, small-scale private economic activity,
banking and all major capital and let agriculture continue. The civil war
pushed them toward a radical wartime economy known as "war
communism." The Bolsheviks requisitioned grain from the
peasantry, made private trade in consumer goods and "speculation"
illegal, militarized production facilities, and abolished money. These
measures were responses to economic conditions beyond control.
Radical Bolsheviks believed war communism would replace the capitalist system that
collapsed in 1917. Though war communism lasted during the civil war, the
war devastated Russian industry and emptied cities' populations in Moscow and Kiev.
The masses of urban workers supporting the Bolshevik revolution employed in
major industries diminished, leaving fewer workers remaining on the job.
Industrial ouput fell. War communism was devastating to
agriculture. Peasants seized and redistributed noble lands and held small
plots of land under twenty acres. Grain requisitioning and outlawing all
private trade in grain brought famine in 1921 that claimed 5 million lives.
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