Russias Revolutions

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Russias Revolutions
2
Russia and World War I

• Declaration of war in Russia evoked a moment of
  patriotic union
• Military defeats and domestic strains rekindled
  the smouldering social and political conflict.
• By early 1915 German divisions had dealt a string
  of shattering defeats.
• Relentless German advance
• Russia needed total war a complete
  mobilization of resources, human and material.

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Russias Problems

• Russias stock of ammunition and weapons was low.
• Neither domestic production nor imports could
  satisfy the huge demand of this first modern war.
• As morale plummeted, the army replaced decimated
  officer corps with young officers from lower
  social ranks non-aristocrats who had minimal
  training and little authority over peasant
  soldiers.

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The End of theRomanov Dynasty

• Tsar Nicholas II assumed personal command of the
  army.
• He relinquished power to chosen viziers, his
  unstable wife , and her unsavory entourage that
  included Rasputin.

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The February Revolution (1917)

• Russias scorched-earth policy denied Germany the
  spoils of victory, but also unleashed a tidal
  wave of refugees that overwhelmed the
  administration and economy of interior provinces.
• Street demonstrations in Petrograd to protest
  food shortages.
• Petrograd was virtually paralyzed by a general
  strike.

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The February Revolution (1917)

• As the government in Petrograd disintegrated,
  Nicholas desperately struggled to retain power.
• He formally dissolved the State Duma.
• He attempted to return to the capital, but found
  himself stranded in a provincial town.
• He agreed to abdicate for the sake of domestic
  tranquility and the war effort.

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Provisional Government

• Some members of the Duma formed a provisional
  government.
• Nicholas IIs abdication, compounded by the
  dissolution of the Duma, raised the question of
  legitimacy that would bedevil the Provisional
  Government throughout its brief existence.
• Established councils (soviets) in factories,
  garrisons, and towns.
• The Provisional Government decided to continue
  fighting the war.

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The October Revolution (1917)

• With the tsar gone but the war still going on,
  left-wing revolutionaries calling themselves
  Bolsheviks decided that the time was right for
  full-scale revolution.
• Arresting the members of the provisional
  government and claiming power in the name of the
  soviets, the Bolsheviks proclaimed a socialist
  revolution.

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Vladimir Lenin(1870-1924)

• A child of modest privilege and a law-school
  dropout, he had spend most of the years prior to
  1917 in foreign exile, participating in small
  revolutionary discussion circles and writing
  voluminously.
• Lenin had managed to return to Russia after the
  abdication of Nicholas II.
• Thanks to the Germans who sent him on a special
  sealed train across front lines to foment
  further chaos against their military foe.

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The October Revolution (1917)

• In March 1918, Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of
  Brest-Litovsk.
• A separate peace acknowledging German victory on
  the Eastern Front.
• According to Lenin, accepting the treaty and loss
  of vast territory was needed to safeguard the
  socialist revolution at all costs.
• The Bolshevik leadership relocated the capital
  from Petrograd to Moscow.

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Whites vs. Reds

• Fearing the spread of socialist revolution,
  Britain, France, Japan, and the U.S. sent armies
  to Russia to subvert or at least contain
  Bolshevism.
• The Bolsheviks executed the tsar and his family
  in July 1918, then rallied support for their
  cause.
• They mobilized to fight a vicious civil war
  (1918-1921).
• Whites or counterrevolutionaries vs. the
  Bolsheviks or Reds.
• Their opponents could not dislodge the Bolsheviks
  from the Muscovite core of the former Russian
  empire.

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The Imperial Family
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Centralized Rule

• The civil war provided an excuse for
  Bolshevik-led armies to reconquer, in the name of
  the revolution, many of the former tsarist lands
  that had seceded from the empire.
• From 1921 until 1923, Russia suffered from a
  severe famine.
• Some 7 to 10 million people died.
• This allowed the Bolsheviks to enact dozens of
  decrees (New Economic Policy).
• In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
  (U.S.S.R.) was formed.
• Centralized rule from Moscow.

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CommunistRussia

• One-Party Dictatorship
• The Communist Party was controlled by a small
  group, the politburo (political bureau), which
  assumed a dictatorial role.
• The key leadersLenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a few
  othersdetermined policy within the government.
• No other political parties were tolerated. The
  politburo used execution, terror, and
  forced-labor camps to achieve monolithic party
  unity.

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Communist Russia

• They abolished the power of the Orthodox Church
  and wiped out the educated upper class of
  bureaucrats, landowners, professional people, and
  industrialists.
• They outlawed the ownership of income-producing
  private property sought to advance Soviet
  state-run large-scale industry.
• They used education, from kindergarten through
  university, in press and radio, and in literature
  and the arts, to control the minds of people and
  promote Marxism-Leninism. (brainwash)

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Marxism-Leninism

• The Soviet leadership understood history as
  moving in the stages defined by Karl Marx.
• Feudalism to Capitalism - to Socialism- to
  Communism
• But before achieving communism, a final stage in
  which there would be a classless society and a
  withering away of the state, they believed that
  the Communist Party would have to build
  socialism.
• Socialism would have economic planning and full
  employment.
• Socialism would outlaw private trade and private
  property.
• Soviet or revolutionary socialism increasingly
  defined in opposition to capitalism.

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Joseph Stalin(1879-1953)

• Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin took over despite
  the fact that Trotsky had been Lenins
  hand-picked successor.
• Stalin had used his position as general secretary
  of the party to build support.
• He would kill all those loyal to Trotsky and
  ultimately Trotsky himself. (Mexico 1940)
• Stalin launched a massive program for
  industrialization (railroads, steel mills,
  military hardware), despite what it would require
  in human suffering.
• Five-Year Plan to catch an overtake the leading
  capitalist countries.

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Collectivization

• He also started a revolution in Soviet
  agriculture forcing peasants to forcibly
  participate in collectivization.
• This meant the pooling of farmlands, animals, and
  equipment for the sake of more efficient, and
  state-run, large-scale production.
• Knowing that the well-to-do peasants (kulaks)
  would not accept this, Stalin decided to
  liquidate them as a class.
• Millions were killed outright or sent to
  forced-labor camps to suffer a slow death.

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Purges

• Many of the remaining peasants refused to go
  along, killing their herds and intentionally
  sabotaging their crops.
• From 1931 to 1933, millions starved to death.
• By 1935, practically all farming was
  collectivized.
• To wipe out any remaining resistance, Stalin
  unleashed terror to crush opposition through a
  series of purges.
• 750,000 were executed between 1936 and 1938.
• Those who were not executed were sent to forced
  labor camps, collectively known as the Gulag.
• In the 1920s and 1930s, between 10 and 20 million
  people died as a result of Stalins policies.

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Conclusion

• It appears that most inhabitants of the Soviet
  Union accepted the upheaval and mass arrests as a
  response to internal and external opposition and
  as a method for creating a new world.
• Violent crusade of building socialism in a
  hostile world.
• Moreover, despite the staggering losses, the
  elite continually expanded because the planned
  economy had a voracious need for officials and
  administrators.