LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR

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LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR

• War Communism and the Red Terror

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AIMS

• To examine life in Russia during the Civil War.
• To understand why War Communism and the Red
  Terror were introduced.

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CONDITIONS

• Unstable fighting fronts.
• Soldiers changing sides.
• Disease.
• Lack of central control.
• Atrocities.
• Look at novels Doctor Zhivago.

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ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

• Workers and peasants were in control of land and
  factories.
• Shortage of raw materials.
• Industrial output shrank.
• Prices rose.
• Peasants refused to supply food to cities.
• Food riots.
• Workers began to flee the cities.

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WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

• Lenin faced two main problems1. Keep workers in
  the cities to produce munitions and other
  goods.2. Feed the workers.
• What would you do? Arrange yourselves into groups
  and come up with some policies for Lenin to adopt.

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WAR COMMUNISM

• Name given to Lenins policies 1918-21.1. Grain
  requisitioning.2. Banning of private trade.3.
  Nationalisation of industry.4. Labour
  discipline.5. Rationing based on class.6.
  Internal passports.7. Single managers replaced
  worker committees.

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OPPOSITION

• Workers angry at their conditions.
• Calls for Soviet elections, free press and
  restoration of the Constituent Assembly.
• Anarchists.
• Left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries.
• August 1918 assassination attempt.

DOWN WITH LENIN AND HORSEMEAT!
GIVE US THE TSAR AND PORK!
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END OF THE ROMANOVS

• 17 July, 1918 in Ekaterinburg in the Urals.
• The whole family was shot, the bodies drenched in
  acid and thrown down a disused mine shaft, before
  later burial.
• Survival of children?

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THE RED TERROR

• Run by the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky.
• Executions.
• Random arrests.
• Attacks on peasants during requisitioning.
• Concentration and labour camps set up.
• The machinery of terror and the police state
  were created under Lenin, not Stalin.

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LIFE UNDER WAR COMMUNISM

• Bag-men and the black market.
• Everyone hunted for fuel food (Civil War
  Sausage)
• Bribery corruption.
• Harder for the former people.