The Russian Revolution
 Of
all the Great Powers in 1914, Russia was
the least able to fight a prolonged war
 Although the country was rich in natural
resources, industrialization remained far
behind other major nations in Europe
 Russia’s political institutions were even
weaker than its economy
 Tsar Nicholas II was supreme, and all
cabinet members served at his pleasure
 The legislative body, the Duma, was packed
with his cronies
 Nicholas’ wife, Alexandra, was German by
birth, and throughout the conflict people
suspected her of favoring the Central
Powers
 In
1914, Russia was hardly prepared for
war
 Just nine years earlier Russia had been
defeated in a war with tiny Japan
 The Revolution of 1905, when revolts
and uprisings had forced the Tsar to
concede civil rights and a parliament to
the Russian people, had also shaken the
empire
 Russia's hopes were dashed early in the
Great War
 At Tannenberg and the First Battle of
the Masurian Lakes, in 1914, Russia lost
two entire armies (over 250,000 men)
 Adding
to losses on the front, a strange religious
sectarian, Grigory Rasputin, had gained great
influence over the royal family
 Through hypnosis, he was able to control the
hemophilia of the Tsar’s son
 Alexandra was convinced that Rasputin enjoyed
some divine power
 Actually, he disguised his real character, for he
much preferred vodka to prayer
 Rasputin made both political and military
decisions that did great harm to the prestige of
the monarchy
 To be rid of him, in December 1916 a group of
officers succeeded in shooting Rasputin and
threw his body, not quite lifeless, into a river
 Despite
many obstacles, the Russian army
fought well in the first months of the war
 Then serious shortages of munitions developed
 Many of its junior officers died because
tradition demanded that they lead the troops in
an attack
 In
June 1917 General Alexander Brusilov
launched an offensive on the eastern front
 The Russian general staff planned that it should
force the Austro-Hungarian army out of the war
 However, the Habsburg armies did not
disintegrate
 Discouraged at their failure, many Russian
soldiers decided that they had enough of the
war, and they went back to their villages
 As
Russia’s military capacity
disintegrated, the capital, with its new
name Petrograd, filled with rumors of
treason and corruption
 There was nothing in the stores and
nothing in the shops to buy; there was
no work for the workers in the factories
 In March 1917 a riot broke out when
people demanded food, and army units,
called in to suppress the rioters, joined
them
 Russian generals sent a message to the
tsar: to restore confidence he must
abdicate
 Reluctantly Nicholas complied
 In
Petrograd the capital’s military and civil
servants, doctors, lawyers, and professionals set
up a Provisional Government
 Unfortunately, those who set policy for the
Provisional Government believed the war could
still be won
 They refused to recognize that the situation was
hopeless
 From
the very moment of its creation, the
Provisional Government had to share power
with councils, soviets, that sprung up in
Petrograd
 The leaders of the soviets were inspired by
Marxist doctrine
 They recognized the possibility that the sorry
state of the nation opened a window of
opportunity for putting that doctrine into
practice
 The soviets formed a government with its
own officials, the Petrograd Soviet of
Workers and Soldiers Deputies
 But not all was peace and harmony within
the Soviet
 The
majority were members of the
Social Revolutionaries, but other
smaller groups existed
 Their size did nothing to keep them
quiet
 The Bolsheviks were one faction of the
Social Democrats
 Mensheviks made up the other wing of
the party
 Ironically bolshevik means the majority
and menshevik, the minority, but in
actual numbers the Bolsheviks were the
smaller of the two
 When
the war started, most Bolshevik
leaders were in jail or in exile
 They drifted back to Russia as soon as the
Provisional Government came to power
 The most prominent of the Bolshevik leaders
were Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky
 Both Lenin and Trotsky planned to bring
about a socialist revolution now
 While others wrangled and debated endlessly
what should be done, the Bolsheviks urged
immediate action
 That
action contained three elements: peace
at once, bread for everyone, and land to the
peasants
 For millions of Russians, the Bolshevik
program seemed to offer a solution to the
chaos and military that beset their country
 After
one more failed offensive ordered by the
Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were ready
to act
 On November 7, 1917, the Red Guards, the military
arm of the Bolsheviks, burst through the gates of
Petrograd’s Winter Palace, scattering the
Provisional Government’s officials to the wind
 Said Lenin, “I feel dizzy”
 With the government now in his hands, Lenin had
to deliver on the promises
 He contacted the Germans with a promise that
Russia was ready to talk peace
 The
two sides met at the border town
of Brest-Litovsk
 The Bolsheviks negotiator was Trotsky
 When the Germans presented their
demands, they stunned Trotsky by
demanding that Finland, the Baltic
states, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and
Bessarabia become independent
 In agreeing to these terms, Bolshevik
Russia would have to start its existence
with the loss of a third of its
population and farmland, a fourth of
its railroads, four-fifths of its iron ore,
and 90% of its coal production
 Trotsky
believed that these terms were so
harsh that he refused to sign a treaty with
the comment that “There will be neither war
nor peace”
 He returned to report to the Bolshevik
leadership
 After months of debate, for Lenin was
convinced that Russia had to have peace no
matter the price, the Bolshevik government
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
 Russia’s
travail was not over
 The Bolsheviks were only a small minority
among the population as a whole
 Other parties resented Lenin’s high-handed
operations and began to resist
 Generals and their armies, once loyal to the
tsar, were unlikely prospects for recruitment
to the Bolshevik cause
 Liberal democrats, members of the Social
Revolutionary Party, Orthodox churchmen,
and a host of others openly urged the
overthrow of the Bolshevik regime
 Russia plunged into civil war
 The
contest was between the Bolshevik
government and its Red Army, organized by
Trotsky, and the Whites, the opposition
 Outside Russia, the Allied governments
viewed events with great apprehension
 First, Russia had withdrawn from the war,
easing the pressures on Germany because it
no longer was required to fight a two-front
war
 Second, the prospect of a nation as large as
Russia in the hands of revolutionaries
appeared truly frightening
 On
the excuse that military
supplies might be diverted to the
Germans, troops of Britain,
France, the United States, and
Japan took up positions in
Russian port cities
 Foreign intervention in the civil
war gave Lenin the excuse he
needed to brand his enemies as
traitors to Russia
 Allied intervention, meant to
strengthen the whites, ended up
a burden
 Both
Red and White armies
fought with appalling
ferocity
 Anyone thought to be on the
side of the enemy was
arrested, imprisoned, and
frequently shot
 The tsar and his family
suffered that fate
 Nicholas, Alexandra, and
their children were placed
under house arrest and then
executed, on the suspicion
that they might try to
escape
 The
new state of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics now appeared
 It was the work of Nikolai Lenin and his
Bolshevik Party
 In 1921 the party took the name Communist
 Soon this state became the most totalitarian
nation in all Europe
 By 1921 the Communists routed their
enemies on the battlefield
 The White forces, never able to work
together, collapsed before the communist
Red Army
 Because
Lenin knew well that there was still
a great deal of opposition to Communist rule,
he gave the secret police, the Cheka, a free
hand to search out dissenters
 The result was mass executions,
imprisonment of tens of thousands, and the
flight of millions
 Such was the fate of all whom the
Communists defined as
counterrevolutionaries
 Similar to the Fascists in Italy, the party
made policy, and the government simply
carried out its decisions
 In
the Soviet Union, however, the terror and
efficiency of the Communists far surpassed
the Fascists at their worst
 The Russian Orthodox church lost all its
property, and its patriarch was jailed
 Its bishops were executed or sent to Arctic
labor camps, and its priest were denied
citizenship
 Political leaders of prewar Russia suffered
the same fate
 All Soviet life came under the management
of the state
 Workers
and farmers were enlisted into
communist-led organizations
 Ironically, Soviet legislation forbade strikes,
although according to Marxist theory, the
factory worker was the supreme model of
the new Soviet man and woman
 Lenin
dominated the executive committee of
the party, as head of the Politburo
 As long as Lenin was alive, no one dared
challenge him
 In 1923, however, Lenin suffered a stroke,
allowing the more ambitious members of the
Politburo to jockey for the succession
 After his death, a year later, it seemed
probable that Leon Trotsky would be next in
line
 But even though Trotsky made speeches and
wrote articles for the newspapers, a rival,
Josef Stalin, slowly but surely gained support
 Stalin’s
attention focused on the local level,
placing his partisans in key positions
throughout the nation
 When a showdown took place, the victor was
Stalin
 Trotsky went into exile, and in 1940 one of
Stalin’s agents murdered him
 Lenin
had shown that he could be flexible
when he saw the post-civil-war economy in
shatters
 In what was known as the New Economic
Policy, Lenin allowed farmers to sell their
produce on the market and permitted small
private entrepreneurs to run their own
businesses
 By 1927, the Soviet Union had fully
recovered from its wars
 But Stalin was different
 Stalin,
on the other hand, felt compelled to
follow Marxist prescriptions for a socialist
society
 In 1928 he launched the first Five Year Plan,
in which he intended to industrialize the
manufacturing sector of the country
completely and to collectivize its agriculture
 The
price paid for Stalin’s orthodoxy was
unbelievably severe
 Landowning peasants, the kulaks, preferred
death to giving over their livestock and grain
 The army obliged them
 Millions were killed; even more were
deported to labor camps
 Resistance was especially strong in Ukraine,
so that the peasants here suffered
disproportionately
 One estimate is that, overall, some
14,000,000 died or were exiled to labor
camps in Siberia
 By
destroying the productive kulaks, famine
ravaged the land
 The impassive Stalin, immune to human
suffering, made no concessions
 As long as he controlled the army and secret
police, he felt omnipotent
 In
the 1930s an increasingly paranoid Stalin
launched what became known as the Great
Purge in which anyone suspected of dissent
was either shot or sent to a labor camp
 The true numbers may never be known, but
some historians estimate that ten million
people were sent to the string of labor
camps, later called the Gulag Archipelago by
the writer Solzhenitsyn
 Millions died in the brutal conditions –
including one quarter of the communist Party
itself