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It is 90 years since the world was shaken by the
Russian Revolution. In 1917 revolutionaries established
a state meant to be based on all citizens sharing
the wealth and the power. Instead, the world’s first
communist nation became a brutal, repressive
dictatorship. The shockwaves from the events of the
revolution have affected global politics even up to the
present day. It could be argued that to understand
the history of the 20th century a person needs to
understand what happened in Russia in 1917.
Series 7
Russian revoluti n
Bolsheviks
Lenin
Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Simbirsk, Russia in
1870, the son of well-educated parents. His brother
Alexander was hanged as a conspirator in the
assassination of Tsar Alexander III. He became a
Marxist in 1889 after reading the works of Karl
Marx. While practising law he became active
in socialist politics, uniting Russian Marxist
groups. He spent time in Germany and was
also exiled to Siberia. In 1901 he took the
revolutionary pseudonym Lenin, after the
Siberian river Lena, and began building
a party of professional revolutionaries.
His efforts culminated in the October
Revolution of 1917 when his
Bolshevik Party seized power.
In 1918 he was shot in an
assassination attempt. He never
completely recovered and died
in 1924 after a series
of strokes.
Russia before 1917
Before the revolution Russia was the centre of an
empire ruled by a monarch known as the tsar.
There was a representative legislative
body known as the Duma, which had
been created after the uprising of
1905, but the number of people who could
vote was restricted and key administrative
powers were retained by the tsar and his ministers.
Economically, militarily and industrially the country
was far behind the rest of Europe.
It was still primarily an agrarian
economy relatively new to
industrialisation. Attempts had
been made to modernise the
economy and the military before
World War I broke out in 1914 but the country was not
equipped to last through a long war.
Trotsky
In 1903 the main socialist parties in Russia had split into two
factions. One party insisted socialist revolution was achievable
and that its membership should be restricted to professional
revolutionaries. They called themselves the Bolsheviks, meaning
“the majority”, and named other factions Mensheviks, meaning
“the minority”. In 1917 the Mensheviks argued that Russia needed
to pass through a bourgeois capitalist phase before transformation
to socialism was possible. That bourgeois phase would happen
under an elected constituent assembly. The Bolsheviks, however,
moved with the popular mood. Their persuasive leader Vladimir
Ulyanov (Lenin) argued that the provisional government was the
bourgeois phase of the revolution and that now power should
be transferred to the proletariat (the working class) and their
representative bodies. They campaigned under the slogan “Peace,
land, bread and all power to the soviets”.
Born Lev Bronstein in the
Ukraine in 1879 he was
drawn to Marxism as a
teenager. In 1898 he was
arrested for revolutionary
activity and in 1905 he
played a key role in the
uprisings for which he was
also imprisoned. Initially
opposed to Lenin he came
to side with him and became a key organiser of the
1917 October Revolution. He negotiated the BrestLitovsk peace treaty with Germany and organised
the Red Army – the Soviet military force – during
the civil war. Seen as a successor to Lenin he was
eventually defeated by Stalin, sent into exile and
assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
The spread of communism
Did you know?
The soviets
During the uprising of 1905 groups of workers formed
strike committees called soviets. The most influential
was the Petrograd soviet, under the leadership
of Leon Trotsky. In the 1917 the soviets became
active again, forming a parallel power structure to
the provisional government. Representatives to the
soviets could be immediately recalled at any time and
had a broad franchise (right to vote).
Kim Il-sung,
North Korea
Vladimir Lenin, USSR
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Many of the ideas for establishing the Soviet Union
came from the works of Karl Marx. Born in Prussia
(now Germany) in 1818, Marx was an intellectual who,
in works such as The Manifesto Of The Communist
Party (1848) and Das Kapital (1867), analysed
capitalism and predicted what he saw as the
inevitable rise of states based on common ownership
of wealth and property, run by and for workers.
n Lenin was in virtual exile in Germany when Tsar Nicholas was
deposed but the German government paid for him to travel to Finland,
in order to make his way to Russia. The Germans hoped he would
destabilise the provisional government and help Germany win the war.
n The hammer and sickle emblem symbolises the partnership
between industrial workers and agricultural workers (peasants)
under communism.
n One of the best, albeit biased, eyewitness accounts of the
October Revolution is Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed.
An American journalist with communist sympathies, Reed was
allowed access to many key meetings and gives a flavour of the rush
of events. He died of typhus in Russia in 1919 and was honoured by
burial in the walls of the Kremlin.
Josef Stalin
(1879-1953)
Fidel Castro, Cuba
Tsar Nicholas II
with his family
Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918)
The fall of the Tsar
Born in 1868, the son of Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas II
was the last of the Romanov dynasty to rule Russia.
His military training and shyness made him ill-suited to
dealing with the problems that confronted him.
He remained distant and aloof from his people and
their problems. He was influenced by his wife, the
German princess Alexandra, who pushed him to
reassert his power after the 1905 uprising. Alexandra
also brought in the holy man Rasputin to attempt
to heal their haemophiliac son Alexis. Nicholas’s
increasingly autocratic rule, his failure to handle the
war with Germany and to deal with basic domestic
issues such as food supply led to his overthrow. The
tragic murder of the Tsar and his family in 1918 was
ordered in an attempt to stop armies loyal to the
monarchy from continuing their quest to rescue the
Tsar and restore him to the throne.
As World War I dragged on, conditions for
urban workers and peasants became worse
and agitators increased their pressure for
regime change. As a result of a series of
strikes and a major riot over food shortages,
in March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.
A provisional government was appointed, but it
was not elected and relied on support from the
soviets – the bodies that represented workers,
peasants and soldiers (see The soviets, above).
The provisional government was meant to
last only until a constituent assembly could
be elected, but it collapsed several times. The
provisional government lost public confidence
because of its mishandling of the war, an
attempted coup by its military chief General
Kornilov and continuing food shortages.
The Bolsheviks seize power
In 1917 many of the socialist factions were content to work
with the provisional government to bring about a bourgeois
(middle class) revolution in preparation for a later socialist
revolution. But the Bolsheviks believed the soviets were
already working as a system of democracy. On October
24-25, 1917 (November 7-8 by the modern calendar), the
Bolshevik leadership seized control of the capital, dissolved
the newly elected Constituent Assembly and seized power
in the name of the workers and peasants. The revolution
was later ratified by the Second All-Russian Congress
of Soviets, who thereafter considered themselves the
legitimate parliament. It was, in effect, a coup because
despite claiming to have seized power on behalf of the
proletariat, the Bolshevik leadership retained power in the
face of civil war and foreign intervention. It soon became an
entrenched bureaucracy and eventually an autocracy under
Josef Stalin (see Josef Stalin, right).
Mao Zedong, China
The worldwide revolution fails
For socialism to work properly, Marx believed, it had to be
worldwide. The Bolsheviks expected the first communist
state established in 1917, later known as the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR), would inspire others to follow.
Revolution was spread to some states around Russia but
advanced capitalist countries tended to repel communism.
Germany, which had the world’s largest communist party,
had communist uprisings in 1918, but these were put
down by right-wing militias. Instead, the USSR tried to
build “socialism in one country” resulting in disastrous
economic policies, famine and repression. Later, the USSR
set up puppet communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
China also became communist in the 1940s but the system
differed from the Russian model as did Cuban communism,
established in 1959. Many Marxist states established since
have been communist in name only. The flagship communist
regime in Russia collapsed in the 1990s mainly because of
severe internal economic problems.
Born Iosif Dzhugashvili in Georgia in 1879, he
initially studied to be a priest before becoming
a Marxist revolutionary taking on the name
Stalin – derived from the Russian word for steel.
He played a role as party organiser during the
1917 October Revolution and in 1922 became
secretary of the Communist Party, the successor
of the Bolshevik Party. After Lenin’s death he
manoeuvred to become leader of the USSR. He
ruled as dictator until his death in 1953.
Find out more
Sources and further study:
The Russian Revolution by Beryl Williams (Basil Blackwell)
Power And Privilege by David Christian (Pitman)
The Russian Revolution, 1917 by Rex A. Wade (Cambridge)
Stalin by Isaac Deutscher (Penguin)
Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed (Penguin)
Encyclopaedia Britannica www.britannica.com.
wikipedia.org
Editor: TROY LENNON Graphics: PAUL LEIGH
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