Russian RevolutionCHY 4U

1917

Two Revolutions

• One to overthrow the Czar and establish a Provisional (temporary) Government

= February 1917

= liberal

• One to overthrow the Provisional Government

= October 1917

= (sci) socialist

Czar Nicholas II

Context: A Time of Change

- Change after 1860 because of loss of Crimean War and losing power in Europe.

- Czar Alexander II introduced Great Reforms – emancipation of the serfs, some local representation, etc. Ideological inspiration?

- But he was killed and his successors introduced counter-reforms:

- they were reactionary (censorship, revoke local control).

Alexander II in 1861

Anti-Czarist Forces

• Terrorists:– People’s Will, Land and Freedom– Lenin’s brother executed for plotting to kill the czar in

1887• Marxists:

– Economic and scientific thinking, not emotion– “sooner or later” the oppressed and oppressors would

come into conflict and revolution would change the political system

• Both were highly repressed by Czar’s secret police (Okhrana)

Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (London: Hutchinson, 2009), xxiv, xxvi.

Context: 1905

- Humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War led to protests:

- Troops fired on peaceful protesters (Bloody Sunday) – see 1905 petition

- Peasants seized land

- The Soviet (council) of workers was formed in St. Petersburg (all eventually put down by Czarist troops)

- workers’ revolution, not socialist

Russo-Japanese War Editorial Cartoons - American

Japan-in-America: the Turn of the Twentieth Century. 2008. http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/war/weather27.html (Nov. 16, 2012).

Ibid.

Russian Propaganda

1905 Petition

“Sire! We workers and people of St. Petersburg…our wives, our children and aged and helpless parents, are come to Thee…to seek for truth and protection. We are become beggars, bowing under oppression and burdened by toil beyond our powers, scorned, no longer regarded as human beings, treated as slaves who must suffer their bitter lot in silence. And having suffered, we are driven deeper and deeper into the abyss of poverty, lawlessness, and ignorance. We have been strangled by despotism and arbitrary rule, and we have lost our breath. We have no more strength, Sire. The limit of our patience has been reached. There has come for us the grave moment when death is preferable to a continuation of our intolerable torture.”

Quoted in Rappaport, Conspirator, 108.

St. Petersburg Soviet

Trotsky Internet Archive, 2006, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/index.htm (Nov. 30, 2011).

Trotsky at the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies, middle row, holding papers

Russian Social Pyramid 1900

Elite: Czar and family, aristocrats

Russian Orthodox Church

Czarist military officers

Middle class (bourgeoisie)

Poor, peasants, farmers, workers

Industrialization

Late industrialization in the 1890s

Led to more problems: rapid urbanization lack of housing poor working

conditions ...

...that created more pressure for change

• Trans-Siberian railroad built in 1890s– 5000+ miles long

– connected European part of Russia with the Pacific

– built with loans from France

Ian Blanchard, Russian Industrialization, 1867-1927/8, N.d., http://www.ianblanchard.com/Research%20IB/Rus_Ind/Rus_ind.html (Nov. 15, 2012).

Putilov works, St Petersburg 1903 – making shells

Nicholas’ Reforms

• Czar Nicholas II promised some reforms after the 1905 Revolution

– a Duma, or parliament

– a constitution

• But once in place the Duma supported the Czar who continued to have the most power

The last Czar and his family

First Parliament, 1905

University of Toronto, Research Repository, March Revolution, N.d., https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/11.MR/MR.8.html (Nov. 15, 2012).

Note the Czar opening the Duma

RSDLP

• Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (an umbrella group of socialists of many types)

• Lenin disliked Bernstein’s revisionists and Menshiviks:– “Such thinking – suggesting conciliation with capitalism and the

monarchy – enraged Ulyanov [Lenin]...”– Lenin wanted to use pamphlets, newspapers, professional secret

agents, weapon smuggling to bring about incitement of the revolution

– What Is To Be Done? (1902): “Ulyanov had no faith in the mass movement of the proletariat per se as a force for change: if left to its own devices, it would inevitably disintegrate and become petty and preoccupied with everyday bourgeois issues.”

– Menshiviks too soft – willing to wait too long

Rappaport, Conspirator, 23, 53.

Party Organization

• “Education – or, more correctly, indoctrination – was the key. The masses must be educated into class consciousness and a proper awareness of the battle ahead. But even with this level of political awareness they could achieve nothing in the wider arena without the leadership of an elite, scientifically informed, Marxist intelligentsia, whose role was to organise in the vanguard, in the utmost secrecy. Ulyanov was convinced that true political struggle had to be orchestrated by such a group of hardened, experienced professionals; they would do the thinking for the masses. The proletariat would remain, for him, merely an amorphous mass, the collective instrument of the party’s elite will. Having been indoctrinated by the party into a new revolutionary class consciousness, the masses would eventually bring into being the great socialist vision: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Rappaport, Conspirator, 53-54.

Bolsheviks vs. Menshiviks

• Bolshevik - Menshevik split in 1903– Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to push

revolution along by using professional revolutionaries

– Mensheviks were more orthodox and wanted to wait until revolution occurred (when conditions were ripe)

Political Landscape in the Duma

• Liberals (CADETS) or Constitutional Democrats

• Socialists– Orthodox Marxists

(gradual revolution)

– Lenin and his Bolshevik followers didn’t have any members

World War I

• Russia part of the Triple Entente

• Faring very poorly in the war (5 million casualties, 1914-1917)

• Czar Nicholas went to the front leaving his (German) wife at home

• Lenin’s attitude to war:– imperialist

– capitalist

– get out!

History Learning Site: Russia and World War One, 2012, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/russia_and_world_war_one.htm (Nov. 16, 2012). Pride in the Czar at the start of war

Rasputin

• Manipulation?• Murdered in 1916 by

aristocrats

February Revolution• Rioting spread• Duma asked Czar to

abdicate• Established Provisional

Government– to hold elections to a

Constituent Assembly– write a new constitution– dual power with Soviets

Burning tsarist emblems in Feb. 1917 in Petrograd

Provisional Government

U of T Research Repository, N.d., https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/11.MR/MR.10.html (Nov. 16, 2012).

Only one socialist.

Lenin’s Return

• April Theses, 1917– end the war

– all power to the Soviets (don’t cooperate with the Provisional Gov’t)

– Peace, Land, Bread

Lenin

To whom does this appeal?

October Revolution

• Bolsheviks waiting for the right time to overthrow Provisional Gov’t– gaining power in

Petrograd and Moscow Soviets

– Bloodless? Coup Red Army

Civil War

• Red (Communists) vs. Whites

• Whites– Foreigners (why?)

– Czarists

– others opposed to Bolsheviks

• Red Victory - Red Army organized by Trotsky

Trotsky on Guard, 1920/21

Succession

• Trotsky or Stalin

Lenin’s Death

Lenin after his stroke, 1923

Lenin’s mausoleum

Lenin embalmed

Idealization of Lenin

Lenin Leads, 1924 5th anniversary of Russian Revolution, 1929

Themes

• Common causes of revolution– social and economic

discontent

– new theories, ideas (a program of change)

– leader(s) to implement ideas

– crisis

• Lenin’s adaptation of socialism to suit Russian needs– compare to Marx’s

theory