The Russian Revolution and the Cold War

HIST 10044/3/13

Russia and World War I

• Despite having the largest army in Europe, Russia’s forces were ill-prepared and regularly defeated by the Germans.

• 1916: The Russian army runs out of ammunition and supplies. Soldiers ordered to pick up the rifles of fallen comrades.

• Civilian shortages and widespread hunger.• In the cities, people had to line up before dawn in front of shops for food.• Tsar Nicholas II continued his opulent lifestyle.

February Revolution

• March, 1917: food ran out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg)• Mass demonstrations• Mutinying soldiers and striking workers form soviets

(councils) to take over factories and barracks.• Tsar Nicholas II abdicates and Alexander Kerensky forms

a Provisional Government.• Opens up door for revolutionaries outlawed by Nicholas to participate in government.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

• Two socialist movements come to the forefront.• Mensheviks: advocate electoral politics and reform on the

European socialist model, supported by factory workers and intellectuals.

• Bolsheviks: Advocate radical, revolutionary change, much smaller but much more disciplined.• Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924): radical and exile (Siberia and Switzerland), goal of leading a revolution rather than waiting for it.

Lenin and Marxism• “What is to be Done?” (1902): How does Lenin’s ideas contrast

with those outlined by Marx in the Communist Manifesto?• “Classes are led by parties and parties are led by individuals…

The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator.”• April 1917: Germany allows Lenin to travel from Switzerland to Petrograd, hoping to destabilize Russia.• Lenin announces his platform: immediate peace, all power to the soviets, and transfers of land to the peasants and factories to the workers.• Powerful in the context of World War I.

October Revolution• Provisional Government under Kerensky orders another

offensive against Germany.• Russian soldiers desert and the government loses all credibility.• Nov. 16, 1917: Bolsheviks rise up and overthrow the Provisional

Government.• Surprise to Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who believed

“socialist” revolution could only come after “bourgeois” rule.• Russia not ready for socialism?• Lenin orders purging of Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and other rivals.

Consolidating the Revolution

• Nationalized all private land.• Ordered peasants to hand over crops without compensation

(but didn’t they just seize them from the landlords?)• Take over factories and draft labor brigades.• Cheka: secret police force with powers to arrest and execute opponents.• March 3, 1918: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, peace with Germany and Austria-Hungry.• Russia loses Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states.

Civil War and the Soviet Union• Dec. 1918-1921: Civil War

– Communists (Bolsheviks) hold central Russia– Counter-revolutionary armies supplied

by Allied (Entente) powers.– 3 million die from famine

• 1920-1921: reconquer the Caucasus• 1922: merger with Ukraine forms Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

– Later add Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan

New Economic Policy• War, revolution, and mismanagement had ruined the Russian economy.• Factories and railroads shut down due to lack of fuel, raw materials, and

parts.• Farmland devastated and livestock killed.• New Economic Policy (NEP): introduced

by Lenin in 1923– Peasants may own land and sell their crops– Private merchants may trade– Private workshops could produce goods

and sell them on the free market• Only the largest businesses (banks, railroads, and factories) remained under government ownership.

Two steps back to advance one step forward…

• NEP immediately increased production and made food and goods available

• Does not reflect a long term change in Communist goals of an industrialized economy with no private property• Gave breathing room to create modern industrialized economy• Building factories and industrial infrastructure• Moving peasants to the cities• Providing food for industrial workers

Trotsky and Stalin• January 1924: Lenin dies• Competition over succession• Leon Trotsky

– Command of the Red Army– Support of the “Old

Bolsheviks”– Saw Russian Revolution as

spark that would ignite world wide revolution.• Joseph Stalin

– “The Man of Steel”– General secretary of the Communist Party– Only leading Communist to have ever lived abroad– Believed socialism could survive in one country

Trotsky and Stalin

• Stalin filled the party bureaucracy with his supporters• 1926-1927: Stalin has Trotsky expelled for “deviation from the

party line”• Jan. 1929: Trotsky is forced into exile• Stalin holds show trials to prove Trotsky an enemy of the workers.• Aug. 20, 1940: Trotsky killed with an ice pick in Mexico• 1929: Stalin has total control over Soviet Union• Part of a larger purge…

The Stalin Revolution• Industrialization to increase the power of the Communist Party at

home and the Soviet Union abroad.• Five-Year Plans: state plans for industrial output and economic

development.• 1928-1933: Quintuple electric output and double heavy industry• Mass mobilization makes USSR look like a nation at war.• Collectivization of agriculture: force the peasants to finance industrialization and feed the workers.

Of kulaks and gulags• Kulaks (“fists”): Better off peasants with larger land holdings.• Resist collectivization, destroy crops, smash equipment, kill livestock• “liquidation of kulaks as a class”: 8 million kulaks killed• Gulags: labor camps• Under Stalin’s regime and with widespread failure to meet demands of Five Year Plans, everyone is guilty of some crime.• 8 million people sent to gulags where 1 million died annually.

The Great Purge• Create a “Cult of Personality”• 1930: Stalin arrests hundreds of engineers and technicians for counterrevolutionary ideas and sabotage.• 1933: One million members of the Communist Party expelled for counterrevolutionary ideas and deviations.• Political and military leaders imprisoned and executed.• Eliminates opponents on ideological grounds.• Often involves rewriting of history

The disappearance of Commissar Yezhov

Sample Questions from Purges

• What was he(she) doing before 1917 and during the October Revolution?

• Was he(she) ever arrested before the revolution?• Did he(she) have any disagreements with the party?• Does he(she) drink?• What does he(she) think about Bukharin and the right deviation,

about the kulak, the Five-Year Plan, the events in China?• Is it true that he(she) has a private automobile?• Did he(she) get married in church?• Did he(she) baptize his(her) son?• Whom did his(her) sister marry?

World War 2

The Iron Curtain

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one for or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow”

– Winston Churchill, 1946

The Cold War• Soviet assertiveness in Europe• Communist revolutions in China and beyond• Confirm threat of global Communism

sponsored by the Soviet Union