WAR - Russian Revolution and Stalin (Lesson)
Russian Revolution and Stalin
The Soviet Union (or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR) emerged during the Great War (or World War I—man, the different names for the same thing can get confusing.) As you saw in looking at the effects of the Great War, Russia suffered an imbalance in the number of casualties in comparison to the rest of the Allied nations. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that during the war, resentment towards the war grew exponentially in Russia versus in other Allied nations. This, combined with earlier resentment towards the tsar of Russia, led to a revolution that affected Russian and world history.
When Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 CE, it came as huge shock to Russians and Europeans alike. Russia was a large nation—and European, to boot—and it lost to an Asian nation at a time when Europeans were not looking upon their Asian neighbors with much respect. Plus, in the midst of that war, moderate Russians marched on the Tsar's palace to encourage the enactment of Enlightenment reforms to the nation. The response of the palace guards was to fire on the marchers resulting in the day becoming known as "Bloody Sunday." Following the humiliating defeat of Russia to Japan and the response to the "Bloody Sunday," Tsar Nicholas II created the Duma to serve as a representative, legislative body within his government to appease his disgruntled nation. The problem was that every time the Duma disagreed with the tsar, Nicholas II would disband the representative body—so, in the end, it did not calm the Russian peoples' distaste for its absolutist government.
During the Great War, many resources were sent to the Russian military forces in combat—so many resources, in fact, that it led to food shortages for the civilians of Russia. This, coupled with the increasing casualty rate of the war, led to the deposing of Nicholas II as Tsar of Russia in February 1917 CE. This marked the end of the Romanov Dynasty for the Russian Empire. The provisional government set up to replace the tsardom did not meet with much success as it continued Russia's involvement in the Great War; thereby continuing the conditions that had led to revolution in the first place. In less than a year, the Bolsheviks ousted the provisional government during the October Revolution of 1917.
The Soviets—formerly local assemblies of workers, peasants, and soldiers—formed a Socialist Party (known as the Bolsheviks) with the motto "Peace, Land, Bread" that formed a new government in 1918 CE. Their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was a student of Marxism. He issued the April Theses in April 1918 demanding peace, a redistribution of land to benefit the peasant class, and the granting of the political right to rule to the Soviets. The result of his April Theses was the nationalization (the transfer of private ownership to government ownership) of individual assets and industries in Russia and the end of Russian participation in the Great War. To pull out of the war, Lenin signed a treaty with Germany in March 1918—the Brest-Litovsk Treaty—that ceded Russian land to Germany.
To complete their takeover of the Russian government, the Bolsheviks executed the imperial Romanov family in July 1918. But even that was not enough to guarantee their control over the nation. Former tsarists, social democrats and independent peasants united as the Mensheviks, formed the White Army and waged a civil war against the Bolsheviks and their Red Army. The Russian Civil War raged throughout the countryside and cities until 1921 when the Bolsheviks (militarily led by Leon Trotsky) claimed victory. The following year "Russia" became the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics"—or the USSR.
When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin rose up as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. He immediately reversed Lenin's approach to Marxism (which had been to allow some private ownership of farms and small businesses) and forcibly collectivized all farms and nationalized all industry during his Five-Year Plan. Stalin, fearful of a revolt coming from his fellow communists, consolidated his power and eventually started purging his own government, the military and Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s. Known as the Great Purge, this time marked a period of one-sided trials that led to the executions of perhaps over a million people—no one was safe from being accused of treason (including the Communist hero Leon Trotsky whom Stalin had assassinated while living in exile in Mexico in 1940.) Stalin even had images purged as exemplified in the below pictures that, at one time, included Stalin's head of the secret police, Nikolia Yezhov, before Stalin purged him from the planet and the photograph.
Recap Section
Watch the video below to review what you've learned.
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