The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social change in Russia starting in 1917. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a civil war. It can be seen as the precursor to other revolutions that occurred in the aftermath of World War I, such as the German Revolution of 1918–1919. The Russian Revolution was a key event of the 20th century.
The Russian Revolution began with the February Revolution in 1917, in the midst of World War I. With the German Empire inflicting defeats on the Eastern Front and increasing logistical problems causing shortages of bread and grain, the Russian Army was losing morale, with large-scale mutiny looming. Officials were convinced that if Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the unrest would subside. Nicholas stepped down on 15 March [O.S. 2 March], ushering in a provisional government led by the Duma (parliament). During the unrest, locals in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) formed Soviet councils. These councils did not initially oppose the new government, but they insisted on having influence over it and control of the militias. By March, Russia had two rival governments. The Provisional Government held state power in military and international affairs, whereas the network of Soviets held domestic power. The working and urban middle classes provided critical support to the Soviets. There were mutinies, protests and strikes. Socialist and other leftist political organizations competed for influence within the Provisional Government and Soviets. Factions included the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, and the Bolsheviks, a far-left party led by Vladimir Lenin.
The Bolsheviks won popularity with a program promising peace, land, and bread: an end to the war, land for the peasantry, and ending famine. After assuming power, the Provisional Government continued fighting the war in spite of public opposition. Taking advantage, the Bolsheviks and other factions gained popular support to advance the revolution. Responding to discontent in Petrograd, the Provisional Government repressed protestors, leading to the July Days. The Bolsheviks merged workers' militias loyal to them into the Red Guards. The volatile situation reached its climax with the October Revolution, an armed Bolshevik insurrection in Petrograd beginning 7 November [O.S. 25 October] that overthrew the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks established their own government and proclaimed the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Under pressure from German military offensives, the Bolsheviks relocated the capital to Moscow. The RSFSR began reorganizing the empire into the world's first socialist state, practicing soviet democracy on a national and international scale. Their promise to end Russia's participation in World War I was fulfilled when Bolshevik leaders signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. The Bolsheviks also established the Cheka, a secret police and revolutionary security service working to uncover, punish, and eliminate those considered to be "enemies of the people" in a series of campaigns called the Red Terror.
Although the Bolsheviks held large support in urban areas, they had foreign and domestic enemies that refused to recognize their government. Russia erupted into a bloody civil war, which pitted the Reds (Bolsheviks) against an array of enemies, which included nationalist movements, anti-Bolshevik socialist parties, anarchists, monarchists and liberals; the latter two parties strongly supported the Russian White movement which was led mainly by right-leaning officers and seen as fighting for the restoration of the imperial order. The Bolshevik commissar Leon Trotsky began organizing workers' militias loyal to the Bolsheviks into the Red Army. While key events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, every city in the empire was convulsed, including the provinces of national minorities, and in the rural areas peasants took over and redistributed land.
As the war progressed, the RSFSR established Soviet power in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Wartime cohesion and intervention from foreign powers prompted the RSFSR to begin unifying these nations under one flag and created the Soviet Union. Historians consider the end of the revolutionary period to be in 1922, when the civil war concluded with the defeat of the White Army and separatist factions, leading to mass emigration from Russia. The victorious Bolshevik Party reconstituted itself into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and remained in power for six decades.
The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social change in Russia starting in 1917. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a civil war. It can be seen as the precursor to other revolutions that occurred in the aftermath of World War I, such as the German Revolution of 1918–1919. The Russian Revolution was a key event of the 20th century.
The Russian Revolution began with the February Revolution in 1917, in the midst of World War I. With the German Empire inflicting defeats on the Eastern Front and increasing logistical problems causing shortages of bread and grain, the Russian Army was losing morale, with large-scale mutiny looming. Officials were convinced that if Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the unrest would subside. Nicholas stepped down on 15 March [O.S. 2 March], ushering in a provisional government led by the Duma (parliament). During the unrest, locals in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) formed Soviet councils. These councils did not initially oppose the new government, but they insisted on having influence over it and control of the militias. By March, Russia had two rival governments. The Provisional Government held state power in military and international affairs, whereas the network of Soviets held domestic power. The working and urban middle classes provided critical support to the Soviets. There were mutinies, protests and strikes. Socialist and other leftist political organizations competed for influence within the Provisional Government and Soviets. Factions included the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, and the Bolsheviks, a far-left party led by Vladimir Lenin.
The Bolsheviks won popularity with a program promising peace, land, and bread: an end to the war, land for the peasantry, and ending famine. After assuming power, the Provisional Government continued fighting the war in spite of public opposition. Taking advantage, the Bolsheviks and other factions gained popular support to advance the revolution. Responding to discontent in Petrograd, the Provisional Government repressed protestors, leading to the July Days. The Bolsheviks merged workers' militias loyal to them into the Red Guards. The volatile situation reached its climax with the October Revolution, an armed Bolshevik insurrection in Petrograd beginning 7 November [O.S. 25 October] that overthrew the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks established their own government and proclaimed the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Under pressure from German military offensives, the Bolsheviks relocated the capital to Moscow. The RSFSR began reorganizing the empire into the world's first socialist state, practicing soviet democracy on a national and international scale. Their promise to end Russia's participation in World War I was fulfilled when Bolshevik leaders signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. The Bolsheviks also established the Cheka, a secret police and revolutionary security service working to uncover, punish, and eliminate those considered to be "enemies of the people" in a series of campaigns called the Red Terror.
Although the Bolsheviks held large support in urban areas, they had foreign and domestic enemies that refused to recognize their government. Russia erupted into a bloody civil war, which pitted the Reds (Bolsheviks) against an array of enemies, which included nationalist movements, anti-Bolshevik socialist parties, anarchists, monarchists and liberals; the latter two parties strongly supported the Russian White movement which was led mainly by right-leaning officers and seen as fighting for the restoration of the imperial order. The Bolshevik commissar Leon Trotsky began organizing workers' militias loyal to the Bolsheviks into the Red Army. While key events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, every city in the empire was convulsed, including the provinces of national minorities, and in the rural areas peasants took over and redistributed land.
As the war progressed, the RSFSR established Soviet power in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Wartime cohesion and intervention from foreign powers prompted the RSFSR to begin unifying these nations under one flag and created the Soviet Union. Historians consider the end of the revolutionary period to be in 1922, when the civil war concluded with the defeat of the White Army and separatist factions, leading to mass emigration from Russia. The victorious Bolshevik Party reconstituted itself into the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and remained in power for six decades.
Background
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a major factor contributing to the cause of the Revolutions of 1917. The events of Bloody Sunday triggered nationwide protests and soldier mutinies. A council of workers called the St. Petersburg Soviet was created in this chaos. While the 1905 Revolution was ultimately crushed and the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet arrested, the 1905 Revolution laid the groundwork for the later Petrograd Soviet and other revolutionary movements during the leadup to 1917. The 1905 Revolution also led to the creation of a Duma (parliament) that would later form the Provisional Government after February 1917.
Russia's poor performance in the early years of World War I also prompted growing complaints directed at Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov family. A short wave of patriotic nationalism ended in the face of defeats and poor conditions on the Eastern Front. The Tsar made the situation worse by taking personal control of the Imperial Russian Army in 1915, a challenge far beyond his skills. He was now held personally responsible for Russia's continuing defeats and losses. In addition, Tsarina Alexandra, left to rule while the Tsar commanded at the front, was German-born, leading to suspicions of collusion. These suspicions were exacerbated by rumors of her relationship with the controversial mystic Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin's influence led to disastrous ministerial appointments and corruption, resulting in a worsening of conditions within Russia.
After the Ottoman Empire's entry on the side of the Central Powers in October 1914, Russia was deprived of a major trade route to the Mediterranean Sea, which worsened the economic crisis and the munitions shortages. Meanwhile, Germany was able to produce great amounts of munitions while constantly fighting on two major battlefronts.
The conditions during the war resulted in a devastating loss of morale within the Russian army and the general population of Russia. This was particularly apparent in the cities, owing to a lack of food in response to the disruption of agriculture. Food scarcity had become a considerable problem in Russia, but the cause of this did not lie in any failure of the harvests, which had not been significantly affected by the war. The indirect reason was that the government, in order to finance the war, printed millions of roubles, and by 1917, inflation had made prices increase up to four times what they had been in 1914. Farmers were consequently faced with a higher cost of living but with little increase in income. As a result, they tended to hoard their grain and to revert to subsistence farming. Thus, the cities were constantly short of food. At the same time, rising prices led to demands for higher wages in the factories, and in January and February 1916, revolutionary propaganda, in part aided by German funds, led to widespread strikes. This resulted in growing criticism of the government, including an increased participation of workers in revolutionary parties.
Liberal parties too had an increased platform to voice their complaints, as the initial fervor of the war resulted in the Tsarist government creating a variety of political organizations. In July 1915, a Central War Industries Committee was established under the chairmanship of prominent Octobrist, Alexander Guchkov (1862–1936), which included ten workers' representatives. The Petrograd Mensheviks agreed to join despite the objections of their leaders abroad. All this activity gave renewed encouragement to political ambitions, and in September 1915, a combination of Octobrists and Kadets in the Duma demanded the forming of a responsible government, which the Tsar rejected.
All these factors gave rise to a sharp loss of confidence in the regime, even within the ruling class. This lack of confidence grew throughout the war. Early in 1916, Guchkov discussed the possibility of a coup to force the abdication of the Tsar with senior army officers and members of the Central War Industries Committee. In December, a small group of nobles assassinated Rasputin, and in January 1917, the Tsar's cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, was asked indirectly by Prince Lvov whether he would be prepared to take over the throne from his nephew, Tsar Nicholas II. None of these incidents were in themselves the immediate cause of the February Revolution, but they do help to explain why the monarchy survived only a few days after it had broken out.
Meanwhile, Socialist Revolutionary leaders in exile, many of whom lived in Switzerland, had been the glum spectators of the collapse of international socialist solidarity. French and German Social Democrats had voted in favour of their respective governments' war efforts. Influential Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov in Paris had adopted a violently anti-German stand, and Marxist theorist Alexander Parvus supported the German war effort as the best means of ensuring a revolution in Russia. The Mensheviks largely maintained that Russia had the right to defend herself against Germany, although Julius Martov (a prominent Menshevik), now on the left of his group, demanded an end to the war and a settlement on the basis of national self-determination with no annexations or indemnities.
It was these views of Martov that predominated in a manifesto drawn up by Leon Trotsky (at the time a Menshevik) at a conference in Zimmerwald, attended by 35 Socialist leaders in September 1915. Vladimir Lenin, supported by Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, strongly contested them. Lenin's faction became known as the Zimmerwald Left. Lenin rejected both the defence of Russia and the cry for peace. Since the autumn of 1914, he had insisted that "from the standpoint of the working class and of the labouring masses the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsarist Monarchy". He argued that the war must be turned into a civil war of the proletarian soldiers against their own governments, and if a proletarian victory should emerge from this in Russia, then their duty would be to wage a revolutionary war for the liberation of the masses throughout Europe.
Economic and social changes
An elementary theory of property, believed by many peasants, was that land should belong to those who work on it. At the same time, peasant life and culture was changing constantly. Change was facilitated by the physical movement of growing numbers of peasant villagers who migrated to and from industrial and urban environments, but also by the introduction of city culture into the village through material goods, the press, and word of mouth.
Workers also had good reasons for discontent: overcrowded housing with often deplorable sanitary conditions, long hours at work (on the eve of the war, a 10-hour workday six days a week was the average and many were working 11–12 hours a day by 1916), constant risk of injury and death from poor safety and sanitary conditions, harsh discipline (not only rules and fines, but foremen's fists), and inadequate wages (made worse after 1914 by steep wartime increases in the cost of living). At the same time, urban industrial life had its benefits, though these could be just as dangerous (in terms of social and political stability) as the hardships. There were many encouragements to expect more from life. Acquiring new skills gave many workers a sense of self-respect and confidence, heightening expectations and desires. Living in cities, workers encountered material goods they had never seen in villages. Most importantly, workers living in cities were exposed to new ideas about the social and political order.
The social causes of the Russian Revolution can be derived from centuries of oppression of the lower classes by the Tsarist regime and Nicholas's failures in World War I. While rural agrarian peasants had been emancipated from serfdom in 1861, they still resented paying redemption payments to the state, and demanded communal tender of the land they worked. The problem was further compounded by the failure of Sergei Witte's land reforms of the early 20th century. Increasing peasant disturbances and sometimes actual revolts occurred, with the goal of securing ownership of the land they worked. Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants and substantial inequality of land ownership, with 1.5% of the population owning 25% of the land.
The rapid industrialization of Russia also resulted in urban overcrowding and poor conditions for urban industrial workers (as mentioned above). Between 1890 and 1910, the population of the capital, Saint Petersburg, nearly doubled from 1,033,600 to 1,905,600, with Moscow experiencing similar growth. This created a new 'proletariat' which, due to being crowded together in the cities, was much more likely to protest and go on strike than the peasantry had been in previous times. One 1904 survey found that an average of 16 people shared each apartment in Saint Petersburg, with six people per room. There was also no running water, and piles of human waste were a threat to the health of the workers. The poor conditions only aggravated the situation, with the number of strikes and incidents of public disorder rapidly increasing in the years shortly before World War I. Because of late industrialization, Russia's workers were highly concentrated. By 1914, 40% of Russian workers were employed in factories of 1,000+ workers (32% in 1901). 42% worked in 100–1,000 worker enterprises, 18% in 1–100 worker businesses (in the US, 1914, the figures were 18%, 47% and 35% respectively).
World War I added to the chaos. Conscription across Russia resulted in unwilling citizens being sent off to war. The vast demand for factory production of war supplies and workers resulted in many more labor riots and strikes. Conscription stripped skilled workers from the cities, who had to be replaced with unskilled peasants. When famine began to hit due to the poor railway system, workers abandoned the cities in droves seeking food. Finally, the soldiers themselves, who suffered from a lack of equipment and protection from the elements, began to turn against the Tsar. This was mainly because, as the war progressed, many of the officers who were loyal to the Tsar were killed, being replaced by discontented conscripts from the major cities who had little loyalty to the Tsar.
Political issues
Many sections of the country had reason to be dissatisfied with the existing autocracy. Nicholas II was a deeply conservative ruler and maintained a strict authoritarian system. Individuals and society in general were expected to show self-restraint, devotion to community, deference to the social hierarchy and a sense of duty to the country. Religious faith helped bind all of these tenets together as a source of comfort and reassurance in the face of difficult conditions and as a means of political authority exercised through the clergy. Perhaps more than any other modern monarch, Nicholas II attached his fate and the future of his dynasty to the notion of the ruler as a saintly and infallible father to his people.
This vision of the Romanov monarchy left him unaware of the state of his country. With a firm belief that his power to rule was granted by Divine Right, Nicholas assumed that the Russian people were devoted to him with unquestioning loyalty. This ironclad belief rendered Nicholas unwilling to allow the progressive reforms that might have alleviated the suffering of the Russian people. Even after the 1905 Revolution spurred the Tsar to decree limited civil rights and democratic representation, he worked to limit even these liberties in order to preserve the ultimate authority of the crown.