Transcript The Russian Revolution - World History with Ms. Byrne

The Russian Revolution
Beginnings of Upheaval
• Czar Nicholas II relied on the army
and bureaucracy to hold up his
regime
• Grigory Rasputin began to influence
his wife, Alexandra
– Rasputin gained her confidence through
her son, Alexis, who was a hemophiliac
– Alexandra believed Rasputin had
extraordinary powers since he could stop
her son’s bleeding
• Rasputin was assassinated in
December 1916
– Shot three times, tied up, and thrown into
the river
– He drowned, but he had managed to
untie all of the knots binding him
March Revolution
• March 1917  working-class women led a series
of strikes in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) because
the government had begun to ration bread after
inflated prices
• These women would be forced to wait in line after
working 12-hour days in factories
• March 8 10,000 women march through the city
demanding “peace and bread” and “down with
autocracy”
• March 10  Strike shut down all factories in the
city
• Nicholas ordered troops to open fire on the
protestors, but many joined in the cause and
refused to shoot
• The Duma, legislative body, met on March 12
and asked the Czar to step down
– March 15  Czar Nicholas II gives up the throne
ending 300 year old Romanov dynasty
Provisional Government
• Aleksandr Kerensky headed the
new provisional government
• Decided to carry on the war to
preserve Russian honor
– Made the workers and peasant
unhappy
• Soviets  councils composed of
representatives from the workers
and soldiers
• Soviet of Petrograd formed in March
1917
– Mostly made up of socialists that
represented the more radical ideas of
the lower class
Lenin and the Bolsheviks
• Bolsheviks  small faction of a Marxist
party called the Russian Social
Democracy
• Led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin
• April 1917  German military leaders
shipped Lenin back to Russia hoping to
create disorder
• Lenin believed that the soviets of
soldiers, workers, and peasants were
ready-made instruments of power
• Bolsheviks promised to redistribute land,
an end to the war, transfer factories and
industries to committees of workers, and
transfer government power to the soviets
– “Peace, land, Bread”
Bolsheviks Seize Power
• Party member had grown from 50,000
to 240,000
• Leon Trotsky was the dedicated head
of the Petrograd soviet
• November 6  Bolsheviks seized the
Winter Palace, home of the provisional
government
• Lenin, outwardly, gave power to the
Congress of Soviets, but truly he kept
the power with the Bolsheviks
– Renamed themselves the “communists”
• March 3, 1918  Lenin signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with
Germany
– Gave up eastern Poland, Ukraine, Finland,
and Baltic provinces
Civil War in Russia
• Many people opposed the new Communist
government
– Loyalists, liberals, anti-Lenin socialists, Allied
forces
• Allies sent troops to Russia hoping to bring
them back into the war
– Gave aid to anti-Communist forces
• In Siberia, an anti-Communist, or White, force
attacked and advanced almost to the Volga
River
• Ukrainians also attacked Communist forces
• 1920  White forces defeated and Ukraine
was retaken
• Communists gained control of Georgia,
Russian Armenia, and Azerbaijan
• April 1918  royal family was moved to a
small mining town in the Urals and murdered
Triumph of the Communists
• Red Army was well disciplined
because of the organizational strength
of Trotsky
– Reinstated the draft and insisted on rigid
discipline
• Disunity of anti-Communist forces led
to their ultimate failure
• Communists were single-minded in
their goals
• War communism  government
controlled the banks and most
industries, seized grain from peasants,
and centralized state administration
Triumph of the Communists
• Communist revolutionary terror
– Use of secret police, known
as Cheka
• With foreign armies on
Russian soil, the Communists
could appeal to the patriotism
of Russians
• By 1921, the Communists had
complete control of the nation
• The state was very hostile to
Allied forces since they tried to
aid anti-communist forces