8.3 The Russian Revolution and Its Effects

Russia entered World War I with deep problems left over from 1905 (6.6): poor peasants, angry industrial workers and a Duma with little power. The war made everything worse. Russia lost millions of men, railways broke down, and food and fuel ran short in the cities. Nicholas II took personal command of the army in 1915, so he was blamed for defeats, and the influence of the faith healer Rasputin at court discredited the monarchy.

In February 1917 (March by the Western calendar), bread protests and strikes in Petrograd, starting with women marking International Women's Day, grew into a revolt when soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and joined them. Nicholas II abdicated.

Two bodies now claimed authority. The Provisional Government, made up mostly of liberal Duma leaders and later led by Alexander Kerensky, promised civil liberties and elections for a Constituent Assembly. The Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies, had the loyalty of many workers and soldiers. Its Order No. 1 told soldiers to obey the Soviet whenever its orders conflicted with the government's. Soviets formed across the country.

The Provisional Government made a fatal choice: it kept fighting the war, and it postponed land reform until the Constituent Assembly could meet. A failed summer offensive in 1917 ruined its standing.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, a disciplined Marxist party, returned from exile in April 1917 with German help, since Germany hoped he would take Russia out of the war. His April Theses rejected cooperation with the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik slogans “Peace, Land, Bread” and “All power to the soviets” matched what soldiers, peasants and workers wanted. After an attempted military coup by General Kornilov in August, the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.

On October 25, 1917 (November 7 by the Western calendar), Bolshevik-led forces organized by Leon Trotsky seized key points in Petrograd and the Winter Palace. When elections for the Constituent Assembly gave the Bolsheviks only about a quarter of the vote, Lenin dissolved it after one day in January 1918. Russia was now a one-party state.

• Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918): Russia left the war, giving up Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland and Ukraine, huge areas with much of its population, farmland and industry.
• Civil War (1918–1921): the Red Army, built by Trotsky, fought the Whites, a mix of monarchists, liberals and other anti-Bolsheviks, plus independence movements. Britain, France, the United States and Japan sent troops to aid the Whites, but the Reds held the central heartland and railways and won.
• War Communism: the state took over industry, banned private trade and seized grain from peasants. The Cheka, the secret police, carried out the Red Terror. The former tsar and his family were shot in 1918.
• Result: famine, economic collapse and revolts, including a 1921 uprising by sailors at Kronstadt who had once been Bolshevik supporters.

In 1921 Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). Peasants paid a fixed tax and could sell their surplus, and small private businesses and trade were allowed again, while the state kept control of heavy industry, banking and foreign trade. Lenin called it a temporary retreat. The economy recovered. In 1922 the state became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky to take control, ending the NEP in 1928 (8.6).

The revolution had effects across Europe. The new state promised legal equality for women and made divorce easier. The Communist International (Comintern, 1919) promoted revolution abroad, communist uprisings broke out in Germany and Hungary in 1919, and fear of communism helped fascist movements win support from property owners.