Page 55 - All About History - Issue 26-15

LENIN'S BLOODY REVOLUTION

THE ROAD TO
REVOLUTION

O May 1896
Nicholas II is crowned
tsar, making clear
he’ll continue the
autocratic rule of
Alexander III.
O July 1903
The Russian Social
Democrat party splits
into two factions:
the Bolsheviks,
under Lenin, and the
Mensheviks.
O January 1905
Tsarist troops open
fire on demonstrators
in Saint Petersburg,
causing widespread Members of the Red
strikes. June sees Guard in October 1917
a mutiny aboard
Battleship Potemkin.
uns roared, thousands of voices yelled from the the bureaucracy. Alexander II (1855-81) had brought in
O October 1905 streets in defiance, and on 23 October 1917, the some reforms, such as elective assemblies to represent
Nicholas II ends the massed supporters of Vladimir Lenin laid siege peasant agricultural and industrial workers in local
unrest by promising
increased civil to Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the site of an government. Alexander III (1881-94), however, began to
liberties for the G ineffectual government, and the capstone event of roll back these changes, and Nicholas II, the last tsar of
proletariat. The Duma a socialist revolution. For Lenin and his troops it was both Russia, disappointed many by sticking to that hard line.
is formed.
a political and an ideological victory: the triumphant end He considered any notion of societal reform “a senseless
to years of secretive theorising and plotting, many of them dream” and let it be known that he was resolutely
O July 1914
At the outbreak spent by Lenin in exile, before he returned to Russia to committed to the principle of autocracy.
of war, Nicholas II “liberate” his people. If the celebrations were short lived, As early as the 1860s various seeds of revolutionary
assumes control of
the Russian Army. the inversion of society to replace an autocracy with a thought were beginning to be sown. Movements like The
His family come socialist system was an extraordinary achievement. Populists began musing on a future moving away from
under the damaging Russia, even as late as the late-1800s, had seen a nobility a monolithic state and more towards a country with a
influence of Rasputin.
of about a million presiding over a peasantry of multiplicity of mutually supportive communes.
O February 1917 97 million; according to an 1897 census there These idealistic notions hit something of a
Protests turn to riots was practically no middle class. Industry bump when students from the universities
in Saint Petersburg. was overwhelmingly agricultural, with started taking the message out into the
The city falls to “POPULISM WAS
insurgents; the Duma the peasantry working on land that countryside and found the peasant
collapses into chaos. belonged to the rich minority. An act ABANDONED, AND IN agricultural labourers actually hostile
of 1861 turned some of this land over to their ideas: thinking the students’
O March-April 1917 ITS PLACE, THE IDEAS
Nicholas II abdicates to communal peasant ownership, well-intentioned notions ridiculous,
and the Provisional but the government had provided OF A POLITICAL ANALYST lofty and unachievable. Populism
Government forms. compensation to the landowners, was abandoned, and in its place, the
Lenin returns and and the peasant communes were CALLED KARL MARX ideas of a political analyst called Karl
sets up a base in
Saint Petersburg. now responsible for the repayment BEGAN TO FIND Marx began to find favour.
of this debt to the government. These Marx was often frustrated at the
O July 1917 payments were abolished in 1905, but FAVOUR” way his followers simplified his complex
Alexander Kerensky
becomes prime until then, the peasants were as beholden writings and ran with them in directions
minister of the to their communes as they had been to the he didn’t approve of, but the key idea of his that
government, but landowners. The population was also steadily increasing, people latched on to revolved around the control of the
it remains largely which meant there wasn’t enough land to go around, means of production. History, Marx believed, was a never-
powerless, lacking
legitimisation. leading to unrest. The oil and railway industry booms ending process of change in which particular social classes
of the industrial revolution happened slower and later exploited the labour of everyone else and established
O October 1917 in Russia than in other parts of Europe, but when they dominance, only for their hegemony to become outmoded,
Bolsheviks take Saint
Petersburg and storm arrived they started to create a growing middle class more after which they were naturally replaced by another
the Winter Palace. inclined towards western-style capitalist business interests up-and-coming class drawing power from unanticipated
Lenin controls Russia. than had hitherto been the Russian norm. Workers sources. They in turn would eventually be replaced for the
migrated to industrial areas, but while some official same reasons, and so the cycle would continue.
O November 1917
In elections, the monitoring nominally took place, the overcrowded slum By this process, the bourgeois (the middle class)
Bolsheviks lose. conditions workers had to endure were appalling. in Russia would, according to the theory, replace the
Clever politicking Russia at this time was presided over by the tsar, aristocracy, and only once that had happened would the
from Lenin sees his
party hold onto and whose rule was propped up by the army, the police, the proletariat (the working class) supersede the bourgeois in
consolidate power. Russian Orthodox Church, the land-owning nobility and their own revolution. Rather than leaving these predicted
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