Case Study: The Russian Revolution
In March 1917, in the middle of World War I, Russians were demoralized. The army, poorly trained, inadequately equipped, and incompetently led, had suffered staggering losses; everywhere soldiers were deserting. Food shortages and low wages drove workers to desperation; the loss of fathers and sons at the front embittered peasants. Discontent was keenest in Petrograd, where on March 10, 200,000 striking workers shouting "Down with autocracy!" packed the streets. After some bloodshed, government troops refused to fire on the workers. Faced with a broad and debilitating crisis - violence and anarchy in the capital, breakdown of transport, uncertain food and fuel supplies, and general disorder - Tsar Nicholas II was forced to turn over authority to a provisional government, thereby ending three centuries of tsarist rule under the Romanov dynasty.
The provisional Government, after July 1917 guided by Aleksander Kerensky (1881 - 1970), sought to transform Russia into a Western-style liberal state, but the government failed to comprehend the urgency with which the Russian peasants wanted the landlords' land, and soldiers and the masses wanted peace. Resentment spiraled. Kerensky's increasing unpopularity and the magnitude of popular unrest seemed to the Bolsheviks' leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924), then in hiding, to offer the long-expected opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power and bring about a socialist revolution.
The provisional Government, after July 1917 guided by Aleksander Kerensky (1881 - 1970), sought to transform Russia into a Western-style liberal state, but the government failed to comprehend the urgency with which the Russian peasants wanted the landlords' land, and soldiers and the masses wanted peace. Resentment spiraled. Kerensky's increasing unpopularity and the magnitude of popular unrest seemed to the Bolsheviks' leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924), then in hiding, to offer the long-expected opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power and bring about a socialist revolution.
Guiding Question:
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Topics for Discussion:
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Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 28 Two Successful Revolutions (Pgs. 862 - 873) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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Communist Revolution Timeline:
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The 1905 Revolution
Government 1907 - 1914
February Revolution 1917
October Revolution 1917
Bolsheviks Actions in Power
Civil War 1917 - 1921
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Sources:
Source 1: Lenin defines the need for a Vanguard Party to lead the workers (1902)
Lenin, Coi!ected Works, vol. 1, 1973 |
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic [revolutionary] consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively of its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.... I assert ... that no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders maintaining continuity ... that such an organization must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.... [who] will centralize all the secret aspects of the work—the drawing up of leaflets, the working out of approximate plans; and the appointing of bodies of leaders for each urban district, for each factory district, and for each educational institution....
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Source 2: Nandezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife and secretary, describes their return to Russia (1917)
Nandezhda Konstantinovni Krupskaya, Lenin; ed. H. Isaxs, 1960 |
The masses of Petrograd—workers, soldiers and sailors—came to welcome their leader.... We were in the midst of a surging sea of people. No one who has not lived through the revolution can have any idea of its solemn grandeur. Red banners, a guard of honor of Kronstadt sailors, searchlights from the Peter and Paul fortress ..., armoured cars, files of working men and women guarding the road. , When llyich stepped out on to the platform, a captain came up to him, stood at attention and reported. Taken by surprise, Ilyich returned the salute. A guard of honor was lined up on the platform, and
Ilyich was led past it. . .. Then we were seated in motor-cars, while llyich was placed on an armoured car . . "Long live the socialist world revolution!" llyich shouted into the vast crowd swarming around us. llyich already felt the beginning of that revolution in every fibre of his being. |
Source 3: John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: International Publishers, 1934).
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Source 4: Upon his return to Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist regime, Lenin proclaims his revolutionary strategy in the April Theses (1917)
Lenin's April Theses, proclaimed 1917) |
2. The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which... placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.
... This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life. 3. No support for the Provisional Government... . 4. ... The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers.' Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, ... therefore our task is ... to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of [the Provisional Government's] ... tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. |
Source 5: Lenin addressing troops (1917)
Hard hit by the war, the Russian people abandoned it in 1917, led by the Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He is shown here in Moscow's Red Square addressing Russian troops who had escaped the battlefields of World War I but now fought a civil war against the enemies of the new order. |
Source 6: On December 19th 1917 Lenin wrote to Felix Dzerzhinsky ordering him to take command of the struggle against counter-revolution – and decreeing the formation of the CHEKA:
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The bourgeoisie, landholders, and all wealthy classes are making desperate efforts to undermine the revolution which is aiming to safeguard the interests of the toiling and exploited masses. The bourgeoisie is having recourse to the vilest crimes, bribing society’s lowest elements and supplying liquor to these outcasts with the purpose of bringing on pogroms.
The partisans of the bourgeoisie, especially the higher officials, bank clerks, etc., are sabotaging and organising strikes in order to block the government’s efforts to reconstruct the state on a socialist basis. Sabotage has spread even to the food supply organisations and millions of people are threatened with famine. Special measures must be taken to fight counterrevolution and sabotage. Taking these factors into consideration the Soviet of People’s Commissars decrees the establishment of the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution. The Commission is to be named the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and is to be attached to the Soviet of People’s Commissars. [This commission] is to make war on counter-revolution and sabotage… |
Source 7: Lenin’s hanging order against the kulaks was sent to commissars in Penza, about 300 miles south-east of Moscow, in August 1918:
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Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volosts [regions] must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle with the kulaks.
We need to set an example. You need to hang – hang without fail, and do it so that the public sees – at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. Publish their names. Take away all of their grain. Execute the hostages – in accordance with yesterday’s telegram. This needs to be accomplished in such a way that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let’s choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this. Lenin P.S. Use your toughest people for this. |
Source 9: In late 1918 the German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg wrote about the lack of democracy in Soviet Russia under the Bolsheviks
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“Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people… Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses. It must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity. It must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people." |
Source 10: Written in December 1918 and published in Pravda the following month, Lenin’s Democracy and Dictatorship contained responses to supporters of the Constituent Assembly:
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This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance – but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, its historically conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the state and never forget that the state, even in the most democratic republic… is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.
The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy – democracy for the rich – and establish democracy for the poor. [Only it can] make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants. [Under bourgeois systems] the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.” |
Source 11: An Order for the Expansion of the Red Terror (1918)
In September 1918 the Soviet commissar for the interior, Grigori Petrovski, sent the following communication to local CHEKA units, ordering the expansion of the Red Terror: |
All Right Socialist Revolutionaries who are known to local Soviets must be arrested immediately. Considerable numbers of hostages must be taken from among the bourgeoisie and the officers. At the least attempt at resistance, or the least movement among the White Guards, mass shooting must be inflicted without hesitation. The local Provincial Executive Committees must display special initiative in this direction.
The departments of administration, through the militia and the Extraordinary Commissions, must take all measures to detect and arrest all persons who are hiding under assumed names and must shoot without fail all who are implicated in White Guard activity. All the above mentioned measures must be carried out immediately… The rear of our armies must, at last, be finally cleared of all White Guard activity and of all vile plotters against the power of the working class and of the poorest peasantry. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the application of mass terror. |