FREE ESSAY ON RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS

RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS

Modern History oral task.
The word at the beginning of the 20th century - Russian Revolutions.
Tsar Nicholas II
-  Nicholas inherited the role of Tsar off his father in 1855, when his father Nicholas I
passed away.
-  Tsar Nicholas did not have the abilities to be a natural autocrat. He considered it
his duty to act as autocrat. 
-  Nicholas tried to keep power. This produced a highly inefficient form of government
and the First World War threw these weaknesses into sharp relict. By the end the Tsar had
managed to ensure his isolation from virtually all sections of Russia's society.
-  Nicholas had the backing of a large and inefficient bureaucracy, but remained supreme.
The state police and the army enforced his will, and his officials controlled education
and censored the press. 
-  A duma, or parliament, was set up but the Tsar was able to appoint and dismis
ministers at will.
-  After the attempted revolution in 1905, in which there was many assassinations of
ministers and members of the royal family Tsar Nicholas showed no indication to carry out
reforms.
-  Tsar Nicholas was an unintelligent family man who was completely unsuited to being the
autocratic ruler of 140 million people.
-  Nicholas was easily influenced by others and he lacked the determination to carry out
serious changes in Russia.
-  Tsar Nicholas believed that it was his duty to pass on the power he had inherited to
his son.
-  Nicholas married Alexandra, who was a Granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was
believed to be a German spy. She was also believed to have had an affair with Gregory
Rasputin. 
-  The Tsar was under great influence of the Tsarina. 
-  Tsar Nicholas was killed, with his family, on the 2nd of March 1917.
-  Nicholas II inherited from his ancestors not only a giant empire but also a
revolution. And they did not bequeath him one quality, which would have made him capable
of governing an empire or even a province or a country. 
Gregory Rasputin
-  Gregory Rasputin was believed to be a holly man sent down by god. The Tsarina
Alexandra believed that he was sent there to cure their son Alexander of Haemophilia. 
-  Rasputin was a siberian peasant with a bald scar on his head, the result of a beating
for horse stealing.
Conditions in Russia
-  In 1917 the soldiers at the front were fed up with defeat after defeat, they were
leaving in groups. 
-  1917 the economy was collapsing under the strain of war and food was short in the
cities and even in rural areas.
-  The food supply decreased the industrial and agricultural production was disrupted,
and the transportation system became disorganised.
-  In the trenches the soldiers went hungry and frequently lacked shoes or munitions,
sometimes even weapons. 
-  Prices skyrocketed and goods became scarce.
-  In 1917 famine threatened the larger cities.
-  Throughout the winter of 1916-1917 St Petersburg's workers grew furious at this state
of affairs. The women textile workers were the angriest. The Tsar had forced them off
farms to work 60 hours a week in St Petersburg's factories. Just as their fathers, sons,
and brothers had been forced to go to war. 
-  Russia in 1917 was a land where the First World War had taken a desperate toll. At the
front the soldiers were deserting in droves after many defeats. 
-  A duma or parliament was set up in 1906 but it had little or no influence.
-  Russia was a country where the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor. Many
Russians were living in appalling poverty. 
-  From March to October 1917, the Provisional Government ruled Russia. This had no legal
standing but was intended to govern until a general election could be held. The
Provisional Government became more and more unpopular partly because it decided to
continue the war against Germany, but also because food shortages and inflation grew even
worse. 
-  Nicholas controlled the state police, and the army. His officials controlled education
and censored the press. 
-  Increasing numbers of people migrated to the cities as Russia began to industrialise
rapidly. 
-  Housing and conditions in the factories were poor, providing fertile ground for the
growth of radical and revolutionary political parties. 
-  Russia's industrialisation was hampered by the country's vast size, poor
communications and even more so by the backwards of a society still run as a feudal
system, and by the intertia of the autocratic rule of the Tsars. 
The revolution of 1917
-  The revolution of 1917 grew out of a mounting wave of food and wage strikes in
Petrograd (now St Petersburg) during February. 
-  The immediate cause of the February revolution was the collapse of the tsarist regime.
The underlying cause was the backward economic condition of the country, which made it
unable to sustain the war effort against powerful, industrialised Germany.
-  The October revolution was the result of one man, Lenin, who had to drag not merely
the toilers but his own party into a battle that few had enthusiasm for. The masses did
not take action for themselves but under the control of an elite, although an elite
bitterly opposed to the old order. 
-  The April revolution was bloodless. 
-  Quite clearly the Russian revolution of 1917 was much more than a Communist or
Bolshevik revolution. The makers of the revolution were the Russian people, for only the
people can overthrow that in which they have always believed, not a small number of armed
and dedicated radicals. 
-  The war did not cause the revolution, the war accelerated and finished that which was
already being done by a dynamic, by a process, that probably could not be stopped without
total reconstruction of the Russian society - a revolution in itself.
-  Attack on the winter palace in October 1917. 
-  Long standing causes of the war include peasants anger about land, and population
explosion. 
-  Revolution broke out by a serious of protests against food shortages, inflation, and
rumours about the Tsarina. The protesters were joined by were joined by strikers from
factories Petograd and by soldiers sent to deal with the demonstrators. Even some of the
Tsars most loyal troops joined in.
-  On the 24-25 October 1917 the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in a
coup planned and led by Leon Trotsky. 
-  When a general election was held the Socialist-Revolutionary Party won, but Lenin
dissolved it by force and began to rule as a dictator. 
The Bolsheviks 
-  The Bolsheviks believed that private property was wrong, that all businesses, farms,
and public services should be owned by the state. Workers should be paid according to the
value of the work that they did, and not according to whom they were or what they could
demand.
-  The Bolsheviks set up a secret police force, which ruthlessly murdered Lenin's
opponents. 
-  The Bolsheviks turned Russia into a dictatorship far more violent and far more extreme
than it had been under the tsars.