The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

History in an Hour

Rupert Colley

About History in an Hour

History in an Hour is a series of ebooks to help the reader learn the basic facts of a given subject area. Everything you need to know is presented in a straightforward narrative and in chronological order. No embedded links to divert your attention, nor a daunting book of 600 pages with a 35-page introduction. Just straight in, to the point, sixty minutes, done. Then, having absorbed the basics, you may feel inspired to explore further.

Give yourself sixty minutes and see what you can learn …

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

About History in an Hour

Introduction

Emancipation

Nicholas II: The Last Tsar

The 1905 Russian Revolution

The October Manifesto

War

February Revolution

The Provisional Government

The October Revolution

Civil War

Red Terror

‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live’

Appendix 1: Key Players

Appendix 2: Timeline of the Russian Revolution

Copyright

Got Another Hour?

About the Publisher

Note on dates

Until January 1918, Russia used the ‘Old Style’ Julian Calendar that before 1900 was 12 days behind our Gregorian calendar, and after 1900, 13 days behind. This text uses the New Style throughout.

Introduction

The communist system unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest political experiment ever conducted. The Revolution promised freedom from the shackles of Imperialism, corruption and exploitation but until its collapse in 1991, the peoples of the vast Soviet empire endured seventy years of misguided socialism and totalitarianism.

The last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, ruled over a vast empire that was backward, impoverished and in some respects largely resentful of his autocratic rule. Its people demanded reform and change. The effects of the outbreak of war in 1914 finally, in March 1917, brought down the Tsar and the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.

The Provisional Government that replaced the Tsar proved equally ineffectual at addressing the needs of Russia’s major problems. Only the representatives of the workers, or ‘Soviets’, seemed to understand the problems that lay at the heart of the empire. From the various Soviet parties it was the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, that seized power and established the Soviet Union with its promises of a new socialist utopia. The consequences shaped the entire twentieth century and their ramifications were felt across the world.

This, in an hour, is the Russian Revolution.

Emancipation

On 3 March 1861, Alexander II issued what seemed on the face of it the most revolutionary reform in Russia’s history – his ‘Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs’. The edict freed 23 million serfs from their bondage to landowners, and wrested ownership of 85 per cent of Russia’s land from private landowners in favour of the peasants. The landlords, understandably, opposed such a sweeping change but were told by the Tsar, ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.’

Alexander II, c.1870

The high ideals of Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs fell very short of its ambition. Landowners held onto 15 per cent of the land and this was, invariably, the best land; while peasants had to buy back their land from the nobles, usually at an inflated price. The majority were, inevitably, unable to afford the cost, and were offered a loan by the government, repayable at 6 per cent over forty-nine years. The peasant, freed from serfdom, was no better off and no happier.

Twenty years later, on 13 March 1881, a group calling themselves the People’s Will threw a bomb at the Tsar’s carriage in St Petersburg, fatally wounding Alexander II. The Tsar’s son (Alexander III) and twelve-year-old grandson (Nicholas II) were witness to Alexander’s violent end. As future tsars they never forgot.

Ironically, Alexander II had, just hours before his death, put his signature to a draft decree to establish a parliament, a Duma, the first step towards a constitutional monarchy. He knew that the emancipation of the serfs had failed, and that his reforms, though laudable, merely created demand for greater reform. Thus, by their very action, the terrorists had unwittingly aborted any chance of constitutional reform. Instead, they got a new Tsar, Alexander’s son, Alexander III, who immediately tore up his father’s parliamentary proposal, undid his reforms and intensified the level of repression.

The new Tsar’s Manifesto on Unshakable Autocracy, issued within two months of his father’s death, summed up Alexander III’s view on how Russia should be ruled. Liberalism and democracy were considered signs of weakness; for the benefit of all, his people needed to be ruled with a firm hand and the nation needed to be more ‘Russian’. Ethnic languages and nationalistic tendencies were repressed. The vast empire was to be subject to the Tsar’s Russification and autocratic rule.

The Tsar intended to start teaching his son the art of statesmanship once Nicholas had reached the age of thirty. But on 1 November 1894, aged only forty-nine, Alexander III died of kidney disease. His son was still only twenty-six. Following the death of his father, a fearful Nicholas was thrust unprepared into the limelight, reputedly asking, ‘what will become of me and all of Russia?’

Nicholas II: The Last Tsar

Russia in the early twentieth century was a mesh of nationalities and ethnicities – Ukrainian, Georgian, Finnish, Baltic, Armenian, German, and Polish among others. According to the Russian census of 1897, Russians themselves only constituted 44 per cent of the Tsar’s sprawling empire. This was far from a happy conglomeration of nationhood, and the Tsar needed all the mechanisms of State control to maintain command of his subjects.

Imperial Russia

Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and rule by autocratic means, Nicholas misread the underlying discontent within the empire as the malign influence of the Jew, rather than as genuine grievance. Organizations such as the pro-tsarist Black Hundreds instituted pogroms against the Jews; their communities were forced to settle in the Western reaches of the empire, the Pale of Settlement, where their movements were curtailed.

Nicholas II, c. 1900

Sergei Witte, Russia’s minister of finance and, after 1905, Russia’s first prime minister, was convinced that if Russia was to hold its own against the great European powers, it needed to industrialize. He financed Russia’s industrial and economic progress through large foreign loans, burdening Russia with foreign debt, and heavy indirect taxation. This particularly affected the peasants, as rents rose and grain prices fell; in some areas the effect was devastating – such as the famine in central Volga in 1898–99.

Socialists

In 1898, amidst this turmoil, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RDSRP) emerged as the leading advocates of Marxism and revolution. In 1902 its newest member, Vladimir Lenin, published his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? in which he firmly allied the Party to the interests of the working classes. Only the Party truly understood the needs of the workers, more so than the workers themselves, who, left to their own devices, were concerned only with narrow ambitions, such as improved pay and conditions. It was down to a party of professional revolutionaries, fighting on their behalf, the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’, to bring about wholesale revolution.

Declared illegal, in 1903 the RDSRP had to hold its Second Congress in London where its members quarrelled to the point the Party split into two factions – Bolshevik and Menshevik. (Bolshevik translates as the majority faction, the Mensheviks being the minority; confusingly, the Mensheviks were the majority faction until 1917.) Both factions agreed that the three-century-old Romanov dynasty had to go, but whereas Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocated a core of professional revolutionaries under centralized leadership who would lead workers into revolution, the Mensheviks proposed a more gradual approach. Come the revolution, the Bolsheviks would immediately transfer power to the urban working classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks followed the more traditional Marxist thinking that Russia had first to develop as a capitalist economy before being ready to undergo a ‘transition to socialism’, requiring them to work with the Duma. Opposing both, another new party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, believed the route to revolution lay not with the urban working classes but the peasants.

Russo–Japanese War

Russia’s territorial aims in the East risked bringing it into conflict with the ambitions of Japan. On 8 February 1904, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Russian ships based at Port Arthur in Manchuria. The resultant war was a disaster for Russia, the supposedly military superpower. The annihilation of the Russian navy in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan in May 1905 caused great shock in Russia; the defeat attributed directly to the Tsar. His land armies fared no better. If the Tsar hoped the war would divert attention from unrest at home and stir the patriotic breasts of his subjects, he was much mistaken.

The 1905 Russian Revolution

On Sunday, 22 January 1905, the workers of St Petersburg organized a peaceful demonstration to demand political and constitutional reform. Led by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Gapon, 150,000 demonstrators, including whole families, marched through the city streets to present a petition to the Tsar. Penned by Gapon, the petition called for a reduction in the working day from eleven to eight hours; the right to strike; the introduction of universal suffrage; and an end to Russia’s on-going and disastrous war with Japan.

Bloody Sunday and the 1905 Russian Revolution

Gapon and his legion of demonstrators were not anti-tsar – indeed, dressed in their Sunday best, families carried icons and portraits of Nicholas II, whom they affectionately called their ‘little father’, and sung hymns and songs proclaiming their support for him. Unbeknownst to the marchers, Nicholas II, forewarned of the demonstration, was not at the Winter Palace, but at his summer residence on the outskirts of the city.

The Tsar’s troops shooting at demonstrators in St Petersburg, Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905

Arriving at the Palace, the marchers found their way barred by thousands of armed troops who first fired warning shots, then fired directly into the dense crowd. Panic ensued; many were killed or wounded. Cossacks on horseback charged, galloping through the crowds, slashing at people with their sabres. Elsewhere canon was used against the helpless hordes. Estimates vary, but nearly 200 people were killed and many more wounded; the casualties included children.

Bloody Sunday, as the tragedy came to be known, was the moment the Russian people lost their faith in the Tsar. Up to then, there had been economic hardship and discontent; the Tsar ruled by autocracy and he had made use of the Okhrana, his secret police, but on the whole he had the support of the masses. That Sunday, he may not have issued the fatal order to fire but the people held him responsible – and they felt betrayed.

Mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin

Following the defeat at Tsushima during the Russo–Japanese War, mutinies broke out across the armed forces, most notoriously, among the crew of the Battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet. Morale, already low, coupled with harsh discipline and resentment of Russia’s participation in what was viewed as a pointless war, created a volatile situation. On 27 June 1905 the provision of maggot-infested meat brought the crew to the edge of rebellion. When an officer shot one of the crew, spontaneous mutiny broke out. The mutineers, in turn, killed seven officers. Flying under the red flag of revolution, the sailors sailed the ship that evening to the port of Odessa in the Ukraine. The funeral two days later for their fallen comrades turned into a city-wide protest, resulting in government troops firing into the crowds. As the Potemkin set out to sea, Nicholas II dispatched a number of ships to intercept it to force its surrender. But when the Potemkin declined to surrender, these crews refused to open fire. The Potemkin finally reached Romania where its crew gave up the ship and sought asylum.

The Russo-Japanese War was finally concluded in September 1905 with the Treaty of Portsmouth (in New Hampshire). Despite its humiliating defeat, Russia won an honourable peace due to Sergei Witte, the Tsar’s ex-finance minister. For his efforts, Witte, who had been out of political favour, returned to the fold and was appointed prime minister.

The October Manifesto

Nicholas II donated large sums of compensation to the victims of Bloody Sunday and their families but it was not enough – this massacre sparked the 1905 Russian Revolution. Workers and peasants, no longer feeling constrained by the law or loyalty to the Tsar, staged protest marches and strikes throughout the empire. In the countryside, peasants forcibly ejected landowners from their estates; and in cities and towns, workers formed councils of elected workers – or, to use the Russian word, ‘Soviets’.

By October the country was crippled by a general strike. Finally, under such pressure, the Tsar was forced to listen. Taking heed of Witte’s advice, Nicholas II issued the ‘October Manifesto’ on 30 October 1905:

The disturbances and unrest in St Petersburg, Moscow and in many other parts of our Empire have filled our heart with great and profound sorrow … Fundamental civil freedoms will be granted to the population, including real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association.

It was, in effect, an end of the Tsar’s autocracy and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy. Its promise of civil liberties – freedom of speech, press, and assembly – a broad franchise, and a legislative and elected body (the Duma or national parliament) was revolutionary. Laws could now only be passed with the approval of the Duma. The manifesto promised ‘universal male franchise’ to the Duma. Autocracy, it seemed, was to give way to democracy and a sharing of power between the Tsar and his parliament.

The manifesto worked to a degree. The strikes were called off and new political parties, the conservative Octobrists and the Constitutional Democrats (known colloquially as the Kadets) emerged, both supporting the manifesto and determined to use it as a platform for wholesale constitutional reform.

The ‘Soviets’

In October 1905, the strike committee of St Petersburg formed a council of workers, or a ‘Soviet’, to negotiate with the employers and, if necessary, organize strike action. Although it consisted mainly of Mensheviks, the Soviet was not affiliated to any particular party. One radical, Leon Trotsky – who described himself as a ‘non-factional social democrat’ allied to no specific party – was initially its vice-chairman, then chairman. (In fact, Trotsky was for many years closer to the Mensheviks before eventually joining Lenin’s Bolsheviks.) Trotsky scotched the Soviet’s objective of staging a mass strike for fear of handing the government an excuse for greater repression.

Over forty other Soviets sprung up across the empire. But within a couple of months, Nicholas II felt confident enough to suppress the St Petersburg and Moscow Soviets and arrest its leaders. Trotsky, along with other leaders, was arrested, tried and sentenced to exile in Siberia; although he managed to escape and made his way back to London. Nicholas had successfully dealt with the Soviets. It would be twelve years before the workers felt empowered enough to form another.

Pyotr Stolypin

The democratic aspirations of the October Manifesto did not last – the following May, the Tsar issued a revision to the Fundamental Laws, originally issued in 1832, which formalized the new Constitution and the establishment of the Duma but also retained the Tsar’s ‘supreme sovereign power’. Nicholas declared that he would appoint the government (not the people) and reserved the right to dissolve the elected Duma at any time and rule by emergency decree, as well as the right to veto any law passed by the Duma. The Okhrana, meanwhile, retained their oppressive presence.

Nonetheless, elections took place and the first Duma went ahead, meeting on 10 May 1906. Dominated by ministers sympathetic to the peasantry, its demands were too radical for the Tsar and, on 21 July, he responded by dissolving it. On the same day, he appointed Pyotr Stolypin his prime minister.

Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin

Stolypin’s objective was to do away with the peasant communes, which were essentially too backward and liable to stir unrest, and to encourage the peasantry to set up as independent farmers, loyal to the regime. In November 1906, Stolypin abolished the redemption dues that had so hindered the Russian peasant since the Emancipation Edict of 1861. It was, to use Stolypin’s phrase, a ‘wager on the strong and sober’; an attempt to end political unrest among the peasants. But agrarian reform went hand-in-hand with repression – many leading revolutionaries were executed on the orders of Stolypin, victim to the hangman’s noose or, as it became known, ‘Stolypin’s necktie’, while the ‘Stolypin wagon’ exiled vast numbers of political opponents to Siberia.

The second Duma, instituted March 1907, blocked Stolypin’s reforms but the prime minister was not to be denied. With the Tsar’s backing, he managed to have the Duma dissolved within three months. He got the backing of the Octobrists and changed the voting system, thereby ensuring a reduced peasant voice and a greater return of conservative and moderate members. He then managed to form a third Duma, November 1907, one that was decidedly tsarist.

Stolypin may have pushed his reforms too far, thereby earning the disapproval of the Tsar. Indications were that the prime minister was about to be dismissed. On 14 September 1911, Stolypin was shot while attending the opera in Kiev with the Tsar and his two eldest daughters. As he fell, he yelled out, ‘I am happy to die for my Tsar’, and blessed the Tsar with a sign of the cross. Rumours persisted that the assassination had been officially sanctioned, and that Nicholas’ secret police had allowed Stolypin’s assassin, Dmitry Bogrov, easy access to the opera house. As he lay dying in hospital, the Tsar, kneeling at his bedside, begged Stolypin’s forgiveness. The prime minister died four days later on 18 September. Nicholas halted the investigation into the incident and Bogrov, who, it turned out, was an agent of the Okhrana and a revolutionary, was hastily hanged before being properly interviewed. With Stolypin’s assassination, Russia’s programme of reform came to an immediate and abrupt end.

Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia

Since the revolution of 1905 and particularly the events of Bloody Sunday, Nicholas II had become a reviled figure overly influenced, it seemed, by his wife the Empress Alexandra. The Russian people never took to the Empress, granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. They found her aloof and, as a German, doubted her loyalty and resented her relationship with Grigory Rasputin, a starets, a wandering faith healer. Rasputin managed to maintain an influence over the royal family by his mysterious knack of treating the Tsar’s haemophiliac son, Alexei, heir to the Romanov throne. Only Rasputin, it seemed, could stem the poor boy’s bleeding. Protected by the Imperial Family, Rasputin enjoyed a debauched lifestyle that further alienated the resentful people from their tsar.

By 1912, Nicholas’ rule seemed more secure. The Okhrana had regained the upper hand, and he maintained complete control over the Duma. The following year, 1913, the Tsar even enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity as the Romanov dynasty celebrated its 300th anniversary with great pomp and ceremony.

War

On 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austrian–Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia. The Serbian perpetrators were members of a Bosnian-Serbian terrorist group, the Black Hand, who sought by violent means Serbia’s independence from the Austrian–Hungarian Empire. The Serbian government had no hand in the assassination but it was to them that the Austrian–Hungarian government turned its anger, issuing Serbia an ultimatum designed to humiliate. The Serbians, unable to comply with the demands, found themselves at war with their powerful neighbour, who, as insurance, had sought the endorsement of the even more powerful Germany.

It was to Russia, protector of all Slavs, that Serbia turned. The Tsar ordered the mobilization of his nation’s military in order to wage war on Austria–Hungary. He hoped, nonetheless, to avoid war with Germany. Germany, in turn, gave Russia twelve hours to halt its mobilization. The deadline passed, and on 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and, two days later, on France. The Great War had begun. Russia’s war would draw in over fifteen million of its men; eight million soldiers or civilians were killed or wounded; and almost seventy million Russians living in the west of the empire found themselves at some point under enemy occupation.

Despite some initial setbacks, war bound much of Russia together. Patriotism ran high, as did the desire to defend the motherland and inflict defeat on its enemy. It was not to last. As general disillusionment set in, the Duma proposed political reform and the formation of a government that would ‘enjoy public confidence’ but the Tsar, again protective of his autocracy, blocked such proposals, sacked all those who had instigated it, and dissolved the Duma.

In 1915, Russia lost Poland and the Baltic States to the Germans and Austrian–Hungarians. In September 1915, the Tsar, furious at the extent of Russian defeats, dismissed the commander-in-chief, his cousin, the Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich, and took personal command of his armed forces. It was a disastrous move as not only did he lack any experience or expertise, he could no longer blame any defeats on his commander-in-chief, for they were now his responsibility.

The Tsarina’s Rule

With Nicholas away at the front and divorced from what was happening in Petrograd (the Tsar had changed the name of St Petersburg to the less Germanic-sounding Petrograd in August 1914), his wife, Alexandra, ruled on his behalf. Influenced entirely by Rasputin, she exasperated the government with a constant change of personnel. The government’s handling of both internal affairs and the economy, and its failure to stem the run of defeats, had many questioning its ability and loyalty.