The Russian Revolutions

I. The 1st Russian Revolution--weariness with the war, and the shortages of food and other materials, made Russian workers and their families willing to stand up to the state oppression to end the war and bring their loved ones homes.



A. February Revolution--began on February 23, which socialists declared Working Women’s Day

1. Distributed leaflets--the socialists in Petrograd (the Russianized version of St. Petersburg) marked the day by distributing leaflets to workers in the city, made speeches, and held meetings, but did not call for the workers to go on strike or take any action, for fear of government reprisal.

2. Spontaneous strikes--many women workers in the city, tired of seeing their families go to bed hungary every night, went out on strike, marching in the streets and calling their fellow workers out with them. Discontent was focused food, with shouts of “Bread for the workers!” and “Down with high prices! Down with hunger!”

3. Popular support--the next day, women workers in Petrograd were joined by approximately 400,000 workers in the city square, demanding an end to the war. Armed police attacked the unarmed crowd; soldiers in barracks in the city were used to assist police patrols, and a contingent of soldiers was recalled from the front to put down the rebellion--but instead fraternized with the crowd, and joined them, disarming the police and arresting politicians. The tsar’s advisors recommended that he abdicate the throne, which he agreed to do on March 1.

B. Provisional Government



1. Russian Duma--dominated by landowners and industrialists; few members of the small bourgeois class were members, and those who were largely followed the lead of the upper classes.

a) Duma leaders tried to maintain the monarchy until it became impossible for Nicholas to hang on. The tsar’s ineffectiveness was magnified because during the war he stayed close to the front, leaving his wife Tsarina Alexandria, to rule on domestic issues. The tsarina, unfortunately, had come under the influence of an allegedly debauched Russian Orthodox monk, Grigory Rasputin, who was able to bring comfort to her hemophiliac son.

b) Duma provisional government was dominated by large landowners and industrialists, and lead by a member of the royal family, Prince L’vov. The only figure involved with the provisional government with any revolutionary credentials was Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer who had defended revolutionaries in court.


2. Establishment of the Petrograd Soviet--the lesson learned from the aborted 1905 Revolution led to the re-establishment of the Petrograd Soviet. The worker-led soviets quickly became the focus of the revolution and the de facto government of the city. The elected executive board took over the responsibility of the day-to-day governing of the city--providing food for mutinying soldiers, overseeing the arrest of old police and government officials, arranging for each factory to provide volunteers for the revolutionary militia that maintained revolutionary order, and establishing a newspaper to keep citizens informed of events.


a) All of this was done without much guidance from previous revolutionary leaders, who had largely been exiled to Siberia--although most had subsequently escaped and were living elsewhere in Europe (or the United States, in Trotsky’s case).

3. Russian Social Democratic Labor Party--the main Marxist political party on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, but rent by factional splits.

a) Mensheviks--Menshevik means minority party in Russian. The Mensheviks argued for a broadly-based radical socialist party, but one that would cooperate with bourgeois political parties.


b) Bolsheviks--Bolshevik means majority party in Russian--but the Bolsheviks’ position as majority party was very short-lived, largely because of the belief of their leader, V.I. Lenin, that the socialist revolution would be best served by leadership provided by a small vanguard of dedicated revolutionaries, like himself, rather than relying on inexperienced leaders rising to the top in the chaos of a developing revolution.


c) Unattached radicals--some members of the RSDLP remained unaffiliated with either faction--most conspicuously Trotsky--until forced to make a choice in October 1917.

4. War of Revolutionary Defense

a) The Duma provisional government refused to pull out of the war, provoking great displeasure from the Petrograd Soviets (and much of the rest of the country as well).

b) Experienced radical leaders were still outside of the country at this point. The first two to arrive in Petrograd, Stalin and Molotov, had little expertise in Marxist revolutionary thought (Stalin, in fact, was little more than a hired thug at this point), and offered little guidance to the soviets.


c) Although the soldiers and workers had little confidence in the leaders of the Duma, but they had less confidence in their own ability to guide a revolution themselves, and therefore took little action against the Duma.

5. Failure of the Provisional Government--many blame the arrival of Lenin from Switzerland (courtesy of the German government, which transported him via rail to Sweden, then by ferry to Finland, and then by rail to Finland Station in Petrograd); but it was the government’s insistence on carrying on the war effort, and the growing disenchantment of the greatest number of Russians with this policy, that led to their downfall.

a) Tsarism without the Tsar--the Duma provisional government attempted to maintain the policies of the Tsarist regime without the Tsar as figurehead, not realizing it was the policies that made the Tsar unpopular.

b) Russia’s “colonies” were not overseas, but its governance of non-Russian peoples--fifty percent of the population--within its “empire.”

c) The continuation of unpopular policies quickly made the provisional government unpopular, and this more than any machinations on the part of Lenin led to its downfall.


d) The Kerensky Offensive--the straw that broke the camel’s back. Caving in to continued pressure from the allies, Kerensky (who came to power because of his own political skills, and the lack of such skills by nearly everyone else in the Duma) agreed to opening a new offensive in Austrian Silesia (part of the present-day Czech Republic). The military offensive was a disaster--horrendous casualties, along with mass desertions and mutinies. Kerensky vacillated between attempting to reassert tsarist military discipline, and co-opting militant leftist leaders within the ranks. Lenin had anticipated this development, and was ready to take advantage of the situation.



II. The Soviet Revolution

A. The Bolshevik Revolution--resulted from great number of Russians, dissatisfied with the vacillations and lack of success of the provisional government--and particularly its failure to end Russian involvement in the war--turned to someone who promised a new solution to their problems.


1. Lenin’s vision--his insistence upon building a revolutionary vanguard within the nascent (small and brand new) trade union movement within the small industrial sector gave the Bolsheviks a huge advantage over other groups.

a) Party organization--by the summer of 1914, the Bolsheviks had a substantial following in the factories of Petrograd, and a large contingent presenting the working class in the Duma--although many went to prison for refusing to support the war effort.


2. Trotsky’s vision--Trotsky argued that although the working-class in Russia was very small, because of the country’s “special circumstances” (mainly having to do with the working-class being concentrated in Petrograd and Moscow), that Russia could “skip” the bourgeois revolution and proceed directly to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. “Peace, Land, Bread”--Lenin’s political program, as it was presented to Russians, was simply stated, and appealed to the great mass of people. His speeches and pamphlets distilled Russian dissatisfactions in much the same way that Thomas Paine did for Americans in the Revolutionary War.

4. Kornilov Affair--dissatisfaction with the provisional government came not only from the left, but from the right as well. General Kornilov attempted to lead Russian troops against the workers’ militia in Petrograd, but the cossacks abandoned him, and the militia captured Kornilov and about 7,000 of his supporters with little trouble

5. Bolsheviks become increasingly popular, and during the summer won majorities in both the municipal and parliamentary elections in Petrograd.

6. The October Revolution-- “The Ten Days that Shook the World” The Bolsheviks were able to seize power in Petrograd with little difficulty, and practically no bloodshed. The Bolsheviks declared the dictatorship of the proletariat--distributing land to peasants, nationalizing the banks, seizing all church property (including bank deposits), seizing all private bank deposits, handing over control of factories to the soviets, and fixing the wage rate higher that it had been during the war, as well as declaring a standard 8 hour work day.
Scene from Reds



B. The Aftermath

1. Brest-Litovsk Treaty--Germany demanded (and eventually received) land concessions, which cost Russian most of the Ukraine--which included most of the country’s known coal reserves, and the best land for growing wheat. Trotsky attempted to forestall this development by refusing to sign the demands-- “neither war nor peace”--but Lenin, conceding the war weariness of the country, decided to make the concessions, while hoping that socialist revolutions in the rest of Europe would make the treaty moot.

2. Internal threats-- “white” (as opposed to “red”) Russians and Cossacks--mainly large landowners and their mercenaries--led the “white” forces. Bolsheviks forces eventually responded to the white atrocities with atrocities of their own, including the murder of the royal family.

3. External threats--Russia (or the Soviet Union, as it was known by now) was also invaded by Japan, Great Britain, and the United States in the years immediately after the end of the war--although only Japan stayed any length of time.