Russian Revolution Map – To try to understand the Russian Revolution outside of the broader social context of the time is to neglect the development of nationalism in the region. Wikicommons
Mark Edele receives funding from the Australian Research Council. His book, The Soviet Union. A short story covers similar ground as this essay, but in greater depth. It will be published by Wiley later this year.
Russian Revolution Map
This article is part of our series explaining the key moments in the last 100 years of world political history. In it, our authors examine how and why an event unfolded, its impact at the time, and its relevance to politics today.
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For most people, the term “Russian Revolution” conjures up popular images: protests in a cold February 1917 in Petrograd, big-skinned men in the Petrograd Soviet, Vladimir Lenin addressing the crowd in front of the Finland Station, protesters dispersing in the process. the July days and the storm in the Winter Palace in October.
All of these were important events that forced the Tsar to abdicate, brought the Bolsheviks to power, took Russia out of World War I, set off the British, American, and Japanese, and plunged the Romanov dynasty into years of bloody civil war.
Among revolutionary socialists, they still daydream about a future revolution. Historians on the political right, on the other hand, present them as warnings about what happens if you try to change the world. In Russia, meanwhile, they pose complex challenges to build a past that can inspire the present.
The Russian Empire, already in 1914, under difficult political and social conditions, collapsed under the pressure of modern warfare. In 1916, there was a massive uprising against conscription to work in Central Asia.
The Revolt Of The Center
In 1917, it was the turn of the Russian heartland. Industrial strikes, food shortage protests, and women’s protests coincided with a revolutionary crisis in Petrograd, the capital of the empire.
Eventually, the crisis convinced both the political and military elites to pressure the emperor to abdicate. These events are known as the February Revolution.
They turned out to be only the first step. Throughout 1917, the revolution was radicalized until, in October, the most radical wing of the Russian Social Democrats – Lenin’s Bolsheviks – took power in the name of a revolutionary working class. The October Revolution reignited the Russian Civil War, which the Bolsheviks eventually won.
But the focus on events in Petrograd in 1917 is misleading. If we want to understand the significance of the Russian Revolution for the world today, we need to understand both its place in a broader historical process and its complexities.
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What happened in 1917 was not just the beginning. It was also a moment in the larger trajectory of the Romanov Empire (before Soviet Russia) that found itself in a world war it was ill-prepared to fight.
The year 1917 is part of history, as an empire, built between the 15th and 18th centuries on the basis of peasants tied to the land of their lord (his) and the unlimited power of the emperor (dictatorship) tried to deal with it. A changing world in the 19th and early 20th centuries filled with foreign empires, industrialization and a growing mass society.
It is only a snapshot in the history of imperialism, economic and social change and abolition. These are all ongoing processes that still plague the region today.
The sequence of events began with the lost Crimean War of 1853-56, which precipitated the great reforms of the 1860s and 1870s.
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Together with a determined drive in the 1990s to industrialize the country, these reforms led to a new, modern, urban and educated society.
The more complex society faced its first test in 1904-05. A disastrous war against Japan destabilized the empire enough to trigger the first revolution in 1905. It forced the emperor to give way to modern politics with the creation of a pseudo-parliament, legal parties, and reduced control over the media.
Then came the First World War. The military campaign went badly, reaching elites with manifestly incompetent governance, massively dislocating populations, exacerbating national sentiment in the multinational empire, triggering an economic crisis of enormous proportions, and further polarizing social divisions. have – no.
The result was a cluster of wars, revolutions and civil wars that continued into the early 1920s. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which emerged from this disaster, united most of the countries under Romanov rule. Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland meanwhile went their own way, at least until the Second World War.
File:russian Civil War West.svg
The “Russian Revolution” was then not only Russian and not only a revolution. This was also the moment when modern nations were born.
Regardless of past history, today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia began life in a crucible of war and revolution. Finland and Poland also became independent in 1917.
As one historian pointed out in a summary of events in Ukraine, “the Ukrainian revolution is not the Russian revolution.” Also, the more democratic revolutions in Omsk, Samara and Ufa were not the same as the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, not to mention the ones above the Caucasus, or the great rural revolutions throughout the empire. The other revolutions, often forgotten but part of the process as iconic events in Petrograd, equated to the catastrophic collapse of the Empire in 1918.
But the revolutionary period saw more than just replacing one empire with another. It also changed things decisively. First, the Soviet empire was not capitalist, despite the limited market practices allowed under the New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in 1921 to deal with the catastrophic economic crisis caused by war, revolution, and civil war.
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The new empire was also much more national in form than its Romanov predecessor. The aspirations of non-Russian peoples must be accommodated in some way and therefore a pseudo-federal state, where “Federal Republics” (such as Ukraine, Belarus or Russia) are united in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (or the Soviet Union). In 1991, it would break along the borders of the federal republics, the lines drawn for the most part, due to the reconquest of the Romanov lands by the revolutionary Red Army.
These lines became more important over time, due to another broad aspect of the national transformation of the multiethnic Romanov Empire following the “Russian” Revolution. To deal with the threat of nationalism, the Soviet Union became an “affirmative action power” that did not give Russian minorities the space and means to develop their languages and cultures. This affirmation of the national principle was intended to prevent nationalism and promote the development of socialism. Instead, it “inadvertently contributed to ethnic partisanship.”
Therefore, many of the nationalisms we find in the region today are largely the result of this paradoxical nationalism of the Soviet Union.
Write an article and join a growing community of more than 154,900 scholars and researchers from 4,503 institutions. In the early spring of 1917, the initiative was decided with the Allies. A simultaneous offensive by all the Allies was planned, with the intention of preventing the Germans from moving reserves from one front to another. The plan was destroyed when the weakest link in the chain of allies, Russia, was broken.
Peasant Countries Of The 1905 Russian Revolution By Fjana On Deviantart
Although the Russian army was now better armed, better equipped, and probably better led than ever before, the losses of the previous two and a half years had broken the peace-weary ranks. Yet the army could have held but for the internal collapse. The Russian Revolution broke out in mid-March and the effect on the army was soon apparent. The monarchy in Russia was replaced by a provisional government, whose authority was immediately challenged by the soviets, or “workers’ and soldiers’ councils”. The Soviets could well claim that they were the representatives of the masses and thus the rightful leaders of the revolution, because mass protests rather than constitutional politics overthrew the old regime.
The Russian army remained on the field against the Central Powers, but its spirit was broken and the Russian people were completely exhausted. From a war which the imperial government undertook without being morally and materially prepared for it. Order no. 1, issued on March 1 (March 14, new style) by the Petrograd Soviet, destroyed discipline among the soldiers by ordering that commissions of soldiers or sailors should be formed in all military and naval divisions, and that these commissions should, essentially, , , rebelling against their commanders and seizing control of weapons and ammunition on behalf of the Soviets. The Provisional Government, in its weakness, allowed the situation to slip out of their control and into the hands of the Soviets. The corps, which had deteriorated during the war, was a force to be reckoned with.
Even as early as April, the Austro-Hungarian-German attack on the Stockhide bridgehead, the Russians felt little inclined to fight. The leader
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