Russian Revolution of 1917, Communism, Cold War
The Russian army was the largest in
In the Revolution of 1905, Czar Nicholas II's
priest, Father Gapon led a protest march of tens of
thousands of workers over the conditions in
In February, 1917, in
After the overthrow of the tsar's autocracy, two centers of power emerged. The provisional government led by leaders in the Duma (parliament) was composed of middle class liberals. Kerensky headed the provisional government, distorting the grievances of the lower classes. The new government system was established under constitutional rule. It set up a national election for a constituent assembly to grant and secure civil liberties, release political prisoners, and redirect power to local officials. The other center of power was with the soviets, local councils elected by workers and soldiers. Soviet councils claimed to be true representatives of the people.
Leon Trotsky claimed to be the legitimate political power in
The Bolsheviks, a majority branch of Russian social democracy movement overthrew the provisional government. Marxixt leadership of the Russian Social Democrats took revolutionary steps toward socialism. The Bolsheviks, radical members of the majority, favored a centralized party of active revolutionaries. Revolution alone would lead directly to a socialist regime. The Mensheviks, members of the minority, wanted socialism gradually.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Bolsheviks revolutionary
leadership was Vladamir Ilyich
Ulyanov, or Lenin, a member of the middle
class, expelled from University for engaging in radical activity, and spent
three years as a political prisoner in
Lenin believed the development of Russian capitalism made socialist revolution
possible. The Bolsheviks needed to organize the new class of industrial
workers, to bring revolution. Factory workers needed party leadership to
accomplish the goal of revolution. Russian revolutionary tradition and
Marxism could achieve their goals immediately. The Bolsheviks demanded an
end to the war with
Lenin condemned imperialist war policies and opposed the bourgeoisie
government. He called for "Peace, Land, and Bread Now" and
"All Power to the Soviets," winning Bolshevik support from
workers, soldiers, and peasants. Unemployment, starvation, and chaos in
When the Bolsheviks did not win a majority in the elections, they dispersed the
Constituent Assembly by force, and Lenin's Bolsheviks ruled socialist
The Revolution allowed the Germans to win the war on the Eastern Front.
The socialists held power in what many considered a backward country. The
Russian revolution, "the ten days that shook the world," was a
political transformation that set up future revolutionary struggles. The Bolshevik
takeover in October, 1917 began revolutionary events in
The Bolsheviks eventually won the civil war, gaining greater support and acceptance from the population, and were better organized for the civil war. The Bolsheviks quickly mobilized to fight. Leon Trotsky became the new commisar of war, and his Red Army of 5 million defeated White armies in 1920 and put down the Nationalist uprisings in 1921. The country suffered one million combat casualties, several million deaths from hunger and disease caused by the civil war, 1-300,000 executions, and permanent hatreds among ethnic minorities engendered by the barbarism of the war that brutalized society under the new Bolshevik regime.
The civil war shaped Bolshevik economic "socialism." Taking power in 1917 Lenin expected to create a state capitalist system that resembled successful European wartime economies. The Bolsheviks took control of large scale industry, small-scale private economic activity, banking and all major capital and let agriculture continue. The civil war pushed them toward a radical wartime economy known as "war communism." The Bolsheviks requisitioned grain from the peasantry, made private trade in consumer goods and "speculation" illegal, militarized production facilities, and abolished money. These measures were responses to economic conditions beyond control.
Radical Bolsheviks believed war communism would replace the capitalist system
that collapsed in 1917. Though war communism lasted during the civil war,
the war devastated Russian industry and emptied cities' populations in
Urban workers and soldiers grew discontented with the Bolsheviks. The promise of socialism and workers control turned out a military dictatorship. Strikes and protests broke out in 1920, but the Bolsheviks subdued the "popular revolts." The Bolsheviks would not tolerate and crushed any internal dissent.
The Bolsheviks abandoned war communism due to an economic and political war-ravaged economy. In 1921, the New Economic Policy, (NEP) reverted back to state capitalism after the revolution. The state continued to own all major industry and monetary concerns. Lenin called it the "commanding heights" of the economic system. People were allowed to own private property, trade freely, and farm their land for their own benefit. Fixed taxes were imposed on the peasantry, and what peasants grew beyond the tax requirement was theirs.
Nikolai Bukharin was a Marxist who argued for
taxing private peasant economic activity to industrialize the
Land was redivided to level wealth between rich and poor. Traditional countryside peasant communes produced enough grain to feed the country using primitive farming methods. Manufactured goods had to be produced cheaply enough to benefit urban markets. Peasants traded grain at market and kept their excess grain, their livestock, and their illegal moonshine stills. Hence, there were shortages in grain deliveries to cities.
Joseph Stalin replaced Lenin as the leader of the
Stalin was the undisputed dictator of the
Prompted by fears of falling behind the West and another world war, Stalin's
1927 plan was to step up and increase the pace of industrialization. He
began forced industrialization and total collectivization of
agriculture. In 1928 Stalin ordered officials to begin requisitioning
grains in the Urals and
Large scale rebellions required military intervention and artillery. Peasants resisted forced collectivization by slaughtering their livestock instead of turning it over to the farms. Stalin launched an attack on kulaks, well to do farmers, meaning "tight-fisted -ones." Kulaks were not any better off than their neighbors, and the term was used for those hostile to collectivization.
1.5 million peasants were uprooted, their property
confiscated, and resettled to inhospitable reaches of the Soviet east and north
or to poor farmland. Their land and posessions
were distributed to collective farms or to local officials bent on the "liquidation
process of kulaks as a class." Being forced into collective
farms or the exile of productive members of society didn't produce more
food. Famine spread senselessly across the southern region, the
most productive farming region in
Collectivization provided resources for Stalin's "revolution from above:" a rapid campaign of forced industrialization, The first Five Year Plan 1928-1932, called for industrialization at one of the most stunning rates of economic growth in the modern world. Industrial output and the rate of growth increased greatly at the time of the great economic depression of 1929 in the west The Bolsheviks built new industries in new cities. Steel producing factory towns rivaled anything the West had built. The Industrialization drive transformed the nation's urbanized landscape and population.
The cities of
Heavy industry was favored over light industry and quantity outdid
quality. Stalin's industrialization drive transformed the
Stalinist repression in the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 left a million people dead, and one million and a nalf more in labor camps. Stalin had a personal dictatorship whereby he eliminated enemies real and imagined of the state. Aimed at categories of internal enemies of soviet society, former and current political figures were visible victims. 100,000 Bolshevik party members were removed, and sentenced to prison or execution. Top party officials were denounced, condemned at staged show trials and then shot. In 1937, 40,000 military officers were arrested and 10,000 shot.
Stalin promoted a new, young cadre of officials who owed their careers and
lives to Stalin personally. Ethnic groups were targeted and suspected of
cross-border contacts that were a security threat to Stalin.
2-300,000 kulaks, petty criminals and social misfits were arrested and shot.
The Terror was Stalin's dictator power and personal control over social and
political life in
Communism is used in an economic and political sense. It means,
economically, the ownership by the state of all the means of production and
distribution, and, politically, the dictatorship which permits no free
elections of competing parties. Elections were held in
In the first period of communism, between 1917 and 1921, complete communism was established. Land was nationalized and given to the people to use, rather than to own. Businesses and banks were nationalized. Factories were controlled by soviets. There was a working class struggle. The dictatorship of the proletariat had intellectuals, middle class, and believers in free enterprise dictatorially eliminated. The dictatorship of the workers eliminated all bourgeoisie ideas. Then the classless society was achieved.
The second period, 1921-1928, began the NEP or New Economic Policy of a limited capitalism. The third period, from 1928, started Collective Farms and Industrial modernization 5 year plans.
The Cold War began at the end of WWII. Allied powers relations
were over issues of power and influence in central and eastern
Europe. After the war, relations became that of mutual distrust and
Stalin generated a siege mentality of the authoritarian Soviet regime. Everyone was a potential threat or enemy of the state. Stalin's foreign policy was Anti-Western policy. The Soviets' industrial losses and fears of invasion meant they wanted political, economic, and military control of the Eastern European countries they had liberated from Nazi rule.
The Soviets were suspicious of their wartime allies, remembering American and
British anticommunism between the world wars. Soviet diplomatic pressure,
political infiltration, and military power in
Winston Churchill stated "an Iron Curtain had descended across
In the New Cold War,
The "Berlin Airlift" carried supplies to the western zone of
the city, breaking the siege. The two Germanies
looked like armed camps. The
The Cold War was waged by the
Stalin wanted to incorporate all of