Russian revolution
What were the causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905?
The start of the Russian rev. was it was an empire of wide struggle of heavy violence both anti-government and undirected swept through vast areas of the Russian empire. It was neither controlled nor managed. Nor did it has a single cause or aim. But the direct cause was the abject failure of the Czar’s military forces in the initially-popular Russo-japanese war. With this it set off series of revolutionary activities. Some of them by mutinous soldiers other times by rev. societies.
Along with everything else going on it also included with people whom belong to the middle and lower classes that there where to be better working conditions higher pay, and some liberal and political changes to be made. In response to this the army opened fire and started a brutal bloody fight. (The banquets were a prelude to the dramatic events of Bloody Sunday January 9, 1905, when government troops fired on peaceful marchers)
Hearing this event that peaceful protesters had been massacred over it provoked a widespread outrage. Within months’ time many industrial workers throughout the empire went in strike to protest the government conduct. Soon students at universities and even high schools followed suit afterwards. Disorder broke out among minorities seeking cultural autonomy and political rights. Peasents started to attack landlords’ estates. Members of the middle class defined the government restrictions on public meetings. The entire society seemed on the verge of collapse.
To what extent was World War I a cause of the March and October Revolutions?
The rev. in March 1917 was a revolution around Petrograd (now known as Saint Petersburg). In this chaos members of the Imperial parliament assumed control of the country forming the Russian Provisional gov. The army leadership felt they did not have the means suppress the revolution and Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, abdicated.
The Great Oct. socialist rev. and commonly referred to as red October was the Bolshevik revolution. This was a seizure of state power instrumental in the larger Russian rev. in 1917. This took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated 25 of October 1917.
What roles did Trotsky, Lenin, and Kerensky play in the Bolshevik takeover?
Lenin: He was a great revolutionary thinker. He was editor of the Communist newspaper named Iskra 1900-, and founder of the Bolsheviks which was London Conference 1903, when the Russian Communist Party split in two. Also he preserved – for years he led the Bolsheviks from exile in Switzerland. He was ruthless – he formed the Assembly in 1917, but when it returned a majority of Social Revolutionaries but not Bolsheviks he simply abolished it and declared the ‘dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and the one-party state. When there was opposition, he created the Cheka. When there was Civil War he brought in War Communism and shot strikers.
Kerensky: Trotsky was one of the main thinkers behind the Communists.
He had become a workers’ leader aged only 20, and in 1900 was exiled. He spent most of the next 17 years abroad – apart from 1905, when he came back and became the Chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet during the 1905 revolution. Trotsky organized the November Revolution, 1917. Lenin did not like Trotsky, but Trotsky was so important that he was forced to work with him Trotsky became Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee – ie leader of the Bolshevik Red Guards. As such, it was Trotsky who organized the November Revolution and carried it out.