quarreled among themselves, enabling the Tsar to temporarily suspend the Duma and reestablish control.
The 1905 Revolution failed to solve any of Russian problems.
The 1917 Russian Revolution began when some poor disgruntled women, standing in a bread line in Moscow, began shouting “down with the Tsar”. Police intervened and a riot ensued. Army troops were called in, and, in a totally unexpected turn of events, the soldiers (who were mainly from the peasant class) took the side of the woman. They began “to desert the Tsar’s army in droves”.
The 1917 Russian Revolution was compromised of three major watershed events.
- The first is the complete defeat of the Tsar, Nicholas II in what is known as the Febru ary Revolution. The Tsar abdicated, effectively ending the Russian monarchy.
- The second is the defeat, (by the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin) of the Provision al Government that had replaced the Tsar.
- The third is the institutionalization of Bolshevik rule, the first step to the formation of the Soviet Union that controlled Russia until 1991.
The provisional government, headed by liberal democrat Prince George Lvov and then moderate Socialist Alexander Kerensky, guaranteed civil liberties, freed political prisoners and sought to establish a middle-of the road democratic regime. From the start its hold on Russia was weak and it was never meant to be more than a provisional or temporary power. Its main weakness was its inability to feed the population and deal with its own internal politics.
On the night of October 24, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup, engineered by Trotsky and assisted by the workers’ Red Guard and the sailors of Kronstadt. They captured the government buildings and the Winter Palace in Petrograd. The Provisional Government was overthrown. Kerensky fled the country. A second all-Russian congress of soviets met and approved the coup after the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who believed the Bolsheviks, were moving “too radically and too fast” walked out of the meeting.
The Council of People’s Commissars, was set up with Lenin as Chairman and Trotsky as Foreign Commissar. The second congress immediately called for cessation of hostilities, gave private and church lands to village soviets, and abolished private property. The Soviets (local councils elected by bodies of workers and peasants) were now in power.
Lenin, as Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars, abolished all private ownership of land in Russia and began distributing it to the peasants. Banks were nationalized – and factories were given over to the control of the workers. Lenin closed the Constituent Assembly – taking complete control of Russia. He also