The following sections overview the Russian Revolution, beginning with the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in 1896 and tracing Russian history through the Revolution to World War Two. Section 20.1, Russia on the Eve of the Revolution, is the same as in my "History of the Soviet Union" which is also a Buffalo Seminary Site. Section 20.2 is an overview of Soviet history from 1917 to 1941 and considers Lenin, the Revolution, and Stalin. This period of Soviet history is examined more extensively in my "History of the Soviet Union."
Harry B. Schooley
(Section 20.1)
Czar Nicholas II will inherit a crown with absolute power, but he lacked the will and judgment to use that power in a way meaningful to a Russia experiencing the need for change.
(Section 20.2)
On the background of Russia's disastrous experience in World War One, the monarchy will be swept away by the winds of revolution. Beginning in March, 1917, the Russian Revolution toppled the czarist regime, replacing it with a Provisional Government of moderate socialists who unwisely continued Russia's participation in the war. Radical socialists led by Leon Trotsky, taking advantage of working class unrest, formed a Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies to challenge the Provisional Government for control of the revolution. Led by Vladimir Lenin and promising "Land, Bread, and Peace," the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party won control of the Soviet and organized a coup d'etat that would bring them to power in November,1917. Renaming Russia the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and themselves the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks then set out to reconstruct Russia as a socialist state and in so doing created a dictatorship that subjected all aspects of society to state control.
Following the death of Lenin in 1924, Josef Stalin won a three-year power struggle with Trotsky to become the Soviet leader. Stalin's rule would last until his death in 1953. It would be Stalin who would transform the Soviet Union to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship founded on a Cult of Personality celebrating Stalin as the source of all that was good and true. Stalin implemented a series of Five Year Plans were in the Soviet economy would be rapidly and highly industrialized. All agriculture would be collectivized and operated under state control. Police terror became the means to the end. All who dissented from, questioned, or resisted Stalin's policies were labeled "enemies of the people" and "liquidated" through arrest, imprisonment, and execution. A series of state-sanctioned purges eliminated all of Stalin's enemies, real or imagined, including many "Old Bolsheviks" who had once been close to Lenin. In June 1941, German armies would invade the Soviet Union, bringing the country into World War Two.