Soviet Union

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION of October 1917, which brought the leftist Bolshevik (or Communist) Party of Vladimir I. Lenin into power, had its origins in World War I, a war driven by monarchical alliances on the right. In August, fulfilling its alliance obligations to France, the Russia of Tzar Nicholas II entered the war on the side of France. By August 4, Great Britain would join them. These countries were opposed by imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, sometimes called the Austrian Empire. At first, the entry of Russia into the war was felt to be a great blessing to beleaguered England and France. Yet, the immense size of the country was its own downfall. As Barbara Tuchman wrote in The Guns of August, “as the Grand Duke [Nicholas] confessed to [Raymond] Poincaré [the president of France], the problem was that in an empire as vast as Russia, when an order was given no one was ever sure whether it had been delivered.”

In August 1914, the high command, the STAVKA, was totally unprepared for modern war. By 1916, war weariness had begun to spread through the Russian people. Orlando Figes, in A People's Tragedy, quotes a soldier writing to his wife in November 1916, “they have suffered so much, that it's all they can do to stop their hearts from breaking and to keep themselves from losing their mind.”

On February 23, 1917 (March 8 in our modern calendar), workers began to demonstrate against the suffering from the cost of the war on the Eastern Front (a term used to distinguish the fighting in Eastern Europe from that in France, the Western Front). At the time, Nicholas was fatefully out of the capital at his military headquarters at Mogilev. Before he could return to the capital of St. Petersburg, changed to Petrograd because it seemed too German, a provisional government under Prince Georgi Lvov was installed in the former tzarist Winter Palace. However, the new provisional government was unable to stop the rioting in the aroused capital. By February 28 (March 12, new style), as Figes notes, the casualties of the near anarchy were “up to 1,500 people killed and about 6,000 wounded.” Nicholas abdicated, ending over three centuries of rule by the House of Romanov in Russia.

However, even with Nicholas dethroned, Lvov was unable to govern because a parallel regime already existed, with roots in the revolution of 1905. Workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors formed soviets, or councils, throughout Russia. During the months to come, the provisional government, under Lvov and then his minister for war, Alexander Kerensky, fought a losing battle against the soviets. In April, Lenin returned from exile in Zurich and immediately sought an alliance with the soviets, and ultimately won their support for his Bolshevik Party. The death knell for the provisional government came in August 1917. At that time, Kerensky had sought General Lavr Kornilov to restore order in the capital. Instead, Kornilov saw an opening to make himself military dictator. To Kerensky's chagrin, he had to turn to the Bolsheviks and the soviets for enough fighting men to defeat Kornilov, who was arrested on September 1, 1917. When a Democratic Conference ended on September 14, with no decision on how to share power between middle-class parties like the Kadets and the soviets, Lenin saw a wedge in which to make his bid for supremacy. On October 7, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd from Finland, where he had fled from arrest during the summer.

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