The Russian Revolution and Its Effects

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes and effects of the Russian Revolution (Skill 1.B; LO E).
• Account for KC-4.2.I.A: how the First World War sharpened long-running Russian problems and generated support for revolutionary change.
• Account for KC-4.2.I.B: how military and worker insurrections, supported by the revived Soviets, undermined the Provisional Government and produced the Bolshevik Revolution.
• Account for KC-4.2.I.C: how the Bolshevik takeover produced a protracted civil war between communist forces and their foreign-aided opponents.
• Account for KC-4.2.I.D.i: how Lenin's New Economic Policy compromised communist principles to improve economic performance.

Topic 8.3 covers the Russian Revolution in four phases: the long-running pre-revolutionary tensions sharpened by the First World War; the February Revolution of March 1917 that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II; the October Revolution of November 1917 that brought the Bolsheviks under Lenin to power; and the protracted civil war that produced the Soviet polity by 1922. KC-4.2.I captures the central frame: the Russian Revolution produced a regime built on Marxist-Leninist theory.

The pre-revolutionary tensions (KC-4.2.I.A). The First World War sharpened long-running Russian problems of political stagnation, social inequality, incomplete industrialization, and food and land distribution. The pre-1914 Russian state combined elements that other European great powers had moved past by the mid-nineteenth century. The Romanov dynasty under Tsar Nicholas II (reigning since 1894) maintained autocratic rule with limited concessions to representative government following the 1905 Russian Revolution: the October Manifesto of 17 October 1905 had created a parliamentary Duma, but the Tsar repeatedly modified the electoral law (notably in June 1907) to limit the Duma's representativeness. Russian industrial development in the late nineteenth century under Sergei Witte's finance ministry (1892-1903) had been substantial but partial: a small but militant industrial workforce concentrated in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and a handful of other cities sat alongside a vast peasant majority that the 1861 emancipation had freed from serfdom but left in conditions of economic precarity. Pyotr Stolypin's land reforms of 1906-1911 had attempted to create a class of independent peasant smallholders but had not resolved the underlying land question by 1914.

The wartime mobilization placed unsustainable pressure on the Russian state. Russia mobilized roughly 12 million men over the course of the war; combat casualties through 1916 reached approximately 1.7 million dead and 5 million wounded; civilian food shortages in Petrograd and other major cities worsened through the winter of 1916-1917 as the railway system broke down under the strain of military supply requirements; and the Tsar's personal command of the army from August 1915 (taking over from Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich) meant that he was personally identified with the wartime failures. The unpopular role of Tsarina Alexandra (German-born, deeply unpopular with the Russian population) and the influence of the mystic-monk Grigori Rasputin on the imperial family further discredited the dynasty. Rasputin was assassinated by a group of conservative nobles on 30 December 1916; the political crisis continued.

The February Revolution (March 1917). Bread riots and a women's-day demonstration in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 (23 February Old Style) escalated into a general strike and a soldiers' mutiny over the next five days. The Petrograd garrison refused to fire on the demonstrators; on 12 March the Duma's leadership formed a Provisional Committee, and the workers and soldiers reactivated the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (modeled on the 1905 Soviet). On 15 March 1917 (2 March Old Style) Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael, who declined the throne the following day. The Romanov dynasty (in power since 1613) ended.

The post-February political settlement combined a Provisional Government drawn from the Duma's liberal-conservative leadership (under Prince Lvov initially, then Alexander Kerensky from July 1917) with the Petrograd Soviet's parallel authority over the workers and soldiers. The arrangement (often called "dual power") was unstable. The Provisional Government's two principal commitments — continuing the war on the Allied side, and deferring the land question and constituent-assembly elections until the war's end — both proved untenable. The June-July 1917 Kerensky offensive against Austria-Hungary collapsed within ten days; the Petrograd uprisings of mid-July 1917 (the "July Days") were suppressed but indicated the political weakness of the Kerensky government. The September 1917 Kornilov affair (the abortive march on Petrograd by General Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army) further weakened the Provisional Government and allowed the Bolsheviks to rebuild their political position after the July suppression.

The October Revolution and the Bolshevik consolidation (KC-4.2.I.B). Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov, 1870-1924) had returned to Petrograd from Swiss exile on 16 April 1917 in a sealed train arranged by the German General Staff (which calculated, correctly, that Lenin's return would destabilize the Russian war effort). Lenin's April Theses immediately on his return called for "all power to the Soviets," an immediate end to the war, and the redistribution of land to the peasantry. Through summer and autumn 1917 the Bolshevik Party (one of two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) systematically built up its presence in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. By October 1917 the Bolsheviks held majorities in both Soviets; the Bolshevik Central Committee on 23 October (Old Style) voted to attempt an armed seizure of power.

The October Revolution (Bolshevik Revolution) took place in Petrograd on the night of 6-7 November 1917 (24-25 October Old Style). Bolshevik Red Guards under Leon Trotsky's Military Revolutionary Committee occupied the principal government buildings, the railway stations, the telephone exchange, and the State Bank; the Winter Palace, where the Kerensky cabinet was meeting, was taken in the early hours of 8 November. Kerensky escaped; the rest of the Provisional Government was arrested. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, meeting in the Smolny Institute, ratified the transfer of power to a new Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) under Lenin's chairmanship.

The new Bolshevik government immediately issued the Decree on Peace (calling for an end to the war on terms of "no annexations and no indemnities"); the Decree on Land (transferring landed estates to the peasantry); and a series of decrees on workers' control of factories, the abolition of titles and ranks, and the secularization of marriage and divorce. The Constituent Assembly elections of 25 November 1917 (12 November Old Style) gave the Bolsheviks roughly 24 percent of the vote against the Socialist Revolutionaries' 41 percent; the Assembly met for one session on 18 January 1918 and was dispersed by Bolshevik troops on its second day. The single-party Bolshevik regime was consolidated.

The Russian Civil War (KC-4.2.I.C). The Bolshevik takeover produced a protracted civil war between communist forces and their opponents, who were aided by foreign powers. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 ended Russian participation in the First World War on terms that conceded substantial western territory to Germany (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland) and substantial reparations. The treaty allowed the Bolsheviks to focus on the internal political struggle but also produced the breakaway of the new states the treaty recognized.

The civil war (1918-1922) pitted the Bolshevik Red Army — built by Trotsky as People's Commissar for War from March 1918 and eventually numbering roughly 5 million by 1920 — against multiple White armies. The principal White forces were General Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in the south of Russia; Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak's Siberian forces in the east (Kolchak proclaimed himself "Supreme Ruler of Russia" in November 1918); General Nikolai Yudenich's North-Western Army operating against Petrograd; and General Pyotr Wrangel's forces in Crimea after Denikin's collapse. The Whites combined former Imperial officers, conservative-liberal politicians, Cossack forces, and various minority nationalist movements; their political program was inconsistent and they failed to coordinate effectively across the vast geographic scale of the conflict.

Foreign powers intervened on the White side at various points. The principal Allied interventions included the British and French expeditions to Murmansk and Archangel (from spring 1918); the Japanese, American, British, French, and Italian expedition to Vladivostok (from August 1918); and a British naval squadron in the Baltic. The Czechoslovak Legion (former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war who had fought on the Russian side) revolted against Bolshevik authority in May 1918 and controlled much of the Trans-Siberian Railway through 1919. The Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 ended in the Treaty of Riga (March 1921) that fixed the Polish-Soviet border substantially east of the Curzon Line.

The Red Army defeated the Whites in the south by November 1920 (Wrangel's evacuation from Crimea); the eastern White forces collapsed by 1922 (Kolchak captured and executed in February 1920; the Far Eastern Republic absorbed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in November 1922). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally proclaimed on 30 December 1922.

The civil war's costs were enormous. Combat casualties on both sides reached approximately 1.5 million; civilian losses to disease, famine, and political violence reached substantially higher figures. The Russian famine of 1921-1922 (caused by the cumulative effect of war, civil war, and the Bolshevik forced grain requisitioning of "War Communism") killed approximately 5 million people, despite substantial international relief efforts coordinated by the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover.

The New Economic Policy (KC-4.2.I.D.i). To improve economic performance, Lenin compromised communist principles and adopted some free-market practices under the New Economic Policy. The Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1921 (held during the Kronstadt sailors' revolt of February-March 1921, in which the formerly Bolshevik-loyal Kronstadt naval base demanded an end to War Communism and the restoration of soviet democracy) approved the transition. The principal New Economic Policy provisions replaced the wartime forced grain requisitioning with a fixed agricultural tax payable in kind; restored small-scale private enterprise (the so-called "Nepmen" who operated retail trade and small industry); legalized agricultural markets; and accepted limited foreign investment.

The New Economic Policy was understood by Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership as a tactical retreat from the maximalist War Communism program of 1918-1921, not as a long-term strategic direction. Lenin described it as "two steps forward, one step back." The policy produced a substantial recovery of the Russian economy through the mid-1920s: industrial production reached pre-war levels by 1926; agricultural output stabilized; and the worst conditions of the famine and civil war eased. The political price was a substantial increase in social inequality (the urban Nepmen and the more prosperous peasants, the so-called "kulaks," accumulated visible wealth) and an internal Bolshevik debate over the long-term direction of Soviet economic policy.

Lenin suffered a series of strokes from May 1922 onward and died on 21 January 1924. The succession struggle that followed (covered in Topic 8.6) produced Joseph Stalin's gradual consolidation of power between 1924 and 1929, the eventual abandonment of the New Economic Policy in favor of the centralized Five-Year Plans (from October 1928), and the forced collectivization of agriculture (from 1929) that would substantially reshape Soviet society.

The Skill 1.B argument. Topic 8.3's suggested skill is 1.B (Explanation: explain a historical concept, development, or process). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should describe the multi-phase character of the revolutionary process: the long-running pre-1917 tensions, the wartime acceleration, the February Revolution that overthrew the dynasty, the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, the civil war that consolidated their authority, and the New Economic Policy that stabilized the new regime. Second, students should connect the revolutionary process to the broader twentieth-century European political contest that KC-4.2 frames: the Soviet polity that emerged from the revolution provided the principal twentieth-century communist state and the ideological alternative to liberal democracy and to fascism that Topic 8.6 covers.

Three sources framing the revolution: Lenin's pre-revolutionary program, the Provisional Government's Order Number 1, and a foreign correspondent's eyewitness account.

1. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Account for the long-running Russian problems that the First World War sharpened. Cite political, social, economic, and agricultural conditions as of 1914.
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.I.B: how did military and worker insurrections, supported by the revived Soviets, undermine the Provisional Government? Cite Order Number 1, the failed Kerensky offensive, and the Kornilov affair.
3. (Causation) Account for the Bolshevik consolidation between October 1917 and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. What did the Bolsheviks do with their first three months in power?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.I.C: how did the Bolshevik takeover produce a protracted civil war? Cite the principal White armies, the foreign interventions, and the eventual Bolshevik consolidation.
5. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.I.D.i: why did Lenin compromise communist principles under the New Economic Policy? Cite the Kronstadt revolt and the recovery of the early-1920s Soviet economy.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.