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Stalin, after Lenin’s death, found himself in the moderate group which desired to continue with the

New Economic Policy.  He did not agree with the group’s philosophy, but he needed them for selfish reasons - to defeat his rivals (Trotsky, Preobrazhensky, Zinoviev and Kamenev) to gain power within the Communist Party.  Stalin eventually did win the power struggle in 1927.  He had been in high standing already as the General Secretary of the Party.  After gaining official power, he removed Trotsky from the Communist Party.  Trotsky was sentenced to death for treason, and was assassinated in Mexico in 1940.  Some have a theory that it was Stalin’s agents who killed him.

Stalin being in power meant that the communist way of thinking was changing.  Stalin changed the slogan to “Socialism in One Country”.  He implemented a secret police force of Cheka and OGPU, who hunted down the enemies of his five year plan.  By 1937, a large percentage of peasants were on collective farms.  He began to slowly stop rationing and improvements to standard living were made.
The First Five Year Plan, formed in 1928, had three key features: the blueprint for a command economy was built where there were economical targets that would have to be reached.  Peasants were forced to give up their farms and start work on collective farms, a process called collectivization.  There was a peasant class called the Kulaks that met a nasty end - the entire class was obliterated; killed or sent to prison camps.

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

-Joseph Stalin

This is because they were a natural threat to collectivization.  Stalin wanted to force heavy industry to help the USSR develop their infrastructure and weaponry production.

“We must do in ten to fifteen years what you have done in 150.”

-Joseph Stalin

This plan, while it improved production exponentially, cost a lot in human suffering through Gulags (forced labour camps).

Because of the success of the First Five Year Plan, it seemed wise to create a Second Five Year Plan. This one had harder to reach goals and had to be modified midway through the timeline.

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The initial outbreak of the revolution in March 1917 was caused by the Cossacks shooting their own commander and joining a group of over 200,000 protesters in Petrograd.  Nicholas II literally said, “Nonsense, I shall not even reply.”  when informed of the situation.  By March 14, Moscow had fallen and Tsar was placed in house arrest in a nearby cottage.  Compared to other revolutions, this one was very small.  The autocracy simply imploded, rather than blowing up on the nation.

March 16, 1917: the Soviet and the Duma joined forces to declare a Provisional Government.  At this time, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were all out of the country.  The Provisional Government promised a Constituent Assembly and to legalize strikes.  Unfortunately, they did not realize just how bad of a state Russia was in when they took control.  Famine was continuous at this point.  Most of the leaders did not even believe that they were legitimate themselves, as they had not been elected.  They wanted to hold a constituent assembly to make themselves feel like a legitimate democratic government.  After all, that is a part of democracy.  However, there was a heavy presence of German military, which made this process nearly impossible.  The people were also fairly unwilling to fight against Germany at this point.  Lenin had a slogan: “Peace, Bread and Land” that addressed Gosudarstvennaya Duma Gosudarstvennaya Duma all of these issues.

On April 16, 1917, Lenin returned from exile.  He was startled by how unmotivated the revolutionaries were, and came up with his April Thesis:

Proletariat and peasants to start the communist revolution.  Bourgeois revolution is the only thing that has been accomplished thus far

Immediate peace

Seizure of gentry land

All power to Soviets

Seizure of factories

This is also when he came up with his slogan “Peace, bread and land”, which gained the support of the Bolsheviks and the Soviets.

War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created.
-Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and War

In mid-July, radical soldiers and mods worked with the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government.  The Soviet did not support them, and they quickly failed.  The Soviets were quickly gaining power.  Lenin fled the Provisional Government and joined the Bolsheviks from Finland.  Alexander Kerensky came into play at this point, becoming P.M..

Later in August, a group of current and former Russian officials came together to try to collaborate on solving Russia’s biggest problems.  Unfortunately, all this did was make the bridges between Marxist and non-Marxist groups more unstable.

Two groups were working together at this point.  Socialists, led by Kerensky, and Constitutional Democrats, led by General Kornilov.  There was a threat in Petrograd, and so these two groups sent troops to protect the government.  However, Kornilov betrayed Kerensky and turned it into an attempted coup.  Kerensky gained the loyalty of the masses to save the revolution.  The Bolsheviks had a new respect from the population, as they had defeated Kornilov’s attempted coup.

The Bolshevik revolution followed closely after Kornilov’s failed coup.  The October-November Revolution started with the Bolsheviks taking Petrograd on October 13, then Moscow on October 23, the same day that Lenin returned.  On November 7, they joined forces with Trotsky and the Soviets and took power from the Provisional Government.

Within the first few months of Lenin’s new government, he made it clear that he did not want the war to continue.  He also wanted peasants to take over the land in a collective way, rather than in plots of land, which the peasants took willingly.  Lenin opened up negotiations with Germany to establish a state of peace between the nations, and was willing to give up large amounts of land to achieve this.  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was born.

In January of 1918, the old Assembly met in a feeble attempt to bring back democracy.  Lenin called on his Red troops to destroy them, and since there was no force that was willing to fight them, the Red troops succeeded.

In the summer of 1918,

War Communism gained momentum.  Industry was nationalized shortly after the revolution.  The state appropriated nearly all industries with more minor ones.  Private industry practically disappeared, and private trade was suppressed and replaced with a government control of the distribution of food and other necessary items.  And then, land became state property that could only be used by people who would care for it themselves.  The peasants would not get much in return for growing food for the government, so they were more than disinterested in doing such a thing.  After some time, the government ordered peasants to turn in their entire harvests except for a small amount to sustain themselves.  This was supposed to feed the Red Army and the urban population.  The peasants, of course, resisted and this triggered repression against them.

The civil war of Russia began during the Summer of 1918. This was a multi-party war. The objective of this was to solve and find out the political future of the Russian Empire. The major parties who contributed to the war were the

Red Army that fought for the Belsheviks who wanted Communism, and on the opposing side was the White Army who fought for Monarchism as well as capitalism.  The Whites had Tsarist army officers, cossacks, the bourgeoisie, and any other political groups on their side.  The Reds were composed of Bolsheviks.  The Whites had a strong influence on the outskirts of Russia, but the Reds were all-powerful in big cities such as Petrograd, Moscow and Kiev.

"In the course of the last few months my command had received considerable reinforcements. In spite of heavy losses, its strength was almost normal. We were well supplied with artillery, technical equipment, telephones, telegraphs, and so on, which we had taken from the enemy. When the Reds had succeeded in making themselves masters of the Kuban district they had recourse to conscription there. Now these forced recruits were deserting en masse, and coming over to us to defend their homes. They were good fighters, but once their own village was cleared of Reds, many of them left the ranks to cultivate their land once more."

-General Peter Wrangel on the Civil War

The civil war was not only fought out by the two major parties, but alongside foreign powers and independent movements.  In 1918, fourteen countries came to intervene in the war.  In the west, they pretended to be preventing Germans by seizing weapons and artillery.  The intervening countries supplied Whites with equipment and protection.  The intervention was over by 1920 in the West and 1922 in the East.

However, it was not a passionate intervention.  The Reds had still maintained control of industry and military supplies and had won the hearts of the majority of the population.  They also had a unified group under command, whereas the Whites had several groups that may not always agree.  The Red Army defeated the White Army in many different areas of Russia, including the Ukraine and the army led by Admiral Aleksander Kolchak in Siberia in 1919.  The remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920.  The war ended in 1923 with the red army seemingly in majority control with the new Soviet Union. There was an estimated seven million deaths.

Lenin finally decided in 1921 that War Communism was not improving their economy.  He developed the New Economic Policy in 1921, allowing some private trade, peasants to sell their surplus, and workers in very small factories to purchase their workplace, bringing back a form of private ownership.

For the rest of Lenin’s years, the Bolsheviks were constantly in a state of procrastinating the international revolution of communism.  In 1919, there was even a group set up called the Comintern to monitor the pending international revolution.  In 1921, the Bolsheviks began rebuilding their industrial base through the Treaty of Rapallo.  This was an agreement between the USSR and Germany, where the USSR would manufacture war materials that Germany was banned from making in the Treaty of Versailles in return for steel manufacturing technology from Germany.

Lenin was shot in 1921, and while he was not fatally wounded, he never recovered completely.  In 1922, the Bolshevik Party became the Communist Party, or more simply, the “party”.  Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic, or the USSR (Soviet Union).  Finally, in January 1924, Lenin died of overworking.  This resulted in a power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.

“You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.”

-Vladimir Lenin, How to Organise Competition

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Karl Marx  birthed the idea of communism.  He died in 1883 before he could manage to put it in place.  During his lifetime, he wrote Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto.  The latter of which was co-authored by Friedrich Engels.  These explained that economic relations are most important between people.

When making a product, there are several building block.  Of those building blocks, the workman, or the proletariat, is the most important as he turns the materials into a working product.  This is important because often people think that the owner, or bourgeoisie, is the most important piece of the puzzle.

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingmen of all countries unite!”

-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

He differentiated capitalism from communism in the sense that capitalism would naturally include stealing from the workman who contributed most to the companies.  He centralized the idea of surplus value, which is the idea that workers make a surplus in their labour through producing and selling product.

“Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”

-Karl Marx, Das Kapital

The Russo-Japanese war, which started in 1904, was one of many challenges facing Russia in this time period.  The two nations could not settle on who would have control over Korea and Manchuria.  Eventually, Japan defeated Russia and forced them to abandon their ideology of expanding.

The Russian Revolution in 1905, also known as Bloody Sunday, built momentum for five years.  The people held working strikes and there was frequent peasant unrest.  People were increasingly critical of the Tsarist regime.  There was a sizeable group of liberals who were referred to as the Constitutional Democratic Party.  An opposing party was Social Democratic, formed in 1900 by the communists.  By 1903, they had split into two groups:

The Bolsheviks, meaning “one of the  majority”, were  founded by Lenin with help from Bognadov.  They came to power during the October Revolution.  They believed that winning the hearts of the majority of the population was unnecessary for starting a revolution, but rather having a small group of strong-minded leaders would suffice.

The Mensheviks, a smaller group who believed that the majority of the population must be won over in order to start a revolution.  They were led by Martov.

The turning point for the revolution was when Russia lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese war, and it officially started on January 22, 1905 when Tsarist troops shot at a group of protesters who were simply begging the Tsar for help.  This day, referred to as Bloody Sunday, saw 130 killed and hundreds more injured.  After this massacre, the Tsar responded to some smaller requests, but not enough to prevent a worker strike from the 20th-30th of October, 1905.  This is considered the most effective strike of all time.  During the strike, the first Soviet was formed in St. Petersburg.

All of these actions led to the Tsar’s announcement of the October Manifesto.  This swore to provide some civil liberties and to create a Duma (a legislative assembly).  It should have turned Russia into a Constitutional Monarchy.  The radicals wanted to hold a Constituent Assembly, where a constitution would be written.  During this time, the government arrested the St Petersburg Soviet.

After the 1905 Revolution, a set of laws called The Fundamental Laws came into play.  The purpose was to put the Tsar’s October Promises into effect, which returned much of his powers to him.  With this regained power, he dismissed the new Duma.  He also proceeded to arrest and harass the radicals, which triggered more and more terrorism.  Every time a terrorist was arrested, the terrorists would multiply and create an even larger problem than they had previously.  This continued until 1917.

The First World War obviously did not help the situation in Russia.  In 1914, there had been so many strikes that the Tsar believed the war would help the country come together again for a nationalistic cause.  Unfortunately, everyone soon realized that the Tsarist government was not ready for the war and revolution was once again on the table.  By 1917, there had been 1.5 million desertions due to lack of proper equipment and effective medical care.  These troops essentially began the revolutions.

In 1915, Nicholas Tsar II went to take control of his troops.  He abandoned Alexandria, the Tsarina, with full control of domestic affairs.  She ended up handing responsibility over to Rasputin, a monk with questionable sense.

“I am not yet ready to be Tsar. I know nothing of the business of ruling.”

-Nicholas Tsar II

The general population was not impressed with the Romanovs.  Tsarina gave control to Rasputin because she believed he had healed her son’s hemophilia.  Rasputin played musical chairs with the cabinet ministers until all of the officials had been removed, and then he replaced them with his inebriated friends.