The Russian Revolution: From February to the USSR
The February Revolution of 1917
The February Revolution occurred when the people of Petrograd protested against the Tsarist regime and the scarcity of food in the city. There was also widespread dissatisfaction with the involvement in the First World War. As the protests grew, many politicians became reformist. In early February, the protests became violent as citizens rioted and clashed with police and soldiers. When the bulk of the troops stationed in the capital joined the uprising, it became a revolution that forced the Czar to abdicate after a transition almost without bloodshed. It was a new interim government, also called the Duma, while planned elections. Between February and October, the revolutionaries tried to encourage more radical changes, either through the Petrograd Soviet or directly. In July, the Petrograd Bolsheviks, in collaboration with the anarchists, promoted a civil rebellion. This ended in failure. The provisional government experiment failed for several reasons:
- The decision to continue the war, which prevented the holding of elections.
- The weakness of the bourgeoisie and their fear of being overtaken by other more radical sectors, making it impossible to undertake the expected reforms.
- The pressure of the Soviets who sought a different model of society than the bourgeoisie.
The October Revolution of 1917
The growing role of the Soviets in Russia created a duality of power: one legally, embodied in the Provisional Government, and the other, in reality, that of the Soviets led by Lenin. They followed the formation of a Military Revolutionary Committee, planned the armed insurrection against the government of Kerensky. On October 25, 1917, Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the leftist revolutionaries in an uprising against the ineffective Provisional Government. The October Revolution ended the revolutionary phase instigated in February, replacing the provisional government headed by Kerensky with the organized power of the Soviets and deliberative workers, soldiers, and peasants, real bodies and assembly-political participation by the working classes population. However, although many Bolsheviks supported a Soviet democracy, the model of reform from above, socialism in one country, won the final power to the detriment of the theory of permanent revolution of Trotsky when Lenin died and Stalin took control of the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Trotsky, and other democratic communists and anarchists, were persecuted and finally imprisoned or killed. After October 1917, many members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party and Anarchists opposed the Bolsheviks through the Soviets. When this failed, it caused several riots in a series of events called the Third Revolution. The most notable examples were the Tambov rebellion, between 1919 and 1921, and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. These movements, which required a wide variety of demands and lacked effective coordination, were eventually crushed during the Civil War.
Civil War
After the Bolsheviks took control, the new government ended Russian participation in World War I through the signing of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. The Russians were forced to hand over the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Ukraine. The people were indignant about the loss of these territories, and opposition to the Bolshevik party caused a civil war that began in 1918 and ended in 1920. The government of Lenin, Moscow established the new capital and took steps to eliminate his political rivals. Although the peasantry was not a follower of the Communists, they decided to support them, fearing that a victory by the ‘Whites’ would lead to the restoration of the monarchy. The White Army, disorganized and with little support, was defeated in 1920 by the Red Army. Lenin and the Russian Communist Party seized control of the country. Strikes by workers, peasant revolts, and the rebellion of the Kronstadt garrison, which called for a government formed exclusively by socialists, were suppressed in a short time. In 1921, Lenin established the New Economic Policy to strengthen the new state. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially formed. In March 1921, during the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Lenin turned to the unity and cohesion of the party, warning of the threat of counterrevolution. The political parties and organizations were abolished.
The USSR
The USSR was established in December 1922 as a federation of Soviet Socialist Republics comprising Russia, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Byelorussia with its capital in Moscow. It was governed by a single party (CPSU), established in each of the republics. Until 1945 the USSR was the only communist state in the world. In 1923 he drafted a new constitution that delineated the responsibilities of the new state: economic planning, defense, and the role of the republics, which were recognized the right of equal and respected in theory the possibility of abandonment union. The legislative regime lay in the Soviet. It was elected by indirect universal suffrage. Any political organization was controlled by the Communist Party, very hierarchical, the main body was the Central Committee, headed by the Secretary General (in 1922 Stalin was elected). The mission of the party was to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as a step towards the consolidation of socialism and eventually communism. State control by the CPSU turned the USSR into a totalitarian state. In 1924 the Soviet Union normalized relations with foreign countries and many countries recognized it. The illness and death of Lenin (1924) left open the question of leadership succession. On the death of Lenin a “troika” was appointed that was responsible for the party leadership. Trotsky did not take part, but Stalin did, who was moving progressively to the old revolutionary leaders to keep absolute power. In 1925 Trotsky was expelled from the CPSU. Banished in 1927, two years later he was exiled from Russia.