Video:
Audio:
Recommended Reading:
- Powerpoint presentation
- The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky
- Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie
- What Is to Be Done? and the “April Theses” by V.I. Lenin
- Robert Service’s Lenin: A Biography is preferable to the many biographies that whitewash Lenin’s crimes.
- A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes
Russian Revolution – Quiz
- Identify the major problems faced by the Romanov dynasty prior to the Russian Revolution.
- Explain the major difference between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.
- Explain the disagreement between the varieties of socialists who came to be known as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
- Identify the major problems that confronted the Kerensky government following the February Revolution.
- Explain the process by which the Bolsheviks managed to seize control of the government in the October Revolution.
- economic backwardness compared to Western Europe, poor fortunes in the war, Rasputin’s partial discrediting of the tsar
- Marxism postulates that the working class will spontaneously revolt; Marxism-Leninism states that professional revolutionaries must “activate” the working class
- Mensheviks believed socialists should work within the system until the bourgeois phase of history had fully matured; Bolsheviks believed only a brief bourgeois phase was necessary and could be followed quickly by a violent proletarian revolution
- it continued to do badly in the war; its insistence on continuing the war to maintain international legitimacy was unpopular in Russia
- Lenin, Trotsky et al returned to Russia in the spring of 1917 and began fomenting revolution. A failed attempt to seize power in the summer led to Lenin’s temporarily fleeing the country. The Communists gradually gained influence in the local soviets, especially the St. Petersburg soviet. In the autumn Lenin returned and staged a palace coup organized tactically by Trotsky.