World History

Unit 6: World War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 24: World War I and the Russian Revolution

51. Thu, Mar 13, 20140

The Russian Revolution, coming as it did right in the heart of the First World War — in many ways the darkest days for both sides — was slow to be appreciated in the west, though those who knew what was going on found the whole perplexing and alarming. Largely due to military disasters in the war with Germany, the Russian monarchy fell and was replaced by not one but two governments that in their turn fought for dominance for the next several years, creating their own private version of the global war in Russia. In the end, the Bolshevik revolutionaries under Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) and his quieter but more thoughtful second in command Leon Trotsky (not, I believe, even mentioned in your text) established the Soviet Union which retained control of the largest area of any single nation in the world for most of the twentieth century, influencing policy, economics, and fostering paranoia and fear (justified and unjustified, to various degrees) for about seventy years. The legacy of that regime is still strongly present in Russia.

Reactions in the West after the fact were mixed; one of the great historians of the Revolution was in fact John Reed, an American journalist, who is buried in the wall of the Kremlin. His book Ten Days that Shook the World is a warm and enthusiastic endorsment of the October Revolution. Not all who followed were so enthusiastic. By the time the second generation of revolutionary leaders gained power — Joseph Stalin, in particular — it was clear that irrespective of Marxist doctrine or populist understandings of liberty, the regime was capable of enormous oppression.

• What gave rise to the Russian Revolution? How does it differ from the American Revolution? From the French Revolution? Did it succeed or did it ultimately fail? What does success in such a situation look like?
• The Soviet Union was one of the first world governments chiefly founded on a dogmatic position, rather than growing somewhat more organically out of the need of a population to be governed. Does that really make a difference? Is that a distinction worth considering? What did the Bolsheviks do in implementing a Marxist ideology in government? Must Marxism necessarily be totalitarian in form?
• How much of the program of the Soviet Union was really the legacy of old Russian imperial thinking with a new set of colors and hats?

Contents of this page © Copyright 2011, 2012 by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.