Historical Events
Russia · Events 12
The Revolution of 1905
Beginning with the Bloody Sunday massacre, the Revolution of 1905 was the first nationwide challenge to the tsarist autocracy, combining mass strikes, mutinies in the army and navy, and peasant risings. In the course of the struggle workers invented the soviet, a council of factory-elected, instantly recallable delegates, which grew from a strike committee into an organ of popular power. The revolution was beaten down by 1907, but it trained the class and the party that would win in 1917.
The February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 began with a strike by women textile workers in Petrograd, who marched on International Women's Day demanding bread and an end to the war. Within days the strike became general, and when garrison soldiers ordered to fire turned instead to the workers' side, the tsarist regime collapsed. The result was not a simple change of government but dual power: the Provisional Government held formal authority, while the real loyalty of workers and soldiers lay with the soviets.
The October Revolution
After the defeat of the Kornilov revolt in autumn 1917, the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, and the Military Revolutionary Committee led by Trotsky secured the loyalty of the capital's garrison. The insurrection of 7 November (25 October, Old Style) took Petrograd almost without bloodshed, and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, opening that same night, ratified the transfer of power. The Congress immediately adopted the Decrees on Peace and Land and formed the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) headed by Lenin.
Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupation
The peace of Brest-Litovsk was a dictated settlement between a Soviet Russia whose army had melted away and an undefeated Germany. In the talks that opened in December 1917 three lines split the party: revolutionary war, "neither war nor peace", and immediate peace. After the German offensive of February 1918 Lenin staked his resignation on acceptance and the treaty was signed on 3 March. Russia gave up its rights over Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland and a third of its population, while Germany installed a Hetman in Ukraine, sent troops into Finland's civil war and planned duchies under its own umbrella in the Baltic. Germany's defeat in November voided the treaty, but the vacuum left by Article 12 of the armistice, which kept German troops in the Baltic, and the meeting of the Red Army, national governments and Whites in it became the stage for the borderland wars of the following year.
Ukraine’s revolution and wars
The Central Rada formed in Kyiv in March 1917 began by seeking autonomy within a federal Russia and declared independence in January 1918, but over the next four years Kyiv changed hands more than ten times. Soviet troops, the German occupation and Hetman Skoropadsky, the Directory of Vynnychenko and Petliura, Denikin's Whites and the Polish army held the city in turn, while the peasant armies of Hryhoriv and Makhno fought a war of their own that belonged to no state. Some 1,500 pogroms killed tens of thousands of Jews. The Warsaw agreement of 1920 and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 ended the Ukrainian People's Republic's war of independence, leaving the contradiction between Soviet Ukraine's formal statehood and the real control of the Bolshevik centre.
The Civil War and Foreign Intervention
From 1918 to 1922 the Soviet republic fought for its survival, encircled by White generals and intervention forces from more than a dozen foreign powers. The Red Army that Trotsky organized grew to five million soldiers and defeated the armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel in turn, as the majority of workers and peasants preferred Soviet power to the return of the landlords and the old order. Yet victory came at a terrible price: millions died from war, famine, and epidemics, while the terror practiced by both sides and the emergency rule of wartime left deep marks on the character of the Soviet state that followed.
Baltic wars of independence and border settlements
After Germany's collapse in November 1918 the new governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had to build states between three forces: the Red Army, the Russian Whites and the German Freikorps. Estonia, backed by the British fleet and Finnish volunteers and having won its peasants with land reform, drove out the Red Army in early 1919; when Yudenich's Northwestern Army, launched from Estonian soil, broke before Petrograd, Estonia disarmed it and in February 1920 signed at Tartu Soviet Russia's first treaty recognizing a state's independence. Latvia defeated in turn Stučka's Soviet government, von der Goltz's German troops and Niedra's pro-German government, and Bermondt-Avalov's attack on Riga; Lithuania saw off Litbel but lost Vilnius to Poland. The treaties of Tartu, Moscow, Riga and Tartu (Finland), all signed in 1920, drew Soviet Russia's north-western frontier, but the Polish-Lithuanian dispute remained.
The Russian Famine of 1921–1922
The Russian Famine of 1921–1922 was a mass starvation catastrophe triggered by a severe drought in spring 1921 across a country already devastated by seven years of war, revolution, and civil war. War Communism's forced grain requisitions had stripped peasants of seed reserves; when drought struck 35 gubernias across the Volga basin, the Urals, Ukraine, Crimea, and beyond, the paralysed railways could not move what food remained. Of roughly 90 million inhabitants, at least 28 million went hungry, and an estimated five million died of starvation and epidemic disease. The Soviet government accepted foreign aid and confiscated church valuables to buy grain. The American Relief Administration, under Herbert Hoover, provided the largest share, feeding over ten million daily from 21,000 kitchens. The famine decisively pushed the Bolsheviks to adopt the New Economic Policy.
Formation of the USSR
On 30 December 1922 the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Transcaucasia concluded a union treaty as equals, creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The autonomization draft that would have absorbed the republics into the Russian federation was abandoned after Lenin's intervention, in favor of a union of equal republics with an explicit right of secession. The korenizatsiya (nativization) policy that followed had the state systematically promote national languages and national cadres, a nationality policy without precedent in the world of its time.
The Economic Reform Debate and the 500 Days Programme
The reforms begun with the 1987 Law on State Enterprises and the 1988 Law on Cooperatives produced an economy neither planned nor market. Enterprises gained the freedom to raise wages while prices stayed fixed; money multiplied as goods dwindled, and the budget deficit grew together with empty shelves. In the summer of 1989 hundreds of thousands of miners in the Kuzbass and Donbass struck, with even bars of soap on their list of demands. In 1990 Shatalin and Yavlinsky produced the 500 Days programme for a transition to a market economy, backed by Yeltsin's Russian republic, but Gorbachev chose a compromise with the Ryzhkov government's moderate plan.
The Novo-Ogaryovo Process and the New Union Treaty
When the March 1991 referendum returned 76 percent for preserving the union, Gorbachev made it his last political capital. On 23 April, at the Novo-Ogaryovo estate outside Moscow, he issued the 9+1 statement with the leaders of nine republics, Yeltsin's Russia included, opening negotiations on a new union treaty that would recast the USSR as a voluntary federation of sovereign republics; six republics, among them the Baltic states and Georgia, stayed away from the start. Through a summer of tugging over taxation and the division of powers a draft was completed, with signing set for 20 August. In a late-night meeting at the end of July, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev agreed that after the signing the hardliners, Kryuchkov and Pavlov among them, would be replaced; the KGB's microphones carried the conversation straight to its subjects.
The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSR
In August 1991, hardliners seeking to stop the signing of a new union treaty confined Gorbachev and set up a State Committee for the State of Emergency to stage a coup. Led by Kryuchkov, Yazov, Pavlov and others, the coup collapsed within three days as Yeltsin resisted atop a tank and citizens rallied. The coup’s failure only accelerated the dissolution of the union.