Son of Alexander III, Nicholas received a military education and succeeded his father as tsar in 1894. He was an autocratic but indecisive ruler and was devoted to his wife, Alexandra, who strongly influenced his rule. His interest in Asia led to construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and also helped cause the disastrous Russo-Japanese War ( 1904—5).
After the Russian Revolution of 1905, Nicholas agreed reluctantly to a representative Duma but restricted its powers, and made only token efforts to enact its measures. His prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, attempted reforms, but Nicholas, increasingly influenced by Alexandra and by the mystic Grigory Rasputin, opposed him; Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in 1911, After Russia suffered setbacks in the First World War, Nicholas ousted the popular Grand Duke Nicholas as commander-in-chief of Russian forces and assumed command himself, at the bidding of Alexandra and Rasputin. His absence from Moscow and Alexandra's mismanagement of the government caused increasing unrest and culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Nicholas abdicated in March 1917 and was detained with his family by Georgy Y, Lvov's provisional government. Plans for the royai family to be sent to England were overruled by the local Bolsheviks {the majority wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party). Instead Nicholas and his family were sent to the city of Yekaterinburg, where they were executed in July 1918.
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905
Unsuccessful uprising in Russia against the tsarist regime
After several years of mounting discontent, a peaceful demonstration was crushed by Tsar Nicholas li's troops in the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905. General strikes followed in St Petersburg and other industrial cities. The revolt spread to non- Russian parts of the empire, including Poland, Finland, and Georgia. Anti-revolutionary groups, including the Black Hundreds, opposed the rebellion with violent attacks on socialists and pogroms against Jews.
By October 1905, general strikes had spread to all the large cities, and the workers' councils or soviets, often led by the Mensheviks (the minority wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party), became revolutionary governments. The strikes' magnitude convinced Nicholas II, advised by Sergey Witte, to issue the October Manifesto, promising an elected legislature. The concessions satisfied most moderates, though the more ardent revolutionaries refused to yield, and pockets of resistance in Poland, Georgia, and elsewhere were harshly suppressed as the regime restored its authority. While most of the revolutionary leaders, including Leon Trotsky, were arrested, the revolution forced the tsar to institute reforms such as a new constitution and an elected legislative body (Duma), though he failed to adequately implement various promised reforms.
tlie imperial government, and the second, in October (November, New Style), placed the Bolsheviks in power, (Until 1918 Russia still used the Julian or "Old Style" calendar, dating the beginning of the year from December 25; in that year, the Gregorian or "New Style" calendar was adopted, as it had been by most other western countries, in many cases for more than 300 years. The adoption of the new calendar resulted in the loss of 13 days, so that February 1, 1918, became February 14.)
The February Revolution of 1917 was spontaneous, leader- less, and fuelled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. Hardly a hand was raised in support of the imperial order, and with the defection of the military, the tsar could not survive. After Nicholas's abdication in March, most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum was created that needed immediate attention. A Provisional Government was formed and was to remain in office until a democratic parliament, the Constituent Assembly, convened in January 1918. In practice, however, authority was from the outset exercised by the Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) Soviet, or "Council", a body that claimed to represent the nation's workers and soldiers, but actually was convened and run by an executive committee of radical intellectuals nominated by the socialist parties. Similar soviets sprang up in other cities.
This dual power prevailed because the Provisional Government was undermined by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. The government seemingly spoke for the country, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moreover, being a temporary administration, the government postponed all hard decisions - what should be done about land seizures by the peasants, for example - for the Constituent Assembly.
VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN (1870-1924)
Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and architect and builder of the Soviet state
Growing up in a middle-class family, Vladimir llyich Ulyanov, as Lenin was born, was strongly influenced by his eldest brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged in 1887 for conspiring to assassinate the tsar. He studied law and became a Marxist in 1889 while practising law. He was arrested as a subversive in I89S and exiled to Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, They lived in western Europe after 1900, At the 1903 meeting in London of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik faction. In several revolutionary newspapers that he founded and edited, he put forth his theory of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat, a centralized body organized around a core of professional revolutionaries; his ideas, later known as Leninism, would be joined with Karl Marx's theories to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist worldview.
With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin returned to Russia, but he resumed his exile in 1907 and continued his energetic agitation for the next ten years. He saw the First World War as an opportunity to turn a war of nations into a war of classes, and he returned to Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 to lead the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky.
As revolutionary leader of the Soviet state, Lenin
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (1918) and repulsed counter-revolutionary threats in the Russian Civil War. It was largely because of his inspired leadership that the Soviet government managed to survive. He guided the formation and strategy of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and ensured there were sufficient resources to sustain it. But above all it was his political leadership that saved the day for the Soviets. By proclaiming the right of the peoples to self- determination, including the right to secession, he won the active sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the non-Russian nationalities within Russia. Indeed, his perceptive, skilful policy on the national question enabled Soviet Russia to avoid total disintegration and to remain a huge multinational state. By making the industrial workers the new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of rations, housing, and political power, he retained the loyalty of the proletariat. His championing of the peasants' demand that they take all the land from the gentry, church, and crown without compensation won over the peasants, without whose support the government could not survive.
In ill health from 1922, Lenin died of a stroke in 1924.
Another fatal mistake was its continued prosecution of the war.
By this time Russia's complex political make-up had crystallized into two main parties, both offshoots of the Social Democrats (the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party). This party had followed the classic doctrines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to which the development of capitalism inevitably created a radicalized proletariat that would in time stage a revolution and introduce socialism. The Menshe- viks, the more moderate socialists, held that Russia had to pass through its capitalist phase before the socialist one could appear. The Bolsheviks wanted the transition period to be short. Their firebrand leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (18701924), was a fanatical revolutionary who organized a relatively small but totally devoted and highly disciplined party bent on seizing power, Lenin bad the advantage that, from his base during the First World War in neutral Switzerland, where he had agitated for Russia's defeat, he had attracted the attention of the Germans, who shrewdly supplied him with the money necessary to organize his party and build up a press. A