Russian women demonstrated against the lack of bread on the table on March 8, 1917, on International Women's Day. This day marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution and led to the assassination of the Tsar and his family, and the Communist rule. How could that happen?
To understand how it was able to revolutionize in 1917, we have to go back to the eighteenth century. Then comes the Enlightenment thinking, in which the hierarchy imposed by God, as the church had proclaimed for centuries, was called into question. The French Revolution (1789) with its Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, overthrew the king and power fell into the hands of (part of) the people.
The rise of the proletariat
With the advent of industrialization in the nineteenth century, a new social class emerged:that of factory workers. They migrated from the countryside to the city to work in factories under appalling conditions.
Twelve-hour workdays, living in slums where infectious diseases broke out all the time, hunger, many industrial accidents and child labour. Equality was nowhere to be found here and socialists began to worry about these dire conditions. But it was also believed that rapid developments in science and technology could solve the problems.
Socialist philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) saw a law in these developments that would be as inevitable as the laws of physics. In 1848 he published the Communist Manifesto. It states that it is inevitable that the oppressed working class would take power by force. Then there would be a period of dictatorship that would flow into a classless state. In this, everyone worked and consumed only what was necessary, so that there would be no property and thus inequality.
Russia lags behind
At the time the German Marx published his manifesto, there was hardly any industry in Russia and the vast majority of the population consisted not of factory workers but of serfs. They belonged to their lord and tilled his land. The debates between socialists in Russia were initially suppressed, but Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881) finally abolished serfdom in 1861. The socialists felt that the Tsar should also give the peasants the land they worked, but that was not the case. Alexander too far. He even made them pay for the land, yet his people remained largely loyal. When a group of students started spreading their socialist ideas in the countryside in 1873, they were chased away and linked to the police. The farmers didn't want to hear about it.
After the failed campaign among the peasants, some socialists found an explanation in communism. Russia – with all its peasants – was not yet ready for the socialist revolution. To do this, a class of factory workers had to be created first. Industrialization started slowly in Russia from 1880, and in only a few cities. Impoverished peasants flocked from the countryside to these cities in search of work. Here they fell into a social hole and were at the mercy of the industrialists. The urban proletariat – a requirement according to Marx – was born. They liked to listen to socialists who promised them a better life.
Stubborn Tsar
When the Tsar unexpectedly dies in 1894, his young and unprepared son Nicholas II (1868-1918) succeeds him. These are turbulent times, in which a major famine of two winters ago still causes unrest and riots. In these riots in 1895 the young lawyer Vladimir Ulyanov (1870-1924) was arrested in Saint Petersburg and exiled to Siberia for three years. Here he would call himself Lenin.
Lenin had plenty of time to study the Communist Manifesto and its applications to Russia. In his view, property from industrialists and landowners had to be taken away and distributed among peasants and workers to create true equality. Lenin understood that the capitalists would not allow this just like that, so violence had to be involved, and revolution was the answer.
Over time, the call for reform grew and Nicholas II established a parliament, the Duma, in 1905. Large landowners and other wealthy people, however, were represented here to a far greater extent than the common man. In its implementation, the Duma turned out to have little power and mainly served as an advisory body to the Tsar. That was difficult with a man who was rather stubborn and averse to criticism. Real reforms were therefore still delayed.
Crisis from war
What finally made the difference was the great war that ravaged Europe and all the misery and deprivation it caused. The Russians who were still loyal to the Tsar in 1914, thought differently in 1917. Previously they were convinced of the quick victory, now they blamed the court for the lack of it. On March 8, 1917, the women of Saint Petersburg demonstrated for better working conditions and more bread. Strikes broke out everywhere and even the army leadership, including the hitherto loyal tsarist guard, lost faith in the tsar. Nicholas agreed to the call for his resignation and signed the abdication on March 15, without much blood being spilled.
A provisional government took power, but they did not listen to the people's cry to get out of that terrible war. They crushed protests against this and radical socialists – including Lenin – stirred up the population. For example, Lenin promised to put an end to the war, which resonated with workers and soldiers. The number of members of his party the Bolsheviks grew from 20,000 to 250,000 in six months.
In October that year, Lenin and his mostly young supporters staged a coup during a party congress. But the peasants appeared to have much less faith in the Bolsheviks. In the first general election in November 1917, the party won only a quarter of the seats, after which Lenin decided to ignore the result and let the coup take the lead.
Ideals disappeared
The bloody civil war that followed led, among other things, to the murder of the Tsar's family. Lenin and his supporters eventually established the dictatorship, as Marx had already described it. After this, the communist paradise should break out, but how and when was just not clear because Marx had not described that. Little was left of Lenin's idealistic ideas of 1917 and the Russian Communist Party, as it was now officially called, clung to the dictatorship to stay in power.
Shortly after the end of the civil war, Lenin and Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) passed away as party leaders. What followed was a reign of terror and economic decline that left its mark not only on the country but also on global politics. It was only after the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War that the rule of the Russian communists ended in 1991.