Social cleavages: Social cleavages

Social cleavages:

• Social cleavages:

• urban society versus ruling elite

• working class versus all elites

• City versus countryside

• Peasants

• Overpopulation
• land poor

• Nicholas II unwilling to reform

Front experience

• Front experience

• Soldiers radicalized
• Increasingly refused to fight

• Home front

• impoverished (food and clothing supply)

• Tsar and his government losing war and legitimacy

• KEY: Summer 1915 Nicholas decided to go to the front

• Tsarina Aleksandr
• Rasputin

February 23 (March 8), 1917: International Women’s Day

• February 23 (March 8), 1917: International Women’s Day

• Petrograd (St. Petersburg)

• Women joined by locked-out workers

• Police over-reacted

• Revolution broke out

• March 2 (15), 1917: Tsar Nicholas II abdicates.

• March 3 (16): Mikhail declines the throne.

1. Petrograd Soviet:

• 1. Petrograd Soviet:

• Grass-roots organization
• Workers
• Soldiers
• Radical left parties:
• Bolsheviks
• Mensheviks
• Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)

2. Provisional Government (official government)

• 2. Provisional Government (official government)

• Middle classes, urban dwellers

• Liberal democratic parties

• Prince Lvov

• Aleksandr Kerensky

• Mistakes:

• Continued the war effort
• Refused to give land to peasants
• Failed to solve food supply problem

Seized:

• Seized:

• Land
• Forest

• Fought over the spoils

• Localism

Bolsheviks

• Bolsheviks

• V.I. Lenin
• L. Trotsky
• Marxists
• Tightly organized
• Led and followed the masses

• Slogans:

• “Bread, Peace, Land!”
• “All Power to the Soviets!”

Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government

• Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government

• Most applauded

• All-Socialist Coalition Government

• Lenin refused

• January 1918: Constituent Assembly

• March 1918: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Reds (pro-Bolshevik troops)

• Reds (pro-Bolshevik troops)

• Whites (anti-Bolsheviks from SRs to Army officers)

• Greens (peasant insurgents)

• Nationalists

• Western Allies

Why did the Bolsheviks win?

• Why did the Bolsheviks win?

• Strategic, industrial center
• Red Army (Trotsky)
• Peasants’ and workers’ support

• Whites

• on periphery
• lacked unity
• refused to cooperate with nationalists

Nationalists

• Nationalists

• on periphery
• lacked unity
• popular support

• Peasants

• poorly organized
• local concerns
• Sometimes supported Reds
• “Soviet Power” (local power)