Week 9- History of Russian Communism Flashcards
two stages of Russian revolution
1) overthrow of czarist autocracy
2) when Bolsheviks took power
stage one of Russian revolution
- first strikes in Petrograd, women protested lack of bread and coal, and government troops gave away weapons to strikers
- development of soviets
- Lenin returns from Switzerland and says “peace, bread, and land”
stage two of Russian revolution
- armed Bolsheviks and regular army took over Petrograd with little to no bloodshed
- Lenin becomes first leader of soviets
dynamics of communist Russia
- established highly centralized, non-democratic regime with Lenin as central leader.
- Power lay with Communist Party, not with Soviets.
did reds or whites win the Russian civil war
reds
five year plan
- was basically crash industrialization
- very successful, but a lot of suffering
- aim was to take surplus from rich and give to the poor, but then people just killed all of their cattle so no one could have it. leading to a famine
what does Stalin embrace
extreme nationalism
kulaks
- slightly better off than peasants
- lost their land and sent to Siberian labor camps
great famine
Between 5 and 6 million deaths, over half of them in the Ukraine. Unrecorded in the Soviet press.
how did Russian revolution differ from Marxists theory
1) It happened in Russia, not in industrialized Britain or Germany
2) It established a “Dictatorship of the PARTY” instead of a “Dictatorship of the PROLETARIAT”
3) It established a “totalitarian state” rather than ushering in a “withering away of the state.”
4) Under Stalin, nationalism was brought back and Marx had been against nationalism
why did communist Russia turn out so poorly
- it DID turn Soviet Union into a soviet power
- industrial workers and intellectuals had a brutal fate thanks to the famine
1) Marxists theories were implemented without democracy
2) Leaders literally only cared about power
3) No democracy and lots of poverty
