The Russian Revolution Essay Research Paper The

The Russian Revolution Essay, Research Paper

The Russian Revolution, 1917

1917 was the year of the Russian Revolution; but that Revolution, the Russian Revolution, contained two phases, or two specific revolutions. The first, or April Revolution, took place one evening in April, 1917; on that night, the Imperial Russian Empire, the autocratic and orthodox Russian monarchy known as Tsarism “simply ceased to exist.” As revolutions go, this was a rather bloodless one; the autocracy had few supporters willing to shed their blood to preserve it.

Into the place of the now dead autocracy stepped a temporary Provisional Government, and as you no doubt already know, it proved to be quite temporary. Through a succession of personnel and policies, none of which managed to attract the support of the Russian people, the Provisional Government staggered on until November, when the Bolsheviks and their allies simply thrust it aside in an even less bloody, less violent revolution — the November, or Bolshevik, Revolution.

Now what is generally overlooked by partisans and opponents of these two revolutions, the Revolutions of April and November, 1917, is that both of these specific revolutions were but phases of a larger, more significant, and more historically profound event — the revolution of the Russian people, the real Russian Revolution of 1917.

In July, 1914, Imperial Russia declared war upon Germany and Austro–Hungary, and thereby signed its own death warrant. Indeed, the destruction of the autocracy was inevitable. If the government had been able to stave off the pressures from the military and from the ultra–nationalists, if the ruling classes had been enlightened enough, intelligent and sophisticated enough to realize the inability of Russia to conduct a war against Germany and Austro–Hungary, and had they been able to pressure the hopelessly stupid and incompetent Tsar, Nicholas II, to stand firm against the military and the ultra–nationalists, it would not have mattered in any case.

The autocracy, the Tsarist Russian Empire, was doomed. Had the Russian government in 1914 abandoned the Serbs; had the government refused to honor its treaties to its allies and its promises to the extreme nationalists within Russia, the strongest domestic supporters of the regime, the resulting diplomatic defeat for the Russian government would have dealt a probably fatal blow to the prestige of the Tsarist regime among that regime.s strongest, and most vital, supporters: French and British imperialists, Serbian nationalists, and within Russia, the slavophiles, the ultra-nationalists, and the military establishment.

Governments are not ordained from God. Heaven cares little one way or the other about governments. No, clearly, governments are the creation of men, and they last only so long as the ruled are willing to submit or the rulers are strong enough to impose. That is, all governments require popular support, approval, acquiescence, or — at the very least — a sort of grudging through tolerant submission. Failing this, a government — any government, any time in history, anywhere in the world — requires an armed might sufficient to subdue and cower into submission those to be ruled.

A government or regime that comes into power and somehow manages to remain in power for any length of time acquires certain strong advantages: most people suffer from inertia — that is, they tend to submit to “that which is,” hoping that “that which is” does not strike them personally. The Russian government in 1914 had that advantage. In addition, it had the advantage of over 1000 years of tradition inculcated into the masses of Russians. Tradition tends to perpetuate tradition. The longer people assume that someone “up there” in authority knows what he is doing and that he is doing what is best, or that God wills it anyhow — even if things are not working out too well, the stronger and stronger becomes that assumption.

However, numerous events of the nineteenth century, the War and Revolution of 1905, and then the conduct of the War of 1914 –1917, all acted to critically undermine that tendency of the Russian people to assume the all important assumption — that assumption, remember, without which no government can hope to rule with the approval, support or acquiescence of the people.

Lose the faith of the masses, lose their support, lose their grudging toleration of your continual rule, and you have to resort to armed might. Remember, most people are ruled by others throughout human history, and ruled through their own minds. Ideology is generally far stronger than swords and guns, tanks, and bombers. Years, decades, centuries of education, inculcation, socialization, indoctrination — or whatever you choose to call the process — produces a faith in the system, produces a consensus on the shared values of the society, the basic values of the social order whatever they happen to be, whichever social order about which you happen to be talking. Autocracy, Nationalism, and Orthodoxy — the slogan and the ideology of Tsarism — had been the basis of continual popular acceptance of the regime by the Russian masses. Handfuls or even thousands of agitators — nihilists, populists, socialist revolutionaries, bolsheviks, mensheviks, or liberals — cannot destroy the basic value system of a culture, or a society.

Assassinations of Ministers of