Russian Revolution

From MarxWiki

Beginning in the early 1900s, dissatisfaction was growing with the tyrannical reign of the Czars of Russia. The Romanov dynasty, with the face of Nicholas II in power from 1894, had found itself rather unpopular with the impoverished and unindustrialized country. In 1905 there was a revolution against the czar that was easily quelled by the Russian Army, but it was obvious that things were not as strong as they had been since men like Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great. After this revolution, the Duma, a kind of house of parliament, was set up by the czar in an attempt to quiet the opposition to authoritarian rule that was growing in Europe at the time. From this point, new parties began to form to try to conquer the ideology of the underappreciated and oppressed. Enter Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party. Growing in strength and numbers based on Lenin's dynamic oratory skills expousing Marxist ideals of the oppressed working class rising up in bloody and violent revolution against the oppressive higher classes, Lenin championed the cause of the proletariat. In 1914, World War I broke out and Russia was dragged into it due to a complicated arrangement of treaties. The Russian army, though the largest in Europe, was the least well trained and least well equipped to handle a war of this magnitude, as well as a front the length of the western Russian border. As more and more soldiers were killed, and as the front became more and more treacherous, the oppositional parties in the Duma began to call for Czar Nicholas II to pull out, which he didn't. The parties gained strength, most importantly Lenin's Bolshevik party and the social democratic Menshevik party. March, 1917: a revolution modeled on the 1905 instance involves Leon Trotsky, a military mastermind, and the arrest of Czar Nicholas and his family. Provisional governments are installed and the Soviets, consisting mostly of the Bolsheviks who spearheaded the revolution, assume power.