The Russian army was the largest army in the world and they thought they were indestructible because of this but this was not true. Such a vast army needed equipment and lots of it. However the Minister of War, Sukhomlinov, thought that the war would only last for two months and did not order hardly any supplies. So in 1914 6.4 million soldiers had to share 4.6 million rifles. Unarmed men were sent into battle, encouraged to steel rifles of the dead. Even the soldiers with rifles were told to limit it to 10 bullets a day making it impossible for them to fight. Military uniforms were also in short supply and any men had to go into war without the right uniform or protection meaning casualties would be greater than they already are. They also did not have the correct winter clothing and due to the very harsh and cold winters in Russia many people began to die. The bad infrastructure of the country did not help, it took ages for the trains to reach the front line meaning food and medical help could not be brought to the soldiers. It was not only the fact that the army was so unequipped that led to such large failures it was also due to the bad leadership of the forces and there lack of training. The large losses at battles such as Tannenburg were partly due to the fact that the Germans intercepted Russian military orders which were not in code, so it was very easy for them to find out the positions and the tactics of Russian troops. The trenches were poorly built and there was no protection from artillery fire. Many of the leading officers were just noblemen who did not know about trench warfare and were in command of peasant soldiers who did not know how to fight. Due to the large loss of troops conscription was introduced which meant that anyone between certain ages would be made to join the army without any military training. This was very unpopular as by this time many people did not agree with the war due to the large loss of men and damage being done to the economy and great failures in many battles. Despite these shortcomings order was tried to be held using very harsh methods, whipping was used when soldiers would not listen to there commanding officer and this made the morale very bad. It was inevitable that as the longer the war continued morale would get worse and soldiers would come to hate their officers and discontent grew. As the war became evermore unpopular the support for the Bolsheviks grew because of there anti war campaigns.
It was not only the Russian army that was suffering but the economy of the country was getting worse than it already was due to the war. The first problem was the lack of workers. In all 15.5 million men was conscripted into the armies to fight, halving the number of workers needed to work in the fields and the factories. 600 factories had to close and weeds grew on fields were crops had once grown.
The second problem was transport. Russia was the biggest country in the world and it was depended on its railways to transport food and raw materials over this vast mass of land. There were not enough trains to supply the armies and the towns with what they food and raw materials. Thousands of tones of butter, meat and grain rotted in railway sidings in the country side, while soldiers and the people in the cities went hungry, simply because there were not enough trains to transport them.
Another problem they had was inflation. Russian money, the rouble, began to lose its value in 1914. At the same time food prices went up. Therefore people were finding there money was buying less food. To try and solve this the government tried printing more money but this made things worse and the value of the rouble kept on falling.
There was also of the problems of rumours against the government becoming more popular ideas. Tsar Nicholas decided to leave and take personal command of his forces at the army headquarters 500 kilometres away. He left his wife Alexandra in charge of the government in Petrograd, who was completely under the influence of Rasputin. Rasputin was born in Siberia and a peasant for most of his early life. He soon became popular in the royal family after he apparently healed the haemophiliac son of Tsar Nicolas II. For the sixteen months they were left in charge they were free to do what they wanted. During these sixteen months she used her power to sack ministers who displeased her and replace them with anyone her, and Rasputin pleased.
With misters coming and going at such a great speed the work of the government stood still. Food, fuel and ammunition were already in short supply, but now they became nearly unobtainable. It was now in Petrograd that ugly rumours about Alexandra and Rasputin grew. People were well aware of Alexandra was German at birth. They believed that Alexandra and Rasputin were German agents trying to destroy Russia from within. Even the closest supporters of the Tsar believed this. Then in December 1916 three nobles set out to kill Rasputin, which they did, but they had great difficulty. Apparently he had survived being poisoned and shot several times, he was finally killed by being tied up and thrown into a river to drown.
The war had caused great problems for the Tsar’s regime. It was very unpopular among the Russian people because many people were dying and people were forced to fight when they did not want to. Russia had also lost land during the war and due to the overstretched army and the resources going towards the war the economic state of the country got worse. Inflation had hit an all time high and food shortages were becoming even worse and the country began to panic as the cold winter started to set in. rumours in the government also spiralled out of control. The Bolsheviks opposed the war which had made them very popular in 1917. The Russian people thought that if war was stopped the infrastructure of the country would star to get better and food supplies would be back in full swing. Peasants, which made up 85% of the population, were treated very badly and did not have the same rights as middle class people so the ideas of communism of which the Bolsheviks supported became very popular among peasants so there support had increased.
Why was the Bolshevik revol1ution of 1917 successful?
Part 3
In 1900 four out of five people were peasants; they were country people who made their living by farming. They had been serfs (slaves) of their landlord with no freedom or right of their own and had no land of their own either. This changed in 1861 when Tsar Alexander II freed the peasants and let them own the land on which they grew their food. But there were strings attached, firstly was the land that was given to the peasants was not given to them as individuals but as village communes, known as mirs, in which they lived. Every year the land was split by the commune to each and every family depending on their size and needs, a big problem came of this. As the population grew their plot of land got smaller and smaller each year making it harder for them to survive. What upset the peasants further was that these plots of land did not come free, they had to pay for them in small instalments each year which was paid back over 49 years, peasants didn’t live much longer than this so this upset the peasants more. As you can see life for a peasant was hard, nearly half of new born children died before the age of five. This was because disease and malnutrition were very common. The best they could wish for was a good harvest so they could have enough food to feed their families and also some spare to sell at market to pay for their taxes and yearly payments.
Many peasants tried to improve there way of life by going to work in the cities until harvest, in St Petersburg nearly a million people had come looking for work. They lived in miserable conditions with up too ten people living in one room and four in each bed. They had very long and hard days working for eleven and an half hours, exclusive of meal times. Even though working these long hours still many worked overtime, because of they were paid very poorly. These workers were unable to improve their conditions because Trade unions and strikes were both against the law.
Not all of Russia was poor though. Russian nobility was incredibly rich. Tsar Nicholas being at the top of this owned eight different palaces and employed 15,000 servants and whilst on the move they would need up to twenty train carriages to move their entire luggage. Although nobles only made up 1 percent of the population they owned twenty five percent of the land. Those of which farmed there land made tremendous profits at market and those who didn’t farm the land could just sell it on to be able to afford their luxuries. But it was not only the noble who were rich, by 1900 a new type of class was coming through, the capitalists, who made money from banking industry and trade. The minister of finance made it very easy for the capitalists to make a profit by handing out government contracts, loans to build new factories and cut taxes. Although it was easy to make profits for the capitalists they did not help to improve conditions of workers and hatred soon spread through slums and boarding houses of Russia. The inequality in Russian society was one of the main reasons why the revolution happened because the peasants wanted to be equal and not treated different or have to live differently to any other class.
The idea of communism spread through Russia and at the front of it was the Bolshevik party and leading it was Lenin. Once the tsar was advocated Lenin rushed home and the provisional government was in power. He saw this as an opportunity to put his ideas for communism forward. These were known as the April theses:
In them it said that a second revolution was needed and that the Bolshevik party will not support the Provisional Government. A new republic should be made for the peasants and workers and should be set in place instead of the Provisional Government. He said that all land should be taken by this new republic as well as taking over the banks and taking control of all business industry farming, transport and trade. He also wanted immediate stop to the fighting in World War One and the present army and police forces will be taken over by the new republic. However, elected officials working for the soviets should replace them. He also wanted an international organisation to be set up so the ideas of communism and revolution could be spread worldwide.
Most of these views was very popular and support for the Bolsheviks increased tremendously. One of the reasons for this was that communism was getting ever increasingly popular and there was widespread hatred of the provisional government. The other reason of this was because Lenin had a very forceful personality, people listened to his speeches and he seemed to be making sense. He used slogans such as “all power to soviets” and “Peace! Bread! Land!”. By May 1917 there were 80,000 members of the Bolshevik party, three times larger than in march, but it was still considered a small party. Lenin created these April theses to start a second revolution. Communist polices of the Bolsheviks were popular and appealed to the majority of people and there main idea was that a second revolution was needed to create a better society.
The Provisional Government were becoming ever increasingly unpopular. During September and October 1917 the provisional government gradually lost there authority. Peasants in the countryside rebelled, soldiers in the army refused to fight, and the Bolsheviks in the city got ready for a second revolution.
During the summer of 1917 the peasants began to take control of the land on which they grew their food. They had waited since March to be given land by the provisional government but had failed to do so. On more than 2000 farms peasants killed there landlords and split it between them, land was also taken from the church and the tsar. Kerensky tried to stop this by sending out punishment expeditions into the countryside. Several expeditions went out killing peasants and burning there homes. But he could not find enough troops and fighting soon continued. The violence in the country side delayed the harvest on many farms and food shortages got worse and Russian people faced winter in famine.
In the armies discipline was breaking down. The Petrograd Soviets order no.1 in march already led many soldiers to disobey order given out by officers. And thousands of soldiers were leaving the army every week, many going back home to try and grab some land for themselves. In the frontline the Bolsheviks encouraged soldiers to drop weapons and to give up fighting. In many parts of the frontline soldiers were drunk and they had amused themselves by rolling live grenades into their officers trenches. In October 1917 Lenin returned to Petrograd and started to draw up plans to start a revolution. The unpopularity of the provisional government increased the support for the Bolsheviks and increased the idea of revolution around Russia.
General Kornilov believed that a ‘strong man’ was needed to take over Russia and he was the man to do it. He wanted to continue the war without distraction so he decided to march to Petrograd with a rebel troop of Cossacks and a savage division from the Caucasus Mountains. He had ordered them to kill all revolutionists and get rid of the Petrograd soviet. Kerensky, leader of the provisional government at the time, didn’t know what to do and seemed deemed to fail. He went to the Bolsheviks for help. He asked them to set up a defence and they were called the red guards. This meant letting them out of prison. Within a few days 25,000 Bolsheviks armed with rifles and machine guns were ready to fight. Kornilovs troops refused to fight against fellow workers and kornilov was now arrested.
The Kornilov Revolt and formation of the Red Guards helped the revolution to happen. There help had proved to the provisional government that they weren’t German agents trying to stop the war and they came out as heroes. They also came out as an armed and disciplined fighting force; Trotsky was a good organiser and had the Red Guard under his control. They strengthened their position further when they won the majority of the election in September. By October 1917 they looked more powerful than ever and a revolution looked inevitable.
So was all of these reasons were important to why the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 successful. However, It was mainly because of the inequality in Russian society at the time was the reason for revolution. It was the communist ideas of the Bolsheviks that appealed to the peasants more because it promised them more land and money which is why the Bolsheviks ended up revolting. The unpopularity of the provisional government set up the write time for them to revolt and brought in more supporters and there wouldn’t have been reason to revolt if the provisional government had been popular. The failure of the Kornilov Revolt helped them to set up the strong fighting force they needed to start a revolution. I believe if any of these main factors hadn’t been there the revolution would not have been a success.
