The Bolshevik Revolution

O'Neill, Joseph R. The Bolshevik Revolution. 2009. 112p. ISBN 9781604535112. Available at 947.084 ONE on the library shelves.

The late 1800s and early 1900s was a time of social upheaval. Nationalism was emerging, empires were tittering on the verge of collapse, and social inequities between the vast lower classes and those who controlled wealth and the means of production were deeper than before. Russia, which was a military powerful but economically mismanaged and therefore weak country, was governed by an absolute monarch, the Tsar, who could do what he pleased. Social advancement was next to impossible, and corruption was endemic. 

Revolutionaries guided by Vladimir Lenin took inspiration from Karl Marx's the Communist Manifesto and sought to violently overthrow the monarchy and establish in its place a dictatorship of the workers. Russia's economic backwardness meant that the country was still overwhelmingly agrarian, and that workers were a relatively small number of individuals within the economic system. Several protests and strikes took place in the first decade of the 1900s and were violently repressed.

The First World War dislocated Russian economic activities, and incompetence at the front led to a military collapse. Seeing their chances, in October 1917 Lenin and others led workers in rebellion, and they managed to overthrow the government and seizing control of the state apparatus. Out of the ashes of the conflict emerged the USSR, which would come to dominate the communist world for seventy years, until its collapse in 1991.