The Bolsheviks And The Russian Empire

This book offers a new interpretation of the Russian Revolution, finding that nearly two-thirds of the Bolsheviks were ethnic minorities.

A work delving into the end of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of the Bolsheviks by a foremost figure in the field of geopolitics in the early 20th century

This is a new release of the original 1931 edition.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. 0In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924. A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

Traces the causes and consequences of the revolutions which transformed the Russian empire into the communist Soviet Union - Stalin - Lenin ; Krushev.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

In the third year of the First World War, The Russian Empire experienced a year of revolutionary turmoil that saw the fall of the emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. This was followed by the creation of an interim government which in turn was overthrown by an extreme revolutionary socialist regime in October that year. By the end of 1917 a government that would rule Russia as a dictatorship for most of the rest of the 20th Century was firmly in power and its establishment would have profound implications for the rest of Russian and 20th Century history. However, the revolution was not simply the product of short term events, instead it developed from long term problems and challenges from within Russia, which the government of the tsars was incapable of controlling. The purpose of this ebook is to focus closely on the revolutionary year of 1917 and explain why not just one but two governments fell in that year. It will also examine how and why the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary socialist party came to power. Firstly, however, we must explore the long term causes of the Russian Revolution, which stretch back deep into Russian history. This e-book also features advice on source-based questions and a section on historical interpretations of the Russian Revolution.