The Russian Revolution and Europe in the 1920s

This is Unit Fifteen of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the Russian Revolution and Europe in the nineteen twenties, the exam's twelfth band. Unit fourteen ended with Russia's exit as the one that changed the century. This unit follows it from the last autocrat to the first command economy, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is the anchor's line that Russia never had the stage in between. Two wars broke Nicholas, the first answered with a Duma he did not mean and the second with bread riots he could not shoot. Lenin's party had been built for that moment on a theory that a vanguard could bring socialism to workers and a peasant country could skip capitalism. February made a republic without power; October took power without a republic. Then peace at any price, civil war, retreat, succession, and Stalin's plan, famine and purge. Part one carries Russia to nineteen thirty-nine and then turns to Europe's twenties and the art that took the old order apart. Part two takes the novel, Freud, women, and the methods. By the end you will be able to describe the autocracy breaking. To describe the two revolutions and the civil war. To describe Lenin's retreat and Stalin's plan. To describe Europe's twenties. And to describe Modernism.

Five entries on the autocracy breaking: the last autocrat, Bloody Sunday, what nineteen-oh-five conceded, Rasputin and the war, and the vanguard party built for the moment.

Modernity reached him through war, twice.

WC2 1401 Nicholas II: The Last Autocrat

Nicholas the Second, tsar from eighteen ninety-four, held complete authority over politics and the Church; the tsars alone had resisted modernity. Modernity reached him through war twice, against Japan in nineteen-oh-four and Germany in fourteen. Defeat in the first was blamed on his backwardness and indecision; the anchor's image is the photograph with his cousin George the Fifth. The characterization is attributed.

A petition to the Little Father, shot at.

WC2 1402 The Russo-Japanese War and Bloody Sunday, 1905

In January nineteen-oh-five, with the Japanese war still running, workers marched to the Winter Palace to petition their Little Father, a hundred thousand of them by the anchor's count. Troops fired, and around a thousand died, the witness says. Strikes spread nationwide, and radicals held neighborhoods of Petersburg and Moscow. The anchor puts it after the defeat; it was during.

Three things the tsar could not take back.

WC2 1403 The Revolution of 1905: The Duma, Unions, and a Freer Press

In October nineteen-oh-five the tsar's manifesto, witness-named, conceded a Duma and the vote, and the army regained control. The Duma's parties quarrelled; foreign policy and the army stayed the tsar's. Three things changed: unions were legal, the Duma could not be wholly dismissed, and censorship no longer worked, leaving an anti-government press the tsar could not stop.

A faith healer in the palace, a tsar at the front.

WC2 1404 Rasputin, and the War Breaks the Tsarist State

Alexei's hemophilia brought Rasputin, an illiterate Siberian faith healer who seemed to stop the bleeding, perhaps by hypnotism, the anchor's guess, into the palace. In autumn nineteen fifteen Nicholas took command at the front, leaving the court to the tsarina and Rasputin. Nobles murdered him in sixteen. Desertion, defeat and hunger brought near-anarchy, and the Bolsheviks were ready.

A vanguard, because workers alone stop at unions.

WC2 1405 Bakunin Plus Marx: Lenin's Vanguard Party

Russian radicalism was apocalyptic, Bakunin its type: destroy the order and altruism follows. Marx said revolution needed advanced industry; Russia was peasant. Lenin's answer was the vanguard party: dedicated revolutionaries who lead, because workers alone reach only trade union consciousness, and Russia could skip capitalism. A militant, organized party with contacts in the army by seventeen. Part two reads Lenin.

Six entries on two revolutions and a civil war: Women's Day and the abdication, dual power, the Winter Palace and a dispersed assembly, Brest-Litovsk, Reds against Whites, and the Union founded.

Bread prices, then the tsar's removal.

WC2 1406 February 1917: Women's Day, the Army Joins, the Tsar Abdicates

On International Women's Day in February nineteen seventeen, women workers in Petrograd protested bread prices. Within days the demands were peace and the tsar's removal; a general strike followed. The army refused to fire and joined, as in every revolution since seventeen eighty-nine, the anchor says, and in early March Nicholas abdicated. The city was Petrograd; the anchor says St. Petersburg.

A government without power, soviets without a majority.

WC2 1407 Dual Power: The Provisional Government, the Soviets, and "Peace, Land, and Bread"

The Duma's politicians formed a Provisional Government, Lvov then Kerensky, of the educated middle class; it passed reforms and refused to leave the war. Soviets, councils of workers and soldiers, claimed real power in the cities and bases. Lenin, returned by Germany in April, offered peace, land and bread; soldiers deserted and peasants seized land. Kerensky and the April Theses are witness-named.

The Winter Palace taken, the assembly dispersed.

WC2 1408 October 1917, and the Constituent Assembly Dispersed

The Bolsheviks won the Petrograd Soviet, and on the seventh of November, new style, October old style, Red Guards took the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government. They declared peace and land without compensation. The elected Constituent Assembly met once, in January eighteen, and was dispersed. The anchor's seized the Duma is the witness's Winter Palace.

Peace at any price.

WC2 1409 Brest-Litovsk

To end the war at any price, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on the third of March nineteen eighteen. Russia gave up Poland, Ukraine, Finland and the Baltic states in exchange for peace; the exit freed German divisions for the west. Germany lost the gains when it lost the war eight months later. Date and territories are the witness's.

Few but coherent.

WC2 1410 Reds Against Whites: Civil War, Intervention, Ten Million Dead

Counter-revolution came at once. The Red Army, built by Trotsky, fought the Whites: ex-tsarists, liberals, Mensheviks, minorities seeking independence, and foreign troops including Americans. The tsar's family was shot in eighteen. The Reds were few but coherent and won. The anchor counts close to ten million dead, mostly civilians; the witness dates victory to twenty-three.

No precedent for a socialist society.

WC2 1411 The USSR Founded; Poland, Finland, the Baltics Free

By nineteen twenty-two the Bolsheviks held Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia and founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Poland, Finland and the Baltic states kept the independence the collapse had given them. The Cheka, witness-named, founded in December seventeen, policed dissent and ran the camps. No precedent existed for a socialist society.

Six entries from Lenin's retreat to Stalin's plan: the NEP, the succession won by appointments, the Great Turn, the famine, the purges, and the Union's rank by nineteen thirty-nine.

Retreat to markets.

WC2 1412 War Communism to the New Economic Policy

War Communism, grain requisitions and nationalization, won the Civil War and wrecked the economy; by nineteen twenty-one the harvest was a third of normal. Lenin retreated to the New Economic Policy: peasants sold surplus, small private trade returned, the state kept banks and heavy industry. An arts renaissance and rising living standards followed. A sailors' rising of twenty-one is disclosed, not named.

Appointments beat the Red Army's builder.

WC2 1413 Lenin Dies, 1924: Stalin's Secretaryship Defeats Trotsky

Lenin's strokes from nineteen twenty-two left a struggle. Stalin, General Secretary, controlled appointments; Lenin's Testament, on the Lumen witness, urged his removal, and Stalin kept it buried. Trotsky, the Red Army's builder, wanted world revolution and an end to the NEP. By twenty-seven Stalin had defeated Trotsky and Zinoviev. The anchor calls Stalin Premier; the post was General Secretary.

Peasant and land unbound.

WC2 1414 Socialism in One Country: The Great Turn and Collectivization

Stalin's Socialism in One Country meant industrial buildup at home before world revolution. The Great Turn of nineteen twenty-eight ended the NEP; collectivization from twenty-nine forced peasants into collective farms under quotas set unachievably high. Kulaks, prosperous peasants few in number, twenty-five to forty acres with hired labor, became the scapegoats. Peasant and land unbound, the anchor says.

Two figures, no verdict.

WC2 1415 The Famine of 1932 to 1933, and the Five-Year Plans

The winter of nineteen thirty-two to thirty-three brought famine, worst in Ukraine; the witness estimates three point nine million Ukrainians dead, the Holodomor. The anchor puts collectivization's total at six to ten million. The Five-Year Plans built industry to near parity with the West, quotas never met and thousands dead building them. Totals are contested; both figures are attributed, no verdict.

Each purge purged the purgers.

WC2 1416 The Purges, the NKVD, and the Gulag

The purges struck the party, the army and the police: kulaks, Old Bolsheviks, officers, party members, then ordinary citizens. The NKVD tortured confessions to outlandish charges; each purge purged the purgers. The Gulag held the survivors. Every communist is a possible hidden enemy, Stalin said. The anchor counts at least seven hundred thousand killed; estimates vary.

Third industrial power by thirty-nine.

WC2 1417 Recognition and Rank: The USSR by 1939

Britain and France recognized the Soviet Union in nineteen twenty-four, the United States in thirty-three; the anchor's date for France is corrected. The command economy made it the third industrial power by thirty-nine, after the United States and Germany, and its army at parity with the West. The aim was allies against Germany and Japan.

Two entries on Europe's twenties: order rebuilt on paper from Washington to Kellogg-Briand, and a democracy that disappointed where kings had gone.

War renounced, on paper.

WC2 1418 Locarno, Dawes, Kellogg-Briand: The Spirit of the Twenties

The Washington Naval Conference of nineteen twenty-one limited fleets. The Dawes Plan of twenty-four eased Germany's reparations with American loans. Locarno in twenty-five guaranteed the western borders and brought Germany into the League. Kellogg-Briand in twenty-eight renounced war, sixty-two nations signing, with no way to enforce it. Witness-built; the anchor has none of these.

Not a prelude, but a crisis of its own.

WC2 1419 After the War: Kings Gone, Democracy Disappointing

The war destroyed the old order of monarchy and nobility across Central and Eastern Europe. What replaced it, republican democracy, proved profoundly disappointing, the anchor says: instability before the war and after it. Four dynasties gone, no settled order in their place. The interwar years were not a prelude but their own crisis. The anchor's framing, attributed.

Four entries on Modernism: authority rejected, Marinetti's manifesto, the painters from Cubism to Schiele, and a riot at the Rite.

Morality as a smokescreen.

WC2 1420 Modernism: Rejecting Authority, Art for Art's Sake

Modernism, born around nineteen hundred and grown up in the twenties, rejected established authority and the post-Victorian middle class. It refused melodrama's moral messages: art for art's sake, provocation, either glorifying industry or experimenting with form. Its target was Victorian morality, hierarchy and control; the inner life a mess of drives, morality a smokescreen. The anchor's definition.

War as the world's only hygiene.

WC2 1421 Futurism and Marinetti's Manifesto, 1909

Italian Futurism sang speed, technology and violence. Marinetti's manifesto of nineteen-oh-nine praised the love of danger, glorified war as the world's only hygiene, promised to destroy museums and libraries, and declared scorn for woman; a racing car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. Most Futurists embraced fascism after the war. Quotations are the document's; the anchor's verdict attributed.

Several angles, painted feeling, gold leaf, ugly nudes.

WC2 1422 Cubism, Expressionism, Klimt, Schiele

Picasso's Cubism showed several perspectives at once. Expressionism, Kandinsky and Marc's Blue Rider among its groups, painted feeling in color; Vorticism in England painted motion and explosions. In Vienna Klimt's gold-leaf The Kiss of nineteen-oh-eight crowned his golden phase; his University murals were destroyed as degenerate. Schiele painted emaciated, ugly nudes of himself. Klimt, Cubism and Expressionism rest on the art witness; Schiele is anchor-only.

A riot, then a classic.

WC2 1423 Stravinsky's Rite and Schoenberg's Twelve Tones

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Scythian fertility rites, was hissed and pelted at its Paris premiere in nineteen thirteen and canonical within years. Schoenberg abandoned tonality and built the twelve-tone method, subverting expectations audiences had trained since the Renaissance. Anchor-only; no witness treats the composers.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the last autocrat, Bloody Sunday during the war, three things the tsar could not take back, Rasputin, and the vanguard. You can describe Women's Day and the abdication, dual power, the Winter Palace and the dispersed assembly, Brest-Litovsk, Reds against Whites, and the Union founded. You can describe the NEP, the succession won by appointments, collectivization, a famine with two figures and no verdict, the purges, and the third industrial power by thirty-nine. You can describe order on paper and democracy disappointing. And you can describe Modernism rejecting authority, Marinetti, the painters, and a riot at the Rite. Part two takes the novel, Freud, the New Woman and the vote, Lenin read, February against October, and the capstone.