Russia in War and Revolution 1900-1924 PDF

# Russia in War and Revolution: Russia 1900-24 ## Part One: Russia under the Tsar - Introduction - The Russian Empire in 1900 - The government of Russia - Russian society - Opponents of the Tsar - The 1905 Revolution - The aftermath of the 1905 Revolution - Revision guide ## Part Two: War and Rev...

# Russia in War and Revolution: Russia 1900-24 ## Part One: Russia under the Tsar - Introduction - The Russian Empire in 1900 - The government of Russia - Russian society - Opponents of the Tsar - The 1905 Revolution - The aftermath of the 1905 Revolution - Revision guide ## Part Two: War and Revolution - Introduction - Russia at war, 1914-17 - The Revolution of March 1917 - The Provisional Government - The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 - Revision guide and revision exercise ## Part Three: Lenin’s Russia - Introduction - 'Peace at any price' - Civil war and foreign intervention - 'One step backwards...' War Communism and the NEP - Revision guide and revision exercise ## The Russian Empire in 1900 ### The Land and the Climate - Russia is very big. It is colder in the north and warmer in the south. - The tundra is a cold land where little grows. - The taiga is a cold land covered with pine trees. - Only in the south is the land warm enough for farming. - In 1900 only 5% of all Russian land was used for farming. - The cold climate affected Russia's industry and commerce as well as her farming. - Much of Russia's coastline is frozen over with thick ice for much of the year. - The great rivers of Siberia - the Ob, the Yenisey and the Lena - are also frozen for much of the year - The coast and the rivers stayed locked in ice throughout the long winter, so sea and river trade were impossible until spring arrived. - A new railway, the Trans-Siberian, was being built to allow trade between east and west all year round, but in 1900 it was still only half-built. ### An Empire of Many Peoples - In 1900 Russia was a great empire ruled by a Tsar, or Emperor - Nicholas II. - About 125 million people lived in Tsar Nicholas’s empire. - Less than half were Russians. <br> | People | Population | |---|---| | Russians | 55,650,000 | | Ukrainians | 22,400,000 | | Poles | 7,900,000 | | Byelorussians | 5,900,000 | | Jews | 5,000,000 | | Kirghiz | 4,000,000 | | Tartars | 3,700,000 | | Finns | 2,500,000 | | Germans | 1,800,000 | | Lithuanians | 1,650,000 | | Letts | 1,400,000 | | Georgians | 1,350,000 | | Armenians | 1,150,000 | | Romanians | 1,110,000 | | Caucasians | 1,000,000 | | Estonians | 1,000,000 | | Iranians | 1,000,000 | | Other Asiatic Peoples | 5,750,000 | | Mongols | 500,000 | | Others | 200,000 | - The majority of the Tsar’s subjects were non-Russian peoples who had been conquered by their ancestors. - So, for six out of ten of the Tsar’s subjects, Russian was a foreign language. ## The Government of Russia ### The Autocracy - Tsar Nicholas II, the Emperor of Russia, was an autocrat. - He did not have to share power. - Nicholas could make new laws, increase taxes, and do exactly what he liked without consulting anyone. - There was no parliament to limit his power. - He could sack any minister or adviser who disagreed with him. - In practice, Nicholas couldn’t govern 125 million Russians all by himself. - He employed many thousands of civil servants. ### The Russian Orthodox Church - The priests of the Russian Orthodox Church taught people to respect the autocracy and to be loyal to the Tsar. - The head of the church was a government minister. - Bishops took their orders from him, and priests took their orders from the bishops. - In this way, the government had control over the minds and souls of many Russian churchgoers. ### Nicholas and Alexandra - Nicholas had this to say in October 1894, the day after the death of his father, Alexander III: >"What is going to happen to me, to all Russia? I am not ready to be the Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to ministers." - In January 1895, he said: >"I shall preserve the principle of autocracy just as firmly as my late unforgettable father preserved it." - Count Witte, Russia’s first Prime Minister, was sacked by Nicholas in 1906. >"We talked for two solid hours. He shook my hand. He wished me all the luck in the world. I went home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk." - Sir Arthur Nicholson, the British Ambassador to Russia in 1906, said: >"The gentle but uneducated Emperor is weak on every point except his own autocracy.” - Alexander Kerensky, Russian politician and Prime Minister in 1917, wrote about Nicholas in his memoirs in 1966: >"The daily work of a ruler he found terribly boring. He could not stand listening seriously to ministers’ reports, or reading them. He liked such ministers as could tell an amusing story and did not weary his attention with too much business." - Nicholas’s German wife, Alexandra, was confident and strong willed. - She encouraged Nicholas to rule as an autocrat and to ignore new ideas about sharing power with the people. ## Russian Society ### The Peasants - In 1900, four out of every five citizens of the Russian Empire were peasants - country people who made their living by farming. - Until 1861, the peasants were serfs, slaves to their landlords with no rights, no freedom, and no land of their own. - In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, Nicholas II's grandfather, freed the peasants from serfdom and allowed them to own the land on which they grew their food. - The land was not given to them as individuals; it was given to the village commune, or mir, in which they lived. - The peasants had to pay for the land given to the commune in yearly installments, called redemption payments, over the next forty-nine years. - Only when a peasant had paid all forty-nine instalments would the land become his or her personal property. - Life for Russian peasants was hard. Nearly half of all newborn children died before the age of five, while the average life expectancy of those who did reach the age of five was only fifty years. - Diseases and malnutrition were common. - The best that peasants could hope for in life was a good harvest. ### The Town Workers - Many peasants tried to improve their lives by going to work in the nearest town or city. - They would work in factories or mines until harvest time, when they returned to their communes. - The largest city in Russia in 1900 was the capital, St Petersburg. - This extract is from a book written by Father Georgei Gapon, a priest in St Petersburg, about cotton workers in 1905: >"They receive miserable wages and generally live in an overcrowded state, very commonly in special lodging houses. A woman takes several rooms in her own name, subletting each one; and it is common to see ten or more persons living in one room and four sleeping in one bed... The normal working day is eleven and a half hours of work, exclusive of meal times. But manufacturers have received permission to work overtime, so that the average day is longer than that nominally allowed by law - fourteen or fifteen hours. I often watched the crowds of poorly clad and emaciated figures of men and girls returning from the mills... Why do they agree to work overtime? They have to do so because they are paid by the piece and the rate is very low." - Workers like these were unable to improve their conditions. Trade unions were not allowed by law. Going on strike was illegal. ### The Rich - Not all Russians were poor. - Russian nobles were fabulously rich. - Tsar Nicholas owned eight different palaces and employed 15,000 servants. - When the royal family moved from one palace to another, up to twenty railway carriages were needed for their luggage. - Although the nobles were only 1% of the Russian population, they owned around 25% of all the land. - Those who could be bothered to farm their land efficiently made handsome profits. ## Opponents of the Tsar - Most Russians did not question the Tsar’s autocratic system of government. - They believed that God had appointed the Tsar to rule over them, and that everyone else had their rightful place in society. - Some Russians, however, refused to accept this. - They wanted to get rid of the Tsar and make big changes to Russian government and society. ### Terrorism - On a snowy Sunday afternoon in March 1881, a bomb exploded underneath the carriage of Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar who had freed the peasants from serfdom twenty years earlier. - He was unhurt, but when he got out of his carriage to inspect the damage, a young man stepped forward and threw what looked like a snowball at his feet. - The snowball exploded, tearing off one of Alexander’s legs and ripping his belly open. - He bled to death shortly after, watched by his son Alexander and his grandson Nicholas. - The assassination of Alexander II was carried out by a terrorist group called the ‘People’s Will’. - The assassination did not destroy the autocracy. - Both Alexander III and Nicholas II, who watched him die, were determined not to let the same happen to them. - Both used the Okhrana to arrest critics and opponents. - Many thousands ended up in prison or in exile in Siberia. ### The Socialist Revolutionary Party - The SRs wanted all land in Russia to be given to the mirs (village communes), so that peasants could have a bigger share of the land. - To help achieve their aims, the SRs had a ‘Fighting Organisation’, which organised terrorist campaigns. - They gained support from millions of peasants who wanted their own land but had fallen behind with their yearly redemption payments. ### The Social Democratic Party - The Social Democrats followed the ideas of Karl Marx, who had written the Communist Manifesto (1848). - Marx predicted that there would be a violent revolution in which the working class overthrew the capitalists who owned the wealth of the country. - The workers would take away the factories, mines, machinery, and raw materials from the capitalists and share them equally among themselves. - The Social Democratic Party was set up in 1898. - Its leaders quickly began to argue about the best way to start a socialist revolution. - In 1903, they split into two groups: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. - The Bolsheviks believed that the revolution should be organised by a small group. - They should lead the party and make all the decisions. - The Mensheviks believed that the party should be a mass party. - It should be run democratically, with members electing the leaders and deciding on its policies. - The leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, argued that the Mensheviks' approach would waste time. - Julius Martov, leader of the Mensheviks, replied that the revolution would fail if it did not have the support of the whole working class. ### Liberals - Not all the Tsar’s opponents were violent revolutionaries. - Many law-abiding Russians supported the Tsar, but they wanted him to share his power. - They wanted a democratic system of government, like the one in Britain where an elected parliament shared power with the monarch. - Sadly for the liberals, Alexander II had made plans for a Russian parliament the day before he was blown up by the ‘People’s Will’. - The first thing his son, Alexander III, did when he became Tsar was to tear up those plans. ## The 1905 Revolution ### War Against Japan - In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan. - They were fighting for control of Korea and Manchuria in the Far East. - Tsar Nicholas was glad to go to war. - He thought that a quick victory would make him popular, and would stop people criticising his government. - Right from the start of the war, the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat. - To help the army, Nicholas sent the Russian Baltic fleet on a seven-month voyage halfway around the world to Manchuria. - But as soon as the Russian fleet arrived in Japanese waters, the Japanese fleet destroyed all but three of the Russian ships in the battle of Tsushima. - The war with Japan weakened Nicholas's position. It also made conditions for working people worse than before. - Factories closed as raw materials ran short, and workers found themselves out of work and on the streets. ### Bloody Sunday - On Sunday, 22 January, 1905, a crowd of 200,000 workers and their families marched through the streets of St Petersburg towards the Tsar’s Winter Palace. - Their aim was to present Nicholas with a petition asking for better working and living conditions; an end to the war with Japan; and a shorter working day, among other reforms. - The marchers were led by Father Gapon, a priest who sympathised with poor workers. - When the marchers reached the centre of St Petersburg, soldiers and police tried to stop them. - Scuffles broke out and then the soldiers opened fire, aiming low. - Around 500 marchers were killed and thousands more were wounded. - This dreadful massacre quickly came to be known as Bloody Sunday. - As news of the massacre spread, there were riots in the countryside and strikes in the towns. - Hundreds of government officials were murdered. - Tsar Nicholas’s uncle, the Grand Duke Serge, was blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb. - Bloody Sunday had started a revolution against the Tsar. ### The 1905 Revolution - In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, pride of the Black Sea fleet, threw their officers overboard and took control of the ship. - This was mutiny. - Although the mutineers had no plan, and gave themselves up only a few weeks later, the mutiny was very threatening to Tsar Nicholas. - It showed that he could not trust his armed forces. - Just as worrying for Nicholas was the behaviour of peasants in the countryside. - In many areas, peasants had rebelled, butchering their landlords and burning their farms. - At the same time, many of the non-Russian peoples of the Empire, such as the Georgians and the Poles, took the opportunity to declare their independence from Russian rule. - In September 1905, a general strike began. - All over Russia, factories, offices, shops, railways, hospitals, and schools closed down. - In many towns and cities, the strikers set up councils called Soviets to run the towns during the strike. - The Soviets quickly became an alternative form of government. - The striking workers were willing to obey the orders of the Soviets, even though they would not obey the Tsar’s government. ### The October Manifesto - Faced with all these problems, Nicholas had to give way. - In October 1905, he issued a document called the October Manifesto, which said that Russia could have a Duma, an elected parliament to help run the country. - It also allowed the Russian people basic rights, such as the right to form political parties and the right of free speech. - The liberals were delighted with the October Manifesto, but the revolutionary parties did not trust Nicholas to keep his word. - They were proved right in December when the police arrested the members of the St Petersburg Soviet and sent fifteen of them into exile in Siberia. - In Moscow, an army was sent to crush the Soviet, and more than a thousand people died in street fighting between revolutionaries and soldiers. - In the early months of 1906, the Tsar crushed all other areas of revolution. - Bands of thugs known as Black Hundreds decided to take the law into their own hands and organised massacres of revolutionaries. - By March 1906, the revolution was over. - But at least Russia had got a parliament out of it - the Duma. - Elections for the Duma were held in March 1906, and a majority of anti-government candidates gained office. - But when the Duma met for the first time in May, Nicholas issued a set of Fundamental Laws. - The first one said: >"To the Emperor of all the Russias, belongs supreme autocratic power." - As far as Nicholas was concerned, nothing much had changed. Duma or no Duma, Russia was still an autocracy. ## The Aftermath of the 1905 Revolution ### The Dumas - Tsar Nicholas made it perfectly clear in his Fundamental Laws that he would not allow the Duma, Russia's new parliament any real power. - When the Duma demanded a share in government, Nicholas surrounded its meeting place with troops and broke it up. - Russia’s first Duma had lasted for seventy-five days. - A second Duma was elected in 1907, but it was less to Nicholas’s liking. - It contained not only liberals but also Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats who aimed to destroy the autocracy. - Nicholas broke up the second Duma after three months. - The third Duma, which met in 1907, did better than its two predecessors. It lasted a full five years. - This was because Nicholas changed the voting laws to make sure that revolutionaries were not elected to it. - The third Duma was mostly made up of conservative politicians who behaved themselves and did what Nicholas wanted. ### The Stolypin Reforms - With the powerless third Duma providing a show of democracy, Nicholas got on with the business of autocracy. - In 1906, he appointed a new, tough Prime Minister to make sure there were no more outbreaks of revolution. - His name was Peter Stolypin. - Stolypin believed in strict government. - His first action as Prime Minister was to clamp down on terrorism. - In 1906, 1008 terrorists were arrested, tried by special military courts, and executed. - Russians gave the gallows a new nickname in 1906: ‘Stolypin’s Necktie’. - In the same year, 21,000 people were exiled to Siberia. - Terrorism had ceased to be a serious threat to the autocracy. - Stolypin realized that brute force would not solve every problem. - He feared that there would be further outbreaks of violence in the countryside if the peasants remained poor. - Stolypin therefore helped the peasants to become the owners of their own land. - The redemption payments that peasants had been paying since 1861 were abolished. - So too was the law which said that the village communes, the mirs, controlled the land. - Stolypin hoped that hardworking peasants would now leave the communes and set up their own farms. - They would be bigger and more productive than the communal farms. - In time, he thought, the peasants who owned land would grow rich. - They would want peace in the countryside and would therefore help prevent revolution. ### Rasputin - While Stolypin was Prime Minister, Nicholas and his wife Alexandra became involved with a strange Siberian peasant who claimed to be a Starets - a holy man of God. - Nicholas and Alexandra were very religious. When they found out that their only son, Alexis, had the incurable disease haemophilia, Alexandra began to pray daily for his recovery. - In 1905, it seemed as if her prayers had been answered. - Two ladies of the court introduced Nicholas and Alexandra to Gregory Efimovitch, a man whom they said had special powers of prophecy and healing. - Shortly after this, Alexis had a fall which started off internal bleeding. - Gregory Efimovitch prayed at Alexis’s bedside, and the next morning Alexis had fully recovered. - From then on, the Starets was one of the most trusted members of their court. ## Russia at War, 1914-17 - Russia went to war in August 1914, and the news that the country was at war was very popular. - All over Russia, there were patriotic demonstrations in support of the Tsar. - Hatred of Germany spread like wildfire. - Nicholas renamed St Petersburg, which he thought sounded too much like a German name, Petrograd. ### Early Defeats - Two huge Russian armies attacked Germany at the end of August 1914. - They should have won a great victory against the single German army facing them, but the Russian armies were badly led and badly equipped. - Nearly a million men were without rifles, and many didn’t even have boots. - In two battles, at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, both Russian armies were wiped out. - Over 250,000 Russian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. - This was only six weeks after the start of the war. - By the end of 1914, the Russians had lost over one million men through casualties, deaths, and soldiers taken prisoner. ### The Collapse of the Economy - As the war continued in 1915, the Russian economy began to collapse. - The first problem was the lack of workers. - In all, 15.5 million young men were taken into the armies to fight, halving the number needed to work in factories and the fields. - In 1915, nearly 600 factories had to close because they didn’t have enough workers. - On many farms, weeds grew in empty fields where corn had once grown. - The next problem was transport. - Russia, the biggest country in the world, depended on railways for food and raw materials, but there were not enough trains to keep the armies as well as the towns-people supplied with food and materials. - Thousands of tonnes of butter, meat, and grain rotted in railway sidings in the countryside, while soldiers and people in the towns went hungry, simply because there weren’t enough trains to transport them. - Coal supplies to factories and power stations halted, while coal trains stood at the coal mines waiting for engines to pull them. - And as the power failed, so more factories had to close. - A third problem was inflation. - Russian money, the rouble, began to lose its value in 1914. - At the same time, food prices went up. - People found that their wages were buying less and less food. - Meanwhile, on the fighting fronts, defeat followed defeat. - By the end of 1915, 300,000 Russians had been killed, and three million were either wounded or locked up in enemy prison camps. ### Dark Forces Destroying the Throne - In August 1915, Tsar Nicholas decided to take personal command of his armies. - He left Petrograd and went to live at army headquarters 500 kilometers away, which was a fatal mistake. - He left Alexandra in charge of the government in Petrograd, who was completely under the influence of Rasputin. - For the next sixteen months – from August 1915 to the end of 1916 – Alexandra was able to do more or less what she liked. - She used her power to sack ministers who displeased her and to replace them with men whom she, and Rasputin, favoured. - During these sixteen months, Russia had four different Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, four Ministers of Agriculture, three Ministers of War, and two Ministers of Foreign Affairs. - With ministers coming and going at such speed, the work of the government ground to a halt. - Food, fuel, and ammunition were already in short supply. - Now they became almost unobtainable. - And although the Russian armies won some important victories in 1916, the death toll of Russian soldiers continued to rocket until it went over one million. ## The Revolution of March 1917 - During the month of March 1917, conditions in Russia grew rapidly worse. - In the capital, Petrograd, discontent turned into a full-scale revolution which overthrew the Tsar. - It happened like this: ### Wednesday 7 March - The managers of the giant Putilov steel works locked out their 20,000 workers after pay talks broke down. - This meant that 20,000 tough, angry steel workers were now out on the streets in a hood for trouble. - Workers in other factories went on strike in support of the steel workers. ### Thursday 8 March - Fifty factories closed down and 90,000 workers went out on strike. - As this was International Women’s Day, there were also thousands of socialist women on the streets, demonstrating. - The subject on everybody’s mind was bread. - Sybil Grey, an Englishwoman living in Petrograd, recorded in her diary: >"On Thursday, March 8th, a poor woman entered a bread shop on the Morskaia… and asked for bread. She was told there was none.” - A general, passing by in his motor, stopped and remonstrated with her. - A crowd collected round them, smashed his motor car, and, increasing in size, paraded the streets asking for bread. ### Friday 9 March - 200,000 workers were on strike. - Leon Trotsky, writing in his History of the Russian Revolution in 1932, wrote: >"About one half of the industrial workers of Petrograd are on strike. The workers come to the factories in the mornings; instead of going to work they hold meetings. They begin the processions towards the centre... Throughout the entire day, crowds of people poured from one part of the city to the other. They were persistently dispelled by the police, stopped and crowded back by cavalry detachments and occasionally by the infantry." ### Saturday 10 March - 250,000 workers were on strike. - There was no public transport, and no newspapers. - Food shortages continued. - Louis de Robien, a French diplomat living in Petrograd, wrote in his diary: >"The movement has taken on a political character... In the square in front of the Kazan Cathedral, there are reserves of infantry. The troops opened fire in the Nevsky Prospekt at about 6 o’clock... Most of the rounds were blank… All the same there were some killed and wounded." - Later in the day, Cossacks refused to attack a procession of strikers when they were ordered to do so. ### Sunday 11 March - The President of the Duma, Michael Rodzianko, sent this telegram to the Tsar: >"The situation is serious. The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed; the transport system is broken down; the food and fuel supplies are completely disorganised. Discontent is general and on the increase. There is wild shooting on the streets; troops are firing at each other. It is urgent that someone enjoying the confidence of the country be entrusted with the formation of a new government." - The Tsar’s response to this telegram was to order the Duma to stop meeting. ### Monday 12 March - At 6 o’clock in the morning, a mutiny began in the Volinsky regiment of the army: a sergeant shot his commanding officer dead. - The soldiers then left their barracks and marched into the centre of Petrograd. - Louis de Robien recorded the results in his diary: >"Serious mutiny has broken out among the troops and all the men we saw belong to regiments sent to restore order, who, after firing a few volleys, made common cause with the mutineers. All the units sent to fight the mutiny are defecting one after another." - Later in the day, the Duma held a meeting, despite the Tsar’s order not to do so. - It set up a twelve-man committee called the Provisional Committee to take over the government. - That evening, revolutionaries set up a Soviet, or council, of workers and soldiers in Petrograd. - The Petrograd Soviet also intended to take over the government, and immediately began to organise food supplies for the city. ### Tuesday 13 March - Tsar Nicholas sent a telegram to the Duma, saying that he would share power with the Duma. - Michael Rodzianko, the Duma leader, replied: >"The measures you propose are too late. The time for them has gone. There is no return.” ### Wednesday 14 March - Leading army generals sent telegrams to Nicholas, informing him that none of the army supported him. - Nicholas, 500 km away in army headquarters, now tried to return to Petrograd to take control of the situation. - But, according to Louis de Robien: >"My first impression on leaving the house this morning was a better one. There seem to be fewer shots and there is some attempt at organisation: in fact, I met a convoy of sledges carrying food supplies, escorted by soldiers… It is said that the Emperor has left Headquarters, but that his train has been stopped by the revolutionaries while he was on his way to Tsarskoe Selo.” ### Thursday 15 March - Nicholas, now 250 km away from Petrograd, where revolutionaries had halted his train, agreed to abdicate and give the throne to Alexis. - He realised that Alexis was too ill to be Tsar and gave the crown to his brother, Grand Duke Michael. - However, Michael, feared that he would be just as unpopular as Nicholas, and within twenty-four hours, he too had abdicated. - Russia was now a republic - a country governed not by a monarch but by an elected leader. - The question was, which elected body should governed Russia: the Duma's Provisional Committee or the Petrograd Soviet? ## The Provisional Government - Russia’s new government was the twelve-man committee that the Duma had set up on 12 March. - The twelve men called themselves the Provisional Government, meaning that they would govern Russia for a short time until elections could be held. - They would then resign. - The Provisional Government was the official government. - But across the corridor from their meeting place in the Tauride Palace was a second, unofficial government, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. - This council, which had been elected by working people, aimed to protect the interests of working people and soldiers. ### Lenin and the April Theses - At the time of the March Revolution, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin, was in exile in Switzerland. - He disagreed with the revolutionaries who cooperated with the Provisional Government. - He wanted to get back to Russia to organise a second revolution. - Petrograd, however, was 2000km away, and the lands between Switzerland and Russia were held by Germany and Austria, Russia’s enemies in the Great War. - The Germans were happy to help Lenin get back home. - They knew that he would make trouble for the Provisional Government. - That would help Germany in the war. - They provided Lenin with food, money, and a special train in which he crossed Germany safely. - Lenin reached Petrograd on 16 April 1917. - Soon after his arrival, he made a speech to the Bolsheviks. - He said that there must be an end to the war with Germany. - All land must be given to the peasants. - Banks must be nationalised. - The Bolsheviks should change their name to ‘Communists’. - Lenin also said: >"No support must be given to the Provisional Government. Instead, the Soviets should get together to form a new government. ‘All power to the Soviets!’" - Lenin’s ideas later became known as the April Theses. ## The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 ### The State of Russia in September 1917 - During the summer of 1917, peasants began to take control of the land on which they grew their food. - They had been waiting since Match for the Provisional Government to give them land, but it had failed to do so. - On more than 2000 farms, peasants killed their landlords and divided the land up among themselves. - In other areas, they seized the lands of the Church and the Tsar. - Kerensky tried to stop the peasants from grabbing the land by sending soldiers on ‘punishment expeditions’ into the countryside. - Several expeditions went out, whipping peasants and burning their homes, but Kerensky could not find enough loyal troops to do this dirty work for him. - The violence between landlords and peasants continued. - The violence delayed the harvest on many farms, and this led to food shortages. - Russia was already desperately short of food, so now people faced the winter with a threat of famine. - In the armies, discipline was breaking down. - The Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1 in March had already led many soldiers to disobey orders given by their officers. - Now, thousands of soldiers were deserting from the army every week, mostly to go back to their villages to make sure they got their fair share of land. - In the front lines, Bolsheviks encouraged soldiers to lay down their weapons and to give up fighting. - Everywhere in the army, there was drunkenness, chaos, and violence. - In many parts of the front line, soldiers amused themselves by rolling live hand grenades into their officers’ quarters. - In October, the Army General Headquarters admitted in a report: >"The army is simply a huge, weary, shabby and ill-fed mob of angry men united by their common thirst for peace and by common disappointment." ### The November Revolution - In October 1917, Lenin returned to Petrograd from his hiding place in Finland. - At a Bolshevik meeting, he said that they should begin a revolution immediately. - He said: >"Hunger does not wait. The peasant uprising does not wait. The war does not wait.” - The Bolshevik leaders agreed to stage an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. - Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik chairman of the Petrograd Soviett, drew up the plans, and set up headquarters in the Smolny Institute, a disused school. - Trotsky did not have to make his plans in secret, because there was nothing Kerensky and the Provisional Government could do to stop him. - The army said it would support the Bolsheviks, and the guards of the Peter and Paul Fortress gave all the rifles in the fortress to the Bolsheviks. - By the night of 6 November, the Red Guards were well armed, and they were ready for action. - They began to take control of all the most important in Petrograd. - First they took control of the six bridges across the river Neva. - Then, in the morning of 7 November, they seized government buildings, the power station, and the railway stations. - The Provisional Government had its headquarters in the Winter Palace, and was guarded only by army cadets and the Women's Battalion of the Russian Army. - In the evening of 7 November, a cruiser, the Aurora, sailed up the river Neva. - Bolshevik sailors had captured the Aurora. - They fired blank shells at the Winter Palace. - Later, the guns in