| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Revolution of 1905 | ended in failure but there was a little reform although really it was still tsarist. Heightened divisions among exiled Russian socialists. |
| Liberal constitutionalism | played a role in the expanding domain of Russian public opinion since the 1860s. believers in this were gentry, leaders of local assemblies, and members of the expanding professional classes. Some state bureaucrats too. |
| Socialist Revolutionaries | populists. Largest radical group. Believed the peasants would one day overthrow the tsar and only revolution could bring reform. |
| Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party | Marxists founded this at Minsk in 1898. confident that one day in way future proletariat would be sufficiently numerous/class-conscious to seize power. After a democratic revolution had successfully overthrown the Russian aristocracy. |
| Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) | leader of the Bolsheviks. family was nonhereditary nobility due to result of loyal service. got a law degree. Exiled to Siberia. Also exiled in Switzerland. Believed that Marxist analysis could be applied to the backwards Russia. Rejected all compromise. Instead of believing in social experiences of the workers, believed that only a small minority of workers would achieve consciousness and that they should join with intellectuals in a party that would direct the masses. Thought capitalism was ripe for a fall around the time of the war. Wanted to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. |
| Alexander Ulyanov | Lenin’s brother; member of the revolutionary group “Peoples’ Will;” executed due to participation in plot to assassinate Alex III. |
| What is to be Done? | Lenin’s pamphlet that established the basic tenets of a new revolutionary party. |
| Bolsheviks | Russian for "majority." Lenin's faction of the Social Democratic Party in Russia, which seized power in October 1917. Unlike most Marxists, who stressed the power of laboring people, Lenin stressed that a highly disciplined socialist elite - rather than the working class as a whole - would lead Russia to socialism. |
| Menshiviks | the “minority;” those who believed that the proletariat revolution lay in the future but not until after the bourgeois uprising. Believed that their historic role ws to mobilize support for their party through propaganda, undertake timely liberal alliances, and reject terror—sought to be a large party of extreme revolutionary opposition. |
| Jewish Pale | those provinces where Jews were allowed to settle in Russia and where they faced endemic anti-Semitism and occasional bloody pogroms. |
| Bloody Sunday | January 22 1905. Orthodox priest led a march of workers carrying a reformative petition to the tsar’s Winter Palace. but troops blocked their way and 300+ marchers including women and children died and 1000+ maybe wounded. Shattered the myth that the tsar was the Holy Father. |
| Sergey Witte | became prime minister for Nicolas II. Eager to make Russia a modern industrial power if the tsar granted minimal reforms. Got Nicolas to rescind redemption payments, allow religious toleration in Poland, allow Poles/Lithuanians to use their own languages, turn political trials back to regular courts, and abolish some restrictions on Jews. Eventually dismissed… |
| October Manifesto | 1905. created a national representative assembly (Duma) to be chosen by UMS. Promised freedom of the press. |
| Duma | national representative assembly; created by the October Manifesto; had little real power. Met for the first time in April 1906. |
| Constitutional Democratic Party | Kadets. Staunch liberals who demanded constitutional government and thought that Nicolas’s promised reforms left the essential structures of autocracy unchanged. |
| Soviets | neighborhood councils made up of delegates from factories, shops, trade unions, and political parties that helped organize strikes (legalized in Dec.). St. Petersburg workers’ councils, the establishment of which were championed by the Mensheviks. Willing to collaborate with liberals. |
| Black Hundreds | fanatical Russian nationalists, perhaps instigated by Orthodox priests, who unleashed a wave of violence against Jews. Led by small traders and agricultural laborers who feared that economic change would cost them. Also by police who opposed political reform. Continued to beat up opponents of tsar. |
| State Council | upper assembly decreed to be established by the tsar. Loyal people. Counteracted the influence of the Duma. |
| Pyotr Stolypin | named by Nicolas 2 as prime minister. Did undertake some rural reforms beginning in 1906 |
| Stolypin’s neckties | ropes of the gallows used to execute more than 1,000 people. These hangings occurred due to an august decree by the tsar that established military field courts that could summarily convict and sentence civilians accused of violent political crimes. |
| Octobrists | dominated the 1907 (third) Duma. Believed that the tsar’s promises in his manifesto of October 1905 represented sufficient reform and wanted to stop at that. |
| Defensists | those among Russian socialists who argued that Russian workers should defend their country against German attack. |
| Internationalists | opposed the war; viewed it as a struggle between capitalist powers in which workers were but pawns. |
| War Industries Committee | industrialists formed this with permission of the tsar in 1915 in order to expedite wartime production. Delegations of workers were added. |
| Petrograd | city with a lot of social polarization. |
| Tannenberg | most disastrous military defeat of the Russians where 100,000 Russian troops were captured |
| Tsarina Alexandra | loathed by her subjects. Born in Germany. Granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Raised in England. Converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Had an ill son. Friends with Rasputin a lot. Extended influence over weak-willed husband; conservative. Was not a German agent but served their purposes well. |
| Alexei | ill only son of the Romanovs. Hemophiliac and heir to the throne. Healed by Rasputin. |
| Grigory Rasputin | Alexandra’s great favorite. Debauched holy man. Occult power. Moved his way to the inner circle of court life and then healed Alexei. Was assassinated by noble conspirators: first by poison, then shot, then smashed skull, then drowned in Neva River! |
| Progressive Bloc | formed by some liberal members of the Duma, including Kadets. Committed to working with the tsar in hopes of encouraging reform. |
| Alexsandr Kerensky | Socialist Revolutionary leader. Head of the provisional government, trying to smooth relations between them and the soviet. Leader of the first coalition gov. prime minister of the second coalition gov. |
| Nevsky Prospect | around where the upper-and-middle class residential districts and the palatial buildings of imperial government lay in Petrograd. Long street. Shows segregation. |
| February Revolution | general strike closes down Petrograd, Russian soldiers mutiny, Bolsheviks and others are arrested because they want to go further than demonstrations, Nicolas 2 abdicated and provisional government was set up awkwardly duly serving with the Petrograd Soviet. |
| Petrograd Soviet | of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Members included several hundred workers. Elected officers, discussed ways to defend Petrograd against German military attack, and sent representatives to encourage the formation of soviets in other cities. Menshevik-dominated. Bolshevik leaders held back. |
| Prince Michael | Nicolas’s brother who he left the throne to. Petrograd convinced him to refuse to succeed. |
| Order Number One | issued by the soviet on march 1 1917. claimed for the Petrograd Soviet the authority to cancel orders of the provisional government on military matters and called for the election of soldiers’ committees in every unit. |
| Commissars | people who would spread news of the revolution to distant reaches of the old empire. Did this in the October revolution and ones before. Also, after the Russian Civil War, they reestablished Bolshevik authority over border lands like Georgia, Ukraine, and Turkistan. |
| All-Russian Congress of Soviets | began at the end of March 1917. brings together representatives of other soviets that had sprung up after revolution. Transforms Petrograd Soviet into a national body, est. a central executive committee dominated by members of the Petrograd Soviet. Increased popular pressure for radicalization of Revolution. |
| April Crisis | of the provisional government. Was when the minister of foreign affairs, a leader of the Kadets, added something that called for “war to decisive victory” and other stuff to an official communication to the allies. Protests and demonstrations against the war by the Petrograd Soviet ensued, leading to his resignation. |
| Revolutionary defensism | the demand of the Petrograd Soviet and accepted by the provisional government which was a middle position between conservatives and radicals. Wanted “peace without annexations and indemnities;” also demanded that Russian military capacity be fully maintained. |
| April Theses | Lenin’s. argued that wartime chaos had allowed the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions to merge in a dramatically short period of time, and the overthrow of the aristocracy had handed power to the weak bourgeoisie holding power through the provisional government, which needed to be overthrown by the proletariat |
| Red Guard | factory workers’ militias |
| July Days | when the Bolsheviks rose in insurrection but ended up failing. This hardened political lines in Russia. Bolsheviks were arrested. |
| Pravda | means truth. The Bolshevik party’s newspaper whose offices were shut down by provisional government troops. |
| General Lavr Kornilov | newly appointed commander in chief of the army in 1917 who seemed an obvious candidate to overthrow the provisional government. Tough, decorated Cossack. Escaped from Hungary after being captured during the Great War and was a favorite of the Kadets. |
| Conference of Public Figures | in early august 1917 these people pledged Kornilov their support—influential leaders drawn from industry, commerce, banking, military |
| Kornilov Affair | when Kornilov was going to throw a coup and people supported him but there was a misunderstanding between him and Kerensky because kerensky believed that he would forma military government to restore order at first but remain loyal to him and the idea of a democratic government. Kornilov actually liked military style and authority, probably wanted to seize power and impose a right-wing military regime. Kornilov called on the army to be loyal to Russia and aid the dying motherland. There was never an actual coup d’état in this example of counter-revolution but it aided the Bolsheviks, who were able to portray themselves as the only possible saviors of the Revolution. |
| Leon Trotsky | Lev Davidovich Bronstein. 1879-1940. led uprising in the October Revolution. Revolutionary son of a wealthy jewish farmer. Only serious fighting of the October revolution I think. The “People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs.” Offered Germany an armistice in Dec. 1917 but didn’t want a peace but they ended up signing a treaty |
| October Revolution | provisional government collapsed, Kerensky left Petrograd, not a lot of opposition, just neutrality.. not a lot of violence… Bolsheviks now held power in Petrograd |
| Moscow | russia’s second city. Less socially polarized than Russia. Insurrection there began after the first favorable reports from Petrograd arrived. A week of fighting and then provisional govt. forces surrendered. |
| Cheka | All-Russian Extraordinary Commission. New centralized police authority est. December 1917. rooted out Bolsheviks’ enemies. Rapidly proliferated into a large organization with virtually unlimited power. Arbitrary arrests |
| Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People | Lenin proclaimed this in January 1918. stated that the goal of the revolutionary government was the socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism in all countries. |
| Russian Socialist Soviet Republic | created by the third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. A federation of soviet republics in which Russia’s interests still remained paramount. |
| Treaty of Brest-Litovsk | march 3, 1918. signed w/ Russia’s Bolshevik government and Germany. Gave up one-fourth of the surface of what had been imperial European Russia—very fertile land, most of iron and steel production. Agreed to German occupation of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Acquiesced to pulling Russian troops out of Ukraine and Finland(Germans then occupied all of these areas and set up puppet regimes and got Ukraine into a harsh treaty). This angered the leftist Socialist Revolutionaries who then ended their cooperation with the Bolsheviks. |
| Russian Civil War | began in 1918 when Kornilov and other generals raised armies to fight the Bolsheviks. Whites vs. Reds. Reds won. |
| Whites | anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War. Shared a common hatred of the Bolsheviks. Played upon anti-Semitism by denouncing Trotsky and other Jewish Bolsheviks. Popular opinion was rallied against them when the Allies intervened on their “side” and they were more Brutal than their counterparts |
| Reds | Bolsheviks called this during the Russian Civil War. |
| Nestor Makno | anarchist who led a huge peasant army that controlled parts of Ukraine after the Germans had fallen back. |
| General Alexsandr Kolchak | established a dictatorship in Siberia, claiming to be the new government of Russia. Backed by Britain and France. |
| War Communism | how the Bolsheviks reacted to the crisis in the summer of 1918 of food shortages and famine. Appropriated heavy industries and gradually put an end to private trade. Created “committees of poor peasants.” Forcibly requisitioned food and raw materials, turning poor peasants against wealthier ones. May have saved the Revolution but it took the terrible toll of decline in industrial production. |
| Kulaks | name for wealthier peasants. |
| Ekaterinburg | town in the Ural Mountains whereto Bolshevik guards moved Nicolas II and his family. They were executed on the orders of the local soviet on july 17. |
| White Terror | in Finalnd, this took 80,000 victims among those who had supported the Revolution. |
| Red Terror | officially began in September 1918, following attempts on the lives of several Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. Government decrees gave the Cheka almost unlimited authority and set up forced labor camps to incarcerate those considered enemies. |
| General Anton Denikin | White general who headed the 150,000 strong largest White army that was defeated by the Red Army during the summer of 1919 in Ukraine. |
| Bolshevik Revolution | The overthrow of Russia's Provisional Government in the fall of 1917 by Lenin and his Bolshevik forces, made possible by the government's continuing defeat in the war, its failure to bring political reform, and a further decline in the conditions of everyday life. |
| Comintern | An association of Communist parties founded in 1919 by Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin, to promote the spread of the revolution and the preaching of communist principles throughout Europe. |
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