THE OUTBREAK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (dates in the new style)

• 1903: The Russian Social Democratic Party splits between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

• 1905: Revolutionaries briefly seize power in most cities after defeat by Japan; creation of the Duma.

• August 1914: The leaders of each socialist party support their national war effort.

• March 15, 1917: Tsar Nicholas II abdicates.

• March-October 1917: DUAL SOVEREIGNTY (the Petrograd Soviet vs. the Provisional Government)

• September 9-14, 1917: Attempted coup by General Kornilov

• November 6-7, 1917: The “Great October Revolution” (Bolsheviks seize control of Petrograd and Moscow).

A Russian peasant village in 1910:80% of the population were still peasants, mostly

illiterate,and rural poverty was spreading

The government responded in 1906 by

abolishing all restrictions on foreign investment

and migration by peasants to cities

(LEFT: An oil field near Baku on the Caspian Sea)

Russian peasants newly arrived in

Moscow, looking for work

Anti-war demonstrators before the Winter Palace, Petrograd, January-February 1917

Funeral in Petrograd in

March 1917 for demonstrators killed on orders of Tsar Nicholas

II

Revolutionary soldiers and workers in power: Both the “Petrograd Soviet” and “Provisional Government” claimed

authority

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, i.e., “Lenin” (1870-1924), leader since 1903 of the “Bolshevik” faction of Russian

socialism

LENIN’S APRIL THESES

1.Transform the Imperialist War into Civil War!

2.All Power to the Soviets!

3.Land for the Village Poor!

War Minister Alexander Kerensky

addresses troops about to leave for the front in 1917; he always sought to honor Russia’s treaty obligations

to France and Great Britain

Machine gun fire disperses pro-Bolshevik demonstrators on Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, July 4, 1917

General L.G. Kornilov waves to the crowd in Moscow in August 1917; he attempted a military

coup in September

Climax of the “Great October Revolution”:Painting of the Red Guards storming the Kremlin on November 2

Fraternization on the Eastern Front, November/December 1917

Kaiser Wilhelm II confers with the heads of the Supreme Army Command, Hindenburg & Ludendorff,

1917

The popular victors of Tannenberg insisted on the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Europe at the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 1918

German troops moving through San Quentin to preparefor the “Ludendorff Offensive” launched on March 21, 1918

The Ludendorff Offensive,

March-July 1918

American troops disembark at Le Havre, July 12, 1918

German POWs captured in France, April 1918

The breach of the “Hindenburg Line” at St. Quentin, 2 Oct 1918

British troops line the banks of the St. Quentin

Canal

Their multitude of German prisoners

In October 1918 Ludendorff told the Kaiser to appoint Prince Max of Baden head of a “parliamentary”

government, but Max soon turned to Friedrich Ebert of the SPD

Social Democratic politicians address revolutionary sailors

at Kiel, November 5, 1918: Mutiny broke out when the admirals ordered a desperate attack

Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann (SPD) proclaim the Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag on 9

November 1918

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg founded the Spartacus League in 1917 and the German Communist

Party in December 1918. They embraced Lenin’s slogan,

“All power to the Soviets!”

Communist insurgents in the newspaper district of Berlin,

January 1919

A Free Corps unit sworn to crush the Reds

Some Free Corps soldiers used the swastika as a symbol of Aryan

racial purity; many later joined the Nazis

They killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht on January 15, 1919

“Workers, burghers, farmers, soldiers of every German tribe: Unite in the National Assembly!” (The SPD joined with liberal and

Catholic democrats to write the Weimar constitution in 1919.)

The Big Four at Versailles: David Lloyd George,Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, & Woodrow

Wilson

ESTIMATED COMBAT FATALITIES IN THE GREAT WAR

Austria-Hungary 1,200,000

France 1,385,000

Germany 1,800,000

Great Britain 947,000

Italy 460,000

Ottoman Empire 325,000

Russia 1,700,000

Serbia 360,000

United States 115,000

RESULTS OF THE VERSAILLES CONFERENCE

National self-determination for Poles, “Czechoslovaks”, “Yugoslavs”, Latvians, Lithuanians, & Estonians

Formation of a “League of Nations” dedicated to “collective security”

Italy gains the southern Tirol but is forced to renounce Dalmatia; the status of Fiume remains disputed

Great Britain gains control of Germany’s African colonies, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq as “League of Nations Mandates;” France gains Syria and Lebanon

The Allies award Asia Minor to Greece, but that country suffers catastrophic defeat by Turkey in 1920/21

Postwar borders, 1921

The borders of the Weimar Republic (France occupied the Rhineland until 1930, the Saarland until 1935)

The Russian Civil War, 1918-21:

France intervened from Odessa; Britain & the USA, from

Murmansk & Archangel; the USA and Japan from Vladivostok

“Long live the three-million-man Red Army!” (1919)

“Capitalists of the World,

Unite!”(Soviet poster

from 1920, echoing

Bukharin’s theory of

imperialism)

“Long Live the Third Communist International!”(Soviet Poster, 1920)