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On January 22, 1905, about 200,000 workers and their families approached the czar's Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They carried a petition asking for better working conditions, more personal freedom, and an elected national legislature. Nicholas II's generals ordered soldiers to fire on the crowd. More than 1,000 were wounded and several hundred were killed. Russians quickly named the event "Bloody Sunday."
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World War I began because of the war declared by Austria on Serbia. Russia decided to assist Serbia in the war and Germany saw their chance and declared war on Russia. When Germany looked to France for help, they were not there. So Germany declared war on France also. Soon afterwards, Great Britain declared war on Germany which meant the much of Europe was now locked in battle. There was a force known as the Allies, which consisted of Great Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and Italy.
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Facing a war on two fronts, Germany had developed a battle strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan. Named after it's desginer, General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen. The plan called for attacking and defeating France in the west and then rushing east to fight Russia.The Germans felt they could carry out such a plan because Russia lagged behind the rest of Europe in it's railroad system and thus would take longer to supply it's front lines.
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By early 1915, opposing armies on the Western Front had dug miles of parallel trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire. This set the stage for what became known as trench warfare. In this type of warfare, soldiers fought each other from trenches. And armies traded huge losses of human life for pitifully small land gains.
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Even as the war on the Western Front claimed thousands of lives, both sides were sending millions more ment to fight on the Eastern Front. This area was a stretch of battlefield along the German and Russian border. Here, Russians and Serbs battled Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
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World War I became a total war. This meant that countries devoted all their resources to the war effort. In Britain, Germany, Austria, Russia, and France, the entire force of government was dedicated to winning the conflict.
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The Germans launched a massive attack against the French near Verdun. Each side lost more than 300,000 men. In July, the British army tried to assist the French and attacked the Germans northwest of Verdun, in the valley of Somme River.
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In 1917, the focus of the war shifted to the high seas. That year, the Germans intensified the submarine warfare that had raged in the Atlantic Ocean since shortly after the war began. In January 1917, the Germans announced that their submarines would sink without warning any ship in the waters around Britain. This policy was called unrestricted submarine warfare.
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In March 1917, civil unrest in Russia-- due in large part to war-related shortages of food and fuel-- forced Czar Nicholas to step down In his place a provisional government was established. The new government pledged to continue fighting the war. However, by 1917, neraly 5.5 million Russian soldiers had been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. As a result, the war-weary Russian army refused to fight any longer.
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Soon, the Central Powers began to crumble. First the Bulgarians and then the Ottoman Turks surrendered. In October, revolution swept through Austria-Hungary. In Germany, soldiers mutinied, and the public turned on the kaiser. On November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II stepped down. Germany declared itself a republic. French and Germans signed a Armistice, or an agreement to stop figting. On November 11, World War I came to an end.
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The differences in French, British, and U.S. aims led to heated arguments among the nation's leaders. Finally a compromise was reached. The Treaty of Versailles between Germany and the Allied powers was signed on June 28, 1919. The treaty created a league of Nations. The league was to be an international association whose goal would be to keep peace among nations.
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Stalin began his ruthless climb to the head of the government between 1922 and 1927. In 1922, as general secretary of the Communist Party, he worked behind the scenes to move his supporters into positions of power. By 1928, Stalin was in total command of the Communist Party. Trotsky, forced into exile in 1929, was no longer a threat. Stalin now stood poised to wield absolute power as a dictator.
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Stalin outlined the first of several Five-Year Plans for the development of the Soviet Union's economy. The Five-Year Plans set impossibly high quotas, or numerical goals, to increase the output of steel, coal, oil, and electricity. To reach these targets, the government limited production of consumer goods. As a result, people faced severe shortages of housing, food, clothing, and other neccesary goods.
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In 1933, Jiang gathered an army of at least 700,000 men. Jiang's army then surrounded the Communists mountain stronghold. Outnumbered, the Communist Party leaders realized that they faced defeat. In a daring move, 100,000 Communist forces fled. They began a hazardous 6,000-mile-long journey called the Long March.
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In 1934, Stalin turned against members of the Communist Party. In 1937, he launched the Great Purge, a campaign of terror directed at eliminating anyone who threatened his power. Thousands of old Bolsheviks who helped stage the Revolution in 1917 stood trial. They were executed or sent to labor camps for "crimes against the Soviet state." When the Great Purge ended in 1938, Stalin had gained total control of the Soviet government and the Communist Party.
