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Marxists revolutionaries disagree over revolutionary tactics. The more radical Bolsheviks are ready to risk everything. The charismatic Vladimir Lenin becomes the leader.
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Following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan launches a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. The Russian fleet was decimated.
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a group of workers led by the radical priest Georgy Apollonovich Gapon marched to the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to make their demands. Imperial forces opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding hundreds. Strikes and riots broke out throughout the country in outraged response to the massacre, to which Nicholas responded by promising the formation of a series of representative assemblies, or Dumas, to work toward reform.
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refers to a major revision of the 1832 Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, which transformed the formerly absolutist state into one in which the emperor agreed for the first time to share his autocratic power with a parliament
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The Battle of Tannenberg ends: the Russian Second Army is decimated by a much smaller German force
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workers in the city’s largest factory (the Putilov engineering factory) demanded a 50% wage increase so that they could buy food. The management refused so the workers went on strike.
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Led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin, leftist revolutionaries launch a nearly bloodless coup d’État against Russia’s ineffectual Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in the Russian capital of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and within two days had formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Bolshevik Russia, later renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was the world’s first Marxist state.
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The Bolsheviks move their capital from Petrograd to Moscow for safety reasons.
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Treaty of Riga. Armistice between Russia and Poland.
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The Kronstadt rebellion was an attempt to instigate an anti-Bolshevik revolution in early 1921. It took shape on Kronstadt, an island fortress and military garrison just a few miles from Petrograd. The Kronstadt uprising was sparked by the failure of Bolshevik economic policy, food shortages and worsening conditions.
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in post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.
