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ImageRussia experienced great changes in the latter half of the 1800's and in the early 1900's. The serfs (rural slaves) were freed in 1861.
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Image However, they received little land and were heavily in debt. In the towns and cities, industrialization altered the face of Russian society.
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ImageIn 1898, the Marxists formed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
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ImageOn Jan. 22, 1905, thousands of men, women, and children peacefully marched to Czar Nicholas's Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the capital. Their intention was to deliver a petition asking for better working conditions and a democratically elected assembly. The czar's soldiers fired on the demonstrators, killing or wounding hundreds of them.
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ImageLasted from 1914 to 1918 (Four years Of war)
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ImageGermany Declared War In August Of 1914.The Germans easily overwhelmed a Russian army that was poorly trained and badly led.
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ImageMeanwhile, Czar Nicholas and his wife were deeply influenced by the monk Grigori Rasputin. Under Rasputin's influence, Nicholas filled key posts with officials who were incompetent and unpopular. In December 1916, a group of Russian nobles loyal to the czar murdered Rasputin.
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On March 8, 1917 (February 25, on the old Russian calendar), strikes and riots over food and coal shortages broke out in Petrograd. This uprising became known as the February Revolution. Troops sent to stop the uprising joined the demonstrators instead.
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ImageOn March 15, 1917, the government forced Czar Nicholas to abdicate (resign his throne). Nicholas and his family were later taken into custody. The Bolsheviks killed them at Yekaterinburg in 1918.
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Trotsky, who had escaped in 1907 and gone into exile, had returned to Petrograd in May 1917 and was chosen to head the soviet there in September.
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. Communist Russia gradually transformed itself into the Soviet Union. It reconquered Ukraine, which it had lost in 1918, and Georgia and eastern Armenia, which it had lost during the period of civil war.
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The RCG (Russian Communist Government) formed the union of soviet socialist republics.
