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The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a series of political events in Russia, which, after the elimination of the Russian autocracy system, and the Provisional Government (Duma), resulted in the establishment of the Soviet power under the control of the Bolshevik party. This eventually led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which lasted until its dissolution in 1991.

The Revolution can be viewed in two distinct phases:

The February Revolution of 1917, which displaced the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last effective Tsar of Russia, and sought to establish in its place a liberal republic.

The October Revolution, in which the Bolshevik party and the workers' Soviets, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government. While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and St. Petersburg, there was also a broadly based movement in the rural areas as peasants seized and redistributed land.

See also "Russian history, 1892-1920" for the general frame of events.

Causes of the Russian Revolution

1917 saw two distinct Revolutions in Russia: the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and formation of the Provisional Government (February Revolution), and the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government. The causes of these two revolutions encompass Russia’s political, social, and economic situation. Politically, the people of Russia resented the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II and the corrupt and anachronistic elements in his government.

Socially, Tsarist Russia stood well behind the rest of Europe in its industry and farming, resulting in few opportunities for fair advancement on the part of peasants and industrial workers. Economically, widespread inflation and food shortages in Russia contributed to the revolution. Militarily, inadequate supplies, logistics, and weaponry led to heavy losses that the Russians suffered during World War I; this further weakened Russia’s view of Nicholas II.

Ultimately, a combination of these four, coupled with the development of revolutionary ideas and movements (particularly since the 1905 Bloody Sunday Massacre) led to the Russian Revolution.

Economic

The economic causes of the Russian Revolution largely originated in Russia's outdated economy and the Tsars' failure to modernize it. Russia's agricultural economy still resembled that of medieval Europe, with peasants bound to an inefficiently-managed village commune, and using outdated farming methods.

Suffering from a naturally cold climate, Russia's growing season was only 4-6 months, compared to 8-9 in most of Western Europe, and so the rural agrarian economy struggled to produce enough food to feed the cities each year.

Further hampering food production was Russia's lack of modern infrastructure or transport. Despite vast expansions under Sergei Witte to the railway system, Russia still lacked the ability to effectively transport food to the cities.

During World War I, this became a massive problem as haphazard conscription removed skilled workers from the railways and food-related industries, effectively aggravating poor harvests and causing famine.

Factory workers also suffered due to Russia's young industry that sought to catch up with the rest of Europe. They had to endure terrible working conditions, including twelve to fourteen hour days and low wages. Riots and strikes for better conditions and higher wages broke out. Although some factories agreed to the requests for higher wages, wartime inflation nullified the increase.

There was one protest to which Nicholas responded with violence (see Causes: Political); in response, industrial workers went on strike and effectively paralyzed the railway and transportation networks.

What few supplies were available could not be effectively transported. As goods became more and more scarce, prices skyrocketed. By 1917, famine threatened many of the larger cities. Nicholas's failure to solve his country's economic suffering and communism's promise to do just that comprised the core of the Revolution.

Social

The social causes of the Russian Revolution mainly came from centuries of oppression towards the lower classes by the Tsarist regime and Nicholas's failures in World War I. While rural agrarian peasants had been emancipated from serfdom in 1861, they still resented paying redemption payments to the state, and demanded communal tender of the land they worked. Increasing peasant disturbances and sometimes full revolts occurred, with the goal of securing ownership of their land.

The rapid industrialization of Russia also resulted in urban overcrowding and poor conditions for urban industrial workers (as mentioned above). Between 1890 and 1910, the population of the capital of St Petersburg swelled from 1,033,600 to 1,905,600, with Moscow experiencing similar growth.

In one 1904 survey, it was found that an average of sixteen people shared each apartment in St Petersburg, with six people per room. There was also no running water, and piles of human waste were a threat to the health of the workers.

World War I then only added to the chaos. Conscription swept up the unwilling in all parts of Russia. The vast demand for factory production of war supplies and workers caused many more labor riots and strikes. Conscription stripped skilled workers from the cities, who had to be replaced with unskilled peasants, and then, when famine began to hit, workers abandoned the cities in droves to look for food.

Finally, the soldiers themselves, who suffered from a lack of equipment and protection from the elements were discontent with Russia's poor accounting in the war.

Political

Politically, most areas of Russian society had reason to be dissatisfied with the existing autocratic system. They had no representation in government, and the Tsar remained out of touch with the people's problems.

Dissatisfaction with Russian autocracy culminated in the Bloody Sunday massacre, in which Russian workers saw their pleas for justice rejected as thousands of unarmed protestors were shot by the Tsar's troops. The response to the massacre crippled the nation with strikes, and Nicholas released his October Manifesto, promising a democratic parliament (the State Duma) to appease the people.

However, the Tsar effectively nullified his promises of Democracy with Article 87 of the 1906 Fundamental State Laws, and then subsequently dismissed the first two Dumas when they proved uncooperative. These unfulfilled hopes of democracy fuelled revolutionary ideas and violence targeted at the Tsarist regime.

It appears as though Tsar Nicholas II never really considered Russia a constitutional state and invariably held on to his strong inclination towards an Autocratic Russia.

"Let it be known to all that I... shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as did my unforgettable dead father" - Tsar Nicholas II, 1906, in a speech to the Duma.

Military

Beside the economic and social problems plaguing the country, the Russian Empire was still recovering from a humiliating defeat at the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. One of Nicholas's reasons for going to war in 1914 was his desire to restore the prestige that Russia had lost during that war.

Nicholas also wanted to galvanize the diverse people in his empire under a single banner by directing military force at a common enemy, namely Germany and the Central Powers. He believed by doing so he could also distract the people from the ongoing issues of poverty, inequality, and poor working conditions that were sources of discontent.

Instead of restoring Russia's political and military standing, World War I would lead to horrifying military casualties on the Russian side and undermined it further. From the beginning the troops were not adequately supplied with weapons, or were led by incompetent generals and officers.

Logistics were also a problem, since Russia's poorly maintained roads and railroads inhibited communication and distribution of supplies. Almost everywhere Russian forces were matched against German forces who had a superior advantage in weaponry, military talent, and logistics.

World War I

Russia's recent history was a litany of military failures. Even before the outbreak of the First World War, Russia had lost a war with Japan in 1904-05. Most of Russia's fleet was sunk by the Japanese in that war. While the Russian army enjoyed some initial successes against Austria-Hungary in 1914, Russia's deficiencies — particularly regarding the equipment of its soldiers and the lack of advanced technology (aeroplanes, telephones, poison gas) became increasingly evident.

In 1915, things took a critical turn for the worse when Germany shifted its focus of attack to the Eastern front. The superior German army - better led, better trained, better supplied - was terrifyingly effective against the ill-equipped Russian forces. By the end of October 1916, Russia had lost between 1.6 and 1.8 million soldiers, with an additional two million prisoners of war and one million missing for a total of nearly five million men.

These were staggering losses. Mutinies began to occur, and in 1916 reports of fraternizing with the enemy started to circulate. Soldiers went hungry and lacked shoes, munitions, and even weapons. Rampant discontent lowered morale, only to be further undermined by a series of military defeats.

In the autumn of 1915, Nicholas had taken direct command of the army, personally overseeing Russia's main theater of war and leaving his ambitious though incapable wife Alexandra in charge of the government. Reports of corruption and incompetence in the Imperial government began to emerge, and the growing influence of Grigori Rasputin in the Imperial family was widely resented.

Nicholas was blamed for all these crises, and what little support he had left began to crumble. As this discontent and utter hate of Nicholas grew, the State Duma issued a warning to Nicholas in November 1916 stating that disaster would overtake the country unless a constitutional form of government was put in place. In typical fashion, Nicholas ignored them.

As a result, Russia's Tsarist regime collapsed a few months later during the February Revolution of 1917. A year later, the Tsar and his family were murdered. Ultimately, Nicholas's inept handling of his country and the War destroyed the Tsarist regime and cost him both his rule and his life.

February Revolution

The February Revolution was the result of the acute aggravation of the economical and political crisis in Russia. It came about seemingly spontaneously when people of the Russian capital Petrograd started to rally against the war and against the food supply shortages in the city.

As the protests grew, various political reformists (both liberal and radical left) started to coordinate their activities. In February the protests in Petrograd turned violent as large numbers of city residents rioted and clashed with police and soldiers, followed by the total strike. Eventually the bulk of the soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd joined the protests, and the uprised people occupied most of the important places in the city. This had led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in a nearly bloodless transition of power.

A new Provisional Government was formed. Between February and October revolutionaries attempted to foment further change, working through the Petrograd Soviet and other organizations. The driving force behind the provisional government was a young and popular lawyer named Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky, as minister of war, decided to continue the Russian effort in World War I despite the enormous unpopularity of the war.

He appointed new generals and began a new offensive, the Kerensky Offensive, which started well and then turned into yet another defeat. Kerensky's government tried to shame the soldiers into fighting by creating a Women's Battalion, but without success. The failure of his offensive brought about much resentment from the people leading eventually to the October Revolution.

October Revolution

The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and was based upon the ideas of Karl Marx. It marked the beginning of the spread of communism in the twentieth century. It was far less sporadic than the revolution of February and came about as the result of deliberate planning and coordinated activity to that end.

Though Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Party, it has been argued that, seeing as Lenin wasn't present during the actual take over of the Winter Palace, it was really Trotsky's organisation and direction that led the revolution, spurred by the motivation Lenin instigated within his party. The financial and logistical assistance of German intelligence via their key agent, Alexander Parvus was a key component as well.

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a nearly bloodless revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the time, so period references show an October 25 date). The October Revolution ended the phase of the revolution instigated in February, replacing Russia's short-lived provisional government with a Soviet one.

Although many Bolsheviks supported a soviet democracy, the 'reform from above' model gained definitive power when Lenin died and Stalin gained control of the USSR. Trotsky and his supporters, as well as a number of other democratically-minded communists, were persecuted and eventually imprisoned or killed.

After October 1917, many SR's (members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party) and Russian Anarchists opposed the Bolsheviks through the soviets. When this failed, they revolted in a series of events calling for "a third revolution." The most notable instances were the Tambov rebellion, 1919 - 1921, and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. These movements, which made a wide range of demands and lacked effective coordination, were eventually crushed during the Civil War.

Civil war

The Russian Civil War, which broke out in 1918 shortly after the revolution, brought death and suffering to millions of people regardless of their political orientation. The war was fought mainly between the Red Army ("Reds"), consisting of radical communists and revolutionaries, and the "Whites" - the monarchists, conservatives, liberals and moderate socialists who opposed the drastic restructuring championed by the Bolsheviks. The Whites had backing from nations such as the UK, France, USA and Japan.

Also during the Civil War, Nestor Makhno led a Ukrainian anarchist movement which generally cooperated with the Bolsheviks. However, a Bolshevik force under Mikhail Frunze destroyed the Makhnovist movement, when the Makhnovists refused to merge into the Red Army. In addition, the so-called "Green Army" (nationalists and anarchists) played a secondary role in the war, mainly in Ukraine.

The Russian revolution and the world

There are some who say that the Russian revolution was intended to spread across the world. Lenin and Trotsky said that the goal of socialism in Russia would not be realized without the success of the world proletariat in other countries, e.g. without German Revolution. However, till this day, this issue is subject to conflicting views on the communist history by various Marxist groups and parties.

Some state that it was Stalin who was the first to later reject this idea, stating that socialism was possible in one country.

Others counter that this was simply an excuse for Stalin and his followers to push back democratic gains won during the revolution and consolidate his bureaucratic dictatorship.

The confusion regarding Stalin's position on the issue stems from the fact that he, after Lenin's death in 1924, successfully used Lenin's argument - the argument that socialism's success needs the workers of other countries in order to happen - to defeat his competitors within the party by accusing them of betraying Lenin and, therefore, the ideals of the October Revolution.

Brief chronology leading to Revolution of 1917

It has been suggested that Timeline of The Russian Revolution be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Dates are correct for the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918. It was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar during the 19th century and thirteen days behind it during the 20th century.

1855 - Start of reign of Tsar Alexander II

1861 - Emancipation of the serfs

1866-74 - The White Terror

1881 - Alexander II assassinated; succeeded by Alexander III

1883 - First Russian Marxist group formed

1894 - Start of reign of Nicholas II

1898 - First Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)

1900 - Foundation of Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR)

1903 - Second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Beginning of split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

1904-5 - Russo-Japanese War; Russia loses war

1905 - Russian Revolution of 1905.

January - Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg.

June - Battleship Potemkin uprising at Odessa on the Black Sea (see movie The Battleship Potemkin)

October - general strike, St. Petersburg Soviet formed

- October Manifesto - Imperial agreement on elections to the State Duma

1906 - First State Duma. Prime Minister - Petr Stolypin. Agrarian reforms begin

1907 - Second State Duma, February - June

1907 - Third State Duma, until 1912

1911 - Stolypin assassinated

1912 - Fourth State Duma, until 1917. Bolshevik - Menshevik split final

1914 - Germany declares war on Russia

1915 - Serious defeats, Nicholas II declares himself Commander in Chief. Progressive Bloc formed.

1916 - Food and fuel shortages and high prices

1917 - Strikes and riots; troops summoned to Petrograd

Extended Chronology of 1917 Revolution

January

Strikes and unrest in Petrograd

February

February Revolution

26th – 50 demonstrators killed in Znamenskaya Square

27th – Troops refuse to fire on demonstrators, desertions. Prison, courts, and police stations attacked and looted by angry crowds.

Okhranka buildings set on fire. Garrison joins revolutionaries.

Petrograd Soviet formed.

March

1st – Order No.1 of the Petrograd Soviet

2nd – Nicholas II abdicates. Provisional Government formed under Prime Minister Prince Lvov

April

3rd – Return of Lenin to Russia. He publishes his April Theses.

20th – Miliukov's note published. Provisional Government falls.

May

5th – New Provisional Government formed. Kerensky made minister of war and navy

June

3rd – First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. Closed on 24th.

16th – Kerensky orders offensive against Austro-Hungarian forces. Initial success.

July

2nd – Russian offensive ends. Trotsky joins Bolsheviks.

4th-7th – The "July Days"; anti-government demonstrations in Petrograd.

6th – German and Austro-Hungarian counter-attack. Russians retreat in panic, sacking the town of Tarnopol. Arrest of Bolshevik leaders ordered.

7th – Lvov resigns. Kerensky is new PM

22nd – Trotsky and Lunacharskii arrested

August

26th – Second coalition government ends

27th – Right-wing General Lavr Kornilov is alleged by Kerensky to have attempted a coup. Kornilov arrested and imprisoned.

September

1st – Russia declared a republic

4th – Trotsky and others freed. Trotsky becomes head of Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

25th – Third coalition government formed

October

10th – Bolshevik Central Committee meeting approves armed uprising

11th – Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, until 13th

20th – First meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee (Revolutionary Soviet Committee) of the Petrograd Soviet

25th – October Revolution is launched as MRC directs armed workers and soldiers to capture key buildings in Petrograd. Winter Palace attacked at 9.40pm and captured at 2am. Kerensky flees Petrograd. Opening of the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

26th – Second Congress of Soviets: Mensheviks and right SR delegates walk out in protest against the previous day's events. Decree on Peace and Decree on Land. Soviet government declared - the Council of People's Commissars (Bolshevik dominated with Lenin as chairman).

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky ( Aleksandr Fëdorovic Kerenskij; May 2 [O.S. April 22] 1881 – June 11, 1970) was a Russian revolutionary leader who was instrumental in toppling the Russian monarchy.

He served as the second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government until Vladimir Lenin seized power following the October Revolution.

Early life and activism

Kerensky, the son of a headmaster, was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), the same town as Lenin (then Ulyanov). At one point Kerensky's father, Fyodor, had taught the young Vladimir Ulyanov at Kazan University. Kerensky

graduated with a degree in Law from St. Petersburg University in 1904. He showed his political allegiances early on, with his frequent defense of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries. He was elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912 as a member of the Trudoviks, a moderate labor party. A brilliant orator and skilled parliamentary leader, he became a member of the Provisional Committee of the Duma as a Socialist Revolutionary and a leader of the socialist opposition to the regime of the ruling tsar, Nicholas II.

February Revolution of 1917

When the February Revolution broke out in 1917, Kerensky was one of its most prominent leaders, and was elected vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He simultaneously became the first Minister of Justice in the newly-formed Provisional Government. When the Soviet passed a resolution prohibiting its leaders from joining the government, Kerensky delivered a stirring speech at a Soviet meeting. Although the decision was never formalized, he was granted a de-facto exemption and continued acting in both capacities.

After the first government crisis over Pavel Milyukov's secret note re-committing Russia to its original war aims on May 2-4, Kerensky became the Minister of War and the dominant figure in the newly formed socialist-liberal coalition government.

Under Allied pressure to continue the war, he launched what became known as the Kerensky Offensive against the Austro-German South Army on June 17 Old Style. At first successful, the offensive was soon stopped and then thrown back by a strong counter-attack. The Russian army suffered heavy losses and it was clear - from many incidents of desertion, sabotage, and mutiny - that the Russian army was no longer willing to fight. Kerensky offensive.

Kerensky was heavily criticised by the military for his liberal policies, which included stripping officers of their mandate (handing overriding control to revolutionary inclined "soldier committees" instead), the abolition of the death penalty, and the presence of various revolutionary agitators at the front. Many officers jokingly referred to commander in chief Kerensky as "persuader in chief".

On July 2, 1917, the first coalition collapsed over the question of Ukraine's autonomy. Following widespread unrest in Petrograd and suppression of the Bolsheviks, Kerensky succeeded Prince Lvov as Russia's Prime Minister. Following the Kornilov Affair at the end of August and the resignation of the other ministers, he appointed himself Supreme Commander-in-Chief as well. He retained his other posts in the short-lived Directory in September and the final coalition government in October 1917 until it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks.

Kerensky's major challenge was that Russia was exhausted after three years of war, while the provisional government did not offer much motivation for a victory outside of continuing Russia's obligations towards its allies. Furthermore, Lenin and his Bolshevik party were promising "peace, land, and bread" under a communist system. The army was disintegrating due to a lack of discipline, which fostered desertion in large numbers.

Kerensky and the other political leaders continued their obligation to Russia's allies by continuing involvement in World War I - fearing the economy, already under huge stress from the war effort, may become increasingly unstable if vital supplies from France and the UK were to stop.

Some also feared that Germany would demand enormous territorial concessions as the price for peace (which indeed happened at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). The dilemma of whether or not to withdraw was a great one, and Kerensky's inconsistent and impractical policies further destabilized the army and the country at large.

Furthermore, Kerensky adopted a policy which isolated the right wing conservatives, both democratic and monarchist oriented. His philosophy of "no enemies to the left" greatly empowered the Bolsheviks and gave them a free hand, allowing them to take over the military arm or "voyenka" of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets.

His arrest of Kornilov and other officers left him without strong allies against the Bolsheviks, who ended up being Kerensky's strongest and most determined adversaries as opposed to the right wing, which evolved into the White movement.

October Revolution of 1917

During the Kornilov Coup, Kerensky had distributed arms to the Petrograd workers, and by October most of these armed workers had gone over to the Bolsheviks. Lenin was determined to overthrow Kerensky's government before it could be legitimised by the planned elections for a Russian Constituent Assembly, and on November 7 [O.S. October 25] 1917 the Bolsheviks launched a Coup d'état.

Kerensky's government in Petrograd had almost no support in the city. Only one small force, the First Petrograd Women's Battalion, actually fought for the government against the Bolsheviks. It took less than 20 hours before the Bolsheviks had taken over the government - in what is known as the October Revolution.

Kerensky escaped the Bolsheviks and went to Pskov, where he rallied some loyal troops for an attempt to retake the capital. His troops managed to capture Tsarskoe Selo, but were beaten the next day at Pulkovo. Kerensky narrowly escaped, and spent the next few weeks in hiding before fleeing the country, eventually arriving in France. During the Russian Civil War he supported neither side, as he opposed both the Bolshevik regime and the White Movement.

Life in exile

Kerensky lived in Paris until 1940, engaged in the endless splits and quarrels of the exiled Russian democratic leaders. In 1939, Kerensky married former Australian journalist Lydia ‘Nell' Tritton. When the Germans overran France at the start of World War II, they escaped to the United States.

In 1945 his wife became terminally ill. He travelled with her to Brisbane, Australia and lived there with her family until her death in February 1946. Thereafter he returned to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life.

When Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Kerensky offered his support to Stalin, but received no reply. Instead he made broadcasts in Russian in support of the war effort. After the war he organised a group called the Union for the Liberation of Russia, but this achieved little.[citation needed]

Kerensky eventually settled in New York City, but spent much of his time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, where he both used and contributed to the Institution's huge archive on Russian history, and where he taught graduate courses. He wrote and broadcast extensively on Russian politics and history. His last public speech was delivered at Kalamazoo College, in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Kerensky's major works include The Prelude to Bolshevism (1919), The Catastrophe (1927), The Crucifixion of Liberty (1934) and Russia and History's Turning Point (1966).

Kerensky died at his home in New York City in 1970, one of the last surviving major participants in the turbulent events of 1917. The local Russian Orthodox Churches in New York refused to grant Kerensky burial, seeing him as being largely responsible for Russia falling to the Bolsheviks. A Serbian Orthodox Church also refused. Kerensky's body was then flown to London where he was buried at Putney Vale non-denominational cemetery.

The provisional Russian government formed in Petrogrado after the deterioration of the Russian Empire and the abdication of the czar.

When the authority of the government of the czar started failing in March, 1917, two institutions rivals, the Duma and Soviet de Petrogrado, they were competing for the power. As commitment, a government formed provisonal that had to direct the country up to the elections of the constituent assembly.

When Czar Nicolas II abdicated on March 15 and his

brother, Big Duke Miguel, pushed the throne back the following day, the provisional government governed Russia of a formal way, but his power was actually limited by the increasing authority of Soviet de Petrogrado.

The provisional government had success in the organization of the elections, but it failed in the attempt of finishing the Russian participation in the First World war, debillitando like that his popularity between the detractors of the war.

In a beginning the government was presided by Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov and later by Alexander Kerensky. The government was remplazado later for the Bolsheviks that they restored their own « provisional government » in the stage of October of the Russian Revolution. Later, when the constituent assembly was dissolved, the Bolshevik government was named again.

Prime ministers of the provisional government

Príncipe Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov (march 23 - july 21)

Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov, (Prince of Lvov)

(november 2 , 1861 – march 7 , 1925) Knyaz (Prince) Georgy Yevgenyevich L'vov was a Russian statesman and the first post-imperial prime minister of Russia, from March 23 to July 7, 1917.Pre-Revolution

Prince L'vov was born in Dresden into a Rurikid family, descending from sovereign princes of Yaroslavl. His family moved home to Popovka in the Aleksin region near Tula from Germany soon after his birth. He graduated from the University of Moscow with a degree in law, then worked in the civil service until 1893.

During the Russo-Japanese War he organised relief work in the East and in 1905, he joined the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. A year later he won election to the first Duma and was nominated for a ministerial position.

He became chairman of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos in 1914 and in 1915 he became a leader of the Union of Zemstvos and Towns (Zemgor) which helped supply the military and tend to the wounded from the Great War.

1917

After the 1917 February Revolution, L'vov became the first head of the Russian Provisional Government, holding the title, Minister-President and Minister of the Interior, but resigned 7 July that year amid mounting disorder and following a major demonstration.

Despite being initially popular, the continued war had drained his support. His justice minister, Alexander Kerensky, replaced him. When the Bolsheviks took power following the October Revolution, L'vov was placed under arrest, but he escaped to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life.

A Cossack born in Kazakhstan (then Russian Turkestan), Kornilov was a career officer in the Imperial Russian army. Between 1890 and 1904 he led several exploration missions in Eastern Turkestan, Afghanistan and Persia and learned several Central Asian languages. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 he was awarded Cross of St. George for bravery and promoted to the rank of colonel.

He served as military attache in China from 1907-11 and with a rank of major general commanded an infantry division at the start of World War I, but was captured by the Austrians in April 1915. Escaping in July 1916, he was given

command of the Petrograd Military District in March 1917, and was appointed Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Provisional Government's armed forces in July 1917.

General Kornilov decided to intervene in the chaotic situation of Russia, because he shared the widespread belief of many middle-class Russians that the country was descending into anarchy and that military defeat would be disastrous for Russian pride and honour. Lenin and his 'German spies', he announced, should be hanged, the Soviets stamped out, military discipline restored and the provisional government 'restructured'.

In August of 1917 Kornilov issued a call to all Russians to 'save their dying land' and ordered his loyal troops to advance on Petrograd. Uncertain of the support of his army generals, Kerensky had to ask for help from other quarters; these included the Bolsheviks' Red Guards.

After his failed coup attempt in September of 1917, Kornilov was placed under house arrest. The Bolsheviks seized power shortly thereafter.

Again escaping from his imprisonment, Kornilov made his way to the Don region, where he helped in the formation of the counter-revolutionary Volunteer Army at Novocherkassk with General Mikhail Alekseev. He was killed during fighting against Red forces at the Kuban capital Ekaterinodar in April 1918, when a shell landed on his headquarters.

The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1903 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

At the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed, believing it was better to have a large party of activists with broad representation.

A majority of delegates agreed with Martov and formed the Mensheviks, while Lenin's faction became known as the Bolsheviks. The majority of the Central Committee and other central Party organs elected at the Congress

supported Lenin's position, and hence Menshevik is derived from the Russian word "minority" while Bolshevik is derived from "majority".

The split between the two factions was long standing, and had to do both with pragmatic issues based in history such as the failed revolution of 1905, and theoretical issues of class leadership, class alliances, and bourgeois democracy.

Both factions believed that Russia was not developed to a point at which socialism was possible and believed that the revolution for which they fought to overthrow the Tsarist regime would be a bourgeois democratic revolution.

The Bolsheviks felt that the working class should lead the revolution in an alliance with the peasantry with the aim of establishing the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, where the Party acts as extreme revolutionary opposition. On the other hand, the Menshevik vision was one of a bourgeois democratic revolution in which they could take part in government.

After the split

1903-1917

Many Mensheviks left the party after the defeat of 1905 and joined more legal opposition organisations. After a while, Lenin's patience wore out with their compromising and in 1908 he called Mensheviks "liquidationists". This eventually led to the Bolsheviks declaring their faction to be the party in 1912 with the aid of a handful of Mensheviks. The Menshevik faction proper further split in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. Most Mensheviks opposed the war, but a vocal right-wing minority supported it in terms of "national defense".

1917 Revolution

After the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty by the February Revolution in 1917, the Menshevik leadership led by Irakli Tsereteli demanded that the government pursue a "fair peace without annexations", but in the meantime supported the war effort under the slogan of "defense of the revolution". Along with the other major Russian socialist party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks led the emerging network of Soviets, notably the Petrograd Soviet in the capital, throughout most of 1917.

With the collapse of the monarchy, many social democrats viewed previous tactical differences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks as a thing of the past and a number of local party organizations were merged. When Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin and Matvei Muranov returned to Petrograd from Siberian exile in early March 1917 and assumed the leadership of the Bolshevik party, they began exploring the idea of a complete re-unification of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the national level, which Menshevik leaders were willing to consider.

However, Lenin and his deputy Grigory Zinoviev returned to Russia from their Swiss exile on April 3, 1917 and re-asserted control of the Bolshevik party by late April 1917, taking it in a more radical, anti-war direction. They called for an immediate socialist revolution, which made any re-unification impossible.

In March-April 1917 the Menshevik leadership conditionally supported the newly formed liberal Russian Provisional Government. After the collapse of the first Provisional Government on May 2, 1917 over the issue of annexations, Tsereteli convinced the Mensheviks to strengthen the government for the sake of "saving the revolution" and enter a socialist-liberal coalition with Socialist Revolutionaries and liberal Constitutional Democrats, which they did on May 4, 1917 (Old Style).

With Martov's return from European exile in early May, the Left wing of the party challenged the party's majority led by Tsereteli at the first post-revolurionary party conference on May 9, but the Right wing prevailed 44-11. From that point on, the Mensheviks had at least one representative in the Provisional Government until it was overthrown by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution of 1917.

With the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks clearly diverging, Russian Mensheviks and non-factional social democrats returning from European and American exile in spring-summer of 1917 were forced to take sides. Some re-joined the Mensheviks. Some, like Alexandra Kollontai, joined the Bolsheviks directly.

A significant number, including Leon Trotsky and Adolf Joffe, joined the non-factional Petrograd-based anti-war group called Mezhraiontsy, which merged with the Bolsheviks in August 1917. A small but influential group of social democrats associated with Maxim Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life) refused to join either party.

After the 1917 Revolution

This split in the party crippled the Mensheviks' popularity, and they received less than 3% of the vote during the Russian Constituent Assembly election in November 1917 compared to the Bolsheviks' 25% and the Socialist Revolutionaries' 57%. The right wing of the Menshevik party supported right-wing actions against the Bolsheviks, while the left wing, the majority of the Mensheviks at that point, supported the Left in the ensuing Russian Civil War.

However, Martov's leftist Menshevik faction refused to break with the right wing of the party with the result that their press was sometimes banned and only intermittently available.

Menshevism was finally made illegal after the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921. A number of prominent Mensheviks emigrated thereafter. Martov who was suffering from ill health at this time went to Germany, where he died in 1923.

However, before his death he established the paper Socialist Messenger reportedly with funds supplied by his old comrade Lenin[citation needed]. The Socialist Messenger would move along with the Menshevik centre from Berlin to Paris in 1933 and then in 1939 to New York City where it was to be published up until the early 1970s.

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai ( born Domontovich, (March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 - March 9, 1952) was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik.

She was effectively exiled by Stalin, who sent her to Mexico and Sweden as a diplomat, and was thus one of the very few "Old Bolsheviks" to escape death during the Great Purges of the 1930s.

Kollontai was born in St. Petersburg to Mikhail Domontovich, a general in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the head of the chancellery of the Russian administration in Bulgaria from 1878-1879, and Alexandra Masalin-Mravinsky, the daughter of a wealthy Finnish

timber merchant.

Revolutionary career

At the time of the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into the Mensheviks under Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin in 1903, Kollontai did not side with either faction. However, she came to dislike aspects of Bolshevism and opted to join the Mensheviks.

In 1914, Kollontai joined the Bolsheviks and returned to Russia, after a period of exile in Scandinavia and America, for her earlier political activities. After the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, she became People's Commissar for Social Welfare. She was the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration and was best known for founding the Zhenotdel or "Women's Department" in 1919.

This organization worked to improve the conditions of women's lives in the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education, and working laws put in place by the Revolution. She was well recognized later for socialist feminism. The Zhenotdel was eventually closed in 1930.

In the government, Kollontai increasingly became an internal critic of the Communist Party and joined with her friend, Alexander Shlyapnikov, to form a left-wing faction of the party that became known as the Workers' Opposition. However, Lenin managed to dissolve the Workers' Opposition, after which Kollontai was more or less totally politically sidelined.

Kollontai lacked political influence and was appointed by the Party to various diplomatic positions from the early 1920s, keeping her from playing a leading role in the politics of women's policy in the USSR. In 1923, she was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, becoming the world's first female ambassador. She later served as Ambassador to Mexico and Sweden.

During World War II, there were some Nazi discussions that her embassy in Stockholm could have potentially been a channel for German-Soviet negotiations, although they never came to pass. She was also a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations. She died in 1952.

Alexandra Kollontai is an unusual figure in the history of the Soviet Union, as she was an "Old Bolshevik" and a major public critic of the Communist Party who was neither purged nor executed by the Stalin regime, though as a diplomat serving abroad, she had little or no influence in government policy or operations and so was effectively exiled.

Kollontai also raised eyebrows with her strong promotion of free love. However, this does not mean that she advocated casual sexual encounters; indeed, she believed that due to the inequality between men and women that persisted under socialism, such encounters would lead to women being exploited, and being left to raise children alone.

Instead she believed that true socialism could not be achieved without a radical change in attitudes to sexuality, so that it might be freed from the oppressive norms that she saw as a continuation of bourgeois ideas about property.

It is a myth that she said that the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water; what she actually said is that sexuality was a human instinct as natural as thirst, but this was misunderstood by Lenin, who used it to discredit her.

Bolsheviks (Russian: derived from bolshinstvo, "majority") were members of the Bolshevik faction of the marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Bolsheviks had an extreme socialist and internationalist outlook, and were opponents of the Russian traditional statehood and the Russian Orthodox Church.

The other faction of the RSDLP was known as the Mensheviks, derived from the word men'shinstvo ("minority"). The split into two factions occurred at the Second Party Congress in 1903. After the split, the Bolshevik party was designated as RSDLP(b) ( where "b" stands for "Bolsheviks".

Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917 in an event known as the October Revolution. Shortly after seizing power, the party changed its name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918 and was generally known as the Communist Party after that point. However, it was not until 1952 that the party formally dropped the word "Bolshevik" from its name. (See Congress of the CPSU article for the timeline of name changes.)

The word "Bolshevik" is sometimes used as a synonym for Communist. In the United States, it was often used by right-wingers as a derogatory term for left-wingers, few of whom were actually Communists.

The Bolshevik political platform has often been referred to as Bolshevism. Leon Trotsky frequently used the terms "Bolshevism" and "Bolshevist" after his exile from the Soviet Union to differentiate between what he saw as true Leninism and the regime within the state and the party which arose under Stalin. However, "Bolshevism" today is commonly associated with the Stalinist regime which existed in the Soviet Union.

The 1903 Split

At the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels and London in August 1903, Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a small core of professional revolutionaries, leaving sympathizers outside the party, and instituting a system of centralized control known as the democratic centralist model.

Julius Martov, until then a close friend and colleague of Lenin's, agreed with him that the core of the party should consist of professional revolutionaries, but argued that party membership should be open to sympathizers, revolutionary workers and other fellow travellers. The two had disagreed on the issue as early as April-May 1903, but it wasn't until the Congress that their differences became irreconcilable and split the party.

Although at first the disagreement appeared to be minor and inspired by personal conflicts, e.g. Lenin's insistence on dropping less active editorial board members from Iskra or Martov's support for the Organizing Committee of the Congress which Lenin opposed, the differences quickly grew and the split became irreparable.

Origins of the Name

The two factions were originally known as "hard" (Lenin's supporters) and "soft" (Martov's supporters). Soon, however, the terminology changed to "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks", from the Russian "bolshinstvo" (majority) and "menshinstvo" (minority), based on the fact that Lenin's supporters narrowly defeated Martov's supporters on the question of party membership. Neither Lenin nor Martov had a firm majority throughout the Congress as delegates left or switched sides. At the end, the Congress was evenly split between the two factions.

From 1907 on, English language articles sometimes used the term "Maximalist" for "Bolshevik" and "Minimalist" for "Menshevik", which proved confusing since there was also a "Maximalist" faction within the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1904-1906 and then again after 1917.

Beginning of the 1905 Revolution (1903-1905)

The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903-1904 with many members changing sides. The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, who was at first allied with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, parted ways with them by 1904. Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

He remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat" until August 1917 when he joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their positions converged and he came to believe that Lenin was right on the issue of the party.

The lines between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks hardened in April 1905 when the Bolsheviks held a Bolsheviks-only meeting in London, which they call the Third Party Congress. The Mensheviks organized a rival conference and the split was thus formalized.

The Bolsheviks played a relatively minor role in the 1905 revolution, and were a minority in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies led by Trotsky. The less significant Moscow Soviet, however, was dominated by the Bolsheviks. These soviets became the model for the Soviets that were formed in 1917.

Attempts to Re-unite with the Mensheviks (1906-1907)

As the Russian Revolution of 1905 progressed, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and smaller non-Russian social democratic parties operating with the Russian Empire attempted to reunify at the Fourth (Unification) Congress of the RSDLP held at Folkets hus, Norra Bantorget in Stockholm, April 1906. With the Mensheviks striking an alliance with the Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority.

However, all factions retained their respective factional structure and the Bolsheviks formed the Bolshevik Center, the de-facto governing body of the Bolshevik faction with the RSDLP. At the next, Fifth Congress held in London in May 1907, the Bolsheviks were in the majority, but the two factions continued functioning mostly independently of each other.

Split between Lenin and Bogdanov (1908-1909)

With the defeat of the revolution in mid-1907 and the adoption of a new, highly restrictive election law, the Bolsheviks began debating whether to boycott the new parliament known as the Third Duma. Lenin and his supporters Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev argued for participating in the Duma while Lenin's deputy philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and other argued that the social democratic faction in the Duma should be recalled.

The latter became known as "recallists" ("otzovists" in Russian). A smaller group within the Bolshevik faction demanded that the RSDLP central committee should give its sometimes unruly Duma faction an ultimatum, demanding complete subordination to all party decisions. This group became known as "ultimatists" and was generally allied with the recallists.

With a majority of Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by mid-1908 when the differences became irreconcilable, Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909)[2], assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism [3]. In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine "Proletary" and expelled from the Bolshevik faction[4].

Final Attempt at Party Unity (1910)

With both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks weakened by splits within their ranks and by Tsarist repression, they were tempted to try to re-unite the party. In January 1910, Leninists, recallists and various Menshevik factions held a meeting of the party's Central Committee in Paris.

Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea, but were willing to give it a try under pressure from "conciliator" Bolsheviks like Victor Nogin. Lenin was adamantly opposed to any re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership.

The meeting reached a tentative agreement and one of its provisions made Trotsky's Vienna-based Pravda a party-financed 'central organ'. Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.

Forming a Separate Party (1912)

The factions permanently broke off relations in January 1912 after the Bolsheviks organized a Bolsheviks-only Prague Party Conference and formally expelled Mensheviks and recallists from the party. As a result, they ceased to be a faction in the RSDLP and instead declared themselves an independent party, which they called RSDLP (Bolshevik).

Although the Bolshevik leadership decided to form a separate party, convincing pro-Bolshevik workers within Russia to follow suit proved difficult. When the first meeting of the Fourth Duma was convened in late 1912, only one out of six Bolshevik deputies, Matvei Muranov, (the other one, Roman Malinovsky, was later exposed as a secret police agent) voted to break away from the Menshevik faction within the Duma on 15 December 1912.[5] The Bolshevik leadership eventually prevailed and the Bolsheviks formed their own Duma faction in September 1913.

The Bolsheviks believed in organizing the party in a strongly centralized hierarchy that sought to overthrow the Tsar and achieve power. Although the Bolsheviks were not completely monolithic, they were characterized by a rigid adherence to the leadership of the central committee, based on the notion of democratic centralism.

The Mensheviks favored open party membership and espoused cooperation with the other socialist and some non-socialist groups in Russia. Bolsheviks generally refused to co-operate with liberal or radical parties (which they labeled "bourgeois") or even eventually other socialist organizations, although Lenin sometimes made tactical alliances.

During the First World War, the Bolsheviks took an internationalist stance that emphasized solidarity between the workers of Russia, Germany, and the rest of the world, and broke with the Second International when its leading parties ended up supporting their own nations in the conflict.

Bolsheviks during the 1917 Revolution

July Days

In early July widespread discontent in Petrograd led to militant demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik leadership opposed this as premature but ended up leading the demonstrations, hoping to prevent any bloodshed. They felt compelled to do this to win the trust of the workers and also in recognition of the fact that many of the Bolshevik rank and file were already organising and supporting the demonstrations.

Troops loyal to the Provisional Government suppressed the demonstrations violently. The following crackdown resulted in the Kerensky government ordering the arrest of the Bolshevik leadership on July 19. Lenin escaped capture, went into hiding, and wrote State and Revolution, which outlined his ideas for a socialist government.

The repression against the Bolsheviks ceased when the Kerensky government was threatened by a rebellion led by General Kornilov and offered arms to those who would defend Petrograd against Kornilov.

The Bolsheviks enlisted a 25,000 strong militia to defend Petrograd from attack and reached out to Kornilov's troops, urging them not to attack. They stood down and the rebellion fizzled with Kornilov being taken into custody. However, the Bolsheviks did not return their arms and Kerensky succeeded only in strengthening the Bolshevik position.

During this period a situation of dual power developed. While the legislature and provisional government were controlled by Kerensky in coalition with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the workers' and soldiers' soviets were increasingly under the control of the Bolsheviks.

October Revolution

The Central Committee of the Bolsheviks spent September and October of 1917 debating whether they should use parliamentary methods or whether they should seize power by force. With Lenin in hiding in Finland, the parliamentary line -- advocated by Kamenev, Zinoviev and Rykov against Trotsky -- at first prevailed and the Bolsheviks participates in the quasiparliamentary bodies convened by the Provisional Government, the Democratic Conference and the smaller, more permanent Pre-Parliament.

Lenin sent numerous letters to the Central Committee and Petrograd party activists urging them to abandon the parliamentary path and overthrow the Provisional Government by means of an insurrection. The balance of power within the Central Committee shifted in favor of the insurrection in early October resulting in the Bolshevik delegation withdrawing from the Pre-Parliament on October 7, 1917 (Old Style).[6]

On October 10, the Bolshevik Central Committee held a meeting and decided in favor of an uprising with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against it. The latter took the unusual step of making their objections public, which infuriated Lenin, who demanded their expulsion from the party for breaching party discipline.

The Central Committee also established a smaller Politburo to prepare for the uprising, although it's not clear whether it was ever functional (Trotsky later claimed that it never met) and was dissolved on October 25, 1917, once the Bolsheviks had taken power in the October Revolution. A permanent Politburo was not established until March 1919 during the Russian Civil War when decisions had to be made quickly and many Central Committee members were away from the new capital, Moscow.

When Kerensky moved against the Bolsheviks on October 22 by ordering the arrest of their Military Revolutionary Committee, banning the Bolshevik newspaper and cutting off telephone lines to the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, Trotsky urged that the Bolsheviks' decision on overthrowing the government be put into action.

Lenin concurred and on October 24, orders were issued for the Bolsheviks' Red Guards to occupy key locations in the city and surround the Winter Palace where the Provisional government had its headquarters. The uprising was a success and Bolshevik-led forces were in control of the capital by October 26.

On October 25-26, 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met and established a new government called the Council of People's Commissars or Sovnarkom. Lenin became the head (Chairman) of the new government, Trotsky became the first People's Commissar for foreign affairs and other Bolshevik leaders took over other government ministries which were known as "commissariats"

In March 1918, the Seventh Party Congress of the Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) met and changed the name of the party to the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to differentiate it from the Mensheviks and other remaining factions of the RSDLP.

After the name change, the party was increasingly known as the "Communist Party" with the name "Bolshevik" gradually becoming a reference to the party's earlier days. The word "Bolshevik" was retained when the party changed its name to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 to emphasize the fact that the party included not only Russian but also non-Russian segments within the recently formed Soviet Union.

It was finally dropped from the party's formal name in October 1952 when the Nineteenth Party Congress changed the party's name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Parallel with the gradual removal of the word "Bolshevik" from the party's name, Joseph Stalin conducted the Great Purge in which most leaders of the original Bolshevik Party (including all surviving members of the original Politburo) were expelled, imprisoned or killed. For Leon Trotsky, the only one of the old Bolshevik leaders who survived long enough in foreign exile to found a lasting political and ideological tradition of his own, "Bolshevik" and "Stalinist" came to be totally antithetical terms, tantamount to light and darkness, Good and Evil.

Trotskyists up to the present still tend to regard "Bolshevik" as a positive term and indeed the highest form of praise. Some of them use the word "Bolshevik" in the names of their parties or factions as well as their newspapers.

For his part, Stalin never accepted this dichotomy, and even though he gradually abandoned the name, he and subsequent Soviet leaders always claimed that they continued the work of the Bolsheviks. The term "Bolshevik" was also used interchangeably with the term "Communist" by many anti-Communists who were critical of the Soviet Union throughout its existence.

"Jewish Bolshevism"

Anti-communists, and particularly fascists, often used the term "Jewish Bolshevism", alluding to the fact that some of the Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish ethnicity or ancestry.

Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik revolution is well documented. Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the president. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:

It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …[7]

In another report on June 9, 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for the London Times. He writes:

A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.[8]

Winston Churchill, in an article which originally appeared in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8, 1920, wrote:

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews …[9]

Even the American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.[10] Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.[11]

Others argue that the Jewish role was not overwhelming, citing statistics such as:

In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) only 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian).

Among Lenin's 15 peoples' comissars, only 1 was Jewish (Trotsky). Among the 23 narkoms between 1923-1930, there were 12 Russians, 5 Jews, 2 Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), 1 Pole, 1 Moldavian, 1 Latvian, and 1 Ukrainian.

There were 3 Jews in the Politburo in the first half of the 1920's (Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev). There were none among the 9 members of the Politburo in 1927, the above three having been expelled from the Party. In the 1930's, there was only 1 person of Jewish descent in the Politburo, namely Kaganovich, known for his devotion to Joseph Stalin.

There are also claims that Jews, while not dominating the politics of the Soviet regime, were highly prominent among the members of the secret police and other instruments of oppression. Indeed, of the 12 members of the Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish (14 Latvians, 13 Russians, 7 Poles). Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.

In the mid-1930's, under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police briefly became dominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian.

Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced with ethnic Russian Nikolai Yezhov in September 1936, arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitiously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police, NKVD rose to 102 people (67%) and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937-1938).

Derogatory Usage of "Bolshevik"

During the days of the Cold War in the United Kingdom, labour union leaders and other leftists were sometimes derisively described as "Bolshie." The usage is roughly equivalent to the term "Red" or "Pinko" in the United States during the same period. However these days it is often used to describe a difficult or rebellious person e.g:"Timothy, don't be so bolshie!" An alternate spelling is "bolshy". (Collins Mini Dictionary 1998)

In Israel during the 1950's and the 1960's, opponents of then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion sometimes accused him of being "a Bolshevik". Although Ben Gurion was a staunch anti-Communist, the idea was that his party Mapai had a stranglehold on political and social life and no opposition party had a real chance to win an election until the 1970s.

In present-day Israel, the term is used to accuse any politician, of whatever political colouring, of authoriatarian or tyrannical behaviour. During the 2005 evacuation of the Gaza Strip, PM Ariel Sharon was frequently called "a bolshevik" by his opponents.

The October Revolution, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution or November Revolution, was the second phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the first having been instigated by the events around the February Revolution.

The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and the

Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchist. It is the first official Marxist communist revolution of the twentieth century.

The crucial revolutionary activities in Petrograd were under the command of the Petrograd Soviet headed by Leon Trotsky and the Military Revolutionary Committee headed by Adolph Joffe. The revolution was widely regarded as a reaction to the strains that had been placed upon Tsarist Russia as a result of the great war.

The revolution overthrew the Russian Provisional Government, which led to the Russian Civil War from 1918-1920, followed by the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.

Initially, the event was referred to as the October uprising or the Uprising of 25th, as seen in contemporary documents, for example, in the first editions of Lenin's complete works. With time, the October Revolution was seen as a hugely important global event, the first in a series of events that lay the groundwork for an epic Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and Western capitalist countries, including the United States.

The Great October Socialist Revolution (Russian: Velikaya Oktyabr'skaya sotsialisticheskaya revolyutsiya) was the official name for the October Revolution in the Soviet Union since the 10th anniversary celebration of the Revolution in 1927. Today this name is used mainly by Russian Communists.

The term Red October has also been ascribed to the events of the month; this name has in turn been lent to a tractor factory made notable by the Battle of Stalingrad, a Moscow sweets factory that is well-known in Russia, and a fictional Soviet submarine.

Causes

The mounting frustration of workers and soldiers erupted in July with several days of rioting on the streets, in what became known as the July Days. This event was sparked by the June offensive against Germany, in which War Minister Alexander Kerensky sent troops in a major attack on the Germans, only to be repelled. The July Days were also sparked by the workers' anger at their economic plight.

A group of 20,000 armed sailors from "Red Kronstadt", as it was known, marched into Petrograd and demanded that the Soviet take power. The capital was defenseless for two days. After suppressing the riots, the government blamed the Bolsheviks for encouraging the rebellion and many Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev, were forced to go into hiding.

Although the Bolshevik party had to operate semi-legally throughout July and August, its position on the far left end of the political spectrum was consolidated. Radical anti-war social democrats, who had joined the Mezhraiontsy earlier in the year, merged with the Bolsheviks in August. Many of them, particularly Trotsky, Joffe and Konstantin Yurenev would prove vital to the Bolsheviks' eventual seizure of Petrograd.

The Kornilov Affair was another catalyst to Revolution. Alexander Kerensky, who held positions in both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, felt he needed a trustworthy military leader. However, on appointment, Lavr Kornilov saw this as an opportunity to take control of Petrograd himself and seize the city through his own troops. When Kerensky realised what was happening, he panicked and the Bolsheviks' Red Guard offered to defend the capital.

Kerensky was even good enough to give them arms. Kornilov's troops never attempted a seizure in the end and were persuaded by delegations from the soldiers defending the city to stop at the railway stations, against the will of their commander. However, this was a big turning point towards the October Revolution.

The Bolsheviks were seen as the "defenders of the city" and their support increased immensely, as the support for Kerensky and the Provisional Government eroded. Following the Kornilov affair, Kerensky's reputation was "irretrievably damaged" (Kerensky's wife). Bolsheviks became the majority party in the Petrograd Soviet in early September 1917 with Trotsky becoming the Soviet's Chairman.

On October 23, 1917 (by the Julian calendar still in use in Russia at the time; November 5 by the current Gregorian calendar), Bolshevik leader Jaan Anvelt led his leftist revolutionaries in an uprising in Tallinn, the then capital of Estland. On October 25 (November 7), 1917 , Vladimir Lenin led his forces in the uprising in Petrograd, the capital of Russia, against the ineffective Kerensky Provisional Government.

For the most part, the revolt in Petrograd was bloodless, with the Red Guards led by Bolsheviks taking over major government facilities with little opposition before finally launching an assault on the Winter Palace on the night from November 6 to November 7. The assault led by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko was launched at 9:45pm signalled by a blank shot from the cruiser Aurora. The Winter Palace was guarded by Cossacks, Women's Battalion, and cadets (military students) corps.

It was taken at about 2am. The latter date was made the official date of the Revolution. Later official accounts of the revolution from the Soviet Union would depict the events in October as being far more dramatic than they actually had been. (See first hand account by British General Knox).

Official films made much later showed a huge storming of the Winter Palace and fierce fighting, but in reality the Bolshevik insurgents faced little or no opposition and were practically able to just walk into the building and take it over - more people were killed in the shooting of the film October than in the actual revolution. The insurrection was timed and organized to hand state power to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies which began on November 7.

The Second Congress of Soviets consisted of 649 elected delegates; 390 were Bolshevik and nearly a hundred were Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who also supported the overthrow of the Kerensky Government. When the fall of the Winter Palace was announced, the Congress adopted a decree transferring power to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, thus ratifying the Revolution. The transfer of power was not without disagreement.

The center and Right wings of the Socialist Revolutionaries as well as the Mensheviks believed that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had illegally seized power and they walked out before the resolution was passed. As they exited, they were taunted by Leon Trotsky who told them "You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out.

Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!" The following day, the Soviet elected a Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) as the basis of a new Soviet Government, pending the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, and passed the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land.

The Decree on Land ratified the actions of the peasants who throughout Russia seized private land and redistributed it among themselves. The Bolsheviks viewed themselves as representing an alliance of workers and peasants and memorialized that understanding with the Hammer and Sickle on the flag and coat of arms of the Soviet Union.

Bolshevik-led attempts to seize power in other parts of the Russian Empire were largely successful in Russia proper--although the fighting in Moscow lasted for two weeks--but they were less successful in ethnically non-Russian parts of the empire, which had been clamoring for independence since the February Revolution. For example, The Ukrainian Rada, which had declared autonomy on June 23, 1917, created the Ukrainian National Republic on November 20, which was supported by the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets.

This led to an armed conflict with the Bolshevik government in Petrograd and, eventually, a Ukrainian declaration of independence from Russia on January 25, 1918. In Estonia, two rival governments emerged: the Estonian Diet declared independence on November 28, 1917, while an Estonian Bolshevik, Jaan Anvelt, was recognized by Lenin's government as Estonia's leader on December 8, although forces loyal to Anvelt only controlled the capital.

The success of the October uprising completed the phase of the revolution started in February and transformed the Russian Revolution from liberal to socialist in character. A coalition of anti-Bolshevik groups attempted to unseat the new government in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1922.

The United States did not recognize the new Russian government until 1933, and later would send 10,000 troops to contain a Japanese invasion of Siberia. The European powers recognized the Soviet Union in the early 1920's and began to engage in business with it.

Born in Simbirsk, Russia (now Ulyanovsk), Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–1886), a Russian civil service official who worked for progressive democracy and free universal education in Russia, and his liberal wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (1835–1916). The family was of mixed ethnic ancestry. "Lenin's antecedents were Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others". Lenin was baptized into the Russian

Orthodox Church.

Two tragedies occurred early in his life. The first occurred when his father died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1886. In May 1887, his eldest brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for participation in a plot (bomb attack) threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III. This radicalized Lenin. His official Soviet biographies have this event as central to his revolutionary exploits.

A famous painting by Belousov, We will follow a different path, reprinted in millions of Soviet textbooks, depicted young Lenin and his mother grieving the loss of his elder brother.

The phrase "We will follow a different path" meant that Lenin chose a Marxist approach for a popular revolution, instead of anarchistic individualistic methods. As Lenin became interested in Marxism, he got involved in student protests and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from Kazan University. He continued to study independently and by 1891 had earned a

license to practice law[2]. He also distinguished himself in Latin and Greek, and he also learned German, French and English.

Revolutionary

Upon graduation, Lenin took on a job as an assistant to a lawyer. He worked for several years in Samara, Russia, then in 1893 moved to St Petersburg. Rather than settling into a legal career, he became more involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts and the study of Marxism. On December 7, 1895, he was arrested and held by authorities for 14 months, then exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia.

In July 1898, he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a socialist activist. In April 1899, he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In 1900 his exile ended and he travelled in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. He lived in Zurich, Geneva, Munich, Prague, Vienna and London, and during his exile founded the newspaper Iskra. He also wrote several articles and books related to the revolutionary movement. At this period, he started using various aliases, finally settling upon Lenin.

He was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; in Russian), and in 1903 he led the Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks that was partly inspired by his pamphlet What is to be Done. In 1906 he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. In 1907, he moved to Finland for security reasons.

He continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities, including the Prague Party Conference of 1912 and the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. When Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile, and it is believed she became Lenin's partner during this time. Lenin later moved to Switzerland.

When the First World War began in 1914, and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (at that time self-described as Marxist), including luminaries such as Karl Kautsky, supported their various countries' war efforts, Lenin was shocked, at first refusing to believe that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits. This led him to a final split with the Second International, which was composed of these parties. Lenin adopted an 'unpatriotic' position, stating the goal as the defeat of the Tsarist government in the war.

After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin knew he needed to travel back to Russia as soon as possible. But he was isolated in neutral Switzerland as the First World War was raging, and it would not have been easy to travel through Europe. The Swiss communist Fritz Platten, however, managed to negotiate with the German government for Lenin and his company to travel through Germany in a sealed train.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is thought to have expected Lenin to cause political unrest back in Russia and help end the war on the Eastern front. While on German territory, Lenin was not allowed outside the train. Once past Germany, Lenin continued by ferry to Sweden, and the rest of the trip through Scandinavia was arranged by the Swedish communists Otto Grimlund and Ture Nerman.

On April 16, 1917, he returned to Petrograd and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses, which called for an uncompromising opposition to the provisional government. Initially, Lenin isolated his party through this lurch to the left.

However, this uncompromising stand meant that the Bolsheviks were to become the obvious home for the masses as they became disillusioned with the provisional government, and with the "luxury of opposition", the Bolsheviks did not have to assume responsibility for any policies implemented by the government (Christopher Read: From Tsar to Soviets pp151–153).

Meanwhile, Aleksandr Kerensky and other opponents of the Bolsheviks accused Lenin of being a paid German agent. On this allegation, co-leader Leon Trotsky made a defensive speech on July 17, saying: "An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you as well as we are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution.

I have fought twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism. ... I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months’ imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany."

After a failed workers' rising in July, Lenin fled to Finland for safety. He returned in October, inspiring an armed revolution with the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" against the Provisional Government. His ideas of government were expressed in his essay "State and Revolution", which called for a new form of government based on workers' councils, or soviets.

In this work, he also claimed that ordinary workers should, in principle, be capable of running a factory or government. He emphasized, though, that to be able to govern the state, a worker should "learn communism." He furthermore insisted that a member of the government should be paid no more than the salary of an average worker.

On November 8, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress.

"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country," Lenin said, emphasizing the importance of bringing electricity to all corners of Russia and modernizing industry and agriculture.

"We must show the peasants that the organization of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism."

He was very concerned about creating a free universal health care system for all, the emancipation of women, and teaching the illiterate Russian people to read and write. But first and foremost, the new Bolshevik government needed to take Russia out of the World War.

Faced with the threat of German invasion, Lenin argued that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty. Other Bolshevik leaders, such as Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position, of "No War, No Peace", calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no territorial gains on either side be consolidated.

After the negotiations collapsed, Germany launched an invasion that resulted in the loss of much of Russia's western territory. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin's position consequently gained the support of the majority in the Bolshevik leadership. On March 3, 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia lost significant territories in Europe.

After the Bolsheviks lost the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly, they, with the backing of the overwhelming majority of the workers in both of Russia's major cities, Petrograd and Moscow, used the Red Guards to shut down the first session of the Assembly on January 19.

Later, the Bolsheviks organized a counter-Assembly, the third Congress of Soviets, which gave them and their allies over 90% of the seats, arguing that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was first and foremost an act of the proletariat itself: "Of course, those who thought that it was possible to leap straight from capitalism to socialism, or those who imagined that it was possible to convince the majority of the population that this could be achieved through the medium of the Constituent Assembly—those who believed in this bourgeois-democratic fable, can go on blithely believing it, but let them not complain if life destroys this fable,"

further arguing that "the chief reason why the 'socialists' (i.e., petty-bourgeois democrats) of the Second International fail to understand the dictatorship of the proletariat is that they fail to understand that state power in the hands of one class, the proletariat, can and must become an instrument for winning to the side of the proletariat the non-proletarian working masses, an instrument for winning those masses from the bourgeoisie and from the petty-bourgeois parties."

The Bolsheviks formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and they joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the soviet government. The situation degenerated, with non-Bolshevik parties (including some of the socialist factions) actively seeking the overthrow of the Bolshevik government. Lenin responded to these efforts by shutting down their activities and jailing some of the members of the opposing parties.

Even though Lenin advocated and helped to form a "Soviet democracy," it is often argued by Lenin's opponents on the right, like Kautsky, and on his left, like Kollontai, that he countermanded proletarian emancipation and democracy (workers' control through the soviets or workers' councils) by force.

[The Mensheviks' Political Comeback - The elections to the provincial soviets in spring 1918: Vladimir Brovkin. Russian Review 42 (1983) pp 1-50] Anti-Communist historian and conservative politician Richard Pipes has argued that policies such as handing sweeping power to the state, enforcing rigid party discipline, using terror as a means of political intimidation, and requisitioning grain paved the road to Stalinism.

Although many of these decried institutions and policies—such as secret police, labor camps, and executions of political opponents—were practiced under Lenin's regime, these techniques were all commonly used by the tsars long before Lenin and were long since established as the standard means of dealing with political dissent in Russia. However, the scale was different: three times more political prisoners were executed in the first few months of Bolshevik rule than in over 90 years under the tsar. [Stephane Courtois, et. al, "The Black Book of Communism", Harvard University Press. 1999. ISBN 0674076087].

Defenders of Lenin assert that this criticism ignores many central events during Tsarist rule, such as the Russo-Japanese War, Bloody Sunday (1905), and World War I. They also mention that the scale of the circumstances which surrounded the Bolsheviks was different as well: a country ravaged by an unprecedently destructive world war, a mass of people kept historically illiterate by tsarist autocracy, an oppositional force that fought to oust the Bolsheviks from power, etc.

Moreover, Leon Trotsky claimed that a "river of blood" separated Lenin from Stalin's actions because Stalin executed many of Lenin's old comrades and their supporters, grouped in the Left Opposition. This was indeed to include Trotsky himself.

The Leninist vision of revolution demanded a professional revolutionary cadre that would both lead the working masses in their conquest of power and centralize economic and administrative power in the hands of a workers' state. From early 1918, Lenin campaigned for a single, democratically accountable individual to be put in charge of each enterprise, contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise.

As S.A. Smith wrote: "By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state." During the civil war, democracy would become concentrated within the Bolshevik party and later the politburo of the CPSU.

To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counterrevolutionaries, the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the Cheka, immediately after the revolution. The Bolsheviks had planned to hold a trial for the former Tsar for his crimes against the Russian people, but in August 1918, when the White Army was advancing on Yekaterinburg (where the once royal family was being held), Sverdlov made a quick decision to execute the Tsar and his family right away, rather than having them being taken by the Whites.

Sverdlov later informed Lenin about this, who agreed it had been the right decision, since the Bolsheviks would rather not have let the royal family become a banner for the White Movement.

On January 14, 1918, a terrorist attack was made against Lenin’s car in Petrograd by unknown gunmen. Lenin and Fritz Platten were in the back of the car together, after having given a public speech. When the shooting started "Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down. ... Platten’s hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin."

On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he had spoken at a meeting and was on the way to his car. She called out to Lenin, who turned to answer. She immediately fired three shots, two of which struck him in the shoulder and lung.

Lenin was taken to his apartment in the Kremlin, refusing to venture to a hospital since he believed that other assassins would be waiting there. Doctors were summoned but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. Lenin eventually recovered, though his health declined from this point. It is believed that the incident contributed to his later strokes.

The Communist government responded to the assassination attempt, and to the increasingly mobilizing anti-communist offensive of which it was a component, with what they termed the Red Terror. Tens of thousands of perceived enemies of the Revolution, many accused of actively conspiring against the Bolshevik government, were executed or put in labor camps. The deliberate continuation of civil war, instigated by Lenin, caused widespread famine and led to the deaths of millions.

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of "mass terror against enemies of the revolution" and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment. Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged. (A Peoples Tragedy, pp524-5).

However, it is legitimate to ask, if that is the case, why such anger had never been vented in such a way until now, when the conditions of the lower orders were improving year by year as a result of reforms from the top, and why so many of the proletariat opposed the Bolsheviks.

When in late 1918 Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the "excesses" of the Cheka, it was Lenin who defended it. (Figes p649) However, the nature of these so-called "excesses," as well as Lenin's reasons behind their defense, remain unnamed.

In March 1919, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the Communist International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement.

From that point onwards, they would become known as communists. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the "Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)," which eventually became the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the civil war raged across Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the Red Army (communists) and the White Army (Tsarist).

Foreign powers such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in this war (on behalf of the White Army). Eventually, the more organizationally proficient Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the White Russian forces and their allies in 1920. Smaller fights, however, continued for several more years.

Both White and Red Army forces, during this tumultuous time of war and revolution, "behaved with great brutality and cruelty in areas they controlled. Towns were burned, property destroyed or stolen, peasant farmers' crops and livestock taken by force — if people objected, they faced torture and execution." However, the great weight of atrocities must be laid at the door of the Bolsheviks.

Far from being dictated by military necessity, Brovkin has argued that this level of terror was highly counterproductive. Alienation of the population behind the lines can explain, according to him, both red and white defeats during the civil war. (Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922).

In late 1919, successes against the White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to the West, by force if necessary. When the newly independent Second Polish Republic began securing its eastern territories annexed by Russia in the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, it clashed with Bolshevik forces for dominance in these areas, which led to the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919.

With the revolution in Germany and the Spartacist League on the rise, Lenin viewed this as the perfect time and place to "probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army." Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to link up the Russian Revolution with the communist supporters in the German Revolution, and to assist other communist movements in Western Europe. However the defeat of Soviet Russia in the Polish-Soviet War invalidated these plans.

Lenin was a harsh critic of imperialism. In 1917 he declared the unconditional right of self-determination and separation for national minorities and oppressed nations, usually defined as those nation-states that were previously subject to capitalist imperial control.

However, when the Russian Civil War was won he used military force to assimilate the newly independent nations Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, arguing that the inclusion of those countries into the newly emerging Soviet government would shelter them from capitalist imperial ambitions. [14] This would allow these countries admittance into the Soviet Union rather than simply forcing them to become part of Russia as would be in imperialist practices.

The long years of war, the Bolshevik policy of War communism, the Russian famine of 1921, and the encirclement of hostile capitalist governments took their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country lay in ruins. There were many peasant uprisings, the largest being the Tambov rebellion. After an uprising by the sailors at Kronstadt in March 1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), in a successful attempt to rebuild industry and especially agriculture.

Lenin's stand against anti-Semitism

After the revolution, Lenin worked hard to combat Anti-Semitism, which then as now was very much alive in Russia. In a radio speech in 1919, Lenin said: "The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. ... Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. ...

It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. ... Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations."

Lenin's health had already been severely damaged by the intolerable strains of revolution and war. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. The bullet was still lodged in his neck, too close to his spine for medical techniques of the time to remove.

In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed on his right side, and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December of the same year, he resigned from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered his third stroke and was left bedridden for the remainder of his life, no longer able to speak.

After his first stroke, Lenin dictated several papers regarding the government to his wife. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which among other things criticized top-ranking communists, especially Joseph Stalin. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary since April 1922, Lenin said that he had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands" and suggested that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post."

Upon Lenin's death, his wife mailed his Testament to the central committee, to be read at the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. However, because the will criticized all of the most prominent figures in the central committee: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin, the committee had a vested interest in not releasing the will to the wider public.

The central committee justified this by claiming that Lenin had been mentally ill in his final years and, as such, his final judgments were not to be trusted. Disregarding the words of Lenin is often perceived to be a fatal error. Lenin's Testament was first officially published in 1926 in the United States by Max Eastman.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924, aged 53. Rumors of Lenin having syphilis sprang up shortly after his death. The official cause given for Lenin's death was cerebral arteriosclerosis, or a fourth stroke. But out of the 27 physicians who treated him, only eight signed onto that conclusion in his autopsy report. Therefore, several other theories regarding his death have been put forward. For example, a posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology claimed to show that Lenin died from syphilis[citation needed].

Documents released after the fall of the U.S.S.R., along with memoirs of Lenin's physicians, suggest that Lenin was treated for syphilis as early as 1895. Documents suggest that Alexei Abrikosov, the pathologist in charge of the autopsy, was ordered to prove that Lenin did not die of syphilis.

Abrikosov did not mention syphilis in the autopsy; however, the blood-vessel damage, the paralysis and other incapacities he cited are typical of syphilis. Upon a second release of the autopsy report, none of the organs, major arteries, or brain areas usually affected by syphilis were cited.

In 1923, Lenin's doctors treated him with Salvarsan, the only drug at the time specifically used to treat syphilis, and potassium iodide, which was customary at the time in treating the disease.

Although he might have had syphilis, he had no visible lesions anywhere on his body that normally accompany the later stages of the disease. Most historians still agree that the most likely cause of his death was a stroke induced by the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt.

The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor three days after Lenin's death; this remained the name of the city until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg.

During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was quite popular and there was an intent to cryonically preserve Lenin's body in order to revive him in the future. Necessary equipment was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realized. Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow on January 27, 1924.

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary.

While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

At the same time as Engels, Marx took part in the political and philosophical struggle of his times, writing the

Communist Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848, although the two men had nothing to do with each other. Marx had broken with his university environment, German Idealism and the Young Hegelians, and took part in the debates of the European workers' movement, in particular in relation with the First International founded in 1864. He published the first tome of Das Kapital in 1867, a few years before the 1871 Paris Commune.

The influence of his ideas, already popular during his life, was given added impetus by the victory of the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1917 October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx's own thought to the popular "Marxist" interpretations of it during this period is a point of controversy; he himself once said that "the only thing [he] knew was that he wasn't Marxist".

While Marx's ideas have declined somewhat in popularity, particularly with the decline of Marxism in Russia, they are still very influential today, both in academic circles, and in political practice, and Marxism continues to be the official ideology of some Communist states and political movements.

Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family in Trier, in the Rhineland region of Germany. His father Heinrich, who had descended from a long line of rabbis, converted to Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau.

Marx's father was actually born Herschel Mordechai, but when the Prussian authorities would not allow him to continue practicing law as a Jew, he joined the official denomination of the Prussian state, Lutheranism, which accorded him advantages, as one of a small minority of Lutherans in a predominantly Roman Catholic region. The Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals and artists during Marx's early life.

Education

Up until the age of thirteen, Marx was educated at home. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of 17 to study law, where he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president; his grades suffered as a result. Marx was interested in studying philosophy and literature, but his father would not allow it because he did not believe that his son would be able to comfortably support himself in the future as a scholar.

The following year, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time.

Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.

Marx and the Young Hegelians

The Left or Young Hegelians consisted of circles of philosophers and journalists around Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer opposing their teacher Hegel. Nevertheless they made use of Hegel's dialectical method, separated from its theological content, as a powerful weapon for the critique of established religion and politics. Some members of this circle drew an analogy between post-Aristotelian philosophy and post-Hegelian philosophy.

One of them, Max Stirner, turned critically against both Feuerbach and Bauer in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum" (1845, The Ego and Its Own), calling these atheists in all seriousness "pious people." Marx, at that time a follower of Feuerbach, was deeply impressed, abandoned Feuerbachian materialism and accomplished what recent authors have denoted as "epistemological break".

He developed the basic concept of historical materialism against Stirner in his book "Die Deutsche Ideologie" (1846, The German Ideology), which he did not publish. Another link to the Young Hegelians was Moses Hess, with whom Marx eventually disagreed, yet to whom he owed many of his insights into the relationship between state, society and religion.

Activities in Europe

When his mentor, Bruno Bauer, was dismissed from Friedrich-Wilhelms' philosophy faculty in 1842, Marx abandoned academia and moved into journalism. In October of 1842, he became editor of the influential liberal newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (literally "Rhenish Newspaper") located in Cologne, Germany. The newspaper was shut down in 1843 by the Prussian government, in part due to Marx's conflicts with government censors. Marx continued his writing as a freelance journalist, but his radical political views meant that he had to leave Germany.

Marx left for France, where he re-evaluated his relationship with Bauer and the Young Hegelians, and wrote On the Jewish Question, mostly a critique of current notions of civil rights and political emancipation, which also includes several critical references to Judaism as well as Christianity from an atheistic standpoint. It was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels, a committed communist, who kindled Marx's interest in the situation of the working class and guided Marx's interest in economics.

Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which remained unpublished until 1932. In the Manuscripts, the young Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. After they were forced to leave Paris in turn because of his politics, Marx and Engels moved to Brussels, Belgium.

There Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known after his death as the historical materialism, particularly in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), the basic thesis of which was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism. This was the first major work of what scholars consider to be his later phase, abandoning the Feuerbach-influenced humanism of his earlier work.

Next, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a response to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty and a critique of French socialist thought. These works laid the foundation for Marx and Engels' most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on February 21, 1848, as the manifesto of the Communist League, a small group of European communists who had come to be influenced by Marx and Engels.

Later that year, Europe experienced tremendous revolutionary upheaval. Marx was arrested and expelled from Belgium; in the meantime a radical movement had seized power from King Louis Philippe in France, and invited Marx to return to Paris, where he witnessed the revolutionary June Insurrection (Revolutions of 1848 in France) first hand.

When this collapsed in 1849, Marx moved back to Cologne and started the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ("New Rhenish Newspaper"). During its existence he was put on trial twice, on February 7, 1849 because of a press misdemeanour, and on the 8th charged with incitement to armed rebellion. Both times he was acquitted. The paper was soon suppressed and Marx returned to Paris, but was forced out again. This time he sought refuge in London in May 1849 where he was to remain for the rest of his life.

London

Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League, whose headquarters were based in London itself, and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He was soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.

In 1855, the Marx family suffered a blow with the death of their son, Edgar, from tuberculosis.[2] Meanwhile, Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market. This work however was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

During this period, Marx championed the Union cause in the United States Civil War. In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels. In 1859, Marx was able to publish Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work.

One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876).

Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.

During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia.

In Germany, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, he opposed the tendency of his followers Karl Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.

Family life

Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a baron in Germany. Karl Marx's engagement to her was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. He ended up marrying her, though, June 19th, 1843. They stayed in touch throughout the first half of his life, when he was moving around Europe.

During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester.

This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Money from Engels allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodging in a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although it is worth noting that this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.

There is a disputed rumour that Marx was the father of Frederick Demuth, the son of Marx's housekeeper, Helene "Lenchen" Demuth. The matter is unproven either way

Death and Legacy

Following the death of his wife Jenny in 1881, Marx's health worsened and he died in 1883, as a stateless person. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on 17 March 1883. The message carved on Marx's tombstone is: "WORKERS OF ALL LANDS, UNITE", the final line of The Communist Manifesto. The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain — Marx's original tomb was humbly adorned; only eleven people were present at his funeral. In 1970, there was an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the monument.

Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral including Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the words:

"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep-but forever." [3]

Marx's daughter Eleanor (1855-1898) became a socialist like her father and helped edit his works.

As the American Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, "there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike." The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism.

Philosophy

Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Along with the Hegelian dialectic, Marx inherited a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting “nature” with “history”. Sometimes they use the phrase “existence precedes consciousness”.

The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is — social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the main features of human nature is adaptability. Nevertheless, Marxian thought rests on the fundamental assumption that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour " and the capacity to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the active role of human consciousness:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)

Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time.

Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production.

Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is inherent in all human history:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1)

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labour power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss.

Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function.

Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations.

For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion, summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Political economy

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land.

People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are "proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeoise." The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets.

According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.

The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor.

Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat.

He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without violence.

He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Yet he was aware of the possibility that in some countries, with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g. Britain, the US and the Netherlands) this transformation could occur through peaceful means, while in countries with a strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the upheaval will have to be violent.

Main Works

Das Kapital

Das Kapital (or Capital in English) is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis and the critique of commodity fetishism. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction.

According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society.

Grundrisse

Marx was involved in a huge ongoing work-in-progress, which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as Grundrisse. These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists.

In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism.

Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; and sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").

Marx and Engels' work covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose a grand, cohesive theoretical outlook dubbed Marxism. Nevertheless, there have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles; "if that is Marxism" — paraphrasing what Marx wrote — "then I am not a Marxist").

Essentially, people use the word "Marxist" to describe those who rely on Marx's conceptual language (e.g. "mode of production", "class", "commodity fetishism") to understand capitalist and other societies, or to describe those who believe that a workers' revolution as the only means to a communist society. Some, particularly in academic circles, who accept much of Marx's theory, but not all its implications, call themselves "Marxian" instead.

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization was far more successful than the First International had been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful German Social Democratic Party, which was predominantly Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914, however, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary" socialism, and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.

World War I also led to the Russian Revolution in which a left splinter of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized "Communist Party."

Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries.

In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play a leading role in a Communist revolution in third world countries still marked by feudalism whose majority of workers were peasants, not industrial workers.

This was termed by Mao as the New Democratic Revolution. As a departure from Marx's understanding of the socialist revolution that maintained that the revolution must take place with countries that have already gone through the captialist stage of development first and have produced the proletarian class as the majority, which is to carry out the revolutionary transformation of society into a socialist country and communist world. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.

Under Lenin, and increasingly after the rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the actions of the Soviet Union (and later of the People's Republic of China) came in many people's mind to be synonymous with Marxism, with its attendant suppression of the rights of individuals and workers in the name of the struggle against capitalism, including the execution of larges numbers of people under Stalin, a fact which has been used by anti-Communists against Marxism.

However, there were throughout dissenting Marxist voices — Marxists of the old school of the Second International, the left communists who split off from the Third International shortly after its formation, and later Leon Trotsky and his followers, who set up a "Fourth International" in 1938 to compete with that of Stalin, claiming to represent true Bolshevism.

Coming from the Second International milieu, in the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School. Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.

The Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic enterprise.

Influential Marxists of the same period include the Third International's Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School are often known by the term Western Marxism.

In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review, a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States independent of the Communist Party.

In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by restating its central tenets in the language of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the academy, as is the Israeli Shlomo Avineri.

The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still do as of 2006): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, the USSR and its republics, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments.

Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

Marx was ranked #27 on Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history.

In July 2005 Marx was the surprise winner of the 'Greatest Philosopher of All Time' poll by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time.

Born in Barmen-Elberfeld (now Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) as the eldest son of a successful German textile industrialist, Engels became involved in radical journalism as a teenager (Carver 2003:3).

His father sent the young Engels to England in 1842 to help manage his cotton factory in Manchester. Shocked by the widespread poverty, Engels began writing an account which he published in 1845 as The Condition of the Working

Class in England in 1844 ([1]).

In the same year Engels began contributing to the journal Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, which Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx edited and published in Paris. After Engels and Marx first met in person in September 1844 they discovered that they had similar views on philosophy and on capitalism, and decided to work more closely together. Their first common work, the book Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family), a polemic mainly written by Marx, attacked Marx's former mentor and friend Bruno Bauer and his circle. This book appeared in March 1845, about the time when Marx wrote the Theses on Feuerbach in his notebook.

After the French authorities deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of

expression than some other countries in Europe.

In July 1845 Engels took Marx to England. There he met an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns (Crosby), with whom he lived until her death in 1863 (Carver 2003:19). Later he lived with her sister, Lizzie. marrying her the day before she died in 1877 (Carver 2003:42). These women may have introduced him to the Chartist movement, of whose leaders he met several, including George Harney.

Engels and Marx returned to Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee. They planned to unite socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe. Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in London in June 1847 and formed a new organization: the Communist League. Engels attended as a delegate and had a great impact on the developed strategy of action.

In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Engels actively participated in the Revolution of 1848, taking part in the uprising at Elberfeld. Engels fought in the Baden campaign against the Prussians (June/July 1849) as the aide-de-camp of August Willich, who commanded a Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising. [2]

By 1849 both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.

In remembrance of the historical democratic and socialist movements in Germany in 1848/1849, the German social psychologist Richard Albrecht read a public lecture in Cologne (Rhineland), 150 years later in 1988, on the specific role Frederick Engels played as an anti-Prussian partisan and counterpart of the Prussian police agent Dr Wilhelm Stieber (alias Schmidt).

This scholarly piece first appeared in print in 2000 (Almanach der Varnhagen-Gesellschaft, ed. Dr. Nikolaus Gatter, vol. 1 (2000), 197-208, Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz ISBN 3-8305-0025-4; but it became available online free of charge in 2004. It gives insights into the personality of Frederick Engels (nicknamed "the general") before, during and after his emigration (first to Basel in Switzerland, then to Manchester): see "Gegenspieler - Der General und sein Schatten: Engels, Stieber & die preußische Reaktion 1851/52. Historischer Bericht zum ersten Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln" [Counterparts - The General and His Shadow: Engels, Stieber & the Prussian Reactionary Forces, 1851/52. Another look at the first "Colonial Communist Trial"]

In order to help provide Marx with an income, Engels returned to work for his father in Manchester, before moving back to London in 1870. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also contributed significantly to feminist theory, seeing for instance the concept of monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the domination of man over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers.

Engels died in London in 1895, childless. Following cremation at Woking, his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, as he had requested .

Engels had a reputation as an avid bird-breeder.

Leon Davidovich Trotsky (also transliterated Leo, Lev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij, Trockij and Trotzky) (November 7 [O.S. October 26] 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist.

He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War.

He was also a founding member of the Politburo. Following a power struggle with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. He was eventually assassinated in Mexico

by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent, with an ice axe[1]. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of the Communist theory of Trotskyism, and Trotskyism remains a major school of Marxist thought that is theoretically opposed to Stalinism and Maoism.

Childhood and family (1879-1896)

Trotsky was born in Yanovka, Kherson Province, Ukraine on November 7, 1879, in a small village 15 miles from the nearest post office. He was the fifth child of a wealthy but illiterate Jewish farmer, David Leontyevish Bronstein (or Bronshtein, 1847 - 1922) and Anna Bronstein (d. 1910).

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, named after an uncle who would, later that month, attempt to blow up the imperial railway carriage. Although the family was ethnically Jewish, it was not religious, and the languages spoken at home were Russian and Ukrainian instead of Yiddish. Bronstein's younger sister, Olga, married Lev Kamenev, a leading Bolshevik.

When Bronstein was nine, his father sent him to Odessa for education. He was enrolled in a historically German school, which became increasingly Russified during his years in Odessa due to the government's policy of russification.

Although he was a good student, even in his youth Bronstein was rebellious and he organized a protest against an unpopular teacher in 2nd grade. However, he didn't take an active part in politics or socialism until 1896, when he moved to Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) for the final year of schooling.

Bronstein became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to Nikolayev. At first a narodnik (revolutionary populist), he was introduced to Marxism later that year and gradually became a Marxist. Instead of pursuing a mathematics degree, Bronstein helped organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Using the name 'Lvov', he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students.

In January 1898, over 200 members of the Union, including Bronstein, were arrested and he spent the next two years in prison awaiting trial. Two months after Bronstein's arrest and imprisonment, the 1st Congress of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was held and from that point on, Bronstein considered himself a member of the party.

While in prison, he married a fellow Marxist, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and studied philosophy. In 1900 he was sentenced to four years in exile in Ust-Kut and Verkholensk (see map) in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, where his first two daughters, Nina Nevelson and Zinaida Volkova, were born.

It was in Siberia that Bronstein became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in the last two years of the 19th century. Some social democrats known as "economists" were arguing that the party should concentrate on helping industrial workers improve their lot in life.

Others argued that overthrowing the monarchy was more important and that a well organized and disciplined revolutionary party was essential. The latter were led by the London-based newspaper Iskra, which was founded in 1900. Bronstein quickly sided with the Iskra position.

First emigration and second marriage (1902-1903)

Bronstein escaped from Siberia in the summer of 1902, having stolen a passport in the name of Leon Trotsky (a former jailer in Odessa), which became his primary revolutionary pseudonym. Once abroad, he moved to London to join Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and other editors of Iskra. Under the penname Pero ("feather" or "pen" in Russian) Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading authors.

Unbeknownst to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly split between the "old guard" led by Plekhanov and the "new guard" led by Lenin and Martov. Not only were Plekhanov's supporters older (in their 40s and 50s), but they had also spent the previous 20 years in European exile together. Members of the new guard were in their early 30s and had only recently come from Russia. Lenin, who was trying to establish a permanent majority against Plekhanov within Iskra, expected Trotsky, then 23, to side with the new guard and wrote in March 1903 [3]:

I suggest to all the members of the editorial board that they co-opt 'Pero' as a member of the board on the same basis as other members. [...] We very much need a seventh member, both as a convenience in voting (six being an even number), and as an addition to our forces. 'Pero' has been contributing to every issue for several months now; he works in general most energetically for the Iskra; he gives lectures (in which he has been very successful).

In the section of articles and notes on the events of the day, he will not only be very useful, but absolutely necessary. Unquestionably a man of rare abilities, he has conviction and energy, and he will go much farther.

Due to Plekhanov's opposition, Trotsky did not become a full member of the editorial board, but from that point on he participated in its meetings in an advisory capacity, which earned him Plekhanov's enmity.

In late 1902, Trotsky met Natalia Sedova, who soon became his companion and, from 1903 until his death, wife. They had two children together, Leon Sedov (b. 1906) and Sergei Sedov (b. 1908). As Trotsky later explained [4], after the 1917 revolution:

In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife.

However, the name change remained a technicality and he never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya". Trotsky and his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, maintained a friendly relationship until Sokolovskaya disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges.

Split with Lenin (1903-1904)

In the meantime, after a period of secret police repression and internal confusion that followed the first party Congress in 1898, Iskra succeeded in convening the party's 2nd congress in London in August 1903, with Trotsky and other Iskra editors in attendance. At first the Congress went as planned, with Iskra supporters handily defeating the few "economist" delegates at the Congress.

Then the Congress discussed the position of the Jewish Bund, which had co-founded the RSDLP in 1898 but wanted to remain autonomous within the Party. In the heat of the debate, Trotsky made a controversial statement to the effect that he and eleven other non-Bund Jewish delegates who had signed an anti-Bund statement

while working in the Russian party, regarded and still do regard themselves also as representatives of the Jewish proletariat.

As Trotsky explained two months later, his statement was just a tactical maneuver made on Lenin's request.

Shortly thereafter, pro-Iskra delegates unexpectedly split in two factions. Lenin and his supporters (known as "Bolsheviks") argued for a smaller but highly organized party. Martov and his supporters (known as "Mensheviks") argued for a larger and less disciplined party. In a surprise development, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903-1904 with many members changing sides. Plekhanov soon parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From that point until 1917 he remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat".

Trotsky spent much of his time between 1904 and 1917 trying to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later conceded he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party. During these years Trotsky began developing his theory of permanent revolution, which led to a close working relationship with Alexander Parvus in 1904-1907.

After the events of Bloody Sunday (1905), Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905. At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing press in Kiev, but soon moved to the capital, Saint Petersburg. There he worked with both Bolsheviks like Central Committee member Leonid Krasin as well as the local Menshevik committee, which he pushed in a more radical direction.

The latter, however, were betrayed by a secret police agent in May. Trotsky had to flee to rural Finland where he worked on fleshing out his theory of permanent revolution until October, when a nationwide strike made it possible for him to return to St. Petersburg.

After returning to the capital, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper Russian Gazette and increased its circulation to 500,000. Trotsky also co-founded Nachalo ("The Beginning") with Parvus and the Mensheviks, which proved to be very successful.

Immediately prior to Trotsky's return to the capital, the Mensheviks had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had -- an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first Soviet ("Council") of Workers.

By the time of Trotsky's arrival, the St. Petersburg Soviet was already functioning with Khrustalyov-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov), a compromise figure, at its head and proved to be very popular with the workers in spite of the Bolsheviks' original opposition.

Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" (after the village he was born in, Yanovka) and was elected vice-Chairman. He did much of the actual work at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on November 26, was elected its Chairman. On December 2, the Soviet issued a proclamation which included the following statement about the Tsarist government and its foreign debts [6]:

The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore decided not to allow the repayment of such loans as have been made by the Czarist government when openly engaged in a war with the entire people.

The following day, December 3, the Soviet was surrounded by troops loyal to the government and the deputies were arrested.

Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were put on trial in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. At the trial, Trotsky delivered some of the best speeches of his life and solidified his reputation as an effective public speaker, which he confirmed in 1917-1920. He was convicted and sentenced to exile for life.

Second emigration (1907-1914)

In January 1907, Trotsky escaped en route to exile and once again made his way to London, where he attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP. In October 1907, he moved to Vienna where he frequently participated in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and, occasionally, of the German Social Democratic Party, for the next seven years.

It was in Vienna that Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe, his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced Trotsky to psychoanalysis. In October 1908 he started a bi-weekly Russian language Social Democratic paper aimed at Russian workers called Pravda ("The Truth"), which he co-edited with Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and Victor Kopp and which was smuggled into Russia. The paper avoided factional politics and proved popular with Russian industrial workers.

When various Bolshevik and Menshevik factions (both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split multiple times after the failure of the 1905-1907 revolution) tried to re-unite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris over Lenin's objections, Trotsky's Pravda was made a party-financed 'central organ'.

Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two years until it finally folded in April 1912.

When the Bolsheviks started a new workers-oriented newspaper in St. Petersburg on April 22, 1912, they called it Pravda as well. In what appeared to be a minor development at the time, in April 1913 Trotsky was so upset by what he saw as a usurpation of 'his' newspaper's name that he wrote a letter to Nikolay Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, bitterly denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky was able to suppress the contents of the letter in 1921 to avoid embarrassment, but once he started losing power in the early 1920s, the letter was made public by his opponents within the Communist Party in 1924 and used to paint him as Lenin's enemy.

This was a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP and led to numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The most serious disagreement that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with Lenin at the time was over the issue of "expropriations", i.e. armed robberies of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for the Party, which had been banned by the 5th Congress, but continued by the Bolsheviks.

In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction led by Lenin and a few Mensheviks held a conference in Prague and expelled their opponents from the party. In response, Trotsky organized a "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (a.k.a. "The August Bloc") and tried to re-unite the party. The attempt was generally unsuccessful.

While in Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers like Kievskaya Mysl under a variety of pseudonyms, often "Antid Oto". In September 1912 Kievskaya Mysl sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year and became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky, later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in the Soviet Communist Party.

On August 3 1914, at the outbreak of World War I which pitted Austria-Hungary against the Russian empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré.

World War I (1914-1917)

The outbreak of WWI caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions, while Plekhanov and other social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported the Russian government to some extent.

While in Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party, prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution, and wrote a book against the war, The War and the International. The thrust of the book was against the pro-war position taken by the European social democratic parties, primarily the German party.

Trotsky moved to France on November 19, 1914, as a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl. In January 1915 he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the Left) Nashe Slovo ["Our Word"], an internationalist socialist newspaper, in Paris.

He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered", which didn't go quite as far as Lenin, who advocated Russia's defeat in the war and demanded a complete break with the Second International.

Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who would, like Lenin, break with the Second International and form a Third International. The conference adopted the middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed to it, in the end Lenin voted [9] for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists.

In September 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities wouldn't let him stay and he was deported to the United States on December 25, 1916. He arrived in New York City on January 13, 1917. In New York, he wrote articles for the local Russian language socialist newspaper Novy Mir and the Yiddish language daily Der Forverts (The Forward) in translation and made speeches to Russian émigrés.

1917

Trotsky was living in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. He left New York on March 27, but his ship was intercepted by British naval officials in Halifax, Nova Scotia and he spent a month detained at Amherst, Nova Scotia. After initial hesitation by the Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov, he was forced to demand that Trotsky be released and the British government freed Trotsky on April 29. He finally made his way back to Russia on May 4 of that year.

Upon his return, Trotsky was in substantive agreement with the Bolshevik position, but he didn't join them right away. At the time, Russian social democrats were split in at least 6 groups and the Bolsheviks were waiting for the next party Congress to determine which factions they would merge with.

Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in St. Petersburg, and became one of its leaders. At the First Congress of Soviets in June, he was elected member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee ("VTsIK") from the Mezhraiontsy faction.

Trotsky was arrested on August 7, 1917 (New Style) after an unsuccessful pro-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, but was released 40 days later in the aftermath of the failed counter-revolutionary uprising by Lavr Kornilov.

After the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky was elected Chairman on October 8 (New Style). He sided with Lenin against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev when the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed staging an armed uprising and he led the efforts to overthrow the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6, 1918. (Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book "The October Revolution" issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949.)

"All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised."

After the success of the uprising on November 7-8 (New Style), Trotsky led the efforts to repel a counter-attack by Cossaks under General Pyotr Krasnov and other troops still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government at Gatchina. Allied with Lenin, he successfully defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, etc) to share power with other socialist parties.

By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose star appeared to be fading. This turnaround planted the seeds of the two Bolshevik leaders' mutual enmity, which lasted until 1926 and, in the end, did much to destroy them both.

Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Brest-Litovsk (1917-1918)

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Trotsky became the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and published the secret treaties previously signed by the Triple Entente and the United States that detailed plans for post-war reallocation of colonies and redrawing state borders.

Trotsky was the head of the Soviet delegation during the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk between December 22, 1917 and February 10, 1918. At that time the Soviet government was split on the issue. Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, continued to believe that there could be no peace between a Soviet republic and a capitalist country and that only a revolutionary war leading to a pan-European Soviet republic would bring a durable peace.

They cited the successes of the newly formed (January 15, 1918) voluntary Red Army against Polish forces of Gen. Józef Dowbor-Musnicki in Belarus, White forces in the Don region and newly independent Ukrainian forces as proof that the Red Army could successfully repel German forces, especially if propaganda and asymmetrical warfare were used.

Left Communists didn't mind holding talks with the Germans as a means of exposing German imperial ambitions (territorial gains, reparations, etc) in hopes of accelerating the hoped for Soviet revolution in the West, but they were dead set against signing any peace treaty.

In case of a German ultimatum, they advocated proclaiming a revolutionary war against Germany in order to inspire Russian and European workers to fight for socialism. Their opinion was shared by Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were then the Bolsheviks' junior partners in a coalition government.

Lenin, who had earlier hoped for a speedy Soviet revolution in Germany and other parts of Europe, quickly decided that the imperial government of Germany was still firmly in control and that, absent a strong Russian military, an armed conflict with Germany would lead to a collapse of the Soviet government in Russia.

He agreed with the Left Communists that ultimately a pan-European Soviet revolution would solve all problems, but until then the Bolsheviks needed to be able to survive and stay in power. Lenin didn't mind prolonging the negotiating process for maximum propaganda effect, but, from January 1918 on, he advocated signing a separate peace treaty if faced with a German ultimatum.

Trotsky's position during this period was in between these two Bolshevik factions. Like Lenin, he admitted that the old Russian military, inherited from the monarchy and the Provisional Government and in advanced stages of decomposition, was unable to fight:

That we could no longer fight was perfectly clear to me and that the newly formed Red Guard and Red Army detachments were too small and poorly trained to resist the Germans.

On the other hand, he agreed with the Left Communists that signing a separate peace treaty with an imperialist power would be a terrible moral and material blow to the Soviet government, negating all of its military and political successes in late 1917-early 1918, resurrecting the notion that the Bolsheviks were secretly allied with the German government, and causing an upsurge of internal resistance.

In case of a German ultimatum, Trotsky argued, the best policy was to refuse to accept it, which had a good chance of being the last drop that would lead to an uprising within Germany or, at the very least, inspire German soldiers to refuse to obey their officers since any German offensive would be a naked grab for territories. As Trotsky wrote in 1925:

We began peace negotiations in the hope of arousing the workmen's party of Germany and Austria-Hungary as well as of the Entente countries. For this reason we were obliged to delay the negotiations as long as possible to give the European workman time to understand the main fact of the Soviet revolution itself and particularly its peace policy.

But there was the other question: Can the Germans still fight Are they in a position to begin an attack on the revolution that will explain the cessation of the war How can we find out the state of mind of the German soldiers, how to fathom it

Throughout January and February of 1918, Lenin's position was supported by 7 members of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Bukharin's by 4. Trotsky had 4 votes (his own, Felix Dzerzhinsky's, Nikolai Krestinsky's and Adolph Joffe's) and, since he held the balance of power, he was able to pursue his policy in Brest-Litovsk. When he could no longer delay the negotiations, he withdrew from the talks on (February 10, 1918), refusing to sign on Germany's harsh terms.

After a brief hiatus, the Central Powers notified the Soviet government that they would no longer observe the truce after February 17. At this point Lenin again argued that the Soviet government had done all it could to explain its position to Western workers and that it was time to accept the terms. Trotsky refused to support Lenin since he was waiting to see whether German workers would rebel or whether German soldiers would refuse to follow orders.

The German side resumed military operations on February 18. Within a day, it became clear that the German army was capable of conducting offensive operations and that Red Army detachments, which were relatively small, poorly organized and poorly led, were no match for it.

At this point, in the evening of February 18, 1918, Trotsky and his supporters in the Bolshevik Central Committee abstained. Lenin's proposal was accepted 7-4 and the Soviet government sent a telegram to the German side accepting the final Brest-Litovsk peace terms.

The German side didn't respond for three days, continuing its offensive and encountering little resistance. When the response did arrive on February 21, the proposed terms were so harsh that even Lenin briefly thought that the Soviet government had no other choice but to fight.

In the end, however, the Bolshevik Central Committee once again voted 7-4 on February 23, 1918, which paved the way to the signing of Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3 and its ratification on March 15, 1918. Since he was so closely associated with the policy previously followed by the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky submitted his resignation from his position as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in order to remove a potential obstacle to the new policy.

The failure of the recently formed Red Army to resist the German offensive in February 1918 put its weaknesses on display: insufficient numbers, lack of knowledgeable officers, almost complete absence of coordination and subordination. Celebrated and feared Baltic Fleet sailors, one of the bastions of the new regime led by Pavel Dybenko, ignominiously fled from the German army at Narva. The notion that the Soviet state could have an effective voluntary or militia type military was seriously undermined.

Trotsky was one of the first Bolshevik leaders to recognize the problem and he pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as an advisory body. Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed to create the Supreme Military Council, with former chief of the imperial General Staff Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich at its head, on March 4.

However, the entire Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army, including People's Commissar (defense minister) Nikolai Podvoisky and commander-in-chief Nikolai Krylenko, protested vigorously and eventually resigned. They believed that the Red Army should consist only of dedicated revolutionaries, rely on propaganda as well as on force, and have elected officers.

They viewed former imperial officers and generals as potential traitors who should be kept out of the new military, much less put in charge of it. Their views continued to be popular with many Bolsheviks throughout most of the Russian Civil War and their supporters, including Podvoisky, who became one of Trotsky's deputies, were a constant thorn in Trotsky's side.

The discontent with Trotsky's policies of strict discipline, conscription and reliance on carefully supervised non-Communist military experts eventually led to the Military Opposition, which was active within the Communist Party in late 1918-1919.

On March 13, 1918 Trotsky's resignation as Commissar for Foreign Affairs was officially accepted and he was appointed People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs in place of Podvoisky and chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The post of the commander-in-chief was abolished and from that point on, Trotsky was in full control of the Red Army, responsible only to the Communist Party leadership, their Left Socialist Revolutionary allies having left the government over Brest-Litovsk.

With the help of his faithful deputy Ephraim Sklyansky, Trotsky spent the rest of the Civil War transforming the Red Army from a ragtag network of small and fiercely independent detachments into a large and disciplined military machine.

The Civil War (1918-1920)

1918

Trotsky's managerial skills and his approach to building the Soviet military were soon put to a test. When the Czechoslovak Legions, then en route from European Russia to Vladivostok, rose against the Soviet government in May-June 1918, the Bolsheviks were suddenly faced with the loss of most of the country's territory, an increasingly well organized resistance by Russian anti-Communist forces (usually referred to as the White Army after their best known component) and widespread defection by the military experts that Trotsky relied on.

Trotsky and the Soviet government responded with a full-fledged mobilization, which increased the size of the Red Army from less than 300,000 in May 1918 to one million in October 1918, and an introduction of political commissars into the Red Army. The latter were responsible for ensuring the loyalty of military experts (who were mostly former officers in the imperial army) and co-signing their orders.

Facing military defeats in mid-1918, Trotsky introduced increasingly severe penalties for desertion, insubordination, and retreat. He organized the formation of the infamous "blocking units", special squads stationed behind the front-line troops, whose role it was to summarily gun down all soldiers suspected of desertion and unauthorized retreat. As he later wrote in his autobiography:

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements — the animals that we call men — will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.

These reprisals included the death penalty for deserters and "traitors", as well as using former officers' families as hostages against possible defections:

[...] commissars are obligated to keep track of [former] officers' families and appoint them to positions of responsibility when it is possible the seize their families in case of treason.

[...]I ordered you to establish the family status of former officers among command personnel and to inform each of them by signed receipt that treachery or treason will cause the arrest of their families and that, therefore, they are each taking upon themselves responsibility for their families. That order is still in force.

Since then there have been a number of cases of treason by former officers, yet not in a single case, as far as I know, has the family of the traitor been arrested, as the registration of former officers has evidently not been carried out at all. Such a negligent approach to so important a matter is totally impermissible.

Trotsky also threatened to execute unit commanders and commissars whose units either deserted or retreated without permission. (Trotsky later argued that these threats were either taken out of context or were used to scare his subordinates into action and were not necessarily meant to be carried out.) Since Red Army commissars were often prominent Bolsheviks, it sometimes led to clashes between them and Trotsky.

Though he and Trotsky were later to become mortal enemies, Stalin was influenced by Trotsky's use of disciplinary measures, and expanded the use of blocking units well into World War II.

In addition to the use of terror, Trotsky believed that state-sponsored propagation of revolutionary ideals could improve an army's performance. As he wrote in his memoirs:

And yet armies are not built on fear. The Czar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. [...] The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.

The train referred to in the quote above was Trotsky's personal armored train that he used during the Civil War to visit the most critical sections of the front. While there, he not only planned and supervised military operations, but also used his considerable oratorical talents to inspire Red Army soldiers and even deserters, often with considerable success. Trotsky made at least 36 trips to "hot spots" in 1918-1920 and his train became one of the symbols of the Red Army.

Trotsky continued to insist that former officers should be used as military experts within the Red Army and, in the summer of 1918, was able to convince Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership not only to continue the policy in the face of mass defections, but also to give these experts more direct operational control of the military.

In this he differed sharply from Stalin who was, from May through October 1918, the top commissar in the South of Russia. Stalin and his future defense minister, Kliment Voroshilov, went so far as to refuse to accept former general Andrei Snesarev who had been sent to them by Trotsky. Stalin's stubborn opposition to Trotsky's military policies led to an acute personal conflict, which continued, in various forms, for the next 10 years, until Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union.

In September 1918, the Soviet government, facing continuous military difficulties, declared what amounted to martial law and reorganized the Red Army. The Supreme Military Council was abolished and the position of the commander-in-chief was restored, filled by the commander of the Red Latvian Rifleman Ioakim Vatsetis (aka Jukums Vacietis), who had formerly led the Eastern Front against the Czechoslovak Legions.

Vatsetis was put in charge of day to day operations of the Red Army while Trotsky was appointed Chairman of the newly formed Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and retained overall control of the military. Trotsky and Vatsetis had clashed earlier in 1918 while Vatsetis and Trotsky's adviser Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich were also on unfriendly terms. Nevertheless, Trotsky eventually established a working relationship with the often prickly Vatsetis.

The reorganization caused yet another conflict between Trotsky and Stalin in late September - early October 1918 when the latter refused to accept former imperial general Pavel Sytin, who had been appointed by Trotsky to command the Southern Front. As a result, Stalin was recalled from the South Front. Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov tried to get Trotsky and Stalin to mend fences, but their meeting was unsuccessful.

1919

Throughout late 1918 and early 1919, Trotsky had to fend off a number of attacks on his leadership of the Red Army, including veiled accusations in newspaper articles inspired by Stalin and a direct attack by the Military Opposition at the VIIIth Party Congress in March 1919. On the surface, he weathered all of them successfully and was elected one of only five full members of the first Politburo after the Congress. However, as he later wrote [18]:

It is no wonder that my military work created so many enemies for me. I did not look to the side, I elbowed away those who interfered with military success, or in the haste of the work trod on the toes of the unheeding and was too busy even to apologize. Some people remember such things. The dissatisfied and those whose feelings had been hurt found their way to Stalin or Zinoviev, for these two also nourished hurts.

It was not until the summer of 1919 that the dissatisfied had an opportunity to mount a serious challenge to Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army.

By mid-1919, the Red Army had successfully defeated the White Army's spring offensive in the East and was about to cross the Urals mountains and enter Siberia in pursuit of Admiral Alexander Kolchak's forces. However, at the same time the situation in the South, where General Anton Denikin's White Russian forces were advancing, was deteriorating rapidly.

On June 6 commander-in-chief Vatsetis ordered the Eastern Front to stop the offensive so that he could use its forces in the South. The leadership of the Eastern Front, including its commander Sergei Kamenev (a colonel in the imperial army, not to be confused with the Politburo member Lev Kamenev), and Eastern Front Revolutionary Military Council members Ivar Smilga, Mikhail Lashevich and Sergei Gusev vigorously protested and wanted to keep emphasis on the Eastern Front.

They insisted that it was vital to capture Siberia before the onset of winter and that, once Kolchak's forces were broken, it would be possible to free up many more divisions for the Southern Front. Trotsky, who had had conflicts with the leadership of the Eastern Front earlier, including a temporary removal of Kamenev in May 1919, supported Vatsetis.

The conflict came to a head at the July 3-4 Central Committee meeting. After a heated exchange the majority supported Kamenev and Smilga against Vatsetis and Trotsky. Not only was Trotsky's plan rejected, but he was subjected to a barrage of criticism for various alleged shortcomings in his leadership style, much of it of a personal nature. Stalin used this opportunity to try to pressure Lenin to dismiss Trotsky from his post. However, when, on July 5, Trotsky offered his resignation, the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee unanimously rejected it.

Nevertheless, a number of significant changes to the leadership of the Red Army were made after July 4. Trotsky was temporarily sent to the Southern Front, while the work in Moscow was informally coordinated by Smilga.

Most members of the bloated Revolutionary Military Council who were not involved in its day to day operations, were relieved of their duties on July 8 while new members including Smilga were added. The same day, while Trotsky was already in the South, Vatsetis was suddenly arrested by the Cheka on suspicion of involvement in an anti-Soviet plot and replaced by Sergei Kamenev.

After a few weeks in the South, Trotsky returned to Moscow and resumed control of the Red Army. A year later, after Smilga's (and Tukhachevsky's) famous defeat during the Miracle at the Vistula, Trotsky refused to use this opportunity to pay Smilga back, which earned him Smilga's friendship and subsequent support during the intra-Party battles of the 1920s.

In the meantime, by October 1919 the Soviet government found itself in the worst crisis of the Civil War, with Denikin's troops approaching Tula and Moscow from the South and General Nikolay Yudenich's troops approaching Petrograd from the West. Lenin decided that, since it was more important to defend Moscow than Petrograd, the latter would have to be abandoned.

Trotsky argued that Petrograd needed to be defended, at least in part to prevent Estonia and Finland from intervening. In a rare reversal, Trotsky was supported by Stalin and Zinoviev and prevailed against Lenin in the Central Committee.

He immediately went to Petrograd, whose leadership headed by Zinoviev he found demoralized, and organized its defense, sometimes personally stopping fleeing soldiers. By October 22 the Red Army was on the offensive and in early November Yudenich's troops were driven back to Estonia, where they were disarmed and interned. Trotsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his actions in Petrograd.

1920

With the defeat of Denikin and Yudenich in late 1919, the Soviet government's emphasis shifted to economic work and Trotsky spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals region trying to get its economy going again. Based on his experiences there, he proposed abandoning the policies of War Communism, which included confiscating grain from peasants, and partially restoring the grain market.

Lenin, however, was still committed to the system of War Communism at the time and the proposal was rejected. Instead, Trotsky was put in charge of the country's railroads (while retaining overall control of the Red Army), which he tried to militarize in the spirit of War Communism.

It wasn't until the spring of 1921 that economic collapse and uprisings would force Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to abandon War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy.

In the meantime, in early 1920 Soviet-Polish tensions escalated to the point where they eventually led to the Polish-Soviet War. In the run-up to the war and during the hostilities, Trotsky argued that the Red Army was exhausted and that the Soviet government should sign a peace treaty with Poland as soon as possible.

He also didn't believe that the Red Army would find much support in Poland proper. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, however, thought that the Red Army's successes in the Russian Civil War and against the Poles meant that, as Lenin said later:

The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.

However, the Red Army offensive was stopped and turned back during the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, in part because of Stalin's failure to obey Trotsky's orders in the run-up to the decisive engagements. Back in Moscow, Trotsky again argued in favor of signing a peace treaty and this time was able to prevail.

The Trade Union Debate (1920-1921)

In late 1920, after the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War and in the period leading up to the Eighth and Ninth Congress of Soviets, the Communist Party found itself engaged in a heated and increasingly acrimonious discussion over the role of trade unions in the Soviet state.

The discussion split the Party into numerous factions, with Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin each having their "platforms" (factions), Bukharin eventually merging his faction with Trotsky's. Smaller, more radical factions like the Workers' Opposition (headed by Alexander Shlyapnikov) and the Group of Democratic Centralism were particularly active.

Trotsky's position in this crucial debate was formed while he was heading a special commission on the Soviet transportation system, Tsektran. His appointment as head of this committee was made in order to rebuild a railroad system that lay in ruins after the Civil War. Being the Commisar of War and a revolutionary military leader, he felt there was a need to create a militarized "production atmosphere" by incorporating the trade unions directly into the State apparatus.

His unyielding stance that in a worker's state the workers should have nothing to fear from the state, and that the State should have full control over the trade unions lead him to argue in the Ninth Party Congress for, "such a regime under which each worker feels himself to be a soldier of labor who cannot freely dispose of himself; if he is ordered transferred, he must execute that order; if he does not do so, he will be a deserter who should be punished. Who will execute this The trade union. It will create a new regime. That is the militarization of the working class."

Lenin sharply critiqued Trotsky and accused him of "bureaucratically nagging the trade unions" and of staging "factional attacks." His view did not focus on State control as much as the concern that a new relationship was needed between the State and the rank-and-file workers.

He said, "Introduction of genuine labor discipline is conceived only if the whole mass of participants in productions take a conscious part in the fulfillment of these tasks. This cannot be achieved by bureaucratic methods and orders from above."

This was a debate that Lenin thought the Party could ill afford. His frustration with Trotsky was capitalized on by Stalin and Zinoviev, who used their support for Lenin's position to improve their standing within the Bolshevik leadership at Trotsky's expense.

Disagreements were threatening to get out of hand and many Bolsheviks, including Lenin, feared that the Party would splinter. The Central Committee was split almost evenly between Lenin's and Trotsky's supporters, with all three Secretaries of the Central Committee (Krestinky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Leonid Serebryakov) supporting Trotsky.

At a meeting of his faction at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, Lenin said [25]:

I have been accused: "You are a son of a bitch for letting the discussion get out of hand". Well, try to stop Trotsky. How many divisions does one have to send against him [...]

We will come to terms with Trotsky. [...]

Trotsky wants to resign. Over the past three years I have had lots of resignations in my pockets. And I have let some of them just lie there in store. But Trotsky is a temperamental man with military experience. He is in love with the organization, but as for politics, he hasn't got a clue.

At the Congress, Lenin's faction won a decisive victory and a number of Trotsky's supporters (including all three secretaries of the Central Committee) lost their leadership positions. Zinoviev, who had supported Lenin, became a full member of the Politburo while Krestinsky lost his Politburo seat.

Krestinsky's place in the secretariat was taken by Vyacheslav Molotov, later Stalin's right hand man and Trotsky's enemy. The Congress also adopted a secret resolution on "Party unity", which banned factions within the Party except during pre-Congress discussions. The resolution was later published and used by Stalin against Trotsky and other opponents.

At the end of the Tenth Party Congress, Trotsky had to rush to Petrograd to organize and direct the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion, the last major revolt against Bolshevik rule.

Libertarian socialist Emma Goldman has criticized Trotsky for his actions as Commissar for War and his role in the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion, and also arguing that he ordered unjustified incarcerations and executions of political opponents such as anarchists, which, in Goldman's view, makes Trotsky's allegiance to socialism and communism highly questionable. Trotsky, however, frequently argued for revolutionary defensism, which states that revolutionists have a right to protect a revolution from counterrevolutionary violence.

Fall from power (1922-1928)

Lenin's illness (1922-1923)

In late 1921 Lenin's health deteriorated and his periods of absence from Moscow became longer and longer, eventually leading to three strokes between May 26, 1922 and March 10, 1923, which resulted in paralysis, loss of speech and finally death on January 21, 1924.

With Lenin increasingly sidelined throughout 1922, Stalin (elevated to the newly created position of the Central Committee General Secretary earlier in the year), Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev formed a troika (triumvirate) to ensure that Trotsky, publicly the number two man in the country at the time and Lenin's heir presumptive, would not succeed Lenin.

The rest of the recently expanded Politburo (Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Bukharin) was at first uncommitted, but eventually joined the troika. Stalin's power of patronage [28] in his capacity as General Secretary clearly played a role, but Trotsky and his supporters later concluded that a deeper, more fundamental reason was the process of slow bureaucratization of the Soviet regime once the extreme trials and tribulations of the Civil War were over: much of the Bolshevik elite wanted 'normalcy' while Trotsky was, personally and politically, a personification of a more turbulent revolutionary period that they would much rather leave behind.

Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, evidence suggests that at first the troika nominated Trotsky to head second rate government departments (e.g. Gokhran, the State Depository for Valuables [29]) and then, when Trotsky predictably refused, they tried to use it as an excuse to oust him.

When, in mid-July 1922, Kamenev wrote a letter to the recovering Lenin to the effect that "(the Central Committee) is throwing or is ready to throw a good cannon overboard", Lenin was shocked and responded [30]:

Throwing Trotsky overboard - surely you are hinting at that, it is impossible to interpret it otherwise - is the height of stupidity. If you do not consider me already hopelessly foolish, how can you think of that

From that moment until his final stroke, Lenin spent much of his time trying to devise a way to prevent a split within the Communist Party leadership, which was reflected in Lenin's Testament. As part of this effort, on September 11, 1922 Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his deputy at the Sovnarkom. The Politburo approved the proposal, but Trotsky "categorically refused" [31].

In the fall of 1922, Lenin's relationship with Stalin deteriorated over Stalin's heavy-handed and chauvinistic handling of the issue of merging Soviet republics into one federal state, the USSR. At that point, according to Trotsky's autobiography [32], Lenin offered Trotsky an alliance against Soviet bureaucracy in general and Stalin in particular.

The alliance proved effective on the issue of foreign trade [33], but it was complicated by Lenin's progressing illness. In January 1923 the strained relationship between Lenin and Stalin completely broke down when Stalin rudely insulted Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

At that point Lenin amended his Testament suggesting that Stalin should be replaced as the party's General Secretary, although the thrust of his argument was somewhat weakened by the fact that he also mildly criticized other Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky.

In March 1923, days before the third stroke that put an end to his political career, Lenin prepared a frontal assault on Stalin's "Great-Russian nationalistic campaign" against the Georgian Communist Party and asked Trotsky to deliver the blow at the XIIth Party Congress. With Lenin no longer active, Trotsky did not raise the issue at the Congress.

At the XIIth Party Congress in April 1923, immediately after Lenin's final stroke, the key Central Committee reports on organizational and nationalities questions were delivered by Stalin and not by Trotsky, while Zinoviev delivered the political report of the Central Committee, traditionally Lenin's prerogative.

Stalin's power of appointment had allowed him to gradually replace local Party secretaries with loyal functionaries and thus control most regional delegations at the Congress, which enabled him to pack the Central Committee with his supporters, mostly at the expense of Zinoviev and Kamenev's backers.

At the Congress, Trotsky made a speech about intra-party democracy, among other things, but avoided a direct confrontation with the troika. The delegates, most of whom were unaware of the divisions within the Politburo, gave Trotsky a standing ovation, which couldn't help but upset the troika. The troika was further infuriated by Karl Radek's article Leon Trotsky — Organizer of Victory published in Pravda on March 14, 1923, which seemed to anoint Trotsky as Lenin's successor.

The resolutions adopted by the XIIth Congress called, in general terms, for greater democracy within the Party, but they were vague and remained unimplemented. In an important test of strength in mid-1923, the troika was able to neutralize Trotsky's friend and supporter Christian Rakovsky by removing him from his post as head of the Ukrainian government (Sovnarkom) and sending him to London as Soviet ambassador. When regional Party secretaries in Ukraine protested against Rakovsky's reassignment, they too were reassigned to various posts all over the Soviet Union.

The Left Opposition (1923-1924)

Starting in mid-summer 1923, the Soviet economy ran into significant difficulties, which led to numerous strikes countrywide. Two secret groups within the Communist Party, Workers' Truth and Workers' Group, were uncovered and suppressed by the Soviet secret police. Then, in September-October 1923, the much anticipated Communist revolution in Germany ended in defeat.

On October 8, 1923 Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission which attributed these difficulties to lack of intra-Party democracy. Trotsky wrote:

In the fiercest moment of War Communism, the system of appointment within the party did not have one tenth of the extent that it has now. Appointment of the secretaries of provincial committees is now the rule. That creates for the secretary a position essentially independent of the local organization. [...] The bureaucratization of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions by means of the method of secretarial selection.

There has been created a very broad stratum of party workers, entering into the apparatus of the government of the party, who completely renounce their own party opinion, at least the open expression of it, as though assuming that the secretarial hierarchy is the apparatus which creates party opinion and party decisions. Beneath this stratum, abstaining from their own opinions, there lays the broad mass of the party, before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or a command.

Other senior Communists who had similar concerns sent The Declaration of 46 to the Central Committee on October 15, in which they wrote:

[...] we observe an ever progressing, barely disguised division of the party into a secretarial hierarchy and into "laymen", into professional party functionaries, chosen from above, and the other party masses, who take no part in social life. [...] free discussion within the party has virtually disappeared, party public opinion has been stifled. [...] it is the secretarial hierarchy, the party hierarchy which to an ever greater degree chooses the delegates to the conferences and congresses, which to an ever greater degree are becoming the executive conferences of this hierarchy.

Although the text of these letters remained secret at the time, the two documents had a significant effect on the Party leadership and prompted a partial retreat by the troika and its supporters on the issue of intra-Party democracy, notably in Zinoviev's Pravda article published on November 7.

Throughout November, the troika tried to come up with a compromise formula that would placate, or at least temporarily neutralize, Trotsky and those who supported him. (Their task was made easier by the fact that Trotsky was sick in November and December 1923.) The first draft of the resolution was rejected by Trotsky, which led to the formation of a special group consisting of Stalin, Trotsky and Kamenev, which was charged with drafting a mutually acceptable compromise. On December 5, 1923, the Politburo and the Central Control Commission unanimously adopted the group's final draft as its resolution.

On December 8, Trotsky published an open letter, in which he expounded on the recently adopted resolution's ideas. The troika used his letter as an excuse to launch a campaign against Trotsky, accusing him of factionalism, setting "the youth against the fundamental generation of old revolutionary Bolsheviks" and other sins. Trotsky defended his position in a series of seven letters which were collected as The New Course in January 1924.

The illusion of a "monolithic Bolshevik leadership" was thus shattered and a lively intra-Party discussion ensued, both in local Party organizations and in the pages of Pravda. The discussion lasted most of December and January until the XIIIth Party Conference which was held between January 16 and 18, 1924. Those who were opposed to the line of the Central Committee during the debate were thereafter referred to as members of the Left Opposition.

Since the troika controlled the Party apparatus through Stalin's Secretariat as well as Pravda through its editor Bukharin, it was able to direct the course of the discussion and the process of delegate selection. Although Trotsky's position prevailed within the Red Army and Moscow universities and received about half the votes in the Moscow Party organization, it was defeated elsewhere and the Conference was packed with pro-troika delegates.

In the end, only three delegates voted for Trotsky's position and the Conference denounced "Trotskyism" as a "petty bourgeois deviation". After the Conference, a number of Trotsky's supporters, especially in the Red Army's Political Directorate, were removed from leading positions or reassigned. Nonetheless, Trotsky kept all of his posts and the troika was careful to emphasize that the debate was limited to Trotsky's "mistakes" and that removing Trotsky from the leadership was out of the question. In reality, of course, Trotsky had already been cut off from the decision making process.

Immediately after the end of the Conference, Trotsky left for a Caucasusian resort to recover from his prolonged illness. He was still en route there when he received the news of Lenin's death on January 21, 1924.

He was about to come back when a follow up telegram from Stalin arrived, giving an incorrect date of the scheduled funeral, which would have made it impossible for Trotsky to return in time. Many commentators speculated after the fact that Trotsky's absence from Moscow in the days following Lenin's death contributed to his eventual loss to Stalin, although Trotsky generally discounted the significance of his absence.

After Lenin's death (1924)

There was little overt political disagreement within the Soviet leadership throughout most of 1924. On the surface, Trotsky remained the most prominent and popular Bolshevik leader, although his "mistakes" were often alluded to by troika partisans. Behind the scenes, he was completely cut off from the decision making process. Politburo meetings were pure formalities since all key decisions were made ahead of time by the troika and its supporters.

Trotsky's control over the military was undermined by reassigning his deputy, Ephraim Sklyansky, and appointing Mikhail Frunze, who was being obviously groomed to take Trotsky's place, in his stead.

At the XIIIth Party Congress in May, Trotsky delivered a conciliatory speech:

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right.... We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying, "My country, right or wrong," whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my country. We have much better historical justification in saying whether it is right or wrong in certain individual concrete cases, it is my party.... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.

The attempt at reconciliation, however, didn't stop troika supporters from taking potshots at him.

In the meantime, the Left Opposition, which had coagulated somewhat unexpectedly in late 1923 and lacked a definite platform aside from general dissatisfaction with the intra-Party "regime", began to crystallize. It lost some less dedicated members to the harassment by the troika, but it also began formulating a program. Economically, the Left Opposition and its theoretician Yevgeny Preobrazhensky came out against further development of capitalist elements in the Soviet economy and in favor of faster industrialization of the economy.

That put them on a collision course with Bukharin and Rykov, the "Right" group within the Party, who supported troika at the time. On the question of world revolution, Trotsky and Karl Radek saw a period of stability in Europe while Stalin and Zinoviev confidently predicted an "acceleration" of revolution in Western Europe in 1924.

On the theoretical plane, Trotsky remained committed to the Bolshevik idea that the Soviet Union could not create a true socialist society in the absence of the world revolution, while Stalin gradually came up with a policy of building 'Socialism in One Country'. These ideological divisions provided much of the intellectual basis for the political divide between Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the one hand and Stalin and his allies on the other.

Immediately after the XIIIth Congress (where Kamenev and Zinoviev helped Stalin defuse Lenin's Testament, which belatedly came to the surface), the troika, always an alliance of convenience, started showing signs of cracking up. Stalin began making poorly veiled accusations in Zinoviev's and Kamenev's address.

However, in October 1924, Trotsky published The Lessons of October, an extensive summary of the events of the 1917 revolution. In the article, he described Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something that the two would have preferred left unmentioned. This started a new round of intra-party struggle, which became known as the Literary Discussion, with Zinoviev and Kamenev once again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. Their criticism of Trotsky was concentrated in three areas:

Trotsky's disagreements and conflicts with Lenin and the Bolsheviks prior to 1917

Trotsky's alleged distortion of the events of 1917 in order to emphasize his role and diminish the roles played by other Bolsheviks

Trotsky's harsh treatment of his subordinates and other alleged mistakes during the Russian Civil War

Trotsky was again sick and unable to respond while his opponents mobilized all of their resources to denounce him. They succeeded in damaging his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council on January 6, 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go along and skillfully played the role of a moderate. Trotsky kept his Politburo seat, but was effectively put on probation.

A year in the wilderness (1925)

1925 was a difficult year for Trotsky. After the bruising Literary Discussion and losing his Red Army posts, he was effectively unemployed throughout the winter and spring. In May 1925, he was given three posts: chairman of the Concessions Committee, head of the electro-technical board, and chairman of the scientific-technical board of industry.

Trotsky wrote in My Life that he "was taking a rest from politics" and "naturally plunged into his new line of work up to my ears", but some contemporary accounts paint a picture of a remote and distracted man. Later in the year, Trotsky resigned his two technical positions (claiming Stalin-instigated interference and sabotage) and concentrated on his work in the Concessions Committee.

In one of the few political developments that affected Trotsky in 1925, the circumstances surrounding the controversy around Lenin's Testament were described by American Marxist Max Eastman in his book Since Lenin Died (1925). The Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's account and used party discipline to force Trotsky to write an article denying Eastman's version of the events.

In the meantime, the troika finally broke up. Bukharin and Rykov sided with Stalin while Krupskaya and Soviet Commissar of Finance Grigory Sokolnikov aligned with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The struggle became open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. With only the Leningrad Party organization behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, dubbed The New Opposition, were thoroughly defeated while Trotsky refused to get involved in the fight and didn't speak at the Congress.

United opposition (1926-1927)

During a lull in the intra-party fighting in the spring of 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters in the New Opposition gravitated closer to Trotsky's supporters and the two groups soon formed an alliance, which also incorporated some smaller opposition groups within the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United Opposition.

The United Opposition was repeatedly threatened with sanctions by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party and Trotsky had to agree to tactical retreats, mostly to preserve his alliance with Zinoviev and Kamenev. The opposition remained united against Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, especially on the issue of the Chinese Revolution. The methods used by the Stalinists against the Opposition were becoming more and more extreme.

At the XVth Party Conference in October 1926 Trotsky could barely speak due to interruptions and catcalls and at the end of the Conference he lost his Politburo seat. In 1927 Stalin started using the GPU (Soviet secret police) to infiltrate and discredit the opposition. Rank and file oppositionists were increasingly harassed, sometimes expelled from the Party and even arrested.

Defeat and exile (1927-1928)

In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. When the United Opposition tried to organize independent demonstrations commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1927, the demonstrators were dispersed by force and Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party on November 12.

Their leading supporters, from Kamenev down, were expelled in December 1927 by the XVth Party Congress, which paved the way for mass expulsions of rank and file oppositionists as well as internal exile of opposition leaders in early 1928.

When the XVth Party Congress made Opposition views incompatible with membership in the Communist Party, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters capitulated and renounced their alliance with the Left Opposition. Trotsky and most of his followers, on the other hand, refused to surrender and stayed the course.

Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata (now in Kazakhstan) on January 31, 1928. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929, accompanied by his wife Natalia Sedova and his son Leon Sedov.

After Trotsky's expulsion from the country, exiled Trotskyists began to waver and, between 1929 and 1934, most of the leading members of the Opposition surrendered to Stalin, "admitted their mistakes" and were reinstated in the Communist Party. Christian Rakovsky, who served as an inspiration for Trotsky between 1929 and 1934 while he was in Siberian exile, was the last prominent Trotskyist to capitulate. Almost all of them perished in the Great Purges just a few years later.

Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929. His first station in exile was the Turkish island of Prinkipo (now Büyükada) off the Istanbul coast, where he stayed four years. There were many former White Army officers in Istanbul, which put Trotsky's life in danger, but a number of Trotsky's European supporters volunteered to serve as bodyguards and assured his safety.

In 1933 Trotsky was offered asylum in France by Daladier. He stayed first at Royan, then at Barbizon. He was not allowed to visit Paris. In 1935 it was implied to him that he was no longer welcome in France. After weighing alternatives, he moved to Norway, where he got permission from then Justice minister Trygve Lie to enter the country, Trotsky was a guest of Konrad Knudsen near Oslo.

After two years, allegedly under influence from the Soviet Union, he was put under house arrest. After consultations with Norwegian officials, his transfer to Mexico on a freighter was arranged. Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas welcomed him warmly, even arranging a special train to bring him to Mexico City from the port of Tampico.

In Mexico, he lived at one point at the home of the painter Diego Rivera, and at another at that of Frida Kahlo. He remained a prolific writer in exile, penning several key works, including his History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and The Revolution Betrayed (1936), a critique of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.

Trotsky argued that the Soviet state had become a degenerated workers' state controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy, which would eventually either be overthrown via a political revolution establishing workers' democracy or degenerate to the point where the bureaucracy converts itself into a capitalist class.

While in Mexico, Trotsky also worked closely with James P. Cannon, Joseph Hansen, and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, as well as other supporters. Cannon, a long-time leading member of the American communist movement, had supported Trotsky in the struggle against Stalinism since he first read Trotsky's criticisms of the Soviet Union in 1928. Trotsky's critique of the Stalinist regime, though banned, was distributed to leaders of the Comintern. Among his other supporters was Chen Du Xiu, founder of the Chinese Communist party.

Moscow show trials

In August 1936, the first Moscow show trial of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" was staged in front of an international audience. During the trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 other accused, most of them prominent Old Bolsheviks, confessed to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership.

The court found everybody guilty and sentenced the defendants to death, Trotsky in absentia. The second show trial of Karl Radek, Grigory Sokolnikov, Yuri Pyatakov and 14 others took place in January 1937, with even more alleged conspiracies and crimes linked to Trotsky. In April 1937, an independent "Commission of Inquiry" into the charges made against Trotsky and others at the "Moscow Trials" was held in Coyoacan, with John Dewey as chairman[6]. The findings were published in the book Not Guilty

At first Trotsky was opposed to the idea of establishing parallel Communist Parties or a parallel international Communist organization that would compete with the Third International for fear of splitting the Communist movement. However, Trotsky changed his mind in mid-1933 after the Nazi takeover in Germany and the Comintern's response to it, when he proclaimed that:

An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it. ... In all our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of departure the historical collapse of the official Communist International [44].

In 1938, Trotsky and his supporters founded the Fourth International, which was intended to be a revolutionary and internationalist alternative to the Stalinist Comintern.

The Dies Committee

Towards the end of 1939 Trotsky agreed to go to the United States to appear as a witness before the Dies Committee of the House of Representatives, a forerunner of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Representative Dies, chairman of the committee, demanded the suppression of the American Communist Party. Trotsky intended to use the forum to expose the NKVD's activities against him and his followers.

He made it clear that he also intended to argue against the suppression of the American Communist Party, and to use the committee as a platform for a call to transform the world war into a world revolution. Many of his supporters argued against his appearance, but it came to nothing anyway, as, when made aware of the deposition Trotsky intended to make, the committee refused to hear him, and he was denied a visa to enter the USA. On hearing about it, the Stalinists immediately accused Trotsky of being in the pay of the oil magnates and the FBI.

Trotsky eventually quarreled with Rivera and in 1939 moved into his own residence in Coyoacán, a neighborhood in Mexico City. On May 24, 1940, he survived a raid on his home by Stalinist assassins under the leadership of GPU agent Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich, Mexican Stalinist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Vittorio Vidale. Later, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky was successfully attacked in his home by a Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an ice axe into Trotsky's skull.

The blow was poorly delivered, however, and failed to kill Trotsky instantly, as Mercader had intended. Witnesses stated that Trotsky spat on Mercader and began struggling fiercely with him. Hearing the commotion, Trotsky's bodyguards burst into the room and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky stopped them, shouting, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell." Trotsky died the next day at a local hospital.

Mercader later testified at his trial:

I laid my raincoat on the table in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a terrible blow on the head.

According to Joseph Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Trotsky's house in Coyoacán was preserved in much the same condition as it was on the day of the assassination and is now a museum run by a board of intellectuals, including his grandson Esteban Volkov. The current director of the museum is Dr. Carlos Ramirez Sandoval under whose supervision the museum has improved considerably after years of neglect. Trotsky's grave is located on its grounds.

Trotsky was never formally rehabilitated by the Soviet government, despite the Glasnost-era rehabilitation of most other Old Bolsheviks killed during the Great Purges. Nonetheless, Trotsky was featured on a commemorative postage stamp in 1987 [7].

Contributions to theory

Trotsky considered himself a "Bolshevik-Leninist", arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party. He considered himself an advocate of orthodox Marxism. His politics differed in many respects from those of Stalin or Mao, most importantly in his rejection of the theory of Socialism in One Country and his declaring the need for an international "permanent revolution".

Numerous Fourth Internationalist groups around the world continue to describe themselves as Trotskyist and see themselves as standing in this tradition, although they have different interpretations of the conclusions to be drawn from this. Supporters of the Fourth International echo Trotsky's opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism, advocating political revolution, arguing that socialism cannot sustain itself without democracy.

Permanent Revolution

Permanent Revolution is the theory that the bourgeois democratic tasks in countries with delayed bourgeois democratic development cannot be accomplished except through the establishment of a workers' state, and further, that the creation of a workers' state would inevitably involve inroads against capitalist property. Thus, the accomplishment of bourgeois democratic tasks passes over into proletarian tasks.

Although most closely associated with Leon Trotsky, the call for Permanent Revolution is first found in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in March 1850, in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League:

It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. ... Their battle-cry must be: "The Permanent Revolution."

Trotsky's conception of Permanent Revolution is based on his understanding, drawing on the work of the founder of Russian Marxism Georgy Plekhanov, that in 'backward' countries the tasks of the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution could not be achieved by the bourgeoisie itself.

This conception was first developed by Trotsky in collaboration with Alexander Parvus in late 1904 - 1905. The relevant articles were later collected in Trotsky's books 1905 and in Permanent Revolution, which also contains his essay "Results and Prospects".

Born Ioseb Jughashvili (Russian: Iosif Vissarionovic Džugashvili]), Stalin became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922.

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, he prevailed over Leon Trotsky in a power struggle during the 1920s. In the 1930s Stalin initiated the Great Purge, a campaign of

political repression, persecution, and killings that reached its peak in 1937 [citation needed].

Stalin's rule had long lasting effects on the features that characterized the Soviet state from the era of his rule to its collapse in 1991—though Maoists, anti-revisionists and some others say he was actually the last legitimate socialist leader in the Soviet Union's history. Stalin claimed his policies were based on Marxism-Leninism but they are now often considered to represent a political and economic system called Stalinism.

Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s.

Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in Ukraine (see Holodomor), Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that may have resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably peasants deemed "kulaks."

The Soviet Union under Stalin made a major contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany during WWII (known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War, 1941–45). After the war, Stalin established the USSR as one of the two superpowers in the world, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following his death in 1953.

Stalin's rule - reinforced by a cult of personality - was characterized by state terror, mass deportations and political repression, resulting in the death of millions of Soviet citizens. Stalin fought real and alleged opponents mainly through the security apparatus, such as the NKVD. Many of his victims died in the Gulags and as the result of deportations, while others were executed. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's eventual successor, denounced Stalin's rule and the cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process of "de-Stalinization" which later became part of the Sino-Soviet Split.

Reliable sources about Stalin's youth are few; however those which were left were subject to censorship as was common during Stalin's reign. Some consider the writings of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva to be the most reliable sources, since they were not censored.

Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire to Vissarion Dzhugashvili and Ekaterina Geladze. In 1913, he adopted the name Stalin, which is derived from the Russian phrase for "man of steel". His mother was born a serf. The other three children died young; "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively an only child. His father Vissarion was a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)

Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Joseph's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry.(Hoober 15)

Another of his childhood friends, Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Joseph's father gave him a hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty. Stalin had broken his arm several times over his life. There have been claims that one of Stalin's arms was shorter than the other.

One of the people for whom Ekaterina did laundry and housecleaning was a Gori Jew, David Papismedov. Papismedov gave Joseph, who used to help his mother out, money and books to read, and encouraged him. Decades later, Papismedov came to the Kremlin to learn what had become of little Soso. Stalin surprised his colleagues by not only receiving the elderly man, but happily chatting with him in public places.

In 1888, Joseph's father left to live in Tiflis, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, Soso began his education at the Gori Church School.

When attending school in Gori, Soso was among a very diverse group of students. Iosif and most of his classmates were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian.

Even when speaking in Russian, their Russian teachers mocked Iosif and his classmates because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants.

During his childhood, Iosif was fascinated by stories he read telling of Georgian mountaineers who valiantly fought for Georgian independence. His favorite hero in these stories was a legendary mountain ranger named Koba, which became Stalin's first alias as a revolutionary. He graduated first in his class and at the age of 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox institution which he attended from 1894 and onward.

Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because of the lack of locally available university education. In addition to the small stipend from the scholarship Joseph was paid for singing in the choir.

Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement (to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. As a result, he was expelled from the seminary in 1899. He then worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917.

Stalin adhered to Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. Stalin and Lenin attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London, England in 1907. This congress consolidated the supremacy of Lenin's Bolshevik Party and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Stalin never referred to his stay in London.

In the period after the Revolution of 1905 Stalin led "fighting squads" in bank robberies to raise funds for the Bolshevik Party. His practical experience made him useful to the party, and gained him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912.

His only significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna, Marxism and the National Question.

It presents an orthodox Marxist position on this important debate. This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution (see Lenin's article On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination for comparison).

In 1901, the Georgian clergyman M. Kelendzheridze wrote an educational book on language arts, including one of Stalin’s poems, signed by 'Soselo'. In 1907 the same editor published “A Georgian Chrestomathy, or collection of the best examples of Georgian literature”. In Volume 1, page 43, he included a poem of Stalin’s dedicated to Rafael Eristavi. His poetry can still be seen in the Stalin Museum in Gori.

Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907, only four years after their marriage. At her funeral, Stalin allegedly said that any warm feelings he had had for people died with her, for only she could mend his heart. To him, her life was the only thing that made him happy. They had a son together, Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom Stalin did not get along in later years.

His son finally shot himself because of Stalin's incredible harshness toward him, but survived. After this, Stalin said "He can't even shoot straight". Yakov served in the Red Army and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for a German General, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant is not worth a general"; others credit him with allegedly saying "I have no son," to this offer, and Yakov is said to have died running into an electric fence in the camp where he was being held.

This, however, is the "official report," (though it is not very flattering to Stalin's character) and to this day his cause of death is unknown. Nonetheless, there are many who believe his death was a suicide.

His second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died in 1932; she may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political".

Officially, she died of an illness. With her, he had two children: a son, Vassili, and a daughter, Svetlana.

Vassili rose through the ranks of the Soviet air force, officially dying of alcoholism in 1962; however, this is still in question. He distinguished himself in World War II as a capable airman. Svetlana emigrated to the United States in 1967.

Stalin's mother died in 1937; he did not attend the funeral but instead sent a wreath.

In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. The Soviet dissident writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife, Lida, in 1918 during Stalin's exile in northern Siberia.

In 1912 Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile.

Following the February Revolution, Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown.

In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.

According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the revolution of November 7. Other writers, such as Adam Ulam, have argued that each man in the Central Committee had a specific job to which he was assigned.

The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6 1918:

All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised.

Note: Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book The October Revolution issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949.

Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky, and Bubnov. However, no evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which would, in any case, have been subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by Trotsky.

During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War, Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army at various fronts. Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–1923).

He was also People's Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–1922), a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–23) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917).

See also: Stalin in the Russian Civil War

Campaign against the Left and Right Opposition

On April 3, 1922, Stalin was made general secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. It has been claimed that he initially attempted to decline accepting the post, but was refused. This position was seen to be a minor one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but actually had potential as a power base as it allowed Stalin to fill the party with his allies.

Due to Stalin's popularity within the Bolshevik party he gained plenty of political power. This took the dying Lenin by surprise, and in his last writings he famously called for the removal of the "rude" Stalin. However, this document was voted on as to its adoption by the Party in a Congress - and a unanimous vote to reject the document was taken by all members of the Congress as Lenin was at this time deemed very ill.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution.

In the struggle for leadership one thing was evident; whoever ended up ruling the party had to be considered very loyal to Lenin. Stalin organized Lenin's funeral and made a speech professing undying loyalty to Lenin, in almost religious terms. He undermined Trotsky, who was sick at the time, possibly by misleading him about the date of the funeral. Thus although Trotsky was Lenin’s associate throughout the early days of the Soviet regime, he lost ground to Stalin.

Stalin made great play of the fact that Trotsky had joined the Bolsheviks just before the revolution, and publicized Trotsky's pre-revolutionary disagreements with Lenin. Another event that helped Stalin's rise was the fact that Trotsky came out against publication of Lenin's Testament in which he pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of Stalin and Trotsky and the other main players, and suggested that he be succeeded by a small group of people.

An important feature of Stalin’s rise to power is the way that he manipulated his opponents and played them off against each other. Stalin formed a "troika" of himself, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky. When Trotsky had been eliminated Stalin then joined Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev, emphasising their vote against the insurrection in 1917. Zinoviev and Kamenev then turned to Lenin's widow, Krupskaya; they formed the "United Opposition" in July 1926.

In 1927 during the 15th Party Congress Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and Kamenev lost his seat on the Central Committee. Stalin soon turned against the "Right Opposition", represented by his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and Rykov.

Stalin gained popular appeal from his presentation as a 'man of the people' from the poorer classes. The Russian people were tired from the world war and the civil war, and Stalin's policy of concentrating in building "Socialism in One Country" was seen as an optimistic antidote to war.

Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his opposition. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country.

However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936–38.

Stalin and changes in Soviet society

Industrialization

Main article: Industrialization of the USSR

The Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.

Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With no seed capital, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was also use of the unpaid labor of both common and political prisoners in labor camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects. The Soviet Union also made use of foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While there is general agreement among historians that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of this growth is disputed.

Official Soviet estimates placed it at 13.9%, Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth temporarily was much higher after Stalin's death

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and agricultural production would rise by 200% and 50%, respectively; however, agricultural production actually dropped. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks only made up 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the moderate middle peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. The middle peasants were about 60% of the population).

Therefore those defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.

The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (Pravda, April 3, 1930) — is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines. (Chairman Mao Zedong of China would trigger a similar famine in 1959 to 1961 with his Great Leap Forward).

During the 1932–1933 famine in Ukraine and the Kuban region, now often known in Ukraine as the Holodomor (Ukrainian: ), not only "kulaks" were killed or imprisoned. The controversial Black Book of Communism and other sources document that all grains were taken from areas that did not meet targets, including the next year's seed grain. It also claims that peasants were forced to remain in the starving areas, sales of train tickets were stopped, and the State Political Directorate set up barriers to prevent people from leaving the starving areas.

However, famine also affected various other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. During this same period the Soviet Union was exporting grain. (The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)

Soviet authorities and other historians have argued that tough measures and the rapid collectivization of agriculture were necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians such as Alec Nove, who claim that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than thanks to, its collectivized agriculture.

Science

Main articles: Science and technology in the Soviet Union, Suppressed research in the Soviet Union

Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control, along with art and literature. On the positive side, there was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains, owing to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic — the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences" genetics and cybernetics.

In the late 1940s there were also attempts to suppress special and general relativity, as well as quantum mechanics, on grounds of "idealism." But the chief Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories, they would be unable to create a nuclear bomb.

Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society.

Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."

Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.

Scientific research was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–1939) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their dissident views, not for their research.

Nevertheless, much progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957.

Indeed, many politicians in the United States expressed a fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education. In large, coordinated, and goal-based projects—such as the Soviet atomic bomb project—Stalin's personal support could get rapid results, though often through the utilization of slave labor.

Social services

The Soviet people also benefited from a degree of social liberalization. Females were given an adequate, equal education and women had equal rights in employment, precipitating improving lives for women and families. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which vastly increased the lifespan for the typical Soviet citizen and the quality of life.

Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people universal access to health care and education, effectively creating the first generation free from the fear of typhus, cholera, and malaria. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record-low numbers, increasing life spans by decades.

Soviet women under Stalin were also the first generation of women able to give birth in the safety of a hospital, with access to prenatal care. Education was also an example of an increase in standard of living after economic development. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near-universally literate generation. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract.

Transport links were also improved, as many new railways were built. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovites, received many incentives for their work. They could thus afford to buy the goods that were mass-produced by the rapidly expanding Soviet economy.

With the industrialization and heavy human losses due to World War II and repressions the generation that survived under Stalin saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.

During Stalin's reign the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism".

Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were not only repressed, but often persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam).

A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of former emigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Alexei Tolstoi in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943.

Poet Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested. Her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, had been shot in 1921, and her son, historian Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in a gulag.

The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general and specific developments has been assessed variously. His name, however, was constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; and in several famous cases, his opinion was final.

Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play, The Days of the Turbins, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater.

Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel, Pharaoh, by the Polish writer Boleslaw Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage.

In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the seven skyscrapers of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s.

An amusing anecdote has it that the Moskva Hotel in Moscow was built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off on both of the two proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. In actuality the hotel had been built by two independent teams of architects that had differing visions of how the hotel should look.

Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been levelled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted. During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival, as a patriotic organization: thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time.

The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that remains not fully healed to the present day.

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted.

Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the numerous indigenous cultures that made up the Soviet Union. The politics of the Korenization and forced development of "Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance" was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society.

The attempted unification of cultures in Stalin's later period was very harmful. Political repressions and purges had even more devastating repercussions on the indigenous cultures than on urban ones, since the cultural elite of the indigenous culture was often not very numerous. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

The Great Purgue

Stalin, as head of the Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party, justified as an attempt to expel 'opportunists' and 'counter-revolutionary infiltrators'. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps, to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.

The Purges commenced after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the party in Leningrad. Kirov was very close to Stalin and his assassination sent chills through the Bolshevik party. Stalin, fearing that he might be next, began tightening security, (and in effect to remove those who might have threatened Stalin's leadership) by seeking out alleged spies and counter-revolutionaries.

Several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938.

Most notably in the case of alleged Nazi collaborator Tukhachevsky, many military leaders were convicted of treason. The shakeup in command may have cost the Soviet Union dearly during the German invasion of 22 June 1941, and its aftermath.

The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn alleges that Stalin drew inspiration from Lenin's regime with the presence of labor camps and the executions of political opponents that occurred during the Russian Civil War.

Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since 1936, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now remained — Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" () Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov.

No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo.

Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "Enemy of the People," starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova: "Don't you understand They are arresting people for nothing now" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD.

Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.

In parallel with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

Deportations

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.

Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations.

The following ethnic groups were deported completely or partially: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Jews. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia.

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, and reversed most of them, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.

After the failure of Soviet and Franco-British talks on a mutual defense pact in Moscow, Stalin began to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany. In his speech on August 19, 1939, Stalin prepared his comrades for the great turn in Soviet policy, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany.

According to a controversial Russian author living in the UK, Viktor Suvorov, Stalin expressed in the speech an expectation that the war would be the best opportunity to weaken both the Western nations and Nazi Germany, and make Germany suitable for "Sovietization". Whether this speech was ever delivered to the public and what its content was is still debated. (see Stalin's speech on August 19, 1939 and Igor Bunich).

Officially a non-aggression treaty only, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had a "secret" annex according to which Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence.

The USSR was promised an eastern part of Poland, primarily populated with Ukrainians and Belorussians in case of its dissolution, as long as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Another clause of the treaty was that Bessarabia, then part of Romania, was to be joined to the Moldovan ASSR, and become the Moldovan SSR under control of Moscow.

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland started World War II. Hence, Stalin decided to intervene, and on September 17 the Red Army entered eastern Poland and the Baltic states and annexed these territories.

In November 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border provoking war. The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army were prepared for, and the Soviets sustained high casualties. The Soviets prevailed in March, 1940, but the problems of the Soviet army had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany.

On March 5, 1940, the Soviet leadership approved an order of execution for more than 25,700 Polish "nationalist, educators and counterrevolutionary" activists in the parts of the Ukraine and Belarus republics that had been annexed from Poland. This event has become known as the Katyn Massacre.

In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Although expecting war with Germany, Stalin may not have expected an invasion to come so soon — and the Soviet Union was relatively unprepared for this invasion. An alternative theory suggested by Viktor Suvorov claims that Stalin had made aggressive preparations from the late 1930s on and was about to invade Germany in summer 1941.

Thus, he believes Hitler only managed to forestall Stalin and the German invasion was in essence a pre-emptive strike. This theory was supported by Igor Bunich, Mikhail Meltyukhov (see Stalin's Missed Chance) and Edvard Radzinsky (see Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives). Most Western historians reject this thesis, though.

Until the last moment, Stalin had sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might provoke German attack, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces.

Even after the attack commenced. A myth is that Stalin appeared unwilling to accept the fact and, according to some historians, was too stunned to react appropriately for a number of days. And this myth is dispelled by people who have looked into the Soviet Archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both Richard Overy and Simon Sebag Montefiore have showed that he held at least 8 major meetings the same day as the invasion. Stalin ignored much intelligence warning of a German attack.

In the diary of General Fedor von Boch, it is also mentioned that the Abwehr fully expected a Soviet attack against German forces in Poland no later than 1942. Such speculations are difficult to substantiate, however, as information on the Soviet Army from 1939 to 1941 remains classified, but it is known that the Soviets had received some warnings of the German invasion through their foreign intelligence agents, such as Richard Sorge.

The Germans initially made huge advances, capturing and killing millions of Soviet troops. Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks of war, and early indications evidenced their prescience.

The Soviet Red Army put up fierce resistance during the war's early stages, but was often ineffective against the better-equipped, well-trained and experienced German forces and also due to an ineffective defense doctrine. The invaders were eventually driven back in December 1941 near Moscow. Stalin then worked with independent-minded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov to orchestrate the decisive German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Stalin met in several conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in Moscow, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam to plan military strategy (Truman taking the place of the deceased Roosevelt).

In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted:

"Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated."

His shortcomings as strategist are frequently noted regarding massive Soviet loss of life and early Soviet defeats. An example of it is the summer offensive of 1942, which led to even more losses by the Red Army and recapture of initiative by the Germans. Stalin eventually recognized his lack of know-how and relied on his professional generals to conduct the war.

Yet Stalin did rapidly move Soviet industrial production east of the Volga River, far from Luftwaffe-reach, to sustain the Red Army's war machine with astonishing success. Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy and responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and unrevolutionary, nationalist appeals to patriotism.

He even appealed to the Russian Orthodox church and images of national Russian heroes for that matter. On November 6, 1941, Stalin addressed the whole nation of the Soviet Union for the second time (the first time was earlier that year on July 2).

According to Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27, 1942, any commander or commissar of a regiment, battalion or army, who allowed retreat without permission from above was subject to military tribunal. The Soviet soldiers who surrendered were declared traitors; however most of those who survived the brutality of German captivity were mobilized again as they were freed. Between 5% and 10% of them were sent to gulags.

In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused inconceivable starvation and suffering among the civilian population that were left behind.

According to recent figures, of an estimated four millions POW's taken by the Russians, including Germans, Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and others, some 580,000 never returned, presumably victims of privation or the Gulags. Returning Soviet soldiers who had surrendered were viewed with suspicion and some were killed.[17]

The Soviet Union bore the brunt of civilian and military losses in World War II. At least 8,668,400 Red Army personnel and 20 million civilians died. The Nazis considered Slavs to be "sub-human", and many people believe the Nazis killed Slavs as an ethnically targeted genocide. This concept of Slavic inferiority was also the reason why Hitler did not accept into his army many Soviet citizens who wanted to fight the regime until 1944, when the war was lost for Germany.

In the Soviet Union, World War II left a huge deficit of men of the wartime fighting-age generation. To this day the war is remembered very vividly in Russia, Belarus, and other parts of the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, and May 9, "Victory Day", is one of Russia's biggest national holidays.

Domestically, Stalin was presented as a great wartime leader who had led the Soviets to victory against the Nazis. By the end of the 1940s, Russian nationalism increased. For instance, some inventions and scientific discoveries were reclaimed by ethnic Russian researchers.

Examples include the boiler, reclaimed by father and son Cherepanovs; the electric bulb, by Yablochkov and Lodygin; the radio, by Popov; and the airplane, by Mozhaysky. Stalin's internal repressive policies continued (including in newly acquired territories), but never reached the extremes of the 1930s.

Internationally, Stalin viewed Soviet consolidation of power as a necessary step to protect the USSR by surrounding it with countries with friendly governments, to act as a cordon sanitaire (buffer) against possible invaders (while the West sought a similar buffer against communism).

He had hoped that American withdrawal and demobilization would lead to increased communist influence, especially in Europe. Each side might view the other's defensive actions as destabilizing provocations and these security dilemmas frayed relations between the Soviet Union and its former World War II western allies and led to a prolonged period of tension and distrust between East and West known as the Cold War (see also Iron curtain).

The Red Army ended World War II occupying much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries:

In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war and then also occupied Korea above the 38th parallel north. Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China, though receptive to minimal Soviet support, defeated the pro-Western and heavily American-assisted Chinese Nationalist Party in the Chinese Civil War.

The Communists controlled mainland China while the Nationalists held a rump state on the island of Formosa (a.k.a. Taiwan). The Soviet Union soon after recognized Mao's communist People's Republic of China, which it regarded as a new ally.

Diplomatic relations reached a high point with the signing of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Both communist states provided military support to a new communist state in North Korea, which invaded U.S.-allied South Korea in 1950 to start the Korean War.

In Europe, there were Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Hungary and Poland were under practical military occupation. From 1946-1948 communist governments were imposed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and home-grown communist dictatorships rose to power in Yugoslavia and Albania.

These nations became known as the "Communist Bloc." Britain and the United States supported the anti-communists in the Greek Civil War and suspected the Soviets of supporting the Greek communists although Stalin ended his support while his then ally, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito (Tito), continued his support of the Greek communists. Albania remained an ally of the Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948. Greece, Italy and France were under the strong influence of local communist parties, which were at the very least friendly towards Moscow.

Both Superpowers viewed Germany as key. In retaliation to the Western formation of Trizonia, the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, which was under British, French, and U.S. occupation, to force these powers into surrendering their occupation zones in the city.

However, the Berlin Blockade failed due to the massive aerial resupply campaign carried out by the Western powers known as the Berlin Airlift. In 1949, Stalin conceded defeat and ended the blockade. After West Germany was formed by the union of the three Western occupation zones, the Soviets declared East Germany a separate country in 1949, ruled by the communists.

Stalin originally supported the creation of Israel in 1948. The USSR was one of the first nations to recognize the new country. Golda Meir came to Moscow as the first Israeli Ambassador to the USSR that year. But he later changed his mind and came out against Israel. Right before his death in 1953 Stalin was planning an anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campaign in the USSR and another blood purge of the government.

In Stalin's last year of life, one of his last major foreign policy initiatives was the 1952 Stalin Note for German reunification and Superpower disengagement from Central Europe, but Britain, France, and the United States viewed this with suspicion and rejected the offer.

Stalin as theorist

Stalin made few contributions to Communist (or, more specifically, Marxist-Leninist) theory, but the contributions he did make were accepted and upheld by all Soviet political scientists during his rule.

Among Stalin's contributions were his "Marxism and the National Question", a work praised by Lenin; his "Trotskyism or Leninism", which was a factor in the "liquidation of Trotskyism as an ideological trend" within the CPSU(B).

Stalin's Collected Works (in 13 volumes) was released in 1949. A subsequent 16 volume American Edition appeared, in which one volume consisted of the book "History of the CPSU(B) Short Course", although when released in 1938 this book was credited to a commission of the Central Committee.

In 1936, Stalin announced that the society of the Soviet Union consisted of two non-antagonistic classes: workers and kolkhoz peasantry. These corresponded to the two different forms of property over the means of production that existed in the Soviet Union: state property (for the workers) and collective property (for the peasantry). In addition to these, Stalin distinguished the stratum of intelligentsia. The concept of "non-antagonistic classes" was entirely new to Leninist theory.

Stalin and his supporters, in his own time and since, have highlighted the notion that socialism can be built and consolidated in just one country, even one as underdeveloped as Russia was during the 1920s, and indeed that this might be the only means in which it could be built in a hostile environment.

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrenty Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin collapsed in his room, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.

Although his guards thought it odd that he did not rise at his usual time, the next day they were under orders not to disturb him and he was not discovered until that evening. He died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, and was buried on March 9. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. His body was preserved in Lenin's Mausoleum until October 31, 1961, when his body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin walls as part of the process of de-Stalinization.

It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated. The ex-Communist exile Avtorkhanov argued this point as early as 1975. The political memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claimed that Beria had boasted to Molotov that he poisoned Stalin: "I took him out."

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him", and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat.

In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that Stalin ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and so predisposes the victim to hemorrhagic stroke (cerebral hemorrhage). Since it is flavorless, warfarin is a plausible weapon of murder. The facts surrounding Stalin's death, however, will probably never be known with certainty.

His demise arrived at a convenient time for Beria and others, who feared being swept away in yet another purge. It is believed that Stalin felt Beria's power was too great and threatened his own. Whether or not Beria or another usurper was directly responsible for his death, it is true that the politburo did not summon medical attention for Stalin for more than a day after he was found.

Stalin created a cult of personality in the Soviet Union around both himself and Lenin. The embalming of the Soviet founder in Lenin's Mausoleum was performed over the objection of Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Stalin became the focus of massive adoration and even worship.

Numerous towns, villages and cities were renamed after the Soviet leader (see List of places named after Stalin) and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He accepted grandiloquent titles (e.g. "Coryphaeus of Science," "Father of Nations," "Brilliant Genius of Humanity," "Great Architect of Communism," "Gardener of Human Happiness," and others), and helped rewrite Soviet history to provide himself a more significant role in the revolution. At the same time, according to Khrushchev, he insisted that he be remembered for "the extraordinary modesty characteristic of truly great people."

Many statues and monuments were erected to glorify Stalin but all of them distorted Stalin's true build. Going by these monuments and statues it would be easy to assume that Stalin was a tall and well built man not unlike Tsar Alexander III. This was not the case however and at merely 5'2" Stalin was almost certainly the least physically dominating ruler that Russia has ever seen. This physical "hindrance" was hidden in all portraits and statues to avoid any image of weakness that could harm his cult of personality.

Trotsky criticized the cult of personality built around Stalin as being against the values of socialism and Bolshevism, in that it exalted the individual above the party and class and it disallowed criticism of Stalin. The personality cult reached new levels during the Great Patriotic War, with Stalin's name even being included in the new Soviet national anthem.

Stalin became the focus of a body of literature encompassing poetry as well as music, paintings and film. Artists and writers vied with each other in fawning devotion, crediting Stalin with almost god-like qualities, and suggesting he single-handedly won the Second World War.

It is debatable as to how much Stalin relished the cult surrounding him. The Finnish communist Tuominen records a sarcastic toast proposed by Stalin at a New Year Party in 1935:

Comrades! I want to propose a toast to our patriarch, life and sun, liberator of nations, architect of socialism (he rattled off all the appellations applied to him in those days), Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and I hope this is the first and last speech made to that genius this evening.

In recent years, support of Stalin has resurged. Millions of Russians, exasperated with the downfall of the economy and political instability after the breakup of the Soviet Union, want Stalin back. A recent controversial poll revealed that over thirty-five percent of Russians would vote for Stalin if he were still alive. This is seen by some as a return of Stalin's cult.

Recently a 400 m² Stalin memorial has been inaugurated in Krasnoyarsk, with a statue exactly the size of the so-called Leader of the People in the middle. The memorial had been closed from 1961 up to this day. (Interfax, April 19, 2006)

Supporters argue that under Stalin's rule the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural nation to a global superpower. The USSR's industrialisation was successful in that the country was able to defend against and eventually defeat the Axis invasion in World War II, though at an enormous cost of human lives.

However, historian Robert Conquest and other Westerners claim that the USSR was bound for industrialization, and that its speed along this course was not necessarily improved by Bolshevik influence.

It has also been argued that Stalin was partially responsible for the initial military disasters and enormous human causalities during WWII, because Stalin eliminated many military officers during the purges, and especially the most senior ones, and rejected the massive amounts of intelligence warning of the German attack.

While Stalin's social and economic policies laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a superpower, the harshness with which he conducted Soviet affairs was subsequently repudiated by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, notably in the denunciation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956.

In his "Secret Speech", On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his cult of personality, and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality".

However, his immediate successors continued to follow the basic principles of Stalin's rule -- the political monopoly of the Communist Party presiding over a command economy and a security service able to suppress dissent. The large-scale purges of Stalin's era were never repeated, but the political repression continued.

Other names

His first name is also transliterated as Iosif. His original surname, (Jughashvili), is also transliterated as Jugashvili. The Russian transliteration is , which is in turn transliterated into English as Dzhugashvili and Djugashvili; – – shvili is a Georgian suffix meaning "child" or "son".

There are several etymologies of the (jugha) root. In one version, it is the Ossetian for "rubbish"; the surname Jugayev is common among Ossetians, and before the revolution the names in South Ossetia were traditionally written with the Georgian suffix, especially among Christianized Ossetians. In a second version, the name derives from the village of Jugaani in Kakhetia, eastern Georgia.

An article in the newspaper Pravda in 1988 claimed that the word derives from the Old Georgian for "steel" which might be the reason for his adoption of the name Stalin. (Stalin) is derived from combining the Russian (stal), "steel", with the possessive suffix – (–in), a formula used by many other Bolsheviks, including Lenin.

It has also been said that, originally, "Stalin" was a conspiratorial nickname which stuck with him.

Like other Bolsheviks, he became commonly known by one of his revolutionary noms de guerre, of which Stalin was only the most prominent. He was also known as Koba (after a Georgian folk hero, a Robin Hood-like brigand); and he is reported to have used at least a dozen other names for the purpose of secret communications. Most of them remain unknown.

Directly following World War II, as the Soviets were negotiating with the Allies, Stalin often sent directions to Molotov as Druzhkov. Among his other nicknames and aliases were Ivanovich, Soso or Sosso (mainly his boyhood name), David, Nizharadze or Nijeradze, and Chizhikov.

Stalin was nicknamed "Uncle Joe" by the Western media. When told of this nickname by Franklin D. Roosevelt, he almost walked out of the Yalta Conference.

Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to social control.

As an economic system, socialism is usually associated with state or collective ownership of the means of production. This control may be either directly exercised

through popular collectives, or it may be indirectly exercised on behalf of the people by the state.

The modern socialist movement had its origins largely in the working class movement of the late-19th century, although certain elements of what is typically thought of as socialism long predate the rise of the workers movement (see: Thomas More's Utopia). In this period, the term "socialism" was first used in connection with European social critics who condemned capitalism and private property. For Karl Marx, who helped establish and define the modern socialist movement, socialism implied the abolition of markets, capital, and of labor as a commodity.

It is difficult to make generalizations about the diverse array of doctrines and movements that have been referred to as "socialist", because socialists have differed in their vision of socialism as a system of economic organization practically from the time of it's inception.

The various adherents of contemporary socialist movements do not necessarily agree on a singular common doctrine or program. As a result, the original socialist movement has split into different and sometimes opposing branches.

Perhaps the most notable divide exists between moderate socialists and communists. Some socialists have championed the complete nationalization of the means of production, or decentralized ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers councils.

Stalinists insisted on the creation of Soviet-style command economies under strong central state direction, or a centrally planned economy. Some branches include aspects of capitalism, such as market socialism, in which social control of property exists within the framework of market economics and private property. Others have proposed selective nationalization of key industries within the framework of mixed economies.

Marxism refers to the philosophy and social theory on one hand, and to the political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand (namely, parts of the First International during Marx's time, communist parties and later states).

Karl Marx, a 19th century German, Jewish, socialist philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, often in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, drew on G.W.F.

Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French republicanism and socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his most famous work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das Kapital (1867).

He believed that a revolution would be the catalyst in the transformation from capitalism to socialism. Locating itself at the far left, Marxism has been situated largely outside the Western political mainstream since its inception and up to the present day, although it has played a major role in history.

Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes survive in most countries around the world, while the influences of Marx's philosophy may be found in many Marxist and non-Marxist works around the world.

Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a future classless, stateless social organization based upon common ownership of the means of production and the absence of private property.

It can be classified as a branch of the broader socialist movement. Communism also refers to a variety of political movements which claim the establishment of such a social organization as their ultimate goal.

Early forms of human social organization have been described as "primitive communism" by Marxists. However, communism as a political goal generally is a conjectured form of future social organization. There is a considerable variety of views among self-identified

communists, including Maoism, Trotskyism, council communism, Luxemburgism, Christian communism, and various currents of left communism, which are generally the more widespread varieties.

However, various offshoots of the Soviet (what critics call the "Stalinist") and Maoist interpretations of Marxism-Leninism comprise a particular branch of communism that has the distinction of having been the primary driving force for communism in world politics during most of the 20th century. The competing branch of Trotskyism has not had such a distinction.

Karl Marx held that society could not be transformed from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production all at once, but required a state transitional period which Marx described as the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

The communist society Marx envisioned emerging from capitalism has never been implemented, and it remains theoretical; Marx in fact commented very little on what Communist society would actually look like. However, the term "Communism," especially when the word is capitalized, is often used to refer to the political and economic regimes under communist parties which claimed to embody the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the late 19th century, Marxist theories motivated socialist parties across Europe, although their policies later developed along the lines of "reforming" capitalism, rather than overthrowing it.

The exception was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. One branch of this party, commonly known as the Bolsheviks and headed by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in taking control of the country after the toppling of the Provisional Government in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1918, this party changed its name to the Communist Party, thus establishing the contemporary distinction between communism and other trends of socialism.

After the success of the October Revolution in Russia, many socialist parties in other countries became communist parties, signaling varying degrees of allegiance to the new Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

After World War II, Communists consolidated power in Eastern Europe, and in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China, which would later follow its own unique ideological path of communist development. Among the other countries in the Third World that adopted a pro-communist government at some point were Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Mozambique. By the early 1980s almost one-third of the world's population lived in communist states.

Since the early 1970s, the term "Eurocommunism" was used to refer to the policies of communist parties in western Europe, which sought to break with the tradition of uncritical and unconditional support of the Soviet Union. Such parties were politically active and electorally significant in France and Italy.

There is a history of anti-communism in the United States. However, many regions of South America and Central America continue to have strong communist movements of various types.

With the decline of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s and the breakup of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, communism's influence has decreased dramatically in Europe. However, around a quarter of the world's population still lives in Communist states, mostly in the People's Republic of China.

Leninism refers to various related political and economic theories elaborated by Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, and by other theorists who claim to be carrying on Lenin's work.

Leninism builds upon and elaborates the ideas of Marxism, and serves as the philosophical basis for Communism and the pre-Stalin government of the Soviet Union.

The term "Leninism" itself did not exist during Lenin's life. It came into widespread use only after Lenin ended his active participation in the Soviet government due to a series of incapacitating strokes shortly before his death.

Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term at the fifth congress of the Communist International (Comintern).

Leninism has become one of the dominant branches of Marxism since the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Leninism's direct theoretical descendents are Stalinism and Trotskyism, named for Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky, associates of Lenin who became the leaders of the two major political and theoretical factions that developed in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death.

Proponents of each theory (such as Stalin and Trotsky themselves) often deny that the other is a "real" Leninist theory, and claim that their own theory is the only true successor to Lenin's ideas.

The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian.

Originally it was identified as those people who had no wealth other than their sons; the term was initially used in a derogatory sense, until Karl Marx used it as a sociological term to refer to the working class.

The Proletariat in Marxist theory

In the Marxist theory, the proletariat is that class of society which does not have ownership of the means of production. Proletarians are wage-workers, while some refer to those who receive salaries as the salariat. For Marx, however,

wage labor may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se.

Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as occupying conflicting positions, since (for example) factory workers automatically wish wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages (costs) to be as low as possible.

In Marxist theory, the proletariat may also include some elements of the petty bourgeoisie, if they rely primarily but not exclusively on self-employment at an income no different from an ordinary wage or below it, and the lumpenproletariat, who are not in legal employment.

Intermediate positions are possible, where some wage-labor for an employer combines with self-employment. Socialist political parties have often struggled over the question of whether they should seek to organize and represent the entire proletariat, or just the wage-earning working class.

According to Marxism, capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie (the "capitalists", who own and control the means of production). This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who own no means of production of their own, must seek jobs in order to live.

They get hired by a capitalist and work for him, producing some sort of goods or services. These goods or services then become the property of the capitalist, who sells them and gets a certain amount of money in exchange. One part of the wealth produced is used to pay the workers' wages, while the other part (surplus value) is split between the capitalist's private takings (profit), and the money used to pay rent, buy supplies and renew the forces of production.

Thus the capitalist can earn money (profit) from the work of his employees without actually doing any work, or in excess of his own work. Marxists argue that new wealth is created through work; therefore, if someone gains wealth that he did not work for, then someone else works and does not receive the full wealth created by his work. In other words, that "someone else" is exploited. Thus, Marxists argue that capitalists make a profit by exploiting workers.

Marx himself argued that it was the goal of the proletariat itself to displace the capitalist system with socialism, changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which: "..the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Communist Manifesto.

In George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, those not directly associated with The Party (either the "Inner Party" of rulers or the "Outer Party" of bureaucrats) were referred to as "the proles".

The Allied Powers, led by Britain, France, Russia, and later also Italy and the United States, defeated the Central Powers, led by Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

Much of the fighting in World War I took place along the Western Front, within a system of opposing manned trenches and fortifications (separated by a “No man's land”) running from the North Sea to the border of

Switzerland. On the Eastern Front, the vast eastern plains and limited rail network prevented a trench warfare stalemate from developing, although the scale of the conflict was just as large. Hostilities also occurred on and under the sea and — for the first time — from the air. More than nine million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and millions more civilians suffered; more people died of the worldwide influenza outbreak at the end of the war and shortly after than died in the hostilities.

The war caused the disintegration of four empires: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian. Germany lost its overseas empire, and states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created, or recreated, as was the case with Poland.

Ultimately, World War I created a decisive break with the old world order that had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, which was modified by the mid-19th century’s nationalistic revolutions. The results of World War I would be important factors in the development of World War II 21 years later.Causes

Main article: Causes of World War I

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, in Sarajevo. Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a group whose aims included the unification of the South Slavs and independence from Austria-Hungary (see also: the Black Hand).

The assassination in Sarajevo set into motion a series of fast-moving events that escalated into a full-scale war. However, the reasons behind the conflict are multiple and complex. Historians and political scientists have grappled with this question for nearly a century without reaching a consensus.

Sole responsibility of Germany and Austria

This “official” explanation appeared in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, often referred to as the War Guilt Clause. The argument was based on the fact that Austria attacked Serbia on July 29, 1914 and Germany invaded Belgium on August 3. Thus, the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires were the initial attackers and therefore, held responsible for the war.

German academics such as Fritz Fischer, Imanuel Geiss, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen and V.R. Berghahn have all promoted this thesis in the post-World War II period. Fischer contended that Germany wanted to control most of Europe or, at the very least, unite it economically through Germany. However, as he points out, diplomatic efforts to do so had often centered around Anglo-Germanic cooperation, not war.

Arms races

The naval arms race that developed between Britain and Germany was intensified by the 1906 launch of HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary warship that rendered all previous battleships obsolete. (Britain maintained a large lead over Germany in all categories of warship.) Paul Kennedy has pointed out that both nations believed in Alfred Thayer Mahan's thesis that command of the sea was vital to a great nation.

David Stevenson described the armaments race as "a self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness", while David Herrman viewed the shipbuilding rivalry as part of a general movement towards war. However, Niall Ferguson argues that Britain’s ability to maintain an overall advantage signifies that change within this realm was insignificant and therefore not a factor in the movement towards war.Plans, distrust and mobilization

Closely related is the thesis adopted by many political scientists that the war plans of Germany, France and Russia automatically escalated the conflict. Fritz Fischer and his followers have emphasized the inherently aggressive nature of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, which outlined German strategy if at war with both France and Russia.

Conflict on two fronts meant that Germany had to eliminate one opponent quickly before taking on the other, relying on a strict timetable. Germany’s strategy called for a strong right flank on the attack on Belgium, and to conquer and crush French mobilizations to cripple the French army.

After the attack, the German army would then be rushed to the eastern front through railroads and quickly destroy the slowly-mobilizing military of Russia.

However, things did not end up as planned and early mistakes would cost Germany the war. France’s well defended border with Germany meant that an attack through Belgian (and possibly Dutch) territory was a necessity, creating a number of unexpected problems.

In a greater context, France’s own Plan XVII called for an offensive thrust into Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, crippling Germany’s ability to wage war.

Russia’s revised Plan XIX implied a mobilization of its armies against both Austria-Hungary and Germany.

All three created an atmosphere where generals and planning staffs were anxious to take the initiative and seize decisive victories. Elaborate mobilization plans with precise timetables had been prepared. Once the mobilization orders were issued, it was understood by both generals and statesmen alike that there was little or no possibility of turning back or a key advantage would be sacrificed. Furthermore, the problem of communications in 1914 should not be underestimated; all nations still used telegraphy and ambassadors as the main form of communication, which resulted in delays from hours to even days.

Militarism and autocracy

President of the United States Woodrow Wilson and other observers blamed the war on militarism. The idea was that aristocrats and military elites had too much control over Germany, Russia and Austria, and the war was a consequence of their desire for military power and disdain for democracy.

This was a theme that figured prominently in anti-German propaganda, which cast Kaiser Wilhelm II and Prussian military tradition in a negative light. Consequently, supporters of this theory called for the abdication of such rulers, the end of the aristocratic system and the end of militarism—all of which justified American entry into the war once Czarist Russia dropped out of the Allied camp.

Wilson hoped the League of Nations and universal disarmament would secure a lasting peace. He also acknowledged variations of militarism that, in his opinion, existed within the British and French political systems.

Economic imperialism

By 1903 Germany planned a rail link to the Persian Gulf through Ottoman territories that would have expanded German trade with the Middle East. The railroad reflected the peaceful economic rivalries of the era, and was not intended as a prelude to war. However Lenin asserted that the worldwide system of imperialism was responsible for the war.

In this he drew upon the economic theories of Karl Marx and English economist John A. Hobson, who had earlier predicted the outcome of economic imperialism, or unlimited competition for expanding markets, would lead to a global military conflict. [4] This argument proved persuasive in the immediate wake of the war and assisted in the rise of Marxism and Communism. Lenin argued that large banking interests in the various capitalist-imperialist powers had pulled the strings in the various governments and led them into the war.

Nationalism and romanticism

The civilian leaders of the European powers found themselves facing a wave of nationalist zeal that had been building across Europe for years, as memories of war faded or were convoluted into a romantic fantasy that resonated in the public conscience. Frantic diplomatic efforts to mediate the Austrian-Serbian quarrel simply became irrelevant, as public and elite opinion commonly demanded war to uphold national honor.

The patriotic enthusiasm, unity and ultimate euphoria that took hold during the Spirit of 1914 was full of that very optimism regarding the postwar future. Also, the Socialist-Democratic movement had begun to exert pressure on aristocrats throughout Europe, who optimistically hoped that victory would reunite their countries via the consolidation of their domestic hegemony.

However, Lord Kitchener and Erich Ludendorff were among those who predicted that modern, industrialized warfare would be a lengthy excursion. Others, such as Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, were concerned by the potential social consequences of a war.

International bond and financial markets entered severe crises in late July and early August; this reflected worry about the financial consequences of war. Nevertheless, spurred on by propaganda and nationalist fervor, many eagerly joined the ranks in search of adventure.

See also: Recruitment to the British Army during WW I

Culmination of European history

A localized war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia was considered inevitable due to Austria-Hungary’s deteriorating world position and the Pan-Slavic separatist movement in the Balkans. The expansion of such ethnic sentiments coincided with the growth of Serbia and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as the latter had formerly held sway over much of the region.

Imperial Russia also supported the Pan-Slavic movement, motivated by ethnic loyalties, dissatisfaction with Austria (dating back to the Crimean War) and a century-old dream of a warm water port. For Germany, their location in the center of Europe led to the decision for an active defense, culminating in the Schlieffen Plan. July crisis and declarations of war

After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary waited for 3 weeks before deciding on a course of action, because most soldiers were on leave to help gather the harvest.[citation needed]

On July 23, assured by unconditional support of the Germans should war break out, the empire sent the July Ultimatum to Serbia, which demanded, among other things, that Austrian agents would be allowed to take part in the investigation of the murder, and that Serbia would take responsibility for it.

Emboldened by the promise of Russian support, the Serbian government accepted all the terms, except those relating to the participation of the Austrian agents in the inquiry, which it saw as a violation of its sovereignty. Breaking diplomatic relations, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia on July 28 and proceeded to bombard Belgrade on July 29. On July 30, Austria-Hungary and Russia both ordered general mobilization of their armies.

The Germans, having pledged their support to Austria-Hungary, sent Russia an ultimatum on July 31 to stop mobilization within 12 hours. On August 1, with the ultimatum expired, the German ambassador to Russia formally declared war.

On August 2, Germany occupied Luxembourg, as a preliminary step to the invasion of Belgium and the Schlieffen Plan (which was rapidly going awry, as the Germans had not intended to be at war with a mobilized Russia this quickly).

The same day, yet another ultimatum was delivered to Belgium, requesting free passage for the German army on the way to France. The Belgians refused. At the very last moment, the Kaiser Wilhelm II asked Moltke, the German Chief of General Staff, to cancel the invasion of France in the hope this would keep Britain out of the war. Moltke, horrified by the prospect of the utter ruin of the Schlieffen Plan, refused on the grounds that it would be impossible to change the rail schedule—“once settled, it cannot be altered”.

The question of whether such a radical change in Germany’s plans would have indeed been possible was the subject of much dispute. When Moltke’s reply was revealed after the war to General von Staab, Germany’s Chief of the Railway Division, he saw it as an affront to the capabilities of his unit, and proceeded to write a book proving such a change was indeed possible.

On August 3, Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium on August 4. This act violated Belgian neutrality, to which Germany; France; and Britain were all committed. The guarantee prompted Britain, which had been neutral, to declare war on Germany on August 4.

Matthias Erzberger, the Reichstag deputy, later testified that six months after the outbreak of war, Moltke admitted that attacking France first was a mistake and that “the larger part of our army ought first to have been sent to the East to smash the Russian steamroller”.

Opening hostilities

Europe

In Europe, the Central Powers—the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire—suffered from mutual miscommunication and lack of intelligence regarding the intentions of each other’s army. Germany had originally guaranteed to support Austria-Hungary’s invasion of Serbia but practical interpretation of this idea differed. Austro-Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover the northern flank against Russia.

Germany, however, had planned for Austria-Hungary to focus the majority of its troops on Russia while Germany dealt with France on the Western Front. This confusion forced the Austro-Hungarian army to split its troop concentrations. Somewhat more than half of the army went to fight the Russians on their border, and the remainder was allocated to invade and conquer Serbia.Serbian Campaign

Main article: Serbian Campaign (WWI)

The Serbian army fought a defensive battle against the invading Austrian army (called the Battle of Cer) starting on August 12. The Serbians occupied defensive positions on the south side of the Drina and Sava rivers. Over the next two weeks Austrian attacks were thrown back with heavy losses.

This marked the first major Allied victory of the war. Austrian expectations of a swift victory over Serbia were not realized and as a result, Austria had to keep a very sizable force on the Serbian front, which weakened their armies facing Russia.Germany in Belgium and France

Invading Belgium had been a violation of an earlier treaty between Germany and Britain. The German Foreign Minister of the day discounted the betrayal by calling the treaty "a scrap of paper."

After entering Belgian territory, the German army soon encountered resistance at a fortified Liège. Although the army as a whole continued to make rapid progress into France, the German invasion forced Britain’s decision to intervene on the side of the Allies.

As a signatory of the 1839 Treaty of London, Great Britain was committed to the preservation of a neutral and independent Belgium. In British eyes, the ports of Antwerp and Ostend were deemed too important to be possessed by a hostile continental power. Britain sent an army to France (the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF) which advanced into Belgium and slowed the Germans.

Initially, the Germans had great successes in the Battle of the Frontiers (August 14–August 24). However, Russia attacked in East Prussia and diverted German forces intended for the Western Front. Germany defeated Russia in a series of battles collectively known as the Second Battle of Tannenberg (August 17–September 2). This diversion exacerbated problems of insufficient speed of advance from railheads not allowed for by the German General Staff.

Originally, the Schlieffen Plan called for the right flank of the German advance to pass to the west of Paris. However, the capacity of rail and surface roads hampered the German supply train, allowing French and British forces to finally halt the German advance east of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12), thereby denying the Central Powers a quick victory over France and forcing them to fight a war on two fronts.

The German army had fought its way into a good defensive position inside France and had permanently incapacitated 230,000 more French and British troops than it had lost itself in the months of August and September. Yet communications problems and questionable command decisions (such as Moltke transferring troops from the right to protect Sedan) cost Germany the chance for an early victory over France with its very ambitious war plan.

Africa and Pacific

In August 1914, French and British Empire forces invaded the German protectorate of Togoland in West Africa. Shortly thereafter, on August 10, German forces based in South-West Africa attacked South Africa. An Anglo-Indian army was raised, which landed in Basra in November 1914.

New Zealand occupied German Samoa (later Western Samoa) on August 30. On September 11, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force landed on the island of Neu Pommern (later New Britain), which formed part of German New Guinea.

Japan seized Germany’s Micronesian colonies and the German coaling port of Qingdao, in the Chinese Shandong peninsula. Within a few months, the Allied forces had seized all the German territories in the Pacific. However, sporadic and fierce fighting continued in East Africa for the remainder of the war, as German forces recruited native soldiers and evaded capture. Trench warfare begins.

Main article: Western Front (World War I)

Advances in military technology meant that defensive firepower outweighed offensive capabilities, making the war particularly murderous, as tactics had failed to keep up. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances; artillery, now vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground a nightmarish prospect.

Germans began using poison gas in 1915, and soon, both sides were using gas. Neither side ever won a battle with gas, but it made life even more miserable in the trenches and became one of the most feared and longest remembered horrors of the war. Unfortunately, few drastic changes in tactics could have been made even if the military leaders of the time were open to them.

The war saw the invention of tanks as another attempt to break the trench warfare stalemate. They were primarily used by the British and French, though the Germans used captured Allied tanks and a small number of their own design.

After the First Battle of the Marne, both Entente and German forces began a series of outflanking maneuvers to try to force the other to retreat, in the so-called Race to the Sea. Britain and France soon found themselves facing entrenched German positions from Lorraine to Belgium’s Flemish coast.

Britain and France sought to take the offensive, while Germany defended occupied territories. One consequence was that German trenches were much better constructed than those of their enemy: Anglo-French trenches were only intended to be “temporary” before their forces broke through German defenses. Some hoped to break the stalemate by utilizing science and technology.

In April 1915, the Germans used chlorine gas, for the first time, which opened a 6 kilometer (4 mi) wide hole in the Allied lines when French colonial troops retreated before it. This breach was closed by allied soldiers at the Second Battle of Ypres (where over 5,000 mainly Canadian soldiers were gassed to death) and Third Battle of Ypres, where Canadian forces took the village of Passchendale with the help of allied powers.

On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army saw the bloodiest day in its history, suffering 57,470 casualties and 19,240 dead. 800 soldiers of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment went into battle at Beaumont-Hamel in France. The next day, only 68 men answered the regimental roll call.

Like their British counterparts, the battle of Beaumont Hamel remained the bloodiest day in the history of Newfoundland until 1949 when it joined the Canadian Confederation. As a result of their heroism, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment was granted the title Royal by His Majesty King George V and became “The Royal Newfoundland Regiment”.

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next four years, though protracted German action at Verdun throughout 1916, and the Entente’s failure at the Somme, in the summer of 1916, brought the exhausted French army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at frontal assault—with a rigid adherence to unimaginative maneuver—came at a high price for both the British and the French poilu (infantry) and led to widespread mutinies especially during the time of the Nivelle Offensive in the spring of 1917.

News of the Russian Revolution gave a new incentive to socialist sentiments among the troops, with its seemingly inherent promise of peace. Red flags were hoisted, and the Internationale was sung on several occasions. At the height of the mutiny, 30,000 to 40,000 French soldiers participated.

Throughout 1915–17, the British Empire and France suffered far more casualties than Germany. However, while the Germans only mounted a single main offensive at Verdun, each failed attempt by the Entente to break through German lines was met with an equally fierce German counteroffensive to recapture lost positions.

Around 800,000 soldiers from the British Empire were on the Western Front at any one time. 1,000 battalions, each occupying a sector of the line from the North Sea to the Orne River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway.

The front contained over 9,600 kilometers (6,000 mi) of trenches. Each battalion held its sector for about a week before moving back to support lines and then further back to the reserve lines before a week out-of-line, often in the Poperinge or Amiens areas.

In the British-led Battle of Arras during the 1917 campaign, the only military success was the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian forces under Sir Arthur Currie and Julian Byng. It provided the British allies with great military advantage that had a lasting impact on the war and is considered by many historians as the founding myth of Canada.

Southern theatres

Ottoman Empire

Main article: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I

The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in October and November 1914, because of the secret Ottoman-German Alliance, by three Pashas, which was signed in August 1914. It threatened Russia’s Caucasian territories and Britain’s communications with India and the East via the Suez canal. The British and French opened another front in the South with the Gallipoli (1915) and Mesopotamian campaigns.

In Gallipoli, the Turks were successful in repelling the British, French, and Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) and forced their eventual withdrawal and evacuation.

In Mesopotamia, by contrast, after the disastrous Siege of Kut (1915–16), British Empire forces reorganized and captured Baghdad in March 1917. Further to the west in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, initial British failures were overcome when Jerusalem was captured in December 1917, and the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, under Field Marshall Edmund Allenby, broke the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918.

Russian armies generally had the best of it in the Caucasus. Vice-Generalissimo Enver Pasha, supreme commander of the Turkish armed forces, was a very ambitious man with a dream to conquer central Asia. He was not, however, a practical soldier. He launched an offensive with 100,000 troops against the Russians in the Caucasus in December of 1914. Insisting on a frontal attack against Russian positions in the mountains in the heart of winter, Enver lost 86% of his force at the Battle of Sarikamis.

The Russian commander from 1915 to 1916, General Yudenich, with a string of victories over the Ottoman forces, drove the Turks out of much of present-day Armenia.

In 1917, Russian Grand Duke Nicholas assumed senior control over the Caucasus front. Nicholas tried to have a railway built from Russian Georgia to the conquered territories with a view to bringing up more supplies for a new offensive in 1917. But, in March of 1917 (February in the pre-revolutionary Russian calendar), the Czar was overthrown in the February Revolution and the Russian army began to slowly fall apart.

Italian participation

Main article: Italian Campaign (World War I)

Italy had been allied to the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires since 1882. However, Italy had its own designs against Austrian territory in the Trentino, Istria and Dalmatia, and maintained a secret 1902 understanding with France, which effectively nullified its alliance commitments. Italy refused to join Germany and Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the war because their alliance (the "Triple Alliance") was defensive, while Austria-Hungary was the attacker.

The Austrian government started negotiations to obtain Italian neutrality in exchange for French territories (Tunisia), but Italy joined the Entente by signing the London Pact in April and declaring war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915; it declared war against Germany fifteen months later.

In general, the Italians had numerical superiority but were poorly equipped. The Italians went on the offensive to relieve pressure on the other Allied fronts and achieve their territorial goals. In the Trentino front, the Austro-Hungarian defense took advantage of the elevation of their bases in the mostly mountainous terrain, which was not suitable for military offensives.

After an initial Austro-Hungaric strategic retreat to better positions, the front remained mostly unchanged, while Austrian Kaiserschützen and Standschützen and Italian Alpini fought bitter close combat battles during summer and tried to survive during winter in the high mountains. The Austro-Hungarians counterattacked in the Altopiano of Asiago towards Verona and Padua in the spring of 1916 (Strafexpedition), but they also made little progress.

Beginning in 1915, the Italians mounted 11 major offensives along the Isonzo River north of Trieste, known collectively as the Battle of the Isonzo. These eleven battles were repelled by the Austro-Hungarians who had the higher ground. In the summer of 1916, the Italians captured the town of Gorizia.

After this minor victory, the front remained practically stable for over a year, despite several Italian offensives. In the fall of 1917, thanks to the improving situation on the Eastern front, the Austrians received large reinforcements, including German assault troops.

The Central Powers launched a crushing offensive on October 26 that was spearheaded by German troops and supported by the Austrians and Hungarians. The attack resulted in the victory of Caporetto: the Italian army was routed, but after retreating more than 100 km, it was able to reorganise and hold at the Piave River.

In 1918, the Austrians repeatedly failed to break the Italian line in battles such as the battle on the Asiago Plateau and, decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, surrendered to the Entente powers in November.

War in the Balkans

Main article: Serbian Campaign (WWI)

Faced with the Russian threat, Austria-Hungary could spare only one third of its army for Serbia. After suffering tremendous losses, the Austrians briefly captured the Serbian capital, but Serb counterattacks succeeded in expelling the invaders from the country by the end of 1914. For the first 10 months of 1915, Austria used most of its spare armies to fight Italy. However, German and Austria diplomats scored a great coup by convincing Bulgaria to join in a new attack on Serbia.

The conquest of Serbia was finally accomplished in a little more than a month, starting on October 7, when the Austrians and Germans attacked from the north. Four days later the Bulgarians attacked from the east. The Serbian army, attacked from two directions and facing certain defeat, retreated east and south into Albania, stopping only once to make a stand against the Bulgarians, near modern day Gjilan, Kosovo, where they again suffered defeat.

From Albania they went by ship to Greece. In late 1915, a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece to offer assistance and to pressure the Greek government into war against the Central Powers. Unfortunately for the Allies, the pro-Allied Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos was dismissed, by the pro-German King Constantine I, before the allied expeditionary force had even arrived.

The Salonica Front proved entirely immobile, so much so that it was joked that Salonica was the largest German prisoner of war camp. Only at the very end of the war were the Entente powers able to make a breakthrough, which was after most of the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had been removed, leaving the Front held by the Bulgarians alone. This led to Bulgaria’s signing an armistice on September 29, 1918.

Initial actions

While the Western Front had reached stalemate in the trenches, the war continued in the east. The Russian initial plans for war had called for simultaneous invasions of Austrian Galicia and German East Prussia. Although Russia’s initial advance into Galicia was largely successful, they were driven back from East Prussia by the victories of the German generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914.

Russia’s less developed industrial base and ineffective military leadership was instrumental in the events that unfolded. By the spring of 1915, the Russians were driven back in Galicia, and in May, the Central Powers achieved a remarkable breakthrough on Poland’s southern fringes, capturing Warsaw on August 5 and forcing the Russians to withdraw from all of Poland. This became known as the “Great Retreat” by the Russian Empire and the “Great Advance” by Germany.

Russian Revolution

Main article: Russian Revolution of 1917

Dissatisfaction with the Russian government’s conduct of the war grew despite the success of the June 1916 Brusilov offensive in eastern Galicia against the Austrians. The Russian success was undermined by the reluctance of other generals to commit their forces in support of the victorious sector commander.

Allied and Russian forces revived only temporarily with Romania’s entry into the war on August 27: German forces came to the aid of embattled Austrian units in Transylvania, and Bucharest fell to the Central Powers on December 6.

Meanwhile, internal unrest grew in Russia as the Tsar remained out of touch at the front. Empress Alexandra’s increasingly incompetent rule drew protests from all segments of Russian political life and resulted in the murder of Alexandra’s favorite Rasputin by conservative noblemen at the end of 1916.

In March 1917, demonstrations in St. Petersburg culminated in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the appointment of a weak Provisional Government, which shared power with the socialists of the Petrograd Soviet. This division of power led to confusion and chaos both on the front and at home, and the army became increasingly ineffective.

The war, and the government, became more and more unpopular, and the discontent led to a rise in popularity of the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, who promised pulling Russia out of the war and were able to gain power.

The triumph of the Bolsheviks in November was followed in December by an armistice and negotiations with Germany. At first, the Bolsheviks refused to agree to the harsh German terms, but when Germany resumed the war and marched with impunity across Ukraine, the new government acceded to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, which took Russia out of the war and ceded vast territories, including Finland, the Baltic provinces, parts of Poland and Ukraine to the Central Powers.

After the Russians dropped out of the war, the Entente no longer existed. The Allied powers led a small-scale invasion of Russia. The invasion was made with intent primarily to stop Germany from exploiting Russian resources and, to a lesser extent, to support the Whites in the Russian Revolution. Troops landed in Archangel (see North Russia Campaign) and in Vladivostok

Events of 1917 would prove decisive in ending the war, although their effects would not be fully felt until 1918. The British naval blockade of Germany began to have a serious impact on morale and productivity on the German home front. In response, in February 1917, the German General Staff (OHL) was able to convince Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to declare unrestricted submarine warfare, with the goal of starving Britain out of the war.

Tonnage sunk rose above 500,000 tons per month from February until July, peaking at 860,000 tons in April. After July, the reintroduced convoy system was extremely effective in neutralizing the U-boat threat, thanks to American experimentation. Britain was safe from the threat of starvation, and the German war industry remained deprived materially.

The decisive victory of Austria-Hungary and Germany at the Battle of Caporetto led to the Allied decision at the Rapallo Conference to form the Supreme Allied Council at Versailles to coordinate plans and action. Previously British and French armies had operated under separate command systems.

In December, the Central Powers signed an armistice with Russia, thereby releasing troops from the eastern front for use in the west. Ironically, German troop transfers could have been greater if their territorial acquisitions had not been so dramatic. With both German reinforcements and new American troops pouring into the Western Front, the final outcome of the war was to be decided in that front.

The Central Powers knew that they could not win a protracted war now that American forces were certain to be arriving in increasing numbers, but they held high hopes for a rapid offensive in the West using their reinforced troops and new infantry tactics.

Furthermore, the rulers of both the Central Powers and the Allies became more fearful of the threat first raised by Ivan Bloch in 1899, that protracted industrialized war threatened social collapse and revolution throughout Europe. Both sides urgently sought a decisive, rapid victory on the Western Front because they were both fearful of collapse or stalemate.

Entry of the United States

America’s policy of insisting on neutral rights while also trying to broker a peace resulted in tensions with both Berlin and London. Wilson vowed "America was too proud to fight," and instead tried to mediate a compromise settlement; yet no compromise was discovered. Wilson also repeatedly warned that America would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare because it violated America's dignity. Initially, Germany stopped. However, in January the Germans announced they would resume unrestricted submarine warfare.

They vastly underestimated America's response. Compounding matters, Berlin's proposal to Mexico to join the war as German's ally against the U.S. was exposed in February, angering American opinion. (see Zimmermann Telegram). After a German submarine attacked several American merchant ships, sinking three, and the Lusitania, a British passenger boat carrying 150 Americans, Wilson requested that Congress declare war on Germany, which it did on April 6, 1917.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the war resolution 373-50, the U.S. Senate 82-6, with opposition coming mostly from German American districts. Wilson hoped war could be avoided with Austria-Hungary; however, when it kept its loyalty to Germany, the U.S. declared war on Austria-Hungary in December 1917.

Although the American contribution to the war was important, particularly in terms of the threat posed by an increasing U.S. infantry presence in Europe, the United States was never formally a member of the Allies but an “Associated Power”. Significant numbers of fresh American troops arrived in Europe in the summer of 1918, and they started arriving at 10,000 per day.

Germany miscalculated that it would be many more months before large numbers of American troops could be sent to Europe, and that, in any event, the U-boat offensive would prevent their arrival. In fact, not a single American infantryman lost his life due to German U-boat activity.

The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, several destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland and several submarines to the Azores and to Bantry Bay, Ireland to help guard convoys. Several regiments of U.S. Marines were also dispatched to France. However, it would be some time before the United States would be able to contribute significant personnel to the Western and Italian fronts.

The British and French wanted the United States to send its infantry to reinforce their troops already on the battlelines, and not use scarce shipping to bring over supplies. Thus the Americans primarily used British and French artillery, aircraft and tanks. However, General John J. Pershing, American Expeditionary Force (AEF) commander, refused to break up American units to be used as reinforcements for British Empire and French units (though he did allow African American combat units to be used by the French).

Pershing ordered the use of frontal assaults, which had been discarded by that time by British Empire and French commanders because of the large loss of life sustained throughout the war.

German Spring offensive

German General Erich Ludendorff drew up plans (codenamed Operation Michael) for a 1918 general offensive along the Western Front. This Spring Offensive sought to divide the British and French armies in a series of feints and advances. The German leadership hoped to strike a decisive blow against the enemy before significant United States forces could be deployed.

Before the offensive even began, Ludendorff made what may have been a fatal mistake by leaving the elite Eighth Army in Russia and sending over only a small portion of the German forces from the east to aid the offensive in the west.[citation needed]

Operation Michael opened on March 21, 1918, with an attack against British forces near the rail junction at Amiens. Ludendorff’s intention was to split the British and French armies at this point. German forces achieved an unprecedented advance of 60 kilometers (40 mi). For the first time since 1914, maneuvering was achieved on the battlefield.

British and French trenches were defeated using novel infiltration tactics, also called Hutier tactics after General Oskar von Hutier.

Up to this time, attacks had been characterized by long artillery bombardments and continuous-front mass assaults. However, in the Spring Offensive, the German Army used artillery briefly and infiltrated small groups of infantry at weak points, attacking command and logistics areas and surrounding points of serious resistance. These isolated positions were then destroyed by more heavily armed infantry. German success relied greatly on this tactic.

The front line had now moved to within 120 kilometers (75 mi) of Paris. Three super-heavy Krupp railway guns advanced and fired 183 shells on Paris, which caused many Parisians to flee the city.

The initial stages of the offensive were so successful that German Kaiser Wilhelm II declared March 24 a national holiday. Many Germans thought victory was close; however, after heavy fighting, the German offensive was halted. Infiltration tactics had worked very well, but the Germans, lacking tanks or motorized artillery, were unable to consolidate their positions. The British and French learned that if they fell back a few miles, the Germans would be disorganized and vulnerable to counterattack.

American divisions, which Pershing had sought to field as an independent force, were assigned to the depleted French and British Empire commands on March 28. A supreme command of Allied forces was created at the Doullens Conference, in which British Field Marshal Douglas Haig handed control of his forces over to Ferdinand Foch.

Following Operation Michael, Germany launched Operation Georgette to the north against the Channel ports. This was halted by the Allies with less significant territorial gains to Germany. Operations Blücher and Yorck were then conducted by the German Army to the south, broadly towards Paris.

Next, Operation Marne was launched on July 15 as an attempt to encircle Reims, beginning the Second Battle of the Marne. The resulting Allied counterattack marked their first successful offensive of the war. By July 20, the Germans were back at their Kaiserschlacht starting lines, having achieved nothing.

Following this last phase of the ground war in the West, the German Army never again held the initiative. German casualties between March and April 1918 were 270,000, including many of the highly trained stormtroopers. Their best soldiers were gone just as the Americans started arriving.

Meanwhile, Germany was crumbling internally as well. Anti-war marches were a frequent occurrence and morale within the army was at low levels. Industrial output had fallen 53% from 1913.

The Allied counteroffensive, known as the Hundred Days Offensive began on August 8, 1918. The Battle of Amiens developed with III Corps Fourth British Army on the left, the First French Army on the right, and the Canadian and Australian Corps spearheading the offensive in the centre. It involved 414 tanks of the Mark IV and Mark V type, and 120,000 men. They advanced as far as 12 kilometers (7 mi) into German-held territory in just seven hours. Erich Ludendorff referred to this day as “the Black Day of the German army”.

The offensive slowed and lost momentum due to supply problems. British units had encountered problems with all but seven tanks and trucks ran out of fuel. On August 15, General Haig called a