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Alexander III Comes to Power
Alexander III succeeded his father, Alexander II, who was assassinated, and halted all reforms in Russia. Like his grandfather Nicholas I, Alexander III clung to the principles of autocracy, a form of government in which he had total power. -
Nicholas II Comes to Power
He continued the tradition of Russian autocracy. To finance the buildup of Russian industries, the government sought foreign investors and raised taxes. -
Russian Marxists
Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Vladimir Lenin rose to command the Bolsheviks, who were radical and supported a small number of committed revolutionaries willing to sacrifice everything for change. He had to flee to Western Europe until he could safely return to Russia -
Bloody Sunday
200,000 workers and their families approached the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They carried a petition asking for better working conditions, more personal freedom, and an elected national legislature. Nicholas II’s generals ordered soldiers
to fire on the crowd, where more than 1,000 were wounded and several hundred were killed. -
World War I
Nicholas II made the fateful decision to
drag Russia into World War I. Russia was unprepared to handle the military and economic costs. Defeat followed defeat and more than 4 million Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner in less than a year. -
The March Revolution
Women textile workers in Petrograd led a citywide strike. In the next
five days, riots flared up over shortages of bread and fuel. Nearly 200,000 workers swarmed the streets shouting, “Down with the autocracy!” and “Down with the war!” At first the soldiers obeyed orders to shoot the rioters but later sided with them. -
Nicolas II Steps Down and the Bolsheviks Gain Power
The local protest exploded into a general uprising—the
March Revolution. It forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate his throne and he was executed. After the Bolsheviks took out the government that existed after the Czars, Lenin ordered that all farmland be distributed among the peasants and gave some of the factories to the workers, while the Bolshevik government signed a truce with Germany to stop all fighting and began peace talks -
Civil War in Russia
The Bolsheviks now faced a new challenge—stamping
out their enemies at home. The White Army was made up of very different groups, including those groups who supported the return to rule by the czar, others who wanted democratic government, and even socialists who opposed Lenin’s style of socialism. The civil war, which lasted three years and caused 14 million Russians to die, left Russia in chaos. -
Lenin Helps the Economy
After a civil war over freedoms and other stuff, Lenin temporarily put aside his plan for a state-controlled economy. Instead, he resorted to a small-scale version of capitalism called the New Economic Policy (NEP). The reforms under the NEP allowed peasants to sell their surplus crops instead of turning them over to the government, while the government kept control of major industries, banks, and means of communication, but it let some small factories, businesses, and farms operate privately. -
Stalin Becomes Dictator
After Lenin suffered a stroke, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky began a race to lead the Communists, which Stalin won. Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin was in total command of the Communist Party. Trotsky, forced into exile in 1929, was no longer a threat and Stalin now stood poised to wield absolute power as a dictator.
