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Russo-Japanese War
In the late 1800s, Russia and Japan competed for control of Korea and Manchuria. The two nations signed a series of agreements over the territories. Russia suffered multiple defeats by Japan, but Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that Russia would win and chose to remain engaged in the war. The consequences transformed the balance of power in East Asia, resulting in a reassessment of Japan's recent entry onto the world stage. It was the first military victory of an Asian power over a European one. -
Reign of Czar Alexander III
In 1881, Alexander III succeeded his father, Alexander II, 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. Anyone who questioned the absolute authority of the czar, worshiped outside the Russian
Orthodox Church, or spoke a language other than Russian was labeled dangerous. -
Reign of Czar Nicholas II
Nicholas II or Nikolai II, known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer in the Russian Orthodox Church, was the last Emperor of Russia, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his forced abdication on 15 March 1917. When Nicholas II became czar in 1894, he continued the tradition of Russian autocracy. Unfortunately, it blinded him to the changing conditions of his times. -
Bloody Sunday
On January 22, 1905, about 200,000 workers and their families
approached the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They carried a petition asking for better working conditions, more personal freedom, and an elected national legislature.
Nicholas II’s generals ordered soldiers to fire on the crowd. More than 1,000 were wounded and several hundred were killed. Russians quickly named the event “Bloody Sunday.” -
Establishment of the Duma
He approved the creation of the Duma—Russia’s first parliament. The first Duma met in May 1906. Its leaders were moderates who wanted Russia to become a constitutional monarchy similar to Britain. But because he was hesitant to share his power, the czar dissolved the Duma after ten weeks. The Tsar dismissed the first duma within 75 days and re-elected second duma within three months. It was dissolved in 1917 during the Russian Revolution. -
Russia's Participation in WWI
Nicholas II made the decision to drag Russia into World War I. Russia was unprepared to handle the military and economic costs. Its weak generals and poorly equipped troops were no match for the German army. The Eastern Front or Eastern Theater of World War I was a theatre of operations that encompassed at its greatest extent the entire frontier between the Russian Empire and Romania on one side and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and the German Empire on the other. -
Abdication of Czar Nicholas III
The local protest exploded into a general uprising—the
March Revolution. It forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate his throne. A year later revolutionaries executed Nicholas and his family. In March 1917, the army garrison at Petrograd joined striking workers in demanding socialist reforms, and Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. Nicholas and his family were first held at the Czarskoye Selo palace, then in the Yekaterinburg palace near Tobolsk. -
Death of Rasputin
In late 1906, Rasputin began acting as a healer for the Tsar and his wife Alexandra's only son Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. At court, he was a divisive figure, seen by some Russians as a mystic, visionary, and prophet, and by others as a religious charlatan. The high point of Rasputin's power was in 1915, when Nicholas II planned the fights in World War 1. In 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by a group of conservative noblemen who opposed his influence over Alexandra and the Tsar. -
Bolshevik Revolution
The Russian Revolution took place in 1917 when the peasants and working class people of Russia revolted against the government of Tsar Nicholas II. They were led by Vladimir Lenin and a group of revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks. The new communist government created the country of the Soviet Union. By the fall of 1917, people in the cities were rallying to the call, “All power to the soviets.” Lenin’s slogan—“Peace, Land, and Bread”—gained widespread appeal. -
Civil War
The Bolsheviks now faced a new challenge—stamping out their enemies at home. Their opponents formed the White Army. The White Army was made up of very different groups. There were 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. Only the desire to
defeat the Bolsheviks united the White Army. The groups barely cooperated with each other. -
Establishment of USSR
During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent three-year Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin dominated the soviet forces, a coalition of workers’ and soldiers’ committees that called for the establishment of a socialist state in the former Russian Empire. In the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the Communist Party. Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state, and agricultural land was divided into state-run collective farms. -
Lenin's Death
Lenin suffered a stroke in 1922. He survived, but the incident set in motion competition for heading up the Communist Party. The government publicly announced Lenin's death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and soviets visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Over the next three days, about a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions. -
Stalin's Rise To Power
In 1912, Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support. -
Leon Trotsky's Exile
Against Stalin’s stated policies, Trotsky called for a continuing world revolution that would inevitably result in the dismantling of the Soviet state. He also criticized the new regime for suppressing democracy in the Communist Party and for failing to develop adequate economic planning. In 1926, he was expelled from the Politburo and in 1927 from the Communist Party. In January 1928, Trotsky began his internal exile in Alma-Ata and the next January was expelled from the Soviet Union outright.