LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Russian Revolution of 1917
built 291 days ago
The Russian Revolution of 1917 began because of economic breakdown, war, and people's discontent of tsar autocracy. The coalition of Bolsheviks was formed. In 1922 the history of Soviet Union began. Soviet Union included 15 Soviet Union Republics. In 1991 the USSR was gone.
Source:
Russian life on the eve of war and revolution was defined by enormous change and uncertainty. Cities and industry were growing rapidly, creating expanded social opportunities but ... great uncertainty. Peasant villagers more and more often migrated between agrarian and industrial work environments and many relocated entirely, creating a growing urban labor force. A middle class of white-collar employees, businessmen, and professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, engineers, etc.) was on the rise. Even nobles had to find new ways to subsist in this changing economy. Contemporaries spoke of new classes forming - proletarians and capitalists, for example - though these were classes also divided along crisscrossing lines of status, gender, age, ethnicity, and belief.
Source:
The Russian Revolution of 1905 began in St. Petersburg on Jan. 22 (Jan. 9, O.S.) when troops fired on a defenseless crowd of workers, who, led by a priest, were marching to the Winter Palace to petition Czar Nicholas II. This "bloody Sunday" was followed in succeeding months by a series of strikes, riots, assassinations, naval mutinies, and peasant outbreaks. These disorders, coupled with the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War (1904—5), which revealed the corruption and incompetence of the czarist regime, forced the government to promise the establishment of a consultative duma, or assembly, elected by limited franchise. Nonetheless, unsatisfied popular demands provoked a general strike, and in a manifesto issued in October the czar granted civil liberties and a representative duma to be elected democratically.
Source:
Among the other factors making for revolution was the mentality of the russian peasantry, a class never integrated into the political structure. Peasants made up 80 percent of Russia's population: and although they took hardly any active part in the conduct of state affairs, in a passive capacity, as an obstacle to change and, at the same time, a permanent threat to the status quo, they were a very unsettling element. It is commonplace to hear that under the old regime the Russian peasant was "oppressed," but it is far from clear just who was oppressing him. On the eve of the Revolution, he enjoyed full civil and legal rights; he ... owned, either outright or communally, nine-tenths of the country's agricultural land and the same proportion of livestock. Poor by Western European or American standards, he was better off than his father, and freer than his grandfather, who more likely than not had been a serf. Cultivating allotments assigned to him by fellow peasants, he certainly enjoyed greater security than tenant farmer of Ireland, Spain or Italy.
Source:
The White Nights of St Petersburg would be excellent supplementary material for anyone studying the Russian Revolution of 1917. But what makes it really special is the picture it gives of St Petersburg in 1917 and the lives of its inhabitants.
Source:
Nicholas Berdyaev observed that the “Russian revolutionaries who were to be inspired by the ideas of Chernyshevsky present an interesting psychological problem. The best of Russian revolutionaries acquiesced during this earthly life in persecution, want, imprisonment, exile, penal servitude, execution, and they had no hope whatever of another life beyond this. The comparison with Christians of that time is almost disadvantageous to the latter; they highly cherished the blessings of this earthly life and counted upon the blessings of heavenly life.”
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Russian Revolution of 1917