1)4 reasons + 1 of Russian revolution:
a) agrarian issue;
b) working class issue;
c) border lands issue;
d) eliminating autocracy;
e) NEW issue: long World War I, that provoked the crisis;

2) antagonist to private property intentions of masses of Russian population;

1917 Revolution in General

1) Different points of views:
a) a Jewish plot;
b) German espionage;
c) a conspiracy of the secret society of freemasons;

d) a bourgeois-democratic revolution from February till March, then the transitional period from February to October, than Great October Socialist revolution (main soviet point of view);
e) no revolution at all, but military coup d'état;
f) Russian democratic revolution, ended with the overturn realized by Bolsheviks in October 1917 (dominative now)

October Revolution Viewpoints

1) Soviet official point of view socialist revolution, that opened the transitional period from capitalism to socialism in the whole world;
2) it was only democratic revolution of the working class and peasantry, not socialist one (in 1960s);
3) Military coup (active role of the army and Red guard, forced dismissal of the Provisional
government, recognized by the society, including Soviets, as the official power
4) Conspiracy;
5) Anarchic uprising (destroyed the country and pushed it back);
6) Main stream point of view now- it was a stage in Revolutionary process of 1917, which led to the failure of the democratic revolution (there wasn’t any separate October revolution for Russia, it was the victory only for the Bolshevik party, a political overturn)

1) Different points of views:
a) a Jewish plot;
b) German espionage;
c) a conspiracy of the secret society of freemasons;

d) a bourgeois-democratic revolution from February till March, then the transitional period from February to October, than Great October Socialist revolution (main soviet point of view);
e) no revolution at all, but military coup d'état;
f) Russian democratic revolution, ended with the overturn realized by Bolsheviks in October 1917 (dominative now)

II. DUAL POWER: PROVISIONAL
GOVERNMENT AND SOVIETS (IN
TAURIDE PALACE) IN THE CENTER
AND MULTI POWER IN LOCAL
PLACES

1) Provisional government in 1917- 4
consistencies (minority of the Russian society- 1/6 part of population-17% votes; Western path):
a) March-April (Kadets and Octoberists)

b) the First Coalition(several parties)- late May-July; Kadets and Octoberists ally with some SRs to gain mass support)
c) the Second Coalition- late July-August; (majority are socialists and not Kadets and Octoberists)
d) the Third (and final) Coalition- September- October (practically all are Mensheviks and SRs)

War Issue and the Provisional Government:

1st Consituency of Provisional Government (March-April):

War issue: opposed making peace with the Central Powers;;
== France, Britain and since April 1917 the USA pressured Russia to stay in the war (arguments; Russia will be equal in a victorious democratic community of nations + secret treaties );
==P.Milyukov- to ensure Russia’s greatness and potential to build a democracy + the only way to keep society together; so he insisted on a war to victory (stoic endurance).
== However his views made open and provoked massive protest and First Provisional government
to fall.

The Soviets: == support a war of defense (to reject any conquers and lead the war to defend Russia);

War issue: ‘revolutionary defensism”:
==passive defense of the revolution against German army and at the same time the politicians seek a general peace without territorial and financial spoils of war- neither the Allies nor the Central Powers were interested in such a peace ;
==to end this war by surrendering could
lead or to a military coup by right-wing nationalists and generals or bring the occupation of Russia by Germans

Patterns for Russian Society:

1st Constintuency of Provisional Government:

b) law and order, but no real means to provide;
c) establish freedom of speech and the press + other civil liberties: freedom of religious beliefs; + suffrage: general, direct and secret
d) Labor unions were given full freedom to strike;
e) Waiting for Constituent assembly: or constitutional monarchy (as in England) or a republic (as in France);
f) No major changes in land, property rights, and labor legislation;

Soviets:

a) factories, but flooded by soldiers sent by their units;
b) until late summer the larger soviets were dominated
by moderate socialists- Mensheviks and SRs ( Provisional government controlled town Dumas; and Petrograd Soviet- local soviets)
c) Missions:
==to keep an eye on the Provisional Government in defense of lower-class interests;
==it was the bourgeois stage of the revolution; + fear of a counterrevolution from the right if they sought to take power
== Mensheviks soviets should control the revolutionary energies of the masses, protect and advance their class interests;

"Sense of Dual Power"

*The Provisional Government has the responsibility, but no whole power(“power without social base”)
The Petrograd Soviet has power, but no responsibility (“social base, but no power”)

*Political freedom, not limited by any frames, provided stormy unprepared formation of the civil society; all social parts were involved in creating
social organizations : Soviets, fabric commissions, trade unions, leagues, associations, peasant committees; different parties, etc.

*Both the Provisional government and the Soviets acted within the type of a parliamentary republic (though officially Russia was proclaimed republic only September 1,1917)

SUMMER 1917.

Conclusion: Russian empire society was divided over whether to continue a war or deepen the revolution; it was an emotional peak of the nation, calling each other “citizen”
 1) July- all citizens of both sexes aged 21 and over got the right to vote. Russia became the first major country in Europe to grant women the vote;
2) August- patriarchate was restored in Russia (since the beginning of the 18th c.-Peter the Great subordinated Church to the state)

1) Provisional government in 1917- 4
consistencies (minority of the Russian society- 1/6 part of population-17% votes; Western path):
a) March-April (Kadets and Octoberists)

b) the First Coalition(several parties)- late May-July; Kadets and Octoberists ally with some SRs to gain mass support)
c) the Second Coalition- late July-August; (majority are socialists and not Kadets and Octoberists)
d) the Third (and final) Coalition- September- October (practically all are Mensheviks and SRs)

1st Consituency of Provisional Government (March-April):

War issue: opposed making peace with the Central Powers;;
== France, Britain and since April 1917 the USA pressured Russia to stay in the war (arguments; Russia will be equal in a victorious democratic community of nations + secret treaties );
==P.Milyukov- to ensure Russia’s greatness and potential to build a democracy + the only way to keep society together; so he insisted on a war to victory (stoic endurance).
== However his views made open and provoked massive protest and First Provisional government
to fall.

The Soviets: == support a war of defense (to reject any conquers and lead the war to defend Russia);

War issue: ‘revolutionary defensism”:
==passive defense of the revolution against German army and at the same time the politicians seek a general peace without territorial and financial spoils of war- neither the Allies nor the Central Powers were interested in such a peace ;
==to end this war by surrendering could lead or to a military coup by right-wing nationalists and generals or bring the occupation of Russia by Germans

1st Constintuency of Provisional Government:

b) law and order, but no real means to provide;
c) establish freedom of speech and the press + other civil liberties: freedom of religious beliefs; + suffrage: general, direct and secret
d) Labor unions were given full freedom to strike;
e) Waiting for Constituent assembly: or constitutional monarchy (as in England) or a republic (as in France);
f) No major changes in land, property rights, and labor legislation;

Soviets:

a) factories, but flooded by soldiers sent by their units;
b) until late summer the larger soviets were dominated by moderate socialists- Mensheviks and SRs (Provisional government controlled town Dumas; and Petrograd Soviet- local soviets)
c) Missions:
==to keep an eye on the Provisional Government in defense of lower-class interests;
==it was the bourgeois stage of the revolution; + fear of a counterrevolution from the right if they sought to take power
== Mensheviks soviets should control the revolutionary energies of the masses, protect and advance their class interests;

*The Provisional Government has the responsibility, but no whole power(“power without social base”) The Petrograd Soviet has power, but no responsibility (“social base, but no power”)

*Political freedom, not limited by any frames, provided stormy unprepared formation of the civil society; all social parts were involved in creating
social organizations : Soviets, fabric commissions, trade unions, leagues, associations, peasant committees; different parties, etc.

*Both the Provisional government and the Soviets acted within the type of a parliamentary republic (though officially Russia was proclaimed republic only September 1,1917)

SUMMER 1917.

Conclusion: Russian empire society was divided over whether to continue a war or deepen the revolution; it was an emotional peak of the nation, calling each other “citizen”
 1) July- all citizens of both sexes aged 21 and over got the right to vote. Russia became the first major country in Europe to grant women the vote;
2) August- patriarchate was restored in Russia (since the beginning of the 18th c.-Peter the Great subordinated Church to the state)

Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR)- the largest political organization in Russia- occupied the leading position in the Soviets of all levels, especially Peasant Soviets.
a)They shaped peasants interests:”equal land using” without any redemption payments, giving all
land in common property
b) This party was divided in 2: the more radical wing began calling themselves Left SRs, and they joined the Bolshevik assaults on the Provisional government; thus the Left Block was created Bolsheviks and Left SRs)

Moderate Socialists During October-Revolution:

*mistake of the moderate socialists-
they left the soviet congress held in October in indignation, leaving the congress in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

*Bolsheviks preserved the power only by abandoning the democratic elements of socialism and erecting a revolutionary dictatorship.

SOVIETS OCTOBER,25-27, 1917.

1) idea to create an all-socialist coalition of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs);
a) however Bolsheviks made an armed uprising in Petrograd and it provoked the protest:
mistake of the moderate socialists- they left in indignation, leaving the congress in the hands of the Bolsheviks;
b) an all-Bolshevik cabinet headed by Lenin was formed- Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom- the Russian acronym); Lenin was a kind of a prime-minister (commissar); Trotsky- foreign commissar and Stalin- commissar of nationalities
c) Left SRs were brought into the cabinet in December 1917
2) Central executive Committee- elected congress of Soviets- was formed, headed by president, first head of state- energetic Bolshevik, Yakov Sverdlov (1885-1919);
3) Decree on land (SRs program):
the transfer of all private land into the tillers’ hands
4) Decree on peace: (immediate armistice; to sign fair democratic peace without contributions and obtaining new territories, publishing secret treaties, etc.)

SR reaction to The Separate Peace with Germany:

First crisis in the Left Block- March
1918 (Left SRs and Bolsheviks): the Left SRs withdrew from the government and went into active opposition; but they preserved their positions in the Soviets )
6) the treaty was nullified in November with Germany’s defeat in WWI.

IV. Smashing Non-Bolshevik OPPOSITION.

1) 1st Decree-”Press”: all liberal newspapers were closed, including some of SRs; by the end of August 1918 all nonbolshevik papers were closed;
2) key political figures- Kadets- were arrested; Provisional government was working till the middle of November1917;
3) revolutionary tribunals were set up; (no power to issue death sentences)
4)Secret police - Cheka (from the first Russian initials of Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counterrevolution and Sabotage)-operated above the law, headed by F.Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926)
== based only on “revolutionary expedience”

5)Treaty with Germany- 1st political crisis in Left Block (Left SRs and Bolsheviks)- cabinet resignations in 1918 and the gradual disappearance of non-Bolsheviks everywhere in government;
a) the Soviet state becomes one-party dictatorship everywhere: in police, courts, press, economy;
b) 1918-the Bolsheviks took the name Russian Communist Party (a sign of the transition from revolutionary movement to ruling machine;
c) but power lay in the narrow circle of Political Bureau, or Politburo and Secretariat, which handled internal party matters

6) active opposition:
a) anarchists;
b) Kadets (committees to defend Russian Democratic
revolution);
c) Mensheviks demonstrations in Spring 1918
d) Left SRs- 2d crisis- May-June 1918 (after Peace treaty with Germany now + harsh Bolsheviks food policies on peasantry):
*Assassination of German ambassador Mirbach to Moscow and Soviet officials in Petrograd; arrests of all Left SRs leaders ; they were withdrawn from the Soviets, arrested or shot; part began anticommunist activities, part entered the

Communist Party; by July 1918 the one-party dictatorship was finally established

*mistake of the moderate socialists-
they left the soviet congress held in October in indignation, leaving the congress in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

*Bolsheviks preserved the power only by abandoning the democratic elements of socialism and erecting a revolutionary dictatorship.

1) 1st Decree-”Press”: all liberal newspapers were closed, including some of SRs; by the end of August 1918 all nonbolshevik papers were closed;
2) key political figures- Kadets- were arrested; Provisional government was working till the middle of November1917;
3) revolutionary tribunals were set up; (no power to issue death sentences)
4)Secret police - Cheka (from the first Russian initials of Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counterrevolution and Sabotage)-operated above the law, headed by F.Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926)
== based only on “revolutionary expedience”

5)Treaty with Germany- 1st political crisis in Left Block (Left SRs and Bolsheviks)- cabinet resignations in 1918 and the gradual disappearance of non-Bolsheviks everywhere in government;
a) the Soviet state becomes one-party dictatorship everywhere: in police, courts, press, economy;
b) 1918-the Bolsheviks took the name Russian Communist Party (a sign of the transition from revolutionary movement to ruling machine;
c) but power lay in the narrow circle of Political Bureau, or Politburo and Secretariat, which handled internal party matters

6) active opposition:
a) anarchists;
b) Kadets (committees to defend Russian Democratic
revolution);
c) Mensheviks demonstrations in Spring 1918
d) Left SRs- 2d crisis- May-June 1918 (after Peace treaty with Germany now + harsh Bolsheviks food policies on peasantry):
*Assassination of German ambassador Mirbach to Moscow and Soviet officials in Petrograd; arrests of all Left SRs leaders ; they were withdrawn from the Soviets, arrested or shot; part began anticommunist activities, part entered the

Communist Party; by July 1918 the one-party dictatorship was finally established

1) it’s a Russian political event, tied with Russian multisided economic and political development. It is not Western Marxism, but Lenin’s National idea, mixture of Populists theory and Marxism
2) their slogans reflected:
a) anticapitalist intentions among workers;
b) intentions against private property among peasants, tied with peasant community lifestyle;
c) inclinations of the Russian people to social equality and justice on egalitarian bases in conditions of economic and war disasters;
d) roots of collectivism;
e) not understanding and not admitting the Western democratic patterns by masses of Russian people

*Russia was the first country in the world where the absolute value of Western European experience for the whole humanity was put under question.

III. REVOLUTIONARY DIPLOMACY.

1) steps, made by Trotsky- Foreign Commissar:
a) published the allies secret treaties;
b) announced the confiscation of foreign capital and the renunciation of tsarist debts
c) called on the masses in the states at war to take peacekeeping into their own hands
2) Brest-Litovsk negotiations: primary the central powers territorial peace terms: the detachment of the Baltic lands and Poland from the Russian state

 3) 3 main points of views among Bolsheviks party leaders (all hoped on world socialist revolution):
a) Lenin: to save the Soviet power on any conditions; this way the world socialist revolution is saved (helping afterwards to the revolutions in other countries by money, arms, people, troops); + army is tired of war
b) N.Bukharin (1888-1938): a revolutionary partisan war of defense that would put the German army deep into Russia and destroy it;
c) Trotsky: formula “neither war nor peace”

4) Lenin was in minority till Germans
advanced and upped their demands + Ukraine and part of Belorussia.
5) Treaty of Peace:
a) 60 million people were surrendered; Finland, the Baltic lands, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine;
b) about half of Russia’s industrial might;
c) Russia had to pay 3 billion of contribution (paid more than a half)

5) First crisis in the Left Block- March
1918 (Left SRs and Bolsheviks): the Left SRs withdrew from the government and went into active opposition; but they preserved their positions in the Soviets )
6) the treaty was nullified in November with Germany’s defeat in WWI.

5)Treaty with Germany- 1st political crisis in Left Block (Left SRs and Bolsheviks)- cabinet resignations in 1918 and the gradual disappearance of non-Bolsheviks everywhere in government;
a) the Soviet state becomes one-party dictatorship everywhere: in police, courts, press, economy;
b) 1918-the Bolsheviks took the name Russian Communist Party (a sign of the transition from revolutionary movement to ruling machine;
c) but power lay in the narrow circle of Political Bureau, or Politburo and Secretariat, which  handled internal party matters

1) Centre of the country was always with Soviet power;
2) Bolsheviks managed to mobilize much more forces, than the Whites (common people + not less than ¼ of officers of the Tsarist Army, so called military specialists);
3) The Whites couldn’t launch the idea, program, attractive to the common people, peasantry; the Bolsheviks’ ideas were simpler, more understandable;
4) Peasantry, besides uprisings, still inclined towards the Reds; main reason LAND< GIVEN IN SPRING 1918.
5) the slogan of the Whites “ the Great and Indivisible Russia” spurned the borderlands leaders (Poland, Finland, Baltic lands). The Bolsheviks were skillful in launching the slogan “self-determination till seсcession” or “autonomy”
6) Scratch composition of the Whites, no unified center or magisterial leader: open monarchists; liberals; SRs; independent Cossacks);

7) Bolsheviks party role- closely-knit and highly disciplined; the Whites didn't possess such a force

VII. RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES
OF THE CIVIL WAR.

1) Russia lost in 1917-1922-13 million people;

2) incredible economic breakdown (not only because of the Civil war, but the whole economic policy of the Soviet power):
a) “deindustrialization ‘ of Russia;
b) Russia dropped out of the world economy;
c) Russia lost its entrepreneurs, production experience;
d) “deurbanization” experience;
3) the changed character of the political structure; the civil war just strengthened it: one party; dictatorship; violence and terror; only state property, etc.:
a) centralization process in party and in the system of power; power belongs not to the Soviets (representing state) any more, but to the party, even to a small group within its leadership- Political bureau- so Lenin and his closest collaborators;
b) bureaucratization- opposite side of centralization: all the state and party positions were occupied not by elections, but by appointment;
c) militarization: both in the state and in the party the military spirit and style were implanted; any order was equal to a military order and demanded strict subordination
== the victories in the Civil war helped the Bolsheviks to believe in omnipotence of the command methods of governing;
== together with market economy Russia rejected the values of the civil society, legal state, human rights, etc.
4) Losses in scientific and cultural
development:
a) emigration of the major part of creative intelligentsia by the middle of the 1920s;

b) 1922- Lenin’s initiative to deport 160 prominent representatives of the Russian culture, philosophy- so called “philosophical steamboat”
5) Changing patterns in massive psychology and leadership:
a) by 1922- 90% of the Communist party entered it during the Civil war; complete loss of the human values;
b) spirit of militarization;
6) the revolution woke up to social activities a
mass of very poor people, passive before;
7) the roots of Stalinism are in the civil war:
a) violence over peasantry;
b) terror;
c) omnipotence of secret police bodies;
d) spirit of militarism;
e)cult of leaders; etc.