What were the events which lead up to the first Russian Revolution?

Question

well..can anyone help me with that..
i gotta do sth about this in my essay..>#<

Answer 1

the czar was abusing his power. plain and simple. the people were tired of being used as slaves and being sent to fight a useless war (WWI). the communist idea made sense to them at the time

Answer 2

Aside from the wiki article mentioned above, do not forget the part about Lenin being shipped to Russia in a sealed boxcar by the Germans as part of their mission to destabilize Russia.

Answer 3

The taxes were too high, especially to help pay for Russia participating in WWI.

Answer 4

Although unrest had been a regular part of the Russian Empire, serious disturbances had been rare in the decades prior to 1905. Nonetheless, political discontent had been building since the controversial 1861 emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. The emancipation was dangerously incomplete, with years of 'redemption' payments to the nobility, and only limited, technical freedom for the narod (common people). Rights for the people were still embedded in a range of duties and rules which were rigidly structured by social class.

The emancipation was only one part of a range of governmental, legal, social and economic changes began in the 1860s as the country slowly moved from feudal absolutism towards market-driven capitalism. While these reforms had liberalized economic, social and cultural structures, the political system was left virtually unchanged. Attempts at reform were sternly resisted by the monarchy and the bureaucracy. Even agreed-upon development was limited; for example, less than forty provinces had zemstva (rural councils), fifty years after the legislation was introduced. The raising of expectations, offset by the limited implementation progress, produced frustration which eventually led to rebellion. The feeling among those who rebelled was that the demand for 'land and liberty' could only be truly met by revolution.

Active revolutionaries were drawn almost exclusively from the intelligentsia. The movement was called narodnichestvo, revolutionary populism. This was not a singular and unified group, but rather an enormous spectrum of radical splinter groups, each with its own agenda. The revolutionaries' early ideological roots stemmed from the pre-emancipation work of the noble Alexander Herzen and his synthesis of European socialism and Slavic peasant collectivism. Herzen held that Russian society was still pre-industrial, and espoused an idealised view which considered narod and the obshchina (peasant commune) as the base for revolutionary change; as, in his opinion, the country lacked a significant body of industrial proletariat at the time.

Other thinkers argued that the Russian peasantry was an extremely conservative force, loyal to their household, village, or commune, and no one else. These thinkers held that the peasants cared only for their land and were deeply opposed to democracy and western liberalism. Later Russian ideologues gravitated to the idea of a leading revolutionary 'elite' or New class, a concept that was later put into action in 1917.

On March 1 1881, Alexander II was assassinated in a bomb-blast by Narodnaya volya, a splinter of the second Zemlya i volya party. He was succeeded by Alexander III, a deeply conservative man who was heavily influenced by Constantin Pobedonostsev, a devotee of autocratic government.

Under Alexander III the Russian police political service (the Okhrana) acted very effectively to suppress both revolutionaries and proto-democratic movements across the country. The Okhranka scattered the revolutionary groups through imprisonment and exile. Members of revolutionary organisations often emigrated to avoid persecution. It was this emigration into Western Europe that first brought Russian thinkers into contact with Marxism. The first Russian Marxist group was formed in 1884, although it did not reach any significant size until 1898.

In sharp contrast to the social stagnation of the 1880s and 1890s were the huge modernising leaps in industrialisation, relative to Russia's relatively low technological level at the time. This growth continued and intensified in the 1890s, with the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway and the reforms brought about by the "Witte system". Sergei Witte, who became Minister of Finance in 1892, had been faced with a constant budget deficit. He sought to increase revenues by boosting the economy and attracting foreign investment. In 1897 he put the ruble on the gold standard. Economic growth was concentrated in a few regions, including Moscow, St Petersburg, Ukraine, and Baku. Roughly one third of all the capital invested was foreign, and foreign experts and entrepreneurs were vital.

Nicholas II came to power in 1894. Like his predecessors, he stubbornly refused to allow any political change.

By 1905, revolutionary groups had recovered from the oppressive 1880s. The Marxist Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was formed in 1898 and then split in 1903, forming the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) published his work What Is To Be Done? in 1902. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs) was founded in Kharkov in 1900, and its 'Combat Organisation' (Boevaia Organizatsiia) assassinated many prominent political figures up to 1905 and beyond; this included two Ministers of the Interior, Dmitry Sergeyevich Sipyagin in 1902 and his successor, the hated Vyacheslav von Plehve, in 1904. These killings drove the government to grant more draconian powers to the police.

The war with Japan 1904-05, while initially popular, was now feeding discontentment, as military failures and unclear war aims alienated the people. The deep inequality of the emancipation was being re-examined, and the peasants were burning farms all across Russia. The boom of the 1890s had fallen into a slump and workers were expressing their grievances at their abysmal conditions. In 1903 one-third of the Russian army in western Russia had engaged in "repressive action".

On January 22, 1905 [O.S. January 9], the day known as "Bloody Sunday", there was a protest march in St. Petersburg, led by Father Georgi Apollonovich Gapon, hoping to deliver a petition to the Tsar, urging him to improve workers' conditions and to hold democratic elections to establish a constituent assembly. The protest was put down by armed force outside the Tsar's Winter Palace without the Tsar's knowledge as he was not in St. Petersburg at the time. Estimates of the number of deaths vary, but it is generally accepted that around a thousand were killed or injured. This event was the spark to push many groups in Russian society into active protest. Each group had its own aims, and even within similar classes, there was no overall direction. The main protestors were the peasants (economic), the workers (economic and anti-industrialism), intelligentsia and liberals (civil rights), the armed forces (economic), and minority national groups (political and cultural freedom).

Peasant unrest
The economic situation of the peasants was appalling, but without organization, each splinter sought its own objectives. Unrest was spread across the year, reaching peaks in early summer and autumn, culminating in November. Tenant farmers wanted lower rents; hired workers wanted better wages; and land-holders wanted bigger plots of land. The protestors' actions included land-seizures, sometimes followed by violence and burning; looting of the larger estates; and illegal hunting and logging in the forests. In the Samara area peasants formed their own republic, illegally logging and distributing land until put down by government troops. The level of animosity displayed had a direct link to the condition of the peasants — the landless of Livland and Kurland attacked and burned, while the better-off in the neighbouring Grodno, Kovno and Minsk took little destructive action. In total, 3,228 disturbances required military intervention to restore order, and land-holders suffered around 29 million roubles worth of damage.

The radical political parties of Russia were quick to intervene in the peasant revolt. There was some attempt to create a council which would organise and coordinate peasant action, leading to the formation of the All-Russian Peasant Union in May. The council was formed by regional delegates, and had close affiliations with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, but failed to put forwards realistic and coherent demands.

After the events of 1905, peasant unrest returned in 1906 and lasted until 1908. The government concessions were seen as support for the redistribution of land, so there were attacks to force landlords and 'non-peasant' land-holders to flee. Believing a country-wide redistribution was imminent, the peasants took the opportunity to 'pre-empt' the decision-makers. They were strongly suppressed.

Strikes
The workers' act of resistance was the strike. There were massive strikes in St. Petersburg immediately after Bloody Sunday; over 400,000 workers were involved by the end of January. The action quickly spread to other industrial centres in Poland, in Finland and the Baltic coast. In Riga 80 protestors were killed on January 13 O.S., and in Warsaw a few days later over 100 strikers were shot on the streets. By February there were strikes in the Caucasus and by April in the Urals and beyond. In March all higher academic institutions were forcibly closed for the remainder of the year, adding radical students to the striking workers. A strike by railway workers on October 8 O.S. quickly developed into a general strike in St. Petersburg and Moscow. This prompted the setting up of the short-lived St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, a largely Menshevik group, which organized strike action in over 200 factories. By October 13 O.S., over 2 million workers were on strike and there were almost no active railways.