Explaining The Russian Revolution: A Student's Guide: Your Guide To The Ten Toughest Exam Questions on the Revolutions of 1917

Explaining The Russian Revolution: A Student's Guide.

Your Guide To The Ten Toughest Exam Questions on the Revolutions of 1917.

Nick Shepley

www.explaininghistory.com

1) What is communism?

Communism is an idea that first emerged during the 19th Century, and it developed in Europe as a direct result of the industrial revolution. In Britain, where the industrial revolution began, and later in France, Germany, Belgium and other countries that began to rapidly industrialise a new social class of people emerged, an industrial working class.

The working classes had bee drawn to towns and cities from the countryside, hoping to earn higher wages and live better lives, but the reality of new cities like Manchester in England was one of immense squalor and poverty.

The working classes developed into a distinct and separate group of people, aware that they were at the bottom of the heap, with few rights, poor wages, terrible housing, dangerous working conditions and they instinctively began to organise themselves. The development of a working class also occurred in North America, and later in South America, Asia and anywhere else in the world that became industrialised, and importantly, it began to happen in Russia too.

Throughout the 19th Century in Europe working class communities began to develop trade unions and use the power of strike action to bring factories to a stand still if their demands for better conditions were not met. The development of the working classes was noticed by many writers and thinkers during the first half of the 19th Century, but no one writer explained what has happening more successfully than Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was a German journalist, philosopher and revolutionary from Trier, who had been forced out of Prussia, France and Belgium and ended up living in London in 1849, a year after he had published his most famous book, the Communist Manifesto with his friend and writing partner Friedrich Engels.

Marx and Engels based their writing on the English working class, a group of people who had become increasingly restless and angry in the previous three decades and more inclined to protest. In their book they argued one of the core ideas of what would later be known as Marxism (but they referred to it as communism), that history has distinct phases, and those phases are determined by the relationships between different social classes. In ancient times the ruling classes might have been emperors and the ruled were slaves, and medieval times the rulers were kings and nobles and the ruled were peasants, and in the 19th Century the rulers were the middle classes or 'bourgeoisie' and the ruled were the working classes. Marx summed up his theory with the following statement:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

Each phase of history ended with a revolution and Marx explained this through his next theory, that of 'dialectical materialism' which, put simply, meant that in each period of history the economic forces and the structure of society that existed contributed to tensions between the classes building up over a long period of time like a powder keg, and at a certain point they would explode, sweeping away the old order and creating something new. Marx believed that this process would finally come to an end and there would be one final society that was based on complete equality and that society would be communist.

He argued that the next revolution would be the working class (proletarian) revolution against the middle classes (bourgeoisie), and that it would come about during a time of crisis for the bourgeoisie, perhaps as a result of a war. He identified the economic system that the bourgeoisie used in order to make themselves rich and to continue to control the working classes as 'capitalism' , an economic and political belief in the virtues of private ownership of wealth - it is the dominant idea in our world today. The bourgeoisie never came up with this term themselves, it was coined by Marx to describe how and why wealth was distributed unevenly in society.

Marx predicted that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be necessary after the workers had seized power, ensuring that the classes who had been removed from power could not reinstate old political and economic ideas. This would be in the interests of everyone, Marx thought, as the revolution would bring about complete equality across society, though Marx did not think this could be done without some degree of violence and terror. A long period of socialist construction would then follow, where the working classes and the newly proletarianised middle and upper classes (those that had survived the revolution and succumbed to the new power of the workers) would build the industry and infrastructure of the future communist society. Finally once communism was built, there would be no further exploitation, no need for a state, no need for private property or wealth, no hunger and if the revolution spread across the world, no need for war either.

These were vey utopian goals, ones which Marx by the end of his life was probably aware would not be achieved, but most of his working life was geared towards creating them. He helped to form an organisation called the International in 1864, it was a conference of all of Europe's revolutionary parties and it initially met in London. The parties from across Europe met and discussed how they could advance the cause of revolution, but they were a mixed bag of various different ideologies, from anarchists to social democrats to communists. Marx unified the movement and forced the anarchists, who coalesced around the revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, out of the international.

Marx's ideas came to Russia quite late on in the 19th Century, though there had been much interest among the intelligentsia (see the next answer for more