October 1917 revolution(By khushiv)
- On 16 October 1917, Lenin persuaded the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik Party
to agree to a socialist seizure of power. A Military Revolutionary Committee was
appointed by the Soviet under Leon Trotskii to organise the seizure.
- The uprising began on 24 October. Sensing trouble, Prime Minister Kerenskii had left
the city to summon troops
- Late in the day, the ship Aurora shelled the Winter Palace. Other vessels sailed down
the Neva and took over various military points
- At a meeting of the All Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the majority
approved the Bolshevik action. Bolsheviks now controlled the Moscow-petrograd
area.
- Most industry and banks were nationalised in November 1917.
- clothing competition organised in 1918 – when the Soviet hat (budeonovka) was
chosen.
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- The Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In
November 1917, the Bolsheviks conducted the elections to the Constituent
Assembly, but they failed to gain majority support. In January 1918, the Assembly
rejected Bolshevik measures and Lenin dismissed the Assembly.
- In March 1918, despite opposition by their political allies, the Bolsheviks made peace
with Germany at Brest Litovsk.
- The secret police (called the Cheka first, and later OGPU and NKVD) punished those
who criticised the Bolsheviks
- During 1918 and 1919, the ‘greens’ (Socialist Revolutionaries) and ‘whites’ (pro-
Tsarists) controlled most of the Russian empire and were fighting against the
reds(Bolsheviks)
- By January 1920, the Bolsheviks controlled most of the former Russian empire
- Soviet Union (USSR) (Union of soviet socialist republic) the state the Bolsheviks
created from the Russian empire in December 1922.
- Stalin, who headed the party after the death of Lenin, introduced firm emergency
measures due to famine. He believed that rich peasants(kulaks) and traders in the
countryside were holding stocks in the hope of higher prices.
- From 1929, the Party forced all peasants to cultivate in collective farms (kolkhoz).
Profit was shared by all.
- The bad harvests of 1930-1933 led to one of most devastating famines in Soviet
history when over 4 million died.
- Bolsheviks encouraged colonial peoples to follow their experiment. Many non-
Russians from outside the USSR participated in the Conference of the Peoples of the
East (1920) and the Bolshevik-founded Comintern (an international union of pro-
Bolshevik socialist parties)
- Some received education in the USSR’s Communist University of the Workers of the
East
