IB History: The Russian Revolution — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The Great Reforms

Defeat on home soil. Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after an eleven-month siege. Britain and France could supply their forces by sea, while Russia had to rely on carts: there was no railway south of Moscow. Losing on Russian soil damaged the prestige won when Russia drove Napoleon out in 1812 and pursued him to Paris. Modern military power required railways, rifles, money and trained reserves; the defeat showed Alexander how much his empire needed them.

Serfdom as a military and financial brake. Serfdom restricted the soldiers and money needed by a great power. Completing military service freed a serf, so releasing trained men into a reserve also meant releasing them from landlords’ control. Landowners had pledged about two-thirds of their serfs as security for state-bank loans. When the banks ran short of cash in 1857–59, the treasury could no longer support lending on that basis.

Fear of the village. The Pugachev rising of 1773–75 remained a warning: peasants and Cossacks, free frontier horsemen of the south, had burned estates across the Volga region. Disturbances increased again in the late 1850s as rumors of freedom spread. Alexander’s 1856 warning to Moscow’s nobles gave that fear a practical conclusion. If the throne decreed emancipation before peasants seized it, the state could determine its terms.

An autocrat and his reformers. Most landlords preferred delay or freedom without land. Alexander II supported a different settlement, and his authority could overcome resistance in a system without a parliament. Nikolai Milyutin and officials who had studied the problem for years drafted statutes in the Editing Commissions of 1859–60 under Yakov Rostovtsev. The concentrated power that made emancipation possible remained untouched by it.

Chapter 2: Reaction and the Railway

The assassination of 1881. The People’s Will pursued Alexander II for two years. Its Winter Palace bomb killed eleven guards in February 1880, and in March 1881 it killed the Tsar just after he approved Interior Minister Mikhail Loris-Melikov’s plan for elected advisers. To Alexander III and the new court, the sequence made concessions look like an invitation to terror. Opponents of reform gained the argument.

Pobedonostsev’s creed. Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s tutor and the government’s lay head of the Orthodox Church, believed parliaments, elections and a free press were a lie that divided nations. In his view Orthodoxy, autocracy and the Russian people held Russia together. His position at the center of power throughout the reign turned distrust of society into a governing principle.

The needs of a great power. Crimea and disappointment at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 convinced rulers that Russia needed railways, industry and money to remain a great power able, like Britain, France and Germany, to shape Europe’s affairs. Grain exports helped pay for foreign loans; French banks lent heavily from 1888, and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891–94 sealed the relationship. Strategic strength required economic change, but the rulers saw no need to share power with the classes it created.

Fear of the borderlands. Officials saw the Polish rising of 1863 and national movements among Ukrainians, Baltic peoples and Finns as threats to unity. These movements sought language, schools and rights for their peoples. Russification aimed to make loyal Russians of subjects through a common language and faith; officials also suspected Jews as disloyal outsiders. More than half the population spoke a mother tongue other than Russian. Defining loyalty through sameness made much of the empire a problem for its own government.

Chapter 3: The Brittle Giant

Autocracy without a shock-absorber. Nicholas faced demands over wages, land, ethnicity and censorship without a legal opposition or parliament through which they could be addressed. In surviving European monarchies, parliaments shared power and responsibility for hard times. Russia's throne had no comparable intermediary, so complaints about government became complaints directed at the ruler himself.

Industrialization outran the state. Witte's factories brought hundreds of thousands of workers together in a few cities. Railways then connected those centers, allowing a strike to spread across Russia in days. The police system had been designed for scattered villages; industrialization gave workers new means of collective action without giving them a political institution in which to press their demands.

The unanswered land question. Four in five Russians were peasants. Freedom from serfdom in 1861 had left many in debt and still wanting the gentry's land. Governments hesitated to give up those estates, but refusing the demand left it alive. It would shape 1917, the civil war and the fortunes of armies that offered land to the villages or threatened it.

A war lost to Japan. The government undertook the 1904–05 war with Japan partly for prestige: “a short victorious war” might quiet unrest. The result was a lost fleet at Tsushima and a humiliating peace. Defeat by an Asian power the regime had despised exposed its weakness just as the cities erupted.

Stalin’s rise. The office of General Secretary gave Stalin influence over appointments: who entered the Party, who advanced and where people served. These administrative decisions mattered in a state governed by a Party closed to dissent. Within five years of Lenin’s death Stalin had outmaneuvered every rival; within ten he had launched a second revolution from above.

A second, deadlier transformation to come. NEP brought recovery through a mixed economy, but the argument over its future remained open. How fast should socialism be built in a peasant country, how should industry be developed, and what place should the market have? After 1928 the leadership answered with forced collectivization, planned industrialization and terror. That terror dwarfed the civil war’s: the revolution’s most lethal phase came during its “peace.”

The world the revolution made. The state made in this revolution became an international model for communist and anti-colonial movements, as well as a great antagonist. It would shape the Second World War and define the Cold War. The atlas follows its birth; the War Room meets it again seventeen years later, as the state that will absorb the largest invasion in history. Each change of color on this map opens onto a much larger history.