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

Chapter 1: The Great Reforms

Defeat on home soil. The Crimean War was fought on Russian territory, and Russia still lost it. Britain and France supplied their armies by sea faster than Russia could supply its own by cart, because the empire had no railway south of Moscow. Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after an eleven-month siege. The defeat destroyed the prestige Russia had carried since 1812, when its armies drove Napoleon out and pursued him to Paris, and it showed the new Tsar that military power now rested on railways, rifles, money and trained reserves.

Serfdom as a military and financial brake. Serfdom tied up soldiers and money, the two things most needed by a great power, one of the few states strong enough to shape the affairs of Europe. A serf who finished his long service came home free, so the army could not build a trained reserve without undermining the system that fed it. Landowners had pledged about two-thirds of their serfs as security for loans from state banks, much as a homeowner borrows against a house, and when the banks ran short of cash in 1857 to 1859 the treasury could no longer prop the system up.

Fear of the village. Russia’s rulers had not forgotten the Pugachev rising of 1773 to 1775, when an army of peasants and Cossacks, the free frontier horsemen of the south, burned estates across the Volga region, and peasant disturbances rose again in the late 1850s as rumours of freedom spread. Alexander’s warning to the Moscow nobles in 1856 that change from above was better than change from below turned that fear into an argument. Emancipation decreed by the throne was meant to arrive before peasants tried to seize it, and on terms the state would set.

An autocrat and his reformers. Most landowners wanted to delay emancipation or to free the serfs without land, and in a system without a parliament their resistance could only be overcome from the top. Alexander II supplied the will, and officials who had studied the problem for years, led by Nikolai Milyutin, drafted the statutes in the Editing Commissions of 1859 and 1860, the committees under Yakov Rostovtsev that wrote the emancipation laws. The autocracy’s concentrated power, the very thing the reform left untouched, was what made such a sweeping change possible in the first place.

Chapter 2: Reaction and the Railway

The assassination of 1881. Alexander II’s murder persuaded his son that concessions only encourage terror. The People’s Will had tried for two years to kill him, and its bomb in the Winter Palace in February 1880 killed eleven soldiers of the guard. It finally succeeded in March 1881, just after he had approved a plan by his interior minister, Mikhail Loris-Melikov, for elected advisers. The murder of the reforming Tsar discredited reform itself in the eyes of the new court, and it handed the argument to those who had always opposed it.

Pobedonostsev’s creed. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s tutor and the layman who ran the Orthodox Church for the government, taught that parliaments, a free press and elections were a lie that divided a nation, and that Russia could be held together only by Orthodoxy, autocracy and the Russian people. His ideas gave repression a principle as well as a purpose. Because he sat at the centre of power for the whole reign, his distrust of society became the working assumption of the government.

The needs of a great power. The Crimean defeat and the disappointment of the Congress of Berlin in 1878 convinced Russia’s rulers that they needed industry, railways and money to remain a great power, one of the few states, like Britain, France and Germany, strong enough to shape the affairs of Europe. Grain exports paid for foreign loans, and from 1888 French banks lent heavily, a relationship sealed by the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891 to 1894. The state drove modernisation for strategic reasons, and it saw no need to share power with the classes that modernisation created.

Fear of the borderlands. The Polish rising of 1863 and the growth of national movements among Ukrainians, Baltic peoples and Finns, campaigns by a people for its own language, schools and rights, persuaded officials that the empire’s unity required a common language and faith. Russification was meant to turn subjects into loyal Russians, and suspicion of Jews as disloyal outsiders ran through the same thinking. A state that defined loyalty as sameness was bound to treat more than half of its population, everyone whose mother tongue was not Russian, as a problem to be managed.

Chapter 3: The Brittle Giant

Autocracy without a shock-absorber. Every European monarchy that survived the century had learned to share power with a parliament that could take the blame for hard times. Russia’s did not. With no legal way to channel discontent, every grievance. Wages, land, ethnic grievance, censorship. Flowed straight to the throne. A system with no valves eventually bursts.

Industrialization outran the state. Witte modernized the economy without modernizing the politics. He built the factories that concentrated hundreds of thousands of workers in a handful of cities, and the railways that could carry a strike nationwide in days. Then left them under a police regime designed for a nation of scattered villages. Modernization created the very class the autocracy could least control.

The unanswered land question. Freed in 1861 but land-hungry and debt-burdened, the peasantry. Four in five Russians. Wanted the gentry’s fields, full stop. No government dared give them away and none could survive refusing forever. This single unresolved demand would decide 1917, the civil war, and the fate of every army that promised or threatened the villages.

A war lost to Japan. The 1904–05 war with Japan. Undertaken partly for prestige, “a short victorious war” to calm unrest. Ended in the loss of a fleet at Tsushima and a humiliating peace. Defeat by an Asian power the regime had despised stripped away its last aura of competence at the exact moment the cities exploded.

Stalin’s rise. The man who held the dull administrative offices. General Secretary above all. Controlled who joined the Party, who was promoted, who was posted where. In a state where the Party was everything and its ranks were sealed against dissent, that was the whole game. Within five years of Lenin’s death he had outmaneuvered every rival. Within ten he had launched a second revolution from above.

A second, deadlier transformation to come. NEP’s mixed economy was a truce, not a settlement. The unanswered questions. How to industrialize a peasant country, what to do with the market, how fast to build socialism. Would be answered after 1928 by forced collectivization, planned industrialization and a terror that dwarfed the civil war’s. The revolution’s most lethal phase came not in its war but in its “peace.”

The world the revolution made. The USSR became the century’s great alternative and antagonist: a model for anti-colonial and communist movements worldwide, and the adversary that would shape the Second World War and define the Cold War. Scrub back through this atlas and you have watched a world power born. Open the War Room and you meet it again, seventeen years on, as the state that will absorb the largest invasion in history. Every color change here is a hundred books. Pick one.