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The October Revolution, [b] also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution [c] (in Soviet historiography), October coup, [4] [5] Bolshevik coup, [5] or Bolshevik revolution, [6] [7] was a revolution in Russia led by Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks as part of the broader Russian Revolution of 1917–1923. It was the second revolutionary change ...
The Bolsheviks ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. [c] The Bolsheviks, or Reds, came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and founded the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
The Bolsheviks made use of the slogan "Self-determination" to fight imperialism and to build support among non-Russian nationalities. [30] Lenin's position was that after the revolution all nationalities would be free to choose, either to become part of Soviet Russia or become independent. [31]
In response, the Bolshevik commissar Leon Trotsky began organizing workers' militias loyal to the Bolsheviks into the Red Army. While key events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, every city in the empire was convulsed, including the provinces of national minorities, and in the rural areas peasants took over and redistributed land.
He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. [142] Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers. [143]
The United States responded to the Russian Revolution of 1917 by participating in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the Allies of World War I in support of the White movement, in seeking to overthrow the Bolsheviks. [1] The United States withheld diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1933. [2]
After the Bolsheviks turned the tide and were winning the civil war in late 1919, Lenin and many others wanted to expand the revolution westwards into Europe, starting with Poland, which was fighting the Red Army in Byelorussia and Ukraine. Stalin, in Ukraine at the time, argued these ambitions were unrealistic but lost.
This period was characterized by the presence of a broad social support among the Bolsheviks: they decisively liquidated landlord ownership, transferred land to the peasants, began to withdraw Russia from the war, introduced workers' control in industry, recognized the right of the peoples of the former empire to acquire state independence ...