Effects of the Russian Revolutions 1917
...es to stop the strikers, but instead they took the strikers side, refusing to fire them. This is very important because when the military take the side of the people, the government can not do anything. The government without the military is just nothing. So now we have an unwanted government without the armed forces. Nicholas II, send an order for the Duma to be abolished, but instead of the abolishment he received a letter informing him that a provisional Government had been set up and that they wanted him to abdicate in favor of his son, Alexis Romanov. But he couldn’t because his son was sick, so instead he abdicated in favor of his brother Grand Duke Michael, who turned it down. When he turned it down, the tsarist regime in Russia disappeared completely. When the Grand Duke refused the crown, he left Russia as a republic after 304 years of Romanov rule. The set up of the provisional government was mainly due to the indecision and fatalism of the tsar himself. After the March revolution, the liberal members of the Duma had a highly ambitious attitude. The only half obeyed the tsars’ orders before he abdicated. Most of the members who actually wanted Nicholas II to abdicate did so only with the hope to save something of the monarchy by crowning a more popular tsar. Before the Russian Revolution, the peasants felt that they didn’t have enough land, and they wanted more land at the expense of great landowners such as the church, the nobility and most of all the state. The peasants thought that they were going to become individual owners of their land themselves. The peasants, in 1917 were suffering of hunger, because of the disturbed transportation of food that war caused. Food never got in time and when it did, it came in short numbers. In the 1917, the peasants sum up to 80% of the total population of Russia. After the October/ November revolution in 1917, when the Bolsheviks were already in the power, there was inflation, which actually affected the peasants in a positive way. They used the inflation to get rid of their debt, which had been lowered to low amounts of money because of the inflation. Also, the prices of industrial products had fallen much more than those of the agricultural products, which favored the peasants greatly. The soviets, however, had no intention of making the peasants land owners, so instead they made plans that favored the industrial workers. But still, they were planning to make it an obligation for the landowners to pay the peasants for their work at the farms, but obviously, the peasants were unhappy with this decision, so they opposed to them, most of the time passively though sometimes they did so actively. Sometimes, they refused to sow or gather the harvest and they sometimes damaged the stores of grain as well. The industrial workers played a very important role at bringing the tsars regime to an end. Thousands of industrial workers revolt, seeking for more food, since the slowed down transportation because of war affected them as much as it affected the peasants. In the year of the Revolutions, the workers class was made out of more than 10% of Russia’s total population. Since the provisional government didn’t give them what they actually wanted, they tried to take power by their own hands, but the government acted before they could do anything. They closed the factories to break down the power of the workers councils. The closing down of these factories was, indeed, not a good thing for the industrial workers, who now didn’t have where to work, and didn’t gain anything either. The new Bolsheviks government decided to bring about workers control of industry. After the close down of the factories, they were re-opened again, and now the workers themselves were the ones who had to manage it. The two Revolutions...