Causes of the Russian Revolution
By: Marissa Mak 10.6
The Russian Revolution - what was it and why did it happen? We need to understand that the Russian Revolution did not come about overnight. It was preceded by years and years of social unrest.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was one of the defining events of the 20th Century. It signaled the end of the Cold War, a half-century long conflict which threatened the world with nuclear destruction. It also signaled the end of communism as an alternative to capitalism and democracy. The second Russian revolution that took place in 1991 definitely has a lot in both long term and short term events that has lead up to these series of events. |
What are the short term and long term causes of this revolution?
Short term causes:
- Food shortages and feeling against the German-born Tsarina and her involvemant with Rasputin.
- By summer 1991, the attempted economic and democratic reforms initiated by the Soviet president Gorbachev in 1985 and known as perestoika (rebuilding) and glasnost (openness) stand surrounded economic chaos, social crisis and political turmoil.
- With Soviet Union on the brink of disintegration, and days before a planned signing of a New Union Treaty by some of the Soviet republics in august 2007, a group of Communist hardliners from the Gorbachev government attempted to seize power, expel Gorbachev, reverse the reforms and prevent the formal breakup of the Soviet Union.
- Food shortages and feeling against the German-born Tsarina and her involvemant with Rasputin.
- By summer 1991, the attempted economic and democratic reforms initiated by the Soviet president Gorbachev in 1985 and known as perestoika (rebuilding) and glasnost (openness) stand surrounded economic chaos, social crisis and political turmoil.
- With Soviet Union on the brink of disintegration, and days before a planned signing of a New Union Treaty by some of the Soviet republics in august 2007, a group of Communist hardliners from the Gorbachev government attempted to seize power, expel Gorbachev, reverse the reforms and prevent the formal breakup of the Soviet Union.
group of Communist hardliners from the
Gorbachev government attempted to seize power
Gorbachev government attempted to seize power
Long term causes:
- In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin’s control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. (http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/)
- Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system’s problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union’s collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism — call it anti-anti-communism — that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime’s stability and legitimacy.
Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A collection of essays about the Soviet Union’s demise in a special 1993 issue of the conservativeNational Interest magazine was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."
1991 aborted coup attempt in Russia
- In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin’s control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. (http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/06/20/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-is-wrong/)
- Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system’s problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union’s collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism — call it anti-anti-communism — that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime’s stability and legitimacy.
Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A collection of essays about the Soviet Union’s demise in a special 1993 issue of the conservativeNational Interest magazine was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."
1991 aborted coup attempt in Russia