Communist Russia - the People and the State



Communist Russia

World History Study Guide 

The People and the State

In March 1917, as the people of Russia demonstrated against the hunger and privations brought by World War I, the tsar of the Russian Empire gave up his throne. A provisional government took power in St. Petersburg, the imperial capital. Seven months later, the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Socialist Party led the overthrow of the provisional government. Under Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known to history by his revolutionary name of Lenin, the Bolsheviks transformed Russia into a socialist state, modeled on the ideas of the nineteenth-century writers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Like Marx and Engels, Lenin saw history as a logical, scientific process. The aim of the Bolshevik government would be to bring this process to its natural conclusion: a socialist state of perfect equality and justice. At this final point in the process, communism would be attained; government itself would no longer be needed, and the state would gradually "wither away," as Engels predicted in his book The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State :

When it [the state] ultimately becomes really representative of society as a whole, it makes itself superfluous. Govern.....

Life Turned Upside Down

As the largest republic within the Soviet Union, Russia held most of the country's population, fertile land, and resources. Lenin and most of the other leaders of.....

A Historic Experiment

The people of Russia participated in a historic experiment, a test of the theories of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. They made up a vanguard, and their success or failure.....

Socialism and Communism

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 brought radical changes in the way Russians saw their own society and the societies of other countries. Those who supported the r.....

In July 1936 Gen. Francisco Franco, commander of the Spanish troops in North Africa, led an uprising against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic. This Popular Front coalition of antifascists, socialists, and communists was widely supported by liberals