7. Russian Revolution
As the Chartist leaders met in the north of England in the 1840s, they would not have known the effect that their actions would have on the world to come. One particular observer was the son of a mill owner, a German, resident in Manchester at the time. Fredrich Engels, together with his friend Karl Marx, would take influences from the ideas of the people around them in England and write The Communist Manifesto, written in Manchester and published in 1848. It would not register too highly on the political Richter Scale at the time of its publication, but nearly 60 years later, it would become the foundational document for one of the greatest revolutions of all time.
As ever with these discussions, one must consider the balance of forces between the protestors and those in authority. In Russia in 1917, the state was in disarray: abroad, the autocratic Tsar Nicholas II had taken the nation into a war that they could not win and at home, the working classes of the cities were at breaking point and the peasants in the countryside were starving. 3 million Russians had died in the war and those at the front simply wanted to go home.
The people had won concessions towards democracy in protest in 1906, but the Tsar had dismissed the Duma, the parliament, on several occasions. Having proven catastrophically incapable of leading his nation, pressure grew on the Tsar to abdicate. Workers in the capital, Petrograd, struck against the war and on March 15, Nicholas handed power over to the Provisional Government.
That was far from the end of it. While political power rested in the Provisional Government, economic power lay with the Petrograd Soviet, which controlled the industrial output. Within that, the Bolshevik Party emerged as the major force. They were expelled by the Provisional Government but were invited back to avert a right-wing coup attempt. Using the popular slogan “Peace, Bread & Land” to appeal to the major power blocks of disillusioned soldiers, hungry workers and disempowered peasants, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky grew from strength to strength.
Now emboldened and armed, they took to the streets to wrest power for themselves, beginning the first explicitly Marxist and socialist revolution in human history. They had their own Bastille moment, storming the Winter Palace that had once housed the Tsar and turning it over to the people. They would be immediately attacked by a coterie of other nations – the United States, United Kingdom, and France in particular – but the Soviet Union, as it was now known, would survive all the way through until 1990.