The Week India — November 12, 2017

(^56) THE WEEK Š NOVEMBER 12, 2017
OCTOBER REVOLUTION@100
Lenin became chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars or
Sovnarcom, and Leon Trotsky, the
commissar of foreign affairs. Decrees
proclaiming reforms followed imme-
diately. Land of the monarchy, gen-
try and the Church was transferred to
the peasants and anti-Bolshevik press
was muzzled. Workers assumed con-
trol of factories and mines and the
new dispensation authorised the
peasants to make their own revolu-
tions. Russia soon slipped into a civil
war, with Lenin’s Red Army battling
the White Army comprising the lib-
erals and the supporters of the Tsar
regime. Two rebellions against the
Bolsheviks, in 1919 and 1921, were
crushed by the Red Army, and Lenin
was firmly in the saddle.
The new constitution adopted in
1918 talked of a dictatorship of the
urban and rural proletariat and the
poorest of peasantry. And the cen-
tralisation of industry and agricul-
ture began taking place. Those who
resisted were crushed mercilessly,
but before Lenin could take forward
the dictatorship, an assassination
attempt on August 30, 1918, laid him
low and he died in 1924. A new consti-
tution adopted that year proclaimed
the Soviet Union as the “bulwark
against the capitalist world” and said
that it would mark a new, decisive
step towards the unification of work-
ers of all countries.
Post Lenin’s death, Trotsky was
expected to succeed him, but the
seminary-educated Josef Stalin
seized control of the party and the
government. Trotsky was kicked out
of the Soviet Union in 1929, and was
sentenced to death by a kangaroo
court in the 1930s. An assassin from
Kremlin tracked him down to Mexico
in 1940, and killed him with an ice axe
in his office.
Stalin’s reign of terror continued
throughout the 1930s and 40s, and
Religion takes over: Patriarch Kirill of
the Russian Orthodox Church with Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev, his wife
Svetlana, and President Vladimir Putin
during an Easter service at the
AP Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow
The coup
d’état as
it unfolded
May 7
1887
Dec 7
1895
Jan 9
1905
Oct 17
1905
Dec 17
1916
Feb 22
1917
Lenin’s brother
Alexander
Ulyanov hanged
for plotting
to kill Tsar
Alexander III
(May 20 N.S.*)
Lenin arrested
and exiled to
Siberia for 3
years
(Dec 20 N.S.)
Bloody
Sunday.
Russian
imprial
guard
fire upon
unarmed
demonstra-
tors led
by Father
Georgy
Gapon.
(May 26 N.S.)
Tsar Nicholas
II issues a
manifesto,
promising civil
liberties and
an elected
parliament,
thus ending
the revolution
(Oct 30 N.S.)
Grigori Rasputin,
a peasant who
gained consider-
able influence
over Nicholas II,
murdered
(Dec 30 N.S.),
(Mar 7 N.S),
The February
revolution
begins with
strikes and
mutinies in
Petrograd
(Mar 7 N.S)
Dec 30
1922
Jan 21
1924
Lenin dies,
Stalin
becomes his
successor
The Union of
Soviet Socialist
Republic (USSR)
established