Lenin also suppressed democracy, closing down the constituent assembly in January 1918 after ‘one day of democracy’. Both the Tsars and the communist rulers also showed no hesitation in the use of secret police and mass terror. Each regime had its own secret police - the Third Section under Alexander II, the Okhrana under Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB under the communists. The suppression of opponents was also a common practice throughout the period. Under the term of Pyotr Stolypin as Prime Minister (1906-11), hundreds of opponents were hanged - earning the hangman’s noose the nickname - ‘the Stolypin necktie’.
It it over-simplistic to state that opposition was successful or unsuccessful in Russia from 1855 and 1964. The effectiveness of opposition in Russia had to be evaluated according to the regime in power. For example, the opposition to Tsarism under Alexander II was unsuccessful as his assassination led to reactionary Tsarist rule for thirty six more years. However, the opposition under Nicholas II’s rule was highly successful, helping to lead to a communist government. All Russian governments in this period faced strong opposition to their regime with the period as a whole punctuated by riots, disturbances and revolutions.
His army also consisted of millions of poor, starving peasants with bad equipment, poor supplies of rifles and ammunition. In 1916, two million soldiers were killed or seriously wounded, and one third of a million taken prisoners. The Russian population was horrified. They considered the Tsar irresponsible for taking over the army and held him responsible for everything; as a result instability was growing at an alarming rate for the Tsar who had once held himself so assuredly in power. Nicholas II took this course of action to assure himself he still had complete control of Russia.
As a result of these combination of factors, WWI was the ‘straw that broke the camels back’ and resulted in the downfall of the tsarist regime in 1917. The ruler of Russia was called the Tsar Nicholas the 2nd was an autocratic leader with few skills to rule 32 million Russians. He was politically naïve and granted himself with absolute power over the
He became famous for his four-year witch-hunt for Communists in the U.S. government that affected the lives of hundreds if not thousands. McCarthy ruined many careers and lives. (Encyclopedia.com) What is meant by the term The Domino Theory and what is its importance? The domino theory was a theory during the 1950s to the 1980s that the United States Government thought
Also his methods of massacring anyone he felt was a threat seemed to be effective in dealing with opposition. By 1939 majority of bishops were killed in Russia and there were only 12 left also 400,000 party members were purged due to his Stalin paranoia of them scheming against him. However to suggest that Stalin was the more effective in dealing with opposition in the period 1855-1964 compared to the other rulers would be wrong. In order to assess this argument we must compare the success of Stalin against opposition to the success of the other against their opposition. By comparing the key events in terms of opposition like the Assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Blood Sunday and the October manifesto in 1905, the February and October revolution in 1917, and how effectively they were dealt with, then we can come to a judgment on the argument.
The key defendants that were removed were Trotsky, Kamenev, Buhkarin, Yagoda and Zinoviev. This was significant in allowing Stalin to establish his personal dictatorship as they removed all of Stalin’s rivals from the 1920’s thus creating fear among the USSR showing that if you did anything that Stalin disliked, your life would be in danger, particularly because these people had been in positions of power therefore people obeyed all of Stalin’s orders. This lead to the wider terror among ordinary people. They were denounces, arrested and sent to Gulags by the NKVD. It is estimated that between 1934-8, 20 million Russians were sent to these gulags.
The Genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government during World War I represents a major tragedy of the modern age. In this the first Genocide of the 20th century, almost an entire nation was destroyed. The Armenian people were effectively eliminated from the homeland they had occupied for nearly three thousand years. This annihilation was premeditated and planned to be carried out under the cover of war. During the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior, and mercilessly put to death.
Mao criticised Khrushchev for his policies such as de-Stalinisation and his secret speech. He was also very critical of the policy of Peaceful Coexistence as he believed it was a way of being friendly with the United States (the enemy) and also Mao saw it abandoning millions of comrades struggling to free themselves of capitalist and imperialist oppression. This, therefore, made the USSR an ‘enemy’. How could two countries work together if they had such differing beliefs about how to run their countries? This problem had a big contribution to the split as they couldn’t agree on anything, and if they did, it was because their national interests were at risk.
At the time, the formation of political parties was illegal but despite this, they still existed. Every sector of society was represented through one of these illegal parties to act as opposition to the Tsarist autocracy. A number of parties set up used violence and terrorist activities to express their views. The Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats were set up to create a new society which gave power to the workers and peasants. The Social Revolutionaries were responsible for over 2000 assassinations from 1901-1905 including the Tsars uncle, Grand Duke Sergei in February 1905.