1918 In 1917, Russia had been in political turmoil with support for the war and the Tsar dwindling. Under intense pressure Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March and a provisional government formed under Alexander Kerensky, pledging to continue fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front. The Western allies had been shipping supplies to Russia since the beginning of the war, through the ports of Archangel, Murmansk and Vladivostok. Following the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917, the Americans also began providing support. Political and social unrest increased however, with the revolutionary Bolsheviks gaining widespread support.
The Night of the Long Knives was the name Hitler gave to his purge of the SA. Hitler found out about a conspiracy to have him removed because the SA had the power to remove him. So with that Knowledge he called for a meeting and there he arrested the leader Ernst Roehm and also arrested 200 other senior officers. Many were shot as they were captured and in the end he also had Roehm killed. He made sure the next leader for them was weak so in the end they lost their power.
Hitler, Stalin, and the Bomb Hitler and Stalin both share the dubious distinction of being two of the most destructive figures throughout all of history. The atrocities committed between the two of them against innocent people runs up into the millions. With Hitler, his rage was derived from his disdain to any Jewish person around believe that they truly were inferior to him. Stalin had a deep fear of people rising up against him and killed a mass amount of his own people just to suppress that fear that the people in his country might soon rebel against him. During the time period in which their reigns each occurred, nuclear science was starting to make some of its biggest discoveries in history.
To understand and identify the aspects of the totalitarian system in both countries it's important to consider both countries history. On November the 11th 1918 Germany agreed to signed the Armistice. After Germany was forced to accept Versailles agreement by accepting guilt for WW 1. As a consequence the German people were demotivated and had no confidence in the new liberal democratic Weimar government and international forces. This resulted in risings such as the Spartacist rising where communists fuelled by the success of the Russian revolution almost occupied nearly every major city in Germany.
Although it unified, it also brought about separation, with the division of Germany and of Berlin. After World War 2 Russia unified all surrounding countries with communism. It began with the setting up of satellite states surrounding Russia later becoming commonly known as the ‘Iron Curtain’. They were set up to protect Russia because they believed the allies would invade, just as they did after the First World War. Russia’s main national interest after setting up other communist republics was to further spread communism.
Others indicate that their rise to power and the overthrow of the Provisional Government was more influenced by the faults and failures of the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government was never in full control of Russia, their power was shared with the Soviets, thus when the Bolsheviks and the Soviets banded together; it shoved the Provisional Government on a rocky road downwards, while the Bolsheviks rose and seized power from them. The Soviets were a great influence in the Bolsheviks surge to power; their leader, Leon Trotsky, and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, began working together in 1917 after Lenin was appointed head of the Bolshevik party and together they drew the support away from Kerensky and the Mensheviks, and introduced his ideas of reform to the lower and middle classes. The class system worked to the Bolsheviks advantage because all of the lower classes needed help and Lenin's ideas for revolution all coincided with the peoples wants and needs, which in turn gained Lenin and the Bolsheviks the support of the lower classes. Trotsky worked to obtain the support by going to events and giving speeches, such as the one he gave on the 22nd of October in 1917, in which he
The purges and show trials aimed to terrorise Soviet society into compliance with Stalin’s regime, and ‘remove potential enemies,’ to allow Stalin to found an almost entirely ‘new’ Communist party, which comprised of ‘more dependable’ members. The Terror fundamentally had the impact of manipulating and destroying social norms, and disarranging the political and military structure which had formed in Russia following the Bolshevik revolution. During the purges and show trials which comprised the Terror, the Communist Party were forced into submission, which essentially impacted the party in an adverse manner. 90 per cent of the once established Bolshevik party members were purged, including Bukharin, Yagoda and Rykov at show trials, and the remaining members were exhausted of any power. The removal of these skilled and able members was detrimental for the Communist party, as it weakened them industrially and economically, and resulted in an endemic lack of experience across the party.
“To what extent did Stalin and/or Lenin transform the USSR, economically & socially, between 1917 & 1939?” Introduction: Between 1917 and 1939 Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin or Man of Steel, and Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin, transformed the USSR from a backward agricultural state into a modern industrial power. Following the October Revolution of 1917 and Russia’s exit from the First World War through the Treaty of Breast-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Red Army commander Leon Trotsky, were fighting the ‘White’ forces in the Russian Civil War. During this time, Lenin introduced ‘War Communism’ in 1918 and the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921, which had an economic effect on Russia, known as the USSR from January 1 1924, as the former caused hyperinflation, while the latter stabilised the economy. Following Fanya Kaplan’s failed attempt to murder Lenin, he unleashed the ‘Red Terror’, where the Cheka secret police, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, having replaced the Tsarist Okhrana police, set about eliminating ‘threats’ to Lenin, essentially the liberal, free-thinking castes of society, such as noblemen and priests. Socially, this removed the intelligentsia from opposing Lenin.Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin assumed leadership over the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks.
Both Winston and V want to take down a dystopian government that rules by people intoxicated with power. They both believe a revolution can happen if the proletarians rise up. The main power of each work (Big Brother in 1984 and the government in V for Vendetta) tries to suppress the people and ruin their lives by using fear. The main characters V, Evey, Winston, and Julia all represent the rebellion. Both the movie and the book have the government watching the people to gain control.
The October Revolution of 1917 was the second major revolution that occurred in Russia in 1917. Due to the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party of Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin was able to come into power in Russia and brought the country under the influence of Marxism. The Bolsheviks, who were an anomaly in Russian politics even at the time of the February Revolution, were able to quickly manoeuvre themselves into power due to the use of force and because the provisional government in Russia failed to establish itself as a stable regime after the fall of the Tsar. The February Revolution that deposed the Tsar occurred spontaneously after factory workers and women protested against the rising inflation and the shortage of food in Petrograd. What the British Ambassador described at first as “nothing serious” , quickly escalated with the end result being the abdication of the Tsar, a new provisional government and around 1,315 casualties .