Rival ambitions in Manchuria and Korea were central to the conflict between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan. The Japanese military unexpectedly defeated Tsar Nicholas II’s Russian forces.
The widespread movement intended to reform Russia’s government and bring social change. Citizens won expanded civil liberties and a limited representative body, the State Duma.
Russia’s controversial involvement in the Great War destroyed the nation’s tenuous domestic peace, obliterated its ill-prepared military, and robbed its citizens of basic necessities.
Citizens, especially housewives and female workers, vocally protested ongoing food shortages. These were soon joined by hundreds of thousands of factory workers on strike against labor conditions. Their overwhelming rebellion forced Nicholas II to abdicate his position.
Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, a socialist revolutionary, the Bolshevik Party overtook Russia’s ineffective Provisional Government, immediately implementing its Marxist vision of a workers’ state.
Opponents of Lenin’s Bolsheviks – including monarchists, liberals, moderate socialists, and non-Russians – organized against the ruling communists, beginning a brutal, years-long civil war. The Bolshevik Reds, matched against the rival Whites, overtook the opposition, retaining control over the majority of the Russian empire.
Communist leaders formed an anti-imperialist, socialist regime, recognized as the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which encompassed more than 80 percent of the tsar’s former subjects.
Founder of the Bolshevik Party Vladimir Lenin dies. The Communist organizer was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who directed the USSR toward economic stability, industry, and modernity.
Fear of enemies and isolation from the international community intensified, prompting a strong sense of paranoia. Morbidly suspicious, Stalin purposefully removed perceived “threats” among the Communist leadership and ethnic, intellectual, military, and professional elite.
Stalin negotiated an agreement with Nazi Germany – a “Non-Aggression Pact” – that allowed the Soviet Union to stand aside as war engaged the world’s capitalist and fascist powers. The contract also included several clauses that permitted the USSR to absorb portions of the tsarist empire lost during World War I.
