why were the peasants unhappy during the russian revolution?

0000003371 00000 n As a consequence, Russias industrial recovery in the early 1920s was much slower than itsagricultural recovery, an inequality that led to the Scissors Crisis. While it was officially denied by the Kremlin for more than 50 years, it "dramatically changed Ukrainian society and culture, leaving deep scars in the national memory", writes Serhii Plokhy, the eminent Ukrainian historian. Russia's population in 1900 was about 120 million; at least eighty percent were peasants, so they formed a big unhappy majority. 129 0 obj Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. This was the situation at the time of the Bolshevik conquest of power on October 25th: the peasant masses, in opposition to their own SR leadership, and under the influence of revolutionary workers and Bolsheviks, were seizing the land. Had the war been won, the regime may have been able to gain political capital from this nationalistic upsurge. As recently as 1959, Norman Mailer could aspire to effect, single-handedly, a revolution in the consciousness of our time, but by centurys end such vaunts gave way to recognition, in some quarters, that certain tectonic shifts in the culture had sidelined its most gifted literary artists, however cogent and perceptive their . The leader of the first of these, Stepan Razin, was memorialized in a statue dedicated by Lenin in 1918; and the second, led by Yemelyan Pugachev, amassed a great army and took several cities before its eventual defeat, and Pugachevs public beheading. The rich peasants had horses and wagons with which to sack the estates and carry off the goods, while the less well-off followed their lead in a wholesale demand for land. Economically, widespread inflation and food shortages in Russia contributed to the revolution. The NEP did not solve all of Russias economic ills either. Peasants were generally mobile, as there was abundant land as well (as noticed by Babur). English Pages [253] Year 2017. URL: https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/new-economic-policy-nep/ It does not store any personal data. Nevertheless, its true that the peasants appropriation of the land for themselves led to trouble for the workers state, in that peasants began to withhold grain to the cities, sparking threat of famine, as Rosa Luxemburg noted. This only increased opposition to the Bolshevik regime which, in turn, increased the risk of rebellion or counter-revolution. Those most prone to become involved were young villagers and soldiers returning from the Far East. By early 1921, the Soviet regime had been rattled by the Kronstadt rebellion, peasant revolts in the provinces, angry food queues in the cities, strikes by hungry workers and factionalism within the Communist Party. 9Lenins Decree on the Land, in Mervyn Matthews, ed., Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Policies, New York, 1974, p. 319. e d u)/Rect[291.0366 72.3516 507.5156 82.8984]/StructParent 9/Subtype/Link/Type/Annot>> This conclave, though composed primarily of representatives of the upper layers of the peasantry, provided an opportunity to assess the peasant state of mind. This was written in mid-1918 and not published until years later. The immediate causes of the 1905 revolution were failed state-level leadership and policy, inflation poverty, hunger, Russo-Japanese War, the rise of reformer and revolutionary groups, and Bloody Sunday. The terms in which Lenin defined the relationship between the old economic policy (war communism) and the new (NEP) were of offensive and retreat, construction and pause, leaving no room for a positive acceptance of the NEP in Bolshevik minds.

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why were the peasants unhappy during the russian revolution?