Page 68 - Mongolia & the Gobi Desert

The failure of agrarian reforms and suppression of the growing liberal intelligentsia were
continuing problems however. Repeated devastating defeats of the Russian army in the
Russo-Japanese War and World War I and the resultant deterioration of the economy led to
widespread rioting in the major cities of the Russian Empire and to the overthrow in 1917 of
the Romanovs.

At the close of the Russian Revolution of 1917, a Marxist political faction called the Bolsheviks
seized power in Petrograd and Moscow under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The
Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party. A bloody civil war ensued, pitting
the Bolsheviks’ Red Army against a loose confederation of anti-socialist monarchist and
bourgeois forces known as the White Army. The Red Army triumphed, and the Soviet Union
was formed in 1922.

Russia as part of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was meant to be a transnational worker’s state free from nationalism. The
concept of Russia as a separate national entity was therefore not emphasized in the early
Soviet Union. Although Russian institutions and cities certainly remained dominant, many
non-Russians participated in the new government at all levels. One of these was a Georgian
named Joseph Stalin. A brief power struggle ensued after Lenin’s death in 1924. Stalin
gradually eroded the various checks and balances which had been designed into the Soviet
political system and assumed dictatorial power by the end of the decade. Leon Trotsky and
almost all other “Old Bolsheviks” from the time of the Revolution were killed or exiled. As
the 1930s began, Stalin launched the Great Purges, a massive series of political repressions.
Millions of people whom Stalin and local authorities suspected of being a threat to their power
were executed or exiled to Gulag labor camps in remote areas of Siberia.

Stalin forced rapid industrialization of the largely rural country and collectivization of its
agriculture. Most economic output was immediately diverted to establishing heavy industry.
Civilian industry was modernized and heavy weapon factories were established. The plan
worked, in some sense, as the Soviet Union successfully transformed from an agrarian
economy to a major industrial powerhouse in an unbelievably short span of time, but
widespread misery and famine ensued for many millions of people as a result of the severe
economic upheaval.

In 1936 the USSR was in strong opposition to Nazi Germany, and supported the republicans in
Spain who struggled against German and Italian troops. However, in 1938 Germany and the
other major European powers signed the Munich treaty. Germany then divided Czechoslovakia
with Poland. The Soviet government, afraid of a German attack on the USSR, began diplomatic
maneuvers. In 1939 after Poland’s refusal to participate in any measures of collective
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stated that each country would occupy a portion of Poland, which they did, thus obliterating
the independent state of Poland.

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