Women´s protest starts a revolution

One hundred years ago, Russian women gathered in protest because of the poor conditions in their country. The First World War had dragged the country down into a state of misery. There was a shortage of everything and millions of people had died. Enough was enough, time for a revolution!

The Chessmen Museum has several Russian chess games. One of them, the Babushka chess set, has already been discussed in one of our articles. Mr Glotzbach, who bequeathed his collection of chess games to the museum, also had a Russian set in his possession. The chess pieces are made of wood and come in two different colour combinations: red and green on yellow, and red and yellow on black. The brightly coloured pawns are wearing characteristic Russian fur hats.

Although not one farmer can be found in this chess game, they actually comprised the largest part of the Russian population. They were poor, and until 1861 most of them were serfs. They were extremely loyal to the hierarchy as established by God, with the tsar as their leader, followed by the clergy and the nobility. Russian intellectuals who had been exposed to socialist ideas believed that the tsar had not gone far enough when he abolished serfdom in 1861. Agricultural land should belong to those who cultivate it, not to some lord.

In 1873, students travelled to the countryside to spread their socialist visions, but the peasants did not want to have anything to do with that urban nonsense. They chased the socialists off or reported them to the police. The tsar would then happily kick them out of the country or send them to a Siberian prison camp, along with their delusional ideas.

Marx as an example
With the arrival of industrialisation in Russia, around 1880, a new social class emerged: that of the factory workers. They migrated from the countryside to the city to work in factories. But conditions were miserable both in the factories and the slums.

According to The Communist Manifesto, written by German economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), it was inevitable that the oppressed working class would take over power by force. The manifest made the Russian socialists understand why their campaign among the peasantry had failed. Their country simply had not yet been mature enough for a socialist revolution.

But twenty years later, there was an urban proletariat and that changed the case. These factory workers, who were exploited by increasingly rich industrialists, did pay attention to the socialist promise. What´s more, they were willing to use violence to achieve their goals. During the riots in 1895, then 25-year-old Lenin was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Here, he had all the time in the world to develop his ideas about how to apply Marx’s communism to Russia.

War, the straw that broke the camel´s back
Still, most of the 130 million Russians, exploited or not, remained loyal to Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918) when the First World War broke out. Three years later, this situation had completely turned around. The country was nowhere near victory, the number of casualties kept increasing and the tsar was blamed for all of this. He was at the front line of the battle together with his troops, and his wife Alexandra and clergyman Rasputin controlled Saint Petersburg, the country´s administrative centre. This was also not to the satisfaction of the people because there was not enough food to go around and they were starving. This was not only caused by failed harvests, there was also a logistic problem: there was just too little material to provide the army as well as the people with food. The tsarina didn´t do much about the situation.

When the women of Russia took to the streets in March 1917, to demand better working conditions and more bread, strikes were organised everywhere. Even army superiors and the Imperial Guard lost faith in Nicholas. This was a decisive point in history because without the army, the tsar would be lost. In order to safeguard himself and his family, he chose the safe way out and abdicated.

There wasn´t too much bloodshed during the transition and a provisional government took over control. It did promise its allies, however, that the country would continue to participate in the war. This came as a shock to the Russians, who had actually rebelled against the war. Resistance was futile and was even suppressed. Had everything been in vain? The radical Bolsheviks, Lenin and his followers, seized their opportunity and stirred up the nation.
In October that same year, the Bolsheviks committed a coup and a bloody civil war ensued, during which the tsar and his family were tragically killed. Lenin got his way and established a dictatorship, inspired by Marx. Marx had not mentioned what exactly needed to be done to achieve the communist Utopia, though. Lenin and his successors had to run a tight ship in order to stay in control. A reign of terror followed, which lasted until the downfall of the Communist Party in 1991. Little was left of the original ideals…

By Marjolein Overmeer