This is the (Early) 20th Century Page!

Click through below to find rebellions, revolutions, riots, and more in early 20th century Tsarist Russia, the last few years. I hope you enjoy and learn something new!

Early 20th Century
1905 Russian Revolution (First Russian Revolution)
  • Date: January 22nd, 1905 – late 1905
  • Location: Russia
  • Groups Uprising: Russian Revolutionaries (Including peasants, industrial workers, the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Russian Social Deomocratic Labour Party, and more)
  • Number of People: Unknown (We can guess in the (high) tens or (low) hundreds of thousands)
  • Leaders: Viktor Chernov, Leon Trotsky
  • Reason(s): The people became more aware of the need for reform (peasants didn't earn enough and couldn't sell/mortgage their land, ethnic/national minorities were systematically Russified and discriminated against, industrial workers were banned from striking and organizing labour unions, etc), Russia's (to them) embarrasing defeat in the Russo-Japanese war, Bloody Sunday (wherein soldiers fired upon unarmed protestors in St. Petersburg)
  • Result: Suppression of revolution (including (allegedly) deaths in the thousands and the exiling of tens of thousands), reforms including the creation of a Duma, the inactment of the October Manifesto, and the Russian Constitution of 1906
February Revolution
  • Date: (N.S.) March 8th-16th, 1917 (The revolution occured during Febuary according to the calender Russia was using at the time (Old Style, the Julian calender (O.S.) as opposed to New Style, the Gregorian calender (N.S.))
  • Location: Petrograd (Formerly (and currently) Saint Petersburg), Russia
  • Groups Uprising: Russian Revolutionaries (Including the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Octobrist Party, the Progressive Party, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party), defected Petrograd garrison regiments (soldiers), common people/Petrograd citizens (particularly women)
  • Number of People: (at its height) +200,000
  • Leaders: Georgy Lvov, Pavel Miliukov, Alexander Guchkov, Mikhail Rodzianko, Alexander Kerensky, Viktor Chernov, Julius Martov, Nikolay Chkheidze, Alexander Shliapnikov
  • Reason(s): Failure to modernise economic, social, and policical structures while maintaining autocracy, continuous cruel treatment of the peasants, poor working conditions for industrial workers, new polictical/social awareness and rising knowledge of western political ideas, food shortages and threats of faminine, a rise in layoffs and inflation (which wages didn't rise to meet), natural "disasters" (such as continous freezing temperatures and dramatic shifts in climate), Russian military failures/ineptitude during World War I (including poor military leadership by the tsar and many of those under him, inadequate supplies, mass desertions, etc), (resulting from Tsar Nicholas II taking personal command) the governing of the unpopular and ineffective Tsarina Alexandra (who was also German. They were fighting the Germans) and Grigori Rasputin (who was even more disliked)
  • Result: The revolutionaries won, the monarchy was ended with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (and the refusal of his brother, Grand Duke Michael, to take the throne. In 1918 the former tsar, tsarina, and their children, among others, would be murdered), the formation/proclamation of the Russian Republic, the sharing of dual power between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, and, later on, the October Revolution (also known as the Bolshevik Coup), which would result in the formation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Soviet Russia, unofficially)