10 Lesser-Known Facts About The Russian Revolution That Put It Into Context

Choosing the word or phrase is sometimes all you need to achieve huge success, and that’s exactly what Vladimir Lenin did with his social revolutionary party. Ironically, the great communist leader was really good at branding. 

Before the Russian Revolution of March 1917, there were many outlawed revolutionary parties that operated underground. Marxists, democrats, socialists, anarchists, populists  and others all had specific gains they were working towards. These included overthrowing the monarchy, ending war, abolishing capitalism, and modernizing Russia. 

In the age of the printing press, these groups directed their revolutionary messages to the Russian peasantry, intellectuals, and working class by producing newspapers and leaflets, which were distributed by party agents. The most well known publications were Pravda and Iskra. At Iskra, Lenin and fellow revolutionary Julius Martov differed in their approach to achieving shared goals. Lenin rigidly believed in swift, disciplined, violent revolution led by a tight-knit group of party members. Martov believed in a reform movement open to all opinions. 

Lenin feared a revolution wouldn’t survive without his approach, because an open, long-term reform movement could be easily infiltrated and crushed by Tsarist forces. In order to build popular support for his group, Lenin claimed the name Bolshevik, meaning ‘majority,’ to give the impression that his revolutionary party already enjoyed the support of the majority of Russians. As a result, Martov and his followers accepted a name practically bestowed upon them  - Menshevik, or ‘minority’. 

In truth, most Russians favored the more gentle approach to social and political change touted by Martov. In the end, by claiming to enjoy majority support, Lenin planted the seeds of the Bolshevik myth that would live on through the 1917 revolution and subsequent 75 years of communist rule. 

Mythology was the glue holding power structures together in the Soviet Union. As seen today in North Korea, foundation myths and propaganda cast a spell over the masses to gain absolute loyalty to the ruling elite. 

To consolidate power, the communist party of the Soviet Union reinforced the myth that the Russian Revolution, which overthrew the Romanov Dynasty, was staged by devoted communist party members led by Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This is only half true, but the misconception was exploited and reinforced by media and propaganda, most notably filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, whose 1929 film October: Ten Days That Shook the World contains scenes of thousands of revolutionaries taking over the Tsar's Winter Palace with nary a women in sight. 

The Great War proved to be disastrous for Russia; almost every decision the government made created a domino effect of problems. Most of the enlisted Russian soldiers were peasant farmers who produced valuable crops propping up the economy. With farmers at the front, the agricultural sector broke down, a problem exacerbated by Russia’s lack of roads and rudimentary railway system. Food shortages occurred across the country. 

On International Women’s Day, February 23, 1917, (March to the rest of the world, as Russia was using a Julian, not Gregorian, calendar) 90,000 citizens, mostly women who had spent countless hours standing in line for bread, began rioting throughout Petrograd. They soon formed a mob and began gathering other workers to demonstrate not just for bread but for the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. 

The commander of the local military garrison, General Khabalov, ordered his soldiers to shoot the rioters if they refused to disperse. The soldiers, disgusted by this order and at themselves for following it, soon revolted and arrested other officers. After four days, the city of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was in a state of insurrection. 

Vladimir Lenin, meanwhile, had been living in exile in Zurich, but with the help of the Imperial German government, was traveling across Europe back to Russia. Very simply, Lenin and the communists were never responsible for the popular revolution that toppled Tsar in Russia. It is fitting that he once said, “A lie told often enough becomes truth” 

Following the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin is quoted as (supposedly) saying; “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. Whether or not he actually said this is irrelevant. The bellicose tone is far more important, as it belied the nature of the Soviet State and its secret police apparatus. 

Felix Dzherzhinsky, Lenin's colleague, was the first director commissar of the newly established Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution (Cheka). Cheka was a secret police agency established by Lenin that acted as muscle for the Soviet Union.

Tactics employed by Check under Dzerzhinsky, who was known as Iron Felix, include verbal and physical intimidation, kidnapping, arrest without warrant, beatings, lengthy interrogation, show trials, and mass execution by firing squad. Other notable directors after Iron Felix include Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria. Each left his own brand of sadism in the pages of Cheka’s history.

From 1917 to 1991, Cheka it was given various names, divided into several departments, and reestablished as one agency numerous times through the fall of the Soviet Union. GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and NKGB are just a few of the acronyms Cheka went by until it was renamed KGB in 1954. It continued as KGB until 1991, but even when the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin spires for the last time, the agency survived. It was renamed Federal Security Service (FSB), and came under the control of Vladimir Putin. 

The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have been interpreted to fit many a political agenda. Applying their ideas to the Russian Revolution, it's clear Russian society and its economy weren’t developed enough to support revolution, or class struggle of any kind; it was still, as they would have called it, "backward." 

Both Marx and Engels took this general view when Russia cast off feudal serfdom in 1861. In Edvins Snore’s 2008 documentary The Soviet Story, professor and historian George Watson of Cambridge University states:

“It first appeared in January 1849 in Marx’s journal, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels wrote of the class war in Marxian terms. When socialist class war happens, when the class war happens, there will be primitive societies in Europe two stages behind because they’re not even capitalist yet. And he had in mind the Basques, and the Bretons, and the Scottish Highlanders, and the Serbs. And he calls them racial trash. ‘Volkerabfall’ And they will have to be destroyed, because being two stages behind in the historical struggle, it will be impossible to bring them up to the point of being revolutionary” 

The horrific statement by Engels likely was a permanent thorn in Lenin’s side when trying to apply Marxist theory in 1917 to post-feudal revolutionary Russia.

The leaders of the Bolshevik revolution considered proletarian credentials important; if an important party member's background was tarnished by bourgeois ancestors, they took steps to cover it up. 

Even before Lenin's death in 1924, the beginnings of a cult of personality had taken root with help of a growing propaganda machine. This was meant to highlight the positive working class traits of leaders as an example for the Russian people to admire and work towards. Lenin stated, “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation” a remarkable statement considering his origins. 

Dmitri Volkogonov, chief of Russia's military's psychological warfare department in the '70 and '80s, and author of Lenin, points out that Lenin’s background wasn’t working class - because his multi-ethnic ancestors were academics, doctors, and wealthy Jewish merchants. To maintain the myth that Lenin came from a simple, working class, purely ethnically Russian background, the party propaganda machine had to bury the truth. 

As with Lenin, Stalin had a murky background. Facts about his life were cherry picked for public knowledge; undesirable material was obfuscated. Stalin and his supporters fancied him a genuine revolutionary committed to the socialist cause, a supporter of other revolutionaries. 

However, many have alleged for years that Stalin was in fact an agent for the Okhranka, the secret police of the Russian Empire. Many Bolshevik peers accused Stalin of working for the Okhranka in his days as a young revolutionary, when he went by Koba. This accusations date as far back as 1916.

Evidence of Stalin's involvement with the Okhranka include his ability to travel freely during a period of crackdowns on revolutionaries, his hard-living lifestyle coupled with no source of income, and the many times he escaped exile. A peer, Domenty Vadachkory, even claimed to have seen Stalin use an Okhranka badge to pass through a checkpoint while returning from exile. 

Evidence exists to counter these claims. Stalin is listed in extant Okhranka records only as a revolutionary, not as a spy or informant. A letter alleging proof of Stalin's activity was proven fake. Many have testified to the very loose nature of the exile system, and how easy it was to escape with forged papers.