A brief history of communism in Russia

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A Brief History…

About this time, labor laws were passed in Western Europe and America that made the work place more safer and more tolerable of workers. The worldwide revolution that Marx foresaw never came to pass.

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A Brief History…

The people that followed Marx’s thinking were called Socialists. The Socialists split into two groups.

The milder group wanted to bring about communism slowly by passing new laws.

The other group (we’ll call them Communists) stuck to Marx’s original idea of a major worker revolt. The Communists were a small extremist group compared to the total number of Socialists. They formed a political party called the Bolshevik Party , which was led by a man named Nikolai Lenin .

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A Brief History…

Russia at this time was being poorly managed by a Czarist government, ruled by Czar Nicholas II . Most of the Russian people were still underpaid workers on land owned by a small number of wealthy landlords.

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A Brief History…

In 1917 a revolution occurred in Russia. The Bolshevik Party successfully overthrew Czar Nicholas II. Besides Lenin, there were two other men who were leaders in the

Bolshevik party: Leon Trotsky , a man who believed in using terrorism, and Joseph Stalin, a strong ruthless man.

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A Brief History…

In 1926, Lenin died, and there was a power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin gained control and Trotsky went to Mexico and was later assassinated. As the new Russian leader, Stalin deported to Siberia all those who did not agree with him. His secret police also used random arrests, torture, and mass executions to maintain his dictatorship. Anyone could be a victim of these killings, or “purges” for no apparent reason.

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A Brief History…

The idealistic goals of Marx, had turned into a system that was in many ways more terrifying than the rule by the Czars. There was no freedom in the new system, which was based on military rule. Forced labor created wealth for a limited few, while the lives of most people changed very little or got worse. Terrorist police prevented uprisings by unhappy people.

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A Brief History…

The communist type of government that came about after the revolution in 1917 was “totalitarian”. Totalitarianism is when one party or group has total control of everything.

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