The Russian Revolution as a Social Movement

The Revolution was the culmination of a long period of ferment, not the beginning. For half a century Russia had been in some turmoil:

Until 1861 Russia had for 300 years been a predominantly agricultural system maintained by the labor and taxes of peasant-serfs.

The peasant-serfs were tied to the land in a system that endured for three centuries, but in the nineteenth century the system was seen as increasingly inefficient. The Industrial Revolution did not affect Russia until the last quarter of the century. The result was a period of modernization that tested the parameters of Russian society and that helped to create a revolutionary situation:

Transportation and communications were improving rapidly, education and literacy more slowly. But the ove

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also sees imperialism as a form of capitalism in transition. Lenin examines the elements of the writings of Marx and Engels and in general agrees with the idea that history has developed on economic grounds and that it has tended toward the classless society over time. He sees, however, a need for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be more violent and more oppressive than Marx makes it seem, and Lenin would direct its power against the capitalists and exploiters who had dominated in the earlier era as a way of freeing society from their domination in the future and from the effects of their domination in the past: Lenin argued. . . that the significance of Marxist theory consisted precisely in looking ahead and developing the right strategy of struggle. Hence there could not be a revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. . . . Marx's ideas had been tested before and had not produced the revolutionary change he had predicted: Marx claimed that this was because the revolutionaries had not heeded objective socioeconomic conditions: they were in fact mere "utopian socialists." His kind of socialism, on the contrary, he described as "scientific." Yet as Hosking shows, for many in the movement the appeal o
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Approximate Word count = 2162
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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