The violent overthrow of existing political systems was a major feature of global history in the first half of the 20th century. Many countries were affected, most notably China and Russia.
Most revolutions reflected the view that monarchical systems were obsolete, and were blocking the changes required to equip a modern state to deal with the modern world: a brutally competitive international system, demands for domestic reform, and the threat of social disorder. In Japan in the 1860s it had proved possible to reconcile imperial legitimacy with radical modernization, but elsewhere, in the early 20th century, the crises were more acute. It was no accident that in a number of states – among them China, Portugal and Turkey – military figures should head the call for change, as it was failures in defence that eroded and cracked old systems. In China the Manchu dynasty lost face after foreign powers intervened to put down the Boxer Rising in 1900. This led to the fall of the Chinese emperor in 1911–12, after more than 2,000 years of imperial rule. A new republic followed, but subsequent decades saw a collapse of national unity as provinces broke away to form warlord states.
The First World War brought down the Austrian, German and Turkish imperial dynasties. It also sparked the Russian Revolution. Repeated defeats at the hands of Germany redoubled the acute social, economic and political strains that the war imposed on Russia, and they discredited the government and especially the Tsar, Nicholas II, who had taken personal responsibility for the war effort. In early 1917 a moderate republican government overthrew him but pledged to continue the war. Its failure was in its turn exploited by Vladimir Lenin’s small but determined group of Bolsheviks, the core of the future Soviet Communist Party. They seized power in the October Revolution, and imposed a totalitarian system.
Lenin destroyed his opponents on the Left, and fought a civil war that defeated the right-wing Whites, in spite of international support that included British, French, American, Canadian and Japanese forces. The Bolsheviks held the key manufacturing centres, and their base in Moscow gave control of the rail system so they could dispatch their resources to where they were most needed.
‘The substitution of the proletarian for the bourgeois state is impossible without a violent revolution.’
Lenin (1917)
Still weary after the ‘Great War’, and lacking coordinated aims, the intervening forces withdrew. Added to that, the White idea of ‘one Russia, great and undivided’ alienated the various nationalist movements that wanted independence from the Russian empire. In the end, those movements failed in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, but succeeded in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Minus these latter territories, the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR or Soviet Union) established by Lenin in 1922 was effectively a re-creation of the old tsarist empire.
The Bolsheviks’ radical reforms included the imposition of state control of agriculture and industry. The liquidation of the kulak class of prosperous peasants displaced over 5 million households into labour camps or distant areas. Lenin had no interest in democracy, which he saw as a bourgeois affectation. The Bolsheviks were committed to change, especially fast industrialization, which they saw as a means of reinforcing their power.
Two key features of the Soviet Union were indoctrination and the secret police. Those viewed as dissidents or counter-revolutionaries were routinely arrested and either executed or sent to the gulag, a vast network of camps. They worked as slave labour in their millions, and many died. This level of paranoia also led to Stalin’s show trials and purges, in which party members, leading Bolsheviks and even top officials of the secret police were forced to confess to crimes against the state and were punished or killed as a consequence.