Lenin: Red Dictator by George Vernadsky 1931 PDF book ( with illustrations)

Lenin: Red Dictator by George Vernadsky





The World War led to a new outburst of revolutionary forces in Russia. The processes it set in motion have not reached an end even now, thirteen years after the beginning of the Second Revolution. One of the causes contributing to the revolution in Russia was a check-in general social and political development, noticeable particularly after the end of the eighteenth century. This was complicated by the fact that Russian life in certain of its aspects changed very swiftly, out of proportion to the gradual rise in the general level of social and political standards. In the eighteenth century, the Russian state differed very little in structure from other states on the continent of Europe.In the political sphere, there prevailed absolute monarchy, in the sphere of social relations the overlordship of the feudal holders of great landed estates and — in greater or less degree — serfdom for the peasants. Europe, however, commenced to throw off these earlier forms of life much more quickly than did Russia. New ways of political and social action were established in France after the end of the eighteenth century, and in German states at the beginning or in the middle of the nineteenth century. The emancipation of peasants from feudal subjection started in Austria in the late eighteenth and in Prussia early in the nineteenth century. Constitutions, although limited in character, were adopted in Prussia in 1848 and in Austria in 1849. In Russia, the political and social influences of the nineteenth century worked more gradually. The peasants were liberated from serfdom in 1861. A constitutional order was set up only in 1905.At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many people were still alive in Russia who had been born in the years when serfdom was in existence — that is, before 1861 — and who remembered it, even if vaguely. Upon the change in the condition of the peasants in 1861 there followed a series of other fundamental reforms, judicial, fiscal, and military, the introduction of provincial and county assemblies, known as zemstvos, as well as of municipal self-government — the so-called "great reforms” of Emperor Alexander II. Taken as a whole, these created in Russia even before 1905, a practically normal system for a middle-class state of the period, but without centralized popular representation. The adoption of a constitution or the crowning of the structure, as it was then called, seemed to be an affair of the near future.Author: George VernadskyPublication Date 1931