On the Provisional Government, try
http://www.johndclar...t/R_Diary29.htm for a quick 'hit' of facts as you revise for the exam.
When the tsar's government was falling apart in 1917, the members of the Duma (his parliament) decided that they would have to take over. So they forced Nicholas to abdicate and set up a government to run the country without him.
They didn't intend this government to be permanent. They wanted to bring in a British-style democracy. So they organised elections for December 1917.
In the meantime, however, they tried to keep the government of the country going.
The word 'provisional' means 'temporary - for the time being, until you get a proper one' (e.g. a 17-year-old gets a Provisional Driving Licence' while he is waiting to take his test and get a Full Driving Licence). This was what the Provisional Government was meant to be - a 'caretaker' government.
That partly explains why it did so little.
If you check out its problems on the webpages above, you will see that it did virtually nothing to try to solve its problems. It carried on with the war, it didn't crush the Bolsheviks or the Petrograd Soviet - it even made the peasant give back the land they had taken from the nobles.
You see, it regarded itself as 'just holding the fort' until the proper Assembly took over in December.
Of course, by the time the elections had been held and the Assembly met, Lenin had toppled the Provisional Government and he closed the Assembly down.
On the Civil War, see
http://www.johndclar...t/R_Diary30.htm too for a quick 'hit' of facts as you revise for the exam.
In 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over, you have to realise that they represented a miniscule proportion of the population - they were the most extreme Communists (who were themselves only a tiny proportion of the population).
So it was only to be expected that there would be a war to try to get rid of the Bolsheviks.
So this great alliance of all kinds of anti-Bolsheviks got together to try to winkle them out - tsarists, and nobles who had lost their land, and middle-class supporters of the Duma, and Social Revolutionaries Lenin had thrown out of the Assembly, and mensheviks (moderate Communists who hated the Bolshevik communists as much as the tsarists did!), and Finns, and British, French and Americans (fed up that Russia had left the war), and Czech prisoners-of-war etc. etc. There were so many they were called 'the Whites', to sort of lump them all together, because they had nothing else in common.
And that, of course, was perhaps the main reason why they lost. The only thing uniting them was their hatred of the Bolsheviks. They hated each other, could not cooperate or coordinate their attacks. Yudenich fell out with the Finns, who went home. Denikin's officers (all noblemen and tsarists) simple got drunk. It was a shambles.
Meanwhile the 'Reds' (the Bolsheviks) were fanatical, and brilliantly (and heroically) led by my hero Trotsky (e.g. siege of Petrograd) - so they kicked a**e!
Help
Posted 31 May 2006 - 07:19 PM
) I know that the Reds won the war, they were the communists, but what I don't understand is why they won and who the Whites were(I know the British and French were involved) and why they lost.
xoxAshaxox, on May 31 2006, 09:19 PM, said:
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