HISTORY NOTES- Russia 1905- 1941

These are just some notes I have made for myself on the Russia unit we have been studying.
Dont know if they might be any use to anyone else, but thought I'd post them just in case! They don't include everything, but are a basic idea of what happened :smile:

Hope they help someone!

x x x

RUSSIA.doc52.2KB

Reply 1

Matthewsimpson

What board are you with? We don't need to know half of that stuff...And your notes are really detailed, are you going to remember all of that?

Reply 2

jelly1000

To the op: If you could post which board & spec your doing it would be v. helpful.

Reply 3

Spence3

This is great :biggrin:

Thanks

Reply 4

Miss Mary

Nice work!
I only wish you had posted it before... it would have been extremely useful to sit for my IGCSEs.
What book did you base your notes on?

Reply 5

Mia:x

Heyy, no prob!
ermm im sitting with AQA, and those notes are a mix of CGP, bitesize, and my school work

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oh and matthewsimpson, im going to try and remember it!

Reply 6

Dr. Blazed

I thought it may help if I made some slight alterations to the first paragraph:

- Before 1905, the Tsar had been supported by the military (they received power in society), the church (they believed the Tsar had been appointed by God, and were allowed to preach what they liked - this isn’t true! The Church were all but obliged to preach what the state demanded, punishment for not doing so could be severe e.g. persecution in the 17th century schism), the peasants (they referred to the Tsar as their ‘little father’ – not really true either: when conditions got rough, there had been massive uprisings which threatened the stability of the ruling classes e.g. those under Stenka Razin and Pugachev), the nobility (they would suffer under a new regime – not far off, but a significant minority – the intelligentsia - were interested in humanitarian reform, despite the threat of censorship and Siberian exile) and the Okhrana (secret police of the Tsar.) However, the autocratic power of the Tsar was out of date- the Romanov dynasty had been in power for over 300 years. New forces were threatening the monarchy, such as a middle class, an industrial working class – the middle classes and industrial working class were tiny in Russia until the 1920s. They had very little impact on threatening the power of the tsar, and Marxism. Russia had few roads, and was not industrialised. The workers e.g. in St Petersburg were poor and oppressed – as was the rural peasantry. The Bourgeois called themselves the Kadets – this was a political party made up of educated lower-ranked nobility and professionals supporting constitutional monarchy, not a general group of Bourgeois in the Marxist sense, and wanted Russia to have a constitution like England’s. Social Revolutionaries and the Marxists - split into the Mensheviks who wanted peaceful change and the Bolsheviks who wanted a revolution - committed acts of terrorism such as the murder of Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911 – and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. A new political ideology called Proletariat threatened the Tsar – this is slightly misleading: the ideology was Marxism, which called for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, i.e. a government controlled by the Proletariat, who were the urban working classes. Peasant villages were controlled by the ‘mir’, a local council who interfered with everyone’s business (careful saying that – the mir had been part of the fabric of Russian life for centuries and was supported by the peasantry) and had the power to decide whether a peasant was allowed to own or rent land. The growth of industry meant there was a large working population in the towns (not quite yet), but conditions were cramped and the workers were badly paid.

Reply 7

Oldspeak

actually, the first bit about how the tsar was supported by the peasants is partly true, as peasants were religious and were told by priests etc that the Tsar was wonderful. obviously this changed by 1905 when working conditions worsened.

Reply 8

Dr. Blazed

njain

I'm actually writing my thesis about Orthodox mythmaking under the Tsars, and in my opinion (for what it's worth), it's important not to be too black and white on this issue. The peasantry really couldn't see beyond the mir (which, incidentally, means both 'commune' and 'world') in the quotidian, and cared little for regime change and religion (von Herberstein's Survey of Moscow and Muscovy is good on this, if you're interested) as intellectual organisms - they wanted food, and that was it. Even by the time of the 1917 revolution, the majority of the peasantry weren't interested in anything more, in spite of abortive attempts by the intelligentsia to change that e.g. the khozdenie v narod in the 1870s.

Reply 9

Mia:x

any corrections obviously appreciated!

x

Reply 10

Nyghtshade

Wow... detailed. o0

One of our history teachers made notes for absoloutely everything we had to learn in our GCSE spec. All separated into topics, including a check list at the end of every topic. I've yet to print all, I dunno, hundred pages out. o0;

Reply 11

wickedpony

hey v.useful I am doing GCSE history and we have just finished learning the cold war and russia thanks for sharing :smile:

Reply 12

MystMan

This has been really useful on checking my own notes, with a little condensing this is perfect!I was wondering if there was any more we need on the Red/White Civil War? But thanks for this source, it's really helpful!

Reply 13

millieXXXXX

Haha your stuff is still useful 13 years later!!!! I thought the notes were particularly useful to remind myself of the whole topic before I started revising more and I could easily pull out key information to put on flashcards. Obviously you also need to add more information of your own from textbooks, videos or class notes but yeah I think its great that people can put their notes on here to help other students out, its a real time saver!

Also btw I'm doing CIE IGCSE history

(edited 3 years ago)