History activities  

Student: 
The Russian Revolution 

 
 
Activity # 1: What is a revolution? 
 
1- Individually invent a definition of REVOLUTION and give examples. 
 
2- Read source 1, "A Russian landowner to his servants" (1847) and answer 
the following questions: 
 
a) What social hierarchies appear at the source? 
 
b) What is the relationship between the landlord and the servant? 
 
c) What image of society appears in the text? 
 
SOURCE Nº1 
 
"I am your lord and my lord is the tsar. The Tsar has the right to give me 
orders and I must obey him, but not give them to you. In my properties I 
am the tsar, I am your god on earth and I must respond to God in 
heaven ... A horse must be rubbed first with the iron pillow and then 
brushed with the soft brush. I will also have to rub roughly, and who 
knows if I'll get to the brush. God cleans the atmosphere with thunder 
and lightning and in my village I will cleanse with thunder and fire 
whenever I consider it necessary. " 
A Russian landowner to his servants, 1847. 
 
3- Read source 2, Leon Trotsky, "On Everyday Life" (1923) and answer the 
following questions: 
 
a) What is the problem that the author of the text poses? 
 
b) What image of society does the source give you? 
 
SOURCE Nº2 
 
"Establishing the political equality of women and men in the Soviet state 
is perhaps one of the simplest problems. Establishing the economic 
equality of the worker and the worker in the factory, in the workshop, in 
the union, is a bit more difficult. But establishing the effective equality 
of men and women in the family is an incomparably more complex 
problem and one that requires immense efforts to revolutionize our 
entire way of life. And yet, it is clear that until the equality between men 
and women has been implemented within the family, we can not 
seriously talk about their equality in the production or even their 
political equality, because if a woman it is subject to family, cooking, 
cleaning and sewing, its possibilities of acting in social life and in the 
life of the state are reduced to a minimum. " 
 
León Trotsky​. "On daily life" 1923. 
 
4- Taking into account the previous responses re-invent, in groups, 
their definitions of REVOLUTION. The new definition has to account for 
the social changes that can be deduced from the sources worked. 
 
Activity nº2: Previous context 
 
 
a) What was the political, economic and social situation of Russia prior 
to the outbreak of the Revolution? 
 
b) What parties are forming as opposition to the existing political 
regime? What are your ideas, your proposals and main actions in the 
period? 
 
c) What was the 1905 Revolution? Develop causes, characteristics, 
reaction of the state and consequences. 
 
d) What were the Soviets? With what current socio-political organization 
can you compare them? Justify. 
 
 Activity nº3: Russian Revolution of 1917 
 
 
Below are different sources that correspond to the revolutionary 
period. 
Read them carefully and then with the help of the book or 
bibliographical material suggested by your teacher, answer the 
questions below each one. 
 
SOURCE N ° 1 
 
"(...) We are in the advantageous situation of a party that knows its path 
firmly, in the midst of the most unprecedented vacillations of all 
imperialism and the entire Menshevik-Eserita block (reformist socialists). 
Our triumph is sure, because the town is already on the verge of 
despair and we offer to all the people the safe exit (...) 
 
There are all the objective premises for a victorious insurrection. We 
have the exceptional advantages of a situation in which only our victory 
in the insurrection will put an end to the vacillations that have 
exhausted the people and are the most painful thing in the world; in 
which only our victory in the insurrection will immediately give the land 
to the peasants (...) " 
 
V. I. Lenin:​ Letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Social 
Democratic Labor Party, 13-14 September 1917. In Selected Works, 
Moscow, Editorial Progress, 1981. 
 
a) Why can two phases be identified in the revolutionary process? What 
characteristics did each one have? Who were the main protagonists in 
each phase? 
 
b) Investigate: who was the author of the source, in what year he wrote 
it, what role he fulfilled in the Russian Revolution. 
 
c) What are the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks? 
 
d) What was the provisional government? What measures do you take? 
 
e) Analyze the following sentence: "The provisional government 
represented by the Mensheviks failed, propitiating the formation of a 
double power and the political rise of the Bolshevik alternative." 
 
f) Select at least two sentences from the source and analyze them 
taking into account the differences between the phases of the Russian 
Revolution. 
 
 
SOURCE N ° 2 
 
DECLARATION OF RIGHTS OF THE WORKING AND EXPLOITED PEOPLE  
 
(Drafted by Lenin and included as a preamble to the first Constitution) 
The Constituent Assembly resolves: 
 
I. 1. Russia is proclaimed Republic of Soviets of workers' deputies, 
soldiers and peasants. All power, centrally and locally, belongs to these 
Soviets. 
 
2. The Soviet Republic of Russia is instituted on the basis of the free 
union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics. 
 
II. Its basic objective being the abolition of all exploitation of man by 
man, the complete suppression of the division of society into classes, 
the implacable crushing of the resistance of the exploiters, the 
establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victory of 
the socialism in all countries, the Constituent Assembly also resolves: 
 
1. The private property of the land is abolished. All the land, together 
with all the constructions, tools and other means of agricultural 
production, is proclaimed property of all the working people. 
 
2. The Soviet laws on workers' control and the Higher National Economy 
Council are confirmed, with the aim of ensuring the power of working 
people over the exploiters and as a first step for factories, workshops, 
mines, railroads and other means of production and transport pass 
entirely to be owned by the workers and peasants State. 
 
3. The passage of all the banks to the property of the worker and 
peasant State is confirmed, as one of the conditions for the 
emancipation of the working masses from the yoke of capital. 
 
4. In order to eliminate the parasitic sectors of society, mandatory 
general work is implemented. 
 
5. In order to ensure the full power of the working masses and eliminate 
any possibility of restoring the power of the exploiters, the armament of 
the workers is decreed, the formation of a red socialist army of workers 
and peasants and the complete disarmament of the possessing classes.  
 
a) What was the assault on the Winter Palace? 
 
b) Taking into account the following information: What were the first 
steps taken by the Bolshevik government? 
 
c) Who is affected by the measures mentioned at the source and why, 
which of these measures transform the pre-existing society? 
 
d) Taking into account what has been done up to this point and after 
reading pages 125 to 127 of your textbook, he explains the following 
sentence: "The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was an anti-feudal, 
anti-capitalist and socialist revolution" . 
 
e) Select those measures that mention the source that can be 
conceptualized in the following terms and justify your choice: 
 
 

 
  Anti-capitalist  Socialist measures 
anti feudal measures  measures   
 

  
 
 
       
 
 
 

 
f) Taking into account the previous table, make a comparison with the 
"Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen" of 1789. What 
differences you can identify between a bourgeois revolution and a 
socialist revolution. 
 
g) Observe the following map and then investigate: What was the 
Brest-Litovsk treaty? 

 
Activity nº4: Civil War 
 
a)  What  are  the  causes  that  lead  to  the  outbreak  of  a  Civil  War  in 
Russia? 
 
b)  What  armies  participated,  what  was  the  social  composition  of  each 
army like? 
 
c) What role did the imperialist powers play? 
 
d) What consequences did the Civil War have?