Czar Nicholas 2 Research Paper

Czar Nicholas II was at the front in February 1917, rallying his troops in World War I, when word arrived of a strike in Petrograd. (Russia’s capital city, St. Petersburg, was renamed Petrograd in 1914.) The czar’s aides in Petrograd assured him that the incident was minor and would end when the bitterly cold weather sent the protestors home. Instead, the strike spread, filling the streets with thousands of angry men and women. The Duma, Russia’s legislature, wrote to the czar that the situation was serious.
Czar Nicholas turned to the army to restore order. When it could not, he decided to return to the capital to deal with the crisis. However, the Duma knew what had to be done. Duma members met the czar’s train as it neared the city. They told Nicholas that the only way to restore order was for him to step down as czar. He tried to abdicate, or formally give up power, in favor of his brother, Mikhail.When Mikhail refused to take the throne, Russia’s monarchy came to an end.
Within days, news of these events reached exiled Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin in Switzerland. He quickly contacted German officials for permission to travel through Germany on his return to Russia. Germany and Russia were wartime enemies, but the Germans were eager to
Founded in 1898, the Social Democrats believed that Russia’s future lay with industrialization and a society built around the industrial working class. Their views were based on the theories of the radical nineteenth-century political thinker Karl Marx. However, the Social Democrats differed over how to apply Marx’s ideas to bring about a socialist revolution in Russia. This dispute split the party in 1903. One group, led by Lenin, took the name Bolsheviks, from the Russian word for “majority.” Several other groups that were by no means united became known as the Mensheviks, from the Russian word for