what are the outcomes of February revolution?
Answers
The Russian Revolution was the result of the very bad results Russia had been getting in WWI with the Germans. Alongside this, a growing tireness of the feudalist system the Russian Empire was built on, which favoured those at the top only. The working class (urban workers and peasants), who made up the majority of the population at the time, were especially tired of this, and in 1905 they attempted to stage a revolution under the red socialist banner, which failed but set the roots for future uprisings.
In Februray 1917, the Russian Republic was established immediately after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated (and then executed along his family and physician), in the territory of the fallen Empire. It had democratic ambitions but was short-lived and very, very weak and prone to factionalism from both, left and right-wing sectors from the Provisional goverment.
The triumph of the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (a faction from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which had split from the Minority, Mensheviks) in October of that same year put an end to the short-lived Republic and marked the start of the communist era in Russia, and immediatley afterwards a Civil War which lasted up to the early 1920s.
In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R) was established and founded as the first constitutionally socialist state in the world, and at first was a peasant backward state due to all the conflicts the new country had. Effectively, 80% of the population were peasants, the economy had collapsed, and was at first unrecognized by most of the world, including the United States (which, alongside the WWI Allies, intervened in the Revolution and Civil War on the side of the Mensheviks and Imperial government).
The U.S.S.R would have a massive impact in Russia, which under Iosif Stalin, after a bitter internal fight with Leon Trotsky, underwent massive industrialization and collectivization of agriculture.
Based on the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, by Marx, the land was redistributed among the poor peasants and a significant number of well-to-do peasants and landlords were executed and beaten to death by the Soviet state apparatus. Stalin established a centrally planned economy and used non-capitalist market methods to do this.
He also expanded the “katorga” labor camp system used by the Tsars and renamed it as “gulag”. The U.S.S.R under Stalin would achieve superpower status, widespread literacy, expanded women’s rights, free public healthcare and education, almost 0% unemployement, a victory over the Nazis in WWII, and the conquer of Eastern Europe.
This era also saw a big economic growth and was untouched by the Great Depression of 1929. This even led to Western scholars to look at the Soviet Union and have positive views on the socialist non-capitalist ecoonomy it had, at a time where capitalism was on the verge of being overthrown.
Fast forward to the present, the Soviet Unión doesn’t exist anymore, but its legacy to the Russian Federation, the successor state to the U.S.S.R. is inmense, leaving it as an industrialized country with lots of resources and technology for the nascent nation in 1992 and onwards. The CCCP, as it’s called in the Russian language, left its successor state a large sphere of influence on its former territory which would make Russia at the very least a regional power, if not a great power, whose status weights enough to challenge American hegemony.