Upheaval Traced to One Execution?
    

We continue Ian Frazier's article

   Points of theory nearly impossible to follow today caused socialist parties of different types to incubate and proliferate and split apart. 

   In 1887, Vladimir Lenin's older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, joined a plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Betrayed by an informer, Ulyanov was found guilty, and he died on the gallows, unrepentant. Lenin, 17 at the time, hated those who (turned on the family). From then on, the czar and the bourgeoisie were on borrowed time. 

   Nicholas II was the last czar. He seemed mild and benign, but after his troops killed hundreds of workers marching on the Winter Palace (in St. Petersburg) with a petition for an eight-hour workday and other reforms, fewer of his subjects thought of him as "the good czar."

   The 1905 protests intensified until they became the 1905 Revolution. The czar's soldiers killed perhaps 14,000 more before it was under control.

   In July 1914, the czar (rallied his subjects and entered) the First World War. Russia's attacks on the Eastern Front helped to save Paris in 1914. By 1917, (Russia) had lost more than three million men.

   Russian soldiers (were) disgusted with the weak czar and the German-born czarina, filled with anger at their officers, and enraged at corruption that kept them poorly supplied. The czar and the upper strata of Russian society insisted they stay in the war for national honor and for their allies. 

   But the soldiers and common people see the idiocy of the endless, static struggle, and the unfair share they bear in it, and they want peace.

Tomorrow: Nicholas II resigns, chaos ensues