Revolutions of 1917-23
| Revolutions of 1917–23 | |
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| Part of the aftermath of World War I | |
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Bolshevik troops photographed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution
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| Date | 8 March 1917 – c. 16 June 1923 |
| Location | Worldwide mainly in Europe and Asia |
| Causes | |
| Goals | |
The Revolutions of 1917–23 were a period of political unrest and revolts around the world inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution and the disorder created by the aftermath of World War I. The uprisings were mainly socialist or anti-colonial in nature and many failed. Out of all the revolutionary activity of the era, the revolutionary wave of 1917–23 mainly refers to the unrest caused by World War I in Europe.
In war-torn Imperial Russia, the February Revolution toppled the monarchy while the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. The ascendant communist party soon withdrew from war with Imperial Germany on the Eastern Front and then battled its political rivals in the Russian Civil War, including invading forces from the Allied Powers. In response to Lenin, the Bolshevik Party and the emerging Soviet Union, anti-communists from a broad assortment of ideological factions fought against them, particularly through the counter-revolutionary White movement and the peasant Green Army, the various nationalist movements in Ukraine after the Russian Revolution and other would-be new states like those in Soviet Transcaucasia and Soviet Central Asia, through the anarchist-inspired Third Russian Revolution and Tambov Rebellion. By 1921, faced with a trade boycott organised by the capitalist countries, exhaustion and starvation, even dissident elements of the Red Army itself were in revolt against the communist state, as during the Kronstadt rebellion. However the attempt at the restoration of the old feudal property relations and the pogroms which followed the victories by the White movement, together with solidarity actions with the workers' republic by workers abroad (such as the English dockers) were amongst the factors which facilitated reconquest by the once isolated and near exhausted Red Army, and led to the eventual defeat of the Whites and the imperialist intervention. The years of fighting subsequently spilled over the borders of the collapsed Russian Empire, as the Bolshevik regime virtually directed the formation of states such as the Mongolian People's Republic. In this process of revolution and counter-revolution the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was born in 1922.
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