Russia is a big country, but like many other countries, it also has a dark side; The Communists. Lenin killed Tsar Nicholas II and his family and stole the country. A story most of the Russians aren`t proud of. The Communists was the worst terrorist organization ever. What they did was big crime.
The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 15 March 1917 as a result of the February Revolution ended 304 years of Romanov rule, establishing the Russian Republic under the Russian Provisional Government in the lead up to the Russian Civil War.
In 1918, the Tsar and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks and the 47 surviviors of the House of Romanov`s 65 members went into exile abroad. (If you are interested in that story you can watch it on Netflix).
Putin are interested in the history of the Tsar family called Romanov and want to celebrate what they started hundreds of years ago. What Lenin and his army did was crime and that is nothing to celebrate.
That`s why Putin in 2005 created Unity Day, also called Day of People`s Unity or National Unity Day in Russia which is a national holiday held on November 4.
It commemorates the popular uprising which expelled Polish-Lithuanian occupation forces from Moscow in November 1612, and more generally the end of the Time of Troubles and turning point of the Polish-Muscovite War (1605-1618).
The day`s neme alludes to the idea that all classes of Russian society united to preserve Russian statehood when there was neither a tsar nor a patriarch to guide them. In 1613 tsar Mikhail Romanov instituted a holiday named «Day of Moscow`s Liberation from Polish Invaders».
It was celebrated in the Russian Empire until 1917, when it was replaced with a commemoration of the Russian Revolution.
Unity Day was reinstitued by the Russian Federation in 2005, when the events of the year 1612 have been celebrated instead of those of 1917 every November 4 since. The day is also the feast day of the Russian Orthodox icon of Our Lady of Kazan.
The holiday replaced the Day of Accord and Reconciliation, established by former President Boris Yeltsin following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was itself a replacement for Revolution Day. Huh….what a mess.
President Vladimir Putin reestablished the holiday in order to replace the commemoration of the October Revolution, known as the Day of Great October Socialist Revolution during Soviet period and as the Day of Accord and Conciliation in post-Soviet times, which formerly took place on November 7.
Putin`s decision angered some sections of the public, particularly the Communist Party, who continued with celebrations on November 7. Putins`s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin took a limited action of changing the name of the holiday, by completely removing it. It goes back and forth.
So, after Lening and his criminal gangsters killed the Romanov family and overthrow the centuries -old monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The World`s first Marxist-Communist state. It became one of the biggest and powerful nations in the world until it collapsed in 1991.
The United Socialist Soviet Republic (U.S.S.R), was made up of 15 Soviet republics; Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Russia, Moldova, Rajikistan and Turkmenistan. They were occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth`s land surface.
Radical Leftists revolutionaries overthrew Russia`s Tsar Nicholas II and ended centuries of Romanov rule and that was the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Communists called the Bolsheviks established a socialist state.
The civil war started and it was a war between the Communists and the Capitalists. The Red Army was backed by the Bolshevik government. They defeated the White Army backed by a large group of monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.
The Bolshevik`s had a secret police called Cheka in a periode known as Red Terror. They carried out a campaign of mass execution against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia`s upper classes.
But Lenin past away in 1924 and Joseph Stalin came to power. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. Stalin transformed Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.
Stalin had a lot of plans, and focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industralization. Before World War II, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join colective farms.
People that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings, and hundreds of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were executed and their property confiscated. The Communists believed that consolidating individually owned farms into a series of large state-run collective farms would increase agricultural productivity. But the opposite was true.
The productivity dropped and this led to a devastating food shortages. Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. The U.S.S.R denied the Great Famine in many years.
The Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) is also known as «starvation» and «to inflict death,» claimed the lives of nearly 4 million people. That`s 13 percent of the population. At that time, it was many protesters, and like other Communists in this world, the dictator didn`t like that.
Stalin eliminated all opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and other public through his secret police. This is how a totalitarian policestate is working.
600,000 Soviet citizens were executed during the height of Stalin`s terror campaign known as the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938. Millions of people in Soviet were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps, also known as Gulags.
Soviet defeated Nazi-Germany at the end of World War II, but Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide. So what did they do?
In 1949, the United States, Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They formed an alliance between countries of the Western bloc and NATO was a political show of force against the U.S.S.R and its allies.
The Communists didn`t like that, so the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, and that started the Cold War.
The Cold War would persist in varous forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and it was a power struggle waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs.
But Stalin past away in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. He became Communist Party secretary in 1953 and premier in 1958. This is the man John F Kenndy had a lot of meeting with. Why? Khrushchev installed nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida`s coast in Cuba. He instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Khrushchev made a lot of refoms that made Soviet society less repressive. He criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents and took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, lossened artistic censorship and closed Gulag labor camps in a time called de-Stalinization.
Deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and neighboring China and food shortages across the U.S.S.R eroded Khrushchev`s legitimacy in the eyes of the Communist party leadership. Members of the Communist Party removed Khrushchev from office in 1964.
Later on, another communist party politician rose to power. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He introduced two sets of policies he hoped would reform the political system and help U.S.S.R become a more prosperous and productive nation. These policies were called Glasnost and Perestroika.
Glasnost was a plan for political openness. It adressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinìst repression, such as banning of books. Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
Perestroika was a plan for economic restructuring. Soviet Union began to move toward a hybrid communist-capitalist system. (This system is more like the system we see in China today). The communists created a committee called Politburo. They would still control the direction of the economy, but the government would allow market forces to dictate some production and deveopment decisions.
Gorbachev came to power only 6 years before Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It started in the 1960`s when the Communists Party elite gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens face starvation. Soviet citizens didn`t have basic needs such as clothing and shoes.
The divide between the extreme wealth of the Politburo and the poverty of Soviet citizens created a backlash from younger people who didn`t like the Communist Party`s ideology as their parents had. On top of that, Soviet faced foreign attack on the economy.
President Ronald Reagan isolated the Soviet economy in the 80`s from the rest of the world and helped drive the oil prices down to the lowest level. When the gas revenue dropped, the U.S.S.R began to lose its hold on Eastern Europe.
Gorbachev`s reforms didn`t work well and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. They started to lose control over the Soviet people and that was the beginning of a new movement in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.
In 1989, a political revolution started in Poland and that spread to other countries that led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. On Saturday it is 30 year since the destruction of the wall that divided Berlin physically and ideologically from 1961 to 1989.
By the end of 1989, the U.S.S.R had come apart at the seams. An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealled the Soviet Union`s fate by diminishing Gorbachev`s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin to the forefront of Russian politics.
In 1991, Boris Yeltsin rose to power, and served ass the president of Russia until 1999. Though a Communist Party member for much of his life, he came to believe in both democratic and free market reforms, and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first freely elected leader in Russia`s 1,000-year history. He became well known for railing against corruption and fired hundreds of lower-level functionaries.
Gorbachev`s Glasnost and Perestroika program had hoped to change but not destroy the Soviet Union, but he resigned on December 25, 1991, and 6 days later the Soviet Union officially dissolved and was replaced by a political weak Commonwealth of Independent State that Yeltsin had established along with his counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus.
With the Soviet Union out of the way, Yeltsin eliminated most price controls, privatized a slew of major state assets, allowed for the ownership of prive property and otherwise emraced free market principles.
Under his watch, a stock exchange, commodities exchange and private banks all came into being. As president, Yeltsin broke from his Soviet predecessors by generally supporting freedom of the press, permitting public criticism and letting Western popular culture seep into the country.
After surviving impeachment proceedings, Yeltsin disbanded the communist-dominated parliament in September 1993 and called for elections to a new legislature.
A new man came to power. Vladimir Putin rose to power when Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation on December 31, 1999. Yeltsin handed off power to Putin, his chosen successor and the last of his prime ministers, who granted him immunity from prosecution. Since 1 January 2000, Vladimir Putin has been Russia`s president. And he is very popular.
Putin is considered to be the most powerful leader in the world and his Unity Day is the beginning of a new era in Russia. Unity Day calls for tolerance between various ethnic and religious groups in the Russian Federation.
The Romanov family was backed by the Orthodox Church and so are Vladimir Putin. Lenin and his terrorist group of Communists killed thousands of priests and burned and bombed hundreds of churches in Russia. We can now see what values Putin stands for.
There are some pople that don`t like Putin, but they are few. And they are Nationalists. On the Unity Day they are marching in Moscow and it`s called «Russian Marches.» But the Nationalist marches have been losing popularity in recent years. Last year, only 400 people turned up and that is down from 25,000 in 2011.
Unity Day, held on November 4, was established in 2005 by President Vladimir Putin as a replacement for Soviet-era commemorations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
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