Key concept
Tsarist autocracy
A political order in which the Tsar claimed supreme, divinely sanctioned authority.
Why it matters: The defence of autocracy shaped the limits of reform and the legitimacy crisis of the Romanov state.
Language for analysis
Concepts
Use precise conceptual language to explain political authority, ideology, and social change.
Key concept
Marxism
A theory of historical and social change centred on class conflict and the transformation of ownership and production.
Why it matters: Russian revolutionaries adapted Marxist ideas to a largely peasant empire and debated organisation, timing, and leadership.
Key concept
Marxism-Leninism
Lenin’s adaptation of Marxist theory emphasising a disciplined revolutionary party and the political leadership of the proletariat.
Why it matters: It supplied a framework for Bolshevik strategy and later justification for one-party authority.
Key concept
Dual Authority
The unstable coexistence of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet after February 1917.
Why it matters: It explains why formal government power did not translate into uncontested practical authority.
Key concept
Soviet
A council representing workers, soldiers, peasants, or other constituencies.
Why it matters: Soviets became alternative centres of authority and a central part of Bolshevik political language.
Key concept
Democratic centralism
A principle combining internal discussion with unified obedience to adopted party decisions.
Why it matters: In practice it became closely connected to party discipline and restrictions on organised dissent.
Key concept
War Communism
The cluster of centralising economic policies used during the Civil War, including requisitioning and extensive nationalisation.
Why it matters: Its purpose and consequences sit at the centre of debates over ideology, emergency, coercion, and economic collapse.
Key concept
New Economic Policy
The mixed economic policy introduced in 1921 that restored limited markets while retaining state control of major sectors.
Why it matters: The NEP demonstrates compromise between revolutionary goals and the demands of economic and political survival.
Key concept
Continuity and change
A historical thinking concept used to judge what altered, what persisted, and how the scale and pace of change varied.
Why it matters: It prevents the assumption that a political revolution transformed every aspect of life equally or immediately.