> How did capitalism impact the Russian Revolution?

How did capitalism impact the Russian Revolution?

Posted at: 2015-06-30 
I didn't answer this question for a long time, because it's a rather weird question.

You see capitalism per se can't cause or affect a revolution. Certain issues of a particular economic and political regime can.

Capitalism with industrial economy and practically non-existant social policies, as it was practised before XX century, created a large strata of people who worked 12 hours or more a day, didn't have any property and could barely survive on what they earned. That's what they call proletariat. Now these people had a very good reason to rebel.

Ironically Imperial Russia had a really small share of the proletariat since it was an agrarian economy. But inefficient political and economic system with the land crisis left a lot of people impoverished and created a pre-revolutionary situation. The final nail in the coffin was knocked after the WW1 began and ruined the country economy making all its problems even more severe.

At the other hand Russian Revolution with anti-capitalists coming to power and the Great Depression displayed that growing class of the proletariat was a potential threat. That made a lot of capitalist countries to implement social security measures: limiting the work hours per week, creating minimum wage systems of various types, introduction of obligatory pensions, medical insurance, free elementary education and so on - the actual set of measures varied from country to country.

Russia was the least developed of all the industrial economies of Europe (not that Russia is Europe but you get it). It was still mostly agrarian. So that right there should give you a hint that the Russian Revolution had not much to do with "the inherent contradictions of capitalism" as Marx calls them.

Ironically, the Revolution was to a large extent financed and made possible by rich capitalists from Wall Street and Germany in particular, who hated the Czar because he was the last monarch on the continent who wasn't a complete puppet of the banking system. Look up the names Jacob Schiff and Olof "the Red Banker" Aschberg for just two examples.

it didn't really make an impact in the Russian Revolution - no Russians were in it btw

people had to hand over their farms to the Communist state - if they didn't they were sent to Gulags or shot on the spot

Capitalism didn't figure at all ?

it was a bloodbath millions of Russian Christians killed

Not at all