Aside from the obviously important people like leaders or the opposition, there were also some other individuals who played notable roles in the unfolding of events in russia between 1855 and 1953. Below they have been grouped into which leader they were operating under – click on their names to learn more.
| Pre 1855 | Alexander II | Alexander III | Nicholas II | Lenin | Stalin |
| Nikon of Moscow | Catherine Dolgorukova Vasily Zhukovsky | Ismail Gasprali | Grigori Rasputin | Alexei Stakhanov |
Different groups of people
Another important factor to think about when looking at life in Russia pre and post revolution is how did the lives of the people differ based on their different identities – those who were rich obviously would have had a very different lifestyle to those whose families started out as serfs, just as how women would have had a very different experience from men, and those from different ethnic groups and religions would have all been treated differently.
History and treatment of the Crimean Tartars
The Crimean Tartars are an ethnic group made up of people of Turkic descent who are native to the Crimean Peninsula. They generally emerged as an ethnic identity some time between the 13th and 17th centuries
In 1855, when Alexander II came to power, Crimea was an area of intense political disputes. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire but gained its independence in a Treaty signed in 1774, but this independence only lasted until 1783 when Russia broke the treaty and annexed the area. A combination of the Crimean War, oppressive laws between 1860 and 1863, generally Tsarist policy, and then the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 meant that hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartar people left their homeland – 12,000 people left on allied ships and were branded traitors by the Russian government, and of the total 300,000 Crimean Tartars in the area, 200,000 emigrated elsewhere, and lots of them died in the process. Between the 1780s and the early 1900s, it’s estimated that 800,000 Crimean Tartars left Crimea; many of their decedents can be found in modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Crimean Tartar people seized the opportunity to form their own republic in Crimea, called the Crimean People’s Republic in December that year. This was the first Muslim democratic republic in the world. It was, however, very short-lived as it was quickly defeated by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. During it’s very brief tenure, the Crimean People’s Republic did publish the ‘Crimean Tartar Basic Law’ which convened a Constitutional Assembly, established a Board of Directors to act as a provisional government, and created a Council of National Representatives as a provisional parliament. It actually gained mutual recognition with the Central Council of Ukraine.
Things did not improve for the Crimean Tartars under Soviet rule either. In the Russian famine of 1921, more than 100,000 of them starved to death, and tens of thousands of them fled to Romania or Turkey. Even more of them were deported or killed between 1928 and 1929 under the collectivisation part of Stalin’s first five year plan. The same policies also led to another major famine between 1931 and 1933. Between 1917 and 1933, about half the population of Crimean Tartars (150,000 people) were are forced out of Crimea or just killed. In 1937, during Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’, many influential Tartar intellectuals were imprisoned or executed.
During the Second World War, even though there was a great number of Crimean Tartar men in the Red Army, Stalin ordered the entire Crimean Tartar population to be deported, mostly to Uzbekistan and other Central Asian areas. He justified this by saying that the existence of a Tartar legion in the Nazi Army meant that all the Crimean Tartars must be collaborating with the Nazis. Between the 17th and 18th of May 1944, 240,000 Crimean Tartars were deported from Crimea to other very distant parts of the Soviet Union. Anybody who escaped this would have been either shot on sight, or drowned. Some of them were sent to the Gulags to work as forced labourers.
After Stalin’s death in the 1950s, while other minority ethnic groups were allowed to return home under Khrushchev’s rule, the Crimean Tartar people were not and were forced to stay closely tied to Central Asia.