February Revolution

In 1874, Jews were granted equal rights with other Russian subjects regarding universal conscription.

Yet during World War I until the February Revolution, Tsar Alexander II's law, which stipulated that Jews could not advance above the rank of petty officer, though it did not apply to military medics, was still enforced.

Under the Bolsheviks, the situation had changed radically, and during World War II, as the Israeli Encyclopedia summarizes, quote, compared to other nationalities of the Soviet Union, Jews were disproportionately represented among the senior officers, mainly because of the higher percentage of college graduates among them, end quote.

According to Arid's evaluation, quote, the number of Jew commissars and political officers in various units during the war was relatively higher than the number of Jews on other army positions.

Um, they struggled to control the court.

Um, I, I just did, I just did a, a, a lecture for, uh, uh, Radio Albion.

The entire church, with one or two exceptions, Russian Orthodox Church, either actively supported or was neutral, um, concerning the February Revolution They even called it the God-protected provisional government.

The Senate said this openly.

Its source is the hurt national feelings of the Russians.

The February Revolution established the equality of all citizens of Russia, including Jews.

The October Revolution went further with the natio- with the Russian nation proclaiming self-renunciation, a certain-" [laughs] Yeah.

Oh, jeez.

They remained under the Bolsheviks.

And in addition, the Bolsheviks in Kiev were supported by a sizable group of Jewish workers who retur- returned from England after they, February, uh, the February Revolution, and who now wholly, siding with the Soviet regime, took up the posts of commissars and officials and created a special Jewish squad of Red Guards.

Well, they didn't need to have a special s- squad of Red Guards.

Red Guards were Jewish.

You think?

[laughs]

The co-authors of the collection rightly warned Russians not to mix up the meaning of the February Revolution and the Jewish involvement in it.

Beekerman, if anything, minimized this involvement.

During World War I, he fought on various fronts against the Germans, Austrians, and Ottomans.

After the February Revolution, he became an elected representative of soldier committees, first for his regiment, then his division.

After October, he participated in some of the earliest fighting of the Civil War in the southern Don region.

However, he only officially joined the Communist Party in March 1919.

He was an active participant in the 1905 revolution.

During World War I, he returned from abroad to help rebuild Bolshevik organizations in Petrograd and Moscow, but he was arrested in 1916 and conscripted into the army.

After the February Revolution, Krylenko was an elected representative of various military committees and even of the First Congress of Soviets in June.

After October, he was the second of three commissars of military affairs of the Sovnarkom.

Its source is the hurt national feelings of the Russians.

The February Revolution established the equality of all citizens of Russia, including Jews.

The October Revolution went further with the nat- with the Russian nation proclaiming self-renunciation.

A certain-

The Russian revolutions of 1917 profoundly transformed the political situation in Transcarpathia.

It's interesting here that the Georgian politicians, Georgian Mensheviks, that is social democrats, They played a prominent role in the political leadership in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was renamed to, between the two revolutions, so the February Revolution and the October Revolution.

And two particularly important Georgian figures were Carlo Terese and Irakli Tsereteli.

But their influence, we can say, they were ousted after the Bolshevik October Revolution, which in fact was not a revolution, it was a coup d'etat by the Bolsheviks, which ousted all other political groupings, including the social democratic Mensheviks.

prominent Swedish and Danish social democrats, including Hjalmar Branting, who was the first Swedish social democratic prime minister from 1920, and also Thorvald Stavning, who became Denmark's social democratic prime minister a couple of years later.

They had already established contacts with Georgian social democrats in the years before the Russian Revolution through the fora that organized the Russian Menshevik congresses and other social democratic labor events that were held in different cities in Europe.

So the contacts were already there, and the engagement intensified after the February Revolution in 1917, when Georgian Social Democrats, the two I mentioned before, Carlo Cerizzi and Irakli Tereteli, became quite influential in the provisional governments that was established in February 1917.

So it was only natural that when Georgia became an independent state, there was a strong basis for developing these relations further.