Reasons for the Russian Revolution

Autocratic rule of Tsars: In 1914, the Russian emperor was Tsar Nicholas II. He
fought a number of wars to expand his empire in the north and west in Europe. He had
borne the expenditure of war by taxing the common people of Russia.

Conditions of Peasants: Majority of the Russians were agriculturalists. Major part of

the land was owned by nobles and clergy and these peasants worked as farmers on
daily wages. They were paid less and worked more and sometimes under debt, they
were not even paid wages.
Industries: Industry was found in certain areas Prominent industrial areas were St.
Petersburg and Moscow. Craftsmen undertook much of the production, but large
factories existed alongside crafts workshops. Foreign investment in industries
increased with the extension of Russia’s railway network.
Conditions of workers in the Industries: Most industries were owned by private
industrialists. Though the government supervised factories’ working hours and wages
of the workers, but still rules were broken. Women workers were also paid less than
men. Some workers formed associations to help members in times of unemployment
and financial hardships. ,

Formation of Socialist parties: All political parties were illegal in Russia before
1914. The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party was founded in 1898 by
socialists, who respected Marxist ideas. But because of government policies, it had to
operate secretly as an illegal organisation. It set up a newspaper, mobilised workers
and organised strikes.

Serfdom was a system where landless peasants were forced to serve the land-owning
nobility. Although the practice in most of Europe was ended by the time of the
Renaissance in the late 16th century, it was still being carried out in Russia well into
the 19th century.

It would not be until 1861 when serfdom would be abolished. The emancipation of
serfs would set off a chain of events that would lead to the Russian Revolution in the
coming years.

1905 Russian Revolution

The Industrial Revolution brought with a multitude of political and social changes.

The Industrial Revolution in Russia doubled the population in urban areas such as St
Petersburg and Moscow, putting a strain on the infrastructure of the cities and leading
to overcrowding and pollution. The result was a new level of destitution of the urban
working class.

The population boom did not have the food supply to sustain it in the long run, as
decades of economic mismanagement and costly wars lead to chronic shortages in the
vast country from time to time.
In response to this the Russian people, composed mainly of workers marched to the
winter palace of Tsar Nicholas II on January 22 1905.

When the huge crowd of people finally showed up the troops were intimidated by the
sheer size of the people present. Upon their refusal of the protestors to disperse when
told to, the Russian troops opened fire killing and wounding hundreds of the
protesters. This event was known as the Bloody Sunday massacre and would have
grave consequences for the Russian monarchy in the years to come.

The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers
responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country. The strikes further
threatened to cripple Russia’s already fragile economy. Left with no choice, Nicholas
II agreed to implement reforms, which would be known as the October manifesto.
But kept delaying them in order to not lose his grip on power. To this effect, he
dissolved the Russian parliament through which he had promised to implement
reforms.

Although nothing significant came out of the 1905 revolution, the events of Bloody
Sunday had alienated the Tsar from his people.

The February revolution began on March 8, 1917. Because Russia used the Julian
Calendar at the time it is known as the February Revolution. The Julian calendar date
of the revolution is given as February 23.

Bolshevik, (Russian: “One of the Majority”) member of a wing of the Russian Social-
Democratic Workers' Party, which, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized control of the
government in Russia (October 1917) and became the dominant political power.

The October Revolution was the second and the last major part of the Russian
Revolution of 1917. It is also known as the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social change in the Russian
Empire, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a
socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a bloody civil
war. The Russian Revolution can also be seen as the precursor for the other European
revolutions that occurred during or in the aftermath of World War I, such as the
German Revolution of 1918–1919.

The Russian Revolution was inaugurated with the February Revolution in early
1917, in the midst of World War I. With the German Empire dealing major defeats on
the war front, and increasing logistical problems in the rear causing shortages of bread
and grain, the Russian Army was steadily losing morale, with large scale mutiny
looming High officials were convinced that if Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the unrest
would subside. Nicholas agreed and stepped down, ushering in a new provisional
government led by the Russian Duma (the parliament).
Soviets held the allegiance of the working class, as well as the growing urban middle
class.

Initially the Bolsheviks were a marginal faction; however, they won popularity by
promising peace, land, and bread, to cease war with Germany, give land to the
peasantry, and end the wartime famine. Despite the virtually universal hatred of the
war, the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting to support its allies,
giving the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions a justification to advance the
revolution further. The Bolsheviks merged various workers' militias loyal to them into
the Red Guards, which would be strong enough to seize power

The Russian Civil War (7 November 1917 — 16 June 1923 was a multi-party civil
war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the overthrowing of the social-
democratic Russian Provisional Government in the October Revolution. It resulted in
the formation of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and later the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in most of its territory. Its finale marked the end
of the Russian Revolution, which was one of the key events of the 20th century.

The Russian monarchy ended with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the
February Revolution, and Russia was in a state of political flux. A tense summer
culminated in the Bolshevik-led October Revolution, overthrowing the Provisional
Government of the new Russian Republic. Bolshevik seizure of power was not
universally accepted, and the country descended into civil war. The two largest
combatants were the Red Army, fighting for the establishment of a Bolshevik-led
socialist state headed by Vladimir Lenin, and the loosely allied forces known as
the White Army, which functioned as a political big tent for right- and left-wing
opposition to Bolshevik rule. In addition, rival militant socialists, notably the
Ukrainian anarchists and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, were involved in conflict
against the Bolsheviks. They, as well as non-ideological green armies, opposed the
Bolsheviks, the Whites and the foreign interventionists. Thirteen foreign nations
intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied intervention, whose primary goal
was re-establishing the Eastern Front of World War I. Three foreign nations of the
Central Powers also intervened, rivaling the Allied intervention with the main goal of
retaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet
Russia.

The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army, fighting for the Bolshevik
form of socialism, and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army, which
included diverse interests respectively favoring monarchism, capitalism, and
alternative forms of socialism, each with democratic and antidemocratic variants.
The Mensheviks came to argue for predominantly legal methods and trade union
work, while the Bolsheviks favoured armed violence. Some Mensheviks left the party
after the defeat of 1905 and joined legal opposition organisations.

The volatile situation reached its climax with the October Revolution, a Bolshevik
armed insurrection by workers and soldiers in Petrograd that overthrew the
Provisional Government, transferring all its authority to the Bolsheviks.
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869 – 1916) was a Russian mystic and holy
man. He is best known for having befriended the imperial family of Nicholas II, the
last Emperor of Russia, through whom he gained considerable influence in the final
years of the Russian Empire.

Rasputin was born to a family of peasants in a Siberian village He had a religious

conversion after embarking on a pilgrimage to a monastery in 1897 and has been
described as a monk or as a pilgrim though he held no official position in the Russian
Orthodox Church. In the winter of 1904–1905, he travelled to Saint Petersburg and
captivated a number of religious and social leaders, eventually becoming a prominent
figure in Russian society. In November 1905, Rasputin met Nicholas II and his
empress consort, Alexandra Feodorovna.

In late 1906, Rasputin began acting as a faith healer for Nicholas' and
Alexandra's only son, Alexei Nikolaevich, who suffered from haemophilia. He was a
divisive figure at court, seen by some Russians as a mystic, visionary and prophet,
and by others as a religious charlatan.

Rasputin soon became a controversial figure; he was accused by his enemies of

religious heresy and rape, was suspected of exerting undue political influence over the
tsar and was even rumored to be having an affair with the tsarina. Opposition to
Rasputin's influence grew within the Eastern Orthodox Church.

‘Silver Age’ refers to the epoch of early and high modernism in Russian culture,
which began around the mid-1890s and was put to a rather abrupt end by the October
1917 Revolution. While the most fundamental feature of this time period is marked by
its idealist philosophical revolution – a trend Russia shared with other European
cultures – its most spectacular manifestation on the Russian scene undoubtedly
belonged to poetry and art. In less than a quarter of a century, Russia produced a
remarkable constellation of poets, quite a few of whom (Alexander Blok, Mikhail
Kuzmin, Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva,
Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky) stood at the world-wide cutting edge of
the poetic culture of their time. The very feeling of the era seemed to be saturated
with poetry: even those authors whose main talent and achievements lay in the
domain of prose – such as Andrei Bely, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius,
Fedor Sologub, and Ivan Bunin – made significant contributions to the poetic
landscape of the time as well.

The flowery name of the age was probably indigenous to the epoch itself, although it
never surfaced in documents of the time, perhaps because it was just too obvious to be
mentioned. It lay dormant in the collective memory for almost half a century, until it
surfaced almost simultaneously in two venues – in the title of critic Sergei
Makovsky’s memoirs, On the Parnassus of the Silver Age (Munich, 1962), and in a
line in Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero’ (first published in 1965) which mentions
‘the silver moon hovering brightly over the Silver Age’.
The 19th century is traditionally referred to as the "Golden Era" of Russian
literature. Romanticism permitted a flowering of especially poetic talent: the names of
Vasily Zhukovsky and later that of his protégé Alexander Pushkin

Other writers of the period, such as Griboedov, Lermontov, and Gogol, as well as
their heirs, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, form the links of this golden
literary chain. Their works have forever entered the classics of the world literature

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of

the Romantic era
He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet as well as the founder of
modern Russian literature

Pushkin’s first major verse narrative, the mock epic Ruslan i Liudmila dates from his
St. Petersburg period. Written in iambic tetrameter, the poem is a faux-fairy tale based
on medieval Russian history. Pushkin’s first major success, the poem also generated
controversy for its break with prevailing verse traditions. Soon after its publication,
Pushkin was sent into exile in southern Russia for his outspoken political views.
During the first years of his exile (1820-1823), Pushkin traveled to the Caucasus and
Crimea, writing lyrics and narrative poems that exhibited debts to his recent
discovery, in French translation, of the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

At the end 1823, Pushkin began work on his masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin (Eugene
Onegin). Written over seven years, the poem was published in full in 1833. In it,
Pushkin invented a new stanza: iambic tetrameter with alternating feminine and
masculine rhymes. The poem is also notable for its inventive and exuberant language
and social critique. The verse novel turned out to be autobiographical
like Pushkin himself, Onegin (the protagonist) gets involved in a duel, though Onegin
survives by killing his opponent, while Pushkin would die in a duel.
Though Nicholas I eventually released him from exile, Pushkin’s work was frequently
censored, his letters intercepted, and his status with the court remained tenuous until
his death.

Social realism is the term used for work produced by painters, printmakers,
photographers, writers and filmmakers that aims to draw attention to the real socio-
political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures
behind these conditions.

A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power
after the death of Lenin in 1924, characterised in painting by rigorously optimistic
pictures of Soviet life painted in a realist style.
Maxim Gorky, the founder of social realism, was a Russian writer who pioneered
literary style through his magnum opus, Mother. It is the story of the radicalization of
an uneducated, hard-working peasant woman who faces domestic assaults by her
husband.

Mother, the immortal classic of Maxim Gorky, one of the world's best-loved writers,
is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman. From her dull peasant
existence into active participation in her people's struggle for justice.

Mother predicts most of the characteristics of the Socialist Realism by Gorky. The
early decades of 20 th century witnessed radical changes such as Russian Revolution
that emancipated the working class from the clutches of Tsarist rule in Russia and
consequently established proletariat dictatorship.

In his novel, Mother Gorky portrays the life of a woman who works in a
Russian factory doing hard manual labour and combating poverty and
hunger, among other hardships. Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova is the real
protagonist; her husband, a drunkard, physically assaults her and
leaves her the responsibility for raising their son, Pavel Vlasov but he
unexpectedly dies. Pavel begins to emulate his father in his
drunkenness and stammer, but suddenly becomes involved in
revolutionary activities. Abandoning drinking, Pavel starts to bring
books and friends home. Being illiterate and having no political
interest, Nilovna is at first cautious about Pavel's new activities.
However, she wants to help him. Pavel is shown as the main
revolutionary character; the other revolutionary characters of the novel
are Vlasov's friends, the anarchist peasant agitator Rybin and the
Ukrainian Andrey Nakhodka, who expresses the idea of Socialist
internationalism. Nilovna, moved by her maternal feelings and, though
uneducated, overcomes her political ignorance to become involved in
revolution, is considered the true protagonist of the novel.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, short story writer,

essayist and journalist. Numerous literary critics regard him as one of the greatest
novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly
influential masterpieces.

Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political,
social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of
philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and
Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov
(1880). His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first
works of existentialist literature

Crime and Punishment is a novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1866. It portrays

the main character, Raskolnikov, as a young, arrogant, and indecisive young man who
is living in poverty. He decides to kill an elderly pawnbroker and pretends to want to
pawn his watch as a way to rehearse the crime. Then as he commits the deed, and
finally as he confronts the many consequences of his actions
The novel is a psychological analysis of the poor former student Raskolnikov, whose
theory that he is an extraordinary person able to take on the spiritual responsibility of
using evil means to achieve humanitarian ends leads him to murder. The act produces
nightmarish guilt in Raskolnikov.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828 – 20 November 1910. He is regarded as one

of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.

Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy's notable works include the novels War and
Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction
and two of the greatest books of all time. He first achieved literary acclaim in his
twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
(1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the
Crimean War. His fiction includes dozens of short stories such as "After the Ball"
(1911), and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Family
Happiness (1859) and Hadji Murad (1912). He also wrote plays and essays
concerning philosophical, moral and religious themes.

In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he

regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction
work Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus,
centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian
anarchist and pacifist His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal
20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi Martin Luther King

rd a train for Serbia to assist in the cause. Levin iAnna Karenina

The Oblonsky family of Moscow is torn apart by adultery. Dolly Oblonskaya has
caught her husband, Stiva, having an affair with their children’s former
governess, and threatens to leave him. Stiva is somewhat remorseful . Stiva’s
sister, Anna Karenina, wife of the St. Petersburg government official Karenin,
arrives at the Oblonskys’ to mediate. Eventually, Anna is able to bring Stiva and
Dolly to a reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, is courted by two suitors: Konstantin

Levin, an awkward landowner, and Alexei Vronsky, a dashing military man.
Kitty turns down Levin in favor of Vronsky, but not long after, Vronsky meets
Anna Karenina and falls in love with her instead of Kitty. The devastated Kitty
falls ill. Levin, depressed after having been rejected by Kitty, withdraws to his
estate in the country. Anna returns to St. Petersburg, reflecting on her
infatuation with Vronsky, but when she arrives home she dismisses it as a
fleeting crush.

Vronsky, however, follows Anna to St. Petersburg, and their mutual attraction
intensifies as Anna begins to mix with the freethinking social set of Vronsky’s
cousin Betsy Tverskaya. At a party, Anna implores Vronsky to ask Kitty’s
forgiveness; in response, he tells Anna that he loves her. Karenin goes home from
the party alone, sensing that something is amiss. He speaks to Anna later that
night about his suspicions regarding her and Vronsky, but she curtly dismisses
his concerns.

Some time later, Vronsky participates in a military officers’ horse race. Though
an accomplished horseman, he makes an error during the race, inadvertently
breaking his horse’s back. Karenin notices his wife’s intense interest in Vronsky
during the race. He confronts Anna afterward, and she candidly admits to
Karenin that she is having an affair and that she loves Vronsky. Karenin is
stunned.

Kitty, meanwhile, attempts to recover her health at a spa in Germany, where she
meets a pious Russian woman and her do-gooder protégée, Varenka. Kitty also
meets Levin’s sickly brother Nikolai, who is also recovering at the spa.

Levin’s intellectual half-brother, Sergei Koznyshev, visits Levin in the country

and criticizes him for quitting his post on the local administrative council. Levin
explains that he resigned because he found the work bureaucratic and useless.
Levin works enthusiastically with the peasants on his estate but is frustrated by
their resistance to agricultural innovations. He visits Dolly, who tempts him with
talk of reviving a relationship with Kitty. Later, Levin meets Kitty at a dinner
party at the Oblonsky household, and the two feel their mutual love. They
become engaged and marry.

Karenin rejects Anna’s request for a divorce. He insists that they maintain
outward appearances by staying together. Anna moves to the family’s country
home, however, away from her husband. She encounters Vronsky often, but
their relationship becomes clouded after Anna reveals she is pregnant. Vronsky
considers resigning his military post, but his old ambitions prevent him.

Karenin, catching Vronsky at the Karenin country home one day, finally agrees
to divorce. Anna, in her childbirth agony, begs for Karenin’s forgiveness, and he
suddenly grants it. He leaves the divorce decision in her hands, but she resents
his generosity and does not ask for a divorce. Instead, Anna and Vronsky go to
Italy, where they lead an aimless existence. Eventually, the two return to Russia,
where Anna is spurned by society, which considers her adultery disgraceful.
Anna and Vronsky withdraw into seclusion, though Anna dares a birthday visit
to her young son at Karenin’s home. She begins to feel great jealous of Vronsky,
resenting the fact that he is free to participate in society while she is housebound
and scorned.

Married life brings surprises for Levin, including his sudden lack of freedom.
When Levin is called away to visit his dying brother Nikolai, Kitty sparks a
quarrel by insisting on accompanying him. Levin finally allows her to join him.
Ironically, Kitty is more helpful to the dying Nikolai than Levin is, greatly
comforting him in his final days.

Kitty discovers she is pregnant. Dolly and her family join Levin and Kitty at
Levin’s country estate for the summer. At one point, Stiva visits, bringing along
a friend, Veslovsky, who irks Levin by flirting with Kitty. Levin finally asks
Veslovsky to leave. Dolly decides to visit Anna, and finds her radiant and
seemingly very happy. Dolly is impressed by Anna’s luxurious country home but
disturbed by Anna’s dependence on sedatives to sleep. Anna still awaits a
divorce.

Levin and Kitty move to Moscow to await the birth of their baby, and they are
astonished at the expenses of city life. Levin makes a trip to the provinces to take
part in important local elections, in which the vote brings a victory for the young
liberals. One day, Stiva takes Levin to visit Anna, whom Levin has never met.
Anna enchants Levin, but her success in pleasing Levin only fuels her resentment
toward Vronsky. She grows paranoid that Vronsky no longer loves her.
Meanwhile, Kitty enters labor and bears a son. Levin is confused by the
conflicting emotions he feels toward the infant. Stiva goes to St. Petersburg to
seek a cushy job and to beg Karenin to grant Anna the divorce he once promised
her. Karenin, following the advice of a questionable French psychic, refuses.

Anna picks a quarrel with Vronsky, accusing him of putting his mother before
her and unfairly postponing plans to go to the country. Vronsky tries to be
accommodating, but Anna remains angry. When Vronsky leaves on an errand,
Anna is tormented. She sends him a telegram urgently calling him home,
followed by a profusely apologetic note. In desperation, Anna drives to Dolly’s to
say goodbye, and then returns home. She resolves to meet Vronsky at the train
station after his errand, and she rides to the station in a stupor. At the station,
despairing and dazed by the crowds, Anna throws herself under a train and dies.

Two months later, Sergei’s book has finally been published, to virtually no
acclaim. Sergei represses his disappointment by joining a patriotic upsurge of
Russian support for Slavic peoples attempting to free themselves from Turkish
rule. Sergei, Vronsky, and others boas skeptical of the Slavic cause, however.

Kitty becomes worried by Levin’s gloomy mood. He has become immersed in

questions about the meaning of life but feels unable to answer them. One day,
however, a peasant remarks to Levin that the point of life is not to fill one’s belly
but to serve God and goodness. Levin receives this advice as gospel, and his life is
suddenly transformed by faith.

Later that day, Levin, Dolly, and Dolly’s children seek shelter from a sudden,
violent thunderstorm, only to discover that Kitty and Levin’s young son are still
outside. Levin runs to the woods and sees a huge oak felled by lightning. He fears
the worst, but his wife and child are safe. For the first time, Levin feels real love
for his son, and Kitty is pleased. Levin reflects again that the meaning of his life
lies in the good that he can put into it.

Nikolai Gogol is known for writing very influential short stories and plays. He is also
famous for his novel, "Dead Souls," which he wanted to write sequels for. His most
famous short stories include "The Nose," "The Overcoat," and "Christmas Eve."
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov 1860 1904 was a Russian playwright and physician who
is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright
produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers
and critics

In 1890, Chekhov undertook an arduous journey by train, horse-drawn carriage,

and river steamer to the Russian Far East and the katorga, or penal colony, on
Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. He spent three months there interviewing
thousands of convicts and settlers for a census. The letters Chekhov wrote during the
two-and-a-half-month journey to Sakhalin are considered to be among his best.

Chekhov avoids depicting the minds of his characters, instead letting the character's
mood or feeling communicate their inner state

He often incorporated a literary technique known as stream-of-consciousness, which

focused on the narrator's inner thoughts and feelings. Chekhov also popularized a
foreshadowing technique, later known as Chekhov's gun.

Anna Akhmatova is regarded as one of Russia’s greatest poets. In addition to poetry,

she wrote prose including memoirs, autobiographical pieces, and literary scholarship
on Russian writers such as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. She also translated Italian,
French, Armenian, and Korean poetry. In her lifetime Akhmatova experienced both
prerevolutionary and Soviet Russia, yet her verse extended and preserved classical
Russian culture during periods of avant-garde radicalism and formal experimentation,
as well as the suffocating ideological strictures of socialist realism. She was described
a “tragic queen,”
Akhmatova’s style is concise; rather than resorting to a
lengthy exposition of feelings, she provides psychologically
concrete details to represent internal drama.
Akhmatova’s second book, Chetki (Rosary, 1914), was by far
her most popular.
In Chetki the heroine is often seen praying to, or evoking, God
in search of protection from the haunting image of her
beloved, who has rejected her.

Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago is a novel by, Boris Pasternak first published in 1957 in Italy. The
novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and
takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II.
Owing to the author's critical stance on the October Revolution, Doctor Zhivago
was refused publication in the USSR. At the instigation of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli,
the manuscript was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, an event that embarrassed and
enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The novel was made into a film

The plot of Doctor Zhivago is long and intricate. Pasternak employs many characters,
who interact with each other throughout the book in unpredictable ways. he frequently
introduces a character by one of his/her three names, then subsequently refers to that
character by another of the three names or a nickname, without expressly stating that
he is referring to the same character.

Yury Zhivago, a man torn between his love for two women while caught in the
tumultuous course of twentieth century Russian history. Yury's mother dies
when he is still a young boy, and he is raised by his uncle Kolya. He enrols at the
university in Moscow, studying medicine. There he meets Tonya, and the two
marry and have a son, Sasha.
Yury becomes a medical officer in the army and is stationed in a small town. He
meets Lara, a woman whom he has seen twice before. The first time, he visited
the house of a woman who tried to commit suicide, and he saw Lara, the
woman's daughter, exchanging glances with an older man, Komarovsky. The
second time, Lara tried to shoot Komarovsky at a party and instead wounded a
prosecutor from the courts. Lara is married to Pasha, a young soldier who is
missing, and she has come west to find him. She has a daughter, Katya, whom
she has left in Yuryatin, her birthplace in the Urals.

Yury is captivated by Lara, but he returns to his wife and son in Moscow. Times
are difficult, and the family must struggle to find food and firewood. They decide
to move east to Varyniko, an estate once owned by Tonya's grandfather but now
being worked as a collective. The journey is long and difficult, but when they
arrive they find plenty of food and wood. Yury goes to the nearest city, Yuryatin,
to use the library. There, he sees Lara once more. They begin an affair that lasts
two months before Yury decides to break off contact and confess all to his wife.
On his way, he is captured by the partisan army, which conscripts him as a
medical officer.

Yury is forced to remain with the army through the end of the war between the
Tsarist Whites and the Communist Reds. When he is released, he returns to
Yuryatin to find Lara. The two spend several months together, and then they go
to Varykino to hide. Lara's former husband, Pasha, became a leader in the Urals
but is now wanted. Komarovsky returns and urges them to go east with him to
avoid being killed. Yury's family has been exiled to Paris, and he is promised the
opportunity to join them. Yury tricks Lara into taking her daughter and going
with Komarovsky, while he remains at Varykino.

Yury returns to Moscow and finds work. He begins living with Marina, the
daughter of a family friend. He and Marina have two children. Yury's old
friends Misha and Nicky encourage him to resolve his divided loyalties toward
Tonya and Marina. He finds a new job but on the way to his first day at work he
dies of a heart attack. Lara comes to the funeral and asks Yury's half-brother, a
lawyer, if there is any way to track the location of a child given away to
strangers. She stays for several days and then disappears, likely dying in a
concentration camp. Years later, Misha and Nicky are fighting in World War II
and encounter a laundry-girl, Tanya, who tells them her life story. They
determine that she is the daughter of Lara and Yury.

The Union of Soviet Writers, USSR Union of Writers, or Soviet Union of Writers
was a creative union of professional writers in the Soviet Union It was founded in
1934 on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1932) after
disbanding a number of other writers' organizations, including Proletkult and the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

The aim of the Union was to achieve party and state control in the field of literature.
For professional writers, membership of the Union became effectively obligatory, and
non-members had much more limited opportunities for publication. The result was
that exclusion from the Union meant a virtual ban on publication. However, the
history of the Union of Writers also saw cases of voluntary self-exclusion from its
cadre. Thus, Vasily Aksyonov, Semyon Lipkin, and Inna Lisnyanskaya left the Union
of Writers in a show of solidarity after the exclusion of Viktor Yerofeyev and
Yevgeny Popov in punishment for self-publishing.

Andrei Zhdanov gave the opening address to the first Soviet Writers' Congress in
August 1934, stating the "tendentious" purpose of literature as forming Marxist
ideology in the minds of Soviets and illustrating the centrality of ideologically-pure
literature to the Soviet and Stalinist project:

Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being "tendentious". Yes, Soviet
literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a
literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political

After the end of the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Writers was divided into
separate organizations for each of the post-Soviet states. The Russian section was
transformed into the Union of Russian Writers.
From January 1946 to December 1990 the Union published a journal titled Soviet
Literature Monthly.

Émigré Writers
As a result of Bolshevik rule, the literary tradition was fragmented. In addition
to official Soviet Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial literature existed.
First, a tradition of émigré literature, containing some of the best works of the
century, continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, unofficial literature
written within the Soviet Union came to include works circulated illegally in
typewritten copies works smuggled abroad for publication and works written “for
the drawer,” or not published until decades after they were written (“delayed”
literature). Moreover, literature publishable at one time often lost favour later;
although nominally acceptable, it was frequently unobtainable. On many occasions,
even officially celebrated works had to be rewritten to suit a shift in the Communist
Party line. Whereas pre-Revolutionary writers had been intensely aware of Western
trends, for much of the Soviet period access to Western movements was severely
restricted, as was foreign travel. Access to pre-Revolutionary Russian writing was
also spotty. As a result,Russians periodically had to change their sense of the
past, as did Western scholars when “delayed” works became known.
Of Russia’s five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature during the Soviet
period, Bunin emigrated after the Revolution, Boris Pasternak had his novel
Doctor Zhivago (1957) published abroad, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) had
most of his works published abroad and was expelled from the Soviet Union, and
Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) published all his collections of verse abroad and was
forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84) was clearly an
official Soviet writer. In the early years following the Revolution, writers who left
or were expelled from the Soviet Union included Balmont, Bunin, Gippius,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Kuprin, and Merezhkovsky. Émigrés also included the poets
Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) and Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958). Marina
Tsvetayeva (1892–1941), regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century,
eventually returned to Russia, where she committed suicide. Vladimir Nabokov,
who later wrote in English, published nine novels in Russian, including Dar
(published serially 1937–38; The Gift) and Priglasheniye na kazn (1938; Invitation to
a Beheading).