Unhappiness In Russia

Unhappiness had been brewing in Russia for a long time, even back in 1861, after the Emancipation of the Serfs. Serfs had been freed thanks to tsar Alexander II's reforms, but even though they were technically free they were forced to keep working to pay off the debts that came along with their freedom. Emancipated serfs also didn't earn much, and they weren't allowed to do what they wanted with their allotted land. Although the Russian population grew immensely in the peasant class during this time up until the First World War, nothing else was keeping up with the sudden population boom. Industrialization was going slow, and the economy was doing terrible. The Russification forced on the people by Alexander II also created ethnic conflicts,
A massacre started, and a wave of strikes, unrest and peasant revolutions followed. Eventually Nikolai II created the October Manifesto, which promised constitutional reforms and the introduction of a parliament, or Duma. This didn't last long though, the people in the Duma disagreed with the tsar on several matters which led to Nikolai changing the voting system. The country was becoming more and more oppressive, but it also went through an intense stage of industrialization. Then came Pyotr Stolypin, which created reforms to try to calm down the unrest that was going on, although one way of calming everything down was executing all the opposition via the mobile courts. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, and his reforms were to be the last real reforms up until the February
They promised to be everything the tsar wasn't; they promised free press, free elections to the duma and several reforms. But they made the mistake of staying in the war. The citizens of Russia weren't happy with this decision, they'd been at war on and off for ages and they didn't want to fund it anymore. After prime ministers Kerensky's failed June offensive in 1917, the Russian army saw a complete collapse. During all this time Lenin has been gathering support from people all over Russia, and after this he escapes to Finland to avoid arrest, but his call for "peace, land and bread" gathered increasing popular support. The Bolsheviks used economic assistance from Germany to deliver propaganda, mainly through the communist newspaper Pravda. This all led to the Bolsheviks winning majority in the Petrograd soviet, which gave them legitimacy for the upcoming overthrow of the provisional