RUSSIA AND JAPAN

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

CAUSES OF BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

• Lost a war to Japan and losing WWI
• Worker strikes had risen to over 180/year
• Large numbers of landless peasants
• Popularity of communist ideas of redistribution of property
• Tsar Nicholas II steps down 1917

VLADIMIR LENIN

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

• Russia destroyed by civil war
• Lenin allows free trade and private ownership
• Converts grain requisitions to a tax
• Effectively stimulates agricultural production to feed cities
• Stalin saw it as retreating from Socialism

JOSEPH STALIN

5 YEAR PLANS

• Fully centralized planning
• Abolishment of private farms to collectives
• Rapid industrialization to catch up
• USSR emerges from WWII as the only other superpower
• Political purges and famine

IMPERIAL JAPAN

INDUSTRIALIZATION

• Japan humiliated in the 1950s by unfair treaties
• End of shogunate brought rapid modernization
• Wanted to blend western advancement with eastern values
• Fukoku kyōhei
• Enrich the country, strengthen the military

EXPANSION

EMPEROR HIROHITO

HIDEKI TŌJŌ

ANTI-AMERICAN ORIGINS

• Rejection of racial equality clause
• Metal and oil embargo by US
• Tripartite pact with Germany and Italy