Notes

RUSSIA 1881 - 1924 REVISION NOTES

These notes are divided into 5 “parts” that correspond to the 5 sections in the outline scheme of work.
Part one is essential to your understanding of parts 2 – 5 but will not be the focus of an exam question.
Consider each of the parts 2 – 5 to be the likely focus of one of the two questions in the exam, so revise with this focus in mind.

Part One - Background
I. Overview
Russia began in the thirteenth century as the area around Moscow, and had expanded geographically to cover over 20% of the world’s land surface by 1881, stretching from Poland in the west to the Pacific in the east. The population was just under 100 million, of whom less than half were technically “Russian”. While the western areas were far more populated than further east, culturally she was Asiatic as well as European.
Economically, Russia was backward and overwhelmingly rural so agriculture, particularly grain, was the mainstay of the economy. As well as feeding her own population, much grain was exported. Russia had immense industrial raw material resources (iron ore in the Urals, coal in the Donetz basin) but development of these was so far limited. Russia was slipping behind European production levels, although technology in cotton textiles was more modern and she was the world’s fifth largest producer.
The structure of society had changed little since 1800 despite the abolition of serfdom in 1861. There was still a strict social hierarchy in which the top “tiers” (10%) governed the rest, the bulk of which (80%+) were peasants. The middle class was small. Nicholas put “landowner” as his occupation in the 1897 census. He said “I conceive of Russia as a landed estate, of which the proprietor is the Tsar, the administrator the nobility, and the workers the peasantry”.
Politically, late nineteenth century Russia had more in common with medieval England than contemporary Europe, the Tsar owning all the land as his personal estate. Russian autocracy had a strong religious element, involving a mystical union between himself and the people who loved and obeyed him as a father and a god. As the embodiment of God on earth it was his mission to carry out God’s will unrestricted by any laws, parliaments or governmental systems. These ideas went back to seventeenth century Muscovy when Mikhail, the first Romanov, ascended the throne with the approval of the boyars (old, high ranking aristocracy), having “saved” Russia from the Poles and Catholicism in 1613.Directed by “divine inspiration”, the Tsar would rule in the best way possible. Nicholas II (1894 – 1917) was particularly keen on this view of Tsarism, seeking to revive seventeenth century Muscovite traditions and stressing his mystical links with the peasantry which the civil service got in the way of.
The other Tsarist tradition came from the time of Peter the Great (1682 – 1725) who had tried to systematise the Tsar’s powers according to legal norms. He had looked to the West for enlightenment, building up St. Petersburg as his capital (“the window on the West”), even going as far as to say that the Tsar had to obey his own laws or risk losing legitimacy. Nicholas II disliked this idea of a state bureaucratic machine, and sought to reinvent the myth of a popular aristocracy, where a “good” Tsar had every peasant’s interests at heart, but was occasionally thwarted by “evil” nobles or bureaucrats (hence the tradition of petitioning the Tsar directly for redress of personal grievances, something which continued under Lenin and Stalin).
For its survival, autocracy depended on the support of the nobility, the army and the Orthodox Church (more below).

Alexander III (1881 – 1894) and his son, Nicholas II, were the last two Tsars. They sought (unsuccessfully) to turn back the clock after the liberal reforms of Alexander II (1855 – 1881). Although Tsarism survived the revolution of 1905, such were the scale of its internal problems and the pressure from opposition movements (and then war) that it collapsed in 1917 to be replaced by a brief period of liberal democracy, and then a much longer period of Communism which only came to an end in the early 1990s.

2. The pillars which supported autocracy
a. the nobility – made up less than 10% of the population, but dominated the bureaucracy and army leadership. So many nobles were dependent on the state for wealth and employment in the bureaucracy that this prevented (unlike in W. Europe) the development of an independent landowning class which might have acted as a counter to the influence of the monarchy. Briefly it seemed possible in the 1860s that the civil service might be overhauled and opened up more to the middle class, but in the end this never happened and its chaotic incompetence was allowed to continue.
Many of the provincial (lesser) nobility not involved in the government were in serious economic decline even before they lost their serfs’ labour in 1861 (which is why there were so many state serfs, mortgaged by landowners to the state). The challenge of competing in a capitalist economy after 1861 was simply too much for many of them, especially those who failed to cut their spending to meet their new situation. Between 1861 and 1900, 40% of gentry land was sold to peasants and far more than this was being rented out to them. Russian literature of the period is full of references to the plight of these provincial nobles and their slow economic decline (Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard”, Gogol’s “Dead Souls”).
Those that did meet the economic challenge often became liberal “zemstvo men” who challenged autocracy by demanding an extension of the role of the zemstvas and seeking to get the peasantry actively involved in their activities. The refusal of the Tsars to allow this could push such potential supporters of Tsarism into becoming opponents – Prince Lvov is a classic example.