Problems in Nicholas II's Russia

Let's start with this passage from an old school tetbook aimed at 14-year-olds:

Ruling Russia

If you have analysed Source A, you already have a very simplified idea of what Traditionalists Used To Say (TUTS) about Nicholas II’s Russia. 

Modern histories, however, have revealed a different picture of things We Only Recently Discovered (WORD), and you can reveal what they are saying by clicking the orange arrows.

In what follows, quotes from school textbooks are marked with an asterisk (*); all other quotes are from academic historians. 

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

Basic accounts from BBC Bitesize

Old Bitesize - on the WaybackMachine

Photographs of Russia 1905-15 - huge collection

YouTube

Russia in 1900 - brief overview

Problems facing Russia in 1900

Old textbook account of the rule of Nicholas II

PJ Larkin, Revolution in Russia (1965)

Economy

TUTS:     The economy was backward, especially agriculture, which was unable to feed the growing population, leading to famine (the harvest failure of 1891-2 claimed 400,000 lives) and poverty. 

  WORD

• The economy was growing rapidly – particularly under the ‘catching-up’ policies of Finance Minister Sergei Witte (1892-1906) there were growth spurts in the 1860s, 1890s and 1908-13.  A State Bank had been set up in 1860 and significant foreign inward investment after Russia tied its currency to gold in 1897.  One historian describes the growth as “impressive”, another as “runaway economic modernization”.   

  The rural economy was also growing, albeit more slowly, and food production was exceeding the rapidly growing population and allowing exports; a rural bourgeoisie (the ‘kulaks’) was developing.  Standards of living were rising slowly across the board, and income inequality was lower than elsewhere in 1900 (and lower than today).  This very growth, however, caused social stresses, as communities were “torn out of their preindustrial rituals and routines” ... and as the developing classes developed ambitions. 

Peasants

TUTS:     Three quarters of the people were impoverished peasants – “tilling an allotment of land that was barely able to produce a subsistence” – characterised by deference and backwardness; though this was presented as a strength of the monarchy, because the peasants believed in the Tsar as their God-ordained ‘father’ – they were politically inactive, and not a seedbed for proletarian revolution. 

  WORD

• Although the abolition of serfdom in 1861 had favoured the aristocrats, it had given the peasants full civil and legal rights.  The 'redemption payments' levied on them to pay for their emancipation were small, and abolished in 1907.  Moreover, recent research has shown that peasant illiteracy made no difference to peasant unrest. 

  Peasant communities (the mir) worked together (and resisted together), were political astute, and often rebellious – the 1891-2 harvest failure & famine (before Nicholas II became Tsar) created significant anger and hostility, as well arrears of both tax and redemption payments.  

  The peasants were much more active in unrest than many textbooks acknowledge.  In 1902 the Socialist Revolutionary Party was founded, and played an active role in the 1905 revolution.  There was a wave of rural terrorism 1902-5.  Peasant unrest kept growing; there were 114,108 military  call-outs t peasant uprisings in 1909.

A cartoon published in Switzerland in 1900 by exiled opponents of Tsarism, showing a 'social pyramid' of imperial Russia.  You can see a similar 'wedding cake' here.

Workers

TUTS:     “There was little or no labour legislation; no trade unions; no rights of combination, assembly, strike or speech.  The working class, quite simply, had no rights.  The working day varied between ten and fourteen hours.  The textile workers in the Moscow region usually lived inside the mill itself, sleeping in the workshops.  Even in the case of the best-paid workers it was rare for a family to have the use of one whole room; several families would generally be crowded together in a single room.”  As a result, “socialism, communism, and anarchism progressively gained popularity in Russia”, leading to the 1917 revolution.

  WORD

• Although concentrated in a few industrial areas, the 3 million ‘workers’ constituted only 2% of the population.  Moreover, they were NOT hugely politicised – recent research has shown that they believed in ‘labourism’ (support for workers’ rights) rather than communism … though many joined in the 1905 Revolution, and hatred of the government increased as the government violently put down strikes and riots. 

  A side-effect of urbanisation, was what was called at the time ‘hooliganism’ – worsening after 1900 from drunkenness, cat-calling and vandalism, to demands-with-menaces and knife crime.  One historian believes this was a self-assertion of powerless people; another comments: “the old social order had irretrievably broken down but a new equilibrium had not yet been reached”. 

Aristocracy

TUTS:     “The nobles were rich and powerful.  [Just 700 nobles] owned a quarter of the land and lived a life of luxury, waited on by lots of servants”*.  “The strongest supporters of the Tsar’s autocratic rule were the nobility”*. 

  WORD

• The abolition of serfdom started the decline of the landed aristocracy.  1861-1905 aristocratic land-ownership fell by 41%, often as a result of bankruptcy.  Reform of the army and civil service increasingly closed that career to the nobles.  By the early years of the 20th century there was a pessimism amongst the upper classes, that their time was up; some blamed the Tsar. 

Church

TUTS:     “Most people were members of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Its priests told people it was a sin to oppose the Tsar.  The Church owned a lot of land, and the head of the Church was one of the Tsar’s ministers.”*  The head-quarters of the Okhrana (secret police) were in the St.  Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, linking it with the Russian Orthodox Church. 

  WORD

• In a population of 125 million in 1897, there were 14 million Muslims, 11 million Roman Catholics and 5 million Jews.  There were Buddhists in Mongolia and 3½ million Protestants in Finland.  The Tsar came to distrust the Church leaders and wanted to reform its dry ceremonials, preferring a more intimate, personal worship … and the Tsarina engaged with Rasputin’s mysticism.  To defend their position, the Church increasingly separated itself from the monarchy, and the Okhrana reported that the Church was undergoing “its own kind of revolutionary movement” in 1912. 

Government

TUTS:     The Tsar was an autocrat.  “There was a Council of Ministers – but these were nobles that he chose.  Opposition was illegal, and the Tsar used the Okhrana (secret police) to arrest and exile thousands of opponents”*.  There were 61,000 trials for political opposition 1906-1913, with 6,000 sentenced to hard labour, 29,000 to exile, and 214 to death. 

Russia was huge – it took a week to cross by train.  As well as 56 million Russians, it included 22 million Ukrainians, 8 million Poles (who rebelled in 1830 and 1863), and more than 100 other languages.  At best this made for “a creaky structure of power”, and at worst meant “it was next to impossible to formulate policies that could be applied consistently throughout the empire … the empire was overgoverned at the centre and under-governed at local level”.  Since everything had to go through the Tsar, decision-making was slow, and because ministers reported separately to the Tsar, it was uncoordinated and unchecked. 

“For all its immense territory and claim to great power status, the Russian Empire was a fragile, artificial structure, held together not by bonds connecting rulers and ruled, but by the bureaucracy, police and army”. 

  WORD

• Despite all this negativity, Russia WAS governed.  There was a burst of reforming laws in the 1860s, which created open courts, independent of the government; and zemstva (local councils) elected by local people, which looked after local government (these worked well). 

  Russia was an empire, governed as many 19th-century empires, with strong leadership at the head, but leaving local decisions to the existing rulers.  Historians are even re-visiting bribery, which was part of the way the Empire had always worked, and wondering how much it differed in practice from the ‘self-interested donations’ modern politicians are happy to receive from lobby groups. 

  The Okhrana was a small, though efficient, organisation, which successfully infiltrated and disrupted revolutionary organisations.  More than 40% of political arrests, however, were tried ‘administratively’ (in secret) and the historian JW Daly believes it was this secrecy, arbitrariness and unpredictability, rather than the suppression of terrorism, which turned the educated classes against the tsar’s government. 

Tsar

TUTS:     “Nicholas II, though full of good intentions, was a weak an obstinate ruler”*, “out of touch with the Russian people”*, whose father had declared him “a child, with infantile judgements”, and who found ruling boring (see Source B). 

The historian Bernard Pares write in 1939: “I have become quite convinced that the cause of the ruin came not all from below, but from above… The Tsar had many opportunities of putting things right ...  he did not.  The reign of Nicholas II had gone bankrupt of itself.” 

  WORD

• You will be able to decide on your own judgement of Nicholas as a ruler, and I will leave you to do so.  However, I will share what I wrote on this website in 2005: that there were huge problems in governing Russia, and significant weaknesses in his position … but the Tsar was still on his throne in 1913, and that has to say something.