Democracy in Russia (1900)
There were no prospects for democracy in Russian in 1914. Tsar Nicholas II believed he had the god-given right to rule over his country absolutely. His power to govern was reinforced by the strongest institutions in Russia, The Orthodox Church, The Army, and the peasant class. Even the Tsar's opposition unwittingly aided him in quashing all hope for democracy. While there were some small democratic institutions, they only helped reinforce the Tsar's belief that the people could never govern themselves. Embodied in Stolypin's reform's, these polices helped sustain the Star's rule until its eventual collapse. That couplep with the Tsar's policies of oppression, brutality, censorship, and class separation all helped him further in his goal to hold on to supreme power. The concessions he made to the people only served to further reinforce his right to rule. Nicholas II used repression, propaganda, the Orthodox Church, religion, migration, anti-Semitism, and war to help sustain what he believed to be his divine rule. Nicholas was educated by private tutors and the reactionary Pobyedonostzev. Alexander III gave his son little training in affairs of state, and Nicholas proved to be a charming but ineffective and easily influenced rule
The reformers hoped to create a new class of independent farmers who, as landowners, would be conservative in their politics and loyal to the tsar. (Hosking, 30)The military was mainly composed of peasants and the uneducated who populated the lower ranks of the enlisted, making up the vast majority of the army. As pacification progressed, Stolypin introduced land reforms, which began the transformation of the Russian countryside from the centuries-old communal system to a capitalistic farming structure. He also allowed peasants to enclose common land for private use if there was a 2:1 majority in the commune. The Russians considered themselves the sole defenders of the true faith. A series of quick Japanese victories, which astounded the world, culminated in the fall of Port Arthur, the victory of troops under General Oyama at Shenyang), and the destruction of the Russian fleet under Rozhdestvenski at Tsushima by Admiral Togo's fleet. It was an imperialistic conflict that grew out of the rival designs of Russia and Japan on Manchuria and Korea. The disastrous outcome of the war for Russia was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Without Stolypin, and his democratic views, there was no other way for the Tsar's rule to endure. BibliographyAnweiler,D Pipes, R. He was guided by the idea that the throne of the Romanovs should be passed on to his son as he had received it from his father: absolute and autocratic. By the end of 1905 revolutionary fervor was waning, and opposition to the monarchy was divided between the Bolshevik-led groups that wanted complete overthrow and those less radical factions that were willing to settle for the minimal constitutionalism promised by the tsar. After considerable manipulation of the electoral laws, a third Duma met with the tsar's grudging approval and served its full five-year term.
Common topics in this essay:
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university press 1997,
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