This upper class owned all the land and was dependent on the Tsar. They also dominated the army command and civil service:. The Tsarist legal system was designed to support autocracy and Tsarist authority.
It was also intended to suppress opposition and increase fear among the population:. A standard punishment for opponents of the Tsar was exile to the remote region of Siberia. Many thousands of people viewed as enemies of the state were sent to Siberia.
They were so far away that they had little chance of threatening Tsarist power. The Empire did not have an elected parliament and there were no elections for positions in the government.
There were no legal or constitutional methods by which Tsarist power could be challenged. The Tsar's will was enforced by a large police system that would report suspicious behaviour and destroy subversive groups:.
Tsars believed that they had a divine right to rule Russia, their position and power had been given to them by God. Along with his German-born wife Alexandra they were firm believers in the autocracy. However, he was a weak individual who found the daily work of a ruler boring. He also found it difficult to tell unpleasant news to people's faces. He preferred to write them a letter. Nicholas II was also distracted by the illness facing his son, Alexia the Tsarevitch , who was the heir to the throne.
Alexia suffered from haemophilia. As a result Nicholas would often spend his time looking after his son rather than dealing with the business of state. The Tsar chose his ministers. He could also remove them when he desired. They were often drawn from the members of the Royal family or nobility.
The civil service helped the Tsar run the Russian Empire, performing his will and maintaining his authority. While both cases saw the a partial introduction of capitalist principles, liberal economic values were not given much interest and in place was a deep fear of the impact on political stability.
The result was heavy constraints on the development of a free market in land and labor. The Russian empire was only characterized as an agrarian economy, but the USSR reached status of a major industrial power. The Brezhnev era saw rapid urbanization and the USSR was marked by universal signs of an industrialized society: shrinking low-status jobs and a sharp increase in high-status ones.
This satisfaction of limited upward mobility was a main cause of the stability of the Soviet system. Political stability in both empires before the s and in the s respectively depended on the ability of an authoritarian regime to create a climate of fear, inertia, and public disinterest in politics. Modernization and competition with the West required the opening up and thus, acquirement of Western values and mentalities.
Looking at the political history of imperial Russia, the effort to merge Western liberal principles with authoritarian tsarist traditions can be seen. The problem in the USSR was not a concentration of power at the top bur rather an obvious overgrowth of the intermediate link and the relative weakness of the lower and higher links. While economic reform raised the prestige and influence of the first and third levels, the second level was lowered.
Peasant conscripts made up the core of Imperial Russian military power. The Russian army gained great prestige for itself and for Russia as a whole by playing a big role in the allied defeat of Napoleon in In military and economic terms, Tsarist Russia only experienced a fragment of the great power that the Soviet Union held.
As was briefly mentioned before, Russia has the unique location of being the middle ground between Asia and Europe. Geography is one reason why Russian stands to some extent alone and isolated when compared with the history of other empires. This heartland was the same for both empires, centered on Moscow and St. Petersburg, making the geopolitical make-up quite similar. However, when geopolitical influence is considered, Tsarist Russia did not come close to match the control exercised by the Soviet empire.
Such a relationship is bilateral and normally beneficial, with mutual though different obligations. Under the Tsarist Empire, Russia was a vast size of a country. It stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean, earning its title as the largest country in the world.
Finland and most of Poland fell to its borders, as did the ancient Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia, and the Muslim emirates of Bukhara and Khiva. The demographic power also greatly differed between the two empires. The goal of Russian imperialism was state-building and security rather than driven by religious messianism. Conquest included the appointment of local elites into the Russian administration and bringing native laws and economic procedures in line with general Russian practices.
Despite not having a nationality policy, Tsarist Russia operated with an ever-present awareness of ethnic and religious distinctions. For example, tsarist officials considered Byelorussians and Ukrainians part of a greater Russian nation and thus, forcefully discouraged the use of the Slavic languages of the western provinces.
The Soviet state that emerged was both federative at least, in name and theory and based on ethnic political units. Nationalities like Jews, Armenians, Ukrainians, did indeed enjoy extraterritorial privileges such as having their own schools and operating in republics of other nationalities.
The expectation that concessions to the national principle would lead to the consolidation of ethnicity, rather than to its disappearance, was correct for the larger nationalities. The USSR was formed, based on, and ruled with a different ideology of replacing capitalism with socialism, and later communism. Thus, the core of the Soviet polity was the Communist Party. Tsarist Russia existed solely as an agrarian empire while the USSR underwent a massive industrialization that allowed for large-scale production and the status of a military and economic superpower.
The different geopolitical imperatives meant that the USSR exerted influence on a global-scale that Tsarist Russia did not, even though both empires incorporated huge territories in their rule. Despite the presence of similar characteristics in both empires, especially seen during their evolution, the USSR was not a clear continuation of the Tsarist Russia Empire and was a distinct Empire in world history. Fry, Michael G. Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy.
London; New York: Continuum. Hough, J. Washington DC: Brooking Institution. Both the crop and livestock system failed to withstand the Russian winters. During the Tsarist rule, the agricultural economy diverged from subsistence production to production directly for the market. Along with the agricultural failures, Russia had rapid population growth, railroads expanded across farmland, and inflation attacked the price of commodities. Restrictions were placed on the distribution of food and ultimately led to famines.
Agricultural difficulties in Russia limited the economy, influencing social reforms and assisting the rise of the Bolshevik party. While rural agrarian peasants had been emancipated from serfdom in , they still resented paying redemption payments to the state, and demanded communal tender of the land they worked. Increasing peasant disturbances and sometimes actual revolts occurred, with the goal of securing ownership of the land they worked.
Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, with 1. At the same time, urban industrial life was full of benefits, though these could be just as dangerous, from the point of view of social and political stability, as the hardships. There were many encouragements to expect more from life.
Acquiring new skills gave many workers a sense of self-respect and confidence, heightening expectations and desires. Living in cities, workers encountered material goods they had never seen in villages. Most importantly, they were exposed to new ideas about the social and political order. The rapid industrialization of Russia also resulted in urban overcrowding. Between and , the population of the capital, Saint Petersburg, swelled from 1,, to 1,,, with Moscow experiencing similar growth.
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