So I've just finished watching Episode 3 of Lucy Worsley's Empire of the Tsars which details the Romanov dynasty from it's inception in 1613 with Michael I being elected to succeed in leading Russia up until the fall of Nicholas II by the provisional government.
Specifically Episode 3 starts with Worsley about Alexander I's death, his brother, Nicholas I succeeding the throne & the decembrist revolt against the new tsar. Worsley is quick to say that the Decembrist revolt is also known as the "first russian revolution". Nicholas I's reign saw geographical expansion as well as economic stagnation & oppression. However Nicholas saw Russia through three wars which drained his economy & I presume the public morale especially with Russian defeat in the Crimean War.
Worsley makes it seem that by 1855, Nicholas had accepted defeat , almost as if he knew there was nothing he could do to make his people's opinions sway his way. The regal baton then gets passed to Alexander II whom Worsley states is seen in Russia as "The last great tsar" who implemented various reforms in numerous different areas of Russian society but is mostly famed for abolishing serfdom & earning the title of being the first Tsar to be assassinated. In Alex's decree that abolished serfdom, Worsley's says that one of the main reasons for the decree's enforcement was because of fear of revolution.
Worsley meets with Professor Alexi Miller, who discusses who the early revolutionaries were that were against Alex II & his reforms. Miller discusses a menshevik revolutionary called "Vera Zasulich" who tried to shoot government representatives. Miller states that at Zasulich's trial, sympathy was shown & she was essentially let off because the judge wasn't a fan of Alex's reforms.
Other revolutionaries known as "People's Will" assassinated Alex II. Alexander III, Alex II's son succeeds his father having seen what (little) liberty can do to a country reverts back to the old ways. Alex III created an "era of reaction" whereby it seemed liberty would be stamped out at any cost. Worsley makes the argument that Alex III's decisions were working well but she also states that every time he'd gotten rid of a revolutionary another popped up in their place.
Worsley then takes us to 1887 specifically the execution of five revolutionaries, one of whom was Aleksandr Ulyanov, the older brother of a guy that became radicalised by his brother's death, trying to do anything to fight Tsardom. This brother went under the pseudonym of Vladimir Lenin.
After Alex III came Nicholas II, a religious man who wanted to revert back to "traditional russian culture". Obviously that didn't work entirely otherwise he wouldn't have been pressured to abdicate in 1917.
So given all this context, Why did it over 90 years for a revolutionary group to take control of Russia when there were numerous scares & attempts before 1917? Why wasn't anyone strong enough to say "fuck you to tsardom before 1917 especially with all the toing & froing of the regal ideology towards their people?
Would it be fair to say that "Communism really wasn't anything special & merely was in the right place at the right time"?
Also, Does anyone have any reading recommendations for Russian society from 1825 - 1917 as Lucy Worsley's series has a strong a unnecessary (even though it's about them) focus on the Romanov's & only briefly touches on or completely skips events that were pivotal at this time? Thank you :)
I've been meaning to catch that series. Thanks for the reminder.
In the first place, we need to put the 19th C 'revolutionary' activity in perspective. While plagued by terrorists and assassins, there was actually little real threat to the Tsardom between 1825 and 1905. To understand why it's worth remembering Lenin's dictum that "it is only when the lower orders do not want to live in the old way and the upper orders cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph." And Lenin knew a thing or two about revolutions.
To start with the first half of that statement, the last real challenge to the Tsardom from below was Pugachev's revolt in 1773-74. The spectre of that rising continued to haunt Russia's rulers but there was no repeat of dissent on that scale until 1905. The Decembrist revolt was an isolated barracks insurrection and socialist attempts to 'go to the people' (khozhdeniye v narod) were miserable failures at the time.
It wasn't until the late 19th C that this began to change, particularly after 1864. The emergence of the zemstvo movement provided an outlet for the increasingly assertive bourgeois and professional classes, the famine of 1891 spurred this on further; resentment and land hunger continued to simmer amongst a peasantry that never quite reconciled itself to the settlement of 1864; and a whole new class came into existence at the end of the century as the new factories produced a working class.
By 1905 the autocracy was presented with a range of popular challengers that simply hadn't existed a century earlier.
At the same time the ability of the 'upper orders' to respond was increasingly on the wane. The key here was the reforms 1864. By abolishing serfdom the Tsardom also (inadvertently) freed much of the nobility from their role as the state's policeman. In lieu of direct noble control over the peasantry, the state's bureaucracy (land captains, etc) was hopelessly inadequate. At the same time, the establishment of zemstva, independent courts, peasant land societies, etc, further undermined Tsarist levers of control.
The irony of course is that this weakening of control occurred at the same time as Alexander III and Nicholas II tried to row back on reform. Unable to turn the clock back a century, they were highly unwilling to further advance popular participation in the state and clung to the autocracy's remaining privileges. Even in 1906, with the ink barely dry on the Fundamental Laws, Nicholas was looking to circumvent the concessions he'd been forced to give.
Thus the control of the Tsarist state over society was increasingly weakened by both the 19th C reforms and the inability to take these further. Even then it took a World War to finally destroy the last bastion of Tsarist authority - the Imperial Army.
This is not to say that ideology wasn't important or that assassinations had no impact. But there is a tendency (in both Western and Soviet histories) to view the Tsardom's fall as a product of a violent ideology (Marxism) meeting a violent intelligentsia; whence revolution. Instead I would view the fall of the Tsardom as fundamentally a product of its own weaknesses (accumulated over the previous century) being horribly exposed by the conditions of the early 20th C. This was an institution that was just very poorly equipped to deal with mass politics.
And in 1917 the Tsardom, supposedly the mighty bastion of European reaction, pretty much disintegrated with minimum resistance.
Recommended Reading
Peter Waldron's End of Imperial Russia and Governing Tsarist Russia are handy short works that examine the institutions of the Tsardom and ask why it fell.
For more in-depth survey's of the Empire's final century, you might try David Saunders' Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform 1801-1881 (emphasis on ideology) and Hans Rogger's Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution.