The period of 1825-1917 was many things for the Russian Empire, but stable was not one of them. There were multiple internal contradictions of autocratic government and deep-seated problems within society that autocracy really could not handle.

Two tumultuous events highlight the deeper problems of imperial Russia: the assassination of Emperor Alexander II and the Revolution of 1905. Each of these events was only a reflection of significant structural flaws and contradictions. In the case of the "Tsar Liberator," his assassination counter-intuitively was the byproduct of his Great Reforms. This period of Russian history mid-century saw the abolition of serfdom, long a third-rail in Russian politics, and a limited opening up of Russian political life. Russia's defeat in the Crimean War eliminated much of the opposition to modernization and reform. Emancipation, the formation of Zemstva, and legal reforms all transformed the empire, but in a limited way. Alexander II would justify emancipating the serfs with the rationale that if the tsarist state did not do it, sooner or later the serfs would. Like many reforms from above, Alexander II's reflected a conservative approach to modernization, compromises with elites, and the biases of his own social milieu. Serfs were no longer serfs, but they became tied to peasant communes and still had a degree of state regulation of their movements. But they did stoke hopes for an even greater reform among youth and other intellectual types (this is the period that gives us the word intelligentsia from the Russian intelligent). Thus the Great Reforms both went too far and not far enough for Romanov autocracy. They created a short-term stability post-Crimea and enacted much needed reforms, but they alienated a large swath of the post-Reform generation by raising expectations and dashing them. Alexander II's assassin, Dmitry Karakozov presaged this larger alienation of inteligent from the state and this trend only grew over time. The pogroms initiated against Jews as revenge for the death of Alexander II, often initiated despite the state's desire for stability, also showed a degree of social fracturing.

The regimes of Alexander III and Nicholas II managed to preserve something of a veneer of stability into Russia in this time. But the archconservative policies of Alexander III made the alienation of intellectuals and reformers that had begun under Alexander II a permanent social fact of the late-Romanov empire. The modernization programs of Sergei Witte and the expansion of the empire meant that Russian society modernized and became more diverse in ways the Great Reform state structures could not accommodate. Nicholas I's earlier triad of "(Russian)Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Official Nationality" as one of the guiding Staatsidee for autocracy simply did not fit an empire that was growing more heterogeneous and of which only a minority of the population were ethnically Russian. Moreover, the Romanov's archconservatism was married to Russia's notions of great power status (in the memorable words of Dominic Lieven, Russia was the "t-rex of reaction") which hamstrung efforts to modernize the monarchy. By 1905, the Empire was a tinderbox waiting for the right spark to set it off. Economic strains of the Russo-Japanese War, a paranoid state security apparatus, and the post-Tsushima sense that the Romanovs were weak created the ideal conditions for a wide-reaching revolution in 1905.

Although the Romanov state survived 1905, albeit just barely by many historians' accounts, it did so by compromising with moderate elements within Russia's alienated political intelligentsia such as the liberal Kadets and enacting a series of hard counter-revolutionary actions including extrajudicial murder by the state-sanctioned groups like the Black Hundreds. This deeply contradictory mix of reformism and repression bought Nicholas II time, but pleased very few. One of the signs of this dissatisfaction was that the Romanovs' tight-hand minister Stolypin and the one who arguably did the most to save the monarchy after 1905, was loathed by virtually everyone in Russian political society ranging from the aged Witte to his own imperial master Nicholas II. Stolypin's constant proroguing of the Duma, an innovation of the post-1905 order, was a sign that even after 1905 that there was little room in a modernizing polity for the type of autocracy the Romanov's had pioneered a century earlier.