Lecture 5. Reforms, reaction, and Revolution

(1855–1917) (4 HRS)

Introduction. Three czars –Russia’s last – ruled between 1861, the year the empire’s serfs were emancipated, and 1917, the year its monarchy was overthrown: Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94), and Nicholas II (1894–1917). As personalities, the three men were quite different.

Alexander II began his reign with the emancipation of the serfs, which was followed closely by the rest of an extensive program of change known as the Great Reforms, only to retrench later on. Alexander III came to the throne in the wake of his father’s assassination and immediately implemented a vigorous program of reaction and repression known as the counter-reforms, but near the end of his reign he instituted a comprehensive program of economic modernization. Nicholas II floundered as he drifted or was pushed back and forth. He continued his father’s economic program for nine years, and then fired its chief architect; reluctantly granted a constitution to stop a revolutionary upheaval, but then did all he could to reverse what he had done; and inaugurated visionary reforms – the vision came from the country’s prime minister, not its czar – to help the peasantry economically, but then changed his own electoral law to reduce the peasantry’s political weight. His one area of consistency was foreign policy – to his and his country’s tragic detriment. Nicholas followed an aggressive foreign policy that led Russia into two wars and was an inept leader in both of them. That unfortunate consistency contributed to a final crisis that was fatal to Nicholas himself, the Romanov dynasty, and the Russian monarchy.

It is a mistake to view that final crisis as somehow inevitable, whatever the virtues or defects of the last three czars. The revolution that brought down the Russian monarchy in March 1917 was above all the product of World War I. Between 1861 and 1914, the year World War I began, Russia made fundamental institutional changes and achieved enormous economic and political progress, albeit in fits and starts. The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s eliminated serfdom and significantly improved the country’s government. From the early 1890s until the outbreak of the world war Russia’s industrial development was extremely impressive. Efforts to raise agricultural production and improve the lives of the peasantry lagged, but after 1906 there were significant gains in those areas. In the wake of the revolutionary upheaval of 1905, which the monarchy barely survived, Russia gained a constitution and a parliament with limited but not inconsequential powers.

The country’s middle class grew rapidly. Russia’s overall situation was definitely improving, but its creaky social order was still vulnerable to powerful shocks, which World War I brought without letup until the breaking point was reached and passed.