History of Russia (1894–1917)
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Under Tsar
During the 1890s and early 1900s, bad living- and working-conditions, high taxes, and land hunger gave rise to more frequent strikes and agrarian disorders. By 1914, 40% of Russian workers were employed in factories of 1,000 workers or more (32% in 1901). 42% worked in businesses of 100 to 1,000 workers and 18% in businesses of 100 workers or fewer (in 1914, the United States had equivalent figures of 18%, 47% and 35%, respectively).[2]
Politically, anti-establishment forces organized into competing parties, although political parties were not legalized until the
Alliance with France, 1894–1914
The central development in Russian foreign policy was to move away from Germany and toward France. Russia had never been friendly with France, and remembered the wars in the Crimean and the Napoleonic invasion; it saw Paris as a dangerous front of subversion and ridiculed the weak governments there. France, which had been shut out of the entire alliance system by Bismarck, decided to improve relations with Russia. It lent money to the Russians, expanded trade, and began selling warships after 1890. Meanwhile, after Bismarck lost office in 1890, there was no renewal of the Reinsurance treaty between Russia and Germany. The German bankers stopped lending to Russia, which increasingly depended on Paris banks.[3] In 1894 a secret treaty stipulated that Russia would come to the aid of France if France was attacked by Germany. Another stipulation was that in a possible war against Germany, France would immediately mobilize 1.3 million men, while Russia would mobilize 700,000 to 800,000. It provided that if any one or more of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy) mobilized their reserves in preparation for war, then both Russia and France would mobilize theirs. "The mobilization is the declaration of war," the French chief of staff told Tsar Alexander III in 1892. "To mobilize is to oblige one's neighbor to do the same." This set up the tripwire for July 1914.[4][5] George F. Kennan argues that Russia was primarily responsible for the collapse of Bismarck's alliance policy in Europe, and starting the downward slope to the First World War. Kennan blames poor Russian diplomacy centered on its ambitions in the Balkans. Kennan says Bismarck's foreign policy was designed to prevent any major war even in the face of improved Franco-Russian relations. Russia left Bismarck's Three Emperors' League (with Germany and Austria) and instead took up the French proposal for closer relationships and a military alliance.[6]
Imperialism in Asia and the Russo-Japanese War
Russia gained room to maneuver in Asia because of its friendship with
In 1900, China reacted to foreign encroachments on its territory with an armed popular uprising, the Boxer Rebellion. Russian military contingents joined forces from Europe, Japan, and the United States to restore order in northern China. A force of 150,000 Russian troops occupied Manchuria to secure its railroads. After the suppression of the rebellion, Russia did not withdraw its troops from Manchuria. Consequently, friction grew between Russia and Japan, and the latter opened hostilities at Port Arthur in January 1904, without any formal declaration of war.
In counterpoint to the Japanese strategy of gaining rapid victories to control Manchuria, Russian strategy focused on fighting delaying actions to gain time for reinforcements to arrive via the long Trans-Siberian railway. In January 1905, after several unsuccessful attacks which cost them 60,000 troops killed and wounded and an eight-month siege, the Japanese captured Port Arthur. In March, the Japanese forced the Russians to withdraw north of
Influence of agriculture
Russia's systems for agricultural production influenced the attitudes of peasants and other social groups to reform against the government and promote social changes. “At the beginning of the twentieth century, agriculture constituted the single largest sector of the Russian economy, producing approximately one-half of the national income and employing two-thirds of Russia’s population”.[7] This illustrates the tremendous role peasants played economically; thus making them detrimental to the revolutionary ideology of the populist and social democrats. At the end of the 19th century, Russian agriculture as a whole was the worst in Europe. The Russian system of agriculture lacked capital investment and technological advancement. Livestock productivity was notoriously backwards and the lack of grazing land such as meadows forced livestock to graze in fallow uncultivated land. Both the crop and livestock system failed to be adequate 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 a rapid population growth, railroads expanded across farmland, and inflation attacked the price of commodities. Restrictions were placed on the distribution of food and ultimately lead to famines. Agricultural difficulties in Russia limited the economy, influencing social reforms and assisting the rise of the Bolshevik party.
Revolution and counterrevolution, 1905–1907
The
The revolution of 1905, an unprecedented empire-wide social and political upheaval, was set in motion by the violent suppression on January 22 (
The outcome of the revolution was contradictory. In late 1905, Nicholas agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to issue the so-called
Those who accepted the new arrangements formed a center-right political party, the
The First Duma was elected in March 1906. The Kadets and their allies dominated it, with the mainly nonparty radical leftists slightly weaker than the Octobrists and the nonparty center-rightists combined. The socialists had boycotted the election, but several socialist delegates were elected. Relations between the Duma and the Stolypin government were hostile from the beginning. A deadlock of the Kadets and the government over the adoption of a constitution and peasant reform led to the dissolution of the Duma and the scheduling of new elections. In spite of an upsurge of leftist terror, radical leftist parties participated in the election, and, together with the nonparty left, they gained a plurality of seats, followed by a loose coalition of Kadets with Poles and other nationalities in the political center. The impasse continued, however, when the Second Duma met in 1907.
Stolypin and Kokovtsov governments
In June 1907, The Tsar dissolved the
Stolypin's boldest measure was his peasant reform program. It allowed, and sometimes forced, the breakup of communes as well as the establishment of full private property. Stolypin hoped that the reform program would create a class of conservative landowning farmers loyal to the Tsar. Most peasants did not want to lose the safety of the commune or to permit outsiders to buy village land, however. By 1914 only about 10 percent of all peasant communes had been dissolved. Nevertheless, the economy recovered and grew impressively from 1907 to 1914, both quantitatively and through the formation of rural cooperatives and banks and the generation of domestic capital. By 1914 Russian steel production equaled that of France and Austria-Hungary, and Russia's economic growth rate was one of the highest in the world. Although external debt was very high, it was declining as a percentage of the
In 1911 Stolypin was assassinated by
Historians have debated whether Russia had the potential to develop a constitutional government between 1905 and 1914. The failure to do so was partly because the tsar was not willing to give up autocratic rule or share power. By manipulating the franchise, the government obtained progressively more conservative, but less representative, Dumas. Moreover, the regime sometimes bypassed the conservative Dumas and ruled by decree.
Active Balkan policy, 1906–1913
Russia's earlier Far Eastern policy required holding Balkan issues in abeyance, a strategy
In spite of these careful measures, after the Russo-Japanese War Russia and Austria-Hungary resumed their Balkan rivalry, focusing on the Kingdom of
After Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia became a major part of the increased tension and conflict in the Balkans. In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War, but the putative allies continued to quarrel among themselves. Then in 1913, the alliance split, and the Serbs, Greeks, and Romanians defeated Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War. Austria-Hungary became the patron of Bulgaria, which now was Serbia's territorial rival in the region, and Germany remained the Ottoman Empire's protector. Russia tied itself more closely to Serbia than it had previously. The complex system of alliances and Great Power support was extremely unstable; among the Balkan parties harboring resentments over past defeats, the Serbs maintained particular animosity toward the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In June 1914, a
Russia at war, 1914–1916
At the outbreak of the war, Tsar Nicholas yielded to pressure and appointed
In the initial phase of the war, Russia's offensives into
Wartime agreements among the Allies reflected the Triple Entente's imperialist aims and the Russian Empire's relative weakness outside Eastern Europe. Russia nonetheless expected impressive gains from a victory: territorial acquisitions in eastern Galicia from Austria, in East Prussia from Germany, and northeastern Anatolia from the Ottoman Empire, which joined the war on the German side; control of Constantinople and the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits; and territorial and political alteration of Austria-Hungary in the interests of Romania and the Slavic peoples of the region. Britain was to acquire the middle zone of Persia and share much of the Arab Middle East with France; Italy—not Russia's ally Serbia—was to acquire Dalmatia along the Adriatic coast; Japan, another ally of the Entente, was to control more territory in China; and France was to regain Alsace-Lorraine, which it had lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, and to have increased influence in western Germany.
Fatal weakening of tsarism
The onset of World War I exposed the weakness of
After Russian military reversals in 1915, Nicholas II went to the front to assume nominal leadership of the army, leaving behind his German-born wife, Alexandra, government and Duma.
While the central government was hampered by court intrigue, the strain of the war began to cause popular unrest. Since 1915 high food prices and fuel shortages caused strikes in some cities.[8] Workers, who had won the right to representation in sections of the War Industries Committee, used those sections as organs of political opposition. The countryside also was becoming restive. Soldiers were increasingly insubordinate, particularly the newly recruited peasants who faced the prospect of being used as cannon fodder in the inept conduct of the war.
The situation continued to deteriorate. Increasing conflict between the tsar and the Duma weakened both parts of the government and increased the impression of incompetence. In early 1917, deteriorating rail transport caused acute food and fuel shortages, which resulted in riots and strikes. Authorities summoned troops to quell the disorders in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been called since September 1914, to Russianize the Germanic name). In 1905 troops had fired on demonstrators and saved the monarchy, but in 1917 the troops turned their guns over to the angry crowds. Public support for the tsarist regime simply evaporated in 1917, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.
Footnotes
- ^ Johnson, Robert Eugene (1979). Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century. Rutgers University Press. p. 120.
- ^ Joel Carmichael, A short history of the Russian Revolution, (1964) pp 23-4 online
- ^ Barbara Jelavich, St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814–1974 (1974) pp 213-220
- ISBN 9780802779106.
- ^ For more elaborate detail, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848–1918 (1954) pp 334-345
- ^ George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (1979),
- ^ Jackson, George D., and Robert James Devlin. Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Print.
- ^ "Subsistence riots in Russia during World War I - Barbara Engel". libcom.org. Retrieved 2015-08-15.
Sources
- The first draft of this article was taken with little editing from the Library of Congress Federal Research Division's Country Studies series. As their home page at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html says, "Information contained in the Country Studies On-Line is not copyrighted and thus is available for free and unrestricted use by researchers. As a courtesy, however, appropriate credit should be given to the series." Please leave this statement intact so that credit can be given.
- This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division.
Further reading
- Apostol, Paul. Russian Public Finance During the War (Yale U.P. 1928.)
- Badcock, Sarah. "The Russian Revolution: Broadening Understandings of 1917." History Compass 6.1 (2008): 243–262. Historiography; [1] History of Russia
- Barnett, Vincent. "Keynes and the non-neutrality of Russian war finance during World War One," Europe-Asia Studies (2009) 61#5 pp 797–812.
- Engel, Barbara Alpern. "Not by bread alone: subsistence riots in Russia during World War I." Journal of Modern History 69.4 (1997): 696–721. online
- Gatrell, Peter. "Poor Russia, Poor Show: Mobilising a Backward Economy for War, 1913–1917" in Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The Economics of World War I (2005) 235–275.
- Gatrell, Peter. "Tsarist Russia at War: The View from Above, 1914–February 1917" Journal of Modern History 87#4 (2015) 668-700 online, historiography
- Gatrell, Peter. Russia's First World War: a social and economic history (Longman, 2005) excerpt
- Haimson, Leopold H. The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914 (Indiana Univ Pr, 1979)
- Haimson, Leopold. "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917 (Part One)." Slavic Review (1964) 23#4 pp: 619–642. in JSTOR; Part 2 in JSTOR
- Hamm, Michael F. The city in late imperial Russia (Indiana Univ Press, 1986)
- Henderson, William Otto. Industrial Revolution on the Continent: Germany, France, Russia 1800–1914 (Routledge, 2013)
- Lincoln, W. Bruce. In war's dark shadow: The Russians before the Great War (1983), covers 1890–1914
- Lincoln, W. Bruce. Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution 1914–1918 (1986)
- Markevich, Andrei, and Mark Harrison. "Great War, Civil War, and recovery: Russia's national income, 1913 to 1928" Journal of Economic History (2011) 71#3 pp 672–703.
- Marks, Steven G. "War Finance (Russian Empire)" International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, 2014) online
- Menning, Bruce W. Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Indiana University Press, 1992)
- Miller, Margaret Stevenson. The economic development of Russia, 1905–1914: with special reference to trade, industry, and finance (1967)
- Offord, Derek. Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy. (Routledge, 2014), survey
- Pipes, Richard. Russia under the old regime (1974), survey
- Riasanovsky, Nicholas, and Mark Steinberg. A History of Russia since 1855-Volume 2 (Oxford UP, 2010).
- Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Russian Empire, 1801–1917. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) survey
- Shanin, Teodor. The roots of otherness: Russia's turn of century (Yale University Press, 1986)
- Skocpol, Theda. "State and Revolution," Theory and Society (1979) 7#1 pp 7–95.
- Smith, Stephen Anthony. Russia in revolution: an empire in crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford UP, 2016).
- Sontag, John P. "Tsarist debts and Tsarist foreign policy" Slavic Review (1968): 529–541.
- Thatcher, Ian D., ed. Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia (2006).
- Tian-Shanskaia, and Olga Semyonova, eds. Village life in late tsarist Russia (Indiana University Press, 1993)
- Todd, William Mills, and Robert L. Belknap, eds. Literature and society in imperial Russia, 1800–1914 (Stanford Univ Press, 1978)
- Wade, Rex A. The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge UP, 2000). excerpt
- Wood, Alan. The Origins of the Russian Revolution, 1861–1917 (Routledge, 2004)
Foreign policy
- Fuller, William C. Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914 (1998)
- Jelavich, Barbara. St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet foreign policy, 1814–1974 (Indiana University Press, 1974)
- LeDonne, John P. The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (Oxford University Press, 1997)
- McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011) excerpt and text search
- Nish, Ian Hill. The origins of the Russo-Japanese war (1985)
- Ragsdale, Hugh, and Valeri Nikolaevich Ponomarev eds. Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993) excerpt and text search
- Rawlinson, Henry, et al. Great Power Rivalry in Central Asia: 1842–1880. England and Russia in the East (Routledge, 2006)
- Reynolds, Michael. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918
- Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Decline Of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 (1958)
Primary sources
- Dmytryshyn, Basil. Imperial Russia: a source book, 1700–1917 (Dryden Press, 1974)
- Gooch, G. P. Recent Revelations Of European Diplomacy (1940), pp 151–211 summarizes memoirs of major participants
- Vernadsky, George, and Sergeĭ Germanovich Pushkarev, eds. A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917: Peter the Great to Nicholas I (Vol. 2. Yale University Press, 1972)