Tsarist Rule in Russia, 1905-14 » Russia in 1905: The Tsar and His Discontented People

Before you start

'Russia and the Soviet Union, 1905-24' is one of the five historical investigations in Paper 2 Section A. You study only one of the five, so work through these lessons only if this is one of your chosen options.

Tsarist rule: one man in charge

In 1905 the Russian Empire was the largest country in the world. It stretched from Poland to the Pacific Ocean. A census in 1897 counted about 126 million people, and the number was growing fast. It was ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, who had come to the throne in 1894.

Russia was an autocracy. The Tsar made the laws, chose and sacked his ministers, and commanded the army. There was no elected parliament to share his power, and political parties were against the law. Nicholas believed that God had given him this power and that it was his duty to pass it on unchanged. In 1895 he told a group of local councillors that their hopes of taking part in the government were 'senseless dreams'.

Nicholas was a devoted family man, but he was not a strong ruler. He found it hard to make decisions, yet the whole system depended on him.

Key terms:

• Tsar: the emperor of Russia
• Autocracy: rule by one person who holds all the power and does not have to answer to a parliament or to voters
• Okhrana: the Tsar's secret police
• Censorship: government control of what can be printed or said in public
• Zemstvo: an elected local council that ran services such as schools, roads and hospitals in the countryside (plural: zemstva)
• Russification: the policy of making non-Russian peoples use the Russian language and follow Russian ways

How the Tsar kept control

The Okhrana had been set up in 1881, after Nicholas's grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, was killed by a bomb. People it suspected could be sent into exile in Siberia, thousands of kilometres from home, without a proper trial. Censorship worked beside it: newspapers and books that criticised the government could be banned. With no free press, no parliament and no legal parties, people had no peaceful way to complain.

The Church was closely tied to the state. It was run by a body called the Holy Synod, and the official at its head was chosen by the Tsar. Most Russians were Orthodox Christians and many could not read, so the village priest was a powerful voice. The Church also ran many village schools.

This system could silence complaints. It could not solve the problems that caused them.

Reasons for discontent

By 1905 almost every group in Russia had a reason to be unhappy.

Peasants

About four out of every five people in the empire were peasants. Until 1861 about half had been serfs, which meant they were tied to a noble's land and could not leave. When they were freed they were given land, but they had to pay the government for it in yearly instalments called redemption payments. In 1905 they were still paying.

• Land hunger: the number of peasants grew quickly in the late nineteenth century, but the land did not. Each family's share became smaller. Peasants believed the nobles' large estates should be theirs.
• Backward farming: the land belonged to the village commune, called the mir, which shared it out in scattered strips. Most peasants still used wooden ploughs, so harvests were poor.
• Hunger: a bad harvest could bring disaster. A terrible famine struck in 1891-92, and poor harvests around 1901 led to peasant riots in 1902.

Industrial workers

In the 1890s the government pushed Russia to build industry fast. Sergei Witte, the finance minister from 1892 to 1903, used foreign loans to build railways, mines and ironworks. Peasants poured into cities such as St Petersburg and Moscow to find work.

• Hours were long. A law of 1897 set the limit at eleven and a half hours a day, and it was often ignored.
• Wages were low, and many workers lived in crowded barracks beside the factory.
• Trade unions and strikes were illegal, so workers could not bargain for anything better.
• A slump after 1900 brought wage cuts and unemployment.

Workers were only a small part of the population, but they were packed together in very large factories in the biggest cities, close to the centre of government. The Putilov engineering works in St Petersburg employed more than 12,000 people. This made protest easy to organise and hard to ignore.

The middle classes

As industry and towns grew, so did the number of bankers, factory owners, lawyers, doctors and teachers. They were educated and knew that Britain and France had elected parliaments. Some sat on the zemstva, but these councils dealt only with local matters and were watched by the Tsar's officials. The middle classes wanted an elected national parliament, free speech and laws that limited the Tsar's power. Nicholas refused to give way.

National minorities

Fewer than half the people of the empire were Russians. The rest included Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews and many others. The government's answer was Russification. Russian was made the language of schools, law courts and government offices. In Poland, lessons had to be taught in Russian. From 1899 Finland began to lose its right to run its own affairs. Jews were treated worst of all: most were forced to live in one western region, called the Pale of Settlement, and they suffered violent mob attacks known as pogroms, such as the one at Kishinev in 1903. Many minorities now wanted self-rule or full independence.

Defeat by Japan

Russia and Japan both wanted to control Manchuria and Korea in the Far East. In February 1904 Japan attacked the Russian naval base at Port Arthur and war began. Most Russians expected an easy win. It did not happen.

• Port Arthur surrendered in January 1905 after a long siege.
• The Russian army was beaten at Mukden in Manchuria early in 1905.
• In May 1905 the Russian Baltic Fleet was destroyed in the Tsushima Strait.

Russia made peace in the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905 and gave up Port Arthur.

The war made every existing problem worse. Supplies had to travel thousands of kilometres along the Trans-Siberian Railway, most of it a single track, so food and fuel ran short in the cities and prices rose. Some factories closed for lack of materials, and workers lost their jobs. Above all, defeat was a humiliation. It showed that the Tsar's government was badly led, and people of every class blamed Nicholas himself. Years of discontent became a crisis.

Exam-style question

Describe TWO features of EITHER Tsarist rule in Russia in 1905 OR the problems facing Russia's peasants in 1905. [6 marks]