Late Tsarism in Russia

I'm back in school, after having completed my Bachelor's degree on September 1 (below).

Not much time off, but I've started a Master's program in history at the University of Edinburgh, which has an online program. The first class -- Ideology and Politics in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Space -- is a hybrid course taught online and via Skype in a classroom. So far so good. Here's my first discussion post for the course.

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I chose to answer these two questions together since I see them as inherently inter-related. In the mid-19th century, the Russian government under the Romanovs was still an absolute monarchy, although it was arguably moving in the direction of a more constitutional state. Since the idea of constitutional governance does not really catch on in Europe until the Enlightenment, it is fair to assess (briefly) Russia's evolution from that point. I had always believed that the Enlightenment more or less failed to influence Russia by virtue of Napoleon's failure there. However, as indicated by Edwin Bacon, the experience of Russian soldiers in Paris as occupiers in 1814 had the effects that Napoleon's invasion could not.[1] Before 1814, the primary reformer in Russia had been Peter the Great, but importantly, his influence was exerted even as he maintained an absolute hold on power. Perhaps the most appropriate comparison for Peter is the "enlightened despotism" of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Bacon's treatment of late 18th century/19th century Russia begins with Catherine the Great, so it seems appropriate to start there. Bacon notes that her reign was marked by an initial embrace of Enlightenment values that was undone by the anti-monarchism and regicide of the French Revolution, with the empress returning to censorship in its wake. The so-called Great Reformer, Alexander II, who came to the throne nearly sixty years later, is depicted by Bacon as a man torn from both sides, by radical revolutionaries on the left who thought his reforms insufficient and conservatives and but reactionaries on the right who sought to reverse their loss of both serfs and privilege. His assassination resulted in a reversion to severe repression under his son and grandson, Alexander III and Nicholas II, respectively, who ruled as absolute monarchs. Thus, it seems an easy conclusion to draw that Russia's monarchy had moments of development into a constitutional state that were erased under subsequent reigns in which the monarch or his/her successor reacted to revolutionary violence.

Oddly, it seems that it was only Nicholas II who reacted to revolution with anything other than repression, although it was certainly his first response. However, the longer-lived, quasi-reformist of establishing the Duma was increasingly undone by the tsar's prime ministers and the tsar himself, such that, by the time World War I began, the promises inherent in establishing the Duma seemed distant. The conclusion here is that Russia took two steps back for each step forward with regard to a more liberal system of government. Joshua Sanborn,[2] for one, argues that it ultimately took the war for the monarchy to dissolve, but he does not attribute the fall of the tsar to the usual factors of other writers. Instead, Sanborn sees the increasing disintegration of order at the front and in border areas as playing the primary role in the erosion of the tsar's authority. I tend to agree with him on this point.

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     [1] Edwin Bacon, Contemporary Russia, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2014), 16-17.

     [2] Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014).