Dimitri’s Reviews > The Russian Revolution > Status Update

The court and its bureaucracy both civilian and military were determined not to allow "society" to profit from the war to enhance its political influence. Deep in their hearts the entourage continued to regard Russia as the dynasty's private domain & to treat every manifestation of patriotic concern on the part of the population as "meddling".

The socialists thus entered the First & Second Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work & disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity. A new electoral law favored the propertied classes by using assets rather than legal status as the criterion of franchise, in the Russian tradition of integrating every independent institution into the state system.

*one of the misleading commonplaces in [Communist historiography] is that Stolypin reforms were meant to promote a class of Kulaks. They had the opposite purpose, to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury & exploitation.

"How succesful were his reforms?" Here Orlando Figes & other post-Soviet authors might be less undecided....

The agrarian unrest of 1905-06 had 2 consequences. Henceforth the Muzhik no longer looked to the Tsar to give him the land he coveted, but to the Duma and the liberal & radical parties. Second, the peasants of Central Russia succeeded in smoking out many landlords who, frightened of the assault on their property, disposed of their estates & cleared out. The peasantry was now the largest purchaser of land.

Thus before a Marxist movement had emerged, the theories of its founders were interpreted, with their sanction, when applied to an autocratic regime in an agrarian country, to mean a revolution brought about, not by the inevitable social consequences of mature capitalism, but by terror and coup d'etat.

The Russian liberals found leverage with the Tsar in this threat, but it was a gross miscalculation in the end.

The emergence of the People's Will (1879) marks a watershed in the history of the Russian revolution. For one, It established violence as a legitimate instrument of politics, enlightenment & persuasion were rejected as futile & even counterproductive. But even more important was the arrogation by the revolutionary intelligentia of the right to decide what was good for the people....

The monarchy governed Russia with the assistance of five institutions. The civil service, the security police, the gentry, the army and the orthodox Church.

Having in the early 1700s laid claim to the status of a European power, the requirement to match her Western rivals in military might & economic productivity forced the monarchy partially to dismantle the matrimonial institutions which had served it well as long as Russia had been essentially an Oriental power competing with other Oriental powers.