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Russian society

The setting

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was one of the great powers but it was universally regarded as backward by comparison with Britain, Germany, and France.

  • Economic terms: it had been late to emerge from feudalism (the peasants were freed from legal bondage to their lords or the state only in the 186os) and late in industrializing.
  • Political terms: until 1905 there were no legal political parties and no central elected parliament, and the autocracy survived with undiminished powers.
The autocracy was fighting a losing battle against insidious liberal influences from the West. After the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas ii established:
  • A national elected parliament, (the Duma).
  • Legalizing political parties and trade unions.
But the old arbitrary habits of autocratic rule undermined these concessions.

The setting

The society

Russia and the relatively advanced western regions of the Empire remained largely rural and nonurbanized. There were a handful of big urban industrial centres (St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Donbass, Warsaw, Lodz, Riga, Rostov). The peasants still held their land in communal tenure; and in many villages, the mir (village council) would still periodically redistribute the strips so that each household had an equal share.Before Emancipation of 1861, the peasants worked their strips of the village land, and they also worked the masters' land or paid him the equivalent of their labour in money. After the Emancipation, they continued to work their own land, and sometimes worked for hire on their former masters land, while making `redemption' payments to the state to offset the lump sums that had been given the landowners as immediate compensation.

The Society

The practice of departing for seasonal work was long-established. But it was becoming increasingly common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The urban working class was still very close to the peasantry. It was almost impossible to make a hard-and-fast distinction between permanent urbandwelling workers and peasants who worked most of the year in the towns. The main reason for the close interconnection between the urban working class and the peasantry was that Russia's rapid industrialization was a very recent phenomenon. First-generation workers, predominantly from the peasantry, formed a large part of the Russian working class. Russian industry was in some respects quite advanced by the time of the First World War. The modern industrial sector was small, but unusually highly concentrated.Some advantages: industrializing late, Russia was able to skip over some of the early stages, borrow advanced technology and move quickly towards large-scale modern production.

The Society

Russia's working class was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic.The strength of working-class revolutionary sentiment in Russia may be explained in different ways.: In the first place, limited economic protest against employers was very difficult under Russian conditions: economic strikes were likely to turn political. In the second place, the peasant component of Russia's working class probably made it more revolutionary rather than less. The Russian peasantry's tradition of violent, anarchic rebellion against landowners and officials was manifest once again in the peasant uprisings of 1905 and 1906.

The Society

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