The majority of the population were peasants who produced wealth from the relatively unproductive way they farmed the land. Until 1863 many peasants were serfs who were owned by their landlords. By 1856 this ancient system was clearly holding Russia back There was only a tiny middle class which in other countries had been the driving force behind modernisation and industrialisation and the working class was inadequate both in size and skills to provide an industrial workforce.
The defeat in the Crimean War and the humiliation Russia faced in signing the peace treaty (Treaty of Paris 1856) made this situation clear. Russia needed to change, to modernise or she would decline. From the Tsar and his advisers to the intellectuals and revolutionaries some sort of change was looked for but the different groups would never be able to agree on what the change should be
Tsar Alexander II had recognised that the land needed reform and that serfdom had to go. The Emancipation of the Serfs 1861 and his other reforms were an attempt to reform Russia from above to allow the Tsar to provide the medicine Russia needed. The extremists, terrorists and revolutionaries did not agree and most of his reforms had not brought real signs of modernisation to Russia by the time he was killed by a terrorist in 1881.
Tsar Alexander III tried to keep a firm grip on social policy but allow experts like Sergei Witte to bring in dramatic economic reform.
Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) continued with the policies of his father but faced more social and political upheaval. Since he lacked real vision and was encouraged in his stubbornness by his wife Alexandria he continually missed opportunities to strengthen his own position and develop Russia. The opposition became more vocal and in some cases very violent. The Witte reforms began to fail and in the light of growing terrorist violence Russia went war against Japan in1904. The disastrous defeat and the spontaneous uprisings that followed (1905 Revolution) might have meant the end of the Tsarist system or real modernisation. Nicholas made some concessions but he was determined to keep autocratic control. Perhaps the energy and reforms of Peter Stolypin offered the Tsarist system the last hope of reform. In 1911 he was murdered and no one was able to prevent Russia joining in the First World War in 1914 against a nation with enormously greater economic and military resources.
The strains of war meant the death of the old regime in Russia but not the dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless group able to exploit the weakness of the Russian system and their inexperience with democratic institutions. In a simple appeal to the masses (Peace, Land, Bread) they managed to popularise a complex socio-economic theory of dialectical materialism. Once they had established themselves they created a dictatorship based on a scientific theory of society rather than the idea of divine right but it still fitted the Russian tradition of control from above. The fact that the dictatorship had scientific justification in some ways made it much more brutal. Added to this were the personal traits of some of the Communist leaders. Lenin created a dictatorial Russian structure based on pragmatism and a belief that the final goal was worth any sacrifice and Stalin was able to use this to establish the purest totalitarian state the world has yet known. Significantly, Lenin’s embalmed body was used to create a communist icon in a nation used to worshipping saints and holy men. In addition, the adoration of Stalin took on all the traits of the mythologizing about the tsar before the blood of the workers smeared his reputation in 1905. In the name of history’s great purpose the Soviet leaders became, as the Maoists like to say insultingly, “the new Tsars.” Communist doctrine held the idea that perfection was possible, but humans were fallible either as counter-revolutionary saboteurs eg. Kulaks and Wreckers, or as bourgeois anti-social elements. The party was founded on the idea of keeping it small and elite. A pure group which would establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and drive through the reforms. The purges of Lenin’s day were designed to purify the party, but the purges instigated by Stalin were designed to remove the revolutionary element from the party. The old debates had to end, the old Bolsheviks who had experienced alternative points of view would be removed in the Yezhovshchina of the 1930’s to be replaced with obedient servants of the party machine.
The turmoil and upheaval of the 1930’s did not lead to a complete collapse in Russia. This was probably only possible because order was maintained through terror. In 1941 it looked as if the Soviet regime would collapse in the face of the German invasion. But Russia won their Great Patriotic War and the victory of 1945 was used by Stalin to justify his actions of the 1930’s. By the early 1950’s it appeared as if Stalin was about to re-launch a new purge. “The Doctor’s Plot” seemed to contain the same elements of paranoia that had driven the state machine to mass murder after the murder of Kirov in 1934.
