In addition to this, another reason why there was not a widespread support for the Tsar is because he kept living and working conditions poor. We can tell this in source A because it says that in 1912, two hundred and seventy miners were shot dead during a strike. That was the year when there were over two thousand separate strikes held in Russia. As said before, people only strike when they are discontented; at the time, the country was 80% full of peasants so they were bound to ask for more pay and better conditions sooner or later.
Another reason why there was not a widespread support for the Tsar is because he relied on the Army to carry out orders a great deal. Whenever there was a problem, he sent out the army to kill people or damage their properties. This of course was not the correct way to deal with the situation. A great example of this is the event of ‘Bloody Sunday’. Five hundred marchers were killed and thousands more were wounded when they went to show Tsar Nicholas a petition about living and working conditions. This convinced many people that the Tsars were appalling leaders and more people wanted to start a revolution as said in source E.
Source E also shows that even the Duma was not happy with the Tsar and his government. The leader of the Octobrists, who was supposed to support the Tsar, wrote the source; but they were angry because the Tsar was not giving them enough power. The essayist is agreeing that the ‘actions of the government are making revolution more likely’ as they were making the wrong choices. He understands there is not faith at all in the government. As it is written in the point of view of part of the Duma, I feel this source is reliable.
However, despite all of this evidence, there are some people who did seem to support the Tsars after all. For example in source D, there is a diary entry by Tsar Nicholas’s sister. It was written on the day when Russia celebrated the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty. From the source,
Amy Wong Form: 10.1
it says that ‘crowds of peasants were wading waist-high in the water to catch a glimpse of Nicky’. This proof however, could be biased; noting the fact that the source was written by Tsar Nicholas’s sister. Also, the day it was in print was a day of celebrating. Most people were probably just celebrating the fact that they had a day off, not because it was supposed to be celebrating the Tsars.
Following on from that is source F, which is a photograph showing townspeople and peasants supposedly waiting to see the Tsar in Kostroma in 1913. Although that is stated, the people in the photo could actually have been taken at another event, celebrating or waiting for something else. There is not much evidence prove it is a photograph is of people waiting to see the Tsar.
In conclusion to all of this, it can be argued that there was and wasn’t a widespread support for the Tsar. Although most of the sources showed a negative support for the Tsar, for example in sources A, B C and E, a couple of the sources did show some support; that in sources D and F, and as the majority of the sources were indeed against the Tsars, I choose to believe that there wasn’t a widespread support for the Tsars, only a small population of Russia did support the Tsars before 1914.