Account for the Political Situation in Russia on the eve of the 1905 Revolution.

by school_cool (student)

Russia’s political situation on the eve of the 1905 Revolution was very tense, conservative and hostile. Reasons for this were: the continuous Autocratic rule believing that the Tsar was in control of the empire by divine rights, the backwardness of Russia compared to Europe, the Industrial development in 1980 which brought the Growth and Population booms in the city towns and Russia’s overestimation of their military forces.

When in 1894, Tsar Alexander II died suddenly of kidney failure his son Nicholas Romanov succeeded him as Nicolas II (1894-1917). Like his father before him he ruled under the conservative Autocratic rule. However unlike his father, Tsar Nicholas was ill-prepared to be Tsar and payed little attention to the political and social status’s of Russia. This was the main reason of Russia's Backwardness compared to the modernized, democratic Europe in the 19th Century. Tsar Nicholas with the help of his mentor Pobedonostev, focused on a Conservative Empire where the Tsar had all power. However he found the Russian Empire hard to control as it was a huge land mass and was very multicultural - the main religions being: Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Islamic.

During Nicholas’s reign in the 1890’s there was a massive increase in industrial development. Witte, Minister of Finance believed that rapid industrial growth could only be achieved by a state intervention. He sustained and strengthened the Protectionist Policy and encouraged the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway. The Trans SIberian Railway network covered 31 940 miles of the Russian Empire. This led to the influx of peasants into the booming industrial cities. Despite the rapid increase of the population, the accompaniment of improvements in housing and infrastructure was not undertaken. So when the recession hit the Russian economy in ...

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By then the revolutionary opposition had begun to assume a more coherent form. In 1898 Russian’s various Marxist organizations came together to form the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Very Left wing) and in 1901 various groups who believed in the possibility of peasant reform came together as the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were the men of the majority and under the influence of Lenin and Trotsky were very left wing. This meant that they wanted to rapidly overthrow the Tsar. The Bolsheviks were the men of the minority and were less left wing. The leaders were Martov and Dan. Despite all these revolutionary groups uprising Tsar Nicholas still defended the Autocracy rule.

To increase the Tsar's popularity he thought it smart to enter in the Russo Japanese War. However Nicholas overestimated the naval and military capabilities of Russia and underestimated the Japanese. So when they sought out to fight for Korea the Russians un expectedly were losing. Nicholas’s refusal to withdraw troops from manchuria found Russia engaged in a war that they were ill prepared for. During this time the 1905 Revolution was undergoing.

All these factors led up to the eve of the 1905 Revolution in Russia and in 1917 Tsar Nicholas was overthrown.