In 1962, President Kennedy delivered a speech in which he asked his audience to condense “the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century.” By this measure, “the printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago…the steam engine provided a new source of power.” Humanity is in the midst of a period of great technological creativity that has radically altered our way of life. As Kennedy warned, however, “such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old.”
While every country in the world has had to find its own way of coping with new social tensions created by modernization, few countries have had as much difficulty coping with modernity as Russia. Although it is now one of the most advanced industrial democracies in the world, it modernized only through a difficult and bloody process.
In the 19th century, the Romanov family ruled Russia much as it had for hundreds of years. The tsar wielded almost unlimited power over the mass of peasants as well as the few aristocrats and merchants. He alone could make war, tax, judge, and coin money because Russia did not have even a weak parliament like the Estates General in France. Indeed, even members of the aristocracy were, “slaves of the tsar.” Of all the nations in Europe, Russia began the 19th century as one of the most feudal and one of the least industrially advanced.
In contrast, Western Europe had changed significantly by 1800. There, advances in rights had facilitated industrialization and industrialization had, in turn, led to increased demand for more rights. Generally speaking, more progressive countries experienced little revolutionary violence as a result of this demand for more rights because they provided non-violent ways for the disenfranchised to effect change.
Countries that were more reluctant to allow the creation of non-violent methods of political expression, however, often experienced more revolutionary violence. Whether they achieved it by gradual reform or by revolution, however, most Western European countries their people far more rights than Russia allowed its people in 1800.
Most monarchs fought against these reforms, but because their power to impose their will upon society decreased as industrialization increased, they had little choice but to compromise. In Britain, for example, the power of taxation had long rested in the hands of Parliament, so the king had to be willing to compromise with Parliament if he wanted it to fund his projects.
By the 19th century, Parliament had gradually taken more and more power away from the king until it was the most powerful authority in the nation. At the same time, most other Western European countries had at least begun moving away from absolute monarchy in favor of a constitutional monarchy. France even went so far as to execute its king in 1793 and has, aside from brief periods of restoration, ruled as a republic or an empire for most of the time since that time.
In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia. Hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides and Moscow was burned to the ground before Napoleon withdrew. The fierce Russian winter claimed most of the rest of his army. By 1815, a coalition of European countries defeated Napoleon and forced him into exile. His failure to invade Russia had a significant influence on the way that Russia developed during the rest of the 19th century.
While Napoleon helped modernize many European countries by rearranging their governments and imposing rational systems of law, measurement, etc., his inability to conquer Russia left the Russian system intact. Perhaps Russia could have been spared many years of Communist rule if Napoleon had managed to conquer Russia just long enough to reorganize Russian society the way he did in much of Western Europe.
Even though Napoleon failed to conquer Russia, he helped influence the way Russians viewed legitimacy and the basis of government. His army brought with it not only weapons, but also ideas. According to Worlds Together Worlds Apart, “The autocratic tsars could no longer justify their absolutism by claiming that enlightened despotism was the most advanced form of government, since a new model, rooted in popular sovereignty and the concept of the nation (or the people), had taken its place.
For the first time, many Russians realized that the world had changed. Among European countries, Russia was one of the few that still had an absolute monarch. By this time, most of the people in Europe were nations of citizens, not the subjects of hereditary monarchs.
Aware that he could not claim divine right for much longer, but having no desire to see Russia become a liberal democracy, Tsar Alexander I had to devise a new sense of nationalism. Given the great ethnic, linguistic, and religious variation inside his immense kingdom, nationalism was as difficult a problem in Russia was in Austria-Hungary.
While most European nationalism was based on language or ethnicity, this would not work in heterogeneous Russia. Therefore, Alexander and his successors stirred patriotism by glorifying the war with the French and idealizing the ruling family as the embodiment of religious orthodoxy and Russian heritage.
Because this new ideological basis for legitimacy did not come with political reform, some groups within Russia were dissatisfied with it. Non-Slavic people living in newly conquered areas of the empire were not likely to identify with the new nationalism, so they had to be suppressed by a political police force called the Third Section. For very different reasons, some aristocratic military officers who had accepted Enlightenment ideas while studying in the West became dissatisfied with the absolute monarchy. Their attempt at overthrowing or at least reforming the old system failed, but it demonstrated that it was becoming harder and harder to keep dangerous Western ideas out of the country.
The problem of how to deal with Western ideas proved even more difficult after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war. The war demonstrated that the French and the British had far superior technology and more industrial economies that allowed them to project force further, faster, and more effectively than the Russians. Tsar Alexander II realized that Russia had to act quickly catch up with the West if Russia was to remain relevant in European politics. To that end, he initiated several “Great Reforms” to modernize the country by building factories, educating the populace, and emancipating the serfs.
While the reforms did help make Russia more economically and militarily competitive with its neighbors, they did more harm than did. As Russia industrialized, average people clamored for more rights as they usually do whenever a society begins the process of industrialization. Since Alexander II failed to provide an outlet for non-violent political expression, people became increasingly violent in their opposition to the absolute power of the state. The tsar suppressed this opposition to the best of his ability, but he found it increasingly difficult to do this. By the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Russia was ripe for revolution.
More so than most other countries in Europe, Russia experienced problems with modernization because of the way its society was structured. While it would have liked to embrace Westernization as a means of remaining competitive with other European countries, Russia could not manage to divorce Western technology from the Western ideas. Its attempt to procure 20th century technology while preserving a 15th century government failed for obvious reasons. It could forcefully suppress most opposition to the tsar for a time, but it could not stamp out all opposition forever. As more and more people became dissatisfied with the old government, it became increasingly difficult for the tsar to maintain control. Given that he had allowed no outlet for non-violent political expression, it was only a matter of time before social tensions with Russia built up to the point that they ignited a revolution.
