The Russian Empire: 1721-1917 (Part I)

The Russian Empire, which lasted from 1721 to 1917, spanned an enormous territory of almost 14 million square miles (36 million sq km) across the eastern portion of Europe and the continent of Asia. Ruled by an autocratic government, with its capital at St. Petersburg, its 170 million people were of over 100 different ethnic backgrounds, comprised primarily of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The Empire was established during the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1694-1725) after Russia emerged victorious from the Great Northern War (1700-21) fought against the Swedish and Polish empires. With the majority of the population bound to serfdom, the Russian rulers attempted to modernize along Western lines, a policy that led to the freeing of the serfs in 1861 during the reign of Alexander II (r. 1855-81). Emancipation did not result in improved conditions for the peasant population and internal dissension continued to fester until the last Russian czar, Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), was forced to abdicate on March 15, 1917, during World War I. Attempts were made to form various Western-styled governments but these failed. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin, succeeded in wresting power from their political opponents and established the Soviet Empire.

The Russian Empire was the culmination of Muscovite Russia’s dominance over its neighbors in Europe and Asia, where, by the end of the 19^th century, only the British Empire was its rival in terms of size.  At the height of its expansion, the Russian Empire stretched across the northern portions of Europe and Asia and comprised nearly one-sixth of the earth’s landmass; it occupied modern Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Finland, the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), the Baltic Republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), and significant parts of Poland and Turkey.  The vast plains with few natural obstacles affected the Russian Empire’s expansion into Eastern Europe and, beyond the Ural Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean, and even into Alaska and California in North America.  However, with only a coastline on north of the Arctic Ocean, the Russian Empire continually searched for a warm-water outlet.

Peter the Great (r. 1694-1725) formally proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721, which lasted almost two centuries until Russia declared itself a republic on March 15, 1917.  In practice, the Empire started when Peter the Great became the sole ruler of Muscovite Russia in 1694 (his dim-witted half brother, Ivan V, remained co-czar but played no role in the government and died in 1696).  Peter enacted a series of reforms to modernize Russia in every aspect of Russian life along European lines– even relocating the capital from Moscow to a new city named after him, St. Petersburg.

Peter traveled to Europe to seek allies against the Ottoman Empire and to enlist European technical specialists into his Empire.  Although he was unsuccessful in forming a European alliance, Peter saw an opportunity to obtain a naval port in the Baltic Sea.  The result was the Great Northern War (1700-21) between Russia and Sweden with Peter emerging victorious and obtaining the Baltic territories for his Empire.  Besides securing a port with a direct link to Europe, Peter also reorganized Russian military, education, government, and even the nobility’s tastes, clothing, and customs after Europe.  By the end of his reign, Peter had transformed the Muscovite state into a European empire.

After Peter’s death in 1725, a series of undistinguished rulers – Catherine I (r. 1725-27), Peter II (r. 1727-30), Anna (r. 1730-40), Elizabeth (r. 1741-62), Peter III (r. 1762) – continued the cultural “Westernization” and expansion of the Russian Empire in a series of wars: the War of Polish Succession (1733-35), the war with the Ottoman Empire (1734-39), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63).  Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96) continued the southern expansion of the Russian Empire to the Black Sea and Crimea in the Russo-Turkish War (1768-74, 1787-91) and towards the west in the Polish Partitions (1772-95), which Russia acquired significant portions of Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland.

Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96) promoted the Enlightenment ideas in the Russian Empire until the Pugachev uprising (1768-74) and publication of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), where he attacked serfdom and autocracy.  By the end of Catherine’s reign, the Russian Empire, with its vast population, resources, and military, was one of the most powerful actors on the world stage.  However, the Empire had fundamental problems: a military that relied on coercion, a primitive economy based on serfdom, the inability to assimilate new minority nationalities, and a cultural divide between a Europeanized elite and a non-western population.

Catherine’s son, Paul (r. 1796-1801), succeeded her but was later overthrown in a coup because of his rampant corruption and reactionary response to the French Revolution. The ascension of Paul’s son, Alexander I, inaugurated a new century and history of imperial Russia. Once secured in power, Alexander I (r.1801-25) was defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and Friedland (1807).  However, in the War of 1812, Alexander’s military repulsed Napoleon’s invasion into Russia and advanced the Russian military into Paris.  After Napoleon’s defeat, the Russian Empire became one of the dominant powers of Europe, and Alexander played a leading role in the redrawing of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  This agreement among the major European powers granted Poland and Finland to the Russian Empire, as it continued to expand into the Caucasus, Turkey, and Alaska.

Alexander’s unexpected death in December 1825 led to a dynastic crisis, which provided an opportunity for a cadre of revolutionists to seize power with the goal to transform the Empire into a constitutional state.  On December 26, 1825, the Decembrists, as they were called, staged a rebellion that the government easily defeated.  Although the Decembrists failed, they became an inspiration to subsequent revolutionaries and gravely affected the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825-55).  As the new emperor, Nicholas I drove dissent underground with his secret police, censorship of the press, and new educational program of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality.

This policy of Russification was not only an attempt to assimilate the newly acquired non-Russian subjects into the Russian Empire, but also sparked a debate among the Russian intelligentsia about Russia’s role and place in the world.  There were two sets of thinkers who addressed these questions: the Westerners and the Slavophiles.  The Westerners were atheists, interpreted Peter the Great as an agent of radical change, and desired to destroy the entire political system and replace it with a new one modeled after Europe.  Opposing them were the Slavophiles, who were Orthodox Christians, sought a return to a pre-Petrine Russian past, and wanted to retain the basic political structure but reform and replace certain aspects of it.  Although this debate primarily was among elites, it influenced all subsequent philosophical, social, and political thought in the Empire.

In addition to these polemical debates, the 19^th and early 20^th centuries saw a flourishing of Russian culture, especially in science, literature, and music.  The Academy of Science and other institutions of higher learning developed science and scholarship in Russia, with outstanding achievements in mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, and psychology.  Poets like Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Alexander Blok (1880-1921), and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) reflected a new refinement and maturity in Russian culture; and writers such as Nikolai Gogol (1809-52), Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Maksim Gorky (1868-1936), and Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) left an indelible mark on both Russian and western culture.  Russian composers also had a tremendous impact on western music – Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-81), Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), Alexander Borodin (1833-87), Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-93), Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) – as well as on Russian ballet, eventually set the standard for classical dance in the western world.

Because of its crucial role in the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815, the Russian Empire was the dominant actor on continental Europe and rolled back political reform and revolutions.  In reaction to the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe demanding constitutionalism, Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) suppressed uprisings in Hungary, urged Prussia not to accept a liberal constitution, and reduced Poland to a state of a Russian province.  Nicholas I seemed to dominate Europe, but this illusion was shattered with Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1854-55).  The Russian Empire had waged a series of successful wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1828 and 1829 and declared war again in 1853.  Fearing that Russia could secure naval access through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, Great Britain and France joined the Ottomans in their defense and landed at Crimea to lay siege to the Russian base at Sevastopol.  The fall of the Russian base the following year exposed the Russian Empire’s inability to defend a major fortification on its own soil.  Although Nicholas died before the fall of Sevastopol, he, as did the rest of the Russian elite, recognized that Russia had to initiate major reforms or lose its status as a major European power.

The economic backwardness of the Russian Empire prompted Alexander II (r. 1855-81) to institute the Great Reforms in the military, judiciary, finance, education, government, and most important of all, the abolishment of serfdom in 1861.  The emancipation of approximately 20 million serfs, approximately 40% of the population, was peaceful but failed to integrate them into an economy based on money and competitive markets.  The emancipation of the serfs was representative of Alexander II’s Great Reforms: the state had transformed the social and economic structure of society but the Russian Empire remained an autocracy.

When Alexander II was unable to control the pace of change, he sought counter-reform until revolutionists (“anarchists”) assassinated the Emperor on March 13, 1881.  Alexander II’s assassination accelerated the process of counter-reforms by his successors, Alexander III (r. 1881-94) and Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917).  These counter-reforms included police surveillance, censorship, persecution of non-Russian populations, and the fostering of anti-Semitism.

Populist and revolutionary movements, as led by Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Bakunin, and Sergey Nechayev, flourished during this period that culminated into the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions.  These movements formed propagandist organizations, like People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), and political parties such as Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which eventually split into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.  The revolutionaries continued to gain support from the proletariat as they, with their awful living conditions, grew and accelerated in number under Minister of Finance Sergy Witte’s program of state-led industrialization (1892-1903).

As the Russian Empire attempted to modernize its economy, it continued to expand its territory into the Caucasus and Central Asia regions and almost sparked a war with Great Britain.  The Empire also expanded into China, which led to construction of the Trans-Siberian railway, and defeated the Ottoman Empire to have influence in the Balkans (1875-77).  The controversy over whether Russia or Japan would occupy Manchuria led to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), with Japan defeating the Russian Empire – the first time an Asian country defeated a European one.  Confronted with unrest and revolution at home, Nicholas II accepted U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation and agreed to acknowledge Japan’s supremacy in Manchuria and Korea.

The defeat by the Japanese exposed the weakness of the Russian Empire and contributed to the 1905 Revolution.  The event that triggered the 1905 Revolution was the government’s violent suppression of a mass procession of workers led by priest Gregory Gapon.  Known as Bloody Sunday (January 22, 1905), this event brought to the surface the social and economic discontent of the proletariat, peasantry, middle class, military, ethnic minorities, and liberal nobility: nation-wide strikes, assassination of government officials, and military mutinies quickly followed.  Nicholas II agreed to the October Manifesto, a document which promised a constitutional monarchy with basic civil liberties and an elected legislature.  In spite of his agreement to these conditions, Nicholas II nonetheless was able to dominate the government, because of his able prime minister, Peter Stolypin (Prime Minister, 1906-11), and because the political reformers were unable to unite, dividing themselves between the Octobrists (moderate-conservatives) and Kadets (moderate-liberals).

After the 1905 Revolution, the Russian Empire entangled itself in a series of ever-changing alliances in Europe, eventually entering the Triple Entente of Great Britain and France against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.  The Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 drew the Russian Empire into these conflicts with its support of its fellow Slavs in Serbia.  When a Serbian terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war, in spite of Serbia’s agreement to Austria-Hungary’s demands.  The system of alliances, along with poor decisions by European leaders, led to World War I (1914-18), with France supporting Russia and Germany supporting Austria-Hungary.  When Germany invaded France, the conflict escalated into a world war.

The Russian offensive into East Prussia and Austria-Hungary was to divert German troops from its western front against the British and French.  Although successful, the Russian military suffered disastrous defeats in 1914-15, exposing the ineptness and incompetence of the government and created social and economic hardships at home.  The strain of the war created popular unrest, particularly among the proletariat, peasantry, and soldiers, resulting in nationwide strikes in 1916.  The legislature, the Duma, continued to quarrel with the government bureaucracy over the conduct of the war and formed the Progressive Bloc to create a genuine constitutional government.  With his insistence that the Russian Empire still was an autocracy, Nicholas II did not approve of the Progressive Bloc.  Regardless of Nicholas II’s insistence, demonstrators in the capital called for an end to autocracy in March 1917.  When the Cossack troops refused to fire onto the crowds and instead handed over their guns, Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, thereby ending the Russian Empire. Seven months later the Bolshevik Revolution began and soon established the Soviet Empire.