InNo+Jeffooo+10.13.10

This is a map of Russia, and circled on there is the regions of where the populations of Russia are located.

Interesting Information Rasputin, who was a man, said to be a "Starets" originally had two penises and one of them is still preserved.

The Russian Empire in 1900
 * Russia is very big

The land and the climate
 * Russia is covered by thick pine forest called taiga
 * Russia is vast, however much of the lands are useless for farming
 * mountains keep out foreign invaders, however keeps the warm air out of Russia
 * Because of the coldness, Russia is mostly useless for farming
 * The land tundra in the Arctic circle is where nothing grows except moss and small shrubs
 * taiga is 1000km south of tundra, its a cold land covered in pine trees
 * only place used for farming is the southwest regions where the air is warmer
 * in the 1900s only 5% of Russia's land was used for farming. The rest was waste
 * because much of Russia is so close to the Arctic circle, it is frozen with thick ice for most of the years

An empire of many peoples
 * in 1900 Russia was an empire ruled by a Tsar (emperor) Nicholas II
 * 125million people lived in his empire
 * Less than half the people were russians
 * the majority of people were poles and Ukrainians wo had been conquered by the ancestors of Nicholas II
 * The people all had their own language, customs and a way of life
 * For six out of ten people in Russia spoke other languages, making Russian a foreign language
 * The people of Russia did not spread throughout the country evenly
 * Most people lived around the 5% of farming lands
 * Tue colder lands of Sibera in the east of Ural mountains were less populated, and the southwest cities and streets were crowded

The Government of Russia

The autocracy
 * The emperor of Russia was an autocrat (a monarch who does not have to share power)
 * Nicholas was able to make his own laws and increase taxes however he liked
 * There was no parliament to limit his power
 * He was able to sack any minister or adviser who he did not like
 * Nicholas could not govern all of Russia by himself
 * The army of Russia was organized into 14 ranks
 * the top of the rank is ministers in charge of the government departments, and the bottom were minor officials like post office clerks and customs inspectors
 * Tsar's civil service collected taxes from the people and made sure his decisions are carried out
 * Because the civil service were not paid, many of them took bribes
 * People were not to questions Tsar's authority, or stand up against him
 * to keep this from happening, Tsar had a secret police force called the Okharna who censored books and newspapers, spied of political groups and arrested people who criticized the government
 * Most of the Political prisoners are exiled
 * When there were rebellions, the Cossacks(fierce mounted soldiers armed with sabres who broke mobs by attacking anyone who did not run) came to help Tsar.
 * The church of Russia also helped maintain the authority of the Tsar
 * Russian orthodox church taught people to respect the autocracy and to be loyal to their Tsar
 * The head of the church was a government minister, who gave orders to bishops and priests
 * Because of this, the government had control over the minds and souls of many Russian churchgoers

Nicholas and Alexandra
 * He was clueless and does not know how to rule a country
 * He followed the things which his father had done before him
 * Nicholas sacked his ministers randomly
 * He was said to be nice, however an uneducated Emperor who is very weak without his autocracy
 * He did not concentrate with his work, and was often slacking off and only liking ministers who had interesting stories instead of important reports
 * Nocholas's German wife Alexandria was confident and strong willed
 * she told Nicholas to ignor new ideas about sharing his power with the people
 * Nicholas and Alexandra were happily married and had five children in the first ten years of their marriage
 * the first four were girls, and the fifth was a boy named Alexis, who had haemophilia, which prevented his blood from clotting
 * Alexandra prayed everyday for hours begging for her sons recovery
 * She told the girls to never tell anyone about Alexis's disease and to make people who knew swear an oath to never bring it up

Russian Society

The peasants
 * 1900 -> 4/5 citizens of Russia were peasants
 * 1861 the peasants were serfs, who were slaves of their landlords with no rights, no freedom and no land of their own
 * 1861 Tsar Alexander II Nicholas II's grandfather, had freed the peasants from serfdom, and allowed the peasants to own land to farm their food
 * The food harvested from these farms were not for them individually, however for the mir's or village they lived in
 * they had to pay for the land given to the commune in yearly instruments called redemption payments for the next 49 years
 * Being freed from the serfdom, did not improve the lives of the peasants
 * Every year, the commune gave the land to the peasants who needed it according to their needs, the larger the family the more land they received
 * however, as the years go by and the population increases, less and less land were handed out
 * between 1861 to 1900, the average size of land halved
 * The peasants found it harder and harder to support their families, and also keeping up with the yearly redemption payments
 * there were many signs of diseases and malnutrition, so only 50% of children lived past 5 years old, and the average life expectancy was only 50 years old

The town workers
 * Many of the workers went to work in the nearest town or city, in factories or mines before harvesting times
 * the largest city in Russia in 1900 was the capital St Petersburg
 * Nearly a million people had gone there to find work, and the numbers still increasing
 * The wages of the jobs were horrible, and many people had to share rooms and beds
 * By law, the maximum amount of hours to work per day is 11 and a half, however the people worked for 14 - 15 hours a day because the wages were so low
 * the workers, could easily be replaced because there would always be long queues of people outside the factories looking for a job

The rich
 * Russian nobles were extremely rich
 * Tsar Nicholas owned 8 palaces and employed 15000 servants
 * Whenever the Royal family moved to another palace, more than 20 railway carriages were needed to carry the luggage
 * The nobles, who were only 1% of the Russian population owned around 25% of all the lands
 * The Royals, who bothered to farm on their land efficiently made good profits, thoes who could not be bothered were able to sell some of their land to pay for their rich lifestyle
 * by the 1900s, a new class was also becoming rich called the capitalists, who made money from the banking industry and trade
 * The minister of finance, Sergei Witte made it easy for the capitalists to make big profit
 * He gave them government contracts for building railways and gave them loans to build new factories, and he also cut taxes
 * With the new easy profits, the capitalists, did nothing to improve the conditions of their workers
 * hatred started to grow against the capitalists throughout Russia

Opponents of the tsar
 * most Russians did not question the Tsar's autocratic system of government
 * They believed that God had appointed the Tsar to rule over them
 * some people refused to believe this, and wanted to get rid of the Tsar and make some changes to Russia, and would do anything to achieve this

Terrorism
 * March 1881 a bomb exploded beneath the carriage of Tsar Alexander II
 * The Tsar who had freed the peasants from serfdom twenty years earlier
 * The bomb did not kill Alexander, however when he came out to check the damage a man threw a bomb at his feet, tearing off one of his legs and ripping his belly open, bleeding to death
 * The assassination was carried out by a terrorist group called the "people's will" which was a group determined to destroy the autocracy
 * Alexander III and Nicholas did not want to die in the same result, so both used the Okhrana to arrest the critics and opponents
 * Many thousands ended up in prison, or exiled in Siberia
 * By 1900 there were only 3 important groups of opponents in existence

The socialist revolutionary party
 * he first of the groups were the SRs socialist revolutionary party
 * They wanted all land in Russia to be given to the Mirs so that peasants could have a bigger share of land
 * However this would mean taking away land from the Tsar
 * The SR had a "fighting organization" for those who's job was to organize terrorist campaigns
 * between1900 and 1905, the terrorist group managed to kill three government minister and a dozen government officials
 * The SR gained millions of peasants as support who also wanted to own land

The social democratic party
 * Another important revolutionary group was the Social Democratic Party
 * They followed the idea of Karl Marx, who believed in communism
 * The idea was for the workers to take away all the factories, mines, machinery and raw materials from the capitalists to share among themselves
 * Marx called this sharing of wealth socialism
 * in the socialist society Marx thought people would work together for everyone and not for selfish reasons, only taking what they need
 * The Social Democratic Party which followed Marc;s ideas was set up in 1898. However their leaders started to argue on how to start
 * in 1903 they split into two groups the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks
 * The Bolsheviks believed that the revolution should be organized by a small group of dedicated and skilled revolutionaries
 * They should lead the party to make all the decisions
 * The Mensheviks believed that the party should be a mass party with as many working class members as possible
 * It should be run democratically, with the members electing the leaders and deciding its policies
 * The leader of the Bolsheviks Vladimir Llyich Lenin argued that if the Mensheviks had their way, it would take years for the revolution
 * The leader of Mensheviks said that the revolutionary would fail without all the working classes
 * The social Democratic party remained split on this issue

Liberals
 * Not all the Tsar's opponents were violent revolutionaries
 * Many of the law abiding Russians were thoes who owned property and were liverals
 * They supported the Tsar but they wanted him to share his power
 * They wanted a democratic system of government like the one in britain where an elected parliament shared power with the monarch
 * Sadly for the liberals, Alexander II had made plans for the Russian Parliament the day before he was blown up by the people's will
 * The first thing when Alexander III did when he became the Tsar was to tear up the plans

War against japan
 * in 1904 Russia went to war with Japan
 * They were fighting over Korea and Manchuria in the far east
 * Tsar nicholas was glad to go to war
 * He thought that a quick victory would make him popular, and for people to stop criticizing his government
 * Since the start of the war, the Russian army suffered from defeat after defeat
 * Nicholas sent a fleet around the world to land in manchuria, and only suffered another defeat in the battle of Tsushima
 * The wars with japan weakened his position, because of all the defeats without win
 * Because of the wars, the working conditions for the people became more and more miserable

Bloody sunday
 * Sunday January 22nd 1905, a crowd of 200000 workers and their families marched through the streets of St Peterburg towards the Tsar's Winter Palace
 * Their aim was to present Nicholas with a petition asking for better working and living conditions like a shorter working day, to end the war with japan an many other reforms
 * The marchers were lead by Father Gapon, who was a priest who sympathized with poor workers
 * When the Marchers reached the center of st petersburg, the soldiers and police tried to stop them, and so scuffles broke out
 * The soldiers opened fire, killing 500 marchers, and wounding thousands
 * when the rest of Russia began to find out about this incident, many riots and strikes broke out and hundreds of government officials were murdered
 * Tsar Nicholas's uncle, the grade duke serge was blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb

The 1905 revolution
 * In 1905, the crew if the battleship Potemkin threw their officers overboard and took control of the ship this was mutiny although the mutineers had no plan, and gave themselves up only a few weeks later the mutiny was very threatening to Tsar Nicholas
 * While there were riots and peasants butchering and burning down their landlords land, the people who originally came from poles and georgians started to declare independence
 * On september 1905, large strikes began
 * All over Russia Factories, Offices, shops, railways and hospitals and schools were closed down
 * In Many towns and cities strikers set up councils called the Soviets, which became the alternative form of government
 * Due to all this, Nicholas had to show some mercy. so therefore issued a document called the October Manifesto
 * This said that Russia could have a Duma (an elected parliament) to help run the country
 * This gave the people rights to form political parties and have the right of speech
 * The liberals were delighted with the October manifesto, however the revolutionary did not trust Nicholas to keep his words
 * December, the police arrested the members of the St Petersburg Soviet and sent fifteen of them into exile in Siberia
 * An army was sent to destroy the Soviet in Moscow, and more than a thousand people died in the fight
 * Early 1906, Tsar crushed all the areas of revolution
 * A band of thugs known as the black hundreds took the law into their own hands
 * They organized massacres of revolutionaries,
 * over 100 cities were people who had joined in the revolutionary bloodbbathed, and the police and soldiers did nothing to stop
 * by March 1906 the revolution was over and Russia got a parliament
 * In may, Nicholas set up the issue of Fundamental laws, this means that as long as Nicholas concerns, nothing much has changed. Russia was still an autocracy

The Aftermath of the 1905 Revolution

The Dumas
 * Tsar Nicholas made it clear that he would not allow the Duma any real power
 * When the Duma demanded for power, Nicholas's troops surrounded the place and broke it up
 * a second Duma elected in 1907, contained liberals and Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats who aimed to destroy the autocracy
 * The second Duma was broken up in less than 3 months
 * The third Duma lasted 5 years, Because Nicholas changed the voting laws and made sure that revolutionaries were not elected to it
 * The third Duma was made up of conservative politicians who behaved themselves and did what Nicholas wanted
 * In 1906, Nicholas appointed a new tough Prime minister called Peter Stolypin to make sure there were no more outbreaks

Stolypin Reforms
 * Stolypin believed in strict government
 * his first action as Prime Minister was to clamp down on terrorism
 * in 1906 1008 terrorists were arrested tried and executed
 * On the same year 21000 people were exiled to Siberia
 * Stolypin helped peasants become owners of their land, to become a slightly more richer
 * The redemption payments that peasants had been paying since 1861 were abolished
 * So too were the laws which said that Mirs controlled the lands
 * Conditions in Russia began to improve
 * Industry grew, wages increased and the harvests were good
 * Millions of peasants bought their own land and set about creating new efficient farms
 * In 1911 however one of Stolypins police agents who had been investigating the terrorist groups turned out to be a terrorist spy, and shot him dead

Rasputin
 * While Stolypin was Prime minister Nicholas and his wife Alexandra became involved with strange Siberian peasants who claimed to be a Starets (holy men of god)
 * In court, two ladies introduced a man who was said to have special powers of the propecy and healing
 * His name was Gregory Efimovitch
 * Shortly after this, Alexis had a fall which caused internal bleeding, and healed the next morning
 * Nicholas and Alexandria was delighted at what theu thought was a miracle
 * Since then, Gregory Efimovitch was regarded with such a favor by everyone as one of the most trusted members of their court
 * Raspuntin was said to be Disreputable, and did many unholy things and was drunk most of his time
 * Nicholas and Alexandria, however did not listen
 * After Nicholas's death in 1911, Ruspuntin's rank became higher within the royal family.
 * Ambitious politicians found it easier to gain promotion if they were friendly with Rasputin
 * As Rasputin's influence increased, more and more people hated him and rumors of him having an affair with Alexandria began to spread

Summary Nicholas II was the Tsar of Russia, he was the one who ruled over russia and had all the power within the country in the 1900s. To keep his royal family safe, the autocracy was passed down, and used for himself. Because of the autocracy, he had all the power, and even had 25% of the income from the country. Most of the people in Russia lived in the south west side of Russia, where it is warmer and has better land for farming. Because of this that region of Russia is extremely crowded, and not enough farming land was given for all the peasants to farm on and therefore the Peasants all rebelled, however none of them ever succeeded.

Questions Which character in the Russian history suffered from hemophilia? Alexis What is a man, who is called a Starets? a man of god How did Alexander II die? He was killed, by a bomb What was the name of the terrorist group which killed Alexander II? terrorists will What land was the Russians fighting against the Japanese for? Manchuria

Works Cited "Map of Russia Coloring Pages." //Super Coloring//. Web. . "Rasputin’s Other Penis." //Hump Jones//. Web. .