InNo+seank2013+10.15.10

=Part One: Russia under the Tsar= AWESOME PART 'FOUND' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-kFLevtCC0 (couldn't get embedded code) :( This is a video of what Russia was like in the 1900. It covers some of the stuff written in the notes below. It may help you understand Russia before the revolution better. toc

The land and the climate

 * 1) Mountains are a good defense against foreign invaders, but keep out warm air from spreading from the south.
 * 2) Most of Russia is useless for farming especially when it is really cold.
 * 3) Much of its land is a part of the Arctic Circle.
 * 4) The Trans-Siberian railway was built to allow trade between east and west all year round because of the ice-breaking problem in the Ocean.

An empire of many peoples

 * 1) In 1900, a Tsar named Nicholas II ruled Russia.
 * 2) About 125 million people lived in his empire but less than half were Russians.
 * 3) To six of ten of Tsar’s subjects, Russian was a foreign language and Russians were foreigners.
 * 4) The cold lands of Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains, were thinly populated, while the fertile land of the south-west and the streets were often overcrowded

The autocracy

 * 1) Nicholas II was an autocrat, a monarch who does not have to share power.
 * 2) He could do whatever he wanted without consulting anyone.
 * 3) He could sack any minister or adviser that disagreed with him.
 * 4) To run the affairs of his vast empire however, he needed to employ thousands of civil servants.
 * 5) They were organized like an army into fourteen ranks.
 * 6) The top of the **Table of Ranks** were ministers in charge of the government departments.
 * 7) The bottom were minor officials, such as post office clerks and customs inspectors.
 * 8) The Tsar’s civil services were carried out by Russian people.
 * 9) Because they were underpaid for their work, many civil servants took bribes.
 * 10) Okhrana or Protective Section, was a secret police force Nicholas had to make sure nobody opposed him.
 * 11) The Okhrana censored books and newspapers and arrested people who criticized the government.
 * 12) Political prisoners were tried by special courts without juries and often ended up in exile.
 * 13) Sometimes, especially when there was famine, riots broke out when there were too many opponents of the Tsar for the Okhrana to handle.
 * 14) Cossacks were fierce mounted soldiers armed with sabers who specialized in breaking up mobs.
 * 15) These were the people who kept peasants from attacking their landlords and tax collectors.
 * 16) The church also helped the Tsar maintain authority.
 * 17) The priests of the Russian Orthodox church taught people to respect and be loyal to the Tsar.
 * 18) Since the head of the church is a government minister, the Tsar had control over the minds and souls of many Russian churchgoers.

Nicholas
>> Nicholas, Russia's Tsar, October 1894, the day after the death of his father, Alexander III
 * 1) Extracts that might give you an idea of Tsar Nicholas's character.
 * **What is going to happen to me, to all Russia? I am not ready to be the Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to ministers.**

>> //Nicholas, Russia's Tsar, January 1895//
 * **I shall preserve the principle of autocracy just as firmly . . . as my late unforgettable father preserved it.**

>> //Count Witte, Russia's first prime minister, 1906//
 * **We talked for two solid hours. He shook my hand. He wished me all the luck in the world. I went home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.**

>> //Sir Arthur Nicholson, British Ambassador, 1906//
 * **The gentle but uneducated Emperor . . . is weak on every point except his own autocracy.**

>> //Alexander Kerensky, Russian Politician, memoirs 1966//
 * **The daily work of a ruler he found terribly boring. He could not stand listening long or seriously to ministers' reports, or reading them. He liked such ministers as could tell an amusing story ad did not weary his attention with too much business.**

Alexandra

 * 1) She encouraged Nicholas to rule as an autocrat and ignore new ideas about sharing power with people
 * 2) They were very happy together and had five children during the first ten years of marriage.
 * 3) The first four were girls and the fifth was a boy, Alexis, was the heir to the throne.
 * 4) However, shortly after, they found out he had a blood disease, haemophilia, which prevented his blood from clotting.
 * 5) Alexandra ordered everyone to swear an oath of secrecy of Alexis's illness.
 * 6) She had a chapel specially built for praying for his recovery.

A Russian cartoon in 1900 described each of the classes above the workers:

 * Capitalists: 'We do the eating'**
 * Army: ' We shoot you'**
 * Clergy: 'We mislead you'**
 * Royal Family: 'We rule you'**

Peasants

 * 1) The peasants were 4 out of every 5 citizens in Russia, those who made their living by farming.
 * 2) Until 1861, they were serfs
 * 3) slaves of their landlords with no rights, no freedom and no land of their own.
 * 4) In 1861, Nicholas II's grandfather freed the peasants from serfdom. However there were strings attached to them.
 * 5) the land on which the peasants grew was not given to them as individuals but to village commune or **mir**.
 * 6) they had to pay for the land in yearly instalments called **redemption payments**, over forty nine years.
 * 7) Only when they had paid their forty nine years will be when they own the land officially.
 * 8) This did not improve their life conditions however, because as the population grew, the plots of land grew smaller and smaller.
 * 9) Another major problem was that bigger plots of land were given to bigger families.
 * 10) Many peasants tried to go to the nearest town or city to work in factories or mines until harvest time to improve their lives.

The town workers
//Father Georgei Gapon, extract from a book written 1905//
 * They receive miserable wages and generally live in an overcrowded state, very commonly in special lodging houses. A woman takes several rooms in her own name, subletting each one; and it is common to see ten or more persons living in one room and four sleeping in one bed.**
 * The normal working day is eleven and a half hours of work, exclusive of meal times. But . . . manufacturers have received permission to work overtime, so that the average day is longer than that nominally allowed by law - fourteen or fifteen hours. I often watch the crowds of poorly clad and emaciated [**//very thin//**] figures of men and girls returning from the mills . . . Why do they agree to work overtime? They have to do so because they are paid by the piece and the rate is very low.**

The rich

 * 1) Even though the nobles were only 1% of the entire Russian population, they owned 25% of all the land.
 * 2) By 1900, a new class of Russians were getting rich - the Capitalists.
 * 3) They made money from banking, industry and trade.
 * 4) The minister of France, Sergei Witte, made it easy for capitalists to make big profits
 * 5) He gave them
 * 6) government contracts.
 * 7) loans to build factories
 * 8) lower taxes
 * 9) Hatred of capitalists steadily grew in the slums and boarding houses of Russia's cities

Terrorism

 * 1) Many people refused to believe that God appointed the Tsar to rule them and they wanted to get rid of him and make big changes to the Russian government and society.
 * 2) On March 1881, a bomb exploded beneath the carriage of Tsar Alexander II who freed the peasants from serfdom twenty years earlier.
 * 3) he was unhurt but when he got outside to inspect the damage, a young man threw what looked like a snowball at his feet and it exploded
 * 4) It tore off one of his legs and ripped his belly open.
 * 5) He died with his son Alexander and grandson Nicholas watching.
 * 6) This assassination was carried out by a terrorist group called **People's Will**.
 * 7) However this assassination did not destroy autocracy.
 * 8) His son and grandson were determined not to let the same happen to them.
 * 9) In 1900 however, there were three groups of opponents in existence.

Socialist Revolutionary Party

 * 1) They wanted all land in Russia to be given to the mirs, the village communes, so that peasants could have a bigger share of land.
 * 2) This meant taking away land from the nobles, the clergies and the Tsar.
 * 3) To help achieve their aim they created a **Fighting Organization** whose job was to organize terrorist campaigns.
 * 4) They managed to kill three government ministers and dozens of other government officials.
 * 5) Not surprisingly, they gained support from millions of peasants.

The Social Democratic Party

 * 1) They followed the ideas of karl Marx who wrote the Communist Manifesto.
 * 2) They wanted their government to have a sharing of wealth called socialism.
 * 3) Where workers would take away factories, mines, and would share them out equally among themselves.
 * 4) At this stage, a system of communism came into existence where people work according to their abilities and are paid according to their needs.
 * 5) In 1903 however, this group split into two, the **Bolsheviks** and the **Mensheviks**.
 * 6) The Bolsheviks believed that the revolution should be organized by a small group of dedicated and skilled revolutionaries who would lead the party.
 * 7) The Mensheviks believed that the revolution should be a mass with as many working class members as possible who would elect democratically their leaders.


 * 1) The leader of Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, argued that it would take years to start a revolution if the Mensheviks had their way.
 * 2) However Julius Martov, leader of the Mensheviks said that the revolution would fail without the support of the whole working class.

Liberals

 * 1) They wanted a democratic system of government however, unfortunately, Alexander II was blown up the day after he made plans for a Russian parliament.
 * 2) Even more unfortunate was that Alexander the third tore those plans up.

War against Japan

 * 1) In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan fighting for control over Korea and Manchuria.
 * 2) Nicholas thought a quick victory would make him popular and stop people from criticizing his government.
 * 3) However he lost, especially in the battle of Tsushima.
 * 4) Far from making him popular, this made his position weaker.
 * 5) Food suplies to the cities broke down and factories closed as raw materials ran short.
 * 6) Workers were out of work and out on the streets

Bloody Sunday
>>
 * 1) On Sunday January 22, 1905 a crowd of 200 thousand workers and families marched into the Tsars Winter Palace determined with an aim.
 * 2) They presented him with a petition asking for
 * 3) better working and living conditions
 * 4) an end to the war with Japan
 * 5) a shorter working day
 * 6) and many other reforms
 * 7) They were led by **Father Gapon**
 * 8) However this ended badly with 500 marchers killed and thousands more wounded.
 * 9) News of this massacre called **Bloody Sunday** spread through Russia and led to riots in the countryside and strikes in towns.
 * 10) Bloody Sunday led to a revolution against the Tsar.

The 1905 Revolution

 * 1) Potemkin, a crew battleship in June 1905, threw their officers overboard and took control of the ship.
 * 2) Although the mutineers had no plan, and gave themselves up only a few weeks later, the mutiny was very threatening to the Tsar.
 * 3) It showed that he could not trust his armed forces.
 * 4) In 1905 September, a general strike began, and in many towns, strikers set up councils called Soviets to run the towns during the strike.
 * 5) The soviets quickly became an alternative form of government, for the striking workers were willing to obey the orders of the Soviets
 * 6) **October Manifesto** was issued in October 1905 that said that Russia could have a **Duma**, an elected parliament, to help run the country.
 * 7) This also gave the Russian people basic rights such as the right to form political parties and the right of free speech.
 * 8) The liberals were delighted, however revolutionary parties did not trust that Nicholas would keep his word
 * 9) They were proved right when police arrested members of the St Petersburg Soviet and sent 15 of them in exile.
 * 10) In Moscow an army was sent to crush the Soviet and more than a thousand people died in street fighting between revolutionaries and soldiers.
 * 11) Black Hundreds, a band of thugs decided to take the law into their own hands and organised massacres of revolutionaries.
 * 12) In over 100 cities, revolutionaries were put to death while police and army did nothing to stop it.
 * 13) By march 1906, the revolution was over.
 * 14) The elections for Duma was held in March 1906 and a majority of anti-government candidates gained office.
 * 15) When Duma met for the first time in May, Nicholas issued a set of Fundamental Laws
 * 16) The first one said 'To the emperor of all Russias belongs supreme autocratic power'.
 * 17) So in the end, Russia was still an autocracy.

The Dumas

 * 1) They had no real power.
 * 2) And when they demanded a shhare in the government, Nicholas surrounded the meeting place with troops and broke it up.
 * 3) The second duma was elected in 1907 but was less to Nicholas's liking.
 * 4) He broke them up in 3 months
 * 5) The third lasted five years mostlybecause Nicholas changed the voting laws to make sure that revolutionaries were not elected to it.
 * 6) In 1906, Nicholas appointed a tough Prime Minister to make sure there were no more outbreaks of revolution.
 * 7) His name was Peter Stolypin.

The Stolypin reforms

 * 1) His first action was to clamp down on terrorism.
 * 2) 1008 terrorists were arrested, tried and executed.
 * 3) In the same year, 21,000 people were exiled and soon, terrorism had ceased to be a serious threat to the autocracy.
 * 4) To supress further outbreaks of violence in the countryside, Stolypin helped peasants become owners of their land.
 * 5) Conditions began to improve: industries grew, wages increased and the harvests were good.
 * 6) In 1911 however, one of Stolypin's police agents who had been investigating terrorist groups turned out to be a terrorist himself.
 * 7) He shot Stolypin dead

Rasputin

 * 1) While Stolypin was prime minister, Nicholas and his wife became involved with a strange Siberian peasant who claimed to be a //Staret -// a holy man of God.
 * 2) In 1905, it seemed as if Alexandra's daily prayers had been answered.
 * 3) This Siberian peasant claimed to have special powers of prophecy and healing that could cure the Tsar's only son.
 * 4) His name was Gregory Efimovitch.
 * 5) He prayed at Alexis's bedside after a fall that caused internal bleeding.
 * 6) Alexis had recovered the next morning
 * 7) And from then on //starets// was the most trusted members of their court.
 * 8) However Gregory was not regarded with such favor with everyone.
 * 9) He was nicknamed Rasputin - the disreputable one - because he drank heavily and had affairs with many local women.
 * 10) At court in St Petersburg, he proved to be more than 'disreputable'.
 * 11) However when Nicholas and Alexandra was told about his wild behavior, they refused to listen and continued to put their trust in him.
 * 12) After the death of Stolypin in 1911, Rasputin's influence over the royal family increased.
 * 13) He began to pass political advice to Alexandra who passed it on to Nicholas.
 * 14) Ambitious politions could easily gain promotion if they were friendly with Rasputin.
 * 15) Businessman who entertained him also got more government contracts easilier.
 * 16) As his influence increased, hatred of him grew.
 * 17) Rumors went around saying that he was having an affair with Alexandra. It was in the newspapers and it seemed all of Russia new about it.
 * 18) All except the Tsar and his wife.

Summary
Russia is so big that not only one man, especially an autocrat, could rule by himself. Nicholas, the Tsar in 1900, tried to rule as Russia as an autocrat and ended up with riots and strike in the countryside and towns of his country. The revolution began shortly after the Japanese and Russian war because they had lost, mostly because of Nicholas's poor decision to go to war. The revolution ended with a parliament called duma, however the country was still an autocracy. After the revolution, there were the stolypin reforms that got Russia back in gear, however Rasputin was beginning to corrupt it.

Questions

 * 1) How and why did Russia's government allow Rasputin get involved with their way of ruling?
 * 2) How did the revolution start?
 * 3) What happened at Bloody Sunday, and why was it called that?
 * 4) Who and why were there opponents of the Tsar?
 * 5) Why did Alexandra and Nicholas worry and pray for their son Alexis?