InNo+hyejijun94+10.17.10

= AWESOME STUFF =

*This is a chart showing three important revolutionary groups that opposed the Tsar. They all had the same goal, which is to get rid of autocracy but there were also some slight differences in their beliefs and the way to achieve their goals.

*This is a real photo of workers marching through the streets of St. Peterburg during the 1905 Russian Revolution. This later caused a dreadful massacre known as Bloody Sunday and this event marked the beginning of a revolution against the Tsar.

= NOTES =

Chapter 1 
__ The land and the climate: __
 * Russia is very big but much of the land is useless
 * The high mountains provide good protection against the foreigners but also keep out warm air
 * Russia is open to cold air from the Arctic Ocean
 * Russia is useless for farming because of this weather
 * The land is ‘tundra’ (where nothing grows except moss and small shrubs) in the Arctic Circle
 * On the south of the tundra there is the ‘taiga’ (cold land covered in forest of pine trees)
 * In 1900, only 5% of all Russian land was used for farming
 * The cold climate affected Russia’s industry, commerce, and farming
 * Much of the land along the coastline is inside the Arctic circle and is therefore frozen over with thick ice for much of the year
 * Sea and river trade were impossible until spring arrived

__ An empire of many peoples: __
 * In 1900, Russia was ruled by a Tsar (or Emperor) Nicholas II
 * About 125 million people lived in Tsar Nicholas’s empire but the majority were peoples such as the Poles and the Ukrainians
 * These peoples each had their own language, customs and way of life
 * Most people lived on the 5% land that was good for farming

Chapter 2 
__ The autocracy: __
 * Tsar Nicholas II was an autocrat – a monarch who does not have to share power
 * Nicholas could do anything what he wanted without consulting anyone
 * No parliament that could limit his power
 * Tsar employed many civil servants to run his vast empire
 * Civil servants were organized like an army into fourteen ranks
 * Top of the ‘Table of Ranks’ – ministers in charge of government departments
 * Bottom of the ‘Table of Ranks’ – minor officials (ex. post office clerks)
 * Tsar’s civil service collected taxes from people and made sure that his decisions were carried out
 * Tsar did not allow people to question his authority or challenge his power
 * Nicholas had a secret police force – the Okhrana or ‘Protective Section’
 * The Okhrana arrested people who opposed the government
 * When riots broke out, the Okhrana could not cope with all the opponents, it was the Cossacks who came to rescue Tsar.
 * Cossacks – fierce soldiers armed with sabres and specialized in breaking up mobs
 * Church in Russia helped to maintain the authority of the Tsar
 * Priests of Russian Orthodox Church taught people to respect autocracy and to be loyal to the Tsar

__ Nicholas and Alexandra: __
 * Nicholas II official title – ‘Tsar and Autocrat of all the Russias’
 * Alexandra (Nicholas’s German wife) was confident and strong minded
 * Nicholas and Alexandra had five children during the first ten years of their marriage
 * The first four were girls and the fifth was a boy, Alexis
 * Alexis had a blood disease, hemophilia, and there was no cure for this
 * Nicholas and Alexandra were both deeply religious
 * They ordered people never to talk about Alexis’s illness

Chapter 3 
__ The peasants: __
 * Peasants were country people who made their living by farming
 * Four out of every five citizens were peasants
 * Until 1861, peasants had been serfs – slaves of their landlords with no rights, no freedom, and no land of their own
 * 1861, Tsar Alexander II (Nicholas’s grandfather) freed the peasants from being serfs but there were a set of things attached to this deal
 * The land where peasants grew food was given to the village commune (or mir)
 * The peasants had to pay for the land given to the commune in yearly installment (redemption payments) over the next forty-nine years
 * When peasants had paid all forty-nine installments, the land become their personal property
 * Peasants’ lives were not better even though serfdom was abolished
 * The mirs divided up the land and gave out to each family, the bigger the family, the bigger the plot of land it was given
 * As population grew, the plots of land grew smaller and smaller
 * The peasants found it harder to support their families
 * They also had to keep up with the yearly redemption payments
 * Diseases and malnutrition were very common
 * They depended on a good harvest to have enough to eat and earn money

__ The town workers: __
 * Peasants tried to improve their lives by working in the nearest town or city
 * In 1900, the largest city in Russia was the capital, St Petersburg
 * Some people were unable to improve their lives
 * Trade unions and strikes were illegal

__ The rich: __


 * Russian nobles were extremely rich
 * 1 percent of the Russian population
 * Owned around 25 percent of all the land
 * By 1900, a new class was also becoming rich – the capitalists
 * They made money from banking, industry and trade
 * They were able to make easy profits

Chapter 4 
__ Terrorism: __
 * Most people did not question the autocratic system of government
 * Believed that God had assigned the Tsar to rule over Russia and that everyone else had their deserved place in society
 * Some refused to accept this and wanted to get rid of the autocratic government
 * In March 1881, a bomb exploded beneath the carriage of Tsar Alexander II, then a young man threw a snowball-like thing at him, and when the snowball exploded he bled to death
 * This assassination was carried out by a terrorist group called the ‘People’s Will’
 * It was a terrorist group that wanted to get rid of autocracy
 * Alexander III and Nicholas II were determined not to let the same happen to them
 * They used the Okhrana to arrest the opponents
 * In 1900, There were three important revolutionary groups of opponents that survived

__ The Socialist Revolutionary Party: __
 * The first group that survived was the Socialist Revolutionary Party
 * They wanted to take away land from the Tsar, nobles and church and give it to the village communes
 * SRs had a ‘Fighting Organization’ to organize terrorist campaigns
 * SRs gained support from millions of peasants

__ The Social Democratic Party: __
 * Another important group was the Social Democratic Party
 * They followed the ideas of Karl Marx – a German writer who had written a book called the Communist Manifesto
 * Karl Marx predicted that the workers would take away properties from capitalists and would share them out equally among themselves
 * This sharing of wealth was called socialism
 * Marx thought that a system of communism would come into existence – a society where people work according to their abilities and are paid according to their needs
 * In 1903, the party split into two groups – the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks
 * Bolsheviks believed that the revolution should be organized by a small group of skilled revolutionaries
 * Mensheviks believed that the party should be a mass party with many working class members and ran democratically, electing the leaders
 * Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, stated that it would take years to start the revolution if the Mensheviks had their way
 * Julius Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks, replied that the revolution would fail without the support of the working class
 * From 1903 onwards, there were three revolutionary groups – the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist Revolutionaries

__ Liberals: __
 * Many law-abiding Russians who owned property were liberals
 * They supported the Tsar but wanted him to share his power
 * They wanted a democratic system of government

Chapter 5 
__ War against Japan: __
 * In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan
 * They were fighting for control of Korea and Manchuria
 * Tsar Nicholas wanted war because he thought that a quick victory would make him popular and stop people criticizing his government
 * Right after the war had started, Russian army was suffering from defeats
 * Nicholas sent the Russian Baltic fleet to Manchuria but the Japanese fleet destroyed all but three of the Russian ships in the battle of Tsushima
 * The war weakened Nicholas’s position and made conditions for working people worse than before (food supplies broke down and factories closed)

__ Bloody Sunday: __
 * On Sunday 22 January, 1905, a crowd of workers and their families marched through the streets of St Petersburg towards the Tsar’s Winter Palace
 * They wanted better working and living conditions, end to the war with Japan, shorter working day, and many other reforms
 * They were led by Father Gapon – a priest who sympathized with poor workers
 * Soldiers and police tried to stop them and killed around 500 marchers and thousands more were wounded
 * This massacre was known as Bloody Sunday
 * After this news about massacre spread, many riots broke out in the countryside
 * Hundreds of government official were murdered
 * Tsar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Serge was killed by a terrorist bomb
 * This event started a revolution against the Tsar

__ The 1905 revolution: __
 * In June 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin, threw their officers overboard and took control of the ship
 * This showed that Tsar Nicholas could not trust his armed forces
 * Many peasants rebelled in the countryside, murdering their landlords and burning their farms
 * Many of the non-Russian peoples of the Empire (such as Georgians and the Poles) declared their independence from Russian rule
 * September 1905, a general strike began
 * Factories, offices, shops, railways, hospitals, and schools closed down
 * The strikers set up councils called Soviets to run the towns
 * The Soviets became an alternative form of government
 * In October 1905, Nicholas issued a document called the October Manifesto
 * This stated that Russia could have a Duma, an elected parliament
 * Allowed the Russian people basic rights (such as the right to form political parties and the right of free speech)
 * The liberals were happy with the October Manifesto
 * The revolutionary parties did not trust Nicholas and they were proved right when the police arrested the members of the Soviet and sent some of them into exile in Siberia
 * In 1906, the Tsar crushed all other areas of revolution
 * A group of criminals known as Black Hundreds decided to take the law into their own hands
 * They organized massacres of revolutionaries
 * By March 1906, the revolution was over
 * Russia still got a parliament out of it
 * Elections were held in March 1906
 * When the Duma met for the first time in May, Nicholas issued a set of Fundamental Laws
 * The first one stated, ‘To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs supreme autocratic power’
 * Even though they had a parliament, Russia had no change
 * Russia was still an autocracy

Chapter 6 
__ The Dumas: __
 * The Russia’s new parliament had no power
 * A second Duma was elected in 1907
 * It contained not only liberals but also Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats
 * Nicholas soon broke up the second Duma
 * Nicholas changed the voting laws to make sure that revolutionaries were not elected
 * So the third Duma lasted a full five years
 * Made up of conservative politicians who did what Nicholas wanted
 * In 1906, Nicholas appointed a new Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, to make sure there were no outbreaks of revolution

__ The Stolypin reforms: __
 * Stolypin wanted a strict government
 * His first action was to end terrorism
 * Many terrorists were arrested and exiled to Siberia
 * To prevent outbreaks of violence in the countryside, he helped the peasants to become the owners of their own land
 * The redemption payments were abolished
 * The village communes controlled the land
 * Conditions in Russia began to improve – industry grew, wages increased, and harvests were good
 * Peasants bought their own land and created new productive farms
 * In 1911, one of Stolypin’s police agents shot Stolypin dead

__ Rasputin: __
 * When Stolypin was a prime minister, Nicholas and his wife became involved with a strange Siberian peasant who claimed to be a Starets – a holy man of God
 * His name was Gregory Efimovitch and was introduced by two ladies of the court saying that he had special powers of prophecy and healing
 * Once, Alexis had a fall and started to bleed. Gregory Efimovitch prayed at his bedside and the next morning Alexis was recovered
 * From then on, the Starets was one of the most trusted members of their court
 * Gregory Efimovitch had a nickname Rasputin (the disreputable one) because he drank heavily and had affairs with many local women
 * But he was more than ‘disreputable’, he was always drunk and once raped a nun
 * Nicholas and Alexandra were told about Rasputin’s wild behavior but they refused to listen, and continued to trust him
 * After the death of Stolypin, Rasputin’s influence over the royal family increased
 * He began to give political advice to Alexandra which she passed onto Nicholas
 * Politicians were easily promoted if they were friendly with Rasputin
 * Many people started to dislike him
 * Rumors were going around that he was having an affair with Alexandra

Summary
In 1900, Russia was ruled by a Tsar, Nicholas II, an autocrat who had forces that could threaten opposing people. In Russian society there were the peasants, town workers, and nobles. Peasants were very poor and owned no rights or land. People started to question the Tsar's autocratic system of government and led to a revolution in 1905. Even though Russia had a new parliament, Nicholas did not allow them to have power, therefore nothing had changed after the revolution.

Questions
1. Why is Russia not a good place for farming? Explain. 2. How did the battle of Tsushima influenced the position of Nicholas? 3. Was the 1905 revolution successful? Why or why not? 4. Nobles were only 1 percent of the Russian population. True/False 5. What were the three important groups of opponents in 1900?