What was tsarist russia like

Today, a large monument to Lenin stands in the square. Amos Chapple is a New Zealand-born photographer and picture researcher with a particular interest in the former U. Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan. Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia. Belarus Ukraine. Follow Us. Previous Next. February 24, GMT. By Amos Chapple. The Tsarist state system had developed over a long period. The Tsar's authority was supported by several features. These are known as the 'Pillars of Autocracy'.

This vast, diverse Empire was ruled by a series of Tsars. They ran the country as autocrats. This meant that the Tsar, and only the Tsar, governed Russia:. Tsars believed that they had a divine right to rule Russia, their position and power had been given to them by God.

The nobility accounted for approximately 10 per cent of the population. This upper class owned all the land and was dependent on the Tsar. They also dominated the army command and civil service:. The Tsarist legal system was designed to support autocracy and Tsarist authority.

It was also intended to suppress opposition and increase fear among the population:. A standard punishment for opponents of the Tsar was exile to the remote region of Siberia. Modernization and competition with the West required the opening up and thus, acquirement of Western values and mentalities.

Looking at the political history of imperial Russia, the effort to merge Western liberal principles with authoritarian tsarist traditions can be seen. The problem in the USSR was not a concentration of power at the top bur rather an obvious overgrowth of the intermediate link and the relative weakness of the lower and higher links. While economic reform raised the prestige and influence of the first and third levels, the second level was lowered.

Peasant conscripts made up the core of Imperial Russian military power. The Russian army gained great prestige for itself and for Russia as a whole by playing a big role in the allied defeat of Napoleon in In military and economic terms, Tsarist Russia only experienced a fragment of the great power that the Soviet Union held.

As was briefly mentioned before, Russia has the unique location of being the middle ground between Asia and Europe. Geography is one reason why Russian stands to some extent alone and isolated when compared with the history of other empires. This heartland was the same for both empires, centered on Moscow and St.

Petersburg, making the geopolitical make-up quite similar. However, when geopolitical influence is considered, Tsarist Russia did not come close to match the control exercised by the Soviet empire. Such a relationship is bilateral and normally beneficial, with mutual though different obligations.

Under the Tsarist Empire, Russia was a vast size of a country. It stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean, earning its title as the largest country in the world. Finland and most of Poland fell to its borders, as did the ancient Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia, and the Muslim emirates of Bukhara and Khiva.

The demographic power also greatly differed between the two empires. The goal of Russian imperialism was state-building and security rather than driven by religious messianism. Conquest included the appointment of local elites into the Russian administration and bringing native laws and economic procedures in line with general Russian practices. Despite not having a nationality policy, Tsarist Russia operated with an ever-present awareness of ethnic and religious distinctions.

For example, tsarist officials considered Byelorussians and Ukrainians part of a greater Russian nation and thus, forcefully discouraged the use of the Slavic languages of the western provinces. The Soviet state that emerged was both federative at least, in name and theory and based on ethnic political units. Nationalities like Jews, Armenians, Ukrainians, did indeed enjoy extraterritorial privileges such as having their own schools and operating in republics of other nationalities.

The expectation that concessions to the national principle would lead to the consolidation of ethnicity, rather than to its disappearance, was correct for the larger nationalities. The USSR was formed, based on, and ruled with a different ideology of replacing capitalism with socialism, and later communism.

Thus, the core of the Soviet polity was the Communist Party. Tsarist Russia existed solely as an agrarian empire while the USSR underwent a massive industrialization that allowed for large-scale production and the status of a military and economic superpower.

The different geopolitical imperatives meant that the USSR exerted influence on a global-scale that Tsarist Russia did not, even though both empires incorporated huge territories in their rule. Despite the presence of similar characteristics in both empires, especially seen during their evolution, the USSR was not a clear continuation of the Tsarist Russia Empire and was a distinct Empire in world history. Fry, Michael G. Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy.

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