A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Tsarist Russia 705

gent opposition of the House of Lords. But with Britain—and all the pow­
ers of Europe—going to war, the details were left for the uncertain future.
Liberal Britain, too, was being swept into international events it could not
control.

Tsarist Russia

Autocratic Russia—an absolutist state based upon an alliance of the tsar
and the nobles—in the nineteenth century presented a particularly sharp
contrast with Great Britain, with its long tradition of parliamentary rule
and commercial and manufacturing prosperity. Since the sixteenth cen­
tury, the Russian tsars had slowly expanded their empire through the con­
quest of vast stretches of territories and peoples to the south and into Asia.
Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the much larger Russian Empire was
multinational. Ethnic Russians formed less than half of the population.
Ethnic resistance to the empire and to the Orthodox Church—for exam­
ple, from Polish Catholics—increasingly challenged Russian domination.
Since the brief and ill-fated Decembrist uprising of 1825 (see Chapter 1 5),
Russia had seen no major reforms, except the emancipation of state-owned
serfs in the 1840s. The structure of the state remained the same, with no
institutional constraints on the tsar’s authority. Yet liberal ideas from the
West had begun to filter into Russia via intellectuals. Alienated from a
society built upon serfdom, which legally bound most peasants to the land
of their lords, some of them believed revolution inevitable. Moreover, serf­
dom not only was inhumane, it was also economically inefficient. This
helped convince the tsar that only through reform and the emancipation of
the serfs could Russia compete with the West.

Stirrings of Reform in Russia

Serfs lived in villages in which patriarchs served as intermediaries between

the lords and the community and, like the gentry, administered harsh

physical punishments to serfs who failed to obey. Only about 5 percent of

the empire’s population resided in towns. Russia had a very small middle

class and a tiny group of intellectuals and educated commoners. The intel­

ligentsia believed that only revolution could bring change.

Nicholas I (ruled 1825-1855), who had become tsar just after the Decem­

brist revolt of 1825, was obsessed with keeping Russia sealed off from

Western ideas, which he blamed for the rebellion of military officers. The

Revolutions of 1848 in Western and Central Europe increased the deter­

mination of the Russian autocracy to stifle internal dissent. The ministry

of education oversaw a policy of tight censorship and repression by the

fearsome Third Section, the political police. But the police found it impos­

sible to seal off the colossal empire entirely. More than 2 million foreign