Why Did Reaction Win In 19th Century Russia

Why did reaction win out in the 19th Century?

By Kings Monkton History

The history of 19th Century Russia is really the history of the failure of the French Revolution to take hold within the centres of power, within the Autocracy. The defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the subsequent 'liberation' of Eastern Europe by Russia prevented a Napoleonicrevolution within Russia's institutions. No doubt a victorious Bonaparte would have abolished serfdom conclusively, 50 years before Alexander II abolished it partially, and would most likely have imported Napoleonic codes of law, the likes of which were imported into Italy and the German states, creating, by 1870 two modern nation states. Instead, Russian Officers stood in Paris in 1815, and their observations were interesting. They were suprised, often, that they had been victorious, seeing the relative wealth and modernity of Parisians, compared to the poverty, inefficiency, incompetence and backwardness that was prevalent back home. The savage violence that was meted out on dissenting Poles also left Russia's allies in the grand coalition against Bonaparte really wondering if this was the sort of regime one ideally wished to be allied to. The revolution that had spawned Napoleon's wars of conquest across Europe was of coursethe French Revolution of 1789, the big bang of modern political thought that has had an impact on world affairs that Chairman Mao quite rightly said 'is too soon to judge'. Thisrevolution and the British (then European) Industrial Revolution brought the foundations of the modern nation state to Europe. Liberal parliamentary democracy, capitalism and a nationalism based on the shared concept of a nation state. Russia has struggled with all three of these concepts and the tantalising question for historians is to what extent were any of them incorporated into Russian life during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and to what extent were any of these ideologies likely to have gained further ground, had it not been for WWI? Certainly the existence of plans by Alexander II for a limited constituent assembly and his other reforms of the 1860s and 70s would tend to suggest that liberal reforms were possible in Russia, even if they were a response to catastrophe in the Crimean War. The existence of the Zemstva and Zemgor at the time of the revolution, and indeed the appearance, stage left, of a provisional government made up of previous Duma members and the head of the Zemgor shows that a parallel political infrastructure had existed in some form since the 1860s, though the experience of 1917 might tend to indicate that it had been fatally weakened long beforehand.

The overwhelming patriotic fervor that swept that hapless Nicholas II to war again suggests that on some levels, nationalism had taken root in Russia, but whether Russians in 1914 were thinking about the defence and the honour of a Russian nation state is questionable. This must be explored more. Again, the experience of Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin and Russia's great spurt would tend to suggest that capitalism wasn't completely alien to Russia at all. It does appear to have been quite vigorously resisted by the Czar, who's fantasy of 'Old Russia' was threatened by the possibility of English style dark satanic mills appearing across the empire.