WwI

8 Pages 2075 Words

ndant nation that had relied on serfdom up until the 1860’s. The tsar, Nicholas II, had dreams of maintaining the “supreme royal power” along with the Russian Orthodox Church in order to preserve Russia’s greatness” (Strachan 265). In fact, in a world that was moving quickly towards the principle of self-determination, Nicholas was hindering Russia’s growth as a supposed “Great Power” and as an industrial, modern nation. Russia’s two most dominating qualities, size and population, became the tsar’s downfall. The size of Russia kept the tsar from making a positive connection with his people. The massive amounts of peasants and their agrarian lifestyle led to the natural establishment of “self-governing” peasant communities organized under a chief. “With Russia’s abolishment of serfdom in 1861, the bonds between these groups grew even stronger because of their collective duty to pay for their community’s land. Anger over these dues led to a failed revolution in 1905 but would later factor into the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917” (www.lib.byu.edu). It took Lenin to see that although Russia had not modernized enough for a Marxian revolution, the key ingredients were there in that the peasant communities, the middle classes, and the Duma were all angered over the tsar’s absolute authority. World War I merely hastened the inevitable and facilitated the dethronement of the tsar.
World War I exposed the weakness of the Russian empire and of the tsar’s power. After failing to mobilize for the war quickly enough, Russia sent two million people to their death in 1915 alone on Germany’s Eastern Front (Strachan 269). This caused an immense amount of war weariness and a call for peace within peasant communities and the working class. With increased pressure fro...