Tsarism in 1914

Revision Notes for Writing an Essay about Tsarism in 1914

• Events moving towards upheaval in summer 1914: urban unrest and strikes, revival of Bolshevik activity, Tsar unpopular, his failure to learn lessons from 1905
• Disturbances  in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Odessa, Tbilisi, Riga and Talinn
• The autocracy wasn’t equal to the problems facing it
• Russia in process of modernisation
• If regime continued to fail to address the root causes of the unrest, it’s difficult to see how another revolution  could be avoided – even without a war
• Hard to say whether it would have happened in 1914 or later
• A crucial point – the Bolshevik Central Committee called off the St. Petersburg strike early in July 1914 due to lack of weapons and ‘inadequate party organisation’
• Workers continued strike for 4 more days though
• This shows they’d lost control of the movement
• Police report – workers had ‘gone berserk’

George Kennan and Leopold Haimson

Argue the regime would have collapsed sooner or later, war or no war

Sheila Fitzpatrick

‘The autocracy’s situation was precarious on the eve of the First World War, the society was deeply divided and the political and bureaucratic structure was fragile and overstrained. The regime was so vulnerable to any kind of jolt or setback that it hard to imagine that it could have survived long, even without the war’

Soviet Historians

• Argued to the end that revolution was historically inevitable and that the ‘revolutionary upsurge’ was reaching a climax in 1914
• In their view the outbreak of war actually delayed the revolution

Christopher Read

• More cautious
• Overthrow of Tsarism not inevitable
• The situation in the years before 1914 could have continued indefinitely

Robert Service

• Agrees with Read
• Says that although ‘the various weaknesses of tsarism were tightly interlinked, leaving the Russian Empire in a condition of general brittleness...a sense of proportion has to be maintained, although it was a vulnerable plant, it was not doomed to undergo the root-and-branch revolution of 1917. What made that kind of revolution possible was the protracted, exhausting conflict of the First World War’

AJP Taylor

Nothing is ever inevitable until it has started to happen

Best Conclusion

• Revolution was highly likely but not absolutely inevitable
• Regime’s survival depended on whether the army remained loyal; on how long the soldiers would continue to obey orders to shoot striking workers