Fall of Russian Empire

3 Key excerpts on "Fall of Russian Empire"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The International Politics of Eurasia: v. 9: The End of Empire? Comparative Perspectives on the Soviet Collapse

  • S. Frederick Starr, Karen Dawisha(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  II Imperial Disintegration

  3 The Fall of the Tsarist Empire and the USSR

  The Russian Question and Imperial Overextension Roman Szporluk

  Introduction

  The Russian state collapsed twice in the twentieth century. In 1917, the Russian Empire disintegrated while it was fighting and losing a foreign war. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, in peacetime, several decades after it had won the greatest war in Russia’s long history of wars. The first state collapsed before the Communists took power; the second, when it was under Communist rule.

  Many works have been written—and even more will be written—about causes of the breakup of both the Russian Empire and the USSR.1 Our task here is much more modest—to focus on certain distinct “factors” (“circumstances,” “conditions”) which substantially contributed to these events, without claiming, however, that these are sufficient or necessary “causes” of what happened.

  Unlike empires of modern times that fell while their former metropoles were gradually being transformed into “normal” nations and nation-states, the tsarist—and then the Soviet—empire fell apart before a modern Russian nation and a Russian nation-state had emerged. A major factor in the imperial collapse in 1917, and in the Soviet collapse in 1991, proved to be conflict between the imperial state and an emergent Russian nation or “society.” In both cases, “Russia” contributed to the fall of “Empire.” This leads us to the conclusion that both empires failed to solve the “Russian Question”—arguably their most important nationality question.

  Another major factor in the fall of both the Russian and Soviet empires was their overextension. They established their hegemony over nations and territories that refused to recognize Russia and /or the USSR as a superior civilization, a higher form of economy and government—qualities which an empire must possess if its rule is not to be based on coercion alone. To maintain hegemony over them in the absence of such recognition required a disproportionate reliance on coercion, and this made Russian rule in “Europe” a heavy burden on the Russian people, which in turn further contributed to the alienation of the Russians from “their” state. These were additional obstacles to the formation of a modern Russian nation. Thus, the inclusion of non-Russian peoples under Imperial/Soviet rule negatively affected the conditions under which the Russians lived. Having been called—and coerced—by their rulers, both tsarist and Communist, to serve “the great cause” of the empire, the Russians found it very difficult to establish for themselves a political identity distinct from and independent of empire.

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  Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union

  • Joseph D. Dwyer, Roman Szporluk(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Hoover Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  16 The Fall of the Tsarist Empire and the USSR: The Russian Question and Imperial Overextension

  Introduction

  The Russian state collapsed twice in the twentieth century. In 1917, the Russian Empire disintegrated while it was fighting and losing a foreign war. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, in peacetime, several decades after it had won the greatest war in Russia’s long history of wars. The first state collapsed before the Communists took power; the second, when it was under communist rule.

  Many works have been written—and even more will be written—about causes of the breakup of both the Russian Empire and the USSR.1 Our task here is much more modest—to focus on certain distinct “factors” (“circumstances,” “conditions”) which substantially contributed to these events, without claiming, however, that these are sufficient or necessary “causes” of what happened.

  Unlike empires of modern times that fell while their former metropoles were gradually being transformed into “normal” nations and nation-states, the tsarist—and then the Soviet—empire fell apart before a modern Russian nation and a Russian nation-state had emerged. A major factor in the imperial collapse in 1917, and in the Soviet collapse in 1991, proved to be conflict between the imperial state and an emergent Russian nation or “society.” In both cases, “Russia” contributed to the fall of “empire.” This leads us to the conclusion that both empires failed to solve the “Russian Question”—arguably their most important nationality question.

  Another major factor in the fall of both the Russian and Soviet empires was their overextension. They established their hegemony over nations and territories that refused to recognize Russia and/or the USSR as a superior civilization, a higher form of economy and government—qualities an empire must possess if its rule is not to be based on coercion alone. To maintain hegemony over them in the absence of such recognition required a disproportionate reliance on coercion, and this made Russian rule in “Europe” a heavy burden on the Russian people, which in turn further contributed to the alienation of the Russians from “their” state. These were additional obstacles to the formation of a modern Russian nation. Thus, the inclusion of non-Russian peoples under Imperial/Soviet rule negatively affected the conditions under which the Russians lived. Having been called—and coerced—by their rulers, both tsarist and communist, to serve “the great cause” of the empire, the Russians found it very difficult to establish for themselves a political identity distinct from and independent of empire.

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  Russia and the World

  New State-of-Play on the International Stage

  • L. Cooper(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 The Fall of an Empire Historically, the fall of an empire has always been accompanied by bloody upheavals, but what occurred in the Soviet Union was a unique event in recent history. The Soviet Union has been consid- ered by many as an imperial state, but according to most Russian analysts, the Soviet Union was not an empire under the classical definition. The Russian Federation, the largest within the Union, never claimed to be a metropolis ruling over the other republics - it was the Union that in a way transcended all of its constituent parts. For over seventy years the Moscow party-government cen- tre with all its power structure held in subordination the peoples of all the republics including the Russian Federation. This mighty power structure collapsed without an armed struggle and without military intervention. From a historical perspective it can be seen that both imperial Russia and the USSR have managed to exist thanks to four main, interrelated pillars of power. The first - a centralised, state-controlled economy whose main task was to support a huge military machine. The second - a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian or totalitarian political system combined with a messianic ideology, which was used to manage an economy based on military power. The third - terri- torial and political expansion limited only by geography and resist- ance by other nations. By its very nature, such a country was condemned to permanent confrontations with the outside world and this confrontation was the fourth pillar on which the system relied - it was a justification of the regime with all its peculiarities (Arbatov, 1994, p. 6). It was practically impossible to eliminate one of the four pillars of power without undermining all the others. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began to destroy one of the pillars through the 'new political thinking' which signified a more benign image of the out- side world.

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