Tsarist Autocracy

8 Key excerpts on "Tsarist Autocracy"

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  Russia and the USSR, 1855–1991

  Autocracy and Dictatorship

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IDEOLOGIES AND REGIMES      

  ANALYSIS 1: WHAT WERE THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE IDEOLOGIES OF Tsarist Autocracy AND SOVIET COMMUNISM?

  During the century and a half since 1850 Russia experienced a wider range of political change than any other European state. Until 1906 the political system was based on autocracy, which survived, in theory if not in practice, until March 1917. Between October 1917 and the end of 1991 the official ideology was Marxism-Leninism, usually referred to as Communism. For a brief period, between March and October 1917, Russia experienced less extreme alternatives in the form of moderate socialism and liberal democracy. Both of these had opposed autocracy but, through their failure to achieve a permanent cooperation after its downfall, let in a system that was to dominate the twentieth century.

  Tsarist Autocracy

  Within the context of Russia, autocracy meant the undiminished and undiluted exercise of the power of the sovereign. The Tsar was an absolute monarch in several senses. Political power came from God and its exercise owed nothing to any elected body; sovereignty was a trust, which was undivided and indivisible. On the other hand, the purpose of power was not the enhancement of the personal interest of the Tsar, since distorted autocracy was the worst form of tyranny. Instead, the Tsar carried a great burden – to uphold the social hierarchy and ensure the welfare of the people. The autocrat had the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, which established a special relationship with the Romanovs and a vital place within the political and social hierarchy.

  The exercise of the autocratic power varied from Tsar to Tsar. The general pattern of Russian history was either dominance by strong rulers (such as Ivan III, Ivan the Terrible, Michael Romanov, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Alexander I) or by political vacuums and weak rulers (such as Peter II, Peter III and Paul). There was very little between the two extremes and the last three Tsars, Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94) and Nicholas II (1894–1914), were particularly conscious of this. They all emphasised their autocratic powers and had others, whether official mentors or strong-willed consorts, to provide constant reminders of their responsibilities.

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  Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881 - 1917

  • H. Rogger(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter TwoTsar, autocrat, and emperor

  Russian autocracy was not an ancient despotism in which neither law nor custom protected persons and property from a totally arbitrary authority. And compared with the murderous excesses of twentieth-century totalitarianism, pre-revolutionary Russia looks tolerant, even idyllic. After Stalin and Hitler, it appears remarkable that only four of the regicide conspirators of 1881 were hanged and that many more of their comrades of 'The People's Will' were merely imprisoned or exiled. Some, like Vera Figner, survived to become heroes to a new generation of revolutionaries or to rejoin the battle against autocracy.

  That Russians measured their government by the standards of a less cruel age is but one reason why so many of them found it oppressive, capricious, or unresponsive. They also compared it unfavourably with what they knew of law and politics in the West where the participation of solid citizens in public life was tolerated or encouraged. A Russian professional or landed proprietor who felt as civilized as any European, could hardly be flattered on learning that at the accession of Nicholas II, Turkey, Montenegro, and Russia were the only European countries without a parliament. He could, moreover, judge his government by rules it had laid down for itself.

  The Fundamental Laws of 1832 proclaimed: 'The Russian Empire is ruled on the firm basis of positive laws and statutes which emanate from the Autocratic Power.' There was, then, a standard by which to gauge the legality of its acts, especially since the Council of State, established in 1810, had to review all legislation originating in the administration before it was submitted for the emperor's approval. That Alexander I as well as Alexander III confirmed the minority view in one third of the decisions on which the Council was divided illustrates that the monarch was supreme over institutions as well as laws. His supremacy was anchored in the first article of the Code of Laws which set forth the unlimited authority of the autocratic sovereign. It was further buttressed by the fact that until 1906 an imperial decree (imennoi ukaz

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  The Rule Of Law And Economic Reform In Russia

  • Jeffery Sachs, Katharina Pistor(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This chapter is organized as follows. First, it offers brief definitions of autocracy and the rule of law in their historical contexts. This discussion analyzes the persistence of the Russian autocratic tradition over the past several centuries, during which occasional episodes of reform from above alternated with long periods of bureaucratic resistance to reform. Next, it examines two crucial episodes in the late nineteenth century, when major economic reforms based on the rule of law seemed possible: the era of the Great Reforms (1861–1874) and the period of rapid industrial development under Minister of Finance Sergei Iu. Witte (1892–1903). After consideration of why these reforms failed, the discussion concludes with some thoughts on the prospects for the rule of law in the post-Soviet economy.

  The Concepts of Autocracy and the Rule of Law

  The standard definition of Russian autocracy (samoderzhavie) has two components. The primary meaning relates to foreign affairs as a ruler who has no foreign overlord enjoys autocratic power, literally “ruling by oneself.” In the absence of internal checks and balances, the term connotes absolute power as well. By the end of Tatar rule, conventionally dated in 1480, the grand principality of Muscovy had made the transition to this system. Over the centuries, in medieval Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, the autocratic government required personal service from most if not all of its subjects, issued a host of arbitrary laws, and remained immune from constitutional restraints on its executive power.4

  A distinction must be drawn between the rule of law and rule through law. The vast number and complexity of the laws promulgated by Russian autocrats had nothing to do with the defense of human rights or limits on the power of the tsar. The enormous Polnoe sobranie zakonov (Complete Collection of Laws, 1649–1913, hereinafter PSZ) and its supplement, the Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva (Collection of Governmental Statutes and Decrees, 1863–1917, hereinafter SURP), together with the various codes of laws issued from 1497 onward, indicated the vigor with which tsarist bureaucrats sought to regiment society by means of statutory compulsion and restriction. The law functioned as an administrative device, not as a set of rules to be obeyed by state officials. For example, profiles of all corporations founded in the Russian Empire are contained in the PSZ and the SURP because every new corporate charter took the form of a law.5

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  Economic Policy Making And Business Culture: Why Is Russia So Different?

  Why is Russia so Different?

  • David A Dyker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ICP

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Autocratic Tradition of Governance The supreme Autocratic power belongs to the All-Russian Emperor. Obedience to his authority, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake, is ordained by God Himself. 1 The first Tsars of Muscovy were the political descendants, not of the old independent Princes, but of the Mongol Khans. It may be said, there-fore, that the autocratic power, which has been during the last four centuries out of all comparison the most important factor in Russian history, was in a certain sense created by the Mongol domination. (Mackenzie Wallace, 1905, vol. I, p. 287) The icon of the [Mother of God] does not make room for ordinary folks, because her majestic authority does not derive its legitimacy from the presence of the faithful. This kind of authority is immutable, precisely because ordinary people did not author it, did not will it, and were not consulted in forging her jurisdiction, nor will they be tolerated to sug-gest modifications. Authority is uncreated matter; it predates all creations and will survive their eventual demise. 2 1 1 Fundamental Law, 1906, as quoted in Sumner, 1961, p. 57. Translation by Sumner. 2 Procaccia, 2007, p. 106. The icon in question is In Thee Rejoices All Creation , Dionysius School, sixteenth century. 2 Economic Policy-Making and Business Culture From St. Petersburg to Moscow the locomotive runs for a distance of 400 miles, almost ‘as the crow’ is supposed to fly, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. For twelve weary hours the passenger in the express train looks out on forest and morass, and rarely catches sight of human habitation…. And why was the railway constructed in this extraordi-nary fashion? For the best of all reasons — because the Tsar so ordered it. When the preliminary survey was being made, Nicholas I.

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  Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

  The Putin System

  An Opposing View

  • Grigory Yavlinsky(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 AUTHORITARIANISM ON THE PERIPHERY Understanding Russia’s Political System and How It Works

  T he events of the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet system have brought Russia to a political system that is based upon a monopolistic grip on power by one dominant group of the ruling bureaucracy. This group appoints whomever they want as chief executives of every uniformed agency (the military, police, security services, and so forth), every administrative unit, and every major economic institution.

  This system precludes the replacement of the ruling circle without the simultaneous breakup of the entire system and a deep political crisis. This is a system geared toward its own self-perpetuation. It excludes the possibility of either spontaneously evolving or reforming itself in accordance with a changing environment. Finally, this is a system based upon the redistribution of rents derived from administrative power; therefore, it is interested in the preservation of those economic and societal conditions that enable it to extract and to keep these rents. I will discuss all the features and characteristics of this system in more detail in the rest of this chapter.

  THE FORMULA OF DOMINATION

  As I have noted, the primary feature that characterizes the formation and succession of the present-day power system in Russia is its authoritarianism. In its essence, if not in appearance, the current political system in Russia is an undiluted authoritarian regime. In this instance, I use this term without a negative emotional connotation. This is just an unbiased assessment of a system of power in which a narrow ruling circle (either with or without a single leader among them) has secured a monopolistic control over the pyramid of administrative power while preventing any significant concentration of political resources in the hands of any other group.

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  Writing Russia

  The Discursive Construction of AnOther Nation

  • Melissa-Ellen Dowling(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nicholas’ concessions to the public merely delayed the regime’s expiration. Despite the reforms, the Okhrana, as the political police were now called, continued to suppress political opposition, and discontent with life under tsarism remained rampant. As McCloskey and Turner observe, ‘impressive though these concessions were Familiar pattern of the political police suppressing opposition. in law, however, they were often denied in practice. When occasion required it, the regime continued to ban radical newspapers and to outlaw political associations’.99 Once again, Russia’s leader struggled to balance freedoms with oppression to prolong his rule and the autocratic institution.100 The government reportedly ordered the shelling of rebellious towns.101 While Russia’s initial involvement in the Great War bolstered patriotic loyalty to Nicholas, the tsar’s absence from the conflict, along with the detrimental economic effects of the war, exacerbated existing social tensions. Society as well as the Duma pressured Nicholas for change, but he resisted. Mass strikes and ‘bread riots’ ensued, and revolutionary forces acquired the advantage.102 Once it became apparent that he had lost the military’s support – a death sentence for any regime – Nicholas abdicated in March 1917.103 After centuries as the epitome of autocracy, the tsarist institution had been abolished, and the 300-year era of Romanov rule was terminated by the tsar’s own people. Although the Russian Revolution seemingly banished autocracy as an official institution, authoritarian features remained prominent throughout the Soviet period, embedded into Russia itself. Homogenisation of Russia. Imprecise use of national terminology. Implicit meaning of Russia the state. Playing into the tragedy that Russia cannot escape its fate since autocracy is a part of its essence. The End of Autocracy? Following the overthrow of tsarism, the Duma instituted a provisional government to temporarily administer Russia. The provisional government rapidly implemented a plethora of liberal reforms which encompassed free speech, free press, and the right to strike.104 They demolished the Okhrana headquarters and abolished the political police as an institution, which the provisional government regarded as a fundamental symbol of ‘Tsarist repression’.105 Despite the fact that they provided the people with a degree of political freedom previously unmatched in Russia, the provisional government nevertheless struggled to maintain widespread popular support. The government failed to alleviate society’s primary concerns for their basic needs of food and land, and its decision for Russia to remain in the Great War was immensely unpopular.106

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  Russia Before The 'Radiant Future'

  Essays in Modern History, Culture, and Society

  • Michael Confino(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Historically speaking, the critical factors in Russia’s development, and the decisive ones for the understanding of its eventual evolution toward a totalitarian regime, oper-ated at the juncture of two sets of constellations: the Russian sociopolitical conditions, and the dynamics of change in the wider European and global sphere. 17 The historical situation obtaining in Russia by the merger of these two constellations of processes and events has been differently viewed by students of this period, but their views fall mainly into two schools of thought in Russian historiography. 52 • Russia before the “Radiant Future” Russia’s Future and Beyond One school of thought assumes that had there been no world war, a consti-tutional regime of the Western type would have emerged in Russia from the inevitable collapse of autocracy. The other school holds that liberalism and constitutionalism did not have (and autocracy had no longer) a base solid enough to withstand the combined strains of industrialization, the agrar-ian problem, and three years of war and military defeats. 18 The corollary is, obviously, that if there was no chance for a liberal-constitutional regime, then some form of dictatorship was bound to succeed autocracy: a fascist one or a Soviet-totalitarian one. It should be pointed out, indeed, that as a matter of historical fact, the idea of dictatorship was not completely alien to that time and place. Thus in 1905 Sergei Witte offered the tsar, as a way out of the crisis, the alterna-tive of an elected Duma within a constitutional-type monarchy or a military dictatorship. Another example gives a glimpse of the public mood: in Au-gust 1917 General Kornilov’s differences with Kerensky and the Provisional Government gave way to widespread rumors of an imminent military dic-tatorship.

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  The Destruction of the Soviet Union

  A Study in Globalization

  • D. Lockwood(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The Tsarist Autocracy, beholden to the landowners and the state bureau- cracy, had proved incapable of modernizing agriculture, unwilling to allow the development of the bourgeoisie, and determined not to reform itself. Tsarism – together with the economic structure which it held in place – was the most important fetter on the development of Russia’s productive forces. Russia, then, stood at the beginning of the twentieth century with a level of economic development and a political system which both made possible and necessary a revolution that would create the polit- ical conditions to facilitate the development of capitalism. 24 Until 1917, this was the ABC for Russian Marxists. Lenin pointed out in 1900: The entire history of Russian socialism has led to the condition in which the most urgent task is the struggle against the autocratic government and the achievement of political liberty. 25 At the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democrats (where the Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place), the capitalist (or as they put it ‘bourgeois’) nature of the revolution to come was so taken for granted that it was not raised for discussion. 26 In the Party Programme, adopted in that year and not changed until 1919, the Party declared ‘as its immediate political task the overthrow of the Tsarist Autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic’. 27 Not even the events of 1905, and the huge working-class movement that arose in that year, could divert the Russian Marxists from the tasks which the level of Russian economic development decreed. The Menshevik leader, Martov, explained: Only a truly revolutionary program can bring unity and order to the process of awakening these elemental forces. And this program, which can only be a program of comprehensive, well-rounded and 60 The Destruction of the Soviet Union consistent development of the bourgeois revolution, will be supplied by the socialist proletariat ...

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