Power imbalance in Russia
Power imbalance in Russia
Northern Eurasia's wide-open, level heartlands were both a challenge and an opportunity for Russia. Once a great European state—as opposed to a nomadic confederation—had been established there, it controlled a vast territory that was so abundant in natural resources that its population could survive catastrophes that would destroy a polity with more modest resources. Without succumbing to their own flaws, they could practically endlessly retreat, bide their time, and discover their enemies' vulnerabilities.
In many Russian regions, it was customary for the skhod to regularly redistribute all or some of the strips of land at the community's disposal in order to make sure that every household had adequate resources for survival and for the fulfilment of these commitments. Families with more members would gain more land, but they would also have to pay more in taxes; families whose members had passed away or left the village would lose land, but they would also have to pay less in taxes.
The system offered a lot of benefits. In a region of the world where agriculture can be marginal, joint accountability (krugovaia poruka) reduced risk. It made it possible for the Russian government and service nobility to do their duties with little expense and eve
It becomes clear that any state in charge of these vast regions had a very challenging and complex duty to complete when you consider that the people who lived in these vast territory were quite diverse and had distinct languages, customs, laws, and beliefs. That is the fundamental issue that Russia's successive leaders have had to address.
In reality, the Tsarist Russian state handled it extremely well, especially in light of the vast distances it had to reign over and the relatively immature level of its political development. The secret to success was the projection of strong state authority symbolically through the iconography of the Tsar and Orthodox Church, paired with strong local communities capable of carrying out responsibilities that in most European countries fell to intermediate levels of government.
Alexander II implemented reforms in the 1860s with the goal of bringing Russian society closer to that of Europe. The end of serfdom served as the cornerstone. This granted peasants new freedoms, such as the ability to participate in the market, hire out their labour, purchase and sell property, and vote in municipal elections above the village level. However, it also removed the nobility' control over peasants, which had previously been a crucial link in the empire's ability to mobilise resources. By enacting new laws and institutions including elected local governments, courts, universities, schools, a conscript army, a national bank, and a stock exchange, the government attempted to close the gap. This modernization was.
The Bolshevik revolutionaries urged labourers, peasants, and soldiers to defeat the exploiters who had benefited greatly from the post-1860 arrangements, rebuild their own self-governing institutions—now taking the shape of Soviets—and manage their own affairs. At least they continued to do so for as long as it took to bring down the previous government and its ambiguous successor, the Provisional Government. But later, the Communists, now known as the Bolsheviks, imposed their own power structure on those fresh organisations. Ironically, the Soviet Union revived the techniques of personally mediated power in the name of modernization, but in a totally different way from how they had been before the 1860s.
