In 1900 the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific, covered about a sixth of the world's land and held more than 125 million people. Its ruler claimed powers that most European monarchs had long since given up. To understand why this state collapsed in 1917, start with how it worked and where it was under strain.

An autocratic empire

Russia was an autocracy: the tsar's power was not limited by any constitution or elected parliament. Laws were his decrees, and ministers answered to him alone. The Orthodox Church taught obedience to the throne, and a political police, best known by the name of its security branch, the Okhrana, watched for subversion and sent suspects into exile in Siberia. In 1833 the education minister Sergei Uvarov summed up the official creed in three words: "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality."

The empire was also a patchwork of peoples. In the census of 1897, Russians made up well under half the population; Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Kazakhs and many others lived under the same crown. In the 1880s the government pushed Russification, imposing the Russian language and culture on minority peoples in schools and offices. Most Jews were confined by law to the Pale of Settlement in the western borderlands and faced quotas in schools and professions. After 1881, and again in 1903 at Kishinev, waves of pogroms, violent mob attacks on Jewish communities, killed and robbed thousands, often while local officials looked away.

The emancipation of the serfs

Until 1861 most Russian peasants were serfs, bound to an estate and subject to their lord's will. Defeat in the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) convinced Tsar Alexander II that Russia had to modernize. He warned Moscow nobles that it was better to end serfdom from above than to wait for it to end itself from below. In 1861 Alexander II freed the serfs by decree, about 23 million of them on private estates, with state peasants following a few years later.

Freedom came with heavy conditions. Peasants often received less land than they had farmed before, and the best meadows and woods often stayed with the nobles. The state paid the landlords, and peasants repaid the state through redemption payments spread over 49 years. In most of Russia the land went not to individual families but to the village commune, the mir, which periodically redistributed strips of field among households and was collectively responsible for taxes. A peasant who wanted to leave for good needed the commune's permission. Many villagers believed that a second, "true" emancipation, handing them all the land, was still to come. That hunger for land would be one of the deepest forces in 1917.

Reform and reaction

Alexander II also created elected local councils called zemstvos in 1864, opened courts with juries and public trials, and shortened military service. He would not, however, grant a national parliament. On 1 March 1881 he was killed by a bomb thrown by members of People's Will, a revolutionary group that had turned to terror. His son Alexander III answered with tighter censorship, wider police powers and Russification. Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894, told delegates from the zemstvos in 1895 that hopes for a share in government were "senseless dreams."

Industry from above

From the 1890s Russia industrialized rapidly, pushed by the state rather than by a confident middle class. Sergei Witte, finance minister from 1892 to 1903, relied on foreign loans, high tariffs and state railway building, including the Trans-Siberian Railway begun in 1891. He put the ruble on the gold standard in 1897 to reassure foreign investors, many of them French. Factories clustered around St Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals and the Donbas, and they were unusually large: by 1917 the Putilov works in the capital employed about 30,000 people. Workers, many of them peasants who kept ties to their villages, lived in crowded barracks and worked long shifts. Trade unions and strikes were illegal.

By 1900, then, Russia combined modern heavy industry with a medieval form of government and a peasant majority of roughly four in five people, many of them farming with old methods on scattered strips.

Worked example: one village after 1861

Picture a village in Tula province, south of Moscow. Before 1861 its families worked three days a week in the lord's fields. After emancipation they are legally free: they can marry without permission, own property and go to court. That is a real gain in dignity. But their allotments are smaller than the land they once tilled, and the lord keeps the forest where they used to gather firewood, so now they must pay to use it.

Every year the commune meets to share out the tax and redemption bill. When harvests fail, households fall into arrears, and the commune as a whole is held responsible. Younger sons go to Moscow textile mills in winter and bring back wages, newspapers and new ideas. By 1905 the village owes years of back payments, while the noble estate next door still holds the best land. In the villagers' eyes, that land belongs to those who work it. When the government loses its grip, first in 1905 and then in 1917, they will take it. The example shows how emancipation could make people freer and angrier at the same time.