Situated near the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa with strong religious ties to the Byzantine Empire and Greek Orthodoxy, Baltic Vikings, and the Asiatic Steppes, Russia is a land that merges East and West and is an anomaly of both. Some points of its history function as Eastern European while still others seem more Western Asiatic. Since Peter the Great's modernization of Russia in the eighteenth century, Russia has faced the West economically, militarily, and socially.
Ivan the Terrible's reign became foundational for Russia as it is today. His wars expanded the tsar's control along the entire Volga River and secured contacts with Central Asia. He also cemented power in the hands of the tsar, not the aristocratic boyars, by instituting land reforms, heavy taxes on the rich, and giving high governmental positions to lower class subjects. Perhaps the most famous examples of Ivan's fabled "terribleness" was the institution of the Oprichinina (1565-1572), the secret police, who answered directly to the king and could raid villages and kill nobility with impunity. These implementations stagnated the unadministered country and led to a period of significant instability following the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584.
By 1613 the Russian populace had rallied around a new tsar of the Romanov family and expelled all foreign rulers from their land. This stability lead to the expansion of bureaucratic rule that organized and controlled all governmental interests. A consequence of this increased state control greatly curtailed peasant migrations who, by 1649, were no longer allowed to leave their landlord or homeland.
Despite this limitation on mobility on the serfs, Western influences grew through the acquisition of Ukraine and other western lands, and the ideological hold of the bureaucratic elite over the peasant class wavered. Peter the Great brought Russia into step with the great powers of Enlightened Europe during his reign in the early eighteenth century by political and scientific modernization.
As the Russian empire expanded, so did the powers of the tsarist autocracy. Owning a much larger percentage of land and being in power over other religious leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church gave the emperor unequaled power within his realm. No popular resistance challenged the accumulation of the tsarist powers, and many famous Russians, including Dostoyevsky, and many Russians believed that the might of the Russian Empire depended solely on strength and power of the tsar. Political blunders and military disasters were often blamed on the aristocracy and bureaucracy of the empire.
From at least the early 1800s, the segments of society that resisted the repressive power of the tsarist regime were sent to Siberia to join work camps and to isolate and reduce the possible spread of dissent. Nicholas I (1825-55) put down the Decembrist Revolt that sought to introduce a constitutional monarchy to the Russian Empire after the military's exposure to Western liberalism during the Napoleonic Wars. In place of a constitutional monarchy, Nicholas I implemented "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" as his governing ideology and sent secret police to enforce anti-monarchical censorship around the empire.
The nineteenth century revealed Russia's potential strength as during the Napoleonic wars but hinted at the flaws of stifled innovation as the nation was torn by revolts mid century. Aside from the top-down emancipation of the serfs in 1861 by Tsar Alexander II, few freedoms were granted to the populace compared to the much more liberal Western powers. Nonetheless, later in the nineteenth century, Alexander III returned to Nicholas I's autocratic policies and sought to isolate his empire to reverse the effects of the West in a process called Russification.
The taste of reform and freedom that 1861 gave to the peasants coupled with reports of reforms going on throughout Europe led to political turmoil and social unrest that intensified throughout the nineteenth century, imposed reform in the 1905 revolution, and ultimately overthrew the tsarist government in 1917. As Lenin then Stalin instituted a communist state, control over dissidents, propaganda, and state confiscations led to the development of a powerful secret police. Dissenters and suspected dissenters of the government were sent to the now infamous work camps known as gulags scattered throughout Russia. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia became a federal state that has adjusted to the balance of its communist past with capitalist economic reforms.
Despite the by-Western-standards oppressive history of the tsars and Secretary Generals of the last half-millennium, the Russian people remain energetic, passionate, and powerful. The Russian people slug through adversary and opposition with an ease that rival nations envy. Russia is resource rich, diverse, and fearsome in both its geography and its people.
No other people in the world can maintain a multi-continental empire for five centuries through world wars, revolts, political collapse, economic flouderings, and the uncertainty of the modern age with the respectable success of the Russian people who will always outlast winter and persist in conquering.
__
Agatha Tyche
