The social, political and economic situation of Tsarist Russia

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century Russia was an unlimited monarchy (autocracy): all power was concentrated in the tsar’s hands, and his main support was the landowners and the Orthodox Church. About 85 percent of the population lived in the countryside. With foreign, above all French, capital heavy industry grew fast: Russia became first in the world in oil extraction and fourth in metal smelting, and monopolies such as Prodamet and Produgol appeared. Even so, Russia lagged behind the leading states (5th in the world in industrial output, per the textbook). More than 100 peoples lived in the empire, and a policy of Russification was applied in the national borderlands. After the 1905 revolution, on the initiative of Prime Minister P. Stolypin, an agrarian reform began in 1906: peasants could leave the village commune and make their land private property, the Peasant Bank helped them buy land, and peasants from land-short regions were resettled in Siberia, Turkestan and the Far East. The reform strengthened a layer of well-off peasants but did not end the landowners’ estates, and because resettlement was poorly supported, part of the settlers returned home. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911.