It was under Shamil that the imamate was at its strongest and most united. Shamil employed the use of guerilla tactics against the Russians who were totally unprepared for such type of warfare. He also made a name for himself for his heroism and ability to escape against all odds. However it was not enough to stand up against the might of the Russian army forever and in Shamil was captured. In return for recognising Russian rule, he was allowed to settle with his family in Kaluga, before moving to Kiev were the warmer climate was more to his liking.
He eventually died in on pilgrimage in Medina. The war involving specifically the east of the North Caucasus is also known as the Russo-Circassian War. Russia had been encroaching into Circassian also known as Adyghe lands since the time of Peter the Great and under Nicholas I fortresses were built on the Black sea coast in the s which later served as strongholds.
Once such fortress was established in on the site of modern day Sochi. After the capture of Imam Shamil Russian troops were freed up which were then transferred to the eastern theatre, where by the Russians were also successful in establishing control and obtaining oaths of loyalty from Circassian leaders.
Those who refused instead were forced to flee to the Ottoman Empire with thousands dying on the route — an event which has since been described by some as an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide. After its success in the Caucasus, Russia turned its attention to lands in Central Asia which, despite not being a single national state, were then referred to as Turkestan modern day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
These events are part of what is known as the Great Game, which pitted Britain against Russia, as it feared Russian expansion towards India. In Russian forces captured Tashkent; this was followed in with the remainder of the Koqand Khanate becoming a protectorate of Russia.
The new territory was officially incorporated into the Empire in as the Turkestan Governorate-General. In Russia captured the important city of Samarkand from the Bukhara Emirate in the east of the region and in both the Bukhara Emirate and the Khiva Emirate accepted Russian suzerainty and became protectorates.
Finally in the Koqand Khanate was abolished and incorporated into Russian Turkestan. The Russian conquest of Turkestan was complete. By the s the Alaskan colonies were becoming more hassle than their worth due to overhunting, competition from the British and Americans and the very distance of the colonies. The native Tlingit people did argue that the land was never the Russians to sell in the first place, but to little effect. The emancipation of the serfs did not bring an end to the revolutionary mood existing in Russia at a time when democratic and republic revolutions were taking place in Europe.
Despite seeing the emancipation of the serfs, the revolutionaries still demanded a constitution for Russia and the improvement of the lot of workers and peasants. In the first attempt on the life of the emperor was made by a revolutionary. In there was an attempt to shot the emperor in Paris and then another attempt in St Petersburg in In Narodnaya Volya were able to plant a bomb in the Winter Palace itself killing 11 security guards but again missing the emperor.
The emperor had been lucky on all previous attempts but Narodnaya Volya only had to be lucky once and this day came in March Alexander then made the fatal mistake of emerging from the bulletproof carriage where there was another member of Narodnaya Volya in the crowd also armed with a bomb.
Ignacy Hryniewiecki — a young Polish revolutionary — throw his bomb fatally wounding the emperor. Alexander II was taken back to the Winter Palace where he died from his wounds. The revolutionaries hoped that the assassination would create a revolution in Russia, however in fact they had just killed the most liberal ruler Russia had ever seen and one who was even considering the idea of creating a constitution.
Alexander III saw the thanks his father received from his liberal policies and instead set out on a conservative policy of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality, which saw an attempt to spread Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian language across the whole empire.
New laws were also introduced in putting further restrictions on Jews. Despite his authoritarian reputation in domestic affairs, in foreign affairs Alexander III is known as the Peacemaker and is unique among Russian rulers as during his reign the Russian army took part in no major conflicts. One major aspect of his reign was entering into an alliance with France, based on his dislike of the conduct of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
In October the train on which Alexander and his family were travelling upon returning from Crimea was bombed and derailed. The attack on the train though is said to have helped bring about the death of the emperor of kidney failure several years later, although his appetite for alcohol probably played a role too.
The emperor died among his family at their residence of the Lividia Palace outside Yalta in Crimea in In celebration a festival was organised for citizens in the Khodynka Field outside Moscow. It is estimated that approximately , attended and when rumours began to spread that the free food and drink was beginning to run out the crowd rushed forward resulting in people being trampled and suffocated.
It is believed that over 1, people died and the same amount again were injured. After the tragedy Nicholas II went ahead with a planned ball in honour of the Franco-Russian Alliance, although it is believed he was persuaded to attend so as not to upset the French guests and would have rather spent the evening in prayer. Looking for something unique? Create the trip of your dreams with the help of our experts.
Skip to main content. Assassination of Paul Like his father before him, the policies of Emperor Paul alienated many nobles from him. Battle of Austerlitz and Peace of Tilsit Upon becoming emperor Alexander I appreciated the threat posed to European monarchy by Napoleon and sought out allies in an attempt to counteract the rising power of France, joining the Third Coalition against France.
Capture of Moscow After Borodino, Napoleon headed straight for Moscow and at a meeting on the outskirts of the old capital in Fili, Kutuzov held a meeting where it was decided to continue the scorched earth policies of Barclay de Tolly and abandon Moscow.
Battle of Maloyaroslavets By October with winter approaching, Napoleon realised that he had no hope but to retreat from Moscow to save his army from starvation and exposure. Crimean War In the s the Ottoman Empire had become so weakened that France and Britain were extremely worried that Russia would be the main benefactor of the Ottoman decline and would be able to implement the plan of Catherine the Great and spread southwards.
End of the Crimean War Despite the heroism of the Russian defenders, in August , after the sixth bombardment, Sevastopol fell. Emancipation of the Serfs Like his father, uncle and great-grandmother, Alexander II knew that Russia would never develop as a modern country while the majority of the subjects in European Russia were enslaved as serfs.
Caucasian War: Murid War Since the Russians had been applying efforts to subjugate the people of the North Caucasus and this process gained further impetus after the victories against the Ottoman Empire and Persia in the late s. Catherine II and other Tsars had understood this, and tried to create such a class by decree. But the bourgeoisie only springs from natural economic development, and not from above.
America or Russia, liberalism or communism : that was the crossroad of modern times that the liberals Tocqueville and Beaumont wanted to present to Europe in the age of democracy. He was too aware of the necessities of the community to believe in the primacy of the individual alone, and too committed to the liberal definition of the rights of the individual to reject them in favor of the community. True, he toyed with socialist ideas.
However, although he criticized the bourgeoisie many times, he never rejected it as a legitimate part of the People ; moreover, he ultimately believed in the unity of the People more than in class struggle. Thus, despite his socialistic sensitivity, he cannot be considered a socialist in the strong sense of the term. True, he was a Romantic, and he was not interested in liberal parliamentary politics although he was close to the Republican Party, he only seems to have been attracted to the direct intervention of the People in politics.
But his Romanticism was not so radical as to fully reject the primacy of the individual. In his long career as an essay writer, he wrote many articles against socialism and for the American model of society.
The parallel between Russia and the USA also appears as part of the argumentation. Close to the liberals after , Martin was appointed to follow Guizot in the chair of modern history at the Sorbonne. Before and after that moment, Martin published several works on French history --including a much-celebrated Histoire de la France in nineteen volumes -- and political essays. In he was elected to the National Assembly and in to the Senate.
Thus, in his account of the development of European civilization, the role of the bourgeoisie becomes pivotal. It was to this class that electoral rights should be extended. Eh bien, en Russie, que voyons nous? In he was ambassador in that country, and he was married to a Russian woman. As a proof of this curious statement, Morny said that the inheritance laws were more progressive in Russia than in France, and that in Russia the son of a peasant, if he becomes a civil servant, has a higher rank than the son of a noble.
Again in this case apropos Poland, Hyppolite Carnot delivered a much-acclaimed speech about Russia. An important moderate republican politician and father of Sadi Carnot President of France in , Hyppolite Carnot became a good friend of the Poles in his early days when exiled with his father in Warsaw.
It can be argued that in the mids it became a commonplace in most accounts of Russian society, and more so when the Russian revolutionary movement started to grow and to be known in France. This is what France had neglected in , thus fuelling the enmity of the lower and higher classes that unleashed the Revolution. A liberal monarchist although not Orleanist and Catholic political writer, Marchal had already written anti-republican and anti-socialist essays.
That year, A. Beginning with Tocqueville, the French liberals developed new ways to think elitist politics in the age of democracy and socialism. Thus, the liberal tradition -- for which the very idea of democracy had always been alien -- now offered the second pair as an acceptable option, whilst rejecting the first, on the grounds that it would necessarily destroy freedom and diversity under the weight of the state. Some of the most important French liberal thinkers, journalists and politicians of the time contributed to the making of this new image of Russia ; likewise, the direct relationship between a liberal worldview and a certain perception of that country became apparent.
By means of this set of representations the liberal tradition was able to confront the challenge of the socialist and romantic images of Russia as a paradise of equality and autonomy. The image of Russia as communism is conspicuously absent from the major works on the image of Russia in France in the nineteenth century. Exceptionally, in his Voyage en Russie Paris : Levrault, , p. Three years later, Russia allied itself with France by entering into a joint military convention, which matched the dual alliance formed in by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Alexander II's reforms, particularly the lifting of state censorship, fostered the expression of political and social thought.
The regime relied on journals and newspapers to gain support for its domestic and foreign policies. But liberal, nationalist, and radical writers also helped to mold public opinion that was opposed to tsarism, private property, and the imperial state. Because many intellectuals, professionals, peasants, and workers shared these opposition sentiments, the regime regarded the publications and the radical organizations as dangerous.
From the s through the s, Russian radicals, collectively known as Populists Narodniki , focused chiefly on the peasantry, whom they identified as "the people" narod. The leaders of the Populist movement included radical writers, idealists, and advocates of terrorism.
In the s, Nikolay Chernyshevskiy, the most important radical writer of the period, posited that Russia could bypass capitalism and move directly to socialism see Glossary. His most influential work, What Is to Be Done? Other radicals such as the incendiary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and his terrorist collaborator, Sergey Nechayev, urged direct action.
The calmer Petr Tkachev argued against the advocates of Marxism see Glossary , maintaining that a centralized revolutionary band had to seize power before capitalism could fully develop.
Disputing his views, the moralist and individualist Petr Lavrov made a call "to the people," which hundreds of idealists heeded in and by leaving their schools for the countryside to try to generate a mass movement among the narod. The Populist campaign failed, however, when the peasants showed hostility to the urban idealists and the government began to consider nationalist opinion more seriously.
The radicals reconsidered their approach, and in they formed a propagandist organization called Land and Liberty Zemlya i volya , which leaned toward terrorism. This orientation became stronger three years later, when the group renamed itself the People's Will Narodnaya volya , the name under which the radicals were responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in In Georgiy Plekhanov formed a propagandist faction of Land and Liberty called Black Repartition Chernyy peredel , which advocated redistributing all land to the peasantry.
This group studied Marxism, which, paradoxically, was principally concerned with urban industrial workers. The People's Will remained underground, but in a young member of the group, Aleksandr Ul'yanov, attempted to assassinate Alexander III, and authorities arrested and executed him.
The execution greatly affected Vladimir Ul'yanov, Aleksandr's brother. Influenced by Chernyshevskiy's writings, Vladimir joined the People's Will, and later, inspired by Plekhanov, he converted to Marxism.
The younger Ul'yanov later changed his name to Lenin. In the late s, Russia's domestic backwardness and vulnerability in foreign affairs reached crisis proportions. At home a famine claimed a half-million lives in , and activities by Japan and China near Russia's borders were perceived as threats from abroad.
In reaction, the regime was forced to adopt the ambitious but costly economic programs of Sergey Witte, the country's strong-willed minister of finance. Witte championed foreign loans, conversion to the gold standard, heavy taxation of the peasantry, accelerated development of heavy industry, and a trans-Siberian railroad.
These policies were designed to modernize the country, secure the Russian Far East, and give Russia a commanding position with which to exploit the resources of China's northern territories, Korea, and Siberia.
This expansionist foreign policy was Russia's version of the imperialist logic displayed in the nineteenth century by other large countries with vast undeveloped territories such as the United States. In the accession of the pliable Nicholas II upon the death of Alexander III gave Witte and other powerful ministers the opportunity to dominate the government.
Witte's policies had mixed results. In spite of a severe economic depression at the end of the century, Russia's coal, iron, steel, and oil production tripled between and Railroad mileage almost doubled, giving Russia the most track of any nation other than the United States. Yet Russian grain production and exports failed to rise significantly, and imports grew faster than exports.
The state budget also more than doubled, absorbing some of the country's economic growth. Western historians differ as to the merits of Witte's reforms; some believe that domestic industry, which did not benefit from subsidies or contracts, suffered a setback. Most analysts agree that the Trans-Siberian Railroad which was completed from Moscow to Vladivostok in and the ventures into Manchuria and Korea were economic losses for Russia and a drain on the treasury.
Certainly the financial costs of his reforms contributed to Witte's dismissal as minister of finance in During the s, Russia's industrial development led to a significant increase in the size of the urban bourgeoisie and the working class, setting the stage for a more dynamic political atmosphere and the development of radical parties.
Because the state and foreigners owned much of Russia's industry, the working class was comparatively stronger and the bourgeoisie comparatively weaker than in the West. The working class and peasants were the first to establish political parties because the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie were politically timid. During the s and early s, abysmal living and working conditions, high taxes, and land hunger gave rise to more frequent strikes and agrarian disorders. These activities prompted the bourgeoisie of various nationalities in the empire to develop a host of different parties, both liberal and conservative.
Socialists of different nationalities formed their own parties. Russian Poles, who had suffered significant administrative and educational Russification, founded the nationalistic Polish Socialist Party in Paris in That party's founders hoped that it would help reunite a divided Poland with the territories held by Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia.
In Jewish workers in Russia created the Bund league or union , an organization that subsequently became popular in western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Russian Poland.
Armenians, inspired by both Russian and Balkan revolutionary traditions, were politically active in this period in Russia and in the Ottoman Empire. Politically minded Muslims living in Russia tended to be attracted to the pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic movements that were developing in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Russians who fused the ideas of the old Populists and urban socialists formed Russia's largest radical movement, the United Socialist Revolutionary Party, which combined the standard Populist mix of propaganda and terrorist activities.
Vladimir I. Ul'yanov was the most politically talented of the revolutionary socialists. In the s, he labored to wean young radicals away from populism to Marxism. Exiled from to in Siberia, where he took the name Lenin from the mighty Siberian Lena River, he was the master tactician among the organizers of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
In December , he founded the newspaper Iskra Spark. In his book What Is to Be Done? He then worked to establish a tightly organized, highly disciplined party to do so in Russia. At the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in , he forced the Bund to walk out and induced a split between his majority Bolshevik see Glossary faction and the minority Menshevik see Glossary faction, which believed more in worker spontaneity than in strict organizational tactics.
Lenin's concept of a revolutionary party and a worker-peasant alliance owed more to Tkachev and to the People's Will than to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the developers of Marxism. Young Bolsheviks, such as Joseph V. Stalin and Nikolay Bukharin, looked to Lenin as their leader.
At the turn of the century, Russia gained room to maneuver in Asia because of its alliance with France and the growing rivalry between Britain and Germany. Tsar Nicholas failed to orchestrate a coherent Far Eastern policy because of ministerial conflicts, however. Russia's uncoordinated and aggressive moves in the region ultimately led to the Russo-Japanese War By Germany was competing with France for Russia's favor, and British statesmen hoped to negotiate with the Russians to demarcate spheres of influence in Asia.
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