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1905….A Dress Rehearsal For Revolution

The major cause of the Revolution in 1905 was an inept ruler.

The Tsars of Russian ruled with no sympathy. Having both the state and the church submissive to this autocracy gave the Tsar a lot of power, at the head of this power in 1905 was Nicholas II, of the house of Romanov.
Russia’s largest population group was the peasants (proletariat) making up around 82 percent [1] of the Russian populace. Although they made up the Russian working class and were relied upon to complete the hard laboring tasks no one else was willing to their land, labour and goods were still fiercely controlled by the aristocracy and their socio-economic conditions were usually poor. Despite this, the Russian Empire had still lacked any serious disturbances in the time leading up to 1905. Nonetheless discontent among the proletariats had been building since the emancipation of the serf in 1861, while Tsar Alexander II thought his plan of freeing the saves was great in theory the reality was many peasants may have been free but were left landless and worse of than before.
The emancipation was only one of a range of governmental, legal, social, national and economic changes beginning in the 1860s as the country slowly moved towards a market-driven capitalism. With liberal and socialist parties on the rise, discontent under the autocratic regime was becoming a problem and demands were made for reform. Although changes were made Tsar Alexander II made none such change to the countries political system and any attempts at reform were written off by the government. The Tsars and their policies were greedy, self-absorbed and wasteful; they had absolute power; there was almost no land available to the peasants and taxation was very high, especially for those who could least afford it. The refusal of any reform produced frustration among Russia’s people which eventually led to rebellion. The feeling among those who rebelled was that any demands could only truly be met by revolution. Thus began...