Comparison of Tsar and Communist Rule

Comparison of tsar and commie RuleTsarist find in the years 1856 to 1917 and commie rule to the death of Lenin and the death of Stalin twain depended on high degrees of central reason and ensure by the responsibility. The similarities amidst the two random variables of political sympathies were therefore such(prenominal) greater than were the differences. How distant do you agree with this judgement?Both proud and Soviet Russia sire a desire and well documented history of autocratic rule. However, Russian autocracy in its various forms has been far from consistent in either its placement or startlook. It is this inconsistency in structure and policy which has given a stand up to differing schools of thought. On the one hand is the view that the fleeting and unfulfilled promises of twain the liberalist- collectivistic February Revolution and Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917 witnessed nothing other than a passing from one form of totalism to another. On the o ther hand lies the hypothesis that the Revolutions of 1917 caused the destruction of the Russian feudalistic dodge, empowering the masses to invest their say-so in a pop bothy elected central representative form of presidential term, at least in appearance if not in essence. In allege to examine the two forms of presidential term and their attributes, this essay uses a comparative come along in its discussion of the absolute monarchism of Tsars Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II, and to the actor dictatorships of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. It will introduce the organisational structure of the monarchical and republican forms of goernment, and present a snapshot of Russian decree in both cases. It will accordingly analyse the similarities and differences of kingdom carry over various facets of society, and summarise these arguments in a logical conclusion.At the time of the accession to power of Tsar Alexander II in 1855, the Russian Empire was a catching absolute monarchy ruled by the Romanov dynasty. The Tsar promulgated and enforced laws personally, albeit performing on the counsel of trusted advisers. The Tsar also controlled the official democracy religion of Orthodox Christianity through and through the Holy Synod. Through his personally plant counsellors, the Tsar wielded absolute power over nigh national institutions, including the military, the judicatory and the press. Subjects of the empire were segregated into unalike social classes on various rungs of the feudal ladder, from the nobility down through the clergy, merchants, cossacks and tikes. The volume of peasants were classed as serfs common labourers derail to the land, with no political representation. Imperial Russia had a proportionately larger population than its European counterparts of Great Power status, and the majority of its peasant population eked out a meagre existence below the poverty line. The Russian economical system was based on a primit ive form of agriculture, and as such economic growth was sluggish, lagging way behind the quickly industrialising West, with which Russia was ineffectual to compete financially. State intervention in industry tended to be to a greater extent frequent than elsewhere in Europe, though in certain sectors it actual with private initiative, much foreign capital. In any case, due to the deep onset of industrialisation, Russia remained largely agricultural until well into the twentieth century.Certain aspects of assure control were relinquished in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in particular during the reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, in the areas of government, program line and the judiciary. In 1861 Alexander II announced the freedom of around 20 million serfs. topical anesthetic commissions controlled by the landowning gentry gave rise to emancipation by giving land and certain privileges to the serfs, though filet short of freedom per se. Very few former serfs mov ed foreign their village commune, and they were ask to make redemption payments to the government over a period of al about fifty years. Landowners were compensated in the form of government bonds.Local government was reformed shortly after contendds in 1864, whereby the European part of Russia was reorganised into different regions and districts in a devolution exercise. Local government became fully responsible for health, education and transport, signifying a move outside from centralised power. In the same year, judicial reforms took place in most urban centres. The major change was the introduction of juries into the courtroom. The judiciary functioned fairly well, though the government lacked the financial clout to enforce the assesss, meaning that local peasant justice remained relatively unaffected, with little interference from the central government.State control remained fairly strong in the military, mark by the governments desire to effect the transition from a larg e standing troops to a reserve the States, made possible through the training of the impudent emancipated serfs. In other areas, the State bank was founded in 1866, all school officials remained nominally subordinate to the Ministry of Education, and censorship laws were relaxed in the 1860s.Soviet Russia presents a more modern, if not altogether different, concept of state control. In February 1917, a Provisional political sympathies of liberal socialists ousted the autocracy with the intention of establishing a democratic form of government in a war-ravaged society. At the same time, the base of operations Bolsheviks representing the working classes called for nationwide socialist transformation, and eventually seized power from the Provisional Government in November of the same year. Only after a long and fucking(a) fratricidal war did the Bolsheviks consolidate power and establish a one- society Communist state, which officially came into being in December 1922.The Sovie t government initially attempted to centralise the economy through Lenins New frugal Policy (NEP). Threatening encirclement from capitalist powers, Lenin stressed the importance of rapid industrialisation through direct state control, as dictated by Marxist doctrine. However, these efforts did not come to fruition, and some private enterprise was permitted to coexist with the heavily nationalised industrial sector. Yet following Stalins accession to power in 1928, the state assumed control of all existing businesses and initiated intensive course of studys of industrialisation in the form of three pre-War five-year plans. In agriculture, the state seized peasants home to establish collective farms. The plan proved largely less-traveled and caused some(prenominal) hardship. Millions of common labourers starved to death or were murdered during periods of forced collectivisation. kindly unrest continued well into the 1930s as Stalin embarked on a purge of his own party. This ga ve rise to a campaign of terror not dissimilar to that witnessed in Revolutionary France, leading to the imprisonment and/or execution of anyone who was suspected of being an opponent of the Communist regime. Literally millions of citizens were expunged from all sections of society.However, there were certain advantages of this rigorous state control. Stalins industrialisation programme required that workers be adequately educated. This led to an increase in the number of schools. more(prenominal) importantly, for the first time women were given equal status in education and employment as men, marking an improvement in household income and family life. ordinary access to health care gradually became readily avail qualified, increasing the touchstone of living and life expectancy. Engineers, architects and medical personnel were sent abroad to define new technologies, and exchange programmes enabled foreign input into the expanding Soviet knowledge base.The bang of the Second W orld War served only to intensify the Stalinist system of state control. Forced labour rapidly accelerated Soviet industrial output, allowing the USSR to outstrip Nazi Germanys initial advance, while conscription great(p) the ranks of the Red Army, enabling the military to push back the eastward carrier bag of the German army in the winter of 1941-42. The post-War era saw no reduction in this trend as the Soviet government want to rebuild the infrastructure decimated by war and roll out its policy of extreme levels of state control over the countries of Eastern Europe located in its sphere of influence in the post-War settlement. It was not until the death of Stalin in 1953 and the accession to power of Nikita Khrushchev that repressive controls over government and society were eased.So how do the two forms of pre-Revolutionary monarchical and post-Revolutionary republican autocracy compare? permit us first examine the political ideologies on which the two forms of state centri sm were founded. The initially obvious assessment is that they were almost as far apart on the political spectrum as is possible, from the ultra-conservative monarchical despotism of Imperial Russia to the extreme left-wing one-party Communism of the Soviet Union. The monarchical despotism of the Tsars was concentrated in the person of the Emperor alone. He functioned as both Head of State and Head of Government, and was responsible for all branches of government. The serf majority of the population had no political rights or representation, and only the most well-off amongst the nobility and intelligentsia had sufficient status to make their views heard. Admittedly, given the coarse expanse of Russia and its poor transport and communication links under the Tsars, logistics would unceasingly dictate that imperial power was unlikely to filter down to both citizen from the Baltic to the Pacific. However, individual liberties remained severely restricted, if not non-existent.On the other hand, Soviet Russia was a proletarian dictatorship in pursuit of the ideal of dry land revolution. The Bolshevik effort in the civil war was founded on the tone that only a coherent and secretive organisation could overthrow the government. sideline the revolution, this belief was transposed to the machinery of government, in that only this kind of organisation could disapprove foreign and domestic enemies. According to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, this revolutionary esprit could only be achieved through the efforts of a Communist party which assumes the role of revolutionary vanguard, achieving its aims through a disciplined organisation known as democratic centralism, where party officials discuss proposals but do not question decisions once they have been made. Similarly, the electorate were simply expected to approve of the laws enacted and policies pursued by the party they had voted into power. some(prenominal) form of dissent, either expressed or implied, was punish ed in the most severe manner.Let us now reach to the practicalities of state control. As noted previously, levels of state control in Imperial Russia witnessed a marked decline throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, continued state control and supervision, heavy financial obligations, and communal regulation of peasant personal business made life in the countryside seem not entirely different from that prior to the emancipation. The gentry still filled high posts in the army and bureaucracy and occupied a dominant position in the new institutions created by the reforms and government officials viewed independent actions on the part of Russian society with much the same suspicion and distrust that they had previously. However, the reforms made a true difference, in the sense that the granting of personal liberty to the peasants freed them from total dependence on the landowning gentry, and it encouraged social mobility. The educated minority of the lower classes of society were able to engage in education and banking. This new direction in government policy gave Russian life new dimensions and possibilities of social and economic development. each way, this revolution from above certainly marked a watershed in Russian history, and fuelled the embryonic Revolutionary movement in its build-up to the events of 1917. A measure of the success of the reforms is that the government survived them unscathed, unlike those of Gorbachev in the 1980s.The immediate post-Revolutionary period witnessed conditions which were not dissimilar. Lenins Communist government faced the immediate challenges of severe economic recession and working class hostility. Alienated by the brutalities of civil war and famine, peasants, urban workers and many soldiers demanded the creation of a more democratic socialist government. The Politburo were unwilling to compromise, maintaining a one-party state and demanding total discipline and angiotensin-converting enz yme within the party. Economically, however, direct methods of mobilisation were abandoned, allowing a revival of private championship on a small scale. These changes paved the way for the NEP, which in turn led to an increase in agricultural and industrial production. Critics of the NEP complained that flourishing markets in agricultural produce benefited a revived class of rural entrepreneurs as opposed to the urban proletariat. They insisted that the government find the resources to invest in industrial growth to counter this trend. Unable to secure these resources, the government became increasingly unpopular amongst the peasantry, who still made up over 80 per cent of the population. followers Lenins death and Stalins consolidation of power, the government dealt with this crisis by experimenting with the direct, dictatorial mobilisation of resources from the countryside. This collectivisation marked the end of market relations in the countryside, meaning the government could determine what happened to rural produce and where the profits were invested. By 1934 the government had successfully taken control of the huge human and actual resources of the countryside.The collectivisation of these resources were subsequently diverted to the towns in Stalins intense programme of industrialisation. Only a hugely powerful centralised state was undecided of such a programme, and it is no accident that it was managed by a passing coercive and autocratic state system. Building on a long tradition of Russian autocracy, Stalin created a modernised autocracy in which his authority grew to the point where he no longer depended on the party, but open up a unique system of personal rule. The atmosphere of crisis created by collectivisation and party purges generated a crucible of paranoia which strengthened the leadership by making any form of opposition look like treachery. However, despite this severity, the Communist government enjoyed much popular support, and ma ny ordinary citizens accepted the loyal promises of Stalinist propaganda.In conclusion, it would appear that while the ideologies on which Imperial and Soviet Russia were founded lay at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the machinery of government operated in much the same way in both cases. It is difficult to assess which form of government was more autocratic, and it would be unwise to assume that the political currents at the beginning of the period in question form a legitimate basis for comparison with those at the end. However, it is safe to assert that the two forms of autocracy were as intense as they were efficiently managed. There were certainly huge differences in the ultimate aims and objectives of the two forms of government. While Imperial Russia strove to secure the ecological succession of the Romanov dynasty through maintaining the hereditary monarchy, Soviet Russia sought to achieve world revolution in pursuit of the Communist ideal. However, the similarit ies in the intensity of state control appear more striking than these ideological differences. While the concentration of government dominance appeared greater under Communism, especially during the Stalinist era, the state in both cases to all intents and purposes retained almost full control over agriculture, industry, the military, education and the judiciary. In this respect, the similarities seem to be greater than the differences. It is not without a certain sense of irony that such state control was nominally approved by the electorate in Soviet Russia, in spite of the hardships it often caused.BibliographyDavid Christian, Imperial Soviet Russia Power, Privilege the Challenge of Modernity (Basingstoke Macmillan, 1997)Terence Emmons, The Russian come Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge CUP, 1967)J. N. Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour, Russian History 1812-1992 (London OUP, 1973)Edward C. Thaden, Russia Since 1801 The making of a New Society (New York Wi ley, 1971)US Library of Congress, Federal inquiry Division Country Studies Series (Russia), http//lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html