At times of civil unrest, he would often dispatch elite Cossack cavalry regiments to deal with unruly citizens.
The Tsar was the head of the Orthodox Church. The Church reinforced his authority:. Official Church doctrine stated that the Tsar was appointed by God. Any challenge to the Tsar - the 'Little Father' - was said to be an insult to God. The Church was very influential among the largely peasant population.
It made sure this message was conveyed regularly to them. The Church was give financial rewards from the Tsar for this propaganda. Most of the Russian population was illiterate and had to rely on what they were told by the Church. It was their only source of education and they tended to believe the teachings of the priests. However, priests were often not respected by peasants, who believed they were increasingly corrupt and hypocritical.
The word of the Church became less respected during the rule of Nicholas II. Tsarist methods of control - state infrastructure The Tsarist state system had developed over a long period. The rapid industrialization of Russia also resulted in urban overcrowding. Between and , the population of the capital, Saint Petersburg, swelled from 1,, to 1,,, with Moscow experiencing similar growth.
This created a new proletariat that due to being crowded together in the cities was much more likely to protest and go on strike than the peasantry had been in previous eras.
In one survey, it was found that an average of sixteen people shared each apartment in Saint Petersburg with six people per room. There was no running water, and piles of human waste were a threat to the health of the workers.
The poor conditions only aggravated the situation, with the number of strikes and incidents of public disorder rapidly increasing in the years shortly before World War I. Military reversals and shortages among the civilian population, however, soon soured much of the population.
German control of the Baltic Sea and German-Ottoman control of the Black Sea severed Russia from most of its foreign supplies and potential markets. By the middle of , the impact of the war was demoralizing.
Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties were increasing, and inflation was mounting. Strikes rose among low-paid factory workers, and there were reports that peasants, who wanted reforms of land ownership, were restless. The tsar eventually decided to take personal command of the army and moved to the front, leaving Alexandra in charge in the capital.
It was another major factor contributing to the retaliation of the Russian Communists against their royal opponents. After the entry of the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers in October , Russia was deprived of a major trade route through Ottoman Empire, which followed with a minor economic crisis in which Russia became incapable of providing munitions to its army in the years leading to However, the problems were merely administrative and not industrial, as Germany was producing great amounts of munitions whilst constantly fighting on two major battlefronts.
The war also developed a weariness in the city, owing to a lack of food in response to the disruption of agriculture. Food scarcity had become a considerable problem in Russia, but the cause did not lie in any failure of the harvests, which had not been significantly altered during wartime. The indirect reason was that the government, in order to finance the war, had been printing millions of ruble notes, and by inflation increased prices up to four times what they had been in The peasantry were consequently faced with the higher cost of purchases, but made no corresponding gain in the sale of their own produce, since this was largely taken by the middlemen on whom they depended.
As a result, they tended to hoard their grain and to revert to subsistence farming, so the cities were constantly short of food. I came to my DPhil research as an AHRC-funded student on a large project grant looking at Russian traditions and identities in the post era.
As someone who had not been studying Russia or Russian for that long, this was an ideal opportunity for me as I had a lot of institutional support, and a great supervisor, on which I could rely as I formed my ideas. My research focussed on architectural preservation in the historic northwest of Russia, and the ways in which people's understanding of this heritage informs their sense of local and national belonging. I became really passionate about the topic when I went to carry out field research in the region in the second year of my DPhil.
I lived for a year in three small Russian towns - Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda - where I worked in local archives and talked to residents about their places where they lived. I make use of a range of sources in my research. My work on local identities draws primarily on archival documents, from correspondence between local preservation societies, to readers' letters published in Soviet newspapers.
I also make use of oral testimony recorded through semi-structured interviews with local residents. This is wonderful material to work with, packed with colourful detail about the reality of life in regional Russia, past and present.
Combining these sources allows you to get at not only the top-down political decisions that shaped life in the Russian regions, but also the lived experiences of those decisions, and the ways that they informed people's understanding of themselves and their communities.
In my work on regional identities I'm always delighted to find evidence of clashes between political elites at the centre and in the regions. The Soviet Union, and the Russian Empire before it, was heavily invested in creating a myth of national unity in order to govern the huge, multi-national, multi-lingual territory effectively.
In reality, however, local elites had their own agendas, and these were often in conflict with politics at the centre. These different agendas are manifest in some debates about the status of the heritage objects that I followed in the archives.
There was one really lively discussion I came across, which concerned a number of famous icons produced in Novgorod in the twelfth century. The icons had been poached by the Russian Museum, in Leningrad now St Petersburg , and were being exhibited there as 'national treasures'.
Local museum workers were most upset about this, and demanded they be returned to the Novgorod Museum where they could be shown in their historically correct context.
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