Read the brief characteristics of Russia. Give Russian equivalents to words in bold.
Unit 8 Text 1 2. Read the text and find out if you were right or not. 1. Considered Russia's last true autocrat, Alexander III was the epitome of what a Russian Tsar was supposed to be. Forceful, formidable, fiercely patriotic, and at 6' 4" towered over his fellow countrymen. He was the embodiment of the fabled Russian bear. He came to power at a critical point in Imperial Russian history. The Industrial Revolution had finally come to Russia and capitalism was taking root. Foreign investment within the country was at an all time high. [1] 2. History tends to view Alexander III as a brutish despot. His only accomplishment being to strengthen his autocratic rule at the expense of the working class and peasantry. Alexander abandoned his father’s plans of granting the constitution and declared that only “absolute autocracy” in the form it was practiced during Peter I and Nicholas I could fight the revolutionary movement. Alexander III introduced some harsh security measures to fight the terror. He executed all those responsible for his father’s death as well as all direct leaders of terrorist revolutionary groups; he tightened police oppression as well as censorship of the press and sent thousands of revolutionaries to Siberia. In his Accession Manifesto, he declared his intention to have "full faith in the justice and strength of the autocracy". Any liberal proposals in government were quickly dismissed. Alexander was determined to strengthen autocratic rule as a God given right. His reign is often referred to as the Age of Counter Reform. 3. To his credit he stabilized the Russian government and maintained peace with his European and Asian neighbors. During all the years of his rule, Russia was not involved in a single major war. For this he was dubbed “The Peacemaker.” As his father before him, Alexander encouraged the development of trade and industry and imposed customs duties on imported goods to recover Russia's economy, which had suffered from the deficit created by the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. He also introduced a higher degree of frugality and accounting in state finances, in this way liquidating the budget deficit. During his rule industrial development increased and the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway began. 4. His canceling of the planned constitution set into motion events that would eventually take Russia to the brink of annihilation. Alexander was hopelessly out of touch with the emerging realities of a modern industrialized Russia. Autocratic rule was established at a time in Russian history when the nation was illiterate, uneducated, and attacked from foreign powers on all sides. At a time when the Russian government should have begun adjusting itself to the changing realities of the 19th Century, Alexander instead strengthened the autocracy. This is his greatest failure. [2]
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Text 2
Read the text. Find if you have mentioned all. What new facts have you learned?
Alexander III and the Counter-Reforms
Alexander III became czar well prepared to carry out a program of reaction and repression. He had never approved of his father’s reforms. Alexander III’s policy of reaction began in 1881 with a supposedly temporary law to strengthen police powers that in fact remained in force until the monarchy fell in 1917. The law subjected a large part of the country to the equivalent of martial law. It allowed the authorities to arrest, imprison, and exile citizens without trial or any other legal proceedings. The next year the police received even more power; they could now bar people who had been placed under “open surveillance” from certain jobs and deny them the right to move from place to place. Meanwhile the political police was reorganized; under the name Okhrana it became notorious for violations of political rights that most other European governments were bound by law to respect. These measures were followed by laws that together constituted the counter-reforms.
During the 1880s a series of decrees tightened press censorship, virtually abolished the autonomy of universities, and weakened the independence of the judiciary. In 1889 the government created land captains, officials with extensive powers to supervise and control the peasantry. The next year a new law increased noble predominance in the zemstvos while strengthening the Ministry of Interior’s control over those bodies.
A law in 1892 had a similar impact on town government: by raising the property qualifications for voting, the law cut the electorate in both Moscow and St. Petersburg by about two-thirds. Alexander III also intensified the government’s Russification efforts directed at non-Russian minorities. While these policies affected nearly all non-Russian groups, they were directed most vigorously against Poles and Ukrainians. The most severe discrimination, however, was directed against the country’s Jews, who were treated as aliens unworthy of a place in Russian society. This policy reflected both widely held anti-Semitic beliefs and the particular anti-Semitic attitudes Alexander.
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In 1881 the government played a major role in permitting or, in the case of some officials, even instigating a dreadful wave of pogroms. This outburst of often murderous anti-Jewish mob actions took place in more than 100 southwestern towns and villages. The pogroms were followed by a series of decrees that limited Jewish access to secondary and higher education, barred them from government service, denied them the right to vote in zemstvo or city duma elections, and discriminated against them in a wide variety of other ways. Tightened restrictions on where they were allowed to live forced thousands of Jews from their homes.
The reign of Alexander III did see a few positive developments. Russia stayed out of war and in 1894 concluded an agreement with France designed to protect both parties against an attack by Germany, whose growing power was a concern in both Paris and St. Petersburg. To help the peasantry, in 1881 the government reduced redemption payments and two years later established a special bank to provide peasants with credit. Most important, in 1892, in an effort to deal with Russia’s chronic inability to balance its budget, the czar appointed Sergei Witte as minister of finance. Competent and strategically minded, Witte viewed Russia’s budgetary problems as symptomatic of a broader and more dangerous problem: its economic backwardness relative to Europe’s other great powers. Like Peter the Great before him, Witte believed that Russia’s economic backwardness was a threat to its national survival. Having won the czar’s confidence, Witte began a comprehensive effort to promote modernization, economic growth, and industrial development.
Unit 9
Text 1
Read the brief characteristics of Russia. Give Russian equivalents to words in bold.
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