Jesse Osborne Block 4; World Studies Louis XIV vs. Peter the Great Peter the Great and Louis XIV had very different approaches to power during their reigns. Louis XIV wanted to please nobles and higher power people, and focused on war and peace, religion, and economic oversight. Meanwhile, Peter I took a drive to modernize the nation of Russia, taking initiative to tame the nobles and reduce their power, achieve secular control of the church, reorganize internal administration, develop an economy and make it powerful. Peter the Great laid the foundations of a modern Russia. He ruthlessly decreased the power on the boyars and demanded they serve his state.
A new religion was created by Henry VIII, called Protestant. This authorized people to divorce if they were unhappy about their marriage. This made all the pope, monks and priests very irritated and angry. Henry’s hunger for power slowly increased; he wanted to dissolve the monasteries as he felt strongly about controlling the church his way. Although Henry was king of England, he thought that the pope might have more control over the people in England.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party wanted to completely abolish the Tsar’s power and give the peasants power to advance Russia. They were quite radical as they had terrorist wing who were responsi9ble for a few political assassinations. Another reformist group was the Social Democrat Party. They believed the industrial workers should be given power in order to revolutionise as removes Tsar’s power over the country. The Social Democrats were split into two groups: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
In Japan the Meiji restoration had to stop the warring factions and create a single ruler. From ether, the newly centralized government could dictate what had to be done to expand. This new centralization worked extremely well. A major difference is that Russia used foreign loans to build its infrastructure and assets, including railroads and heavy manufacturing. Ordinarily, this would be economic ruin as was the ruse for the Ottoman, but Russia nationalize those, or essentially stole then during the 1917 revolution.
Nicholas II had tried his best to regain people’s support and stop the revolution tide through the reforms after the 1905 Revolution. After the 1905 Revolution, the Tsar still had to face the above problems. In order to prolong his rule, he was forced to reform Russia. At first, he agreed to set up parliament, Duma. It made Russia became a constitution country like Britain.
The rights of universities to appoint their own professors was abolished and new legislation required the government’s approval for new syllabuses to be taught. No student was allowed to be taught History unless he had permission from the Minister of Education. I think that the use of repression is the main reason for the weakness of oppositions to Tsarism in the years 1881 – 1914. This is because of many different reasons and factors. One is because the Tsar enforced Russification of the country, meaning the people who were not necessarily a true Russian who enforced the Russian Orthodox Church were made to.
There were signs of an early revolution in the making when the people had had enough off being ruled by an autocratic government. On January 9, 1905 in St. Petersburg, the civilians of Russia peacefully marched to the palace of the tsar with just a simple compromise in which the Russian government was not very fond of due to the fact that they thought an autocratic government was the only government that could rule Russia. They ordered to soldiers to open fire on the demonstrators killing nearly 1,000 people. Russian’s were furious with this and throughout the year, they went on strikes in which one strike paralyzed the country, which then compelled Nicholas the second to grant civil and political freedoms to the people. The document was known as The October Manifesto.
Thus we can see that by the end of the 1920s, Stalin had definitely created a totalitarian state, but to what extent? One example of the way in which the USSR under Stalin was a totalitarian state was the great purges. The purges were the process by which Stalin eliminated all the competition that he had in the communist party, including Communist Party members and Government officials who were potential rivals or threats to him, those who criticized his policies and even the innocent few. Stalin held show trials for those party members who opposed him – including famously the trial of the sixteen, seventeen and twenty one, which all individually eliminated Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Rykov. These trials were meant for the people to see and serve as a warning to any people planning to oppose Stalin.
Ex: created state council and upper chamber but he would nominate half members; he solely encapsulated the right to declare war, he would still control the Orthodox Church, the power to appoint and dismiss ministers and to dissolve the Duma, if he desired. E: Lead up to people being more angry. The picture depicts a group of any women. In addition, Russia's peasants were out on the streets protesting against the lack of food. Both groups were joined by workers from the Putilov Steelworks, who refused to
A strong example of the importance of “Red Terror” was perhaps the execution of the Tsar and his family in public, showing the Cheka‘s uses. This is highlighted when Marples states “the Bolsheviks had proclaimed the abolition of the death penalty, the Cheka obeyed no such rules” supporting Elknar’s point of the “rapid expansion of the Cheka’s powers”, as this allowed the Bolshevik party to fully implement “Red Terror” to squash the threat to their power, even though it was against the party’s original ideals. From this it is possible to state, that the Bolshevik party saw the Cheka as very important to their success in the civil war, as they saw the use of