Free Sample Essays > European History
Was the size of Russia the main reason for making it difficult to rule?
warmer that the soil could have been used for farming; on the south west of the Ural Mountains the land was fertile. To the east of the Ural Mountains the land was cold and useless for farming, so therefore it was thinly populated there. The high mountains provided a good defence against foreign invaders, but the mountains also kept out warm air trying to spread from the south.
The cold climate affected Russia’s industry and commerce as well as her farming. River Ob, River Lena and River Yerisey were all frozen over in winter and sea trade was made impossible until the spring. Most of the land inside the Arctic Circle was frozen over with thick ice for much of the year. Cold air swept down from the Arctic Ocean and for this reason, Russia was mostly useful for farming. In the Arctic Circle the land was ‘tundra’ where nothing grew except moss and scrubs. For more than 1000 kilometres south of the tundra stretched the ‘taiga’, cold land covered in forests of pine trees. This made it difficult to rule due to the size of Russia, as the Tsar would have been blamed for poor trade in cold weather, resulting in poor food supplies and a lack of other important every day items. He would also have been blamed for poor living conditions and the lack of space. Even though the size of Russia is not the Tsar’s fault, he could have eased the problems by sharing what land he had evenly between the people, but this did not happen, instead the richer, higher classed people had big estates which took up valuable land. This would have annoyed the lower classes a lot, and therefore would have disliked the way the Tsar treated them and disliked the way the Tsar ruled.
The different classes in Russia created problems for the Tsar. The Tsar showed an attitude, which told the lower classes that he did not care for them. The country was split into six classes – the Tsar, Nobles, Church, Middle Classes and Army, Workers and Peasants. The Tsar was at the top, while the peasants were at the bottom. People were not treated equally under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. The Nobles owned almost a quarter of all the land, even though they made up just over one percent of the population. If you compare this to what the peasants had, it is quite understandable why they disliked the Tsar. The peasants made up 84% of all the Russian society, and 4 out of 5 people in Russia were peasants, but they had very little land to live and farm on. Peasants were allocated a share of land, but it was barely big enough to survive on. They had to pay loans and many peasants got into [next page]