There are many ways to explain the outbreak of the 1905 revolution, as many factors contributed towards it. The most important and significant factor was the different attitudes towards the government at the time. Attitudes varied from moderate to ones of a violent and extreme nature. Without the range of varying attitudes towards the tsarist system, there would have been no opposition facing the state.
The 1905 revolution was very significant. Opposition towards the tsarist system dated back decades; however people in Russia were getting noticeably more and more dissatisfied with their lives and the way their country was run, as Russia started to modernise. The 1905 revolution was the first time that tsar faced a direct challenge from all three major classes, the peasants, the proletariat and the intelligentsia and bourgeois, at once.
The peasants made up the bulk of Russia’s population, of whom Tsar Nicholas II had little understanding of. The peasants were severely poor and in debt from the mortgages they were forced to take out after their emancipation in 1861. One of the peasant’s main motives behind their involvement in the 1905 revolution was fear that the government would repossess their homes, as they had fallen behind on their mortgage repayments during economic decline. The peasants wanted reform, and were fed up with paying fees to their landlords etc. These circumstances shaped the majority’s opinions of the tsar and his government, who believed that the tsar was incompetent. However, these views had been held for a long time. The peasants became more dissatisfied with the state as policies were set up in order to speed up Russia’s modernisation.
Sergei Witte’s industrialisation policies played a big role in increasing opposition towards the government, mainly within the peasants and the proletariat. Witte’s intentions were to raise the capital needed to fund industry and the building of