Report on the Situation of Russia in 1903

Report on the situation of Russia in 1903
Russia is a vast empire and is crumbling piece by piece due to many different things happening in the country. The empire is falling bit by bit due to the backward industry and bad leadership. Reasons that will be explained in this report for this bad situation are an inefficient and corrupt government, the conditions of peasants, the contrast between the rich and the poor, conditions of workers and threats from opposition groups. All of these things are destroying our beloved Russia bit by bit and I will explain how they are doing this later on in my report.
The first problem is an Inefficient and corrupt government. You are more obsessed with your family than running the country that has been your bloodline for hundreds of years. You the Tsar may have many good ideas but are too shy to bring these ideas up and get them into the country and the way it is run. This may be the end of a legacy for the Romanov family as you don’t have any of the traits of his ancestors and predecessors such as being a forceful character and an imaginative monarch. You avoid making important decisions and do not get help with day to day tasks that help to run the empire of Russia. These tasks have to be delegated to Russian officials and if not the empire which was once so great will become a myth. You are too busy answering to letters from peasants and appointing provincial midwives to deal with the change going on in his country. You are so careless about his country and you would rather write out instructions for the royal car to be brought round. You feel threatened by the officials that we are supposed to trust, you are threatened by their talent, and some of the people that you are threatened by are those such as Count Witte and Peter Stolypin. You refuse to chair council meetings due to him disliking confrontation, instead you meet ministers on a one to one basis and in these meetings you encourage rivalry between the ministers. Due to this rivalry in our government separate departments refuse to co-operate with each other making Russia a worse place to live in. You also appointed family members and friends from the court to important positions. Many of these people are incompetent or even corrupt which resulted in them making huge amounts of money from bribes.
The second point I am going to write about in my report is about the conditions of peasants. Around eighty percent of Russia’s population are peasants who live in places called communes. Some prosperous peasant farmers called Kulaks are living healthy but the rest have dreadful living and working conditions. Famine and starvation are common and in some regions of the country the life expectancy of a farmer is only 40 years. As you must know much of our land is unsuitable for farming and as a result land is in very short supply and in the last 40 years the population Russia has doubled. Peasants in the country are using ancient farming due to the country having a backward economy and it not being modernised. Each peasant family is allotted a strip of land in a field; these subdivisions are allocated by the peasant council called the mir. In Russia there is no basic education and very few peasants can even read or write. Despite all of this many peasants are still loyal to you and respect you so you still have a chance to change the fate of Russia. This loyalty is not due to you but it is due to religious leaders saying how good you are, but all this could change when they figure out for themselves that all you really are is a fraud. Many peasants are changing to the side of the Social Revolutionaries due to them believing that you are a fraud. The only thing that these peasants want is to own their own land and for in not to be owned by the aristocracy, the Church and the Tsar, as I said peasants accumulate to 80% of the country’s population so if you win the hearts of them you will surely restore life as we used to know it.
Thirdly is the contrast between rich and poor in Russia. There is a huge gap between the rich and poor, this is due to the country being backwards and people unable to get jobs that will help to push them further in their chosen career. Such as a farmer may want to own their own piece of land in the future and may request to buy it instead of living under the shadow of the government and the land not being owned by the council. A few steps have happened to get more middle class people into the country and this is the landowners, industrialists, bankers, traders and businessmen. These people have created a new sector in the middle class and increased the population inside of it. But this new found power has made the middle class think that they are better than the poorer people and as a result of this clashes between workers and capitalists are happening everywhere. This leads me onto my next point about the conditions of workers.
Fourthly in my report are the conditions of the working people in Russia. As you know there are newly developing industries in Russia and some peasants have left their land to work in these newly developed industries. They do this but their working conditions stay bad and have hardly improved. Most of these workers are in the capital St Petersburg and Moscow; most people come to these places to look for a new way of life, earn some extra cash before returning for the harvest. Overcrowding, terrible food, disease and alcoholism are everyday factors of life in these areas. You must see these people on the way to your winter palace in St Petersburg, you can see the people living filth and squalor and under the shadow of the man who is doing nothing to help them. These bad working conditions are only to be matched by the terrible working conditions. Unlike every other European Power we don’t have government regulations on things such as child labour, working hours, safety and education. Trade Unions should be allowed to have meetings with the government so that they can help to increase the working and living conditions of the working class people in Russia. Low pay, 12-15 hour days, unguarded machinery and brutal discipline are a few of the things that the peasants don’t like and would want to change, if you don’t act now they may go back to their farm life and the country will go even further back than it was before as if they prefer to work for themselves nobody will work for the middle class people and everything will go back to what it used to be, all because the workers find that working in the factories is no better than working on the land. They may revolt and oust you from the seat of power in the future if you don’t do something to help them and their working conditions soon.
Lastly in my report are the opposition groups that want a new and modernised Russia. Your government faces opposition from three particular groups. The first group are the middle-class liberals who want a greater democracy, these people want to be more like Britain as they feel that if we were to keep a king we should have a powerful parliament as well and they should work well together. The second and third opposition groups are more violently opposed to you and they believe that a revolution is the answer to people’s troubles. The first of these two groups is the Socialist Revolutionaries and they are a radical movement, their aims are to be the robin hood of Russia and steal from the rich and give to the poor. They believed that they have to be violent to get their way. They are responsible for the assassination of two government officials; they also are murdering a lot of the police force, and agents and spies. This group of people are widely supported by people who live in the towns and countryside. The third opposition group are the Social Democratic Party who are a smaller but more disciplined group who follow the ideas of Karl Marx. The group have recently split into two, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks are led by Lenin and they believe that they need to start a revolution whereas the Mensheviks think that Russia is not ready for a revolution. Both of these groups are illegal and many of their members have been executed or sent to exile in Siberia. Many of the leaders of the Social Democrats live abroad in fear of the government executing or exiling them. The activities of these opposition groups are adding to the appalling conditions in the towns and the countryside, this is leading to waves of strikes, demonstrations and protests and you are being warned that this is pushing Russia towards a revolution if you do not act soon.
To conclude if you want to keep Russia in an Aristocracy you need to act soon and listen to the people and their requests and put an end to the opposition group, you also need to modernise the country as this is the main thing that is making this revolution occur. All of these things that I have mentioned are equally important, but I think the main problem in the country is the peasants as they conclude of 80% of Russia’s population and they will be the easiest people to grab the attention of and help.