Political Change in Europe in the Modern Era

European nations gained world dominance between the 15th and 19th centuries through imperialism and industrialization. European nations competed among themselves for international influence, and established by the early 20th century a very intricate balance of power, the disturbance of which ignited World War I in 1914. Over this same period, the power of monarchs within European nations declined as a larger portion of the populace demanded political rights, leading to the democratization of most political systems throughout Western Europe. These shifts in political systems were fed by urbanization, by the rise of class consciousness within the masses, and by the spread of ideas of political and economic philosophers who challenged the power of autocratic government.

Russia from Tsarism to Bolshevik Dictatorship

Russia lagged behind Western Europe in its economic and political development. In the mid-19th century, Russia remained a feudal society with very little industrialization or urbanization, whose tsar had absolute power. Serfs, peasants who were bound to landowners and had no political rights, comprised the vast majority of the population. Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881) initiated an Age of Reform that he hoped would modernize Russia while maintaining the absolute power of the tsar. In 1861 Alexander II emancipated the serfs, on the grounds that “it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.” This act put into place a complicated system by which the peasants acquired a “temporary obligation” to the landlord that could drag on for years, and had to pay to purchase land that they had considered their own and that was often much smaller than the am...

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... of the tsar in the late 19th century until the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship in October 1917.

The moderate pro-monarchist factions (“whites”) and the Bolsheviks (“reds,” renamed the Russian Communist Party in 1918) engaged in a Civil War until 1922, by which time the RCP had defeated the monarchists and reclaimed the border nations that had been part of the Tsar’s empire, with the exception of Poland, Finland, and the Balkan states. With these victories the RCP established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which became a powerful contender in world affairs under Stalin’s rule (1924-1953). The ideological and practical disconnect between Russian Communism and Western Democracy and the alliances of World War II were the foundations of the Cold War rivalry between the world’s two superpowers in the 20th century, the USSR and the USA.