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From 1855 to 1914, the Russian economy grew rapidly and so did the cities. Peasants freed from serfdom crowded into factories; merchants and shopkeepers expanded their businesses; apartment blocks went up, as did tenements. Between 1811 and 1914, the percentage of Russia’s people living in urban areas rose from 6.6 to 15 percent, with much of this increase concentrated in the metropolises. Moscow had swelled to more than a million inhabitants by 1902; St. Petersburg was home to more than 2 million in 1914.1 Now women of all ranks of life had to cope with the problems and the possibilities created by the Industrial Revolution in its Russian incarnation.
Women’s experiences of and participation in the economic and social developments of the last decades of imperial Russia depended on their social position, ethnicity, religion, place of residence, and individual experience. The standard of living rose for some women in the middle ranks of urban society, and the cities filled with new amenities, such as opera houses, theaters, and, by the early twentieth century, electric lighting. Influential noblewomen organized a feminist movement that set up charities and persuaded the government to admit women to higher education. Although, as in the past, improvements in education benefited the nobles first, they now spread to more girls from the middle ranks of Russian society, the working class, and the peasantry. Female graduates of the new schools then established a women’s presence in the growing professions, particularly teaching and medicine
Most of these changes seemed, once again, to leave peasant women behind. They made up 80 percent of the female population in the late imperial decades, and as the twentieth century dawned, most were still living much as their ancestors had, despite the fact that Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861. Their awareness of the outside world was expanding, though, for the menfolk, returning from jobs in the cities, told them about the latest styles in clothes, entertainment, even courtship. More significantly, poor women were playing a crucial part in industrialization. They filled in on the farms when the men went off to work in the cities, and they did a substantial share of the new cottage industry in the villages. Peasant women were also one-third of factory workers and the great majority of the house servants in the growing cities. Russian industrialization depended on their labor in the late nineteenth century, as it would continue to do throughout the twentieth.
The Emancipation granted seigniorial, state, and crown serfs personal freedom, and divided farmland between peasants and landlords. Ownership of the land went to village communes or, in regions where communes did not exist, to individual families. Like most political compromises, the Emancipation was received grudgingly. Peasants believed that they had been given too little land and that their taxes were still too high. Nobles resented losing property that they considered rightfully theirs and they feared that they would not be able to support themselves on what they had left. The aftermath of Emancipation fed these resentments, for the income of lower-ranking noble families plunged, even as most peasants continued to struggle with poverty.
The Emancipation was the centerpiece of a program of reforms begun under Alexander II and continued by his son Alexander III (ruled 1881–94) and grandson Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917). Government ministers overhauled the judiciary by creating additional courts, improving legal procedures, and introducing trial by jury. They established the zemstva (the singular is zemstvo), assemblies elected at the district and county levels to promote local economic development, education, and health care. They reformed the military and encouraged industrialization. They also maintained the government’s autocratic power, censored the press, and harassed critics.
The transformation of the economy bred problems that the bureaucrats were unable to solve. Poverty continued to plague city and countryside alike. Factory work was grueling, dangerous, and poorly paid, and the government did little to improve conditions. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and engineers labored to upgrade social services as well as infrastructure, but when they lobbied for input into government decision-making or requested greater freedom for their professional organizations, they usually received a frosty response from the authorities.
The government also bungled foreign policy. In the late nineteenth century, being a great power was more expensive than ever before, because industrialization had led to mechanized armies and navies. In view of the empire’s already enormous size and economic underdevelopment, Nicholas II should have stayed out of the increasingly hostile competition between the colonial powers in the 1890s. Instead he increased military spending and meddled in China and Korea. The latter folly led to war with Japan, which intensified domestic unrest and, in 1905, produced uprisings across the empire. Yielding to the pressure, Nicholas agreed to the establishment of an elected legislature, but after protests subsided, he refused to share power with it. He then blundered into World War I in 1914. That colossal error, coming on top of so many others, brought on the Russian Revolution in 1917.