The interesting thing about the Romanov dynasty is from a western perspective it lasted for such a long period of time and yet seemed to fall so fast. This concept suggests that the revolution had been coming since before the appearance of the deranged monk in St Petersburg.
The moment many historians trace the revolution back to is the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1881. The legacy of serfdom continued to oppress the peasantry the largest social group in Russia. On paper the freedoms for the people was impressive, in reality little changed for the peasantry. Swaddled with extortionate debt and poor land to work on, it is unlikely the serfs felt genuinely liberated. It created an urban workforce which became the focus group for revolutionaries.
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Petrov interpreted Emancipation as peasants were still not equal and that the reforms were lies in disguise. Alexander Herzen ‘the father of Russian Socialism’ wrote in Kolokol (The Bell) the first Russian censorship-free weekly newspaper:
“You hate the landlord, you hate the official, you fear them, and rightly so; but you still believe in the tsar and the bishop ... do not believe them. The tsar is with them, and they are his men. … The dead bodies of your martyrs will not perform forty-eight miracles, and praying to them will not cure a tooth ache; but their living memory may produce one miracle—your emancipation.”
In the first sentence Herzen reasons with the peasants that their unshaking belief in the Tsar is unfounded. This shows how the emancipation had polarised the serfs and gave them reason to support more extreme views. Therefore, disappointment with this superficial act of Emancipation undoubtedly was instrumental in causing the collapse of Tsarism, as it increased dissatisfaction with Tsarism and increased opposition to the regime. Geroid Robinson reiterates this idea ‘the importance of the impact…on the growth of the Russian revolutionary movement' can be seen since the emancipation of the peasants