The antiquated czarist regime’s determination to hang onto power hindered modernization efforts, as a result, “the Russian Empire trailed behind the rest of Europe in terms of economic and industrial strength,” says Lynne Hartnett, an associate professor of history at Villanova University and an expert on the Russian Revolution. To make matters worse, Nicholas II was starting to roll back the limited democratic reforms that he had agreed to in 1905. But as he notes, the Czarist regime faced plenty of threats to stability, from dire urban working conditions to labor strife that the Czar’s soldiers tried to put down by massacring gold miners in Siberia in 1912. “Some argue that Russia was slowly evolving more modern political and social institutions, that it had a vibrant culture, a highly educated elite, that it had survived the upheaval of the 1905 revolution, and that it had the fastest-growing economy in the world before 1914,” Miner says. Prior to the war, Russia was at a crucial crossroads. Involvement in the cataclysm of war made it nearly inevitable.” World War I Exposes Russia’s Weaknesses “Collapse minus war was possible, but in my view not certain. “Russia was more unstable and had more serious internal dilemmas than many other great powers, and so the degree to which the shock of war resulted in chaos was correspondingly more intense,” explains Steven Miner, a history professor at Ohio University who specializes in Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Whether World War I was a game-changer that caused the Russian Revolution, or only hastened the inevitable collapse of an outdated monarchy unsuitable to compete in the modern world, is a question that historians continue to debate.
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