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.
A beehive without a queen is a community headed for extinction. Bees cannot function without a queen. They become disoriented and depressed, and they stop making honey. This can lead to the destruction of the hive and death of the bees unless a new queen is brought in to guide them. Then, the bees will cooperate and once again be a prosperous community. Lily Melissa Owens, the protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, faces a similar predicament. While she does not live in a physical hive, the world acts as a hive. She must learn to work with its inhabitants, sharing a common direction, in order to reach her full potential. The motif of the beehive is symbolic of how crucial it is to be a part of a community in order to achieve
Throughout The Secret Life of Bees , there is no shortage of symbolism, coming directly from its namesake, bees. Each connection draws upon the deep and rich meaning behind this wonderful composed text. The bees, however, never are a scapegoat. Similar to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus, they never allow for shortcuts or disillusion with reality. They force you to see the world as it is, and to accept it, and send love to it, for it is all you can, when you are as insignificant as a
In the years leading up to World War I, social unrest among the Russian people was spreading rapidly. There was a huge social gulf between the peasants who were former serfs and the landowners. The peasants regarded anyone who did not work as a parasite. They had always regarded as all land belonging to them. They regarded any land retained by the landowners at the time serfs were freed as stolen and only force could prevent them from taking it back. By the time Russia entered the war, one peasant rebellion had already been suppressed and several socialist revolutionary movements were developing.
Morales, A., Sheafor, B. W., & Scott, M. E. (2012). Social work: a profession of many faces. (12th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Russia, industrialized as a result of many peasant revolts. The revolts led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, they received land but the political chains were still in place. Many reforms were still needed. The military became based on merit, education was increased, transportation became more efficient with the introduction or railroads, and law codes were improved with local councils put in place called zemstvoes. These reforms and the great size and natural resources of Russia allowed it to build factories. Yet, the change experienced by the West had not, yet, occurred.
Para 2: First of all, Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel by Kidd because it represented the community of women. The Boatwright sisters, along with Our Daughters of Mary, stood up for Lily when T. Ray came to take her home. Quoted from page 721, “The four of them lined up beside us, clutching their pocketbooks up against their bodies like they might have to beat the living heck out of somebody.” The Daughters of Mary all stood in the parlor of the Boatwright house, ready to take on whatever came their way. The community of women in this novel stuck together
While most of Europe had develop strong central governments and weakened the power of the nobles, Russia had lagged behind the times and still had serfs as late as 1861. The economic development that followed the emancipation of peasants in the rest of Europe created strong industrial and tax bases in those nations. Russian monarchs had attempted some level of reforms to address this inequality for almost a century before, and were indeed on their way to “economic maturity” (32) on par with the rest of Europe. But they overextended themselves and the crushing defeats of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the First World War in 1917 lost them the necessary support from their subjects and created “high prices and scarcity” which were by far “the most obvious factors in the general tension”
Bromley, D. & Melton, G. (2002). Cults, Religion and Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Finally, the novel The Secret life of Bees demonstrates the emotional maturity, and growth of the both Lily and Zach, during times of systematic racism. The novel authentically represents Civil Rights Movement’s time, and makes us realize how spiritually sad and dangerous these times were.
The Late-Tsarist period in Russia is popular in the state’s history in that it was during this time that serfdom was abolished, that is around the early 1860s. Before this era, serfdom was legal and practiced in the traditional Russian systems. Serfdom was an ideology of the late 1640s which gave to landowners the power to override the lives of their peasant serfs (workers) as long as they lived on their land. Serfdom’s legal powers included denial of movement from the landlord’s place, and freedom in acquiring as much service as a landlord could demand. Thus defined, it can be concluded that it was a form of slavery. It is for these reasons that the following study text will evaluate the aftereffects of the 1861 emancipation, and what Russia became after it.
Daschle, Tom, Scott S. Greenberger, and Jeanne M. Lambrew. Critical: what we can do about the health-care crisis. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008. Print.
In order for cults to continue to exist they persuade people to join, at any cost. In trying to persuade people, leaders use both physically and emotionally techniques. Margaret Thaler Singer is a clinical psychologist and professor of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a cult researcher and teacher for fifty years. According to Dr. Singer’s investigations, members of cults are often subjected to unhealthy persuasion techniques.
The resignation of Nicholas II March 1917, in union with the organization of a temporary government in Russia built on western values of constitutional moderation, and the capture of control by the Bolsheviks in October is the political crucial opinions of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The actions of that historic year must also be viewed more broadly, however: as aburst of social strains associated with quick development; as a disaster of political modernization, in relations of the tensions sited on old-fashioned traditions by the burdens of Westernization; and as a social disruption in the widest sense, concerning a massive, unprompted expropriation of upper class land by fuming peasants, the devastation of outmoded social patterns and morals, and the scuffle for a new, democratic society.
“The social causes by the Russian revolution mainly became of centuries of domination over the lower classes by the Tsarist regime, and Nicholas’s failures in World War one.”5 As the rural agricultural peasants had been limitless from serfdom in the year 1861, the peasants still refused paying redemption payments to the state and demanded to be the private owner of the land that they worked. The only problem was further compounded by the never lasting failure of Sergei Witte’s land reforms during the early twentieth century. Peasant disturbances increased which sometimes ended up becoming revolts, with only the goal of securing the ownership of the land they worked. At that time Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, which made up one and a half percent of the population owning twenty-five percent of the land.
Lifton, R., foreword, Cults In Our Midst, by Margaret Thaler Singer & Lalich (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).