Hardship and Misery Prevailed in Pre-Revolutionary Russia.

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Each of the social classes in pre-revolutionary Russia all endured extremely different lifestyles, some living prosperously and contently, but a majority living in horrible circumstances, deprived of basic human rights. For this reason, the proposition “Hardship and misery prevailed in pre-revolutionary societies” is accurate to a high extent, as prior to the revolution, most of the population, particularly the peasants and urban workers, suffered immensely due to the embedded inequality of the autocratic system. The peasants and urban workers often lived in inhumane conditions where food was limited, work was difficult and laborious, and taxes were extremely high. The comparison of peasants and urban workers to the nobility, a very small portion of the entire population, further exposes the inequality of most Russian citizens under Tsarism, showing that despite a small amount of the population living with less hardship and misery, overall these aspects prevailed throughout pre-revolutionary Russia.

Despite living an often lavish life free from hardship and misery, the nobility and aristocracy accounted for only 2% of the population (Fiehn,1996, pg. 6), so cannot be used to accurately determine whether hardship and misery prevailed in pre-revolutionary Russian society. The peasants however, accounted for the largest portion of the population, and lived in horrible conditions where misery and hardship were extremely prevalent. Peasants often had little to eat, especially when harvests were bad, as the only way they could afford to farm at all was to engage in strip farming. Each family usually had around 20 to 30 strips, (Fiehn, 1996, pg. 6) which costed so much that they could usually not afford proper tools or animals to plou...

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Dowler, W. 2004. Russian Heritage: Land, People and Culture. [online] Available at: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/RussianHeritage/5.NOB/5.L/5.XII.16.html [Accessed: 23 Feb 2014].

Encyclopedia Britannica. 2014. Stolypin land reform (Russian agricultural history). [online] Available at: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/567072/Stolypin-land-reform [Accessed: 23 Feb 2014].

Fiehn, T. 2014. Russia & The USSR 1905-1941. London: John Murray.

Libcom.org. 2007. 1912: The Lena massacre. [online] Available at: https://libcom.org/history/1912-lena-massacre [Accessed: 3 Mar 2014].

Malone, R. 2014. Analysing the Russian Revolution. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Morcombe, M. and Fielding, M. 2014. The Spirit of Change: Russia In Revolution. New South Wales: McGraw-Hill.

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