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Issue 3 (56)

MODERNIZING EMPIRE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917
Year	2017	Number	3 (56)
Pages	61-70	Type	scientific article
UDC	930.1:94 (47)	BBK	63.3 (2) 535
Authors	Zubkov Konstantin I.	Topic	DISCUSSION
Summary	The article offers, as alternative to the Marxist and liberal schemes, a theoretical view on the origins and social sense of the Russian revolution of 1917 laying an analytical emphasize on the civilization specifics of Russia’s development during the late 19th — early 20th centuries. Special attention is paid to the uniqueness of the Russian state as the absolutist empire whose historical steadiness is explained by conditions of the ‘catch-up’ modernization and the need to use military-bureaucratic methods for mobilizing the socio-economically and culturally heterogeneous Russian society. The Russian autocracy, combining in its policies the course for the development of industrial capitalism and the conservation of the traditional society as a foothold of societal order, had collapsed in February of 1917 when the conflict between the developing civil society and the autocratic form of rule based on the rigid bureaucratic regulation and the lack of civil rights, reached the culmination. However, structural distortions typical of the authoritarian pattern of capitalist development caused the weakness and crisis of the bourgeois alternative for Russia’s socio-political development under the conditions of escalating revolution. Narrowing possibilities for the Russian society to go out of the system break-up, the fact that brought the Bolsheviks’ seizure of the power, have caused a certain cyclical turn in the further development of the country: the Bolshevik regime was compelled not only to realize the failed mission of the Russian capitalism but also to return, in a far more stiff manner, to the authoritarian methods of mobilizing the society.
Keywords	Russia, revolution, absolutism, autocracy, capitalism, modernization
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