This bold comment is receiving some downvotes, but Tsar Russia, USSR and modern Russia do have a horrible track record. The bloodletting of the Russian revolution was in large part motivated by just how badly the working class was abused, industrialization for them was a hell. Genocides in the baltic states middle of 20th century. Holodomor. All the recent Russian neighbour wars like Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. List of examples is long and it's slowly getting lost in the popular history. If you're from Russia or a neighbouring country, it's very likely that you have experienced serious ramifications of its policy or politics.
Wikipedia page on Chekism is an interesting read. A quote I found there. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa (former general in the Communist Romania),
> In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now former KGB officers are running the state. They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin. The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. Putin’s Russia has one FSB-ist for every 297 citizens.
Tsarist Russia was not a totalitarian state. State control over vast swaths of the country was pretty lax, the peasantry lived their lives unmolested except by tax officials and local magnates. Sure, anyone trying to print something would come up against state censorship because printing presses were few and monitored, but many of Russia's peoples weren't even literate pre-1905 or pre-1917.
This is true really only because it was impossible to have one at the time given the communications infrastructure. It was still the worst human rights situation they could possibly create. The peasantry weren't living their lives in freedom, they were human trafficking victims (or as they were known at the time, 'serfs').
Serfdom in Russia was officially ended in 1861. Slavery in the US was ended in 1865.
So I am not sure what "worst human rights situation" are you talking about. This is without even taking into consideration bunch of other countries with horrible abuse of humans. King Leopold anyone? Singling out Russia in this department is a hypocrisy.
Serfdom in Russia ended in the mid 19th century. Plus, serfdom didn't even exist in most of the country, so e.g. peoples from the Volga-Kama region would move just a few hundred km east towards the Urals and found new villages there where control was lax.
It was still an absolute monarchy until 1906, and in the blink of an eye it went from that to dictatorship under the Soviets. For the average serf, ending serfdom just meant they went from literal slavery to strongly implied 'sharecropping' slavery, much like former slaves in the US.
I don't thing there's much of a meaningful different between authoritarian government and totalitarian government aside from the available technology. If the czars had their way, they'd be in Putin's shoes right now, doing Putin things.
I don’t think one can reasonably categorize Tsarist Russia as "authoritarian", let alone totalitarian. Oppressive to many of its people, sure, and at times even despotic. But Russia's political system was such that much of this oppression was perpetuated by local elites, and the monarch in faraway Saint-Petersburg had little relevance to the people and their plight.
What ultimately led to mass unrest and the February and October Revolutions in Russia was the same huge wealth inequality as France prior to 1789, and people don’t typically use terms like “authoritarian” or “totalitarian” to describe the Ancien Régime.
I'm not a historian, but to me the difference between despotic (and I'd say Imperial Russia was despotic at all times, given that it was always a system of unchecked executive power) and authoritarian is splitting hairs.
Sure, it would be impractical for the Tsar to exercise this authority at the individual level all the time, but all the various local vassals only had their power subject to the Tsar's unchecked authority and when the Tsar wanted them to do something, their choices were compliance or ruin.
> people don’t typically use terms like “authoritarian” or “totalitarian” to describe the Ancien Régime.
Alexis de Tocqueville does, in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution [1]
"In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government."
I don’t think totalitarian is a useful way to describe Tsarist Russia. It was so far from exercising thought control that vast numbers of its citizens embraced an ideology dedicated to its downfall. (Source: Slezkine’s fabulous book The House of Government).
