In what ways were the lives of Russians affected by the Tsar's government before 1905?

The overall answer has to be: "Not many". 

‘Government’ in Tsarist Russia bore no relation to ‘government’ today – WE cannot walk down the street without being affected by a slew of laws, regulations, services, benefits and protections.  By contrast, ‘government’ in Tsarist Russia amounted to little more than an administration, a military, taxation to pay for it, and the repression of dissent … ‘keeping the lid on things’.  So – whilst many people in the Russian Empire may have been massively dissatisfied with their situation – the main impact of Nicholas’s government was in its INactivity … its inability to help that situation.  For most of the people in the empire before 1905 (with two exceptions), the significance of the Tsar’s government lay not in its EFFECTS (quantitative and qualitative changes in their lives) but in the AFFECTS (people’s emotional and attitudinal responses). 

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The Peasants

Most people in the empire – at least 100 million of the 125 million population – were peasants, organised into village communities called mirs.  When Nicholas came to the throne the big legislative change in their lives had already happened – the 1861 abolition of serfdom: … something few of them had asked for, many had not wanted, and for which they were STILL paying, in the form of ‘redemption payments’ which (they had been informed after the event) they had ‘borrowed’ from the government to recompense the nobility. 

So they were not happy bunnies, especially since the mir was jointly-responsible for the village’s taxes – so that, if one farmer could not pay – the rest of the community was made to pay his taxes for him. 

Contrary to the impression given in traditional histories, the peasants were not politically ignorant, and the mir communities were well-organised and astute.  The abolition of serfdom had replaced their former feudal ties to the nobles (where they served their masters, but their masters had a reciprocal responsibility towards them) with a purely transactional/ business relationship, and they started to ask: ‘What are we getting out of this?’ There were tax ‘strikes’, uprisings in the Ukraine 1902-3, and 1903-5 became known as the 'Years of the Red Cockerel' as peasants drove out the nobles and burned down their houses.  A few joined the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party or Agrarian Socialist League. 

Tbf the Tsarist government did not do nothing.  To celebrate his coronation in 1896, Nichola declared an amnesty for tax arrears, and halved land tax rates for a decade.  In 1903, an Imperial Manifesto abolished villages’ collective responsibility for non-payment of taxes.  And in 1904, to celebrate Alexei’s baptism, all arrears on redemption payments were forgiven, and corporal punishment of peasants was forbidden.  These actions will have affected many peasants for the better, though we cannot say to what degree; they were certainly not enough to prevent the 1905 Revolution. 

Moreover, on the other hand, Nicholas DID in 1899 order tax-collectors to exercise "unceasing coercion", and the peasant uprisings usually provoked a visit from the Cossacks ...  representing a direct and brutal negative effect on the lives of the peasants involved. 

The empire’s peasants lived a life we would find horrific: impoverished, working 18-hour days during the growing season, with medieval technology, and subject to periodic famines (such as in 1892-93).  Nicholas’s government did nothing to remedy their situation, beyond relaxing some of the ways it made their lives worse.  Thus the EFFECTS of the Tsarist government on the peasants were minimal; the AFFECTS, mind you, were massive, as the peasants came to loathe the nobility, hate government officials and police, and lose their faith in the Tsar as their ‘father’: "God is too high, and the Tsar is too far away". 

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The Workers

Much the same can be said about the Empire’s workers, who faced unimaginable horrors in the years leading up to 1905.  Russia in this period was experiencing the beginning of an industrial revolution, with all that entailed – industrialisation running ahead of regulation, health & safety nightmares, exploitation of workers.  As hundreds of thousands of workers flooded into the towns, sanitation collapsed, and ‘corner dwellers’ (families sharing a room with three other families), and incidences of workers sleeping on the factory floor, were common. 

Again, it was not that the government did nothing.  Nicholas’s minister, Sergei Witte, genuinely wanted to create a satisfied and loyal workforce.  In 1897, a law imposed a maximum of 11½ hours’ work for day workers and 10 hours for night work.  In 1900, the number of factory inspectors was increased to 257 (for 18,000 factories) and regulations were introduced which prevented local governors from interfering, and allowed Inspectorate reports to be published.  In 1903, pensions were provided for workers injured at work, and regulations issued: requiring workers to be paid in money; limiting fines; and encouraging employers to give proper contracts.  But the extent to which these measures actually made a difference to workers’ lives can be seen in the increasing number of strikes – 1,765 in the years 1895-1904, including an empire-wide strike in 1903, and a general strike in St Petersburg in 1904 which brought the city to a halt. 

Increasingly, therefore, the government turned to coercion.  In 1897, the police were given the power to imprison without trial "determined leaders" of strikes in times of unrest, and the Tsar increasingly used the military to suppress labour agitation: 28 times in 1896, 61 times in 1897, 271 times in 1901, and 522 times in 1902.  An Okhrana initiative – the ‘Zubatov’ Unions, set up and infiltrated by Okhrana informants to make them ‘safe’ – went spectacularly wrong; Zubatov Unions joined in enthusiastically with other strikers, and there is evidence that Father Gapon (who was probably an Okhrana informant) organised his disastrous 1905 demo to prevent a real opposition march. 

As with the peasants, Nicholas did not create the conditions which so harmed workers’ lives.  He even made ineffective attempts mildly to lighten their load, before using the military to repress their protests; his government therefore had little EFFECT on the empire’s workers’ lives.  The AFFECTS – their feelings towards the government for that very lack-of-effect – their anger, ‘labourism’ and hostility – were, however, significant. 

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The Nobles and the Church

If you read the diaries of some of the English young ladies who went to Russia to be governesses (an English governess was very fashionable), you might think the life of the nobility in Nicholas’s Russia was still one of luxury, holidays, theatre, and shopping on the Nevski Prospect.  Nobles rich enough to afford a live-in English governess, however, were in the extreme minority.  The 1861 abolition of serfdom had prompted the decline of the landed aristocracy: deprived of their free workforce, they struggled financially and in the period 1861-1905 aristocratic land-ownership fell by 41%, mainly as a result of bankruptcy, and large numbers of those remaining had loans against their estates.  And it was not just economic decline.  The eradication of the feudal social and administrative structures had required the government to set up new open and independent courts, and also zemstva (local councils) elected by local people, which looked after local government (these worked well … and they did not need the nobility).  Parallel reforms closed the army and civil service as automatic careers for nobles’ sons.  Russian writers of the time such as Dostoyevsky, Chekov and Tolstoy portrayed the aristocracy as decadent, foolish and bewildered by change, with a foreboding that their time was coming to an end.  They were wrong; the nobles’ time was up. 

I read an essay on the web which stated that all Nicholas’s reforms helped the upper, not the lower, classes.  Nothing could be further from the truth; Nicholas did NOTHING to help the nobles.  In 1897, he set up a Special Commission on the Needs of the Nobility, which spent four years discussing how to save the nobility from economic and political decay – it proposed prohibiting the sale of noble land to commoners … and Witte (who openly stated that the nobility "had outlived its time") ignored it.  What Witte did do, in 1894, was end cheap loans to nobles from the Nobles’ Land Bank. 

The nobles’ reactions were split.  Some nobles felt the need to ‘move with the times’ and joined the movement for progressive reform, others wanted to return to the old ways – and both were disappointed … again, we see Nicholas having zero EFFECT on their way of life, but significant AFFECTS on their attitudes. 

The same process was happening with the Orthodox Church, btw, which had always seen itself as the handmaid to the monarchy: priests had told people it was a sin to oppose the Tsar, and the head-quarters of the Okhrana were in the St Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy.  Far from bolstering the Church, however, the Tsar distrusted its leaders and wanted to reform its dry ceremonials, preferring a more intimate, personal worship (and the Tsarina engaged with Rasputin’s mysticism).  Faced with this, a conflicted clergy began to separate itself from the monarchy, and the Okhrana reported that the Church was undergoing "its own kind of revolutionary movement". 

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In all the above, we have seen that Nicholas’s policies had little quantitative effect – for good or ill – upon the peasants, workers, nobles or clergy, and that – if we are looking for answers – we need to look for AFFECTS … changes in the way they felt about the government.  It was Nicholas’s failure to help, as much as anything he did to harm, which affected their attitudes and feelings towards him. 

There were two groups, however, whose lives were very much changed by Nicholas’s government. 

The first were the nationalities.  Nicholas pursued a policy of ‘Russification’ – extending Russian control over the Empire.  The Black Hundreds carried out pograms against the Jews which Nicholas at least winked at, and during his reign he imposed the Russian system of education on Estonia and Lithuania; declared sovereignty over Finnish Law; and looted the Armenian national fund.  This was a direct assault on these peoples’ lives, and the Finns reacted with a tax strike and the assassination of Nikolay Bobrikov, the Russan Governor. 

A second group were the students.  In 1899, there were student demonstrations in protest at government control over the curriculum, and as a result, in 1901, 183 students of Kiev University were conscripted into the Army, and many others were expelled and exiled … a direct effect on their lives, and it provoked a violent response.  The assassinated government ministers – 1901: Bogolepov (Minister of Education); 1902 Sipyagin (Minister of the Interior); and 1904 Plehve (Director of Police) – were all killed by men who had taken part in the student protests of 1899-1903, and who had joined the Combat Organisation of the Social Revolutionaries (SRCO). 

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Opponents of the Regime

Finally, what about the opposition? Is it not the case that opponents of the regime were affected by being mercilessly suppressed by the sinister Okhrana?

It is true that these years were a time of political awakening.  A Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists (1903) asked the Tsar for "popular representation".  A Union of Liberation (1904) – which sought a constitutional monarchy, democracy, and self-determination for the nationalities – held seditious ‘banquet meetings’.  But it is also true that these nascent opposition groups were NOT repressed ...  they just had little to no effect, fuelling exasperation. 

Genuine terrorist organisations, such as the Social Revolutionaries’ Combat Organisation, were hunted down by the Okhrana, and sent to Siberia, as you would have expected.  However Frederic Zuckerman, in his study of the Tsarist Secret Police (1996) presents the Okhrana as developing in response to the terrorism, and not the other way round.  Only after 1902 when an SRCO assassin shot Sipyagin, and Moscow Police Chief Vyacheslav Plehve took over as Minister of the Interior, did he and Zubatov begin to (Zuckerman’s word) ‘experiment’ with political repression – starting by hunting down and arresting members of the SRCO.  For the moment, moreover, the Okhrana remained a chaotic organisation, as was demonstrated in 1904 when an Okhrana agent accidentally ordered the assassination of Plehve himself. 

It would seem that, in terms of repressive regimes, Nicholas’s Russia was not very repressive.  It is true that, in 1903, 6,000 political detainees were tried and convicted, many of them in secret tribunals – but (as Zuckerman points out) 6,000 is not very many in a country of 125 million undergoing country-wide uprisings.  And if you did get sent to Siberia?  Lenin, who was exiled there in 1897-1900, was allowed books, visitors and hunting trips … and managed to escape, suggesting that even Siberia was more about isolation than elimination.  You must not confuse Nicholas’s repression with that of Stalin.  The historian JW Daly suggests that it was the system’s secrecy, arbitrariness and unpredictability, rather than its suppression of terrorism, which turned the educated classes against the Tsar’s government … which would fit in with everything else we have seen about Nicholas’s government: only active enough to annoy. 

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Nicholas’s government was a weak and ineffective dictatorship – weak enough, it would turn out, to crumble when confronted. 

But it is that word ‘ineffective’ (having no effect) which gives us the answer to the question: "In what ways were the lives of Russians affected by the Tsar's government before 1905?"

Because it was the experience of every group in that troubled society which was the Russian Empire – the peasants, the workers, the nobles, the Church, the opposition … everybody except, in fact, the students and the nationalities – that Nicholas’s government was, well: ineffective.  It was ineffective in even beginning to address their desperate needs and, tbh, its attempts to suppress them were ineffective at doing much beyond aggravating them. 

In what ways were the lives of Russians affected by the Tsar's government before 1905?

Not many.