The Romanovs

emperor regarded Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a masterpiece but saw him as a ‘godless nihilist’ and banned his later socialistic works such as What I Believe. After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy was the most famous man in Russia with huge moral authority, but he was increasingly hostile to the regime, embracing a puritanical Christian socialism with sanctimonious dogmatism.

While Russia surged towards industrialized modernity, the emperor tried to hold the state together by mobilizing Russian nationalism and repressing the empire’s minorities. In this multinational empire of 104 nationalities speaking 146 languages, according to the 1897 census, pure Russians (excluding Ukrainians) were a minority of 44 per cent.

Between 1890 and 1900, the production of pig iron, steel and coal all tripled, railway tracks doubled in length while textiles made Russia one of the world’s top five industrial powers. Oil was discovered in Baku, which soon produced half of the world’s supply.