Why did reaction win out in the 19th Century?

By Kings Monkton History

The history of 19th Century Russia is really the history of the failure of the French
Revolution to take hold within the centres of power, within the Autocracy. The
defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the subsequent 'liberation' of Eastern Europe by
Russia prevented a Napoleonicrevolution within Russia's institutions. No doubt a
victorious Bonaparte would have abolished serfdom conclusively, 50 years
before Alexander II abolished it partially, and would most likely have imported
Napoleonic codes of law, the likes of which were imported into Italy and the
German states, creating, by 1870 two modern nation states.
Instead, Russian Officers stood in Paris in 1815, and their observations were
interesting. They were suprised, often, that they had been victorious, seeing the
relative wealth and modernity of Parisians, compared to the poverty, inefficiency,
incompetence and backwardness that was prevalent back home.
The savage violence that was meted out on dissenting Poles also left Russia's
allies in the grand coalition against Bonaparte really wondering if this was the
sort of regime one ideally wished to be allied to.
The revolution that had spawned Napoleon's wars of conquest across Europe
was of coursethe French Revolution of 1789, the big bang of modern political
thought that has had an impact on world affairs that Chairman Mao quite rightly
said 'is too soon to judge'. Thisrevolution and the British (then European)
Industrial Revolution brought the foundations of the modern nation state to
Europe. Liberal parliamentary democracy, capitalism and a nationalism based on
the shared concept of a nation state. Russia has struggled with all three of these
concepts and the tantalising question for historians is to what extent were any of
them incorporated into Russian life during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and
to what extent were any of these ideologies likely to have gained further ground,
had it not been for WWI?
Certainly the existence of plans by Alexander II for a limited constituent assembly
and his other reforms of the 1860s and 70s would tend to suggest that liberal
reforms were possible in Russia, even if they were a response to catastrophe in
the Crimean War. The existence of the Zemstva and Zemgor at the time of the
revolution, and indeed the appearance, stage left, of a provisional government
made up of previous Duma members and the head of the Zemgor shows that a
parallel political infrastructure had existed in some form since the 1860s, though
the experience of 1917 might tend to indicate that it had been fatally weakened
long beforehand.
The overwhelming patriotic fervor that swept that hapless Nicholas II to war again
suggests that on some levels, nationalism had taken root in Russia, but whether
Russians in 1914 were thinking about the defence and the honour of a Russian
nation state is questionable. This must be explored more.
Again, the experience of Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin and Russia's great spurt
would tend to suggest that capitalism wasn't completely alien to Russia at all. It
does appear to have been quite vigorously resisted by the Czar, who's fantasy of
'Old Russia' was threatened by the possibility of English style dark satanic mills
appearing across the empire.