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Russia had prevailed on the Japanese to share some of their influence in Korea, but the two Powers were already on a collision course. Britain’s nose, too, was put out of joint. The prospect of Russia gaining a predominant influence in Manchuria as well as in Korea was not widely popular. ²⁵Only Germany encouraged Russia to satisfy its expansionist ambitions in the Orient rather than looking to the West, which would impede Germany’s own imperialist ambitions. As for the United States, Russia’s sale of Alaska to it in 1867 had sweetened their relations, although they were to cool somewhat after the Mexican War of 1898, the American acquisition of the Philippines, and the extension of US economic influence in the Pacific. ²⁶ But while the Great Powers manoeuvred on the world stage, their domestic problems began to loom larger — and nowhere more so than in Russia.

By emancipating the peasants in the 1860s the government unwittingly contributed to an even greater problem: a population explosion. Between 1850 and 1900 the population of the Russian Empire is calculated to have almost doubled, rising from 70 to 133 million. For an underpopulated country this would not have constituted a problem, but, although much of the Empire was underpopulated, European Russia was not, and there the population grew from 60 to 100 million in the same period.

The problem had not been foreseen, and the reasons for it are still the subject of discussion among scholars. A better diet, leading to improved female fecundity, was one factor; a lower death rate from diseases of malnutrition was another. Earlier marriages and fewer wars and epidemics in the later nineteenth century also counted. So did less onerous terms of compulsory military service after 1874, and improving public health provision. But the emancipation of the serfs also contributed - not simply by engendering excessive optimism among the peasantry, but by abolishing their labour-service obligations to landowners. This reduced both the incentive for peasants to treat their sons as labourers and their resistance to their marrying and setting up on their own earlier in life. ²⁷

Earlier marriages, the earlier division of household property, and entitlement to shares in the communal land led to a problem of which Malthus had warned: that the population could outgrow its land resources and hence its capacity to feed itself. The government could implement plans for famine relief, as it did in 1891. It also began to encourage peasants to migrate to Siberia, and booming industry created a healthy demand for labour which led to a rising tide of migration from countryside to city. But the structures of village life were such as to precipitate a crisis beyond the power of such measures to prevent.

By the turn of the century, with village lands having to be shared between an ever increasing number of households, the average size of family farms was shrinking and increasing numbers of them became marginal. Even the Cossack communities, a privileged part of the population, were affected. Between 1861 and 1914 the Don Cossack population increased by 80 per cent, while changes in conditions of service introduced in 1875 had quadrupled the costs of service. As a result, by the turn of the century one Don Cossack out of every four called to the colours had to be excused on account of family poverty. ²⁸ In many parts of European Russia the countryside began to grow restive again. At the same time, rural conditions were driving more and more young people to the cities, creating social problems there.

The government was careful to monitor conditions in the spawning mills and factories, and recognized that it had a duty of social care to the employees. Legislation to protect workers was no worse than in most other industrializing countries and better than in many. Nevertheless, as everywhere else at this stage of an industrial revolution, conditions in the slums of Moscow and in the working-class suburbs of St Petersburg and many other cities deteriorated. Most of the inward migrants, women as well as men, were young people uprooted from quiet rural Russia, Poland and Ukraine, where the pace of life was sloth-like, and plunged into a disturbingly noisy, crowded, stressful scene. The consequence was a sharp rise in the political temperature of urban Russia.