-07 were the bitter harvest from tension and animosities that had mounted steadily since the Great Reforms of the 1860s. By 1905, with the regime debilitated by foreign war, domestic terror and economic recession, only a tiny minority . . . stood ready to give . . . support to autocracy, still less the bureaucracy (Freeze 197).
However, the groups calling for great change (workers, students, professionals--the same groups calling for reform fifty years earlier) in society and the government were also organizing and strengthening themselves: "1905 was not just a year of revolution" but even more "a year of autonomous social organization" (Freeze 197).
Freeze points out another similarity between the age of industrialization and revolution and the age of reform. Both eras involved the people's demanding more power in running the country, and the realization of the leader that such demands must be met:
However reluctantly and conditionally, Nicholas II recognized society's right to share power in the new State Duma and, concomitantly, conferred an unprecedented range of de jure individual civil rights (Freeze 198).
Industrialization, then, was one element of a wave of great change which swept through the country at the turn of the century. The instability visited upon the country by the emancipation of the serfs continued throughout the post-reform years as freed serfs and the nobility struggled to re-define social and economic relationships. The government and the bureaucracy were the entities blamed in the twentieth as they were in the nineteenth century, but now industrialization rather than serfdom was at the center of the debate:
Alienated by the experience of emancipation, squeezed by old debts and falling grain prices, surround
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