[kentbrookug]

Originally posted by Zkribbler


He coulda won if he'd have gone in to establish a Repubic of Spain and a Republic of Russia. Then the locals would have been on his side. Against father czar? That would be very difficult to achieve. The Russian elites were loyal even when Moscow was lost. Even trying to gain support by freeing serfs would be difficult IMO.

I can't really imagine a republican Russia in the 19th century, certainly not in the first half of it. Enlightened thought which Nappy stood for (to some extent) was indeed popular in certain Russian circles but many of them were aristocrats themselves (prime example Cath the Great herself) and tried to couple enlightened principles with autocratic rule of the czar, who would reform the country "from above", since the vast majority of people, esp. peasants and serfs were seen as unfit to lead any modernization out of themselves (like the French did).

For a more modern, even republican Russia you need a real civic society which gives input for changes in law, education, administration, a beginning industrialization etc. which did not exist in the mainly agrarian Russia in the same way it did in western Europe. And freeing serfs only would not automatically have created these conditions, as Russia itself learned when serfdom was finally abolished in the 1860ies among other reforms then under the impression of the lost Crimean War which increased pressure to modernize drastically.