4 sentences with “tsars”

Alone among the monarchs of the great powers, the tsars had successfully resisted most of the forces of modernity that had fundamentally changed the political structure of the rest of Europe.

Not only were the 19th century tsars arch-conservatives, but the vast majority of the Russian population had no interest in political change. They were among the poorest, least educated and most oppressed in Europe: the Russian serfs.

The period between the rulers ended when an assembly of nobles elected the first member of the Romanov family to hold the title of tsar in 1613 - Michael I - but the tsars remained weak and were plagued by both resistance from the nobles and huge peasant uprisings for many decades.

The Bolshevik "Red Army" clashed with the counter-revolutionary "Whites" throughout western Russia and the Ukraine. For their part, the Whites were an ungainly coalition of former tsars, liberals who had been alienated by the Bolshevik takeover of the Duma (Russian representative assembly), members of ethnic minorities who wanted political independence, an anarchist peasant army in the Ukraine, and troops sent by foreign powers (including the United States) terrified at the prospect of a communist revolution in a nation as large and potentially powerful as Russia.