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• Big - Russia was too big to rule. In 1913, it stretched 4,000 miles from Europe to Alaska, and comprised 125 million people.
• Backward - Russia was backward. It had few roads and limited industrialisation. Most people were still peasants.
• Weak - Russia was militarily weak. It had lost a war with Japan in 1904.
• Disunited - Russia had many different nationalities, languages and religions.
• Autocracy - the government of Russia, which Nicholas ruled over alone, was far too much work for one man.
• Proletariat - Russia was industrialising and the workers, eg in St Petersburg, were poor and oppressed. On Bloody Sunday 1905, they went on a peaceful march to ask the tsar to help them, but the Cossacks attacked them.
• Bourgeois - the representatives of the new middle class industrialists. They called themselves the Kadets and wanted Russia to have a constitution like England's. In 1905, there was a revolution and they managed to force Nicholas to create a Duma (parliament), but it had no real power.
• Revolutionaries - for instance, the Social Revolutionaries and the Marxists - split into the Mensheviks who wanted peaceful change and the Bolsheviks who wanted a revolution - committed acts of terrorism such as the murder of Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911.