How and why did the rulers of Russia manage to build powerful absolute monarchies that proved more durable...?

Question

than that of Louis XIV

Answer 1

it's called terrorism. people were rounded up by the thousands and publicly executed, or imprisoned. pretty soon every city had a gulag or sharashka or other type of concentration/labor/death camp as part of the economy.

the Russian space program, you know the scientists who made the Sputnik ,were just prisoners in a Sharashka, when the government was done with them their arms were amputated and they were killed in one way or another. millions died anonymously and were discardred in mass unmarked graves. this might be why their power was so enduring

Answer 2

One word: Isolation.

Until Peter the Great, in the early 1700s, very little attempt was made by the Russian monarchy to contact other nations.

They had plenty of natural resources, a great wall of mountains to the west, and of course they had their greatest defense; The Russian Winter.

And as far as the monarchies desire for conquest, they kept themselves very busy killing each other off for over 300 years.

Answer 3

Actually the Russian Empire was the first if not ONLY monarchy state to have a separation of state and church.

Where as in the rest of Europe the church ruled with, along or for the monarchy, the church in Russia was COMPLETELY independent of the thrown.

Answer 4

Russia was a much more rural, backward nation until very recently than any of its Western European rivals. The huge majority of its people lived far from any outside interest, and were generally illiterate. And, of course, unlike any European power, outside of the Black Sea and St Petersburg, it had few ports or densely populated border regions where outside ideas and outsiders could be introduced.

Russia had a single state controlled religion, Orthodox Christianity, whose Patriarchs were dependent on the state, unlike the Roman church, whose leaders (the Popes) were often outside the control of the European kings they vied for power with. (That's why the Holy Roman Emperor, effectively ruler of Germany, kept invading Italy, and why the French king 'captured' the Papacy and moved it to Avignon, France, among other battles.)

At the heart of the difference between the French monarchy and the Russian one was simple geography. France was bordered by many rivals, some of whom were sometimes equal in power, such as the Spain-Austria-Netherlands-based Hapsburgs, the English kings, or the Holy Roman Emperors, and who could invade through established corridors - Belgium, Luxembourg, northwestern Italy - that were fertile enough to support land armies on the move, or the English Channel and the Mediterranean which was easy for raiders or traders to cross.

Russia was far far from any real rival, and its heartland was very far from any rival army, protected by relatively harsh and infertile avenues of attack in which an invading army that wasn't entirely mounted might starve or freeze before reaching Moscow or Kiev. The key Russian conqueror of virtually every Russian invader was famously 'General Winter.'

In addition, the Russian monarchy was in theory owner of all lands within Russia, so it could, in theory and often in practice, strip upstart nobles of all their land if they rebelled. Western European nobles were often owners of their land with title older than that of their rulers, and the rulers couldn't easily strip them of their power base without instigating a very broad revolt (ask King John of England, and the Magna Carta.)

In the French instance, in particular, just as with Roman or Byzantine empires and sometimes the English throne, the king was vulnerable to the mobs of his capital city, as well. Until the middle of the 19th century, neither St Petersburg nor Moscow were big cities with big potentially restive populations, but the French king often had to retire to Versailles (that's why it was built, far enough outside of Paris to make it difficult for a mob to march that far, at least before an army could be gathered), just as the later Roman emperors moved their seat of government to Ravenna and to Byzantium to avoid being controlled by agitators of the local mobs in their capital cities.

Answer 5

By a good system of secret police and the total support of the church