The divergence between the Russian Empire and Prussia could only widen in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Prussia assumed the leading role in the new German Empire of 1871. German 'unification', which in reality excluded large numbers of ethnic Germans from the new state, nevertheless created the most formidable economic and military power on the continent. Russia, by contrast, appeared more backward and hence more vulnerable than ever before; yet it was this vulnerability which finally spurred tsarism to embark on a crash course in industrialisation after 1890. Thereafter Russia's phenomenal growth began to close the gap once more. The German government's consciousness of this growth was a contributory factor in its decision to risk war in 1914.
The two empires in this period were very different politically. Germany was a constitutional monarchy and a genuinely federal empire, even if its head of state retained significant powers and its greatest component, Prussia, remained a bastion of conservatism. Russian autocracy survived even the 1905 Revolution, when a constitution of sorts and a representative assembly were forced on the tsar. Yet both empires shared one characteristic: each in reality was multinational, despite efforts to identify the state with a single nationality. Germany, or rather Prussia, coped with its principal minority, the Poles, by waging a campaign of legal discrimination and internal colonisation. Russia, with multiple nationalities, attempted with notable lack of success to create a supranational sense of 'Russian' identity, even though the nationalism of ethnic Russians increasingly complicated the picture, in reaction to the nationalism of non-Russians.
World History
