-The Storm of Collectivization-

The arrest of the main nobles who opposed the tsar sent shock waves throughout Russia.

　There were voices of protest against this outrageous act, but the position of the nobles and wealthy merchants became even more difficult as huge quantities of grain that had been stored in warehouses waiting for prices to rise were exposed to public scrutiny.

"Bread! And ham!"

"I can finally get some decent food!"

"And we owe it all to the Tsar! Long live the Tsar!"

　Having gained the support of the people, Nicholas was able to push through his reforms with great force, and he sold off the lands of the confiscated nobles one after another.

State collective farmsIt" SOVKHOZ" will be remodeled into this.

　The ultimate goal was to increase productivity by consolidating the rural areas and peasants scattered across Russia and centralizing their management in state-run collective farms.

It was hoped that if Russian agriculture, which was underdeveloped, were to switch from countless small-scale individual production to large-scale production centered around sovkhozes, agricultural productivity would increase explosively through the centralized deployment and operation of tractors and other equipment.

　Another enemy alongside the nobility was the traditional RussianRural communitiesIt was.

Many of the freed serfs were part of rural communities that were given land as a result of Alexander II's Emancipation Edict.

(Even in my previous life, the Mir were tough opponents. Nobles would try to increase productivity to make money, but the Mir people don't even have that. They're the kind of people who are satisfied with being self-sufficient and living at a medieval level.)

　They too must be completely destroyed on this occasion.

　Nicholas subjected the Mir to even more rigorous oppression than the nobility. He changed the conscription standards and conscripted young Mir people into the army one after another, while he sent large numbers of soldiers, mainly from urban areas, to the Mir as the vanguard of reform.

　Naturally, large-scale protests broke out in Mir, but this did not faze the Russian Empire, which had deployed troops throughout Russia under martial law.

(Just like during the Russian Civil War, the Red Army did not have the support of the majority. It was supported by the working class in Moscow and Petrograd, while the White Army had the upper hand in most rural areas... but the Red Army was ultimately victorious because the White Army was fragmented and unable to unite in various places.)

　Nikolai Stalin never forgot this valuable lesson. His real aim in invoking martial law was to divide the exposed enemy.

　In the end, although there were several small-scale riots, they did not combine to develop into a large-scale rebellion because of the restrictions on freedom of movement and communication imposed by martial law. The rebel forces in each region were unable to cooperate and were defeated one by one, just like the White Army.

　Furthermore, based on the principle of divide and rule, Nicholas sent soldiers from rural areas to the front lines against Germany, while under martial law he replaced the majority of soldiers deployed within the country with Cossacks and urbanites.

(It seems that the morale of the rural people on the front lines is seriously low, but most of the German army is heading to France, so it should be manageable. In case of emergency, the supervisors and political officers can restore discipline. The bigger problem is at home.)

Not only the Cossack soldiers, a military community whose livelihoods consisted of hunting, fishing, and military service, but also the city soldiers, who had experienced famines many times because of their rural backgrounds, hated the peasants as much as Nikolai did. As Nikolai intended, the rebellions in the countryside were ruthlessly suppressed.

　Although this process resulted in many arrests, Nicholas knew how to put most of them to better use than to let them rot in prison.

　Siberian exile.

　For the future of the Russian Empire, new land would be cultivated. It was a revolutionary idea to give the state's enemies a chance to reform, while isolating them and equipping them with productive activities. The cultivated land would become new collective farms, a symbol of the new Russian agriculture replacing the old rural communes.

　**

　The Tsar's angry fist can crush his enemies, but military and economic might alone cannot control the hearts and minds of the people.

　Above all, the Tsar was both a tyrant and a ruler, and Nicholas had the duty to lead his people in the "right" direction.

"I'm going to build a school for my children."

"School?"

　It took a moment for the assembled government officials to process Nikolai's sudden words at the Imperial Conference.

(That tyrannical monarch, the epitome of a dictator, is going to "build a school for children"?!

Had he eaten something bad? It was hard not to wonder if this was the kind of thing Nikolai would say.

　However, Nicholas was not just saying this on a whim, because he knew that education was the driving force behind the development of the underdeveloped Russian Empire into the Soviet Union, a superpower that divided the world with the United States.

　Violence is not the only thing needed to lead the masses. It is necessary to make the masses obey by force, but at the same time, it is equally important to educate the masses so that they have the "morality" to voluntarily submit to authority.　

(The reason why the masses are stupid is because they have not received the proper education. Being uneducated and uncultured, they are easily led astray by false ideas and knowledge.)

　In fact, the illiteracy rate in Russia at that time was as high as 70% of the population. If you can't read, you can't read books and gain knowledge. There was also a shortage of teachers.

　The only knowledge that an ignorant person in such a situation can rely on is that of the old people in the village who have "many years of experience and intuition." And the old people are generally conservative and do not like change.

　Nicholas also focused on public education in order to create "20th century Russians" worthy of the new empire. He placed special emphasis on primary education, and elementary schools were established one after another in the provinces to free promising children from the old, magical customs that were corroding conservative and closed rural areas.

　Initially, education was practical and focused solely on knowledge, but gradually emphasis began to be placed on ideological education, teaching morality such as respect for the law and authority, and patriotism.

　Russian soldiers were often said to have lower morale than their German, French, or British counterparts, but Nicholas believed this was due to a lack of national identity.

　To put it bluntly, rather than a sense of national identity as "a member of the nation of Russia," the sense of being a member of a local community, such as a certain village or town, was stronger among the peasants. For the peasants, whose visible villages were the ones they were born and raised in, the war in the Russian Empire on the German border was no different from a war between foreigners.

However, if moral education classes could make students more aware of the imagined community of "people" and "nation," it would be possible to change their perception of "the Russian Empire's war," which they had previously thought was someone else's, to "their war." Soldiers would develop a stronger sense of comradeship as "fellow Russians," and at the same time, they would develop a sense of mission to defeat the "hateful Germans."

(Education does not only mean practical education where knowledge is acquired. In modern nations, ideological education such as morality is also important.)

　For Nicholas, the destruction of the nobility and peasant communities was only the first stage in the transformation of Russia into a powerful and powerful nation. For the ambitions of this unique dictator to be realized, the road to glory had to be paved with more blood.