History

In the case of British North America, one of the most significant crises of the Old Regime centered around the fact that it had fought a very long and expensive war against France in 1757-63, a global conflict called the Seven Years War (or in North America the French and Indian War) and now had to find a way to pay off its massive debts by imposing new taxes on the colonies.  In recent times, historians have also realized that the 1760s were an era of postwar economic depression which exacerbated the difficulties Britain had with its North American colonies and intensified resistance to imperial measures. To the planters, layers and merchants who ran the colonial legislatures this seemed like royal and parliamentary usurpation of their rights to tax and govern themselves which they opposed on general principles. For decades before the war, the British government had mostly left the colonies alone, especially under the long Whig administration by Robert Walpole and his successors.  Historians have called this a period of Benign Neglect, when the Navigation Acts controlling colonial trade were not that stringently enforced and the colonies were generally left to govern themselves except in foreign affairs and military policy in wartime. 
Over the decades the colonial leaders had grown accustomed to this situation, and the sudden and dramatic shift in policy toward tighter imperial control came as a shock to them.  When they openly resisted the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Duties on imports two years later, the British government backed down both times, but also asserted that it still had the right to tax the colonies and would not retreat again when the next test came.  The last straw was colonial resistance to the tax on imported tea and the requirement that it be purchased from the East India Company monopoly.  After the Boston Tea party in 1773, George III suspended the civil government of Massachusetts, closed the port of Boston and put the colony under martial law.  For colonial leaders like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, this was proof positive that George III was a tyrant unworthy of any further allegiance, although even after the shooting war had begun, they hesitated for a year before actually declaring independence.  Jefferson listed the many examples of the tyranny and abuses of George III in the Declaration of Independence, including dissolving the colonial legislatures at will, removing judges, maintaining standing armies outside of civil control, denying trial by jury and taxation without consent.  (Document 1.3 Declaration of Independence 1776, Unit I United States 11-13)
In addition, the new king George III was hardly the most intelligent, stable or effective of Britain s rulers, and in fact had episodes of insanity that only grew more severe as he aged.  His choice of prime ministers and advisers such as Lord Bute and Lord North reflected more his insecurity and lack of ability than selection of the best and the brightest, and often during the 1760s there was no stable government, ministry or parliamentary majority at all.  George III was more insistent on using his royal powers and prerogatives than George I and II, and also inclined to take more repressive action against opponents and critics, both at home and abroad.  One of these was the radical John Wilkes, who dared to criticize the king and royal family openly in his newspaper and on the floor of parliament, and was regularly threatened with imprisonment, exile or worse.  Wilkes was a great hero in the North American colonies, however, since he seemed to embody the resistance to tyranny in the spirit of the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which also had its counterpart in the North American colonies in 1689.  All the colonial leaders were very familiar with the precedent set by this revolution and the Declaration of Rights that followed it, which denounced King James II for ruling without Parliament, passing laws, raising taxes and maintaining armies without the consent of the legislature, and imposing excessive fines, bail and cruel punishments on his subjects, often without benefit of trial by jury.  (Document 1.1 English Declaration of Rights 1689. Unit I United States 1-4) Its similarities with the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence are obvious.
To be sure, the colonists of British North America had many other grievances against the Old Regime.  They opposed the royal proclamations of 1763-64 which made western settlement across the Appalachian Mountains more difficult, and the Quebec Act of 1774 which granted religious tolerance to Roman Catholics in Canada and also seemed to be designed to prevent the British North American colonies from expanding too far to the west.  Many colonial leaders were involved in speculation in western lands, and thought that the British government opposed expansion in order to keep its colonies under tighter control.  They also believed that was its real purpose in maintaining a large military force in North America and requiring the colonists to pay for it.  Moreover, the common people, who were mostly small family farmers, also had grievances against the large landowners and proprietors who controlled access to land, such as the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calverts (Lord Baltimore) of Maryland, while dissenting and evangelical Protestants opposed the Anglican Church establishments in many colonies.  For them, the Revolution was not simply about taxes and tea, but sweeping away an old social order that they regarded as feudal and outdated and replacing it with a more liberal or even democratic one.
In Russia, the political, economic, social and military crises of the Old Regime were almost too numerous to list, and the reforms the Tsars and their ministers passed to deal with them were generally too little, too late.  Revolution in Russia had been widely expected both at home and abroad for a century or more by the time it finally did take place and in every case the spark was defeat in war.  Even the reforms of Tsar Alexander II, such as the abolition of serfdom in 1861 had their origins in the loss of the Crimean War in 1854-55 and the patent inadequacies of the reactionary regime of Nicholas I that preceded him.  Revolution in 1905 came about after the victory of Japan and the loss of two Russian fleets and its bases in China and Korea, while German victory in the First World War precipitated the fall of the Tsar in February-March 1917.  In October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power on a program promising land, peace and bread after the Provisional government unwisely decided to continue that war.  (Document 2.6 Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution 1917  Unit II Russia and the US SR 22-25) Time and time again, Russia had by beaten by more modern, advanced nations that showed up the flaws, bungling and inadequacies of the regime in a glaring light. For Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks, of course, defeat in what they all regarded as imperialist wars was most useful as a stepping stone to power, although they also hoped that Communist Revolutions would also sweep through Europe, especially Germany.  This did not happen, however, and instead Russia faced four years of civil war, famine and destruction that left the country in dire condition.  Only then did they have to face the prospect of what Stalin called  Socialism in One Country  which had not been part of the original plan of the revolutionaries.
Count Sergei Witte had been one of the leading supporters of industrialization in Russia and construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, although he was somewhat more diffident and hesitant about political liberalization.  With the benefit of foreign loans from France and other Western nations, Russia did make considerable progress in industrialization in the last decades of the Old Regime, although even in 1917 the majority of the people were still peasants, often illiterate, landless and desperately poor, and discontented over the fact that emancipation in 1861 had generally not provided them with land or improved their social and economic condition.  For Witte, the October Manifesto of 1905 was most useful in divide and conquer politics, or as he put it destroying  the unified front that opposition camp some formidable  by splitting apart liberals and radicals.  He was also conscious that in a revolutionary situation, reactionary forces might gain the upper hand, especially those eager to persecute the Jews and other minorities.(Document 2.4, Count Sergei Witte Memoirs, Unit II, Russia and the USSR, 15-16)  If Russia was in any way a constitutional monarchy after 1905, it was surely the only one in which the emperor and empress still possessed the  supreme autocratic power  and the  initiative in all legislative matters  with the absolute right to control foreign policy and declare war and to dismiss the parliament (Duma) at will. (Document 2.5 Fundamental Law of 23 April 1906, Unit II, Russia and the USSR, 17-22)  It was not democratic enough to satisfy the liberals and social democrats, while Lenin and the Bolsheviks never had any intention of establishing a  bourgeois  parliamentary democracy at all, but only rule by their party in the name of the working class.  In any event, the limited political and economic reforms passed by the later Tsars proved unable to stand the test of time or the strain of renewed national crisis after 1914