Serfdom in Russia ended in the mid 19th century. Plus, serfdom didn't even exist in most of the country, so e.g. peoples from the Volga-Kama region would move just a few hundred km east towards the Urals and found new villages there where control was lax.
It was still an absolute monarchy until 1906, and in the blink of an eye it went from that to dictatorship under the Soviets. For the average serf, ending serfdom just meant they went from literal slavery to strongly implied 'sharecropping' slavery, much like former slaves in the US.
I don't thing there's much of a meaningful different between authoritarian government and totalitarian government aside from the available technology. If the czars had their way, they'd be in Putin's shoes right now, doing Putin things.
I don’t think one can reasonably categorize Tsarist Russia as "authoritarian", let alone totalitarian. Oppressive to many of its people, sure, and at times even despotic. But Russia's political system was such that much of this oppression was perpetuated by local elites, and the monarch in faraway Saint-Petersburg had little relevance to the people and their plight.
What ultimately led to mass unrest and the February and October Revolutions in Russia was the same huge wealth inequality as France prior to 1789, and people don’t typically use terms like “authoritarian” or “totalitarian” to describe the Ancien Régime.
I'm not a historian, but to me the difference between despotic (and I'd say Imperial Russia was despotic at all times, given that it was always a system of unchecked executive power) and authoritarian is splitting hairs.
Sure, it would be impractical for the Tsar to exercise this authority at the individual level all the time, but all the various local vassals only had their power subject to the Tsar's unchecked authority and when the Tsar wanted them to do something, their choices were compliance or ruin.
> people don’t typically use terms like “authoritarian” or “totalitarian” to describe the Ancien Régime.
Alexis de Tocqueville does, in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution [1]
"In this book, de Tocqueville develops his main theory about the French revolution, the theory of continuity, in which he states that even though the French tried to dissociate themselves from the past and from the autocratic old regime, they eventually reverted to a powerful central government."
