Politics

In the modern world, politics forms the backdrop - perhaps the skeleton - of everyday life. The modern state taxes, conscripts, arrests or, to stress more positive matters, assures security, funds education, subsidizes culture, builds hospitals. Throughout Russian history, the state has played a strong role: classical laissez-faire liberalism never took root here. No Russian constitution ever proclaimed the right for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather the Russian Empire and Soviet Union aimed to protect its citizenry but at the same time to preserve the political leadership from the mainly uninformed and possibly seditious masses. This dynamic between, on the one hand, state policies sincerely aiming at the betterment of economic and social conditions and, on the other, policies restricting basic freedoms (the exercise of which seemed potentially dangerous for state order and stability) will be seen throughout the pages that follow. Both Russian and Soviet politics was often “for the people” but almost never “through the people.”

The Great Reforms: 1861-1876

The Great Reforms aimed to reform Russia’s social and economic structure in the wake of the stunning defeat in the Crimean War (1854-6). Despite having the largest army in Europe and fighting on Russian territory (though, to be sure, a great distance from central Russia: the Crimean Peninsula is closer to Istanbul than to St Petersburg), Russia suffered a string of military setbacks at the hands of British and French forces. The failure of the army to protect Russian territory convinced even the most conservative Russians that fundamental reforms were necessary, if only to preserve Russia’s military power and international prestige.

Yet there were other long-term causes for the reforms. The existence of serfdom, a form of unfree labor wherein peasants are not free to move and must give up a significant part of their labor and/or produce to the landowner, had long been seen as economically retrograde and morally repugnant. Liberal economists argued that serfdom (and unfree labor in general) stifled initiative and retarded economic development. Certainly industrial growth demanded a more fluid labor market than serfdom allowed. Many were disturbed by the moral implications of serfdom: arch-conservative Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) reportedly feared divine retribution for presiding over such an immoral system, but at the same time dreaded the social upheaval that liberation might unleash. The obviously enormous complications of liberating nearly half of the Russian population (44.5 percent on the eve of emancipation, or even 80 percent if one includes “state peasants” owned by the imperial family and the Russian state) from serfdom prevented any significant reform from occurring during Nicholas I’s reign. The fear of serf rebellion always formed the background to discussions about serf emancipation. The number of disturbances on the countryside had been growing from the 1830s to 1850s and it was feared that trying to reform the system might touch off a general serf revolt.

The death of Nicholas I in the midst of the Crimean War brought to the throne his son Alexander II (reigned 1855-81) who was neither very young (born 1818) nor particularly liberal, but enough of a realist to recognize the need for major reform. Still, Alexander proceeded cautiously. In 1856 he famously announced at a gathering of Moscow nobles that while he had no plans for the immediate emancipation, it would be better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it “to abolish itself spontaneously from below.” The tsar called on landowners (in other words, the nobility) to discuss the details of emancipation and report to him. Perhaps predictably the nobles submitted proposals very favorable to their own interests, in particular keeping the best land and demanding payment from the freed serfs for any arable land they would thereby obtain. Frustrated with the unwillingness of landowners to sacrifice some of their landed wealth for the greater good of the Russian state, Alexander set up a Secret Committee on Peasant Affairs (later known as the “Main Committee”) in January 1857 to consider concrete measures. Provincial committees of the nobility were allowed to submit proposals but these did not have to be accepted or even acknowledged by the Main Committee or the Editing Commission set up in 1859 to draft the actual emancipation statutes. The result was a compromise that satisfied few and disappointed nearly everyone.

One group that warmly welcomed emancipation was educated society, that is, the intelligentsia (see discussion in chapter 2, “Society,” pp. 64-8). From abroad the radical writer Alexander Herzen hailed the tsar’s planned reform in his influential newspaper Kolokol (The Bell). Within Russia the press eagerly discussed the

Plans for reform, taking advantage of a less stringent censorship regime. Alexander in part encouraged these discussions, seeing glasnost (a word used at the time referring to public debate) as a means of gauging public opinions. On the other hand, proposals seen as too extreme or infringing on the tsar’s power would bring a reprimand or worse. Alexander II wanted, indeed needed, the help of educated Russians to help craft and carry through the reforms, but fearing for his own unlimited power, he was constantly apprehensive about giving them “too much freedom.” Serfs themselves, as mainly illiterate, were not consulted at all.1

The cornerstone of the Great Reforms was the emancipation of the serfs. This measure - really a number of separate statutes - was immensely complex, filling a volume of over 300 pages. The act was announced in churches throughout Russia on February 19, 1861. The authorities’ fear of peasant unrest can be seen both in the choice of this date (at the beginning of Lent, when Russians would refrain from drinking alcohol) and the mobilization of troops throughout the Russian provinces. As it turned out, despite eventual peasant disillusionment when the specific terms of emancipation came to be known, few significant clashes with government authorities or landlords occurred. The manifesto of February 19 abolished serfdom officially, making the sale of serfs with land impossible and ending the landlord’s right to mete out corporal punishment on his serfs. On a practical level, however, little changed immediately: the manifesto admonished the peasants to continue to pay rents and other obligations to their landlords for the next two years.

The basic aim of emancipation was to sever the direct dependence of the peasantry on their former landlords, provide peasants with enough land so that they would not become an impoverished and dangerous rural proletariat, and leave the landlords with sufficient land to continue to serve the state as bureaucrats and army officers. Peasants were shocked to learn that they would not be granted all the land they tilled but only a part of it, and furthermore they would be obligated to pay for this land (few accepted the so-called pauper’s allotment, which would give peasants a much smaller plot but without having to pay for it). Officially landlords were to receive compensation from the peasants only for the land’s fair price, not for the loss of serf labor. In fact the rate at which land prices were figured was often inflated to their landlord’s advantage. The former serfs were to make “redemption payments” for 49 years to compensate the government, which was to pay off the landlords. They did not, however, receive payment in cash but in government bonds that were to be cashed in over the following decades. In any case over half of the redemption payments from serfs to landowners went to paying the latter’s accumulated debts to the state. Thus the emancipation statutes burdened peasants with long-term payments but did not provide landowners with capital that might have been used to modernize agriculture. In part a major banking crisis further undermined the government’s ability to help finance emancipation, an indication of the weak financial position of the Russian state.2

Another important aspect of emancipation was that peasants did not gain private ownership of the land they “redeemed” from their former landlords. Instead the peasant commune (obshchina) owned the land and was responsible for redemption payments and other state obligations such as the providing of draftees for the army. In certain respects the serf’s former dependence on the landlord was replaced by the peasant’s dependence on the commune. Now the individual peasant had to ask the commune’s permission to leave (e. g., to seek work in the city), paid taxes and redemption payments to the commune, and was called to serve in the army through the commune. There were many reasons why the government decided to entrust the commune with these responsibilities, ranging from a Slavophile belief in the intrinsic moral value of that institution to practical considerations of administration and social control. The Russian state wished to “fix” the newly liberated peasants in some kind of institution: the idea of millions of “loose” peasants freely roaming the empire was terrifying. By entrusting the land to the commune, the government gave this institution considerable power, in particular as land would be periodically redistributed among peasant households according to their growing or declining size. With the tiny numbers of provincial and rural police, the Russian state needed to count on the commune to maintain order on the countryside.

The actual implementation of the emancipation provisions took years and in some cases even decades. When peasants realized that the landlords were to retain much land - and often the best quality fields - while former serfs would be saddled with payments over two generations, they were appalled. Peasants often refused to believe that this could be the long-awaited liberation; rumors persisted of a far more favorable “Golden Charter,” supposedly issued by the benevolent tsar but hidden by evil nobles. The worst case of peasant unrest after the February 19 manifesto came in the village of Bezdna in Kazan province. Here in April 1861 the semiliterate peasant Anton Sidorov, after urgently consulting the extremely complex legal language of the statutes, announced that the tsar had granted the land to the peasants and had ended payments and labor duties to landlords. As thousands of peasants flocked to the village to hear Sidorov’s interpretation, the local governor sent troops to arrest him. In the ensuing clashes over 50 peasants were killed and hundreds wounded. While Bezdna was the most significant incident of peasant unrest in the wake of emancipation, the general reaction of serfs to the terms of emancipation was stunned surprise, followed by deep disappointment and resentment.3

Several other significant reforms were also carried out, most remarkable among them reforms of local government, education, the justice system, the military, and censorship. Local government reform was undertaken at two different levels: on the countryside and in urban areas. On the countryside an entirely new institution was set up in 1864, called the zemstvo (pl. zemstva), a word that evoked the noble land assemblies of centuries earlier (zemlia is the Russian word for “land”). The zemstva were elected in rural districts as well as for the entire province. At both levels the nobility was over-represented, but this was probably inevitable given the greater literacy and wealth enjoyed by this privileged group. More important was the fact that peasants were represented in all zemstva where they voted on an equal basis with representatives of the landowning nobles and clergy. The zemstvo was allowed to levy taxes to pay for important practical measures: building roads and schools, encouraging the local economy, setting up clinics and hiring agronomists to help modernize local agriculture. Besides these practical benefits for the local economy, the zemstvo influenced the development of civil society in Russia. The zemstva demonstrated that the Russian public (not government) could elect its own representatives - at least at the local level - who then capably carried out measures for the public good. Zemstvo members came to see themselves as representatives of the local people and not infrequently clashed with government administrators carrying out the orders of the central government. Participation in these bodies thus became a kind of “school for democracy.” But not every region of the Russian Empire had zemstva : in the western and Polish provinces, for example, the government mistrusted the largely Polish nobility and refused to allow the establishment of zemstva there. There were also no zemstva in Siberia or the north of Russia because the nobility was too weak there, the government felt, to assure their proper and loyal functioning.4

The pre-reform administration of towns was generally agreed to have been inadequate, inefficient, corrupt, and unable to cope with basic economic and sanitary needs. The city reform law of 1870 introduced elected city governments, though the vote was slanted toward those holding considerable urban property. The elected city council (duma) selected from among its members an executive board (uprava) and a mayor (golova), who had to be approved by the minister of internal affairs. The elected city governments, introduced first in central Russia and later elsewhere (though not in many non-Russian regions), allowed local citizenry to play a significant part in the economic development of their town and carried out improvements such as the construction of sewers, roads, public transport systems, and the like.

Reforms attacked the educational system from both ends, so to speak. The Elementary School Statute of 1864 allowed and encouraged the creation of schools at the local level, but did not provide money. Funding had to be sought from three sources: zemstva, the Orthodox Church, or the Ministry of Education. University reform was particularly significant: a reform statute of 1863 abolished previous restrictions, opened universities up to members of all estates from peasant to noble, and granted universities a significant measure of selfgovernment. Conservatives would soon complain that the university statute opened up a dangerous “free zone” where radical ideas could be discussed and advocated with impunity. Liberals saw matters differently, considering that the free exchange of ideas was crucial for the training of self-sufficient, enlightened, and professionally competent citizens.

Perhaps the single most successful reform of all was the judicial reform of 1864, which swept away a justice system universally acknowledged to have been corrupt, inefficient, and cumbersome. This reform set up a legal system independent of government administrators. Court trials were to be open to the public with both oral and documentary evidence accepted; juries decided on the guilt or innocence of the accused. With judges appointed according to their professional capabilities and enjoying lifetime tenure, it became more difficult for officials to intimidate or silence court trials. The need for competent judges and lawyers required the creation of a Russian Bar, a professional class of lawyers. Legal education was much improved and lawyers came to see themselves not just as advocates for a specific client but as the champions of justice. Many trained in the law helped create the first Russian political parties after 1905, and it is perhaps not without significance that V. I. Ulianov (Lenin) received a legal education. Parallel to and separate from the main legal system described here was a system of peasant courts generally presided over by a justice of the peace who dispensed quick, if not always legally sophisticated, justice.

Although not abolished, censorship was significantly mitigated during the Great Reforms. New regulations of 1865 abolished most “preliminary censorship” but allowed the government to confiscate, punish, or even shut down publishers responsible for material deemed in violence of the censorship law. For periodicals, a government license was required for publication and some periodicals received the privilege of not undergoing preliminary censorship. As writers and editors quickly grew accustomed to pushing the limits of censorship, a great variety of books, journals, and newspapers appeared, catering to growing literacy rates.

As we have seen, the primary impulse toward the Great Reforms was provided by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. The complexities of the military reform meant that it was the last major reform, going into effect on January 1, 1874. The urgent need for sweeping reform of the Russian army was provided by the outstanding performance of the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent unification of Germany in 1871. With a newly united, economically vibrant, and militarily strong neighbor on its western border, the Russian Empire could not delay in improving its own military institutions.

This new conscription law obliged every male Russian (in principle) to serve in the military for a period ranging from six years to only a few months. Thus an illiterate peasant lad called to arms would serve six years, but if he had attended an elementary school his service would be reduced to only four. University graduates served only six months and if they volunteered for service this term was cut in half. After this period of active service draftees were enrolled in the reserves for an additional nine years. The principle of all Russians regardless of birth or social class carrying out military service was thus established, though in practical terms peasants were far more likely to serve for six years than their middle-class or noble coevals would. Moreover budget shortfalls meant that only a fraction of young Russian men were actually called to arms.5 Besides the conscription law, the military reform set up new officers’ schools based on western models, abolished corporal punishment for soldiers, and established literacy and basic educational training for illiterate recruits. In the next half-century before World War I more young Russians learned basic literacy in the army than in elementary schools.

The Great Reforms radically changed the political structure of Russia, transforming serfs into free peasants, creating an open and independent judiciary, allowing the public to contribute to local economic development through the elected city governments and zemstva. But the fundamental political reality of Russia - autocracy, the unlimited rule of the tsar - remained untouched. Alexander II refused even to allow the creation of any kind of advisory body elected from among his subjects. Moreover the government expressly forbade provincial zemstva to cooperate or even meet with zemstva in neighboring provinces, fearing that such cooperation would infringe on the administrative prerogatives of tsarist officials. In effect the tsar refused to recognize the population of Russia as citizens to whom the welfare of the country could be entrusted. Rather they remained the tsar’s subjects, subject to his will and without any right or possibility to influence further political reform. This, combined with specific disappointments in the terms of serf emancipation, the limited scope of local government, and continued censorship, meant that in the next few decades a significant number of the tsar’s subjects began to seek more radical - even revolutionary - solutions to Russia’s economic, social, and political ills.6

Government under Siege: 1876-1904

On April 4, 1866, a young former student, Dmitrii Karakozov, approached Tsar Alexander II in a garden near the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, aimed a gun at him, and pulled the trigger. The gun failed to go off and the tsar was unhurt; Karakozov was instantly set upon by bystanders, arrested and eventually hanged. Alexander’s first words to Karakozov were “Are you a Pole?”. reflecting the tsar’s knowledge of the great bitterness Poles felt toward him after his crushing of their November Insurrection in 1863-4 (see chapter 3, “Nations,” pp. 97-8). In fact not just Poles but many Russians - Karakozov replied to Alexander that he was a “pure Russian” - were dissatisfied with tsarist rule, the failure to grant peasants more land, and the lack of political reform. Karakozov’s shot was the work of an unstable individual, but it reflected broad dissatisfaction that would only grow in the next decades. The gap between the Russian people, whether peasants, educated professionals, or even privileged noble landowners, and the tsar’s government grew steadily, as Russians sometimes expressed themselves openly but were sometimes forced underground. The unwillingness or inability of the tsarist regime to compromise on political issues or at least to coopt some segments of the population meant that when revolution finally broke out in 1905 the regime barely survived, only to be entirely broken and swept away by the stresses of World War I.

Alexis de Tocqueville once remarked that the most dangerous moment for a government was when it embarked on major reforms. Certainly this appeared to be the case in Russia in the 1860s. Following his brother Nicholas I ’s repressive rule, Alexander Il’s apparent liberalism gave rise to hopes for concessions and reforms that far exceeded anything the tsar would or could advocate. We have already seen the delicate balancing act that serf emancipation entailed in order at least partially to satisfy the demands of the liberal public, the landowners, and the peasantry. Similarly Alexander wanted to ease somewhat the extremely restrictive policies followed by Nicholas I toward Poles, but his desire to allow more free play for Polish language and culture (including the opening of a university in Warsaw) backfired in the November 1863 Polish insurrection against Russian rule. The Polish uprising and Karakozov’s attempt on Alexander’s life convinced conservatives, and to some extent the tsar himself, that reform needed to be scaled back to prevent further unrest - or worse. Thus from around 1870 at the latest we see the paradoxical situation in which the government grew more and more suspicious of reform even as the Russian public showed increasing enthusiasm for liberal and even radical changes.

The alienation of Russian society from its government grew steadily in the 1860s and 1870s.7 The intelligentsia defined itself in opposition to a Russian state that allowed it no direct political role. The government’s unwillingness to introduce even a conservative constitution like that in Prussia or Austria (from 1867 Austria-Hungary) meant that many middle-class professionals and businessmen could not see the tsarist state as supporting their interests. But the more immediate threat to the status quo came from radicals, mainly young university students who concluded that reform had run its course and failed. These young radicals advocated “going to the people” (when educated Russians said, “the people,” they meant the peasantry) to convince peasants of the need for revolution. During the summer of 1874, thousands of idealistic young Russians left the towns and streamed to the countryside to propagandize the peasantry. The attempt was a failure. Peasants were certainly unhappy with the terms of emancipation, but continued to have more trust in the far-away figure of the tsar than in young radicals from the city.8

The failure of the “crazy summer” of 1874 convinced many young radicals that the peasantry were not ready to embrace radical measures. Since peasants remained stuck in a conservative and patriarchal worldview, the radicals would have to make the revolution themselves. The most important group dedicated to carrying out this revolutionary program was Land and Liberty, which soon divided between a moderate faction that stressed education and propaganda among the peasants, and the more radical “Peoples Will,” which advocated terrorist violence. In the years 1879-81 the Peoples Will carried out a number of attempts on Alexander IIs life, blowing up the tsars train and even infiltrating the Winter Palace itself and detonating explosives there, destroying a ballroom where the tsar was supposed to have been.

These repeated well-organized attacks threw Alexander and his advisors into a panic. The tsar wooed public opinion by dismissing the reactionary minister of education and appointing a more liberal minister of the interior, Loris-Melikov. Most remarkably Alexander agreed to create a new advisory body that would include some representatives from zemstva and elected city governments. While this body would have lacked real legislative power, it could have been the first step toward giving Russian society a more direct voice in influencing the tsar’s policies. Whether this body could have defused some of the discontent among the Russian public toward its government we will never know, for on March 1, 1881, the People’s Will finally succeeded in assassinating Alexander II.9

The new tsar, Alexander III, firmly rejected any compromise with liberal or radical demands and quickly rounded up those responsible for his father’s death; the police and the Russian public were astonished at the small number of conspirators. Of course the hoped-for peasant uprising and revolution did not materialize: the peasantry viewed the tsar’s assassination with horror. Rather than attacks on tsarist police or administration, the only mass-scale violence that followed Alexander’s assassination was a wave of attacks on Jews - so-called pogroms - that occurred in the southwestern provinces of the empire (present-day Ukraine) during the summer of 1881 (see chapter 3’ “Nations,” p. 112). While Alexander III did not foment or condone attacks on Jewish property or persons, his open antisemitism certainly did little to discourage such violence. Alexander III also tried to reach back to pre-Petrine times (that is, before the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great) and present himself ceremonially as a tsar of the Muscovite era, ruling over ethnic Russians rather than a multiethnic empire. As Richard Wortman has documented, Alexander III endeavored to introduce would-be Russian elements into his public persona, from his coronation ceremony to his home life to court ceremonies. In this context it is also significant that Alexander III was the first tsar since before Peter the Great to wear a full beard, as was the tradition among male Russian Orthodox believers.10

The reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was one of reaction, repression, and chauvinistic Russian nationalism. For Alexander socialism, liberalism, Jews, and Poles came down to more or less the same thing: alien threats to Russian tradition and political stability. Alexander was no ideologue but, tall of stature, cut an impressive figure. His sheer physical bulk seemed to symbolize stability, conservatism, and the unchanging nature of the Russian Empire. His policies aimed to arrest the spread of liberal and socialist ideas, to stymie the development of non-Russian cultures, strengthen the Russian center over the non-Russian peripheries (see “Russification,” chapter 3, “Nations,” pp. 97-8), and to restrict - though not eliminate entirely - many of his father’s reforms. At the same time economic growth during his reign was impressive: industry, the railroad network, the middle and working classes all grew. But the apparent stability of Alexander Ill’s reign masked a more disturbing truth: the growing gap between Russians and their government. While discontent was forced underground, it did not disappear.

Alexander III’s son, Nicholas II, both admired and feared his father. He had not expected to become tsar (his elder brother died unexpectedly) and did not welcome the enormous power and responsibility thrust upon him by his father’s death in 1894. Many hoped that the new tsar would revert to his grandfather ’s more liberal policies or at least mitigate his father’s repressive policies. But when the Tver’ province zemstvo dared to refer to such liberal hopes in a letter to the new tsar, Nicholas reacted harshly, dismissing these suggestions for reform as “senseless dreams” and promising to continue his father’s policies.11

By the late nineteenth century, the reactionary policies of Alexander III and Nicholas II could not assure stability. Strikes in 1895 and 1896 demonstrated the growth of working-class discontent and showed that socialist ideas were spreading among Russian workers. An even more direct challenge to the existing political order was the formation of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party in late 1901. The SRs were the heirs of the 1870s radicals in at least two important ways: first, in their vision of a peasant-based revolution, and second in their embracing of terrorism as a political tactic. In 1902 the minister of the interior, D. S. Sipiagin, fell to an SR attack; his successor, V. K. Pleve, would be blown up by another SR terrorist in 1904.12 Mere months after the forming of the Socialist Revolutionary party, a young Marxist, Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (better known by his pen name, Lenin), published a pamphlet abroad calling for a small but dedicated party of activists who would dedicate their lives to the revolutionary cause. Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, may be seen as the founding document of what would become the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic party. Of course all of these radical parties could function openly only outside Russia, but the growth of their underground organizations within Russia was noted with concern by the tsarist police.

- The Beginning of the End: 1904-1914 -

For almost two decades after the assassination of Alexander II, the Russian Empire may have seemed economically backward and politically reactionary, but its stability did not appear under threat. The revolutionary movement that had killed Alexander II in 1881 was driven abroad or underground. Still, the resentment felt by members of educated society and the growing working class toward a government that seemed oblivious of their interests continued to grow. This, combined with continued peasant poverty, meant that in case of crisis the government lacked a broad base of social support. Precisely such a crisis was caused by the poor performance of the Russian army and navy against Japan in 1904-5, a crisis that developed into the revolution of 1905.

The origins of the Russo-Japanese War may be traced to at least two fundamental causes: the weakness of China and Russia’s expansion toward the Pacific Ocean. To be sure, Russia had claimed territory along the Pacific coast for centuries, but it was only with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the 1890s that sizeable numbers of Russians came to settle in the Far East, in particular in the railroad’s terminus at Vladivostok, a city founded only in 1860. In order to reduce the length of the railroad’s eastern portion the Russian government reached an agreement with China in 1896 allowing the construction of a line across Chinese Manchuria, founding the Chinese Eastern Railway and creating a major new Russian city in the middle of that railroad at Kharbin. The completion of this line in 1901 caused the Japanese government - itself recently industrialized and extending its influence over Korea after a war with China in 1895 - to fear further Russian incursions into China and Korea. ’ 3 In frustration at what they saw as Russian foot-dragging over evacuating their troops from Manchuria the Japanese decided to launch a preemptive strike, attacking the Russian navy at Port Arthur on the Liaotung Peninsula without a formal declaration of war on February 8, 1904.

The Russo-Japanese War began badly for Russia, with the almost total destruction of the Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur, and went downhill from there. A second fleet was dispatched around the world only to be met by the Japanese in late May 1905 at Tsushima and promptly sunk. The Russian army’s performance on land in Manchuria was less abysmal, but the major battle of Mukden (March 1905) could at best be called a draw. By summer 1905 the financial strain of war combined with unrest at home made the Russian government desperate to find a way to end the war. The Peace of Portsmouth was negotiated with the help of US President Theodore Roosevelt and signed on September 5, 1905.14

For Russian and world history, more important than the Russo-Japanese War itself was the unrest it generated within the Russian Empire. From the start, the Russian military seemed unable to hold its own against Japan - an enormous humiliation for a major European power fighting non-Europeans. The incompetency of the military leadership seemed to epitomize the inability of the government to accommodate and further the economic and political needs of the tsar’s subjects. And, with the military tied up in Manchuria, the government was helpless to put down large-scale unrest in the European part of the empire. Demonstrations, strikes, peasant attacks on manor houses, and the killing of government officials forced Nicholas II to make major concessions, but the disturbances were crushed by the use of military force only in late 1905 and early 1906.

The revolution of 1905 has a specific beginning date: January 9 (o. s.), “Bloody Sunday.” On this date a mass demonstration was planned, with thousands of marchers convening on the Winter Palace in central St Petersburg. Carrying icons and portraits of the tsar, the demonstrators planned to present a petition to their sovereign who, unbeknownst to them, was not in residence. The demonstration had been planned in advance but most of the participants were unaware that permission for their march had been denied by the imperial authorities. Worse yet, the incompetent tsarist police panicked at the size of the crowd streaming into palace square and opened fire, leaving over 100 dead and many more wounded. The shock of this unprovoked attack on unarmed petitioners rapidly turned to anger and, within days, further protests and strikes. In the Baltic and Polish provinces the government essentially lost control of the situation, and even in Moscow and St Petersburg policemen refused to walk alone in the streets, fearing a bullet in the back.

Gradually Nicholas and his government, forced into a corner, made some concessions. In mid-February it was announced that the emperor would summon together “elected representatives of the people” as a kind of proto-legislature. But by the time this consultative legislature known as the “Bulygin Duma” (named after the Minister of the Interior) was to be elected, events had made it superfluous. Faced with anarchy in Warsaw, mass attacks on landed estates in the Baltic, and major strikes in the Russian interior, the prime minister, Sergei Witte, saw no other possibility of restoring order except by making significant concessions to liberal opinion. On Witte’s urging, Nicholas II grudgingly issued the October Manifesto, promising to respect civil rights and to create a legislature elected by broad suffrage. Most importantly the October Manifesto promised that henceforth no law would take effect without the approval of this legislature, the Duma. For liberals, the October Manifesto could be seen as a significant concession and a first step toward a constitutional order. Radicals, however, rejected it as too little (vague and narrow) and too late (Nicholas’s insincerity as a constitutional ruler was only too apparent). The October Manifesto did split the opposition to tsarist rule, but was unsuccessful in ending the revolution.15

The revolution of 1905 was brought to an end not by tsarist concessions, but by the more familiar tactic of repression. The St Petersburg Soviet (the word means “council” in Russian), set up by workers and leftist intellectuals to press for radical demands and coordinate strikes, was closed down by the authorities in November and December. As troops returned from Manchuria, they were used to suppress demonstrations, strikes, and rural unrest. In April 1906 Peter Stolypin was appointed Minister of the Interior and charged with the task of restoring order, a process bitterly described by one of his opponents as aiming to create “the quiet of the graveyard.” Stolypin’s energetic use of repressive measures caused his contemporaries to speak of the “Stolypin necktie,” referring to the noose used to hang opponents of the regime.16

Stolypin is a complex character who has been called tsarist Russia’s “last hope.” While he did not shy away from the use of violence against the regimes opponents, Stolypin also recognized the fundamental reality that the government needed to work out a modus vivendi with the Duma. He was a convinced conservative and supporter of monarchy, but he could also agree to compromises with more liberal elements in Russia. The first Duma convened in May 1906 and was dominated by the left liberal Kadet (short for “Constitutional Democrat”) party. The inability of the government to work with the Duma resulted in the latter s dismissal after 10 weeks and calls for a new election. The second Duma (February-June 1907) was, from the government’s point of view, even worse. The socialists who won nearly 200 seats were more interested in denouncing the government and quarreling with the right-wing delegates than in creating a functioning legislature. When Stolypin, by now prime minister, claimed to have discovered evidence of an antigovernment plot among the socialist Duma members and demanded that 16 of them be stripped of their parliamentary immunity, the Duma balked. Stolypin seized the opportunity to dissolve the Duma, arrest the delegates, and issue the law of June 3, 1907, significantly changing the Duma electoral law to guarantee a more Russian and more pro-government (i. e., conservative) assembly.

Stolypin’s dissolution of the Duma and issuing of a new electoral law was a flagrant violation of the principle that all new laws must be approved by the parliament. In a sense, however, he had no choice: to quote one of his most famous speeches (uttered to radicals in the Duma): “You want great upheavals. I want a great Russia.” A Duma dominated by socialists and left liberals would have little interest in cooperating with the tsarist government. Stolypin’s electoral law helped create a much more conservative assembly dominated by the Octobrist party (the name refers to their belief that the October Manifesto was a reasonable concession upon which to base a new government) with rightist and nationalist parties. Even with this much more moderate Duma, however, Stolypin and the government could not always have their way. Stolypin discovered that parliaments have a way of developing their own ethos and pride, which does not always correspond to the government’s immediate wishes.17

While the Third Duma managed to “live out” its entire five-year term (190712) - the only pre-revolutionary Duma to do so, Stolypin did not survive. Despite his devotion to preserving and strengthening tsarist rule in Russia, Nicholas II, and even more his wife, Alexandra, strongly disliked their faithful servant. Incapable of decisive action himself, Nicholas deeply resented strong men like Stolypin. Probably the prime minister would have been dismissed had he not been assassinated by a former police informer under murky circumstances at the Kiev opera house (in Nicholas’s presence) on September 1, 1911. Stolypin was the last capable and memorable prime minister of imperial Russia.

This is not to say that imperial Russia was doomed as early as autumn of 1911. But neither liberal society, on the whole, nor the industrial proletariat, nor the peasantry could firmly support the status quo. Stolypin had recognized this and pushed through a major reform aimed at creating a class of individual peasant landowners (see chapter 4, “Modernization,” pp. 127-8). Whether this reform could have fulfilled Stolypin’s hopes is impossible to gauge, as World War I intervened before the reform could make a broad impression on the Russian countryside. From 1912 major strikes broke out at the Lena goldfields in Siberia and in industrial cities throughout the empire. Revolutionary agitation spread in factories and the countryside. Then in summer 1914, faced with the prospect of its Balkan “little brother,” Serbia, being overrun by Austria - Hungary, and fearful over the growing military strength in Germany, Russia was drawn into World War I.

War and Revolution: 1914-1917

Less than a decade after defeat against Japan, the Russian Empire did not want a new war. Although enormous efforts had been made to strengthen the army, many suspected that the German army was both better trained and better equipped. The events of August 1914 were to prove the pessimists correct. The German war plan focused on avoiding a two-front war by knocking out France with a massive assault in the first weeks of the war, and then turning on Russia. The Schlieffen Plan assumed that with its greater distances and weaker railroad network, Russian mobilization would require several weeks before the Russian army could pose a serious threat to Germany. The Germans thus concentrated the vast majority of their attack on the western front, with only a dozen or so divisions guarding the border between East Prussia and the Russian Empire.18

The Russian attack across that border in August 1914 deeply shocked German public opinion and forced the military to transfer troops from the western front, which may have been decisive in preventing French defeat. Once reinforcements for the German units in East Prussia arrived, however, the counterattack was devastating to the Russians. The Battle of the Masurian Lakes of August and September 1914 was a huge defeat that revealed both the superior training and equipment of the Germans and the incompetence of the Russian generals. After this battle Russian troops would never again threaten German territory.

The Russian army fared somewhat better against the Austrians. The Galician city of Lwow (now LViv in Ukraine) was taken in early September, and Galicia was to remain under Russian occupation for nearly a year. But from spring 1915 on, the Russian army suffered a number of losses, pulling out of Galicia, losing Warsaw in summer 1915, and abandoning Vilna (today Vilnius in Lithuania) in autumn 1915.19 In the war’s first year Russia suffered four million casualties. While the initial crises in supply and ammunition were to some extent corrected by 1915, it seems clear that the only reason Russia survived militarily was Germany’s choice to expend the bulk of its men and materiel on the western front.

The outbreak of war was accompanied in Russia - as elsewhere throughout Europe - by a wave of patriotism. Suddenly it became risky to be heard speaking German, and a mob sacked and torched the German embassy in St Petersburg. On the front, entire civilian populations were rounded up as “suspect,” and predictably Jews were among the worst hit by these mass deportations to the Russian interior.20 In May 1915 a riot aimed at foreign stores and merchants broke out in Moscow and ended with the destruction of many foreign-owned (or simply suspected of being foreign-owned) businesses. On a popular level there is much evidence to show a marked increase in nationalist rhetoric and action, but the government too adopted policies to strip foreign residents of their businesses and land. Thus the war years helped spur Russian national consciousness and, conversely, antiforeign sentiment aimed both at foreign citizens and at the diverse ethnic groups living within the Russian Empire (see chapter 3, “Nations”).21

Part of the reason why Russians sought a scapegoat in foreigner residents and non-Russians was the almost unremittingly bad news from the front. From spring 1915 onward the Russian army was in nearly constant retreat, and politically matters stood no better. At the beginning of the war, the Duma had overwhelmingly embraced the war effort, with only a few left-wing delegates (including six Bolsheviks) refusing to approve war credits (they were promptly arrested). But the government squandered the possibility of better relations with the Duma and educated society by continuing to treat the Duma as an enemy or rival rather than a partner. Committees set up by zemstva and city Dumas to help the war effort, refugees, and the wounded, often found their efforts stymied by government

Officials.22

After some initial enthusiasm for the war, particularly among the educated middle class, war weariness set in. The peasantry, who made up the bulk of the Russian army, had never welcomed the war and, with continued defeats and withdrawals, voices calling for an end to the war grew ever stronger. The fact that the empress was by birth German (though raised in Britain) and the presence in the palace of the unsavory peasant adventurer Grigorii Rasputin did not help matters.23 With his unfailing instinct for doing the wrong thing, Nicholas II decided in late 1915 to leave Petrograd for the army general headquarters or stavka (near the front lines in what is now Belarus) and assume direct control of the military. Despite the impassioned efforts of his advisors to dissuade him, arguing that he was needed in Petrograd and his presence at headquarters would associate him with military setbacks, Nicholas insisted that his place was at the head of his troops. In fact the tsar’s ministers’ worst predictions came true: Nicholas’s presence at the stavka injected an unhealthy dose of court politics into military decisions, while his absence from St Petersburg gave credence to wild rumors that his “German” wife and her lascivious peasant lover Rasputin were running Russia.

The desperation of educated Russians at the military and political state of affairs is shown by two events of late 1916. On November 1, 1916, the leader of the left-liberal Kadet party, historian Pavel N. Miliukov, gave an extraordinary speech in the State Duma. Setting down a litany of government failures, Miliukov punctuated each with the question “Is this stupidity or treason?” Taking advantage of the fact that the Duma president could not understand German, Miliukov also read aloud from German newspapers, including a line accusing the empress of interfering in politics. For a liberal in a time of war to openly accuse his own government of complete incompetence or even treason is more than unusual; it is practically unprecedented and deeply shocking. Miliukov himself later wrote that his speech was interpreted as “an attack signal for the revolution,” though he denied any such radical purpose, arguing that he merely wanted to clean up the corruption and incompetency that were hindering the war effort.24

The second event of late 1916 was in its own way even more shocking. On December 17 a group of conspirators led by Prince Felix Yusupov and a cousin of the tsar invited Rasputin to Yusupov’s palace where they poisoned, beat, and shot the Siberian holy man. By murdering Rasputin, these arch-conservatives hoped to end his influence over the empress and to bring the tsar back to St Petersburg. In fact Rasputin’s influence on policy was minimal - he had always opposed the war - and his death solved nothing.

I n early 1917 Russians were cold, hungry, and thoroughly sick of the war. Supply problems exacerbated food and fuel shortages in Petrograd. Inflation had sparked a number of strikes and rural unrest in 1916; no improvement of living conditions could be expected before war’s end. In this atmosphere demonstrations for international women’s day (March 9, n. s.) came together with unhappy women, who had waited hours in line only to be told that basic foodstuffs had not been delivered, to cause serious street disturbances in Petrograd. Away at the stavka (military headquarters), Nicholas ordered the street demonstrations repressed, but local police and military were incapable of restoring order - indeed, many went over to the side of the demonstrators. Within days a Provisional Government was set up, drawing mainly from liberal Duma politicians. Finally realizing the gravity of the moment, Nicholas attempted to return to Petrograd, but railroad workers prevented his train from reaching its destination. Stranded in his train car outside the capital, the tsar was met by a delegation of conservative Duma politicians who begged for and finally received his abdication. The Romanov dynasty and imperial Russia was no more.25

Nicholas’s abdication ended autocracy in Russia, and Duma politicians stepped in to prevent a power vacuum, setting up the Provisional Government that was to rule only until proper elections could be held. After an initial short period of euphoria, however, the Provisional Government was faced with the same problems as its imperial predecessor. In particular the decision to continue the war effort, we can see in retrospect, was a mistake. Similarly the blanket amnesty of political prisoners declared by the Provisional Government in its first days undermined the liberal regime’s shaky stability by allowing more radical elements to stream back to Russia and St Petersburg. However, the Provisional Government was not acting on its own: its power was held in check by the more radical Petrograd Soviet, elected by factory workers and military units, which could threaten strikes or demonstrations if challenged. The weakness of the Provisional Government is revealed by its acceptance of the Petrograd Soviet’s “Order No. 1,” which fatally undermined military discipline by allowing soldiers to challenge orders (except on the actual front line). The period between February and October 1917 (o. s.) is characterized by this “dual power” (dvoevlastie), in which the Provisional Government bore the responsibility for unpopular decisions while under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet to accept quite radical policies. The blanket amnesty of political prisoners was followed by the abolition of the death penalty and the annulment of all laws restricting the rights of religious and ethnic minorities. In July suffrage was extended to all citizens 20 or over, making Russia the first major European power to grant the vote to women.

The Provisional Government, as its name implied, saw itself merely as a caretaker until a Constituent Assembly could be elected, a constitution agreed upon, and democratic elections for a proper government held. The transition to democracy is difficult under any circumstances, and in a poor country like Russia in the midst of war, it took months even to set up elections for the Constituent Assembly. In the scant eight months of its existence the Provisional Government lurched from crisis to crisis. An attempt to rally the military in a summer offensive ended in a near complete collapse of the Russian army. The leftist parties (including, though reluctantly, the Bolsheviks) attempted to grab power in July, but this ill-planned coup attempt failed. From July the prime minister was the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, the only member of both the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government.26 Kerensky first attempted to protect the Provisional

Government from a right-wing coup (the so-called Kornilov affair) in August and then from a left-wing power grab in October. While he succeeded in defeating General Kornilov’s attempted coup, his government crumbled before the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Provisional Government disappeared not with a bang and barely with a whimper. To quote Lenin, “Power was lying on the street - we merely stooped down to pick it up.” Russia had become the world’s first socialist state - but few thought that the Bolsheviks would be capable of holding power for long.27

The Revolution’s First Decade: 1917-1927

The Bolsheviks, as good Marxists, did not imagine that Russia would long remain the only socialist country. They hoped that their example would be the spark that would set off the worldwide revolution long awaited by socialists. But initially they had more immediate concerns than spreading world revolution. Afraid that their hold on power would not last long, they aimed to make the strongest possible impression on history by passing a series of radical acts. Within days the Bolsheviks called for negotiations with the Germans to end the war, gave their approval to peasant seizure of landlords’ estates, and even abolished the word “minister,” adopting instead Trotsky’s suggestion of the far more revolutionarysounding “people’s commissar.” Thus the Bolshevik government was known as the “Council of People’s Commissars” or Sovnarkom. Trotsky took over foreign affairs, where one of his first actions was to publish secret agreements between Russia and the western allies, which promised, among other things, Russian control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles. These revelations were extremely embarrassing to western leaders, as they had steadfastly denied the existence of any agreement that might prolong the war and were now shown to be liars. The Bolsheviks also publicly repudiated the tsarist debt, meaning that thousands of middle-class investors, especially in France and Belgium, found that their gilt-edged Russian securities were now worthless.