Rudolf, crown prince of Austria, was born 21 August 1858 in Vienna and died 30 January 1889 in Mayerling. Rudolf was the only son of Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria and Empress Elisabeth (originally of Bavaria). During his lifetime regarded as either the liberal hope of the Habsburgs, or as a wayward radical and dissolute, Rudolf is best known to posterity as the central figure of the legendary murder-suicide of Mayerling.
Due to his mother’s influence, Rudolf received a liberal education from an array of highly respected liberal academics. This upbringing influenced Rudolf to be much more progressive in his thinking than his father. Relations between the emperor and his heir were strained from early on, with Francis Joseph denying Rudolf’s wish when a teenager for a higher education in science. Francis Joseph insisted that Rudolf enter the military, for which Rudolf’s sensitive personality and delicate constitution were not well suited. Rudolf was in his own way very loyal to his father, and tried his best, at least in his public life, to live and work within the limits set for him. These included marriage to the Belgian princess Stephanie in 1881 and pursuit of his career in the military, where in 1888 he was appointed general inspector of the infantry. This was, however, a title with little actual power, and the emperor in practice excluded his son from any major position of influence.
Rudolf therefore found ways to operate outside these public limits and spent much of his life working for his progressive goals, largely in secret, against the policies of his father’s government. One very public form of engagement was his large-scale publishing project, Osterreich-Ungarn in Wort und Bild (Austria-Hungary in words and pictures). Started in 1884, this illustrated guide-cum-encyclopedia of the monarchy, eventually twenty-four volumes, was intended to unite the public in a sense of the rich diversity of the shared realm. This reflected Rudolf’s wish to create a liberal version of the old Habsburg ‘‘Austrian idea,’’ in which the nationalities of the empire would live together in progressive harmony with each other, united by a supranational and liberal monarch (himself).
Rudolf’s political aim was to create a liberal coalition that spanned the Monarchy’s national fault lines. He shared this goal with his ideological ally and friend, the Jewish editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Moritz Szeps, with whom he collaborated under strict secrecy from 1881 onward. Rudolf’s supranational liberalism made him popular with many of Austria’s Jews, and, although he was critical of their nationalistic Magyarizing policies, Rudolf’s approach also made him an ally of the Magyar liberal leadership. Political trends, at home and abroad, were not, however, moving in Rudolf’s direction. The conservative, federalizing policies of the Taaffe government were counter to Rudolf’s plans, and the rise of ethno-nationalism, also among Austrian Germans, prevented the emergence of a transnational liberal alliance; the associated rise of anti-Semitism also led to Rudolf being seen as a ‘‘servant of the Jews’’ because of his many Jewish friends.
Abroad, the death of his relative and ally, Louis II of Bavaria in 1886, followed by the death in 1888 of the Prussian king Frederick III, a liberal, and the succession of William II, whom Rudolf both detested and feared as a reactionary, left Rudolf’s hopes for a band of progressive, liberal monarchs in central Europe in tatters. His efforts to strengthen Austria-Hungary’s ties with liberal France also proved vain. Instead, as an open letter to his father in 1888, under the pseudonym Julius Felix, illustrates, he feared the results of the Dual Alliance with Prussia, warning Francis Joseph about involvement in Bosnia, which he presciently described as ‘‘one foot in the grave.’’
With all of his hopes seemingly dashed, Rudolf became deeply depressed, and he became ever more dissolute. Suffering from gonorrhea picked up from one of his many sexual liaisons, Rudolf retreated into a world of alcohol, drugs, and sex, and from autumn 1888 was clearly thinking of suicide, admittedly with the ‘‘romantic’’ twist that he should die together with a lover. It appears that Baroness Mary Vetsera agreed to his plan, and on 30 January at Mayerling, Rudolf shot first Vetsera and then himself. The subsequent attempts at a cover-up by the Habsburgs led to various conspiracy theories, feeding the Mayerling legend. One irony of Rudolf’s death was that Francis Joseph’s love for his son and the dignity of the Habsburgs overcame his strict Catholic faith, so that he had Rudolf declared insane at the time of his suicide, hence allowing the suicide-murderer to be buried in the family crypt in the Church of the Capuchins.
See also Austria-Hungary; Francis Joseph.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beller, Steven. Francis Joseph. London and New York, 1996.
Hamann, Brigitte. Rudolf: Kronprinz und Rebell. Vienna and Munich, 1978.
Kronprinz Rudolf. MajestOt, ich warne Sie: Geheime und private Schriften. Edited by Brigitte Hamann. Vienna, 1979.
Steven Beller
RUSKIN, JOHN (1819-1900), major British critic of art and architecture and influential political writer.
John Ruskin was born in London on 8 February 1819, the only child of Scottish parents who had settled in London and made good. His parents were powerful influences, for good and ill, in his life. His mother was an evangelical Christian who destined her son for a career in the Church of England, and from infancy he was made to read and memorize the Bible with this formidable and extremely narrow matriarch. Margaret Ruskin adored her son, but she smothered him emotionally, and many of the sexual and psychological problems that dogged his later life can reasonably be seen as having their roots in her unwise treatment of him.
Ruskin’s father, John James Ruskin, was very different. An extremely wealthy wine merchant and typical Victorian self-made man, John James was widely read in the literature of his young manhood (especially Sir Walter Scott [1771-1832] and Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824]), and he was a willing patron of the arts; by the 1860s his collection of paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was the most important in the world. John James Ruskin acted in effect as John Ruskin’s editor and literary agent, eagerly promoting his brilliant son’s writing, paying for publication of his work, and in a sense acting as his son’s personal assistant. John James’s death in 1864 removed an essential prop from Ruskin’s life. Margaret’s death in 1871, by contrast, removed an impediment. Only when he was rid of her could Ruskin, now a very rich man, set up his own home, at Brantwood on Lake Coniston, where he spent the happiest periods of what remained of his very troubled life.
As a parvenu and tradesman, John James was determined to buy social status for his son by sending him to Christ Church, Oxford, as a ‘‘gentleman commoner’’ (a status normally reserved for aristocrats). John Ruskin’s social radicalism, which came to dominate his work after 1860, may be said to date back to his judgments on the manners and morals of these arrogant young men from the ruling class who were his familiars at Oxford.
In 1843 Ruskin, aged only twenty-four, became famous with the publication of first volume of Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters. This huge study, published in five volumes between 1843 and 1860, proclaimed itself from its opening pages as the work of a young lion determined to sweep away established attitudes to, and preferences for, painting. Turner’s late paintings were misunderstood by reviewers in the early 1840s, and the strength of Ruskin’s work was to argue that Turner’s work displayed the natural world as God had made it. This appeal to creationist theology gave Ruskin’s revolution irresistible authority in the eyes of the new middle class (people like his father) who had the money to buy art. Turner’s reputation and fortune were made by Ruskin, and within a few years the careers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (Dante Gabriel Rossetti [1828-1882], Holman Hunt [18271910], and John Everett Millais [1829-1896]) were also established in effect by Ruskin’s hugely influential advocacy.
With The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), Ruskin became as powerful a critic of architecture as he was of painting. The central argument was, again, couched in an appeal to Christian authority: the Gothic style was the style of the early, humble, Christian world, and was therefore the right style for any building which wished to be taken seriously. The point of Gothic architecture for Ruskin was that it was democratic, flexible, and universal. He also managed to argue that it was instinctively ‘‘Protestant,’’ despite the fact that the great exemplar of the form, medieval Venice, was, obviously, rooted in Catholic Europe. He arrived at this position on Venetian Gothic by a historical sleight-of-hand: because Venice of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries was a republic and politically independent of the papacy, it could be seen in this argument as the forerunner of the Protestant resistance to Rome that developed in northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An extraordinary example of Ruskinian Gothic is the Oxford University Museum, created by Ruskin’s friend Henry Acland (1815-1900, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford) in the 1850s. Ruskin’s arguments ensured that a building based on the style of medieval structures devoted to Christianity was considered the obvious, and ideal, place for the study of geology, medicine, and the natural sciences, despite the fact that in the eyes of Oxford Movement theologians (such as Edward Bouverie Pusey [1800-1882]) science was the mortal enemy of religion.
In 1858 Ruskin lost his faith. He underwent what he called an ‘‘unconversion’’ in Turin, and from 1860 onward he devoted himself substantially to politics, especially in his brilliant and provocative essays published as Unto This Last (1861), which famously contains his anticapitalist battle-cry ‘‘There is no Wealth but Life.’’ Ruskin followed this with his grand political project published serially from 1871 until the 1880s (with interruptions), called Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. Concurrently with these political and social writings he created his own utopia in the Guild of St. George, a medieval-style agrarian society designed to offer a radical alternative to the hard and aggressive competitiveness of mainstream Victorian capitalism. He also served as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford from 1869 to 1878 and again from 1883 to 1885.
Ruskin’s personal life was notoriously unhappy. His marriage to Effie Gray in 1848 was annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation in 1854, and Effie then married Ruskin’s former friend and pro-teige Millais (Millais went on to huge commercial fame and success, and he and Effie had eight children). His intense friendship with Rossetti was cruelly disappointing; Ruskin lavished money and affection on Rossetti, who responded with what is reasonable to regard as callous ingratitude and insensitivity. Later he was to lavish similar patronage on Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898), who was more responsive (and greatly benefited from Ruskin’s support). In the late 1850s Ruskin fell in love with a little girl, Rose La Touche (she was ten years old), for whom he nurtured a consuming passion until Rose’s early death in 1875. He suffered a period of complete insanity in 1878 and thereafter seems to have suffered bipolar disorder punctuated by periods of raving and violent derangement. His cousin Joan Severn became his companion and, when he was really mad, custodian, in these later years. Despite his illness, Ruskin wrote his magnificent and indispensable autobiography, Praeterita (1885-1889). This was his last work: he was silent for the last ten years of his life and died at Brantwood in 1900.
The opposition to capitalism set out in Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera made Ruskin hugely popular with late Victorian socialists, especially his disciple William Morris (1834-1896). Through Morris, Ruskin’s work came to be seen in the 1890s as a bible of modern socialism. Ruskin was the central Victorian philanthropist, a man who could not find happiness for himself but passionately believed that it could be available to others. His influence is still seen in Victorian painting and architecture, and felt in the policies of successive socialist governments from the early days of the British Labour Party (the first Labour MPs named Ruskin as their leading influence). His intellectual and political heirs worldwide included Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), and Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948).
See also Morris, William; Pre-Raphaelite Movement; Turner, J. M. W.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Batchelor, John. John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life. London, 2000.
Birch, Dinah. Ruskin’s Myths. Oxford, U. K., 1988.
-. Ruskin on Turner. London, 1990.
Blau, Eve. Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-1861. Princeton, N. J., 1982.
Hewison, Robert. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Princeton, N. J., 1976.
Hilton, Tim. John Ruskin. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1985, 2000.
Wheeler, Michael. Ruskin’s God. Cambridge, U. K., 1999.
John Batchelor
RUSSIA. The outbreak of revolution in France in 1789 posed dilemmas for the imperial Russian state that persisted until the downfall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Empress Catherine II had succeeded to the Russian throne in 1762 and prided herself on her learning and her links with educated and progressive European society. Catherine the Great cultivated her ties with thinkers such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot, corresponding with them and portraying herself as a liberal and enlightened ruler. The French Revolution put Catherine’s ideals to the test: the theories of liberty and individual rights that she had discussed were now being put into practice in France itself.
For Catherine, however, there was no question of relaxing her rule over the Russian Empire and letting western European ideas influence Russian government. She believed that Russia was a very different state from France and the rest of Europe, and that the theories that were inspiring revolution in France should remain purely a matter of intellectual curiosity and debate among a select few in Russia itself. Catherine had acted firmly to put down the Pugachev rebellion in Russia during the 1770s, and, while she liked to be seen in the tradition of ‘‘enlightened absolutism,’’ her policies concentrated on strengthening the Russian monarchy and maintaining tight control over the population. Catherine refused to contemplate emancipating the peasant serf population, believing that it was more important to be able to exercise firm control over her subjects. The Russian state faced this problem right through the nineteenth century: how far could it make reform without endangering the authority of the monarchy? Successive Russian rulers tried to balance the conflicting demands of reform and of the autocracy itself, while the example of the French Revolution of 1789 inspired tsarism’s opponents and spurred on generations of Russian revolutionaries to try to overthrow the regime.
The impact of 1789 ran much deeper, however, for Russia. It brought into sharp focus the relationship between Europe and Russia and raised questions about the way in which Russia should develop. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) had opened Russia’s ‘‘window on the West,’’ both literally through his foundation of the new capital of St. Petersburg at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea, and less tangibly through his promotion of Western culture and technology to develop Russia’s economy and society. Peter had shown that he believed Russia must follow the model of the West if it was to progress and cast off its mantle of backwardness.
This approach did not find universal favor in Russia. There was a strong current of opinion that believed that Russia should hold true to its own historical path and that it should not merely seek to ape the West. The events of the French Revolution brought this debate to the fore and set the tone for much of Russian political thought during the nineteenth century. The Slavophile movement that emerged during the 1830s and 1840s argued that Russia had its own particular path of development and that Russia should remain true to the characteristics that distinguished it from the West. Count Sergei Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 until 1849, formulated the concept of Official Nationality that encapsulated Russia’s unique nature. This suggested that the heart of Russia’s identity lay in the fusion of its political system, its religion, and its nationhood. ‘‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality’’ formed the triad of beliefs that sustained Russia and that made it distinct from every other state in Europe. The Russian tradition identified by conservative Slavophiles held that Russia must remain an autocracy, because its unruly people needed strong government. The Orthodox Church was an essential element of Russia’s identity, and Orthodoxy also proclaimed Russian distinctiveness. Finally, the concept of Russian nationality had an almost mystical quality to it, suggesting that Russia was superior to other nationalities and that the non-Russian peoples of the empire should be assimilated into Russia proper. Slavophile ideas found wide sympathy, including from the great novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who was profoundly nationalistic in outlook.
But the example of the French Revolution and the progress that Western states were making gave added impetus to the Petrine model of development. ‘‘Westernizers’’ argued that Russia was selfevidently backward in economic, social, and political terms and that if Russia was to be able to retain its authority in Europe, it had to cast off some of its historical traditions and follow the pattern of development that had proved so successful in the West. This argument gained greater strength from the mid-nineteenth century onward, as Russia’s military power appeared to be on the wane. The defeat of Napoleon I in 1812 in Russia and Tsar Alexander I’s triumphal entry into Paris in 1814 had suggested that Russian power was immense and that the policies followed particularly by Catherine the Great were bearing fruit. The Crimean War (18531856), however, represented a severe setback for Russia, as its troops were defeated on home soil by British and French armies. This experience of military defeat again raised the question of how Russia could progress. The view of the Westernizers informed the series of Great Reforms that Alexander
II implemented in the 1860s and early 1870s, as Russia freed its serfs, established a proper legal system, and laid the basis for a civil society. This outlook also shaped the views of people who were opposed to the tsarist regime. The revolutionaries who formed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the 1890s drew their inspiration from Karl Marx’s theories, developed in the context of industrial western Europe. Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks explicitly wanted to see Russia follow the Western path of industrial capitalism and to become a socialist society. There was no consensus about the best way for Russia to progress. As Lenin was proclaiming the need for a socialist revolution in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II celebrated the tercentenary of Romanov rule in 1913 by appearing in the traditional costume of his seventeenth-century ancestors. On the eve of war and revolution, the debate was still raging.
REFORM AND REACTION
The tsar stood at the head of the Russian state, ordained to his position by God, and with the unrestricted power to make whatever dispositions he wanted. This was not just a theoretical position, because no institutions had developed that could provide any sort of check to the tsar’s authority. It was not law that guided the activities of the state, but the conscience and, indeed, whims of the mon-archs themselves. The tsars who ruled Russia between 1789 and 1914 were able to impose very different styles of government and to implement dramatic shifts in policy without having to gain the consent of any formal body. In 1802 a system of ministerial government was introduced in Russia to replace the haphazard structures that dated from the time of Peter the Great. These new ministries dealt with the traditional concerns of central government: finance, foreign affairs, justice, and the like, but there was no institution that coordinated their work. Individual ministers reported directly to the tsar, so that the monarch in effect acted as his own prime minister. The overall policy of the Russian government was, therefore, rarely formally discussed by the government as a whole and there was little consideration of the impact of one ministry’s policies on the activities of other parts of the government.
The coordination of the work of the Russian government was achieved solely through the person of the monarch, but Russian tsars hardly possessed a personal staff to support them in this task and to organize the complex work of governing the empire. The views and abilities of the monarch were critical, therefore, not just in setting the overall tone for the government but also in determining how efficiently the day-to-day work of governing the empire was carried out. The personal qualities of the tsar became especially significant at times when the Russian state was faced with crises or difficult decisions. Whereas Alexander II was prepared to grasp the nettle of serfdom in the late 1850s and to persevere to push through the long and complicated process of emancipation, Nicholas II found it difficult to act decisively and equivocated when considering making substantial reforms to cope with the waves of discontent that swept the Russian Empire during his reign.
Catherine II died in 1796 and was succeeded by her son, Paul I (r. 1796-1801). Paul’s reign was short-lived, as his attempts to impose an extreme form of absolutism on Russia met with great disfavor from elements of the noble elite. He was murdered in his own bedroom by a group of nobles, and his son, Alexander I, succeeded to the throne, promising to rule ‘‘in the mind and heart’’ of his grandmother, Catherine II. Alexander I’s reign (1801-1825) saw Russia establish itself as the greatest military power in Europe, but the tsar was unsure about taking advantage ofthis authority to make reform at home. During the first part of Alexander’s reign, he encouraged the development of projects to transform Russian government. The ‘‘Unofficial Committee’’ of the tsar’s friends that met between 1801 and 1803 discussed how the rule of law could be implemented in Russia, but its deliberations came to naught. In 1809 the tsar’s advisor Mikhail Speransky proposed the transformation of Russia into a constitutional state with a legislature whose members would be selected by the tsar from lists prepared by provincial authorities. Speransky’s plans involved a clear limitation on the powers of the monarch and resurrected the idea of law becoming supreme, but Alexander I could not be persuaded to accept them. The tsar was fundamentally ambivalent about implementing a constitution for Russia, even though the idea was again discussed in the early 1820s. In the end, however, Alexander followed the pattern set by Catherine II and declared that constitutions were suitable only for sophisticated peoples and enlightened nations. The attractions of autocracy proved too strong for Alexander, and in the last years of his reign he rejected plans to free the serfs, instead agreeing to experiment with the establishment of ‘‘military colonies’’ to try to create a more educated and useful class of peasantry. Some 750,000 people were forced into these colonies by Alexei Arakcheyev, one of Alexander’s trusted advisors, but the colonies proved to be extremely unpopular and were kept running only by the use of force.
Alexander I died in December 1825, but the succession was unclear. As Alexander had no surviving children, his elder brother Constantine was next in line to succeed. Constantine, however, had entered into a morganatic marriage and had secretly renounced the throne, with Alexander making a secret commitment that the succession should pass instead to his younger brother Nicholas. Alexander’s death was followed by great confusion. Nicholas initially swore allegiance to Constantine, and it was only when Constantine made a public renunciation of the throne that Nicholas sought to take power. This period of uncertainty provided the opportunity for secret societies to stage a rebellion in favor of Constantine and the implementation of a constitution. Thousands of soldiers were marched onto Senate Square on a freezing December day by their officers, but there was no sustained attempt to stage a coup d’etat, and forces loyal to Nicholas were able to open fire on the rebels and quell the uprising. The Decembrist revolt has been heralded as the first Russian revolution, and it marked an important shift from both the elemental peasant rebellions and the palace revolutions that had threatened the tsarist regime during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the first time, a group of radical thinkers had developed a program for change and had attempted to put it into practice, albeit with almost no popular support.
The Decembrist revolt set the stage for the reign of Nicholas I by reinforcing the new tsar’s deep conservatism and making him extremely resistant to any proposals for reform that originated outside the government. Nicholas personally supervised the investigations into the conspiracy: its ringleaders were executed, and more than 120 were exiled to Siberia for long periods. The thirty years of Nicholas I’s reign represented a period when substantive political reform was never on the regime’s agenda. The constitutional ideas that had peppered his brother’s reign disappeared from open discussion, and while Nicholas did examine the question of serfdom and make some reforms to the condition of the state peasantry, Russia’s politics stagnated. The most significant result of this was to make open discussion of political and social questions difficult and to promote the formation of an intelligentsia that was fundamentally unsympathetic to the regime. The tsar’s severe treatment of the Decembrist rebels alienated a significant element of the Russian nobility and provoked some of its members to take extreme views. Peter Chaadayev’s ‘‘First Philosophical Letter’’ (written 1828, published 1836) portrayed Russia as deeply backward and in need of a radical change of direction; the reaction of the authorities was to declare him to be mad. Opposition to the regime also came from other parts of society. Literary criticism was one way in which political and social opinion could be voiced obliquely, and it became an important vehicle for critical views to be aired. Vissarion Belinsky, the son of a poor rural doctor, wrote literary criticism that had a sharp political edge to it, and during the 1840s literary politics came to act almost as a substitute for the real political life that Nicholas I disliked so much. The impact of these intellectuals was, however, very limited. The great majority of the Russian people were illiterate and had no access to the journals and magazines in which the intelligentsia propagated their views, so there was no wide audience for such views. During Nicholas I’s reign, the intelligentsia largely confined themselves to abstract discussion and made no attempt to turn their criticisms of the regime into anything more practical.
The absence of any active domestic political opposition to Nicholas I meant that the only threat to his regime could come from outside. Even this looked unlikely, because Russian power appeared assured in post-Napoleonic Europe. Russia’s foreign policy since Peter the Great had been to expand its boundaries where it encountered weak neighbors. Catherine the Great’s final years had witnessed the partitions of Poland, with Russia gaining the lion’s share of the Polish lands. The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon threatened the European balance of power, and Russia was drawn into wars between 1805 and 1814 to counter the French threat. The famous defeat that Napoleon suffered in the frozen winter of 1812 as he marched on Moscow secured Russia’s position in Europe and allowed the Russian state to concentrate on expanding its empire in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. The Crimean War (18531856), however, dealt a crushing blow to Russian prestige and power. Russia was defeated on its own territory by Britain and France, and, in the middle of the war, Nicholas I died from pneumonia, probably contracted when he insisted on inspecting troops on a freezing February day in 1855.
The death of Nicholas I marked a turning point. His successor, Alexander II, was entirely different in outlook. Defeat in the Crimean War provoked intense reflection about the reasons for the severe change in fortunes that Russia had suffered since the nation had been instrumental in defeating Napoleon. Alexander II accepted that Russia’s military weakness was a symptom of a deeper malaise and that it reflected Russian backwardness in a variety of areas. A sizable group of ‘‘enlightened bureaucrats’’ were instrumental in preparing a major series of reforms that were implemented during the 1860s and early 1870s. The most important of these was the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, but these Great Reforms touched almost every aspect of Russian life.
In 1864 Alexander II took the important step of introducing elected local councils (zemstvos) into most of the provinces and districts of European Russia. These councils were elected on a narrow franchise and were dominated by the nobility. The councils were given rather general responsibilities: to deal with matters such as health, education, the maintenance of roads and bridges, and local economic affairs. Their involvement in local affairs grew substantially, and their expenditures grew sevenfold by 1914. This allowed councils to employ substantial numbers of teachers, doctors, agricultural experts and the like who came to play a prominent part in the life of provincial Russia. These professionals acquired a reputation as radicals, partly because their frequent and close contact with the rural population resulted in their making demands for social reform and improvements in living conditions in the countryside.
Local councils also represented an autonomous source of authority in imperial Russia, able to implement policies that did not necessarily coincide with those of the central government. Furthermore, once the principle of self-government had been conceded at the local level, the more liberal of the local councils argued that there was no reason why the same principle should not play a part in the national administration of the state. The activities of local councils provoked considerable disquiet within the central government, especially after the accession of Alexander III to the throne in 1881. In 1890 the councils’ power to levy taxation was restricted, and provincial governors were given the right to veto any appointments the councils made.
The same attitudes had been true of the Russian judicial system during the nineteenth century, and Russian courts were notorious for their corruption, delay, and inefficiency. But the change in the status of the peasantry brought about by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the emergence of each previously enserfed peasant as a legal entity, free from the ownership of the landlords, meant that they had to be granted access to the law. This prompted a fundamental review of the whole imperial legal structure. In 1864 a system of civil and criminal courts based on Western models was introduced, with clear lines of appeal and staffed by a judiciary whose independence was assured through good salaries, thus obviating the need to take bribes, and by their irremovability from office. Judges could no longer be dismissed for handing down verdicts that displeased the government. Furthermore, jury trials were introduced for the first time in criminal cases, thus adding another element outside the control of the government into the administration of justice. During the 1860s and 1870s an independent and articulate legal profession came into existence, encouraged by the new freedoms that lawyers had gained under the reform, and the courtroom became a focus for challenges to the authority and style of government of the autocracy. Lawyers came to be viewed by the regime as being in the same category as the zemstvo professionals—a source of autonomous opposition to the government—and the government made attempts to restrict their freedom.
Reform extended more widely. The education system was reformed in the early 1860s, giving greater autonomy to universities and introducing a wider and more modern curriculum into schools. Censorship was relaxed, giving authors and editors more latitude in what could be published after the rigid controls imposed by Nicholas I. The army underwent major reform in 1874, when Dmitri Milyutin, the minister of war, abolished what was in effect lifetime service in the army for conscripts and replaced it with a system of universal liability to conscription for a fixed period of six years, followed by nine years in the reserves. This reform recognized that the peasantry was now equal in legal status to the other parts of the population, and opened the way for military service to be a burden that was spread more equitably across Russian men.
REVOLUTIONARIES
For some Russians the autocratic state itself was beyond reform. Revolutionaries in Russia in the nineteenth century made up a tiny proportion of the population. As few as two thousand people took part in the attempts in 1873 and 1874 to take the revolutionary message into the countryside by ‘‘going to the people.’’ The People’s Will (Narodnaya volya), the organization that succeeded in assassinating Alexander II in 1881, had only five hundred members along with several thousand more sympathizers. Nonetheless, these groups did have an influence on Russia that was wholly disproportionate to their size, partly through their terrorist activities and partly through the largely illegal circulation of pamphlets and newspapers. The assassination of the emperor in 1881 had been but the latest in a series of attempts on his life, and despite the regime’s efforts to restrict the flow of information through censorship and customs controls on publications from abroad, clandestinely produced works reached deep into Russian educated society.
Russian revolutionary thinking until the mid-1880s was centered around two basic positions. The most common belief of those who promoted revolution in Russia was that the Russian peasantry should form the basis of the new society that would emerge after the destruction of the tsarist regime. The early 1860s saw appeals such as ‘‘Young Russia’’ calling for a federal-republican Russia, based on peasant communes, and the establishment of the Land and Liberty (Zemlya i volya) group, which demanded a genuine peasant reform in the wake of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. Nikolai Cherny-shevsky, the author of the tendentious novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) who was exiled to Siberia for twenty years starting in 1864, argued that change was needed in Russia and wanted to see the establishment of a society based on cooperatives in the new Russia. These rather isolated expressions of opinion were the forerunners, however, of the much broader populist movement during the 1870s; it tried to move from the theoretical musings produced by a myriad of individuals and small groups to practical action to realize its aims. Populist thinkers believed that humankind was inherently good but that the Russian state had repressed its population to such an extent that this prevented the emergence of any type of just or fruitful society. The Russian peasantry, in the populists’ view, bore the brunt of oppression and it would be these same peasants who would form the basis of a new and equitable society. The peasant commune, already in existence in Russia, would lie at the heart of the postrevolutionary Russian state, and the communal structure could be extended to transform Russia into a federal state arranged around these socialized and self-governing units. The populists saw this as marking Russia out as being able to pursue a social and economic path that was different from the vigorous industrialization that had gripped western Europe by the 1870s. The price they saw the West paying for industrial growth was one that the Russian populists believed to be too high. They felt that Russia’s relatively low level of industrial development meant that the opportunity existed for Russia to avoid capitalism altogether and to move directly to an agrarian socialism.
The second element of revolutionary thinking was related to the means through which revolution could actually be achieved in Russia. A debate raged in the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia about the role of the revolutionary elite and to what extent the ordinary people of the Russian Empire had to make their own revolution. The activities and writings of Sergei Nechayev and Peter Tkachev were important in developing this tradition. Nechayev set out elaborate plans for staging a revolution in Russia and emphasized the absolute commitment that must be demonstrated by those leading the process.
Execution of conspirators in the assassination of Alexander II. Nineteenth-century engraving. Five Russian nihilists found guilty of planning the 1881 assassination of Alexander II were executed by hanging in St. Petersburg. The actual bomber, a Polish dissident, was killed during the attack on the tsar; a sixth conspirator, who was pregnant at the time, was exiled to Siberia. ©Corbis
For Tkachev the revolution had to be undertaken exclusively by this small group of committed revolutionaries, and power would be seized through some form of terrorist conspiracy. This trend was accentuated by the failure of the movement to draw the Russian peasantry onto its side in the early 1870s. A small number of radicals— mainly students and former students—fanned out into villages in most of the provinces of European Russia in the summer of 1874, but found the peasants unsympathetic to their cause. Instead of proving to be the naive and pliant material that the populists had envisaged, the Russian peasantry turned out to be highly resistant to condoning attacks on authority, demonstrating instead a solid faith in the tsar. Nearly eight hundred of these agitators were arrested during the summer,
But what most disturbed the government was the effect they had, not on the peasantry, but in inculcating radical views into the rural gentry and local officials.
The inability of the populists to gain popular support in the mid-1870s was repeated in 1881 when the murder of the emperor by revolutionary terrorists failed to result in any form of popular uprising. Revolutionaries faced a crisis in the 1880s and had to embark on a fundamental reassessment of their strategy. This was made the more urgent by the deeply conservative and repressive regime of Alexander III. The police were increasingly active against revolutionaries during the 1880s, infiltrating their organizations and acting quickly to preempt conspiracies. In 1887 a plot to kill the new tsar was uncovered, leading to the swift execution of five of its leaders, including Alexander Ulyanov, a trauma that was to have a decisive impact on his then seventeen-year-old brother Vladimir, soon to become better known under his revolutionary pseudonym of Lenin. In addition, the fundamental populist belief that Russia could avoid the process of industrialization and develop along a different path was being undermined by the growth of Russian industry and the way in which Russia was increasingly becoming integrated into the European industrial economy. The nature of opposition to the autocratic regime therefore underwent substantial changes during the 1880s and 1890s. Some of the chief proponents of agrarian socialism in Russia, such as Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Vasily Vorontsov, continued to believe that Russia need not experience capitalism, and these ‘‘legal populists’’ suggested that a policy of ‘‘small deeds’’ was the way forward instead of revolution. This meant using the institutions of the Russian state to bring about the greatest possible improvement in the life of the Russian people, in the belief that the state itself would gradually come to appreciate the benefits of a socialized economy.
Marxist ideas, which had been gaining currency among west European radicals, found a ready audience in Russia. Marx’s work had been known in Russia since the mid-1870s, and in the wake of the failure of Russian radicals to enlist the support of the peasantry, Marx’s emphasis on the role that would be played by the proletariat in initiating revolution was very welcome. Georgy Plekhanov, the ‘‘father of Russian Marxism,’’ had begun his radical career as a populist, but in the 1880s he moved sharply away from peasant-centered politics. In 1898 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was founded, and the young Lenin played a key role in turning the party into a disciplined and well-organized group. Russian Marxism attracted relatively few adherents before 1914, hampered both by official oppression and by its concentration on an industrial working class that represented only a very small minority of the Russian people. Many Marxist leaders spent time in exile, both in Siberia and outside Russia, but while this also made it more difficult for the party to expand its support, it did allow the leadership to debate policy and strategy vigorously and openly.
THE ROAD TO DISASTER
The accession of Alexander III to the throne in 1881 marked the beginning of a period of reaction. He wanted to curb the revolutionary movement that had been responsible for the murder of his father, and believed that reform had served only to stimulate popular discontent. After 1881, much of the empire was ruled under emergency legislation and the ‘‘Russification’’ of the empire was a priority, as the Russian language and the Orthodox religion were imposed on non-Russians. Alexander III did make a radical departure in Russia’s foreign policy, however. He drew away from alliances with Germany and Austria, the conservative monarchies that had been Russia’s traditional allies for much of the nineteenth century. Instead, Russia moved toward friendship with France, motivated partly by economic reasons. During the 1890s, Sergei Witte, the minister of finance, pursued policies to attract foreign investment in Russian industry. It was important to demonstrate that Russia was politically stable and that investors could have confidence in the security of their funds. At the same time, France was a vital source of investment and was also in search of an ally in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Both Russia and France saw advantages in drawing closer, and in 1894 they signed a formal alliance, designed to offer protection to both countries in case they were attacked by Germany. This had the desired effect of encouraging French investment in Russia, but it also helped to set in stone the alliance systems that were to contribute to the outbreak of war in 1914.
Alexander III died shortly after concluding this alliance and was succeeded by his son Nicholas II. Nicholas was temperamentally unsuited to rule Russia at a time of crisis. He was a weak ruler, but determined to pass on his inheritance intact to his heir. Nicholas found it particularly difficult to deal with strong-minded ministers, and although he could be persuaded into agreeing with policies, he often resented the pressure that had been placed upon him and tried to reverse decisions after they had been taken. In the years between 1894 and the outbreak of World War I, the Russian government swung sharply and frequently between reaction and reform. The assassination of Dmitri Sipiagin, minister of internal affairs, in April 1902 and the appointment of Vyacheslav Plehve in his place brought about an increase in the role of the police in the Russian Empire as the regime intensified its attempts to eliminate opposition and to consolidate its position in the face of widespread discontent. Finland, part of the Russian Empire since 1809, was severely affected by measures designed to reduce its autonomy, while anti-Jewish pogroms, especially the 1903 Kishinev massacre, produced only a muted response from the authorities. These authoritarian policies did not meet with wholehearted approval inside the government: Plehve’s replacement as interior minister was Peter Svyatolpolk-Mirsky, a man of liberal opinions, but his period in office lasted only five months before he was in turn replaced.
During the 1890s the liberal elements of Russian society had begun to make a resurgence after the constraints placed upon their local government power base. The famine and cholera epidemic that struck Russia in 1891 and 1892, leaving four hundred thousand people dead, and the government’s inadequate response to these disasters spurred liberal opinion to action. A small number of senior local council activists began to meet secretly from 1898 in a group that became known as Beseda and that was the basis of a liberal constitutional movement. Russian liberalism included a very wide range of opinions, and its leaders, such as Pavel Milyukov and Ivan Petrunkevich, had to take pains to make their program as inclusive as possible. The original 1902 program published in the illegal newspaper Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) steered clear of controversy by avoiding calls for a constitution or a parliament by name, although it included an explicit demand for a representative legislative body. The radical intelligentsia succeeded in moving the liberal movement to the left, so that when the Union of Liberation was formally established in 1903 it was intended as an underground organization, aimed at promoting revolution. This shift had come about as liberals had realized that the local councils where the movement had originated were unlikely to become motors of successful change in Russia and that more direct action was needed if reforms were to be achieved. During 1904 liberal calls for change were made more openly, more loudly, and more frequently than at any time previously.
Russian liberals lacked sufficient strength to bring about change by themselves, and revolution and reform took place in 1905 only as a result of pressure from a wider spectrum of society. Student demonstrations had become more frequent in the cities of the empire since 1899 with a much-publicized gathering taking place in St. Petersburg in 1901 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs. The screw was tightened further on the Russian state by defeat in battle. In early February 1904 Russia and Japan went to war over their competing ambitions in the Far East. The Russian military performance was uniformly disastrous: the initial Japanese attack dealt a severe blow to the Russian Far Eastern navy; by May the main Russian base at Port Arthur was besieged, and it surrendered in January 1905. The Battle of Mukden (February-March 1905) was a Japanese triumph. The Japanese delivered a shattering blow to the Russian navy in May 1905 in the Tsushima Strait by destroying the fleet sent from Europe to rescue Russian fortunes, and in August 1905 both sides accepted the United States’ proposal of peace negotiations. The continuing defeats Russia suffered caused a severe crisis of confidence in the tsarist regime and demonstrated the weakness of the autocracy more clearly than anything else.
At a time when the tsarist regime was already under severe stress, it was faced with an unprecedented upsurge in popular discontent. On 22 January (9 January, old style) 1905 a mass demonstration by striking St. Petersburg workers, marching into the center of the city to try to present a petition to the tsar, was met by troops who fired indiscriminately into the crowds, killing 130 people and wounding over 400 more. The events of ‘‘Bloody Sunday’’ brought about mass disillusionment with the government and rendered useless the very tentative steps the regime had been taking toward meeting some of the demands articulated by the liberal opposition. A few weeks earlier the regime had promised some concessions, such as easing press censorship and allowing greater freedom of religion, but Nicholas II, acting on the advice of Witte, the former minister of finance, had rejected granting members of local councils any form of participation in the work of central government.
The strike movement spread very quickly through Russia in January 1905 as working people expressed their anger at the events in St. Petersburg. More than four hundred thousand people
Russian peasants receive food, 1892. An estimated 400,000 people died during the catastrophic famine of 1892. ©Corbis
Took part in strikes during January and February, and they were joined in their protests by students at most of the empire’s higher education institutions. The industrial unrest continued throughout the year, subsiding at the height of the summer, but reemerging with renewed vigor during the autumn so that during October 1905 nearly half a million people stopped work. These strikes were motivated by both economic and political concerns, and their very varied motivation made it extremely difficult for the authorities to take any sort of action, other than pure coercion, that would solve the problem. Discontent was not confined to the factories, for an unparalleled wave of rural disturbances also hit the empire. During 1905 there were more than three thousand instances of peasant rebellion, affecting Russia acutely during the spring and early summer and reaching a peak of ferocity at the end of the year. These uprisings frequently involved the burning and destruction of landowners’ estates, along with strikes by agricultural laborers and the seizure of pastureland and meadows.
The concessions the regime agreed to during 1905 were wrested from it grudgingly. There was considerable debate inside the government about the best way of dealing with the revolution that threatened to engulf it; the policies of repression the Russian state had relied upon were called into question by Witte who argued that instead of dealing with the symptoms of discontent the government should address itself to the real causes of the strikes and rural uprisings. Little by little the regime moved toward granting a constitution; in February the government announced that it would allow ‘‘elected representatives of the people to take place in preliminary discussion of legislation,’’ but when the details of the scheme were revealed in August its limitations were made clear. The State Duma, the national representative body, was to be only a consultative institution, and elections were to be indirect with the franchise heavily skewed toward large landowners and the peasantry, excluding workers and most urban inhabitants. The huge and renewed upsurge in discontent during the autumn forced the government to acknowledge that a consultative assembly was insufficient to satisfy its critics, and Nicholas II accepted, albeit with severe reservations, that the Duma should be transformed into a legislative body. The October Manifesto that announced this change of heart also declared that the new Duma would be elected on a wider franchise than originally planned and that the Russian people should be granted basic civil rights, including freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, and association.
The issuing of the October Manifesto did not put an end to popular unrest. On the contrary, violence intensified in the cities of the empire, and Jews suffered particularly from more than six hundred anti-Jewish pogroms. The climax of rural disturbances came in November, and the unrest was noticeably more violent than earlier in the year. More dangerously for the regime, mutinies began to break out in the army and navy. During the last ten weeks of 1905 there were more than two hundred instances of rebellion in the armed forces. The ability of the government to exert control over the population of the empire was seriously in doubt in the late autumn of 1905. Regaining the loyalty of troops was vital if the autocracy was to survive; conditions of service were improved in the armed forces, and the government demonstrated its determination to deal firmly with mutineers. Reform was not the only weapon the regime used to reassert its authority.
The Russian state was not prepared to abandon its traditional policies of repression, and the police and troops used considerable force to restore order. From 1905 until 1917 the relationship between reform and repression in the Russian state was exceptionally complex. After October 1905 the tsar increasingly resented that he had been compelled to concede a legislative parliament that limited his autocratic power. No longer could the emperor act precisely as he wanted, for now legislation had to be approved by the Duma before it could become law. The government moved to limit the effect of this concession as soon as it seemed that order was being successfully restored to the empire in the spring of 1906. New Fundamental Laws for the empire were issued in April 1906. The State Council was reformed to become the second chamber in the legislative process, to be composed of both members appointed by the tsar and representatives elected by corporate bodies in the empire. This arrangement guaranteed that the State Council would be solidly conservative in outlook and able to block bills passed by the Duma, while the legislative process was capped by making the tsar’s approval the final condition for the enactment of a law. The Fundamental Laws continued to describe the monarch as an ‘‘autocrat,’’ and he could issue emergency legislation when the Duma and State Council were in recess.
Although the franchise for the first elections to the Duma was limited and had been devised with the intention that a conservative peasantry would cast its votes for candidates who would support the tsarist regime, this judgment proved to be very wide of the mark. The First Duma, which convened in May 1906, was dominated by the Kadets (the Constitutional Democratic Party), the embodiment of the liberal movement, and the Trudo-viki, a largely peasant party more radical than the liberal Kadets. Government and Duma found themselves wholly at loggerheads and after less than three months the Duma was dissolved and an interval of more than six months interposed before the Second Duma was to meet. These new elections produced a body little different from its predecessor and the situation of deadlock was repeated. After little more than three months the Duma was again dissolved, but this time the government took more radical action to ensure that the composition of the Duma would be more in line with its own thinking. On 16 June (3 June, old style) 1907, the day after the Second Duma had been dissolved, the government illegally altered the franchise to reduce peasant participation and increase the representation given to landowners and urban property owners. This had a profound effect on the results of the elections for the Third Duma, which resulted in the representation of the Left being dramatically reduced so that the Kadets and Trudoviki together made up only 15 percent of the deputies. The largest single group in the new Duma was the Octobrists, a center party that took its name from the October Manifesto of 1905 that had set up the legislative Duma, and that the government hoped would be a reliable ally. Parties on the right also gained substantial support, taking one-third of the seats.
Caricature of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife. From the Hungarian satirical journal Kakas MEirton, 29 July 1906. Frequently viewed as a weak and ineffective sovereign, Nicholas II is here depicted as terrified of the newly formed Russian parliament.
Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library. ©2005 Hungart, Budapest/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
While the Russian regime was concerned to ensure a pliant Duma and was also busy during 1906 and 1907 continuing its policies of repression, the government was also committed to making fundamental reforms. The constitutional changes of 1905 also brought about for the first time the establishment of proper cabinet government, with the Council of Ministers transformed into a forum for the discussion of policy and its chairman taking the role of prime minister. Between 1906 and 1911 this post was occupied by Peter Stolypin who pursued a policy of ‘‘pacification and renewal’’ for Russia. He believed that the two parts of this policy had to run parallel, for to relax the fight against terrorism would result in such havoc that reform could not be implemented, while to abandon reform would be to cease the attempt at removing the causes of the discontent that fed the revolutionary fervor. In 1906 and 1907 the government introduced a whole series of proposals into the Duma: a major agrarian reform; bills to extend civil rights; the reform of local government; changes to the education system; the reform of emergency powers; and a bill to reform local justice. Stolypin intended to alter Russia fundamentally through his reform program. He believed that ‘‘renewal must begin at the bottom’’ and declared that his reforms were predicated on the creation of‘‘a wealthy, well-to-do peasantry, for where there is prosperity there is also, of course, enlightenment and real freedom.’’ The transformation of Russia Stolypin envisaged would bring into being a class of independent peasant landowners, freed from the shackles of the peasant commune. In addition, Stolypin argued that the Russian state itself had to be transformed so that the ethos of arbitrary government was swept away and replaced with a commitment by the state to being itself governed by law. These twin areas of reform were designed to remove the underlying causes of discontent and to establish the tsarist state as a strong and modern institution.
Stolypin’s plans for reform resulted in little real change. Most of his reform program got bogged down in the Duma and the State Council. His peasant reform required a long period of implementation, and, once rebellion was quashed across Russia, many on the right questioned the need for any sort of reform. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, and this put an end to any hope of real reform in Russia. His successor as prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, was a cautious bureaucrat who wanted only to maintain stability.
World History
