Attitudes, however, were altering only very slowly. Peasants, while making money from the expanded market for their products, kept to traditional notions and customs. In Russia the main rural institution was the village land commune. This body meted out justice according to the local understandings about economic and social fairness. In some areas this involved the periodic redistribution of land among the households of the commune; but even where land was held fixedly, peasants continued to comply with the decisions of the commune. A degree of egalitarianism existed. There was also a tradition of mutual responsibility, a tradition that had been fortified by the Emancipation Edict of 1861 which levied taxes from the village commune as a whole rather than from particular households or individuals. Peasants were accustomed to acting collectively and to taking decisions among themselves about life in the village.5
But this did not mean that the peasantry’s conditions were wholly equalized. A handful of households in a commune would typically be better off than the rest; and the affluent peasants became known as kulaki (which in Russian means ‘fists’). They lent money, they hired labour; they rented and bought land. Poorer households, especially those which lacked an adult male and had to get by with youngsters doing the work, tended to decline into penury. Life was nasty, brutish and short for most peasants.
So long as the peasantry complied with the state’s demands for taxes and conscripts, there was little governmental interference in rural affairs. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most peasants had been bonded to the noble owners of landed estates. Emperor Alexander II saw this to have been an important reason for the Russian Empire’s débâcle in the Crimean War of 1854–6, and in 1861 he issued an Emancipation Edict freeing peasants from their bondage. The terms of their liberation were ungenerous to them. On average, peasants were left with thirteen per cent less land to cultivate than before the Edict.6 Consequently despite being pleased to be relieved of the gentry’s domineering administration of the villages, the peasantry was discontented. There was a belief among peasants that the Emperor ought to transfer all land, including their former masters’ fields and woods, to them and that they themselves should appropriate this land whenever the opportunity might arise.
The Emancipation Edict, by removing the gentry’s automatic authority over the peasantry, had to be accompanied by several reforms in local government, the judiciary, education and military training. Elective representative bodies known as the zemstva were set up in the localities to carry out administrative functions. Local courts, too, were established; and provision for popular education was increased: by the turn of the century it was reckoned that about a quarter of the rural population was literate – and in the largest cities the proportion was three quarters.7 The armed forces reduced the term of service from twenty-five years to six years at the most. Still the peasants were unsatisfied. They were annoyed that they had to pay for the land they received through the Emancipation Edict. They resented also that they, unlike the nobility, were liable to corporal punishment for misdemeanours. They remained a class apart.
Alexander II also insisted that they should have permission from their communes before taking up work in towns; for he and his ministers were fearful about the rapid creation of an unruly urban ‘proletariat’ such as existed in other countries. But this brake on industrial growth was insubstantial. In order to meet their fiscal obligations, communes found it convenient to allow able-bodied young men to seek jobs in factories and mines and remit some of their wages to the family they left behind them in the village. By 1913 there were about 2.4 million workers in large-scale industry.8 The figure for the urban working class reached nearly eleven million when hired labourers in small-scale industry, building, transport, communications and domestic service were included. There were also about 4.5 million wage-labourers in agriculture. Thus the urban and rural working class quadrupled in the half-century after the Emancipation Edict.9
Change occurred, too, amidst the middle and upper classes. Owners of large estates in the more fertile regions adopted Western agricultural techniques and some of them made fortunes out of wheat, potatoes and sugar-beet. Elsewhere they increasingly sold or rented their land at prices kept high by the peasantry’s land-hunger. The gentry took employment in the expanding state bureaucracy and joined banks and industrial companies. With the increase in the urban population there was a rise in the number of shopkeepers, clerks and providers of other products and services. The cities of the Russian Empire teemed with a new life that was bursting through the surface of the age-old customs.
The monarchy tried to hold on to its prerogatives by ensuring that the middle and upper classes should lack organizations independent from the government. There were a few exceptions. The Imperial Economic Society debated the great issues of industrialization. The Imperial Academy, too, managed to elude excessive official restriction, and several great figures won international acclaim. The chemist Mendeleev and the behavioural biologist Pavlov were outstanding examples. But the various professional associations were subjected to constant surveillance and intimidation, and could never press their case in the Emperor’s presence. The industrialists and bankers, too, were nervous and their organizations were confined to local activities; and tsarism kept them weak by favouring some at the expense of others. Imperial Russia put obstacles in the way of autonomous civic activity.
And so the transformation of society was in its early stages before the Great War and the bulk of economic relationships in the Russian Empire were of a traditional kind: shopkeepers, domestic servants, carriage-drivers and waiters lived as they had done for decades. The khodoki – those peasants who travelled vast distances to do seasonal work in other regions – were a mass phenomenon in central and northern Russia.
Even those factories which used the most up-to-date, imported machinery continued to rely heavily upon manual labour. Living conditions in the industrial districts were atrocious. Moscow textile-factory owners had a paternalist attitude to their work-force; but most of them failed to supply their workers with adequate housing, education and other amenities. Russian workers lived in squalor and were as poorly paid as many industrial work forces elsewhere. Like the peasants, they felt excluded from the rest of society. A chasm of sentiment separated them from their employers, their foremen and the police. They were forbidden to form trade unions; they were subordinated to an arbitrarily-applied code of labour discipline at their places of work. The Ministry of Internal Affairs in the late nineteenth century showed sympathy with their plight. But the interests of the owners were usually given official protection against the demands of the workers.
The established working class which had existed in Moscow, St Petersburg and Tula grew rapidly under Nicholas II. But the precariousness of their conditions encouraged workers to maintain their ties with the countryside. Relatives cultivated the communal allotments of land for them; and, in the event of strikes, workers could last out by returning to the villages. This was a system of mutual assistance. Peasant households expected the workers not only to help them financially but also to come back to help with the harvest.
The linkage between countryside and town helped to sustain traditional ideas. Religious belief was prevalent across the empire, and Christmas, Easter and the great festivals were celebrated with gusto by Russians and other Christian nationalities. The priest was a central figure, accompanying the peasants into the fields to bless the sowing and pray for a good crop. But pagan vestiges, too, survived in the peasant world-view and the ill-educated, poorly-paid parish priest rarely counteracted the prejudices of his parishioners. Both the Russian peasant and the Russian worker could be crude in the extreme. Heavy drinking was common. Syphilis was widespread. Fists and knives were used to settle disagreements. And the peasantry ferociously enforced its own forms of order. It was not uncommon for miscreants to undergo vicious beating and mutilation. The sophistication of St Petersburg salons was not matched in the grubby, ill-kempt villages.
Thus th
e Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom. Most people (and ninety per cent of the Emperor’s subjects had been born and bred in the countryside)10 felt that a chasm divided them from the world inhabited by the ruling élites.
Ostensibly the Russian nation was the beneficiary of the empire; but national consciousness among Russians was only patchily developed and local traditions and loyalties retained much influence. This was evident in a number of ways. One example is the way that migrants, as they moved into the towns for work, tended to stay together with people from the same area. The man from Saratov found the man from Archangel almost as alien as someone from Poland or even Portugal. Remarkable differences of dialect and accent prevailed. Despite the current economic transformation, furthermore, most Russians did not move to the nearest town: many did not even visit the neighbouring village. The lifestyles of Russian peasant communities were so strongly attached to particular localities that when peasants migrated to areas of non-Russian population they sometimes felt cut off from their roots and identified themselves with their new neighbours.
There had nevertheless been times when the peasants had rallied to the government’s side. Patriotic sentiments were roused by the Napoleonic invasion in 1812 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8;11 and a deep dislike of foreign traders, mercenaries and advisers had existed in previous centuries.12 The general processes of industrialization and education, too, had an impact on popular sentiments. Russians were moving to towns; they were becoming literate; they could travel from one part of the country to another; they had chances of changing their type of occupation. As they met and talked and worked together, they started to feel that they had much in common with each other.
Yet national consciousness was not a dominant sentiment among Russians. Except at times of war, most of them at the beginning of the twentieth century were motivated by Christian belief, peasant customs, village loyalties and reverence for the tsar rather than by feelings of Russian nationhood. Christianity itself was a divisive phenomenon. The Russian Orthodox Church had been torn apart by a reform in ritual imposed by Patriarch Nikon from 1653. Those who refused to accept Nikon’s dispensations fled to the south, the south-east and the north and became known as the Old Believers. Other sects also sprang up among Russians. Some of these were strange in the extreme, such as the Khlysty who practised castration of their adherents. Others were pacifists; notable among them were the Dukhobors. There was also a growth of foreign Christian denominations such as the Baptists. What was common to such sects was their disenchantment not only with the Russian Orthodox Church but also with the government in St Petersburg.
This situation limited the Russian Orthodox Church’s ability to act as the unifying promoter of Russian national values. Compelled to act as a spiritual arm of the tsarist state, the Church conducted a campaign of harassment against the Russian sects. The kind of intellectual effervescence characteristic of ‘national’ churches in other countries was discouraged in Russia. The tsar and his ecclesiastical hierarchy wanted an obedient, obscurantist traditionalism from the Russian Orthodox Church, and had the authority to secure just that.
Nor did a clear sense of national purpose emanate from the intelligentsia even though the leading cultural figures in the nineteenth century explored how best the human and natural resources of Russia might be organized. The poems of Alexander Pushkin; the novels of Lev Tolstoy, Fëdor Dostoevski and Ivan Turgenev; the paintings of Ivan Repin; the music of Modest Musorgski and Pëtr Chaikovski: all their works stressed that Russia had a great potential which had yet to be effectively tapped. Among creative artists, the musicians were exceptional in displaying allegiance to the monarchy. Most of the intellectuals in their various ways hated tsarism and this attitude was shared by students, teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professional groups.13 It was a commonplace amidst the intelligentsia that the autocratic monarchy was stifling the development of the Russian national spirit.
And yet the intellectuals were remote from agreeing what they meant by Russianness. Indeed many of them abhorred the discourse of national distinctiveness. While criticizing the imperial nature of the state, they disliked the thought of breaking it up into several nation-states; instead they pondered how to create a multinational state which would deny privileges to any particular nation. Anti-nationalism was especially characteristic of the socialists; but several leading liberals, too, refused to invoke ideas of Russian nationalism.
It was left to far-right public figures, including some bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, to argue for the interests of ethnic Russians at the expense of the other peoples of the Russian Empire. Several monarchist organizations came into existence after 1905 which sought to promote this case. The most influential of them was the Union of the Russian People, which had the undisguised support of Nicholas and his family.14 Such organizations called for the unconditional restoration of autocracy. They lauded the tsar, the Russian Orthodox Church and ‘the simple people’. They hated the Jews, whom they blamed for all the recent disturbances in the empire. They helped to form gangs, usually known as the Black Hundreds, which carried out bloody pogroms against Jewish communities in the western borderlands. By stirring up a xenophobic hysteria, they aimed to reunite the tsar and the Russian people.
After his initial declaration of sympathy for the Union of the Russian people, Nicholas took a more measured public stance. He left it to the Union to do what it could. But he was a tsar. He was far too austere to become a rabble-rouser, and his wish to be respected by fellow monarchs abroad was undiminished. Nothing done by Nicholas had an entirely clear purpose or consistent implementation.
Among Nicholas’s inhibitions was the fact that he could not feel confident about the loyalty of his Russian subjects. The Imperial state oppressed Russian peasants, soldiers and workers as well as their non-Russian counterparts. What is more, the Russians constituted only forty-four per cent of the Imperial population in the two decades before 1917.15 The empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities, and the Russians were inferior to several of the other nations in educational and occupational accomplishment. Nicholas II’s German, Jewish and Polish subjects had a much higher average level of literacy than his Russian ones;16 and Germans from the Baltic region held a disproportionately large number of high posts in the armed forces and the bureaucracy. Moreover, the Poles, Finns, Armenians, Georgians had a clearer sense of nationhood than Russians: their resentment of imperial interference was strong. It would not have made sense to alienate such nationalities from the regime more than was necessary.17
Thus the tsarist state in the nineteenth century was primarily a supranational state; it was not one of those several nation-states that had simply acquired an empire. Loyalty to the tsar and his dynasty was the supreme requirement made by the Russian Empire.
Not that the tsars were averse to brutal repression. The Polish Revolt of 1863 had been savagely quelled; and in the North Caucasus, which had been conquered only in the 1820s, the rebel leader Shamil raised a Muslim banner of revolt against tsarism and was not defeated until 1859. The autonomy granted to Finnish administration and education was trimmed on the instructions of Emperor Nicholas II. The Uniate Church in Ukraine and Belorussia; the Armenian and Georgian Orthodox Churches; the Lutheran Churches among Estonians and Latvians; the Catholic Church in Lithuania and ‘Russian’ Poland: all resented the official interference in their practices of worship and became crucibles of anti-tsarist discontent. Meanwhile most Jews were constrained to live within the Pale of Settlement in the empire’s western borderlands – and Nicholas crudely believed them to be responsible for subverting the entire empire.
In his more reflective moments, however, he recognized that the regime’s security was endangered less by th
e ‘national question’ than by the ‘labour question’ – and most factory workers were ethnic Russians. The illegal labour movement had come to life intermittently in the 1890s, but strikes were more the exception than the rule. Peasant disturbances also occurred. Until after the turn of the century, however, tsarism was strongly in place. Rumblings against the monarchy were only intermittent. Liberals, being forbidden to form a political party, held grand banquets to celebrate anniversaries of past events that had embarrassed the monarchy. Peasants whose harvests were twice ruined by bad weather after 1900 were intensely discontented. Workers, too, were disgruntled. The government, acting on the advice of Moscow police chief Sergei Zubatov, had allowed the setting up of politically-controlled local trade unions; and this gave rise to a legal labour movement determined to take on the authorities.
On Sunday, 9 January 1905 a revolutionary emergency occurred when a peaceful procession of demonstrators, led by Father Georgi Gapon, was fired upon outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Innocent civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. Immediately across the Russian Empire there were strikes and marches in protest. Poland and Georgia became ungovernable over the following weeks. In Russia there was revulsion against the Emperor among factory workers, and their demonstrations were initially given approval by industrialists.
As the press began to criticize the authorities, Nicholas II set up an enquiry into the reasons for popular discontent. The news from the Far East brought further discredit to the monarchy. In February 1905 Russian land forces were crushed at Mukden; in May the Baltic fleet was annihilated in the battle of Tsushima. The myth of the regime’s invincibility was dissipated and the illegal political parties emerged from clandestinity. The two largest of them were the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. The former were Marxists who wanted the urban working class to lead the struggle against the monarchy; the latter were agrarian socialists who, while also trying to appeal to workers, put greater faith in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Both sought the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Liberals, too, organized themselves by establishing the Constitutional-Democratic Party in October 1905. On all sides the autocracy was under siege.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 4