The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  Workers formed strike committees; peasants began to make illegal use of the gentry’s timber and pastures and to take over arable land. A mutiny took place in the Black Sea fleet and the battleship Potëmkin steamed off towards Romania. Troops returning from the Far East rebelled along the Trans-Siberian railway. In September 1905 the St Petersburg Marxists founded a Soviet (or Council) of Workers’ Deputies. It was elected by local factory workers and employees and became an organ of revolutionary local self-government. Nicholas II at last took the advice from Sergei Witte to issue an October Manifesto which promised ‘civil liberty on principles of true inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association’. There would also be an elected Duma and adult males in all classes of the population would be enfranchised. Without the Duma, no law could be put into effect. It seemed that autocracy was announcing its demise.

  The Manifesto drew off the steam of the urban middle-class hostility and permitted Nicholas II to suppress open rebellion. Many liberals urged that the Emperor should be supported. The Petersburg Soviet leaders – including its young deputy chairman Lev Trotski – were arrested. An armed uprising was attempted by the Moscow Soviet under the Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries in December 1905. But the rising was quelled. Loyal military units were then deployed elsewhere against other organizations and social groups in revolt. And, as order was restored in the towns and on the railways, Nicholas II published a Basic Law and ordered elections for the State Duma. By then he had introduced qualifications to his apparent willingness to give up autocratic authority. In particular, he could appoint the government of his unrestricted choice; the Duma could be dissolved at his whim; and he could rule by emergency decree. Not only Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries but also the Constitutional-Democrats (or Kadets) denounced these manoeuvres.

  The peasantry had not been much slower to move against the authorities than the workers: most rural districts in European Russia were categorized as ‘disorderly’ in summer 1905.18 Illegal sawing of timber and pasturing of livestock on landlords’ land took place. Threats were made on gentry who lived in the countryside. Often a cockerel with its neck slit would be laid on the doorstep of their houses to warn them to get out of the locality. The Russian peasant households organized their activities within their communes – and frequently it was the better-off households which took the leading role in the expression of the peasantry’s demands. In 1905–6 the countryside across the empire was in revolt. Only the fact that Nicholas II could continue to rely upon a large number of the regiments which had not been sent to the Far East saved him his throne. It was a very close-run thing.

  And so the First State Duma met in April 1906. The largest group of deputies within it was constituted by peasants belonging to no party. Contrary to Nicholas II’s expectation, however, these same deputies stoutly demanded the transfer of the land from the gentry. He reacted by dissolving the Duma. The party with the greatest number of places in the Duma was the Constitutional-Democratic Party and its leaders were so angered by the Duma’s dispersal that they decamped to the Finnish town of Vyborg and called upon their fellow subjects to withhold taxes and conscripts until a fuller parliamentary order was established. Nicholas faced them down and held a further set of elections. To his annoyance, the Second Duma, too, which assembled in March 1907, turned out to be a radical assembly. Consequently Nicholas turned to his Minister of Internal Affairs, Pëtr Stolypin, to form a government and to rewrite the electoral rules so as to produce a Third Duma which would increase the importance of the gentry at the expense of the peasantry.

  Stolypin was a reforming conservative. He saw the necessity of agrarian renovation, and perceived the peasant land commune as the cardinal obstacle to the economy’s efficiency and society’s stability. He therefore resolved to dissolve the commune by encouraging ‘strong and sober’ peasant households to set themselves up as independent farming families. When the Second Duma had opposed him for his failure to grant the land itself to the peasantry, Stolypin had used the emergency powers of Article 87 of the Basic Law to push through his measures. When Russian peasants subsequently showed themselves deeply attached to their communes, he used a degree of compulsion to get his way. Nevertheless his success was very limited. By 1916 only a tenth of the households in the European parts of the empire had broken away from the commune to set up consolidated farms – and such farms in an area of great fertility such as west-bank Ukraine were on average only fifteen acres each.19

  It was also recognized by Stolypin that the Imperial government would work better if co-operation were forthcoming from the Duma. To this end he sought agreements with Alexander Guchkov and the so-called Octobrist Party (which, unlike the Kadets, had welcomed the October Manifesto). Guchkov’s Octobrists were monarchist conservatives who thought roughly along the same lines as Stolypin, but insisted that all legislation should be vetted by the Duma.20 At the same time Stolypin wanted to strengthen a popular sense of civic responsibility; he therefore persuaded the Emperor to increase the peasantry’s weight in the elections to the zemstva. Peasants, he argued, had to have a stake in public life. The political, social and cultural integration of society was vital and Stolypin became convinced that Russian nationalists were right in arguing that Russia should be treated as the heartland of the tsarist empire. Further curtailments were made on the already narrow autonomy of Poles, Finns and other nations of the Russian Empire; and Stolypin strengthened the existing emphasis on Russian-language schooling and administration.

  At court, however, he was regarded as a self-interested politician bent upon undermining the powers of the Emperor. Eventually Nicholas, too, saw things in this light, and he steadily withdrew his favour from Stolypin. In September 1911, Stolypin was assassinated by the Socialist-Revolutionary Dmitri Bogrov in Kiev. There were rumours that the Okhrana, the political police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had facilitated Bogrov’s proximity to the premier – and even that the Emperor may have connived in this. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Emperor resumed policies involving the minimum of co-operation with the State Duma. Intelligent conservatism passed away with the death of Pëtr Stolypin.

  Yet it was no longer possible for tsarism to rule the country in quite the old fashion. In the eighteenth century it had been exclusively the nobility which had knowledge of general political affairs. The possession of this knowledge served to distance the upper classes from the rest of society. At home the families of the aristocracy took to speaking French among themselves; they imbibed European learning and adopted European tastes. A line of exceptional noblemen – from Alexander Radishchev in the 1780s through to an anti-tsarist conspiracy known as the Decembrists in 1825 – questioned the whole basis of the old regime’s legitimacy. But vigorous suppression did not eliminate the problem of dissent. Some of the greatest exponents of Russian literature and intellectual thought – including Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy – made it their life’s work to call for a drastic change in conditions.

  Permanent opposition had taken organized form from the 1860s despite the prohibition on the formation of political parties, on the holding of political meetings and on public demands for political freedom. Most of the rebels were believers in agrarian socialism. Called the narodniki (or populists), they argued that the egalitarian and collectivist spirit of the peasant land commune should be applied to the whole society. At first they had gathered in little secret circles. But by 1876 they had founded a substantial party, Land and Freedom, which conducted propaganda among intellectuals and workers as well as among peasants, and also carried out acts of terror upon officials. When Land and Freedom fell apart, a group of terrorists calling themselves People’s Will was formed. It succeeded in assassinating Emperor Alexander II in 1881. Political repression was intensified; but as quickly as one group might be arrested another would be formed. Not only narodniki but also Marxists and liberals founded tenacious organizations
in the 1890s.

  The culture of opposition was not confined to the revolutionary activists. In the nineteenth century there was a remarkable expansion of education: secondary schools and universities proliferated and students were remarkably antagonistic to the regime. The methods of instruction and discipline grated upon young people. Nor did their unease disappear in adulthood. The tsarist order was regarded by them as a humiliating peculiarity that Russia should quickly remove.

  Their feelings were strengthened by journalists and creative writers who informed public opinion with a freedom that increased after 1905.21 Previously, most legal newspapers had been conservative or very cautiously liberal; afterwards they spanned a range of thought from proto-fascist on the far right to Bolshevik on the far left. Although the Okhrana closed publications that openly advocated sedition, the excitement of opinion against the authorities was constant. Not only newspapers but also trade unions, sickness-insurance groups and even Sunday schools were instruments of agitation. The regime stipulated that trade unions should be locally based and that their leaderships should be drawn from the working class. But this served to give workers an experience of collective self-organization. By thrusting people on to their own resources, tsarism built up the antidote to itself. The rationale of the old monarchy was further undermined.

  Even so, the Okhrana was very efficient at its tasks. The revolutionary leaders had been suppressed in 1907; their various organizations in the Russian Empire were penetrated by police informers, and the arrest of second-rank activists continued. Contact between the émigrés and their followers was patchy.

  The repression secured more time for the dynasty; it also strengthened the determination of the revolutionaries to avoid any dilution of their ideas. At the turn of the century it had been the Marxists who had been most popular with political intellectuals. A party had been formed, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, in 1898. But it quickly dissolved into factionalism, especially among the émigrés. One of the factions, the Bolsheviks (or Majoritarians), was led by Vladimir Lenin. His booklet of 1902, What Is To Be Done?, described the need for the party to act as the vanguard of the working class. He laid down that party members should be disciplined in organization and loyal in doctrine. The party in his opinion should be highly centralized. His theories and his divisive activity disrupted the Second Party Congress in 1903. And Lenin compounded his controversial reputation in 1905 by proposing that the projected overthrow of the Romanov monarchy should be followed by a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ – and he anticipated the use of terror in order to establish the dictatorship.22

  These specifications alarmed his opponents – the so-called Mensheviks (or Minoritarians) – in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party who had always contended that Russia should undergo a ‘bourgeois’ revolution and complete her development of a capitalist economy before undertaking the ‘transition to socialism’. They denounced the projected dictatorship as having nothing in common with genuinely socialist politics. And they wanted a more loosely-organized party than the Bolsheviks had devised.

  The other great revolutionary party was the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, which inherited the traditions of the narodniki of the nineteenth century. Their leading theorist was Viktor Chernov. Unlike the narodniki, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not think that Russia could move straight into socialism without a capitalist stage of economic development. But whereas the Marxists, be they Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, saw the urban workers as the great revolutionary class, the Socialist-Revolutionaries held the peasantry in higher regard and believed that peasants embodied, however residually, the egalitarian and communal values at the heart of socialism. But the Socialist-Revolutionaries recruited among the working class, and in many cities, were rivals to the Russian Social-Democratic Party. In many ways there were differing emphases rather than totally sharp distinctions between Marxists and Socialist-Revolutionaries in their ideas at lower organizational levels of their respective parties; and they suffered equally at the hands of the Okhrana.

  The events of 1905–6 had already shown that if ever the people were allowed free elections, it would be these three parties that would vie for victory. The Kadets recognized the limitations of their own popularity and responded by adopting a policy of radical agrarian reform. They proposed to transfer the land of the gentry to the peasantry with suitable monetary compensation for the gentry. But this would never be sufficient to outmatch the appeal of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks unless that franchise was formulated in such a way as to give advantage to the middle classes.

  Truly this was already a creaky structure of power. Matters were not helped by the fact that the Emperor was not respected. He was a monarch whose capacity for hard work was not matched by outstanding intelligence. He had no clear vision for Russia’s future and wore himself out with day-to-day political administration. He found contentment only in the company of his family and was thought to be hen-pecked by his spouse Alexandra. In fact he was more independent from her than the rumours suggested, but the rumours were believed. Furthermore, he surrounded himself with advisers who included a variety of mystics and quacks. His favouritism towards the Siberian ‘holy man’ Grigori Rasputin became notorious. Rasputin had an uncanny ability to staunch the bleeding of the haemophiliac heir to the throne, Alexei; but, protected by the Imperial couple, Rasputin gambled and wenched and intrigued in St Petersburg. The Romanovs sank further into infamy.

  It was not that Nicholas entirely isolated himself from the people. He attended religious ceremonies; he met groups of peasants. In 1913 the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty was celebrated with acclaim, and the Emperor was filmed for the benefit of cinema-goers. But he seems to have had a horror of his urban subjects: intellectuals, politicians and workers were distrusted by him.23 Nicholas was out of joint with his times.

  Yet the immediate danger to the regime had receded. The empire’s subjects settled back into acceptance that the Okhrana and the armed forces were too strong to be challenged. Peasant disturbances were few. Stolypin had been ruthless ordering the execution of 2796 peasant rebel leaders after field courts-martial.24 The hangman’s noose was known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’. Student demonstrations ceased. National resistance in the non-Russian regions virtually disappeared. Professional associations behaved circumspectly so as to avoid being closed down by the authorities. The labour movement, too, was disrupted by police intervention. Strikes ceased for a while. But as the economy experienced an upturn and mass unemployment fell, workers regained their militant confidence. Sporadic industrial conflicts returned, and a single event could spark off trouble across the empire.

  This eventually occurred in April 1912 when police fired upon striking miners in the gold-fields near the river Lena in Siberia. Demonstrations took place in sympathy elsewhere. A second upsurge of opposition took place in June 1914 in St Petersburg. Wages and living conditions were a basic cause of grievance; so, too, was the resentment against the current political restrictions.25

  The recurrence of strikes and demonstrations was an index of the liability of the tsarist political and economic order to intense strain. The Emperor, however, chose to strengthen his monarchical powers rather than seek a deal with the elected deputies in the State Duma. Not only he but also his government and his provincial governors could act without reference to legal procedures. The Duma could be and was dispersed by him without consultation; electoral rules were redrawn on his orders. Opponents could be sentenced to ‘administrative exile’ by the Ministry of Internal Affairs without reference to the courts – and this could involve banishment to the harshest regions of Siberia. In 1912, 2.3 million people lived under martial law and 63.3 million under ‘reinforced protection’; provincial governors increasingly issued their own regulations and enforced them by administrative order.26 The ‘police state’ of the Romanovs was very far from complete and there were signs that ci
vil society could make further advances at the state’s expense. Yet in many aspects there was little end to the arbitrary governance.

  Nicholas would have made things easier for himself if he had allowed himself to be restrained constitutionally by the State Duma. Then the upper and middle classes, through their political parties, would have incurred the hostility that was aimed at the Emperor. Oppressive rule could have been reduced at a stroke. The decadence and idiocy of Nicholas’s court would have ceased to invite critical scrutiny; and by constitutionalizing his position, he might even have saved his dynasty from destruction. As things stood, some kind of revolutionary clash was practically inevitable. Even the Octobrists were unsympathetic to their sovereign after his humiliation of Stolypin.

  But Nicholas also had reason to doubt that the Duma would have been any better at solving the difficulties of the Russian Empire. Whoever was to rule Russia would face enormous tasks in transforming its economic, cultural and administrative arrangements if it was not to fall victim to rival Great Powers. The growth in industrial capacity was encouraging; the creation of an indigenous base of research and development was less so. Agriculture was changing only at a slow pace. And the social consequences of the transformation in town and countryside were tremendous. Even the economic successes caused problems. High expectations were generated by the increased knowledge about the West among not only the intelligentsia but also the workers. The alienated segment of society grew in number and hostility.