by Riazanovsky
In spite of the serious troubles of the early 1860's, Alexarider II and his associates continued to reform Russia, and the future course of state policy appeared to hang in the balance. For example, while the authorities penalized disaffected Russian students and punished severely - sometimes, as in the case of Nicholas Chernyshevsky, rather clearly on insufficient evidence - those connected with the revolutionary agitation, a considerably more liberal official, Alexander Golovnin, replaced Admiral Putiatin in 1862 as minister of education, and a new and much freer University Statute became law in 1863. Even the Polish rebellion, while it resulted in oppression of the Poles, did not seem to affect the course of reform in Russia. The decisive change away from reform came, in the opinion of many historians, in 1866, following an attempt by an emotionally unbalanced student, Dmitrii Karakozov, to assassinate the emperor. In that year the reactionary Count Dmitrii Tolstoy took charge as minister of education, and the government proceeded gradually to revamp schooling in Russia, intending that stricter controls and heavy emphasis on the classical languages would discipline students and keep their attention away from the issues of the day. Over a period of years reaction also expressed itself in the curbing of the press, in restrictions on the collection of taxes by the zemstvo and on the uses to which these taxes could be put, in the exemption of political and press cases from regular judicial procedure, in continuing Russification, in administrative pressure on magistrates, and the like. On the other hand, despite the reactionary nature of the period, the municipal reform took place in 1870 and the army reform as late as 1874.
New Radicalism and the Revolutionary Movement
Russian history came increasingly to be dominated by a struggle between the government Right and the radical and revolutionary Left, with the moderates and the liberals in the middle powerless to influence the fundamental course of events. The government received unexpected support from the nationalists. It was in 1863, at the time of the Polish rebellion and diplomatic pressure by Great Britain, France, and Austria on behalf of Poland, that the onetime Westernizer, Anglophile, and liberal, journalist Michael Katkov, came out emphatically in support of the government and
Russian national interests. Katkov's stand proved very popular during the Polish war. In a sense Katkov and his fellow patriots who enthusiastically defended the Russian state acted much like the liberals in Prussia and Germany when they swung to the support of Bismarck. Yet, in the long run, it proved more characteristic of the situation in Russia that, although the revolutionaries remained a small minority, they attracted the sympathy of broad layers of the educated public.
While the intellectual history of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century will be summarized in a later chapter, some aspects of Russian radicalism of the 1860's and 1870's must be mentioned here. Following Turgenev, it has become customary to speak of the generation of the sixties as "sons" and "nihilists" and to contrast these "sons" with the "fathers" of the forties. A powerful contrast does emerge. The transformation in Russia formed part of a broader change in Europe which has been described as a transition from romanticism to realism. In Russian conditions the shift acquired an exaggerated and violent character.
Whereas the "fathers" grew up on German idealistic philosophy and romanticism in general, with its emphasis on the metaphysical, religious, aesthetic, and historical approaches to reality, the "sons," led by such young radicals as Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Nicholas Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev, hoisted the banner of utilitarianism, positivism, materialism, and especially "realism." "Nihilism" - and also in large part "realism," particularly "critical realism" - meant above all else a fundamental rebellion against accepted values and standards: against abstract thought and family control, against lyric poetry and school discipline, against religion and rhetoric. The earnest young men and women of the 1860's wanted to cut through every polite veneer, to get rid of all conventional sham, to get to the bottom of things. What they usually considered real and worthwhile included the natural and physical sciences - for that was the age when science came to be greatly admired in the Western world - simple and sincere human relations, and a society based on knowledge and reason rather than ignorance, prejudice, exploitation, and oppression. The casting down of idols - and there surely were many idols in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere - emancipation, and freedom constituted the moral strength of nihilism. Yet few in our age would fail to see the narrowness of its vision, or neglect the fact that it erected cruel idols of its own.
It has been noted that the rebels of the sixties, while they stood poles apart from the Slavophiles and other idealists of the 1830's and 1840's, could be considered disciples of Herzen, Bakunin, and to some extent Belinsky, in their later, radical, phases. True in the very important field of doctrine, this observation disregards the difference in tone and manner: as Samarin said of Herzen, even the most radical Westernizers
always retained "a handful of earth from the other shore," the shore of German idealism and romanticism, the shore of their youth; the new critics came out of a simpler and cruder mold. Socially too the radicals of the sixties differed from the "fathers," reflecting the progressive democratization of the educated public in Russia. Many of them belonged to a group known in Russian as raznochintsy, that is, people of mixed background below the gentry, such as sons of priests who did not follow the calling of their fathers, offspring of petty officials, or individuals from the masses who made their way up through education and effort. The 1860's and the 1870's With their iconoclastic ideology led also to the emancipation of a considerable number of educated Russian women - quite early compared to other European countries - and to their entry into the arena of radical thought and revolutionary politics. The word and concept "intelligentsia," which came to be associated with a critical approach to the world and a protest against the existing Russian order, acquired currency during that portentous period. Finally, the consecutive history of the Russian revolutionary movement - which, to be sure, had such early and isolated forerunners as the Decembrists - began in the years following the "great reforms."
The Russian revolutionary movement can be traced to the revolutionary propaganda and circles of the 1860's. It first became prominent, however, in the 1870's. By that time the essentially individualistic and anarchic creed of nihilism, with its stress on a total personal emancipation, became combined with and in part replaced by a new faith, populism - narod-nichestvo - which gave the "critical realists" their political, social, and economic program. While populism also has a broad meaning which could include as adherents Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, certain ideologists of the Right, and other diverse Russian figures, in the narrow sense it came to be associated with the teachings of such intellectuals as Herzen, Bakunin, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov, and Nicholas Mikhailovsky - who will be discussed in a later chapter - and the main trend of the Russian radical and revolutionary movement in the last third of the nineteenth century. If nihilists gloried in their emancipation, independence, and superiority to the rotten world around them, populists felt compelled to turn to the masses, which in Russia meant the peasants. They wanted to repay their debt for acquiring education - which had brought the precious emancipation itself - at the expense of the sweat and even the blood of the muzhik, and to lead the people to a better future. The intellectuals, it must be added, desired to learn as well as to teach. In particular, following Herzen and Bakunin, they believed in the unique worth and potential of the peasant commune, which could serve as an effective foundation for the just social order of the future. In one way or another most populists hoped to find in the people that moral purity and probity - truth, if you
will - which their own environment had denied them. Whether their search stemmed from critical realism or not, represents another matter. Venturi, Itenberg, and others, with all their determined erudition, cannot quite convince the reader that reason ruled the populist movement.
The climax came in 1873, 1874, and the years immediately following. When in 1873 th
e imperial government ordered Russian students to abandon their studies in Switzerland - where Russians, especially women, could often pursue higher education more easily than in their fatherland - and return home, a considerable number of them, together with numerous other young men and women who had stayed in Russia, decided to "go to the people." And they went to the villages, some two and a half thousand of them, to become rural teachers, scribes, doctors, veterinarians, nurses, or storekeepers. Some meant simply to help the people as best they could. Others nurtured vast radical and revolutionary plans. In particular, the followers of Bakunin put their faith in a spontaneous, elemental, colossal revolution of the people which they had merely to help start, while the disciples of Lavrov believed in the necessity of gradualism, more exactly, in the need for education and propaganda among the masses before they could overturn the old order and establish the new.
The populist crusade failed. The masses did not respond. The only uprising that the populists produced resulted from an impressive but forged manifesto, in which the tsar ordered his loyal peasants to attack his enemies, the landlords. Indeed the muzhiks on occasion handed over the strange newcomers from the cities to the police. The police, in turn, were frantically active, arresting all the crusaders they could find. Mass trials of the 193 and of the 50 in 1877 marked the sad conclusion of the "going to the people" stage of populism. The peasants, to repeat, would not revolt, nor could satisfactory conditions be established to train them for later revolutionary action.
Yet, one more possibility of struggle remained: the one advocated by another populist theoretician, Peter Tkachev, and by an amoral and dedicated revolutionist, Serge Nechaev, and given the name "Jacobin" in memory of the Jacobins who seized power to transform France during the great French Revolution. If the peasants would not act, it remained up to the revolutionaries themselves to fight and defeat the government. Several years of revolutionary conspiracy, terrorism, and assassination ensued. The first instances of violence occurred more or less spontaneously, sometimes as countermeasures against brutal police officials. Thus, early in 1878 Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the military governor of St. Petersburg, General Theodore Trepov, who had ordered a political prisoner to be flogged; a jury failed to convict her, with the result that political cases were withdrawn from regular judicial procedure. But before long an organization emerged which consciously put terrorism at the center of
its activity. The conspiratorial revolutionary society "Land and Freedom," founded in 1876, split in 1879 into two groups: the "Black Partition," or "Total Land Repartition," which emphasized gradualism and propaganda, and the "Will of the People" which mounted an all-out terroristic offensive against the government. Members of the "Will of the People" believed that, because of the highly centralized nature of the Russian state, a few assassinations could do tremendous damage to the regime, as well as provide the requisite political instruction for the educated society and the masses. They selected the emperor, Alexander II, as their chief target and condemned him to death. What followed has been described as an "emperor hunt" and in certain ways it defies imagination. The Executive Committee of the "Will of the People" included only about thirty men and women, led by such persons as Andrew Zheliabov who came from the serfs and Sophia Perovskaia who came from Russia's highest administrative class, but it fought the Russian Empire. Although the police made every effort to destroy the revolutionaries and although many terrorists perished, the "Will of the People" made one attempt after another to assassinate the emperor. Time and again Alexander II escaped through sheer luck. Many people were killed when the very dining room of his palace was blown up, while at one time the emperor's security officials refused to let him leave his suburban residence, except by water!
After the explosion in the Winter Palace and after being faced by strikes, student disturbances, and a remarkable lack of sympathy on the part of the educated public, as well as by the dauntless terrorism of the "Will of the People," the emperor finally decided on a more moderate policy which could lead to a rapprochement with the public. He appointed General Count Michael Loris-Melikov first as head of a special administrative commission and several months later as minister of the interior. Loris-Melikov was to suppress terrorism, but also to propose reforms. Several moderate or liberal ministers replaced a number of reactionaries. Loris-Melikov's plan called for the participation of representatives of the public, both elected and appointed, in considering administrative and financial reforms - not unlike the pattern followed in the abolition of serfdom. On March 13, 1881, Alexander II indicated his willingness to consider Loris-Melikov's proposal. That same day he was finally killed by the remaining members of the "Will of the People."
Foreign Policy
The foreign policy of Alexander II's reign, while perhaps not quite as dramatic as its internal history, also deserves careful attention. It began with the termination of the Crimean War and the Treaty of Paris, possibly the nadir of the Russian position in Europe in the nineteenth century, and
it did much to restore Russian prestige. Notably, the Russians fought a successful war against Turkey and largely redrew the map of the Balkans. Also, in the course of the reign, the empire of the Romanovs made a sweeping expansion in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. But not everything went well. Russia experienced important diplomatic setbacks as well as victories. Moreover, the changing pattern of power relations in Europe - fundamentally affected by the unification of Germany, which the tsarist government helped more than hindered - was in many ways less favorable to the state of the Romanovs in 1881 than it had been fifty years earlier.
The Crimean War meant the collapse of the world of Nicholas I, the world of legitimism with himself as its leader. Specifically, it left the Russian government and public bitterly disappointed with Austria, which, in spite of the crucial Russian help in 1849, did everything to aid Russia's enemies short of actually fighting. As Tiutchev insisted, no "Austrian Judas" could be allowed to pay last respects to Nicholas I on behalf of the Hapsburgs! It is worth noting that when the new minister of foreign affairs, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, surveyed the situation, he turned to France as a possible ally, and Napoleon III indicated reciprocal interest. Yet at that time - in contrast to what happened thirty years later - the Franco-Russian rapprochement foundered on the Polish rebellion of 1863. As already mentioned, both the French ruler and his people sympathized with the Poles, and, as in the case of Great Britain and Austria, France intervened diplomatically on behalf of the Poles, arguing that from the time of the Congress of Vienna and the creation of the Kingdom of Poland the fate of that country was of international concern and not simply an internal Russian affair. The imperial government could reject the argument of these powers and rebuff their intervention only because of the strong support that it obtained from the Russian public and also from Prussia. Bismarck, who realized the danger of Polish nationalism for Prussia and wanted to secure the goodwill of the tsar, sent Count Constantine Alvensleben to promise the Russians co-operation against the Polish rebels and to sign a convention to that effect. Bismarck's astute handling of the Russians contributed, no doubt, to the rather benevolent attitude on the part of the tsarist government toward the unification of Germany under Prussia, which involved the defeat of Austria in 1866 and of France in 1870. In retrospect, the fact that Russia did nothing to prevent the emergence of Germany as the new continental giant has been called the worst mistake that tsarist diplomacy ever made. To qualify that charge, it should at least be noted that Russian statesmen were not the only ones in that crucial decade totally to misjudge the situation and prospects in Europe. Also, Russia did obtain some compensation through the abrogation of the Black Sea provisions of the Treaty of Paris: at a time when
European attention centered on the Franco-Prussian war, Gorchakov, with Bismarck's backing, repudiated the vexatious obligation not to have a warfleet or coastal fortifications on the Black Sea that Russia had assumed under the Treaty. The British protested and an i
nternational conference was held in London in March 1871, but the Russian action was allowed to stand, although the principle of general consent of the signatories as against unilateral action was reaffirmed.
When in the 1870's the tsarist government looked again for allies, it once more found Prussia, or rather Germany, and Austria, which had become Austria-Hungary. For a century the Hohenzollerns had remained, on the whole, the best friends of the Romanovs; as to the Hapsburgs, the Russian rancor against them, generated by their behavior at the time of the Crimean War, had somewhat subsided in the wake of Austrian defeats and other misfortunes. The new alliance, the so-called Three Emperors' League, was formed in 1872 and 1873. Russia's part in it involved a military convention with Germany, according to which each party was to assist with 200,000 troops if its partner were attacked by a European power, and a somewhat looser agreement with Austria-Hungary. The League could be said to represent a restoration of the old association of conservative eastern European monarchies determined to preserve the established order. But, in contrast to earlier decades when Alexander I and Nicholas I led the conservative coalition, the direction of the new alliance belonged to Bismarck. In fact, the Russian government was grateful to be admitted as a partner. Moreover, Russian and German interests did not correspond in some important matters. The lack of harmony became obvious in 1875 when Russia and Great Britain exercised strong pressure on Germany to assure that it would not try a preventive war against France.
The Three Emperors' League finally collapsed over the issue of Turkey and the Balkans, which in the 1870's led to a series of international crises and to war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Beginning with the insurrection against Turkish rule in Herzegovina and Bosnia in July 1875, rebellion swept the Balkans. The year 1876 witnessed a brutal Turkish suppression of a Bulgarian uprising, as well as fighting and massacres in other parts of the peninsula, and the declaration of war on the Porte by Serbia and Montenegro. The Russian public reacted strongly to these developments. Pan-Slavism - hitherto no more than a vague sentiment, except for certain small circles of intellectuals - for the first time became an active force. Pan-Slav committees sent up to five thousand volunteers, ranging from prominent members of society to simple peasants and including about eight hundred former Russian army officers, to fight in the Serbian army, which had been entrusted to another Russian volunteer, General Michael Cherniaev. But the Turks defeated the Serbs, hence the last hope of Balkan nationalities in their uneven contest with the Ottomans