by Riazanovsky
rested on Russian intervention. The imperial government considered intervention carefully and without enthusiasm. The international situation, with Great Britain and Austria-Hungary hostile to Russia, argued against war; and so did the internal conditions, for reforms were in the process of enactment, notably in the military and financial domains, and there was populist unrest. Besides, Gorchakov and other responsible tsarist officials did not believe at all in Pan-Slavism, the exception being the Russian ambassador to Constantinople, Count Nicholas Ignatiev. However, as the Balkan struggle continued, as international diplomacy failed to bring peace, and as Russia became gradually more deeply involved in the conflict, the tsarist government, having come to an understanding with Austria-Hungary, declared war on Turkey on April 24, 1877.
The difficult, bitter, and costly war, highlighted by such engagements as the Russian defense of the Shipka pass in the Balkan mountains and the Turkish defense of the fortress of Plevna, resulted in a decisive Russian victory. The tsarist troops were approaching Constantinople when the fighting ceased. The Treaty of San Stefano, signed in March 1878, reflected the thorough Ottoman defeat: Russia obtained important border areas in the Caucasus and southern Bessarabia; for the latter, Rumania, which had fought jointly with Russia at Plevna and elsewhere, was to be compensated with Dobrudja; Serbia and Montenegro gained territory and were to be recognized, along with Rumania, as fully independent, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were to receive some autonomy and reform; moreover, the treaty created a large autonomous Bulgaria reaching to the Aegean Sea, which was to be occupied for two years by Russian troops; Turkey was to pay a huge indemnity.
But the Treaty of San Stefano never went into operation. Austria-Hungary and Great Britain forced Russia to reconsider the settlement. Austria-Hungary was particularly incensed by the creation of a large Slavic state in the Balkans, Bulgaria, which Russia had specifically promised not to do. The reconsideration took the form of the Congress of Berlin. Presided over by Bismarck and attended by such senior European statesmen as Disraeli and Gorchakov, who was still the Russian foreign minister, it met for a month in the summer of 1878 and redrew the map of the Balkans. While, according to the arrangements made in Berlin, Serbia, Montenegro, and Rumania retained their independence and Russia held on to southern Bessarabia and most of her Caucasian gains, such as Batum, Kars, and Ardakhan, other provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano were changed beyond recognition. Serbia and Montenegro lost some of their acquisitions. More important, the large Bulgaria created at San Stefano underwent division into three parts: Bulgaria proper, north of the Balkan mountains, which was to be autonomous; Eastern Rumelia, south of the mountains, which was to receive a special organization under
Turkish rule; and Macedonia, granted merely certain reforms. Also, Austria-Hungary acquired the right to occupy, although not to annex, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, while Great Britain took Cyprus. The diplomatic defeat of Russia reflected in the Berlin decisions made Russian public opinion react bitterly against Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, and, less justifiably, Bismarck, the "honest broker" of the Congress.
Expansion in Asia
Whereas Russian dealings with European powers in the reign of Alexander II brought mixed results, the empire of the tsars continued to expand grandly in Asia. Indeed, many scholars assert the existence of a positive correlation between Russian isolation or rebuffs in the west and the eastward advance. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that the third quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed enormous Russian gains in Asia, notably in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, and in the Far
East. Also, in 1867, the tsarist government withdrew from the Western hemisphere by selling Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000.
As mentioned earlier, Georgian recognition of Russian rule and successful wars against Persia and Turkey in the first decades of the nineteenth century had brought Transcaucasia and thus all of the Caucasus under the sway of the tsars. But imperial authority remained nominal or nonexistent so far as numerous mountain tribes were concerned. Indeed, Moslem mountaineers reacted to the appearance of Russian troops by mobilizing all their resources to drive the invaders out and by staging a series of desperate "holy wars." The pacification of the Caucasus, therefore, took decades, and military service in that majestic land seemed for a time almost tantamount to a death warrant. Beginning in 1857, however, Russian troops commanded by Prince Alexander Bariatinsky, using a new and superior rifle against the nearly exhausted mountaineers, staged another, this time decisive, offensive. In 1859 Bariatinsky captured the legendary Shamil, who for twenty-five years had been the military, spiritual, and political leader of Caucasian resistance to Russia. That event has usually been considered as the end of the fighting in the Caucasus, although more time had to pass before order could be fully established there. A large number of Moslem mountaineers chose to migrate to Turkey.
The Caucasus needed pacification when Alexander II ascended the throne, but Central Asia had yet to be taken. That was accomplished by a series of daring military expeditions in the period from 1865 to 1876. Led by such able and resourceful commanders as Generals Constantine Kaufmann and Michael Skobelev, Russian troops, in a series of converging movements in the desert, encircled and defeated the enemy. Thus in the course of a decade the Russians conquered the khanates of Kokand, Bokhara, and Khiva, and finally, in 1881, also annexed the Transcaspian region. Russian expansion into Central Asia bears a certain resemblance both to colonial wars elsewhere and to the American westward movement. Central Asia proved attractive for commercial reasons, for the peoples of that area could supply Russia with raw materials, for example cotton, and at the same time provide a market for Russian manufactured goods. Also, Russian settlements had to be defended against predatory neighbors, and that led to further expansion. More important, it would seem that the fluid Russian frontier simply had to advance in one way or another, at least until it came up against more solid obstacles than the khanates of Bokhara and Khiva. In Central Asia, as in the Caucasus, the establishment of Russian rule usually interfered little with the native economy, society, law, or customs.
The Russian Far Eastern boundary remained unchanged from the Treaty of Nerchinsk drawn in 1689 until Alexander II's reign. In the intervening period, however, the Russian population in Siberia had increased con-
siderably, and the Amur river itself had acquired significance as an artery of communication. In 1847 the energetic and ambitious Count Nicholas Muraviev - known later as Muraviev-Amursky, that is, of the Amur - became governor-general of Eastern Siberia. He promoted Russian advance in the Amur area and profited from the desperate plight of China, at war with Great Britain and France and torn by a rebellion, to obtain two extremely advantageous treaties from the Celestial Empire: in 1858, by the Treaty of Aigun, China ceded to Russia the left bank of the Amur river and in 1860, by the Treaty of Peking, the Ussuri region. The Pacific coast of the Russian Empire began gradually to be settled: the town of Nikolaevsk on the Amur was founded in 1853, Khabarovsk in 1858, Vladivostok in 1860. In 1875 Russia yielded its Kurile islands to Japan in return for the southern half of the island of Sakhalin.
XXX
THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER III, 1881-94, AND THE FIRST PART OF THE REIGN OF NICHOLAS II, 1894-1905
The natural conclusion is that Russians live in a period which Shakespeare denned by saying, "The time is out of joint."
M. KOVALEVSKY
The reign of Alexander III and the reign of Nicholas II until the Revolution of 1905 formed a period of continuous reaction. In fact, as has been indicated, reaction had started earlier when Alexander II abandoned a liberal course in 1866 and the years following. But the "Tsar-Liberator" did enact major reforms early in his rule, and, as the Loris-Melikov episode indicated, progressive policies constituted a feasible alternative for Russia as long as he remained on the throne. Alexander III and Nicholas II saw no such alternative. Narrow-minded and convinced reactionaries, they not only rejected f
urther reform, but also did their best to limit the effectiveness of many changes that had already taken place. Thus they instituted what have come to be known in Russian historiography as "counterreforms." The official estimate of Russian conditions and needs became increasingly unreal. The government relied staunchly on the gentry, although that class was in decline. It held high the banner of "Orthodoxy-autocracy-nationality," in spite of the fact that Orthodoxy - helped, or rather hindered, by police and other more direct compulsive measures - could hardly cement together peoples of many faiths in an increasingly secular empire, that autocracy was bound to be even more of an anachronism and obstacle to progress in the twentieth than in the nineteenth century, and that a nationalism which had come to include Russification could only split a multinational state. Whereas the last two Romanovs to rule Russia agreed on principles and policies, they differed in character: Alexander III was a strong man, Nicholas II a weak one; under Nicholas confusion and indecision complicated further the fundamentally wrong-headed efforts of the government.
Alexander III, born in 1845, was full of strength and vigor, when he ascended the Russian throne after the assassination of his father. The new ruler was determined to suppress revolution and to maintain autocracy, a point that he made clear in a manifesto of May 11, 1881, which led to the resignation of Loris-Melikov, Dmitrii Miliutin, Grand Duke Con-
stantine, and the minister of finance, Alexander Abaza. Yet it took a number of months and further changes at the top before the orientation represented by Loris-Melikov was entirely abandoned and the government embarked on a reactionary course. The promoters of reaction included Constantine Pobedonostsev, formerly a noted jurist at the University of Moscow, who had served as tutor to Alexander and had become in 1880 the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod; Dmitrii Tolstoy, who returned to the government in 1882 to head the Ministry of the Interior; and Ivan Delianov, who took charge of the Ministry of Education in the same year. Pobedonostsev, the chief theoretician as well as the leading practitioner of reaction in Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century, characteristically emphasized the weakness and viciousness of man and the fallibility and dangers of human reason, hated the industrial revolution and the growth of cities, and even wanted "to keep people from inventing things." The state, he believed, had as its high purpose the maintenance of law, order, stability, and unity among men. In Russia that aim could be accomplished only by means of autocracy and the Orthodox Church.
"Temporary Regulations" to protect state security and public order, issued late in the summer of 1881, gave officials in designated areas broad authority in dealing with the press and with people who could threaten public order. Summary search, arrest, imprisonment, exile, and trial by courts-martial became common occurrences. The "Temporary Regulations" were aimed primarily at the "Will of the People," which lasted long enough to offer the new ruler peace on conditions of political amnesty and the convocation of a constituent assembly! Although the "Will of the People" had been largely destroyed even before the assassination of the emperor and although most of its remaining members soon fell into the hands of the police, the "Temporary Regulations" were not rescinded, but instead applied, as their vague wording permitted, to virtually anyone whom officials suspected or simply disliked. For many years after the demise of the "Will of the People," terrorism died down in Russia, although occasional individual outbreaks occurred. Yet the "Temporary Regulations," introduced originally for three years, were renewed. Indeed, the tsarist government relied on them during the rest of its existence, with the result that Russians lived under something like a partial state of martial law.
Alexander Ill's government also enacted "counterreforms" meant to curb the sweeping changes introduced by Alexander II and to buttress the centralized, bureaucratic, and class nature of the Russian system. New press regulations made the existence of radical journals impossible and the life of a mildly liberal press precarious. The University Statute of 1884, which replaced the more liberal statute of 1863, virtually abolished uni-
versity autonomy and also emphasized that students were to be considered as "individual visitors," who had no right to form organizations or to claim corporate representation. In fact most policies of the Ministry of Education - which will be summarized in a later chapter - whether they concerned the emphasis on classical languages in secondary schools, the drastic curtailment of higher education for women, or the expansion of the role of the Church in elementary teaching, consciously promoted the reactionary aims of the regime.
The tsar and his associates used every opportunity to help the gentry and to stress their leading position in Russia, as, for example, by the creation in 1885 of the State Gentry Land Bank. At the same time they imposed further restrictions on the peasants, whom they considered essentially wards of the state rather than mature citizens. The policies of bureaucratic control oi the peasants and of emphasizing the role of the gentry in the countryside found expression in the most outstanding "counter-reform" of the reign, the establishment in 1889 of the office of zemskii nachalnik, zemstvo chief, or land captain. That official - who had nothing to do with the zemstvo self-government - was appointed and dismissed by the minister of the interior following the recommendation of the governor of the land captain's province. His assigned task consisted in exercising direct bureaucratic supervision over the peasants and, in effect, in managing them. Thus the land captain confirmed elected peasant officials as well as decisions of peasant meetings, and he could prevent the officials from exercising their office, or even fine, arrest, or imprison them, although the fines imposed by the land captain could not exceed several rubles and the prison sentences, several days. Moreover, land captains received vast judicial powers, thus, contrary to the legislation of 1864, again combining administration and justice. In fact, these appointed officials replaced for the peasants, that is, for the vast majority of the people, elected and independent justices of peace. The law of 1889 stipulated that land captains had to be appointed from members of the local gentry who met a certain property qualification. Each district received several land captains; each land captain administered several volosti, that is, townships or cantons. Russia obtained in this manner a new administrative network, one of land captaincies.
The following year, 1890, the government made certain significant changes in the zemstvo system. The previous classification of landholders, that of 1864, had been based on the form of property, so that members of the gentry and other Russians who happened to hold land in individual ownership were not distinguished. In 1890 the members of the gentry became a distinct group - and their representation was markedly increased. Peasants, on the other hand, could thenceforth elect only candidates for
zemstvo seats, the governor making appointments to district zemstvo assemblies from these candidates, as recommended by land captains. In addition, the minister of the interior received the right to confirm chairmen of zemstvo boards in their office, while members of the boards and zemstvo employees were to be confirmed by their respective governors. In 1892 the town government underwent a similar "counterreform," which, among other provisions, sharply raised the property requirement for the right to vote. After its enactment, the electorate in St. Petersburg decreased from 21,000 to 8,000, and that in Moscow from 20,000 to 7,000.
The reign of Alexander III also witnessed increased pressure on non-Orthodox denominations and a growth of the policy of Russification. Even Roman Catholics and Lutherans, who formed majorities in certain western areas of the empire and had unimpeachable international connections and recognition, had to face discrimination: for instance, children of mixed marriages with the Orthodox automatically became Orthodox, and all but the dominant Church were forbidden to engage in proselytizing. Old Believers and Russian sectarians suffered greater hardships. The government also began to oppose non-Christian faiths such as Islam and Buddhism, which had devoted adherents among the many peoples of the empire.
Russification went hand in hand with militant
Orthodoxy, although the two were by no means identical, for peoples who were not Great Russians such as the Ukrainians and the Georgians belonged to the Orthodox Church. Although Russification was practiced earlier against the Poles, especially in the western provinces following the rebellions of 1831 and 1863 and to a somewhat lesser extent in Poland proper, and was also apparent in the attempts to suppress the budding Ukrainian nationalism, it became a general policy of the Russian government only late in the nineteenth century. It represented in part a reaction against the growing national sentiments of different peoples of the empire with their implicit threats to the unity of the state and in part a response to the rising nationalism of the Great Russians themselves. Alexander III has often been considered the first nationalist on the Russian throne. Certainly, in his reign measures of Russification began to be extended not only to the rebellious Poles, but, for example, to the Georgians and Armenians in Transcaucasia and even gradually to the loyal Finns.