by Riazanovsky
To appreciate the burden that the Russian peasant had to carry, we should take further note of the fiscal system of the empire. Thus, an official inquiry indicated that after the emancipation the peasants paid annually
to the state in taxes, counting redemption payments, ten times as much per desiatina of land as did members of the gentry. And even after the head tax was abolished in 1886 and the redemption payments were finally canceled in 1905, the impoverished masses continued to support the state by means of indirect taxes. These taxes, perennially the main source of imperial revenue, were levied on domestic and imported items of everyday consumption such as vodka, sugar, tea, tobacco, cotton, and iron. The tax on alcohol, which Witte made a state monopoly in 1894, proved especially lucrative. While relentless financial pressure forced the peasants to sell all they could, the government, particularly Witte, promoted the export of foodstuffs, notably grain, to obtain a favorable balance of trade and finance the industrialization of Russia. Foodstuffs constituted almost two-thirds in value of all Russian exports in the first years of the twentieth century compared to some two-fifths at the time of the emancipation.
However, the last years of imperial Russia, the period from the Revolution of 1905 to the outbreak of the First World War, brought some hope and improvement - many authorities claim much hope and great improvement - into the lives of the Russian peasants, that is, the bulk of the Russian people. The upswing resulted from a number of factors. As already indicated, the industrialization of Russia no longer demanded or obtained the extreme sacrifices characteristic of the 1890's, and the new Russian industry had more to offer to the consumer. The national income in fifty provinces of European Russia rose, according to Prokopovich's calculation, from 6,579.6 million rubles in 1900 to 11,805.5 million in 1913. In 1913 the per capita income for the whole Russian Empire amounted to 102.2 rubles, a considerable increase even if highly inadequate compared to the figures of 292 rubles for Germany, 355 for France, 463 for England, or 695 for the United States. Luckily, the years preceding the First World War witnessed a series of bountiful harvests. Russian peasants profited, in addition, from a remarkable growth of the co-operative movement, and from government sponsorship of migration to new lands. Co-operatives multiplied from some 2,000 in 1901 and 4,500 in 1905 to 33,000 at the outbreak of the First World War, when their membership extended to 12 million people. Credit and consumers' co-operatives led the way, although some producers' co-operatives, such as Siberian creamery co-operatives, also proved highly successful. As to migration, the government finally began to support it after the Revolution of 1905 by providing the necessary guiding agencies and also by small subsidies to the migrants, suspension of certain taxes for them, and the like. In 1907 over half a million people moved to new lands and in 1908 the annual number of migrants rose to about three-quarters of a million. After that, however, it declined to the immediate pre-war average of about 300,000 a year. Land under cultivation increased from 88.3 million desiatin in 1901-5 to 97.6 million in 1911-13.
Also as mentioned earlier, the Peasant Land Bank became much more active, helping peasants to purchase over 4.3 million desiatin of land in the decade from 1906 to 1915, compared to 0.96 million in the preceding ten years. State and imperial family lands amounting to about a million and a quarter desiatin were offered for sale to the peasants.
Stolypin's land reform could well be considered the most important factor of all in the changing rural situation, because it tried to transform the Russian countryside. Stolypin's legislation of 1906, 1910, and 1911 - outlined in the preceding chapter - aimed at breaking up the peasant commune and at creating a strong class of peasant proprietors. These peasant proprietors were to have their land in consolidated lots, not in strips. To summarize the results of the reform in the words of a hostile critic, Lia-shchenko:
By January 1, 1916, requests for acquisition of land in personal ownership were submitted by 2,755,000 householders in European Russia. Among these, some 2,008,000 householders with a total acreage of 14,123,000 dessyatins separated from the communes. In addition, 470,000 householders with an aggregate acreage of 2,796,000 dessyatins obtained "certified deeds" attesting to their acquisition of personal holdings in communes not practicing any redistribution. Altogether, 2,478,000 householders owning an area of 16,919,000 dessyatins left the communes and secured their land in personal ownership. This constituted about 24 per cent of the total number of households in forty provinces of European Russia.
Oganovsky, Robinson, Florinsky, Karpovich and others have arrived at roughly the same figure of about 24 per cent of formerly communal households completing their legal withdrawal from the commune. In contrast to Liashchenko, however, some specialists emphasize a greater spread and potentiality of the reform. Notably they stress the fact that, although only 470,000 households in nonrepartitional communes had time to receive legal confirmation of their new independent status, the law of 1910 made in effect all householders in such communes individual proprietors. Two million would thus be a more realistic figure than 470,000. If we make this adjustment and if we add to the newly established independent households the three million or more hereditary tenure households in areas where communal ownership had never developed, we obtain for European Russia at the beginning of 1916 over seven million individual proprietary households out of the total of thirteen or fourteen million. In other words, peasant households operating within the framework of the peasant commune had declined to somewhat less than half of all peasant households in Russia. Consolidation of strips, a crucial aspect of the reform, proceeded much more slowly than separation from the commune, but it too made some progress. One important set of figures indicates that of the almost two
and a half million households that had left communes somewhat more than half had been provided with consolidated farms by 1916.
Still, these impressive statistics do not necessarily indicate the ultimate wisdom and success of Stolypin's reform. True, Stolypin has received much praise from many specialists, including post-Soviet Russian historians and such American scholars as Treadgold, who believe that the determined prime minister was in fact saving the empire and that, given time, his agrarian reform would have achieved its major objective of transforming and stabilizing the countryside. But critics have also been numerous and by no means limited to populists or other defenders of the commune as such. They have pointed, for example, to the limited scope of Stolypin's reform, which represented, in a sense, one more effort to save gentry land by making the peasants redivide what they already possessed, and to the element of compulsion in the carrying out of the reform. They argued that the reform had largely spent itself without curing the basic ills of rural Russia. Moreover, it added new problems to the old ones, in particular by helping to stratify the peasant mass and by creating hostility between the stronger and richer peasants whom the government helped to withdraw from the commune on advantageous terms and their poorer and more egalitarian brethren left behind.
Conclusion
To conclude, various evaluations have been given of the development of Russian industry in the last years of the empire, of the development of Russian agriculture, and indeed of the entire economy of the country. Whereas Gerschenkron, Karpovich, Pavlovsky, and other scholars have emphasized progress and grounds for optimism, Soviet authorities, as well as such Western specialists as Von Laue, concluded that in spite of all efforts - perhaps the maximum efforts possible under the old regime - Russia was not solving its problems either in terms of its own requirements or by comparison with other countries. Most close students of the period have come out with the feeling - so pronounced in Robinson's valuable work on rural Russia - that, whether the conditions of life in Russia improved or declined on the eve of the First World War, they remained desperately hard for the bulk of the population.
It has been said that revolutions occur not when the people are utterly destitute, oppressed beyond all measure, and deprived of hope - crushing conditions lead only to blind and fr
uitless rebellions - but when there is growth, advance, and high expectation, hampered, however, by an archaic and rigid established order. Such a situation existed in Russia in the early twentieth century: in economic and social matters as well as in politics.
XXXIII
RUSSIAN CULTURE FROM THE "GREAT REFORMS" UNTIL THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1917
There is only one evil among men - ignorance; against this evil there is only one medicine - learning; but this medicine must be taken not in homeopathic doses, but by the pail and by the forty-pail barrel.
PISAREV
The three points where the new man thought he had made himself most secure were: first, his liberation from all the values and institutions of the status quo; second, his complete faith in human reason and the principles it made known to him; and finally, his assurance that he was the personal instrument of the historical process… They were convinced that they had found the path to a state of personal engagement which could sustain them in their struggle with the tsarist system, because they believed in the justice of their assault and in the inevitability of its ultimate issue. But if we view it critically we note that it rested on an "adjustment" that was composed in large part of hostility to existing institutions, and in equally large part of commitment to a world that had not yet come into being. Described so, its precariousness becomes obvious.
MATHEWSON
Various forces were at work in the 1890's in opposition to the Gorky-Andreyev school, and particularly to the dominance of social significance and nihilistic thought in literature. There was a definite turning away from civic morality to aestheticism, from duty to beauty, and cultural and individual values were stressed at the expense of political and social values. Most of the participators in this movement were brilliant intellectuals, and their efforts represented a lofty degree of cultural refinement that had never been achieved by any literary group in Russia hitherto.
SIMMONS
The decades that elapsed between the emancipation of the serfs and the revolutions of 1917 constituted an active, fruitful, and fascinating period in the history of Russian culture. Education continued to grow at all levels, in spite of obstacles and even governmental "counterreforms"; in the twentieth century the rate of growth increased sharply. Russian science and scholarship, already reasonably well-established at the time of Nicholas I's death, developed further and blossomed out. In a word, Russia became a full-fledged contributor to and partner in the intellectual and academic efforts of the Western world, its new high position in that respect antedating
by decades the October Revolution. Russian literature continued its "golden age," although primarily in prose rather than in poetry and largely through the achievements of several isolated individuals, such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Later, when the giants died or, as in the case of Tolstoy, stopped writing fiction and the "golden age" came to its end, Chekhov, Gorky, and some other outstanding authors maintained the great tradition of Russian prose. Moreover, the very end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth witnessed another magnificent literary and artistic revival, designated sometimes as the "silver age." In literature that renaissance meant the appearance once again of superb poetry, especially Alexander Blok's, the introduction of a wide variety of new trends, and the emergence of exceptionally high standards of culture and craftsmanship. The "silver age" also extended to the theater, music, ballet, painting, and sculpture, and in effect to every form of creative expression. It proved especially beneficial to the visual arts, which had produced little of distinction in the age of arid realism, and it scored perhaps its most resounding successes in the ballet and the theater. In the history of ideas, as well as in literature and art, the period can be divided into two uneven parts: from the 1860's to the end of the century and indeed to the revolutions of 1917, the creed of radicalism, utilitarianism, and materialism first proclaimed by left-wing Westernizers dominated student and other active intellectual circles, finding its best expression in nihilism, different forms of populism, and Marxism; yet with the turn of the century and the "silver age" in culture members of the intellectual elite began to return to idealistic metaphysics and religion. The First World War and later the revolutions struck when Russian intellectual and cultural life was exhibiting more vitality, diversity, and sophistication than ever before.
Education
The death of Nicholas I and the coming of the "great reforms" meant liberalization in education as in other fields. The university statute of 1863 reaffirmed the principle of university autonomy, while Nicholas I's special restrictions on universities were among the first regulations to disappear in the new reign. The zemstvo reform of 1864 opened vast opportunities to establish schools in the countryside. In towns or rural areas, the increasing thirst for knowledge on the part of the Russians augured well for education in a liberal age. However, as already mentioned, official liberalism did not last long, and reaction logically, if unfortunately, showed a particular concern for education. As a result, the growth of education in Russia, while it could not be stopped, found itself hampered and to an extent deformed by government action.
After Dmitrii Tolstoy replaced Alexander Golovnin in 1866 as minister
of education, the ministry did its best to control education and to direct it into desirable channels. As in the days of Uvarov, high standards were used in universities and secondary schools to keep the number of students down, hindering especially the academic advancement of students of low social background. In secondary education, the emphasis fell on the so-called classical gymnasia, which became the only road to universities proper, as distinct from more specialized institutions of higher learning. These gymnasia concentrated on teaching the Latin and Greek languages, to the extent of some 40 per cent of the total class time. Largely because of the rigorous demands, less than one-third of those who had entered the gymnasia were graduated. In addition to the natural obstacles that such a system presented to "socially undesirable" elements, ministers of education made direct appeals in their circulars to subordinates to keep "cook's sons" out of the gymnasia, as did one of Dmitrii Tolstoy's successors, Ivan Delianov, in 1887. In general, the government tried to divide education into airtight compartments that students as a rule could not cross. Under Alexander III and Pobedonostsev, Church schools received special attention. Following the statute of 1884 concerning Church-parish schools, an effort was made to entrust elementary education as much as possible to the Church, the number of Church-parish schools increasing from 4,500 in 1882 to 32,000 in 1894. While inferior in quality, these educational institutions were considered "safe." By contrast, advanced education for women, barely begun in Russia, came to be increasingly restricted. And in all schools and at all levels the Ministry of Education emphasized "conduct" and tried to maintain iron discipline.
Yet, in spite of all the vicissitudes, education continued to grow in Russia. The impact of the zemstva proved especially beneficial. Thus, according to Charnolussky's figures, the sixty provinces of European Russia in 1880 possessed 22,770 elementary schools with 1,141,000 students, 68.5 per cent of the schools having been established after the zemstvo reform of 1864. In addition to the exclusive classical gymnasia, Realschule, which taught modern languages and science in place of Greek and Latin, provided a secondary education that could lead to admission to technical institutions of higher learning. Other kinds of schools also developed. In addition to the activities of the ministries of education, war, navy, and of the Holy Synod, Witte promoted commercial schools under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance, establishing some 150 of them between 1896 and 1902, and well over 200 altogether. In 1905 these schools were transferred to the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Moreover, after the Revolution of 1905 schools in Russia profited from a more liberal policy as well as from an increasing interest in education on the part of both the government and the public. As mentioned earlier, plans were drawn to institute schooling for all Russian children by 1922, or, according to a revised
estimate fol-
lowing the outbreak of the First World War, by 1925. Educational prospects had never looked brighter in Russia than on the eve of the revolutions of 1917.
The problem, however, remained immense. Russians needed all kinds of training but above all the acquisition of simple literacy. Although by the end of the nineteenth century Russia had 76,914 elementary schools for children and 1,785 for adults with a total of 4.1 million students, and by 1915 the number of students had grown to over 8 million, on the eve of the October Revolution somewhat more than half of the population of the country was illiterate. To be more precise, in 1917 literacy extended in all probability to only about 45 per cent of the people.
At the other end of the educational ladder, universities increased in number, although slowly. The so-called Novorossiiskii University - referring to the name of the area, Novorossiia, or New Russia - was founded in Odessa in 1864, the University of Tomsk in Siberia in 1888, the University of Saratov in 1910, of Perm in 1915, and of Rostov-on-Don in 1917. That gave Russia a total of twelve universities, all of them belonging to the state. However, in 1917 the empire also possessed more than a hundred specialized institutions of higher learning: pedagogical, technological, agricultural, and other. Gradually it became possible for women to obtain higher education by attending special "courses" set up in university centers, such as the "Guerrier courses," named after a professor of history, Vladimir Guerrier, which began to function in 1872 in Moscow, and the "Bestuzhev courses," founded in 1878 in St. Petersburg and named after another historian, Constantine Bestuzhev-Riumin. The total number of students in Russian institutions of higher learning in 1917 has been variously estimated between 100,000 and 180,000. It should be noted that while the university statute of 1884 proved to be more restrictive than that of 1863 and over a period of time led to the resignation of a number of noted professors, most of the restrictions disappeared in 1905. In general, and especially after 1905, the freedom and variety of intellectual life in imperial Russian universities invite comparison with the Western universities, certainly not with the Soviet system.