Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of his characters, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in The Devils (1871), express an equally sarcastic view of the potentialities of the peasantry:
Like all people in a hurry, we’ve been too hasty with our peasants … We’ve made them the rage; for several years a whole branch of our literature has fussed over them as if they were some newly discovered treasure. We’ve crowned their lice-ridden heads with laurel wreaths. During the last thousand years the Russian village has given us nothing more than the Komarinsky dance.21
Others, such as Nikolai Chernyshevski, a writer much admired by Marx and Lenin, while distancing himself from those ‘exclusive worshippers of the Russian national character’ who regarded the obshchina as ‘an object of mystical pride’, thought that the obshchina could enable Russian peasants to avoid the dismal fate of the Western proletariat, through a direct transition from the primitive Russian village to some kind of socialistic cooperative of workers.22 History, Chernyshevski wrote, adapting a Latin proverb, is like a grandmother fond of her younger grandchildren, the tarde venientibus, the latecomers; she gives them not the ossa, the bones, but the medullam ossium, the marrow of the bones.23 In his What Is To Be Done? (a didactic novel written in prison in 1862; the title was later adopted by Lenin for his famous pamphlet of 1901), the heroine, the emancipated Vera Pavlovna, dreams of a future ideal society, and opens a cooperative of dressmakers. Chernyshevski’s tone, however, hints that she might be deceiving herself:
she tried to convince herself of what she wanted to believe, that the shop could get along without her, so that, in time, other shops might be established of the same kind, entirely spontaneously; and why not? Wouldn’t it be a good thing? It would be better than anything else; even without any leadership, outside of the rank of seamstresses, but by the thought and planning of the seamstresses themselves.24
Others thought the idea that Russia could skip the Western stage of industrialization was Romantic and utopian nonsense. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, towards the end of his life (he died in 1848, he was only thirty-seven), recognized, unlike Herzen, the progressive and inescapable nature of capitalism and mocked those who dreamed of skipping stages:
To bypass the period of reform, to leap over it, as it were, and to return to the preceding stage – is that what they call distinctive development? A truly ridiculous idea, if only because it cannot be done, just as one cannot change the order of the seasons or force winter to come after spring …25
Skipping stages, however, was a concept that even Karl Marx had entertained. In 1881 the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, then in exile in Geneva, wrote to Marx asking him ‘a life or death question … for our socialist party’: would the obshchina be able to develop in a socialist direction (and in this case the socialist movement would have to pour their energies into it) or, ‘after decades’, would farming become capitalist and only after further ‘centuries of development’ would Russian capitalism catch up with the West?26 The question was obviously framed to obtain the desired, affirmative, answer, namely, one in favour of skipping capitalism altogether. Marx took the request seriously. He had been pondering the problem of stages for a while. Four years earlier, in late 1877, he had written to the editor of Otyecestvenniye Zapiski (Notes on the Fatherland), a liberal literary magazine, complaining that Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, a leading Narodnik:
feels obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historic-philosophic theory of the marche générale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself … But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.)27
When he replied to Vera Zasulich, Marx wrote at first four drafts of varying length (one of which was almost 4,000 words) before finally sending a brief response declaring that the development of capitalism via the expropriation of the agricultural producer is likely to be a purely western European phenomenon, that the analysis in Das Kapital provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune, and finally that the ‘special study’ he had made of it had convinced him that the ‘commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia’.28 The question may have been of burning interest in 1881, but Zasulich did not publish Marx’s reply, and within a few years (Marx died in 1883) it had become clear to her (and to most Marxists) that the disintegration of the obshchina was unstoppable.29
Liberals, such as Paul Milyoukov, the leader and founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets), had other criticisms of the obshchina (or mir), which, he wrote, was:
ruled by its elders; following customs … The mir even had the right to meddle in family affairs and to chastise its members by the whip or by exile. In reality the mir was an instrument for tax collecting by the central government. Abuses of power were rife within the village, the will of the strongest prevailed. The village representative to the zemstvo [rural council] was in practice a little dictator who had all the powers.30
The beginning of the end for the more utopian visions of the Slavophiles (one in which the obshchina would prevent capitalism and preserve the sanctity of Russia from Westernization) had already occurred much earlier, in 1855, with the death of Tsar Nicholas I.31 The abolition of serfdom finally seemed within reach: the new Tsar, Alexander II, was a progressive aware that ending serfdom had become the goal of the entire intelligentsia, both Slavophile and Westernizing. Its enduring existence in the second half of the nineteenth century was widely regarded as the main cause of the abysmal economic backwardness of Russia. It had been condemned in widely influential novels such as Anton-Goremyka (1847; Luckless Anton) by the twenty-five-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, but progress was by no means straightforward.
Well before the October Revolution the image of the bourgeoisie evoked powerful negative images in Russia, and not just among socialist radicals.32 This coexisted with a longing to ‘do as they do in the West’, which had been expressed since the days of Peter the Great.
To do ‘as they do in the West’, however, it was necessary to liberate the peasantry from the shackles of feudalism. Or so it was thought. The emancipation of the serfs was thus advocated for a mixture of reasons: humanitarian reasons, Westernization, but perhaps the main one was that it would enable industrialization. As Alexander Gerschenkron explained, it was only with the emancipation of the serfs that the main (but not the only) condition for the abysmal economic backwardness of Russia was removed.33 Since fewer people on the land had to produce food not just for themselves but also for a growing proletariat, capitalism required a rise in agricultural productivity. Here the real model was the American one, but this was a model few could follow. Yet there were similarities between backward Russia and advanced America: the emancipation of the serfs, decreed by the Tsar in 1861, almost coincided with the abolition of slavery in the United States (1865).
The emancipation of the serfs delivered 20 million people from bondage and from the arbitrary power of the landlord. Many peasants felt themselves cheated. The burden of debts was heavier than ever, since now they owed the redemption payments, and the so-called cut-off land (otrezki) kept by the former masters was roughly one-sixth of the area involved.34
The Emancipation Decree was followed by reforms. It seemed as if a new era was dawning for Russia. In the course of the following decades, universities became more autonomous; the judiciary more independent; education and the army were reformed; censorship was alleviated; jury trials were instituted for all (except the peasants – 80 per cent of the population!). Locally elected rural assemblies, known as zemstva, were instituted in 1864.35
In January 1881, Alexander II instructed Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, the Minister of the Interior, to draw up plans for a limited constitution. Two months later the Tsar himself was assassinated by terrorists from the organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). The reform process faltered and never recovered its impetus. Alexander II’s successors (the ob
tuse Alexander III, who ruled until 1894, and the even less enlightened Nicholas II) aspired to industrialization without reforms. These they accepted only when pushed, and remained one step or two behind the society they thought they dominated. Their closest advisers were deeply conservative: the Minister of the Interior, Count Dmitry Tolstoy (related to the writer), the ober-prokuror (Chief Procurator) of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and Mikhail Katkov, editor of the influential Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News). These, and people like them, were so ferocious in their criticism of Western individualism and capitalist development, and so powerful, that they often succeeded in delaying what the liberals regarded as essential reforms. The climate of thought among conservatives was epitomized by the philosopher and literary critic Konstantin Leontiev, author of The East, Russia, and Slavdom (1885–6), who believed that despotism was necessary for a ‘flowering life’, regarded egalitarianism as one of the greatest modern evils, and opposed universal education.36
The Russian reactionaries were too reactionary even for a reactionary Tsar like Alexander III, who realized he had to accept some of the liberals’ views. He appointed as his Finance Minister Nikolai Bunge, a supporter of free enterprise and of the West and a protégé of Loris-Melikov, the enlightened former Minister of the Interior.
In tsarist Russia, finance ministers were usually more powerful than prime ministers. They were Mikhail von Reutern (Finance Minister, 1862–78, under Alexander II); Nikolai Bunge (1881–6, under Alexander III, and then Prime Minister); Ivan Vyshnegradsky (1887–92, also under Alexander III); and the remarkable Count Sergei Witte (1892– 1903, and later Prime Minister).37 They somehow did not ‘fit’ within the normal circles of tsarist government. Reutern and Bunge were of German origin; Witte was of Dutch descent, his wife was both a converted Jewess and a divorcee; and Vyshnegradsky came from a humble family of priests (though he eventually became very rich). They, and Bunge above all, were the true architects of Russia’s painful and flawed industrialization, not an easy task since they were supposed to create a modern industrial society within the framework of an absolutist, backward political system. The Ministry of Finance, unlike the rest of the state machine, was a powerhouse.38 These outstanding ministers, from Reutern onwards, carved a path radically different from that of their predecessor, Georg Kankrin, Nicholas I’s perennial Finance Minister (1823–44), who thought that the railways were ‘the malady of our age’ and feared they might cause excessive mobility among the populace and favour the spread of egalitarianism.39 Reutern broke with the past with his criticisms of the old order, and paved the way for a justification of liberal reforms in terms of realpolitik, national regeneration, and continuation of the autocracy.40
The problem these clever ministers faced was the indolence of the nobility, the lack of capital, the burden of debt that weighed on the emancipated peasantry, and the sheer incompetence of native capitalists. These had always been regarded as particularly obtuse – a view that led both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to favour Jewish, Armenian, German, Tatar and Polish merchants rather than the native breed. In 1847 foreign merchants controlled over 90 per cent of foreign trade.41 Perhaps this made it even more difficult for an indigenous capitalism to flourish.42 Everything was done to attract foreign investment. The industrialization of eastern Ukraine (especially the Donbass region) would not have occurred without government intervention, but it would not have been so pronounced without foreign investment. By the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign steel mills produced 90 per cent of the iron and steel in the Donbass.43
In an ideal world a virtuous process should have taken place: some of the more intelligent peasants, liberated by the Emancipation Decree, more efficient and more ‘modern’, would get rich and buy up the land and the farms of poor and inefficient peasants; they would generate a surplus to sell to the nascent industrial proletariat, whose numbers would be increased by the exodus of former peasants (those who were poor, inefficient, etc.). But this process was slower than the optimists had hoped.
Almost as a counterpoint to the legendary optimism of Americans, Russian intellectuals wallowed in miserabilism. The ending of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov (1868–73) – the composer wrote the libretto himself – is sung by ‘the simpleton’:
Flow, flow bitter tears!
Weep, weep, Orthodox soul!
Soon the enemy will come and darkness will descend.
Dark and impenetrable darkness.
Woe, woe to Russia!
Weep, weep, Russian people,
Starving people!44
And the lamentations went on: Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher who, having been a Marxist in his youth, turned to Christianity, lamented in the 1930s that ‘The fate of the Russian people in history has been an unhappy one and full of suffering.’45
The collectivist obshchina, which protected the poor peasants (the muzhiks), also made it difficult for them to sell their share of the land distributed by the Emancipation Decree of 1861. Even the champions of the Decree had insisted that the obshchina was essential for the proper functioning of post-emancipation agriculture, fearing the massive flight from the land that would have resulted from competitive capitalist agriculture.46 Besides, much land (22 per cent in 1905) was still owned by the nobility.47 Peasants, driven by hunger, rented some of it and so ended up working, once again, for landlords. For many muzhiks the emancipation brought little change.
Understanding their dismal condition Nikolay Nekrasov, in his famous poem Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (published posthumously in 1879), tells the story of seven peasants trying to find a happy person in the Russian countryside. They fail miserably.48 As Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu wrote, the modern world has been characterized by a struggle between the principle of individualism and that of collectivism or community. In Russia the second principle has traditionally been the dominant one, particularly in the countryside. Since no one can tell which of the two principles will prevail one must understand the hesitation of the Russian legislator before destroying an institution, that of collective property embodied in the obshchina, which realizes at least partially what in other countries seems to be a utopia.49
Soon agrarian violence erupted. Peasants moved away from their villages looking for temporary jobs.50 The depression of the 1890s, the increase in the price of wheat, and the subsequent famine, added to the hardship and multiplied the economic difficulties faced by those who worked on the land, including some members of the nobility. The landowners demanded and obtained compensation, more privileges, more local government jobs and sinecures. They had to be placated. They were, after all, the autocracy’s main allies.
The bourgeoisie, and not just in Russia, was criticized for lacking the proper capitalist spirit and not doing ‘its duty’, when it was not sufficiently entrepreneurial, progressive, forward-looking. When the bourgeoisie aped the aristocracy it was mocked (as it had been as early as 1670 by Molière in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme). The social pretensions of the bourgeoisie were mercilessly criticized and satirized throughout the nineteenth century (and still are), but a shift began to appear at the turn of the century. The bourgeoisie was no longer funny. It was dangerous.
Charles Normand, writing in 1908 about the haute bourgeoisie (‘cette aristocratie bâtarde’) of the seventeenth century, lambasted it for being even worse than the aristocracy:
more improvident, more selfish, more set in its ways and more culpable than the nobility, it is … a mean-spirited class, greedy for profit, avid for posts and honours, entrenched in its privileges, and as forgetful of its origin and as envious of those whom birth had given a higher place.51
The pro-capitalist elites, especially those in a position of power, like Count Witte when Finance Minister, offered a formidable resistance to the pretensions of the nobility. Why shift precious resources away from railway construction and industrial development to help a largely useless and unproductive class? he mused.52 At a special conference on the
‘Needs of the Nobility’ (1895–7), Witte predicted that within fifty years Russia would be dominated by bankers and industrialists, just like western Europe. If the nobility wanted to survive, he warned, they should pay less attention to shoring up their position as landowners and more to getting into proper business. The mining engineer Aleksandr Fenin, vice-president of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the class of noble landowners’, who might have turned to business, were highly prejudiced against industry. He complained of the ‘malevolence’ with which ‘we “industrialists”’ were viewed in Russia, and tells an anecdote about being visited by Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna. Upon learning that Fenin managed a coal mine, Sofia Andreevna ‘dropped her eyes and uttered the following, straight from the heart: “You manage a coal mine! Well, everyone has to earn a living.”’53
In his unusually frank memoirs Count Witte was even more severe. While acknowledging the existence of ‘many truly noble and unselfish men and women’ among the landed aristocracy, he declared that the majority was:
a mass of degenerate humanity, which recognizes nothing but the gratification of its selfish interests and lusts, and which seeks to obtain all manner of privileges and gratuities at the expense of the taxpayers generally, that is, chiefly the peasantry.54
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