Because of a genetic mutation that the German princess Alexandra had inherited from her grandmother Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Russian tsarevich Alexei came into the world with hemophilia, an incurable disease that impaired the body’s ability to stop bleeding. The tsarevich’s illness remained a state secret. But secrecy could not alter the likelihood that Alexei would die at a relatively early age, perhaps before fathering children. Nor was there a way around the improbability that a boy walking on eggshells, subject to death from internal bleeding by bumping into furniture, could ever serve as a vigorous, let alone autocratic, ruler. Nicholas II and Alexandra remained in partial denial about the dynasty’s full danger. The hemophilia, an unlucky additional factor piled on the autocracy’s deep structural failures, was actually an opportunity to face the difficult choice that confronted autocratic Russia, but Nicholas II and Alexandra, fundamentally sentimental beings, had none of the hard-boiled realism necessary for accepting a transformation to a genuine constitutional monarchy in order to preserve the latter.176
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CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY was self-defeating. Nicholas II worked assiduously not just to stymie the realization of the parliament he had granted, but even to block the realization of a coordinated executive branch, as an infringement on autocracy. “Autocratic government” constituted an oxymoron, a collision of unconstrained sacral power with legal forms of administration, a struggle among functionaries to decide whether to heed the “will” of the autocrat or act within the laws and regulations.177 Blaming the failings of imperial Russia on “backwardness” and peasants, therefore, is misguided. Stolypin was undone primarily by the autocracy itself as well as by Russia’s uncomprehending elites. He wielded an arsenal of stratagems and possessed tremendous personal fortitude, but he met relentless resistance from the tsar, the court, and the rightist establishment, including from Sergei Witte, who now sat in the State Council.178 The establishment would not allow Stolypin to push through a full program of modernization to place Russia on the path of strength and prosperity in order to meet the array of geopolitical challenges. “I am certainly sorry for Stolypin’s death,” Pyotr Durnovó, another Stolypin nemesis in the State Council, remarked at a meeting of rightist politicians in 1911. “But at least now there is an end to the reforms.”179 True enough: reform died. At the same time, it was notable that Stolypin had not for the most part attempted to outflank the recalcitrant establishment by appealing directly to the masses, despite his eventual promotion of a broad Eastern Orthodox “nation.” Devoted to the monarchy, he sought to fuse divinely ordained autocratic power and legitimate authority, caprice and law, tradition and innovation, but he relied upon a deliberately antimass-politics Duma, aiming for a regime of country squires (like himself). In the emigration in 1928, a refugee forced to flee Russia would celebrate Stolypin as Russia’s Mussolini, the first “Eastern Orthodox fascist,” a national social leader.180 Not in the least. Stolypin’s contradictory five-year premiership lacked a radical ideology, and he remained a corridor politician even when he went out to address the people.
In international affairs, Stolypin had been unable to avoid a de facto posture of alignment with Britain against Germany. True, he did achieve an improbable and important policy victory at conservative expense, and despite lacking formal foreign affairs jurisdiction, by restraining Russian passions over the Balkans and elsewhere.181 That hard-won restraint, however, was destined not to last. Beginning just three years after Stolypin’s death, a world war would break out that, when combined with Russia’s alienated conservatives and the Romanov’s secret hemophilia, would sweep aside Russia’s constitutional autocracy and, in very short order, Russia’s constitutionalism entirely. Even then, a Russian fascism would not take hold.182 If anyone alive had been informed during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 that soon a fascist right-wing dictatorship and a socialist left-wing dictatorship would assume power in different countries, would he or she have guessed that the hopelessly schismatic Russian Social Democrats dispersed across Siberia and Europe would be the ones to seize and hold power, and not the German Social Democrats, who in the 1912 elections had become the largest political party in the German parliament? Conversely, would anyone have predicted that Germany would eventually develop a successful anti-Semitic fascism rather than imperial Russia, the home of the world’s largest population of Jews and of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion?183
A focus not on leftist revolutionary activity but on geopolitics and domestic high politics reveals the central truth about imperial Russia: The tsarist regime found itself bereft of a firm political base to meet its international competition challenges. That circumstance made the regime more and more reliant on the political police, its one go-to instrument for every challenge. (Alexander Blok, the poet, who would study the files of the tsarist police after the revolution, deemed them Russia’s “only properly functioning institution,” marveling at their ability “to give a good characterization of the public moods.”)184 Indulgence of the police temptation did not result from any love of the okhranka or of police methods; on the contrary, the tsar and others roundly despised their ilk.185 Rather, the overreliance on the political police stemmed from an irreconcilable antagonism between the autocracy and the Constitutional Democrats, and from the tsarist system’s profound distaste for street mobilization on its behalf. In modern times, it was not enough to demobilize opponents; a regime had to mobilize proponents. A system deliberately limited to the narrow privileged strata, backed by police and a peasant army, was, in the modern age, no polity at all, certainly not for a would-be great power competing against the strongest states. A modern integrated polity needed more than gonfalons, processionals holding icons, polyphonic hymns (“Christ Is Risen”), and the retracing in 1913 of a pilgrimage to Moscow originally undertaken in the seventeenth century. Durnovó, in leading the rescue of the autocracy in 1905–6, had proved able to reset the political moment in Russia, but unable to alter the fundamental structures. Stolypin, equally ready to wield repression yet also far more creative politically, bumped up against tsarism’s political limits. Of all the failures of Russia’s autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at authoritarian mass politics.
Autocratic Russia’s discouragement of modern mass politics would leave the masses—and the profound, widespread yearning among the masses in Russia for social justice—to the leftists. The latter, for their part, including the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, were riven by extreme factionalism, and crippled by the state’s severe repression. Under the autocracy, not just a Russian fascism but also opposition leftist parties largely failed. And yet, within a mere decade of Stolypin’s demise, the Georgian-born Russian Social Democrat Iosif “Koba” Jughashvili, a pundit and agitator, would take the place of the sickly Romanov heir and go on to forge a fantastical dictatorial authority far beyond any effective power exercised by imperial Russia’s autocratic tsars or Stolypin. Calling that outcome unforeseeable would be an acute understatement.
PART II
DURNOVÓ’S REVOLUTIONARY WAR
The trouble will start with the blaming of the government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitation throughout the country, with socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition . . . will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves.
Pyotr Durnovó, February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, on the consequences of a possible war against Germany
BETWEEN 1905 AND 1911, revolutions broke out in Mexico, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman
empire, China, and Portugal, as well as Russia—countries that together accounted for one quarter of the earth’s population. Each led to the introduction of constitutions. It was a global moment, akin in some ways to the 1780s, when revolutions broke out in the United States, France, and the Caribbean. But the early-twentieth-century constitutional experiments were quickly undermined or reversed in every single case. (Only Portugal’s lasted a bit longer, through thirty-eight prime ministers, until a 1926 military coup.) Liberty exerted a powerful pull, but institutionalizing liberty was another matter. The push for constitutionalism usually entailed intellectual types—such as the leader of Russia’s Constitutional Democrat Party (Cadets), Paul Miliukov—coming to power and then looking to wield the state as an instrument to modernize what they perceived as backward societies. But the dream of an intellectual-led, classically liberal leap to modernity ran into a social wall made up of urban laboring populations and communally oriented rural majorities. In the tantalizing examples of Britain and the United States, classical liberal orders were institutionalized long before the dawn of mass politics.1 By the early twentieth century, the introduction of constitutionalism proved too narrow to satisfy the masses. The positive aspects of the changes involved in constitutionalism were often discredited by social disorder. (Russia recorded some 17,000 peasant disturbances between 1910 and 1914 just in the European part of the empire.)2 Furthermore, even though liberalizing intellectuals were inspired by the advanced countries of Europe, the European powers helped suppress the political openings, aiding the “forces of order” in China, Mexico, Iran, and elsewhere. In the Ottoman empire, the would-be modernizers backed away from liberalization. China’s constitutional experiment yielded to warlordism; Mexico erupted into civil war.3 In Russia, too, there was de facto civil war (1905–7), which was won by the forces of order.
If Russia stood out at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was because its forces of order were demoralized in victory: they hated the outcome, “constitutional autocracy,” and had come to disrespect the tsar, even though they were joined to him at the hip.4 At the same time, Russia’s would-be radical socialist revolution was mired in perhaps even greater disarray than the fraught constitutionalism. Socialists were dragged down by a harsh police regime and their own factionalism. More fundamentally, most Russian socialists supported the constitutionalism (“bourgeois” democracy) rather than socialism, as a necessary stage of history, while despising the bourgeoisie.
“Socialism,” concretely, meant a life in Siberia. True, thanks to the Romanov three-hundredth jubilee amnesty in 1913, many were released from internal exile. Lev Rozenfeld (Kamenev) returned to St. Petersburg to take up the editorship of Pravda. The newspaper had been established at the Bolshevik-dominated party conference in Prague in January 1912 and had commenced publication on April 22, 1912; Koba Jughashvili had written the lead article in the first issue, calling for “proletarian unity no matter what.”5 Jughashvili, newly a member of the illegally formed all‒Bolshevik Central Committee, had illegally sneaked back to St. Petersburg after escaping internal exile. The day of his article’s appearance, however, the okhranka ambushed him, and by summer he was deported to the remote far northern Siberian village of Kolpashëvo, near Narym (“marsh” in the Khanty language).6 In September 1912, before winter set in, he escaped by boat and made his way to Lenin in Habsburg Krakow, carrying the passport of a Persian merchant. Lenin considered himself one of the party’s top experts on national affairs. But Jughashvili surprised him with his own work on the nationalities, prompting Lenin to write to Gorky, “We have a marvelous Georgian who has sat down to write a big article for Enlightenment, for which he has collected all the Austrian and other materials.”7 “Marxism and the National Question,” not unlike Jughashvili’s only other lengthy publication (“Anarchism or Socialism?”), was partly derivative, defining “a nation” in terms of three characteristics borrowed from the German Karl Kautsky (common language, territory, and economic links), and one from the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer (common national character).8 But the work was significant for confronting a crucial aspect of revolution in the polyglot Russian empire and largely repudiating the views of the Austro-Marxists and their Georgian Menshevik emulators. It was also significant for its signature—“Stalin” (“Man of Steel”).9 That strong, sonorous pseudonym was not only superior to Oddball Osip, Pockmarked Oska, or the very Caucasus-specific Koba, but also Russifying. By the time the essay came out in Russia, in the March-May 1913 issue of the journal Enlightenment, “Stalin” had again returned to St. Petersburg. There, at a fund-raising ball for International Women’s Day, he was ambushed yet again, betrayed by another member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Roman Malinowski, a thief who had risen to head of the metalworkers’ union but who was also a secret okhranka agent.10 Stalin was deported back to Siberia, where Kamenev, too, would end up.
Malinowski became the only high-level Bolshevik inside Russia left at liberty. Lenin had placed him in charge of directing the entire apparatus of Bolshevik activity inside the Russian empire.11 The Bolshevik leader’s vision of a party membership restricted to professional revolutionaries, a narrowness supposedly necessary in conditions of illegality—a stance Stalin, too, supported—had failed spectacularly. In fairness, the okhranka also ran the similarly hyperconspiratorial Socialist Revolutionary terror organization.12 Russia’s increasingly paranoid revolutionaries “looked in the mirror,” the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin would later recall, “and wondered if they themselves were provocateurs.”13
Despite the okhranka’s virtuosity, however, the autocracy remained under threat of nitroglycerine. In connection with the Romanov tercentenary, the St. Petersburg okhranka had bulked itself up while forbidding any appearance of crowds, fearing they would morph into demonstrations of workers carrying red flags, and that the tsar, like his grandfather Alexander II, might be assassinated.14 “The city,” recalled the chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, “was literally turned into an armed camp.” An “autocrat” unsafe in his own capital? The unseemly clampdown in the capital cast a pall over the celebrations. Despite the wide acclaim during the 1913 Romanov jubilee for the first-ever exhibition of Russian icons, the revivals of Modest Mussorgsky’s operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and the gala culmination of the tercentenary in Moscow in May 1913, elites understood full well that the autocrat could not go about in public.
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GERMANY’S WILHELM II—who was Nicholas II’s cousin—launched his own “festive year” of pomp in 1913. It was the kaiser’s fifty-fourth birthday, the silver jubilee of his reign, and the centenary of the Prussian defeat of Napoleon. Never mind that it had been the Russians who had vanquished Napoleon and occupied Paris. Germany wanted to showcase its dynasty and impressive modernity.15 The combination of German power on the continent and terror dread in St. Petersburg was uppermost in the mind of the man who in 1905–6 had saved the Romanov dynasty.
Pyotr Durnovó viewed foreign affairs through the eyes of a policeman.16 Back in 1904, at the outbreak of what he had dismissed as the “senseless” Russo-Japanese War, he told his predecessor as Russia’s interior minister, “A naïve idea: to fix internal disorder with a foreign success!”17 After Durnovó’s April 1906 dismissal from the interior ministry, he served as leader of the rightist bloc in Russia’s upper house (State Council), a perch from which he went about subverting the post-1905 constitutional experiment (such as it was), and affording special grief to Stolypin.18 Durnovó became well known for expressing unwelcome views to people’s faces, rather than just behind their backs—and this applied even to the tsar.19 In February 1914, he submitted a long memorandum to Nicholas II, and some fifty recipients in the upper elite, seeking to reorient Russian policy.20 Durnovó scoffed at those who asserted that mere displays of Russian power and Anglo-French-Russian unity would deter Germany.21 “The central factor of the period of world history through which we are now passing is the rivalry between England and Germany,�
�� he explained, adding that between them “a struggle for life and death is inevitable.” He argued that what had originally been just a Russian “understanding” (entente) with England had somehow become a formal alliance, and that taking the side of Britain in its confrontation with Germany was unnecessary, because there was no fundamental clash of interests between Germany and Russia. Further, unlike the foreign ministry personnel far removed from the roiling class hatreds that this ex-policeman had confronted, Durnovó emphasized how a war would be catastrophic domestically and the government blamed. “In the event of defeat,” he wrote in the February 1914 memorandum to Nicholas II, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.” Durnovó specifically forecast that the gentry’s land would be expropriated and that “Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.”22
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