A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  The balance of power inside the government was the only thing that really mattered, but the reformers also looked to societal support and in some sectors they found it. Early in 1856 the exiled radical Herzen realized that reform was coming in Russia and he decided to help it along. His first act was to use his base in London to begin publishing a series of essays, Voices from Russia, that provided background information and uncensored discussion of the current problems. Herzen understood that his own views were too extreme for most of his potential audience, so he found contributors who were liberals rather than radicals, even quite moderate liberals. In 1857 he began to publish a monthly newspaper, Kolokol (the Bell), which did reflect his own views, though in many cases he held his fire to avoid alienating the readers. Both the essays and Kolokol were smuggled into Russia and quickly became widely available. The Third Section acquired copies and circulated them to high officials and even to the tsar himself. Herzen’s vivid prose and clear perspective gave him popularity with many readers who did not share his particular views, his peasant socialism, and his opposition to autocracy. His was not the only voice heard, for the (at first temporary) relaxation of censorship allowed newspapers and journals to appear in increasing numbers. This new phenomenon was not only a function of change in the censorship rules, for technological innovations in printing now made daily newspapers possible for the first time in Russia. They were, to a large extent, commercial enterprises, and many of the editors learned to combine sale-ability with liberal ideas. Newspapers whose editors were critical of the authorities from a conservative point of view began to appear as well. Many topics were beyond the pale, such as the personalities and views of the tsar himself and the imperial family, but the editors were able to find ways to discuss current issues and at the same time present a mass of information on Russian life and on the affairs of the world. In the conditions of wide debate over the reforms, even a bare account of village life or a criminal trial could take on relevance to the reform process. Detailed accounts of Western politics, of English parliaments, French foreign policy, or even American presidential elections offered Russian readers regular accounts of political systems different from their own. The reformers inside the state bureaucracy were not unhappy with these developments, as the press allowed them to assess the degree of support or lack of it for their actions, although they had no intention of following suggestions from anyone outside the government. Much of their effort went to keeping the gentry and the aristocrats from influencing opinion or the reform process, as they correctly believed the nobility, high and low, to be mainly against reform. Thus the government reformers kept the government’s deliberations as secret as they could.

  Until the actual emancipation decree of 1861 the government, however secretive, enjoyed the guarded support of emerging opinion among the educated classes. After that moment tensions began to arise between the government and the pro-reform wing of the educated classes, for many of the liberals felt that the reforms did not go far enough. At the same time the pro-reform elements of society began to divide into moderate and radical wings. Herzen was highly critical of the inadequacies of the emancipation, and his views contributed to the formation of a radical camp inside Russia. Most liberals, the intelligentsia, and the liberal minority of the nobility, continued to support the government and enthusiastically plunged into the reform process, the nobles serving on local committees to implement the reforms. Moreover, the government continued with additional reforms, the next steps being the reform of the judiciary, local government, and the army.

  Other factors, however, complicated the politics of the reform. In January 1861, there were a series of disturbances in Warsaw, the first such manifestations of Polish discontent since the 1830 revolt. Tsar Alexander and the ministers sent Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to Warsaw as viceroy with the hope that he could manage a compromise that would introduce some reform into Russian Poland and defuse discontent. The attempt was a failure, and a new revolt broke out in 1863. This revolt undermined Grand Duke Konstantin’s authority in St. Petersburg, and he never again played a major role. It also created a permanent split between Herzen and the liberals, for Herzen supported the Polish effort and the liberals came out for Russian national interest. Kolokol quickly declined into insignificance. Fortunately for Russia the revolt was largely a matter of small guerilla groups operating within the countryside, and in the western Ukrainian provinces the peasants even joined the government troops against the rebels. By the end of 1864 Russian authorities had restored order in Poland, and in the meantime they even managed to decree two important measures for the rest of the Empire, judicial reform and the establishment of a new form of local government.

  The new decrees established a series of local administrative boards, the zemstvos, which were to take care of roads, bridges, public schooling, health, and other matters of local concern. The innovation was that the members of the boards were to be elected. Most delegates to the zemstvos were noblemen, but the newly emancipated peasantry was also regularly represented. Liberals correctly complained that the zemstvos were too closely supervised by the bureaucracy and lacked many of the powers needed to carry out even their modest tasks. The provincial governors and the Ministry of the Interior kept a close watch on the new institutions and had the power to override their decisions. At the same time the zemstvos took on an important role in Russian life, both for the practical problems they addressed and as elected institutions. Whether the government liked it or not, they became centers of modest political activity and provided the local nobility with an outlet for their energies and the experience of political and administrative activity. The zemstvos also employed large numbers of experts from the intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, and statisticians, and this group also became a force for the politicization of the zemstvos as time went on. Ultimately the zemstvos became centers for liberal political organization.

  More radical were the judicial reforms. Nicholas I had codified the laws, but the judicial system remained largely as Catherine II had left it at the end of the eighteenth century. The judiciary was not completely separated from administration, the judges lacked independence and often legal training as well, and judicial procedure still depended on written testimony. Proceedings were not public, and the judges decided cases without a jury. The 1864 decree changed all that, paradoxically giving Russia one of the most progressive judicial systems in Europe. Trials were henceforth conducted in public as an adversarial trial with both a public prosecutor and a defense attorney. In the great majority of criminal cases the decisions on guilt or innocence were made by a jury. The Ministry of Justice appointed the judges, but they could not be removed except for misbehavior. Overnight, Russia acquired a legal system up to European standards and a legal profession. Trials, criminal and civil, became news and were reported in the newspapers, often at length. Unfortunately this brilliant judicial system had to enforce laws that were far from progressive in many areas from family law to commercial matters, but the many areas of ambiguity in the legislation allowed judges to reshape the law in a more modern direction. A more basic flaw in the system was the continued existence of laws allowing the state administration to issue various punishments outside the courts. The most notorious was the use of administrative exile, by which the provincial governors and the Minster of the Interior could sentence anyone they found problematic to exile (not prison) for a number of years merely by decree. Liberal publicists and zemstvo activists increasingly found themselves the target of this practice.

  The other exception to the new system was the formation of a separate court system for the peasants, the township courts. These courts were to formalize the older informal village courts, with a panel of judges elected from among the peasants and a clerk (often the only literate person in the court) to record its actions. Peasants were to settle all civil cases and minor crimes in these courts, which worked not by the law of the state but by the customs of the villages orally transmitted, or simply on the b
asis of “conscience.” Their decisions could not be appealed to state courts. The township courts often decided cases on the basis of the reputation of the plaintiff and defendant, and the main punishment was flogging. This system kept the peasantry separate from the rest of society, conserving the village community and its values.

  In the zemstvos and the new courts some part of the public finally had a sphere of activity, even if it was not political activity. Even this modest public sphere could not function easily without the press. In April 1865, the government finally promulgated permanent censorship laws. The statute itself was an amalgam of two contradictory principles, both Western in origin. The new laws abolished prior censorship that had been largely rendered unworkable by high-speed presses and the new political situation, but retained penalties for undermining respect for the state, the family, and religion. How were these to be enforced? The statute provided for settling the main issues in the new courts, which meant that the state would have to bring a case to a trial open to the public. The attempts to control critical journalists by this method were a failure and soon abandoned, for the courts either found the defendants innocent or if guilty, imposed largely symbolic punishments. The state had recourse to other methods, however, for the statute had taken censorship from the Ministry of Education and placed it under the Ministry of the Interior, the principal body in charge of preserving public order. The statute had also borrowed from French legislation a whole series of administrative measures including fines and warnings to editors that allowed the authorities to bypass the court system. After the initial failures in the court, these administrative sanctions triumphed, including eventually the prohibition of specific works of radical literature. The new censorship rules suppressed much public debate, but were never intended to eliminate it entirely.

  Perhaps the most complicated reform issue after the emancipation of the serfs was that of the army. Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin made his first proposal in 1862, and though it was approved by the tsar, it took until 1874 to be fully implemented. The core of the proposal was the replacement of the twenty-five-year service of the soldiers with a reserve system based on a limited term that was ultimately determined at six years. The conservatives wanted to keep the army a caste, in which peasants were made into soldiers commanded by nobles, while Miliutin saw such an army as reactionary and slated to repeat the defeats of Crimea. He saw no reason why free peasants could not serve and then return to their villages to resume farming. It was his powerful will, and the tsar’s determination to maintain an effective army, that kept the military reform on track through many political vicissitudes.

  Vicissitudes there were. Almost immediately with the appearance of public discussion of reform in 1858–59 the debate went beyond the parameters of government-sponsored liberal reform and conservative resistance. Both liberals outside the bureaucracy and young radicals began to present ideas that went far beyond what the ministers pondered behind the closed doors of government committees. Much of the reason for the challenge lay in the transformation of educated society, the formation of an intelligentsia defined by education and profession – often of plebeian origin and unconnected to the nobility. The core of the intelligentsia were the professionals – teachers, doctors, scientists, and engineers – but the term came to include anyone with some sort of education beyond the basic level, and of course it included students. Young men and (for the first time) women, mostly in and around the universities rejected not only state leadership but were also part of a new culture, for this was the generation that abandoned the interest in German idealist philosophy that had inspired Herzen and Bakunin as well as many liberals, and turned instead to the natural sciences. Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons gave the term “nihilists” to this new generation for their rejection of the pieties of the past. The accusation was that they believed in nothing (in Latin “nihil”). Ferment began among the university students who had been granted a great deal of freedom in the post-Crimean era. In the autumn of 1861 a number of rather minor disturbances at St. Petersburg University led the authorities to close the university and begin to look for radical activity there and at other universities and academies. Small groups of radicals, no more than a few dozen individuals, also began to spread revolutionary manifestoes, convincing the government that vast plots were afoot. In most Russian university cities communes of students with more or less radical ideas came into existence in these years, partly for purely economic reasons but also from conviction that a simple communal life was the path to the future. The students knew about Herzen and read widely in Western liberal and radical literature, but their hero was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose ideas continued to inspire radicals long after he was lost to Siberian exile.

  From the time of his emergence as a leading journalist in 1853, in the pages of the Contemporary, still one of the leading journals, Chernyshevsky had become the dominant intellectual and cultural figure of the radical intelligentsia and remained so for nearly a generation. The son of a priest and the graduate of a seminary rather than a secular high school, Chernyshevsky managed to enter St. Petersburg University, and ultimately acquired a master’s degree in literature. In the pages of the Contemporary, however, his writing covered far more than literature. He wrote on philosophy, economics, and politics when he could, especially West European politics, on which it was easier to publish than on Russian politics. He also devoted a great deal of space to the peasant question, the economic, administrative, and social issues involved in the emancipation. Contrary to the views of liberal economists in the government and in educated society, Chernyshevsky advocated the preservation of the Russian peasant community with its communal landownership and agriculture and village-level decision making. Chernyshevsky, in this respect close to Herzen, believed that Russia could construct a kind of agrarian socialism built around the village community and thus avoid the horrors of industrialization familiar from Victorian England and continental societies. Chernyshevsky was also a revolutionary, though he never created an actual revolutionary organization, but he did look forward to the overthrow of the tsarist regime and sympathized with those who tried to take an active role in the process.

  Chernyshevsky’s most powerful contributions to the emerging revolutionary movement were his articles in the Contemporary. The radicals around the journal were convinced that the natural sciences were the key to all knowledge, that the social sciences were simply a backward area that would soon catch up to biology and chemistry. Their view of man was ruthlessly biological: there were no spiritual entities, and indeed their objection to religion seems to have been founded more on disbelief in the soul than in God. Chernyshevsky and his colleagues also held an essentially utilitarian view of art, the task of which was to transform the consciousness of the readers with its arguments and its presentation of the images of reality as it actually was. By 1862 the government had become aware that he was the most important figure among the radicals, and decided to put an end to his activity. The Third Section had him arrested on suspicion of relations with Herzen and of agitating to arouse the people against the government, but they could find very little against him. Relations with Herzen could not be proven and Chernyshevsky’s articles were not in themselves criminal. After some months they found a police agent among the radicals, already arrested on another charge, who claimed to have letters from Chernyshevsky’s hand and a manifesto calling on the peasants to rise. Using these documents as evidence, the Third Section brought up a new charge, and Chernyshevsky was convicted of trying to inspire rebellion. The sentence was fourteen years labor in the mines (a sentence that was later commuted) and perpetual exile in Siberia. Chernyshevsky was allowed to leave Siberia only in 1883, six years before his death.

  The most complete expression of the values of the new generation came in Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be Done?, written in the prison of the fortress of St. Peter and Paul after his arrest in 1862. The novel managed to be published legally through an error of the cens
or, even though it presented a case for the complete reorganization of society and a plan of the future. The idea was to construct a series of communal production workshops and living arrangements that would liberate the individual from the constraints of poverty and the traditional family. Chernyshevsky’s novel was as much a feminist as a socialist tract. The emancipation of women, even from the upper classes, was a central part of his platform, for Chernyshevsky saw himself as the advocate of individual liberation to a society of “rational egoism” as much as the advocate of peasant and worker emancipation. The book became the Bible of a whole generation and its characters, the devoted revolutionary, the emancipated husband, the new woman – all these provided the youth of the time not only with ideals but also specific models of behavior, which many followed to the letter. Long hair for men and short for women, contempt for upper class manners and dress to the point of rudeness and general sloppiness became the fashion among students and gave the tone to a whole generation. Chernyshevsky’s arrest and exile deprived the radicals of a public voice, and also led to the emergence of a whole underground and émigré literature that circulated among students and youth throughout the empire.