A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  While the work took them out of the village routine, it soon established another routine of its own. Ten and twelve hour days were normal, with only Sunday and a few hours on Saturday off. Pay was low, but the low skill level of most workers meant that Russian labor was expensive to the employer in spite of the low wages. Conditions were probably not radically worse than in the West, but labor unions and strikes were forbidden, so even the most elementary improvements were hard to come by. The 1885 strike at the Morozov textile works near Moscow brought new factory legislation, requiring managers to at least pay the workers on time. On the whole there was little government supervision of the workplace, and ironically the major result of the government’s efforts was the Factory Inspectorate. It had little power to enforce proper conditions, but its voluminous reports and statistics left a treasure for historians.

  Those historians would not have been much interested in the Factory Inspectorate’s records had the Russian working class not become the recruiting ground and principal base of the revolutionary movement. The populists of the 1870s had already attempted to recruit workers, but their great hope was the peasantry, not the workers. The emergence of Marxism in the 1880s under the leadership of Georgii Plekhanov changed the focus. For Russia Marxism was an exotic import, a German ideology with entirely West European roots. In exile in the West, Plekhanov observed the growing strength of Marxist socialism in Germany and was deeply impressed. Armed with a new worldview, Plekhanov rejected the entire heritage of Chernyshevsky and populist ideology. The populists had believed that industrial capitalism in Russia was an artificial growth, the result of the economic policy of the autocracy. Once the autocracy was overthrown, they thought capitalism would disappear and the peasants would build socialism out of peasant communities and artisanal collectives. As a Marxist, Plekhanov believed that the growth of capitalism in Russia was inevitable. It might not grow swiftly, but it was growing and creating a working class – the proletariat, who, in Karl Marx’s words was, “the class called to liberate humanity” and the class that would bring socialism. For the time being, however, Plekhanov and his tiny band of exiles remained in Switzerland translating Marx into Russian and smuggling pamphlets across the Russian border.

  It was the industrial boom of the 1890s that gave the Marxists their chance, and from then on their influence and strength grew from year to year. Small Marxist groups appeared in the larger cities, led by young men and women from the intelligentsia like Vladimir Lenin and Iulii Martov, distributing leaflets and organizing reading groups to spread the new ideas. By 1898 they were able to form a party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Alongside the Marxists the populist strain in the Russian revolutionary movement revived, producing a series of small groups committed to a peasant revolution but in practice recruiting among workers. They combined the older belief in the socialist potential of the village community with the Marxist notion that the workers would organize socialism in the industrial cities. Much of their activity went into terrorism (which the Marxists rejected), but ultimately the populists were able to form a party in 1901–02, the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionaries to rival the Marxist Social Democrats.

  Thus the industrialization of Russia had brought forth new social classes, the businessmen who owned and ran the factories and the workers who toiled within them. It created new forms of urban life and new opportunities for women. Ultimately it also created the social forces that would blow Russian society apart.

  1 In Russia as a whole, in the same year, only 29 percent of men and 13 percent of women were literate. In France, Germany, and northern Europe by the 1890s literacy was nearly universal for both men and women. The Russian figures were matched only in southern Italy, and even Spain was slightly ahead. By 1914 Russian literacy rates reached about 40 percent of the whole population, with great differences between women and men.

  13 The Golden Age of Russian Culture

  The development of Russian society in the reform era profoundly affected Russian culture, both by changing the institutional environment of culture and by calling forth new intellectual and artistic impulses. For almost all spheres of thought and creation, the period was the first great age of Russian culture, and the first one to bring that culture an audience beyond its boundaries. By the 1880s Russia had become part of the world, not just as a major political power but as a major contributor to the arts and even to science.

  SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF REFORM

  Science had not flourished in the years of Nicholas I. While the universities did provide high-level instruction, the professors were often foreigners and facilities were small and inadequate. Lobachevskii’s new geometry was the work of an isolated provincial professor whose calculations needed only his own genius and a pencil and paper. After the Crimean War, the government realized that the scientific level of the country needed to be raised, and the Ministry of Education provided for the expansion of science departments in the universities as part of a general upgrading of higher education. Equally or more important were the initiatives of the Ministry of Finance, especially its reorganization of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg. A modern engineering school was crucial to the industrialization program, but the reformed curriculum had one unexpected result of worldwide significance. The young Dmitrii Mendeleev set out to provide a new, up-to-date chemistry course, and in the process found the existing textbooks unsatisfactory. He started to create his own, and in the process of looking for a way to explain the relationships among the various elements in nature, realized that they fit a certain pattern. The idea of a regularity was not absolutely new, but Mendeleev went further: he saw that there were gaps in the pattern and in 1869 he predicted that new elements would be found to exist that filled in these gaps. Soon scientists abroad found his prediction to be correct, and Mendeleev became Russia’s foremost scientist. His fame endured on the walls of science classrooms ever after in the form of charts of the periodic table of the elements that came from Mendeleev’s discovery.

  The very process of educational reform and the new role of the natural sciences in Russia had sparked a major discovery. Mendeleev went on to work extensively to promote not just chemistry but scientific education and Russian economic development, working closely with the government on these tasks. Another case of the intersection of social changes and science was the work of Vasilii Dokuchaev, the creator of modern soil science. Dokuchaev’s insight was simply that soil could not be treated as just the top layer of rock mixed with decaying organic matter but as a distinct stratum of its own. Trained in geology and mineralogy, he came to this conclusion while working to survey the black earth districts of southern Russia for the Free Economic Society, a project explicitly designed to help Russian agriculture. The Ministry of Finance also helped sponsor other scientific and technological societies, in an effort to spark more public interest and channel it into directions that would contribute to industrialization.

  In these years Russian science came into its own, not only because of the fame of Mendeleev but because dozens of lesser lights acquired solid if modest places in many new and old specialized fields of chemistry, physics, and biology. The other reason for the advances in science was its immense popularity with the intelligentsia of the reform era. For educated people the natural sciences seemed to be a model of rationality and progressive thought. They debated whether the experiments on the nervous system of frogs conducted by the physiologist Ivan Sechenov proved that the soul existed or not, a topic which Sechenov thought went way beyond the possible consequences of his modest work. Darwin was tremendously popular in Russia, though “social Darwinism” never caught on. Part of the popularity of Darwin came from the lack of interest on the part of the church in debating the details of biology or the biblical account of creation. Concerned about the spread of “materialism,” the church nevertheless avoided direct polemics with scientists. In Russia, Darwin’s works were approved by the Ministry of Education as soon as they appeared, even before
Russian translations were available. The atmosphere of the time as well as government policy combined to rapidly raise the level of scientific activity in the country.

  If government policy was crucial to the emergence of world-class natural sciences in Russia, its relationship to the arts was more complicated. For the writers, the relaxation of censorship was crucial, but an equally great change came from the end of court patronage and the rise of a market for books and journals. The painters also benefited from the new social environment, as the new millionaire businessmen became crucial patrons for the artists. Music was more complicated still, since the main opera and ballet theaters fell under the Ministry of the Court, while philharmonic societies and the conservatories worked with a combination of state and private funding and control.

  The social and institutional environment of the arts was only one side of the story of Russia’s Golden Age. Central to the period was also the attempt to grapple with Russia’s history, its current politics and problems, and its place in the world of culture and ideas. Liberal intellectuals and later Soviet historians regularly portrayed almost all of the cultural figures of the era as either “democratic” or “critical,” but this description fits only some of them. Tchaikovsky was an admirer of the autocracy, as was Dostoyevsky, and both of them had only amused contempt for liberal democracy. Perhaps the only internationally famous figure to fully fit the liberal model was Turgenev, but it is perhaps futile to explore the views of most of the great artists, as many of them were too idiosyncratic to classify. Tolstoy is perhaps the most striking example, and not only in his later Christian anarchist phase. What they all did was to create works that were permanent parts of Russian culture, and in the case of the writers and composers, of the whole of Western culture of the modern age.

  MUSIC

  The musicians had the weakest base to work from and yet produced in only a few decades an enormous amount of new music, much of it part of the international repertory to this day. Before the Crimean War Glinka had been virtually the only important composer, an amateur from the nobility who made his name with the help of the Wielhorski salon and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. She was also to play a crucial role in taking Russia into the world of professional music education, for she was the patron of Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was the son of a Jewish businessman from the Ukraine who converted to Christianity and moved to Moscow in the 1830s. There his children’s music teacher quickly noted Anton’s immense talent at the piano and took the boy and his parents to Berlin, where he soon found fame as a child prodigy and acquired a solid musical education and the favor of Mendelson and Liszt. On the father’s death young Anton had few resources and returned to St. Petersburg. There the Wielhorskis introduced him to Elena Pavlovna, and he became her personal pianist, an invented position designed to provide him with an income. By the late 1850s Rubinstein, now world famous, persuaded his patroness that Russia needed a real music school, and in 1861 the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened its doors, across the street from the Mariinskii Theater, where it still stands. Elena Pavlovna’s support ensured state financing to the new institution. From the very beginning Rubinstein ruled it with an iron hand, demanding deep study and long hours, and during his tenure as director the Conservatory produced many prominent musicians. The most important would be Peter Tchaikovsky, one of Rubinstein’s first students. Four years later, a similar conservatory came into existence in Moscow under the directorship of Anton’s younger brother Nikolai, also a talented pianist and composer, though not in his brother’s league. While Anton was in Berlin, Nikolai had stayed behind in Moscow, forming lifelong friendships with his neighbors, the future leaders of the Moscow industrialists, the Tretyakov brothers, and Nikolai Alekseev. The Moscow conservatory had no significant state financing and the businessmen had to periodically help it through crises, a new source of patronage for Russian art. The Moscow Conservatory was on a sound enough footing to hire Tchaikovsky as one of its professors (1867–1877) during the years of his maturation as a composer.

  The Rubinstein brothers and Tchaikovsky constituted one of two musical circles active in Russia from the 1860s to the 1880s. The other major group, also centered in St. Petersburg, consisted of the five composers of the Balakirev circle: Milii Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. These were a curious group – Balakirev was a gentleman amateur like Glinka, while Cui and Mussorgsky were military officers. Mussorgsky soon abandoned the army for music (but had to take positions in the civilian bureaucracy to support himself), while Cui continued in the army as a fortress engineer, rising to the rank of general before his death. Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince and by profession a chemist, teaching at the Medical Academy and achieving some small discoveries in chemistry. Rimskii-Korsakov was a former naval officer and had even participated in the visit of the Russian fleet to New York in 1864, Tsar Alexander’s gesture of support for the Union cause in the American Civil War.

  None of the circle had formal musical training, and not surprisingly their relationship with Rubinstein and the Conservatory was hostile. The hostility was stoked by their foremost defender among the music critics of the time, Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906). Stasov was a librarian at the St. Petersburg Public Library, but quickly acquired a name for himself as a writer both on music and the visual arts. The son of a well-known architect, he had traveled in Europe and was extremely erudite in the music and painting of the time. In both cases his esthetic was simple. He hated any remnant of classicism, and thus condemned all painting since 1500 and most of the music of the eighteenth century. He despised Italian opera, even Verdi, for its adherence to the conventions of aria, duet, and chorus, as well as for the insubstantiality of the plots. Another mark against it was its immense popularity with the aristocratic public in Russia, from the 1830s onward – in Stasov’s view a mark of the elite’s ignorance and love for showmanship. He was for free forms, forms that would adequately express the true nature of human beings, their inner world and their place in society, and thus he believed that art had to be realistic and national. In music that meant a certain preference for program music, and his European heroes were Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann. He advanced his views with wit, rudeness, savage personal attacks, and name-calling when he could, but his intelligence could not be denied. His great enemies in music were Wagner, the European classic tradition that he identified with the heritage of Mendelson, Anton Rubinstein, and the Conservatory. The Conservatory was his particular bugbear, for he thought that it would conserve traditional classic form in music and establish the dominance of German music in Russia – not “true” German music like that of Beethoven or Schumann, but a German-based cosmopolitanism.

  Fortunately the Balakirev circle, soon to be christened the “mighty handful” or “mighty five,” originally a derisive epithet, was not as combative or as rigid as Stasov. They had their own views, developed under the leadership of Balakirev, the group’s main mentor at first, and later in the writings of Cui and the other composers. They were not as exclusively enamored of Russian themes as was Stasov: Balakirev and Mussorgsky from the first wrote program music and songs to non-Russian themes. Cui in particular made a very odd “nationalist.” The son of a Polish noblewoman and a French officer who stayed in Russia after 1812, he was born in Wilno and what training he had in music came from the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. Among all of them, however, the atmosphere of the 1860s, as much as Stasov’s hectoring, encouraged an interest in Russian folk music and operas and instrumental music on Russian themes.

  The Russian themes they chose reflected in a general way the concerns of the 1860s. The use of folk music went along with the intense interest in the peasantry that was the hallmark of the emancipation era. In Russian history they turned to the pivotal moments and the eternal questions of the role of the tsars, their aims, and their effect on Russia. Even in opera, where the portrayal of figures from the Romanov dynasty was prohibited, th
ey presented the Russian past in all its complexity. Rimskii-Korsakov’s first successful opera, “The Maid of Pskov” (1873), addressed the paradoxes of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, while the greatest achievement of any of the five, Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” of 1868–1874, followed Pushkin’s play to portray a tsar whose ambition and greed for power destroyed him and his country in the process. He took the events of the Musketeer revolt of 1682 to portray the end of the old Russia and the dawning of the new in his second opera “Khovanshchina.” These were not political tracts, and Mussorgsky was no radical, but they did offer a reflection on the painful issues of the time, earning them later fame as “critical.” Mussorgsky’s innovations in harmony and other areas would also bring him great fame in the twentieth century, but in his lifetime the operas were only limited successes, and he died of alcoholism before he could finish “Khovanshchina.”

  Of the rest of the five the most successful was undoubtedly Rimskii-Korsakov, who eventually joined the Conservatory and taught himself counterpoint and orchestration, becoming one of its most distinguished professors. His series of operas based on stories from Russian history and folklore became a mainstay of the Russian operatic repertory. Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” and his music on Central Asian themes won him a permanent place in world repertory, and his symphonies and other music continue to be popular in Russia. Balakirev, a contentious if charismatic personality, went through a religious crisis in the 1870s and stopped writing, only to take up music again in the 1880s. His religious and conservative views earned him the patronage of Alexander III’s court, and Balakirev received a position as director of the Imperial Chapel choir.