POLES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The outcome of the Congress of Vienna meant that the historically Polish lands incorporated into the Russian Empire fell into two areas with quite different character and status, central Poland (Congress Poland) and Poland’s former eastern territories. In both parts the Polish nobility did not cooperate in large numbers with the Russian Empire, and instead provided the social basis for nationalist revolt.
The central Polish lands around Warsaw formed the Kingdom of Poland, an autonomous unit within Russia, with the tsar as king of Poland. Its population was overwhelmingly Polish, and until the 1830 revolt, the Kingdom of Poland had its own government, legislature, and army under the general aegis of the tsar and his viceroy in Warsaw. After the revolt was crushed, the Russian viceroy field marshal Paskevich ruled the area directly, with the assistance of appointed officials. Polish émigrés in France and Britain formed a series of revolutionary societies aimed at overthrowing Russian rule, but none of them had any success until after the Crimean War. The eastern territories of the old Poland, today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and the western Ukraine, were quite different in their fate. There the Poles were primarily the nobility, owning serfs of different nationalities whose relationships to the Polish cause ranged from somewhat friendly in Lithuania to quite hostile in the Ukraine. As the townspeople were largely Jewish and thus not part of the Polish nation in the eyes of the revolutionaries, the potential base of the Polish cause in these areas was thin indeed. To make matters worse, these areas were never autonomous within the empire, though the Russian authorities continued to apply Polish law in civil and criminal matters until the 1830s.
To make things even more complicated, the Kingdom of Poland, where serfdom had been abolished by Napoleon, developed more rapidly than the Russian interior. Textile industries came into being in Warsaw, Lodz, and other cities, mostly the work of Jewish, German, and other immigrant entrepreneurs but attracting Polish and Jewish workers and gradually building more modern cities in place of the old centers with their noble palaces and impoverished artisans. Warsaw became the center of unrest in the area. The Russian authorities’ reactions to the new revolt of 1863–64 was to further reduce the limited autonomy of Poland, the policy that came to be known as “Russification.” Even the official name was changed from Kingdom of Poland to “Vistula Provinces” and the school system was henceforth required to teach in Russian. The Russian government enacted reforms of landholding more favorable to the peasantry, seen as a potential counterweight to the nobles. The Polish response to the defeat was a generation that avoided politics and turned toward smaller deeds, the building of civil society through education, even if in Russian, and taking advantage of the booming economy. The irony was that much of the prosperity of Poland’s economy was the result of the huge market provided by the Russian Empire, where Polish goods, uncompetitive in Western Europe, found ready customers. The revival of Polish politics in the 1890s brought new groups into the underground, the National Democrats, a middle-class nationalist group and the various socialist parties, all of whom would play a major role in 1905.
THE BALTIC PROVINCES
In some ways the Baltic provinces, Estonia, Livonia, and Kurland (modern-day Estonia and Latvia) were more profoundly affected by the evolution of state and society in the Russian Empire than other non-Russian European areas.1 Alexander I had abolished serfdom in the Baltic provinces in 1816–1819. The landless emancipation left the Estonian and Latvian peasants still the sharecroppers or tenants of the German nobility, and frequently still obligated to perform labor services, but the emancipation did begin the process of modernization. The role of the Baltic provinces as ports of entry to the Russian Empire made Riga a major commercial and eventually industrial center by the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time the restoration of Baltic noble privileges under Paul I meant that the provincial assemblies of nobles – all of them Germans – and the restoration of traditional forms of city government meant that effective control of the area remained in the hands of the nobility and the German city patriciate. The noble assemblies were freely elected, and worked directly with the tsar, often bypassing the Russian governors, the only representatives of the central government in the area. These were free institutions of a type that did not exist in the rest of the empire (except Finland), but their existence perpetuated the rule of an ethnically distinct nobility over the rural population.
The persistence of the autonomous noble institutions and the freedom of the peasants meant that the effects of the reforms of the 1860s were different in the Baltic provinces from the rest of the empire. For the peasants the great issue was not their legal status but access to land ownership, granted only in the 1860s. The press flourished and was much less restricted than in the rest of the empire as a result of the local legal system. Latvian and Estonian journals and newspapers appeared beside the older German press, providing a forum for political debate as well as cultural and national polemics. There had always been minorities of Latvian and Estonian artisans and small traders in the towns, and the economic development of the area led to a rapid flow of population from the countryside into the city, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the Germans were a minority in the cities. At the same time the spread of education, as elsewhere in the empire, gave rise to an educated class among the Baltic peoples, and voluntary cultural societies carried national ideas to the Latvians and Estonians. For these emergent nationalities the Germans, not the Russian tsar or the Russian people, were still the enemy. Indeed Russian Slavophiles thought that the imperial government should encourage the Latvians and Estonians against the Germans, but the conservative pro-nobility policies of St. Petersburg, as well as the excellent court connections of the Baltic nobles, prevented the full emergence of such a tactic by the Russian authorities.
All of these changes led to conflict between St. Petersburg and the Baltic nobility, but the local noble assemblies continued to exist and function, and in the countryside the German nobility was still completely dominant. Most of them continued to serve in the Russian army and administration and particularly the aristocratic elite remained loyal to the Empire. The existence of the new united Germany after 1870 provided an attraction for some, but on the whole the reliance on the nobility in the area was a largely successful policy in the Baltic provinces. The situation began to change only after 1900, when social changes and national movements brought the Latvian and Estonian majorities onto the front stage of society and politics. And they were not nobles.
FINLAND
Like the Baltic provinces, Finland retained autonomous institutions until the end of the empire, but these institutions and Finnish society were otherwise quite different from the Baltic provinces. Finland, in the words of Alexander I, had been “raised to the rank of nations” by the Russian annexation of 1809. No longer was it merely the eastern extension of Sweden with an exotic language spoken by peasants, but it was a country of its own under the Russian tsar. Alexander had also granted Finland the continuation of the laws and Lutheran religion from the Swedish time, a separate government in Helsinki, and a legislature modeled on the old Swedish diet. Unlike the situation in the Baltic provinces, Finnish peasants had never been serfs but were free tenants and freeholders, and the Finnish diet continued the Swedish practice of including peasant representatives.
Thus the Russian tsars at first could rely in Finland on the loyalty of the Swedish-speaking nobility for they found that the nobility lacked both the antagonism to Russian rule of the Polish nobles and the caste egotism of the Baltic Germans. Indeed for much of the century the Russian tsars looked favorably on Finnish economic development, state building, and emerging national consciousness. The generally peaceful relationship was not wholly untroubled, for Nicholas I never called the Finnish diet to meet. The local government in Helsinki remained in power, carrying out numerous educational and economic projects with the support of the Russian governors-general and the Finnish State Secretariat i
n St. Petersburg (usually headed by a Finn). The establishment of a university in Helsinki not only raised the cultural level of the country but also provided a center for an emerging national culture in both Swedish and Finnish that affirmed national dignity while maintaining loyalty to the empire. Perhaps the most important result was Elias Lönnrot’s compilation of Finnish folkore, the Kalevala, most of it collected among the Finnish-speaking peasantry of northern Russia rather than in Finland itself. Finnish rapidly became a literary language alongside Swedish, though the latter remained the primary language of administration until the end of the Russian Empire. As the 1809 agreement added the Finnish territories taken by Peter the Great to the rest of Finland, the border ran almost to St. Petersburg itself. Thus only a few hours from his capital, the Russian tsar became a constitutional monarch. Finnish law remained separate from that of the rest of the empire, with the result that Russian revolutionaries could hide in Finland without legal obstacles to their activities.
The Crimean War brought some destruction to Finland, as the British navy shelled and burned a number of coastal towns, though no bombardment could knock out the great fort of Sveaborg in the Helsinki harbor. Finland repeatedly demonstrated its loyalty, and was rewarded in the reform era that followed. As in the rest of the empire, the end of the Crimean War meant a radical relaxation of censorship and a new economic policy oriented toward capitalist development. Economic development and reform brought newspapers and public opinion to Finland as well, and political groupings began to form. The decisive change came in 1863 when Tsar Alexander called the Finnish diet into session, an elected legislature that represented “estates” (nobility, townspeople, clergy, and peasants), not the country as a whole since the franchise was sharply restricted. The peasants were overwhelmingly Finnish speakers, and the tsar recognized their needs the same year, mandating that petitions and other documents to the administration could be presented in Finnish as well as Swedish (Russian was not contemplated). The Finnish peasant deputies, all firm supporters of the Finnish language, were the tsar’s main allies in Finland, against the mostly Swedish-speaking liberals among the urban and noble deputies.
Inclusion in the Russian Empire created a new economic situation for Finland, as St. Petersburg was an enormous market for labor and goods. In the early nineteenth century more Finns lived in St. Petersburg than in any Finnish city, and the Finnish countryside provided an increasingly large proportion of the capital’s food supply. The more rapid development of the Russian interior after the emancipation and the construction of railroads only speeded the integration of Finland into the empire’s economy, as textile mills and metalworking plants provided products for the seemingly unlimited Russian market. Thus businessmen as well as nobles had an interest in preserving a stable autonomy within the empire. This success story only came to an end with the attempt at “Russification” by governor-general N. I. Bobrikov in 1896–1902. Bobrikov decided that Finland needed to be further integrated into the empire, a goal shared by Tsar Nicholas II. Bobrikov’s actual measures were rather limited (use of Russian by high officials, a threat to draft Finns to the Russian army) and most of them remained on paper, but they were enough to create a crisis without actually advancing Russian rule in the country. The result was the emergence of radical nationalist groups and dissension among the nobility and business classes. Finland retained almost all its autonomous rights up to 1917, but Nicholas II and Bobrikov had succeeded in alienating large sections of the population, including the elites.
JEWS
The Jews constituted a substantial population – accounting for approximately five million in the Russian empire, about four percent of the whole. At first the social and legal structure of the Jewish community was inherited from Poland and only in the 1860s did the Russian state began to mark out a distinctive Jewish policy in keeping with the principles of the reform era.
Russia had no Jews among its population from the end of Kievan times until the First Partition of Poland in 1772. In the eighteenth century some Jewish merchants and artisans settled in the Ukraine and in Riga, but this was technically illegal and the groups were small. When Russia acquired its first substantial Jewish community, the reaction of the Russian government was to preserve the status quo. The kahal organization of the Jewish community remained as it had been in Polish times, with the chief rabbis of each town collecting the taxes for the state and administering justice. Further, the Jews were restricted to the former Polish provinces (the “Pale of Settlement”), so that they could not move into the Russian interior, though the Pale did come to include the Black Sea coast provinces with the new city of Odessa. Nicholas I’s attitude toward the Jews was essentially hostile, but his only measures of consequence were to draft them into the army (at a higher rate than Christians!) and to formally abolish the kahals in 1844. Virtually all Jews remained inside the Pale until the 1850s.
The reforming governments of the 1860s took a different direction, one of selective integration. (Assimilation or “Russification” was not contemplated.) The idea was that the Jews needed to become more useful to the state and to Russian society, and therefore were to be encouraged through education to form elites that could both render that service and provide modern leadership for the Jewish community. To that end the Russian government listened to the petitions of the Jewish commercial and banking elite, and in 1859 permitted individuals of that elite to take up residence outside the Pale. In 1865 similar permission was granted to the wealthiest artisans. The result was the formation of an important Jewish commercial and intellectual elite in St. Petersburg, whose leaders were the Ginzburg banking dynasty. The Ginzburgs’ ties to the government and court ensured them a voice on Jewish affairs until the 1880s.
The other side of the reform policy was the opening of Russian universities to Jews beginning in the 1850s. Crucial to the fate of Jewish students was the November 1861 decree permitting all Jewish university graduates the same rights to private occupations and residence granted to Christians upon completion of the university degree. Though state service, however, remained closed to them, these measures speeded the transformation of Jewish society, especially since they more or less coincided with the first wave of the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment that rejected the traditional Jewish religious world for the adoption of European education and norms. By 1886 some fourteen percent of all university students in the empire were Jews, and some ten percent of gymnasium students.
The assassination of Alexander II proved to be a disaster for the Jews of the Russian Empire. In wake of his death a wave of pogroms swept the southwestern provinces (mainly the Ukraine) and continued on and off for two years. The mob blamed the Jews for the tsar’s death, looted their houses, and assaulted and raped thousands of people, though only two died in the violence. Alexander III’s government blamed Jewish exploitation of the peasantry for the riots and began to rescind some of the existing legislation. The most important measure was the introduction in 1887 of quotas in the universities, to be only three percent for Jews in St. Petersburg and Moscow, five to ten percent elsewhere. Outside the two capitals, however, the quotas were not strictly enforced. Petitions for exceptions presented to the Minister of Education and other means led to the actual growth in percentage of Jewish students to twenty-seven percent (Kharkov University) and twenty-four percent (Odessa). Thousands of Jews also went abroad for education, especially to universities in Germany and Austria. There they confronted a paradox. Though legally equal in all respects to native students, Russian Jews confronted a student culture that was, by the end of the century, nationalistic and militantly anti-semitic. In Russian universities, where the students mostly supported the liberal opposition to the state or even the revolutionaries, the student culture was largely favorable to the Jews.
Thus the government had gone back on the spirit of selective integration, but most of the legal structure remained and the modernization of Jewish society continued, if slowly. The lack of more general progress ins
pired various responses, one being massive emigration to Western Europe and the United States, but this option also was not universally available or desired. Another response was the appearance of a Jewish press that was liberal in its politics and oriented toward the reform of the empire. Baron Ginzburg and the St. Petersburg Jewish elite lobbied unceasingly, but with less and less success after 1881. More radical options, especially among students and young people generally were the various revolutionary movements. Many Jews joined the Russian populists, including the terrorist groups, and later the Marxists who preached international solidarity. Others formed specifically Jewish socialist groups, the Jewish Workers’ League (the Bund), and finally the growing Zionist movement encouraged Jews to opt out entirely and move to Palestine. As the Russian government after the 1880s tried more and more to present itself as “Russian,” anti-Semitism became more or less an official policy. Pogroms like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which nearly fifty Jews died, further poisoned the atmosphere. In response, Russian liberal and radical groups underlined their opposition to legal and social discrimination against the Jews, and Jewish parties grew more radical as well.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 31