In spite of the restrictions, the evolution of Russian society meant that more and more Jews entered the business classes, the professions, the intelligentsia, and more of them found ways, legal or otherwise, to evade their confinement to the Pale. By 1897 six percent of Jews lived officially outside the Pale – many unofficially. Jewish communities emerged in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and even in towns on the Volga far from the legally permitted areas. Jews were entering Russian society, and the emergence of mass politics in 1905 would bring them to center stage in many ways, some of them highly explosive.
UKRAINIANS
Though the largest non-Russian group in the empire, the Ukrainians played little role in imperial affairs until 1905, except as a potential opposition to the Polish national movement and its claims. Their minor role was the result of the ambiguities of Ukrainian national consciousness, only slowly and incompletely changing among some parts of the local intelligentsia from a Russian regional identity into a national Ukrainian one.
Before the Crimean War the Ukrainian territories were Ukrainian only in the nationality of the peasantry, with the exception of the Left Bank, the former Hetmanate, and the Kharkov province. In these latter regions the local nobility was descended from Khmelnyts’kyi’s officers and maintained local traditions of history and a modest regionalist literature in Russian and occasionally Ukrainian. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ukrainian cultural activities of that local nobility were looked upon with favor from St. Petersburg as a counterweight to Polish political movements and a regional example of Russian uniqueness. The dominant figure in Ukrainian culture, however, came from a wholly different milieu. He was Taras Shevchenko, a serf whose talents at drawing led him to an education at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and liberation from serfdom. A lottery organized by Russian noblemen, with the prize being a portrait of the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, raised enough money to buy him out of serfdom. His first volumes of poetry attracted more attention than his art, and back in Kiev he soon joined the historian Nikolai Kostomarov and other local intelligentsia who were dreaming of Slavic federalism. These dreams came to the attention of the authorities on the eve of 1848, and earned the poet a decade of exile on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
After Crimea the changes in Russian society and government policy had a sharp effect on the tiny Ukrainian intelligentsia. They began to publish a journal in St. Petersburg and involved themselves in the many activities of Russian radicals and liberals, including trying to educate the peasantry. Shevchenko returned from exile and resumed his central place in Ukrainian culture. The cultural efforts of the nascent Ukrainian intelligentsia came to a sharp stop in 1864 and 1867, when most publishing in Ukrainian became forbidden out of fear that Polish nationalists would penetrate the Ukrainian movement. In the Ukrainian cities small groups of intellectuals with a Ukrainian cultural orientation emerged, but they had little impact as yet. The cities remained firmly Russian speaking up to 1917 and after. Most university students in Kiev or Kharkov, Ukrainian or otherwise, ignored the Ukrainian movement and joined Russian radical groups or entered careers in the Russian administration or other institutions. The zemstvos, the elected local councils, were introduced into the Left Bank provinces, but their occasional forays into politics were oriented to the empire as a whole, not to specifically Ukrainian problems. Disagreements among the various layers of Russian bureaucracy over the language issue meant that some Ukrainian language books did appear, and local history and traditions were cultivated in the Russian language. Ironically the chief venue for Ukrainian history was the Archeographical Society in Kiev, which subsisted on funds from the Russian imperial military governors-general of the southwestern provinces. The main area of concern to the Russian empire was the Ukrainian movement across the border in Austrian Galicia, where electoral politics made possible a variety of Ukrainian parties, most of them not friendly to the Russian tsars. In the Russian Empire, however, the Ukrainian movement would not spread beyond the small Ukrainian intelligentsia to a larger population until the eve of the 1905 Revolution.
THE ASIATIC EMPIRE
If the European side of the empire was largely the result of territorial and strategic ambitions, the Asiatic Empire combined those same goals with a largely chimerical desire to imitate the economic success of the European colonial empires. Within that general framework, the Asiatic possessions of Russia fell into two areas, the Caucasus acquired by 1828 and Central Asia, where Russian conquest began in earnest only in the 1860s. To make matters more complex, the Crimean and Volga Tatars and the Bashkirs, conquered earlier and largely surrounded by Russian settlers, played a role both in Russian imperial rule and in the formation of native nationalism in Central Asia and elsewhere. Altogether the various Asian parts of the empire constituted about twenty-five percent of its population.
In the Caucasus Russia began to move beyond the sixteenth century boundary only at the end of the eighteenth century, annexing (rather theoretically) the North Caucasus and then Transcaucasia. Formal control was largely complete by 1828. South of the mountains the Russians established an administration based on Russian officials and the cooperation of the local Georgian and Armenian nobility. These Christian elites were integrated into the imperial nobility rather like the Baltic Germans or the Finns, and many of them played major roles in the Russian state and especially in the army up until 1917. The Azeris and other Muslims were a different story, though the Russian government was to a large extent able to coopt the Muslim clergy and other local elites after the end of the Caucasian wars.
The conquest of the Caucasus had been carried out to secure the eastern flank against the Ottomans. Commercial motives played some role in the planning, for trade with and through Iran was assumed to be a viable path to enormous profits. That idea proved to be an illusion, since Russia lacked the commercial infrastructure to make use of what was available, but that result did not become clear until the 1830s. In any case, the strategic value of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia as a southern frontier against Turkey was immense, and the Russians were not going to leave just because trade with Iran did not prove to be a bonanza. The mountain peoples of the north slopes of the Caucasus were not impressed by Russian strategic interests and liked even less the gradual penetration of Russian settlers in the adjacent lowlands. The result was war.
The Caucasian Wars of the nineteenth century fell into two fronts and two phases. One front was in the western end of the mountain range and its foothills, and the principal opponents were the Circassians, while the other front was far to the east, in Dagestan and parts of Chechnia. The wars began with the Russian attempt to build a solid line of forts to control the area in 1817, which met furious resistance both in east and west. Dagestan emerged as the main center of resistance in 1830, with Islam as its banner. The leaders were part of the Naqshbandi sufi order, which acted as the leadership group for the rebellion. The mountaineers proclaimed Shamil their imam in 1834 and for the next twenty-five years he led the struggle in Dagestan and Chechnia from his stronghold in the southern Dagestani mountains where he was born. This was a war of small units, night raids, guerilla tactics, and occasional massacres, which irritated the Russians but did not defeat them. The Russian army’s attempts to send expeditions into the mountains to defeat the insurgents were equally fruitless until the 1840s. Then they realized that the solution to their problem was not more troops or battles but the construction of roads in the mountains and particularly the cutting of pathways and cleared areas in the dense Caucasian forests. It was the axe more than the gun that gave the Russians an advantage in the Caucasian wars – new “American” axes wielded by thousands of Russian soldiers. Finally, with the end of the Crimean War, Prince Alexander Bariatinskii, the viceroy of the Caucasus, decided to put an end to it and introduced large Russian forces. Shamil had to surrender in 1859, the effective end of resistance. On the northwest slopes of the Caucasus the war with the Circassians continued intermittently until the 1860s, when the Russian government began t
o encourage them to migrate to Ottoman domains, leaving large areas on the western slopes of the Caucasus for Russian settlers. From then until 1917 the north Caucasus was largely quiet. Even the Sufis turned to purely religious concerns and rejected holy war, and in 1914 Russia fielded an entire cavalry division consisting of Dagestanis, Chechens, and other Caucasian mountaineers with Russian and Georgian officers and commanded by a Grand Duke. There were ten Muslim generals and 186 Muslim colonels in the Russian army in 1914, mostly Caucasians, though Muslims did not join the imperial elite in St. Petersburg. Most of the North Caucasus remained under military rule, with Russian (and often Georgian or Armenian) officers appointed to supervise the local communities where the village elders remained in power.
On the southern side of the mountains society evolved in response to Russian rule and the social changes that it brought. The great reforms brought an end to serfdom in Georgia, creating a crisis for much of the Georgian nobility. At the same time the slow spread of education led to the formation of a Georgian intelligentsia, liberal in politics and determined to preserve and continue the national culture. A few of the younger generation were already attracted to Russian populism, and in the 1890s the first Georgian Marxist groups appeared in Tiblisi and Baku. Similarly the Armenians formed a local business class and intelligentsia, both with centers in Tiblisi and Baku rather than Erevan, still a sleepy provincial town. For Russian Armenians the great issues were the condition of the Armenians across the border in the Ottoman territories and increasing Russian pressure on the Armenian Church. The increasing nationalist radicalism of the Armenian intelligentsia led to the formation of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) party in Tbilisi in 1890, a nationalist party with a mildly socialist program. Though its main opponent was the Ottomans, the Dashnaks quickly attracted the enmity of the Russian authorities.
In spite of slow economic growth, development in Trancaucasia remained on the level of peasant agriculture, artisan production and trade with one major exception: Baku. The great irony of Russian Transcaucasia was that it did eventually provide a great economic benefit to the empire in the form of the Baku oil fields. Local producers, mostly Armenians, already exploited the oil in a small way for lighting and other purposes, but by mid century more modern drilling technology appeared, some in local or Russian hands, but the Russian branch of the Swedish Nobel family became the main producer, selling kerosene as fuel for lamps all over Russia. The American Rockefellers joined them, but Nobel remained dominant until the revolution. The result was to produce a modern, European type city on the shores of the Caspian, populated mainly by Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Azeris. Until 1905, the Azeris themselves showed little interest in secular politics or new ideas, but beneath the surface they too were influenced by the changes emanating from Baku.
CENTRAL ASIA
Russia had started to move south into Kazakhstan in the eighteenth century, but until the Crimean War its main activity was the building of border stations and trying to maintain influence among the various tribal rulers of Kazakhstan. Attempts to make a more permanent penetration were failures. Only in 1853 did the Russians manage to seize the small fort of Ak Mechet on the Syr Darya near the Aral Sea, on the south side of the Kazakh steppe. Nothing further happened until 1860. The driving force behind the expansion of Russia into Central Asia was the army and Ministry of War, operating partly out of the need to control the frontier in Kazakhstan and partly out of fear of British expansion into and beyond Afghanistan. The immediate context was the decision to maintain a fortress line south of the Kazakh steppe, on the northern borders of Central Asia proper. This meant seizure of the forts built by the khans of Kokand to control the southern Kazakhs, and put Russia into conflict with both Kokand and Bukhara. In 1860–1864 the Russians took control of the Kokand forts on the southern fringe of the Kazakh steppe, and then moved south to the Central Asia cities. Acting on his own initiative but with the general approval of the Ministry of War, General Mikhail Cherniaev took Tashkent in 1865, giving Russia a stronghold in the rich and well-watered Ferghana valley, Kokand’s base. The largely Uzbek Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand were old-fashioned and weak even by the standards of the Near East in the nineteenth century and soon fell to Russian arms. The khanates’ attempts to fend off the Russians only led to more defeats for them and in 1876 the whole of Kokand fell under Russian rule. Bukhara and Khiva were reduced to Russian protectorates on the model of the native states of British India, and in 1881 general Mikhail Skobelev eliminated the last resistance among the Turkmens. The Russian Empire now stretched to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. The conquest was achieved at a low cost to Russia, only a few hundred soldiers died over the years of fighting. The soldiers of the Khanates were not used to European warfare and though numerous and brave, could not stand up to disciplined troops. Thus the largest problems for the Russians were logistic: learning to transport men and equipment over arid steppes and actual deserts, coping with intense heat in the summer and cold in unsheltered steppe in the winter. Fortunately, for all the British concern about Russian expansion, Central Asia was just too far away for the authorities in Delhi and London to try to counter the Russian moves. Iran and Afghanistan separated the Russian possessions from the British and the Ottomans as well. That is not to say that Britain was not concerned by Russian policy, obsessed as it was by the specter of losing India. The result was the continuation of the long “cold war” between the two empires – a situation that caused immense problems for Prince Gorchakov at the Russian foreign ministry, for his focus was stability in Europe. Thus the army often acted without informing him of its moves until it was too late for him to object.
The Russian colonial administrators, with general Konstantin von Kaufman at their head, were determined to avoid the mistakes of the Caucasus, which they saw as a narrowly military approach to empire. Instead they were going to imitate the master imperialists, their English rivals, and build a modern empire. Central Asia was to be slowly modernized by building European infrastructure, giving modern education to the natives, and encouraging or directly setting up investments that would benefit the empire. The great idea was the development of cotton growing, already a major crop, to supply the Russian textile industry. This project enjoyed modest success, but only by the early twentieth century. All these plans brought a small measure of modern society to Central Asia, one of the poorest and most backward parts of the Muslim world. Those modern elements, however, had other effects, for they called into being a small local intelligentsia with some modern ideas.
Figure 15. Nomadic Kirghiz (Kazakhs) around 1900.
The development of the local intelligentsia was a response not just to Russian rule and its consequences but also to developments among other Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire and beyond. One current was pan-Turkism, the idea that all Turkic speaking people were really one nation, propounded by the Crimean Tatar aristocrat Ismail Bey Gasprinskii. Gasprinskii advocated a modernized state and modernized Islam, but his views on the unity of the Turkic peoples raised the suspicion in St. Petersburg that he was essentially furthering Ottoman foreign policy aims against Russia. Another trend, influential also in Central Asia was jadidism, from the Arabic work jadid (“new”). Jadidism began in the late nineteenth century among the Muslims of British India, who believed that a modernized Islam would be closer to the original inspiration of Mohammed, stripped of the accretions of centuries in between. Like Gasprinskii, the jadidists wanted a modern education system that went beyond rote memorization of the Koran in Arabic and the study of classic Islamic texts. They also wanted many of the features of modern society, which they did not see as contradictory to the Islamic spirit, if not to the Islamic practice of their time. These ideas soon spread among the Volga Tatars, living as they did among Russians who had already achieved a more modern society than that of the Tatars. The Volga Tatar merchants had been for centuries the intermediaries in trade between Bukhara, Khiva, and Russ
ia, and now many came to settle in Central Asia under the aegis of the Russian Empire. They found an audience among the local intelligentsia, which began to try to put their ideas into practice. In the Central Asian cities the only result was the creation of a few small cultural circles, but it was the beginning of modern nation building.
For the Russian Empire, Central Asia, once conquered, was not a serious problem until nearly the end of the empire. Aside from a small Islamic revolt in 1898 in Andijan, the interior of Central Asia was quiet. In the Kazakh steppe matters were more complicated. Russian cities appeared on the northern fringes of the steppe and in them a small Kazakh intelligentsia emerged, dependent on Russian institutions and loyal to the empire. At the same time the economic integration of the Kazakhs into the emerging Russian industrial economy brought demand for cattle and other products that disrupted the traditional nomadic society. Even worse, large numbers of Russian peasants settled among them with the encouragement of the state. Before 1905, however, open conflict was largely absent.
THE MANCHURIAN GAMBLE
Russia’s last attempt at empire on the Western model was its expansion into Manchuria. Witte’s Transsiberian Railroad went right through Chinese territory to Vladivostok, and Russia carved out a sphere of influence like those of the other Western powers in China. The railroad was under Russian control, and the Ministry of Finance had its own police force to guard it. The Russian fort at Port Arthur provided a base for the Russian navy and also anchored the Russian military presence in Manchuria. The center of Russian administration and business, however, was Harbin, a modern city built from scratch by the Russians, with a Russian administration and a progressive urban order unknown in the rest of the empire. Most restrictions on Jews, for example, did not apply in Harbin. Witte was building a modern Russia on Chinese soil. All these plans came to an end, however, with the Russo-Japanese war. The final peace gave the Russian naval base at Port Arthur to Japan, and Japan proceeded on the path of development and control that led to its further expansion in China. Russia retained control of the railroad, but never achieved dominance in northern China. Manchuria was too far away from the Russian heartland, and too close to Japan.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 32