The Russian Empire, conglomerate as it was, functioned successfully only as long as it could remain a coalition of nobilities united by loyalty to the Romanov dynasty and rewarded appropriately for faithful service. Clearly this model of the empire mainly applied to the European areas and the Christian Caucasus, but there it did work until the strains of modernization undermined the domination of the nobility. The Russian state also tried to increase administrative uniformity and centralization, the policy known as Russificiation, but its efforts were half-hearted. There were too many obstacles, lack of financial resources, the influence of local elites, and the general backwardness of the country. The state could not abolish the variety of legal status and local administration in favor of a single unified state that might strive to assimilate all minorities to Russian language and culture, and indeed almost no one in the government had any such aim. Outside government policy, there were, of course, other more modern forces of integration – the power of the huge Russian market, the modernization of Russian culture, modern transportation and media, as in other countries, but they were all weaker than in Western Europe. The result was an unstable equilibrium in an empire too modern to remain an empire of nobilities around the tsar but too backward to fully unleash the social forces that integrated minorities in Western Europe. The Russians could not hope to imitate the ruthless and highly successful Germanization schemes in the German parts of Poland, for those depended on the combination of state resources, enthusiastic public support from a populace mobilized around nationalism, and the economic pull of German society. Russia had little of this, and its policies, especially in Poland, antagonized the people without being effective. Such integration of non-Russian minorities that did occur, and it was not small, came about simply by the ordinary motion of social change, not from state policy.
As time progressed, traditional loyalties eroded. Nationalist movements among the minorities emerged during the 1890s, but did not yet set the tone among non-Russian peoples. Few, save the Poles and the more radical of the Finns, actually anticipated or sought independence: their aim was greater autonomy within Russia. Many of the minorities were more concerned about one another than about Russians or the imperial state. The Baltic peoples saw their main antagonists in the Germans, the Finns fought over the Swedish-Finnish language issue, the nationalist movements of the Poles and Ukrainians feared each other and the Jews. Politicized Jews increasingly turned to Jewish socialist movements (the Bund) or to Zionism. At the same time, the great cities, especially St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Donbass mining and manufacturing towns, were powerful integrating forces, attracting thousands of migrants from among the Baltic peoples, Finns, Poles, and Jews. The main concern of the state remained the politics of the Russian core, the maturing liberal opposition and the revolutionary socialists. The autocracy saw them, not local nationalists, as their main threat, and it was right.
1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term “Baltic Provinces” did not include Lithuania, which was part of the former Polish political and cultural sphere. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came to be called the “Baltic states” and seen as a group only after independence in 1918.
15 Autocracy in Decline
The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to formulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism, political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the implications of the further modernization of society that resulted in part from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy.
Alexander III had become the heir to the throne in 1865 on the death of his older brother. Alexander was already twenty at the time and the product of a rather narrow military education unlike that provided for his brother. In 1866 he married Princess Dagmar of Denmark (Mariia Fedorovna after her conversion to Orthodoxy), leading to a stable marriage with a woman of intelligence and extremely conservative views. The young heir was no intellectual, but he did come in contact with Slavophile ideas at court and through his tutor in jurisprudence, Konstantin Pobedonostev. Through the guards and other aristocrats he became friends with the conservative publicist (and the most prominent gay in the St. Petersburg aristocracy), Prince V. M. Meshcherskii. These were highly principled radical conservatives, with nothing but contempt for freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government, all of which they saw as shams and likely to lead to revolution. In their view what was needed was the unity of society and the monarch, which they saw as the essence of autocracy. By the 1870s they formed a powerful opposition to the more liberal ministers around Alexander II, powerful largely because of their association with the heir. As part of his attempt at balanced government, Tsar Alexander II appointed Pobedonostsev head of the Synod, a position he held for the next twenty-four years. After Alexander III came to the throne, Pobedonostsev used his position at the Synod to retain constant access to the tsar, offering him advice on all sorts of subjects well beyond the ecclesiastical issues under his purview. In the eyes of liberal society and many government officials, he had far too much power and influence, all of it in a conservative direction. “Prince of Darkness” was one of his milder nicknames.
In reality Alexander listened to Pobedonostsev and Meshcherskii, but in his decisions usually went along with the ministers, conservative to be sure but unwilling to tear down the structure so carefully built up by the previous reign. Those structures still left many areas where the ministers and local administrators could act on their own discretion – in relations with the zemstvos, cases of administrative exile of liberals and socialists, and others. Here the tsar and his officials almost always chose the harsher and more authoritarian line. The 1881 “Temporary Regulations” were directed against the revolutionaries and allowed provincial governors to declare states of “reinforced security,” which allowed them to imprison subversives without trial, transfer security cases to military courts, and shut down universities and businesses. The regulations lasted until 1917. At the same time, few “counter-reforms” were actually enacted. University autonomy was further restricted, and the tsar issued a decree establishing noblemen as appointed “land captains” to monitor law enforcement in the villages. The decree did, as intended, reinforce the power of the gentry in the countryside, and other regulations tinkering with local administration strengthened the bureaucracy against the zemstvo, but none of these measures was a major change. In the cities the government eventually raised the property qualification for elections to the city Dumas and prohibited Jews from sitting in the Dumas but left the basic structure intact. The reactionary character of the reign of Alexander III lay in the absence of response to ongoing social and economic change rather than any concerted attempt to return to a previous era.
Part of the new reign was also increasingly shrill official nationalism, including official anti-semitism. Again this was more a change in tone than substance, for little in the way of new measures or policies appeared, but a more rigorous enforcement of discriminatory legislation against Jews, such as the restrictions on settlement beyond the confines of the Pale did appear. In 1887 the government introduced the formal quota for Jews at universities in addition to the new laws on city government. There were other occasional forays into Russification. The latter was often more declaratory than real, for the Russian empire lacked the resources to form a firm policy in this area. Proposals to substitute Russian-language for German-language schools in the Baltic provinces, a particular campaign
of Russian nationalists at the time, failed because the Ministry of Education pointed out that it lacked the resources for either teachers or school buildings. Thus the schools in the Baltic provinces remained in local, that is to say German, hands. The continued prominence of German and other non-Russian aristocrats at the court, in the army, and diplomatic corps also put a very sharp limit to the amount of “Russianness” the government could claim or try to enforce.
It was in foreign and economic policy that the years of Alexander III brought the most changes. In the years after Crimea Prince Gorchakov had kept the country firmly in the traditional camp of friendship with Prussia, at the same time trying to ease the tension with Britain and France. In the latter he was only partially successful, and the ambiguous position of Bismarck’s Germany at the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 undermined the old alliance of Berlin and St. Petersburg. As Germany grew closer to Austria in the course of the 1880s, the relationship fell under even greater strain, for both Russia and Austria had designs on the Balkans. The competition between Russia and the two German powers led to the end of Russian influence in Bulgaria in 1886. The resultant cooling in Russo-German relations left Russia effectively isolated in Europe. The new Germany, however, had been built on victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and thus had in France an implacable enemy. Both Russia and France quickly recognized a common interest, and in 1893 the great republic and the autocracy of the east signed a treaty that made them allies against Germany. The political constellation that had lasted on the European continent since 1815 came to an end, and the first seed was sown that would lead to war in 1914. To this day the Alexander III Bridge in the center of Paris serves as a reminder of that fatal alliance.
The alliance was not yet, however, a trigger of war, for none of the potential enemies wanted it as yet. The dynastic ties between Berlin and St. Petersburg remained, and allowed both sides to retain the illusion that things might eventually work out. The respective armies, however, thought differently, for the Russian army had begun to rethink its western defenses starting in the 1870s, when Germany and Russia were still allies, and the German army also moved quickly to plan for a two-front war. For the time being, however, the attention of governments and societies was more focused on the Far East. Here two quite separate issues came together, Sergei Witte’s economic plans and the rise of Japan.
Sergei Witte was perhaps the last really dynamic and thoughtful statesman in the Russian Empire, a man with great plans and abilities as well as a giant ego, who never easily worked with others on an equal basis. Contemptuous of the other ministers of state – in large part justifiably – he formulated his plans with his staff and worked directly with the tsar. How he came to this position is a story in itself. Witte always claimed that his ancestors were Dutch and came to Russia through the Baltic provinces. In fact his grandfather was simply a middle-class Baltic German (perhaps with Dutch ancestry) who served as a tutor in Russian noble families. The young Witte finished Odessa University in natural science, not administrative law like most future officials. He also seems to have participated in a shadowy right-wing society called the “Union of St. Michael the Archangel,” but then went to work for the South Western Railway, a private railroad running between Odessa and Kiev. This gave him a sense of the workings of capitalist enterprise that few high Russian officials could duplicate. Alexander III first appointed him to the government’s railroad department and his rise was swift: by 1892 he was Minster of Finance at the age of forty-three, a notable achievement in an increasingly elderly government. Like earlier favorites of the tsar, his power rested entirely on the trust of the monarch, for Witte was too arrogant, too uncouth, and too unused to the subtleties of Petersburg politics to find allies among the ministers. He regarded most of them as timid incompetents, but failed to realize that without them he had only the tsar on whom to rely. With Alexander III on the throne, this attitude seemed sensible.
Witte’s great project was the Transsiberian Railroad, begun already in 1891. This enormous line of track, stretching across the whole of northern Asia, was to become in many ways his monument. Against many skeptics he pushed the project through, first with the support of Alexander III and then with that of his son Nicholas II. Witte’s plans were not merely to improve communications with the farthest point of the empire. A radical change was needed to be sure, for the only ways to get from European Russia to the Pacific were to go by horse and riverboat over several months, or to take a steamer from Odessa through the Suez Canal around India and China. Witte intended to develop Siberia, both for its natural resources and its potential as a settlement area to relieve the peasants’ hunger for land. At the same time he was aware that the European powers were carving up China into spheres of influence and he did not want Russia to miss acquiring its share. Thus the last leg of the new railroad’s route was to run from Lake Baikal through Manchuria to Vladivostok, leaving a line inside Russian territory for later. The aim was to take Manchuria as Russia’s share of China and a space for a new, more modern style of colonialism. Witte’s aim had been “peaceful penetration” of China for economic reasons, but the Russian military wanted a naval base, and in 1896 managed to lease Port Arthur, on the south coast of Manchuria, from China. Russia seemed to have a firm position in the Far East.
Figure 16. Count Sergei Witte, probably in New Hampshire for the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905.
The only problem with this brilliant plan was Japan. Exactly in the 1890s Japan was making its own first steps toward empire in Asia, with its defeat of China and increasing informal power in Korea. The presence of a Russian railroad, Harbin, and a naval base at Port Arthur was a serious irritant to the Japanese and a direct consequence of Witte’s policies. For the time being, however, peace remained, and Russia, Japan, and the European powers worked together to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900).
Figure 17. Tsar Nicholas II on the imperial yacht Shtandart.
In 1894 Alexander III died. Though his policies kept Russia from moving forward in almost all areas but industrialization and empire building, he was at least a firm leader capable of making difficult decisions, as Witte recognized. His son, Nicholas II, was a man of very different character. He utterly lacked his father’s ability to take charge and make use of his ministers. Alexander had gone along with them on most occasions but had also been willing to accept a minority view and support it. Nicholas often simply agreed with whoever spoke to him last, and then changed his mind again. He shared his father’s views of the worthlessness of legislatures, freedom of speech, and human rights and tended to see the hidden hand of the Jews in liberalism and socialism. Had he not been the tsar, he would have made an ideal conservative country gentleman, for he was also gracious, kind, and a good family man. His wife Alexandra, the German princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, encouraged all these characteristics, as she was equally conservative and equally devoted to her family.
Unfortunately Alexandra’s devotion to her family and her limited horizons were not helpful in dealing with the hemophilia that her son, the heir to the throne Alexei, had from birth. Her response was to turn to a series of faith healers, each one more influential than the last. To top it off, the fully justified fear of terrorists increased the isolation of Nicholas and his family, in turn making it even harder for them to understand what was happening around them. The endless round of trips to the Crimea and elsewhere, the occasional court entertainments and family excursions on the imperial yacht did not leave much space for contact with the people. The only public appearances were carefully staged, often as part of religious ceremonies, which gave both tsar and people an utterly false sense of the country’s needs and public opinion.
At first, however, everything went well. Nicholas was a great enthusiast for the Far East and its development and supported Witte to the hilt. He even supported the Minister’s controversial placing of Russia on the gold standard in 1897, a measure designed to encourage investment and i
ndustrialization but a decision that was not necessarily good for the agrarian interests that the nobility defended. After 1900 the tsar’s support for Witte began to erode. The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve, a career official and powerful personality, to head the Ministry of the Interior gave Witte a strong rival, and by the middle of 1903 Nicholas had removed the Minister of Finance from office. Plehve’s only solution to Russia’s problems was more repression, both of revolutionaries and middle and upper class liberals.
All of these opposition groups rapidly grew and consolidated in the 1890s. The first to organize were the Marxists, who rejected terror in favor of organizing workers to strike and fight employers and the state in collective action. The Marxists who managed to meet and adopt a general program in 1898 were then immediately arrested and the various Marxist groups did not come together again until 1903. When they met in London that year a new figure came to the fore, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University with experience in the underground and exile. This was Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, whose revolutionary pseudonym was Lenin. The son of a high school science teacher and inspector of public schools in Simbirsk on the Volga, Lenin had gone from Siberian exile to Western Europe to edit a socialist journal, Iskra (Spark), through which he and Marxism acquired a following among the students and few workers who were the seedbed of the revolutionary movement. At the congress in London the party was refounded with a more elaborate program and structure, and the first disagreements broke out. The aim of the Marxists was to overthrow the tsar and establish a democratic republic (a “bourgeois revolution”). That is to say, they believed that until this task was completed, they should not try for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the introduction of socialism. The enemy for now was the tsar. Thus they would be operating under the autocracy, continuously at war with the police, and Lenin believed that the party should be primarily an underground movement of professional revolutionaries. His opponents, with their most accomplished leader Iulii Martov, thought that Lenin was exaggerating the need to concentrate on the underground struggle and wanted a looser party. In the vote on the question Lenin won by a narrow majority, and his followers thus acquired the name Bolsheviks (bol’she meaning “more”) and Martov’s followers Mensheviks (men’she meaning “less”). This dispute did not yet engage the few worker activists, and remained the province of the party’s intelligentsia. For that is what the leaders were in these early years. Martov’s father was a prosperous Jewish businessman and journalist in the Russian-language Jewish press, and he himself attended the gymnasia in St. Petersburg and had a year at the university before he was arrested for revolutionary activity. Trotsky came from a family of Jewish farmers, the descendents of settlers in New Russia from the time of Alexander I. The graduate of an elite Lutheran high school in Odessa, Leon Trotsky, like Lenin and Martov, was typical of the early revolutionary leaders.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 33