However much power the tsar and his ministers retained – and it was considerable – they now had to contend with a wholly new political situation, and few of them, Nicholas least of all, were prepared for it.
The next seven years after the dissolution of the second Duma were Russia’s only peacetime experiment in constitutional government with an open press and active public organizations. The fate of the country depended on the ability of Stolypin and others to deal with this new reality. Stolypin’s repression of the revolution met with apparent success: hundreds of activists were executed, especially from the SR terrorist group, and all radical parties lost members in droves to prison, exile, disillusionment, and simple exhaustion. The dissolution of the Duma in 1907 went along with a new, even more indirect and undemocratic electoral system. Some fifty percent of the seats in the new Duma went to the nobility, while the representation of peasants was radically cut, as were the number of seats assigned to the national minority areas in the south and west. The new Duma was overwhelmingly noble, Russian, and very conservative. Most nobles and many businessmen supported the Octobrist party (so-called in their support of the tsar’s October Manifesto), but there was also an extreme right, mostly noblemen, that included leaders of the Black Hundreds. Stolpyin seemed to have a perfect situation in which to carry out his modest reforms, maintain the power of tsar and government, and move toward a more Russian nationalistic policy in the empire. In fact he accomplished little beyond his agrarian program, which proved to be of limited effect. The result of the endless bargaining of Prime Minister and Duma was only to drive a wedge between him and the upper classes. His reforms were too radical for the nobles and yet not strong enough to placate society and the liberals in the Duma. The climax was his 1911 plan to introduce the zemstvo into the western provinces, areas where nobles were predominantly Polish. In order to stack the zemstvo boards against the Poles, Stolypin proposed to increase the number of peasant deputies, Ukrainians and Belorussians whom Stolypin saw as more loyal to the tsar than Polish nobles. At the same time, the zemstvo would relieve the administrative burden on the state and hopefully placate the liberals. In the event, the scheme was too clever to succeed. He managed to get it through the Duma only to have it fail in the Council of State. Stolypin resigned in protest, knowing that Nicholas thought him indispensable. The tsar begged him to return, but Stolypin would not agree unless Nicholas removed some of the extreme conservatives from the government, prorogued the Duma, and enacted the western zemstvo bill by his emergency powers. The tsar agreed, but the incident confirmed his growing suspicion that Stolypin’s plans were too far reaching, and he was too powerful and not trustworthy. Before their disagreements reached a crisis, an SR terrorist assassinated Stolypin in September at a performance in the Kiev opera house.
With Stolypin gone, the tsar turned to lesser figures to run the government. He particularly disliked the institution of a prime minister, and appointed to the office men who would not dominate the cabinet. The result was drift. None of the problems facing Russian society were addressed, and the government was increasingly isolated. In educated society the perception grew, even among conservatives, that the tsar and government did not understand the country and lived in a world of their own. No major issues were addressed, and government measures achieved neither reform nor successful repression. Attempts to use nationalism and anti-semitism to garner popular support backfired. In 1911 the investigation of a murder in Kiev led to accusations of ritual murder against Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish supervisor in a brick factory. The Ministry of Justice in Petersburg and the police “organized” a trial and pamphlets appeared about ritual murder and other supposed crimes of the Jews. Russia, however, now had a relatively free press and the liberal dailies mounted a furious counter campaign. Passions were so inflamed among the intelligentsia that the performance of a play based on the works of Dostoyevsky was shut down in St. Petersburg, on the grounds that the great writer’s anti-semitic nationalism gave support to the prosecution. The trial took place in the fall of 1913 in a regular criminal court in Kiev. The jury remained unconvinced by the prosecution’s evidence and acquitted Beiliss. The result was a major humiliation for the government.
To top it all off, the presence of Grigorii Rasputin at the court added an element of the grotesque to an already bad atmosphere. Rasputin was a wandering monk from Siberia who was introduced into the court at the end of 1905. Empress Alexandra had always been interested in faith healing and hoped that he could help her son, the heir Aleksei. She soon came to believe that Rasputin alone could stop the bleeding. Rasputin thus had unlimited access to the imperial family, in spite of his heterodox religious views and stories (largely true) of drinking bouts and womanizing. The security police set up a whole detachment to watch the monk with the purpose of stopping the rumors as they discredited the tsar and his wife. Rasputin was a real concern to the monarchists and conservatives in the government and Duma and they managed to bring the issue to the floor of the assembly, in the process enraging the tsar. He never realized that they were trying to save the prestige of the throne and instead interpreted their acts as disloyalty. Rasputin, rumors aside, had no political effect that can be traced, but his presence and the real and exaggerated stories further undermined the monarchy.
If the liberals and conservatives in the Duma, for all their frustrations, found in the new order a vast arena for political activity, the revolutionary parties were demoralized, losing thousands of members, especially from the intelligentsia. The leadership went into exile in the West, spending their time trying to keep the movement alive. The movements fissured: Trotsky abandoned the main Menshevik movement and founded his own newspaper in Vienna, commenting from cafés on world politics. The Bolsheviks were particularly contentious, torn by philosophical disputes as well as party tactics and organization. Lenin wrote an entire book denouncing the attempt of some Bolshevik intellectuals to integrate the epistemology of the German physicist Ernst Mach into Marxism. Only around 1912 did the various factions coalesce into organized parties and reestablish a network in Russia. For the Bolshevik party the moment came that year at a conference in Prague that finally consolidated the Bolshevik structure and program, reaffirming Lenin’s belief in the need for an underground party. The Prague conference also marked the beginnings of a generational shift among the Bolsheviks, for the intelligentsia leadership of Lenin’s youth gradually gave way to a younger group that was more plebeian (if not exactly proletarian). They usually lacked university education but were experienced in the ways of the underground and used to making contact with the workers in continuous struggle with the police. One of these was a Georgian Bolshevik, Soso Djugashvili, known as Koba – a shoemaker’s son from the Caucasus. As he made his mark on the movement throughout Russia, he took a new revolutionary pseudonym, Stalin. As Joseph Stalin he would be known to history.
During the time that Stolypin was struggling to control the Duma, the formation of political blocs in Europe continued. Nicholas and the Kaiser repeatedly tried for a rapprochement, but the attempts came to nothing. In 1907 Russia and Britain signed a treaty dividing up spheres of influence in Iran, thus eliminating a major object of their imperial rivalry. The result was not exactly an alliance, but it did put an end to the decades old “Cold War,” and in the presence of an Anglo-French agreement, meant that Russia, with Britain and France, now faced Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were plenty of areas of conflict, the most important being the Balkans. Russia had allied with Serbia, which stood right in the path of any Austrian or German expansion in that area, and both had great ambitions focused on the Ottoman Empire. Germany hoped to make the Turks semi-allies and semi-dependents in their larger rivalry with Great Britain. In 1909 Austria, with German backing, humiliated Russia by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, since 1878 an Austrian protectorate. A series of local wars in the Balkans added to the growing tension. Then in June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, made a tour of the new Bosn
ian province. As his motorcade proceeded along the narrow street by the river at Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, stepped out from the crowd with a revolver and shot him dead. For Russia as for the rest of Europe, it was a fatal shot.
16 War and Revolution
The Russian revolution of 1917 was one of the many consequences of the First World War. The war placed strains on the Russian state and society that neither could withstand. The result was six years of war and upheaval that created the Soviet Union.
WAR
Russia’s participation in the First World War was not an accident. After the Russo-Japanese War Russia’s foreign policy turned west. In 1907 Russia concluded the treaty with its long time rival, Great Britain, to establish a condominium over Iran. The Russians took control of the northern part of the country down to Teheran, and the British the south. This compromise put an end to Anglo-Russian imperial competition in Asia, and meant that Russia was now effectively allied with Britain as well as France. The only imaginable enemies were Germany and Austria. The agreement over Persia set the stage for 1914, but it was imperial rivalries in the Balkans that provided the spark for the explosion. There, Russia faced a resurgent Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria and Bulgaria tagging along. At this point Russia’s only ally was tiny Serbia, which stood right in the way of Austro-German expansion in the south. A series of Balkan crises in these years repeatedly showed Russia’s weakness in the area: it had no formal allies other than Serbia and none of the informal power that came from business ties established by the Germans and Austrians as well as the French and British. When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, Vienna issued an ultimatum to Serbia and Russia had to back up Serbian resistance. Russia’s basic credibility was at stake, and the result was war. It had not sought the war, but had drifted into the crisis as it was doing in so many other areas.
If the government of the Russian Empire after the death of Stolypin merely drifted on the current of events, neither Russian society nor the revolutionary movement demonstrated such passivity. The years just before the First World War were years of dynamic economic growth for the islands of modern industry in the sea of rural backwardness. Industrial development meant growth in the size and to some extent in the sophistication of the working class, and the revolutionary parties were poised to make use of it. In some places the workers turned to strikes again. In 1912 on the Lena River in Siberia, several hundred workers perished when soldiers and police suppressed a strike at the English-owned gold fields. About this time the revolutionary parties had recovered from defeat in 1905–1907. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs were all reasonably well organized, and the labor movement recovered. In the spring of 1914 a wave of strikes swept St. Petersburg, one where the Bolsheviks for the first time seemed to be in the lead, not the Mensheviks or SRs. The rest of the country was relatively quiet, however, and the news of war hit Russia like a thunderbolt. Russia had actually devoted much effort to rebuilding its army and navy since the war with Japan, and one of the many factors encouraging the German General Staff and the Kaiser to push for immediate war was the fear that Russia would be much harder to defeat in only a few years. That being said, both planning and equipment were still deficient. At the insistence of the tsar huge sums had gone to rebuilding the Baltic Fleet, which in the event was far too small to challenge the German navy and never left port. Russia’s armaments industry was still inadequate to supply a modern army and its transport network, adequate for peacetime, was too small for rapid mobilization and supply of the army on the western frontier. To make matters worse, the rapid advance of the German army through Belgium and France created a crisis at the front. Under heavy French pressure the Russians dealt with the crisis by sending an unprepared army into East Prussia, an expedition that ended in defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914. Thus, Russia began the war with a defeat.
At home the war produced an orgy of patriotism at first. To universal acclaim the government changed the German name St. Petersburg to Petrograd, a Russian translation, more or less, of the same. Liberals and reactionaries in the Duma united on a war platform and the intelligentsia, like their counterparts farther west, poured out a flood of anti-enemy propaganda and nationalist ravings. The workers as well were swept up in the fever and the strike movement in the capital evaporated. The police came down hard on the revolutionary parties, particularly on the Bolsheviks, and within days their leaders inside Russia disappeared into prison and Siberian exile. Stalin was among them. The Bolsheviks were the particular object of the government’s wrath because of their position on the war, a position that transformed an obscure Marxist group into a world movement that fundamentally reordered the twentieth century. For it was out of Lenin’s reaction to the war, not as a response to the later Russian Revolution, that Communism was born.
Before 1914 the European Socialist parties had repeatedly pledged at their international meetings to oppose all wars among the European states as inimical to the interests of the working class. These were large powerful parties with mass membership, control of major labor unions, and elaborate social and cultural services, utterly unlike Lenin’s little band of underground fighters. As the declarations of war came thundering out of the governments in July and August 1914, the expectation was that the socialists would likely oppose the war, and even go on strike, as they had threatened earlier, in order to stop it. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, almost to a man the socialist leaders came out for the war, and joined the chorus of patriotism and hate in their respective countries. The few that dissented felt bound by party discipline to keep silent and follow the leadership. Among the Russians, the elderly founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, came out in support of the war, and the Mensheviks adopted a compromise position, not calling for Russian victory but not opposing the war. Alone among the European Socialists, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and a handful of dissident Mensheviks like Trotsky opposed the war from the first day.
Lenin was no pacifist, and his program on the war was not just to oppose it. He proclaimed that the defeat of the Russian Empire would be the best outcome for Russia and called for all socialists, in Russia and elsewhere, to turn the international war into a civil war. In other words, he was calling for armed insurrection in wartime. This position seemed to him the only correct Marxist attitude, but why did so few of the European Socialists agree? They had, he thought, betrayed the working class they were supposed to lead, but why? In despair at the future, Lenin turned to Marxist theory to try to understand what had happened. He reread Aristotle’s Metaphysics (in Greek; he was a product of the Russian gymnasium) and Hegel’s Science of Logic to try to recapture the original sense of dialectics as Hegel and Marx understood it. He also made a long study of recent economic developments. His aim was to understand the support for the war by the European Socialists. His conclusion was that the answer lay in imperialism, in the superwealth generated by the European empires in Africa and Asia, fuelled by the ever-growing concentration of capital. Empire was the real aim of the warring powers, concealed under a deceptive jargon about freedom or national honor. Wealth from empire also produced a labor aristocracy, happy with the status quo and thus unwilling to cause trouble in wartime. In the short term, it would benefit from imperialism. Both conclusions would have enormous effects after the Russian Revolution, but for the moment the reading did little more than keep Lenin busy while the world slipped deeper into the bloody swamp of war.
As the casualties piled up in the millions, opposition to the war began to surface among the socialists in Western Europe. The first to break ranks were the left wing of the German Social-Democrats, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and their followers, who voted against the war credits in the Reichstag in December 1914. Soon the anti-war socialists held small meetings in Switzerland to call for an end to the war and discuss tactics, and even here Lenin, with his uncompromising call for revolution, was in the minority. The Russian Bolsheviks for the first time came to the
attention of the world, as a tiny band of revolutionaries who stuck to their position even though it seemed to doom them to isolation and defeat. Their position began to attract support among Western socialists, and out of these small groups meeting in Switzerland came a world movement with decisive consequences for Russia as well as for China, Vietnam, and other countries as well.
The consequences of these obscure meetings lay in the distant future. Back in Russia, the situation gradually deteriorated and offered no comfort to either the tsar and his government or the Bolsheviks. At the start of the war Nicholas suspended the Duma, hoping to rule alone. The initial defeat in East Prussia was followed in spring, 1915, by a general Russian retreat from Poland, and this retreat finally led to a government crisis. The Duma was recalled over the summer, and the Kadets and moderate conservatives managed to put together a “Progressive Bloc” that offered to cooperate in the war effort with the government. Ultimately the government did have to call on the zemstvos and various committees of businessmen to resolve the crises in supply, but only reluctantly and too late. New agencies appeared to regulate the economy for the war, as in Germany and other warring powers, but Russia lacked the infrastructure to make them work. The government regulated grain prices to supply the army and cities with cheap food, but the result was that the peasants began to cut back on their sowing, and food production began to fall, worsening the situation.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 35