Recently, some French historians have called for an end to the discussion of the causes and meaning of the French Revolution, declaring it to be “terminated.” But an occurrence that raises such fundamental philosophical and moral questions can never end. For the dispute is not only over what has happened in the past but also over what may happen in the future.
Richard Pipes
Chesham, New Hampshire
May 1989
PART ONE
The Agony of the Old Regime
The paralytics in the government are struggling feebly, indecisively, as if unwillingly, with the epileptics of the revolution.
—Ivan Shcheglovitov, Minister of Justice, in 1915
1
1905: The Foreshock
In the preface to an autobiographical novel, Somerset Maugham explains why he prefers to write narratives in a literary rather than strictly factual manner:
Fact is a poor story teller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion … a story needs a supporting skeleton. The skeleton of a story is of course its plot. Now a plot has certain characteristics that you cannot get away from. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.… This means that story should begin at a certain point and end at a certain point.
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The historian does not have the luxury of reshaping events to fit the skeleton of a plot, which means that the story he tells can have neither a clear beginning nor a definite end. It must begin at haphazard and tail off, unfinished.
When did the Russian Revolution begin? Peter Struve, a leading liberal publicist at the turn of the century, surveying the wreckage of Imperial Russia, concluded that it had been preordained as early as 1730, when Empress Anne reneged on the promise to abide by a set of constitutional limitations that the aristocracy had forced upon her as a condition of giving her the throne. A case can also be made that the Revolution began in 1825 with the abortive Decembrist Revolt. Certainly in the 1870s Russia had a full-fledged revolutionary movement: the men who led the 1917 Revolution looked to the radicals of the 1870s as forerunners.
If, however, one wishes to identify events that not merely foreshadowed 1917 but led directly to it, then the choice has to fall on the disorders that broke out at Russian universities in February 1899. Although they were soon quelled by the usual combination of concessions and repression, these disorders set in motion a movement of protest against the autocracy that did not abate until the revolutionary upheaval of 1905–6. This First Revolution was also eventually crushed but at a price of major political concessions that fatally weakened the Russian monarchy. To the extent that historical events have a beginning, the beginning of the Russian Revolution may well have been the general university strike of February 1899.
And a haphazard beginning it was. Since the 1860s Russian institutions of higher learning had been the principal center of opposition to the tsarist regime: revolutionaries were, for the most part, either university students or university dropouts. At the turn of the century, Russia had ten universities as well as a number of specialized schools which taught religion, law, medicine, and engineering. They had a total enrollment of 35,000. The student body came overwhelmingly from the lower classes. In 1911, the largest contingent was made up of sons of priests, followed by sons of bureaucrats and peasants: hereditary nobles constituted less than 10 percent, equal to the number of Jews.2 The Imperial Government needed an educated elite and promoted higher education, but it wished, unrealistically, to confine education strictly to professional and vocational training. Such a policy satisfied the majority of students, who, even if critical of the regime, did not want politics to interfere with their studies: this is known from surveys taken in the revolutionary year of 1905. But whenever the authorities overreacted to the radical minority, which they usually did, the students closed ranks.
In 1884, in the course of the “counterreforms,” which followed the assassination of Alexander II, the government revised the liberal University Statute issued twenty-one years earlier. The new regulations deprived the universities of a great deal of autonomy and placed them under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Education. Their faculties could no longer elect rectors. Disciplinary authority over the students was entrusted to an outsider, a state inspector, who had police functions. Student organizations were declared illegal, even in the form of zemliachestva, associations formed by students from the same province to provide mutual assistance. Students were understandably unhappy with the new regulations. Their unhappiness was aggravated by the appointment in 1897 as Minister of Education of N. P. Bogolepov, a professor of Roman law, the first academic to hold the post but a dry and unsympathetic conservative whom they dubbed “Stone Guest.” Still, the 1880s and 1890s were a period of relative calm at the institutions of higher learning.
The event which shattered this calm was trifling. St. Petersburg University traditionally celebrated on February 8 the anniversary of its founding.*
2. Nicholas II and family shortly before outbreak of World War I. By his side, Alexandra Fedorovna. The daughters, from left to right: Marie, Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia. In front, Tsarevich Alexis.
On that day it was customary for the students, after taking part in formal festivities organized by the faculty, to stage celebrations in the center of the city. It was pure fun in which politics played no part. But in the Russia of that time any public event not officially sanctioned was treated as insubordination and, as such, as political and subversive. Determined to put a stop to such disturbances, the authorities requested the Rector, the well-known and popular law professor V. I. Sergeevich, to warn the students that such celebrations would no longer be tolerated. The warning, posted throughout the university and published in the press, deserves full citation because it reflected so faithfully the regime’s police mentality:
On February 8, the anniversary of the founding of the Imperial St. Petersburg University, it has been not uncommon for students to disturb peace and order on the streets as well as in public places of St. Petersburg. These disturbances begin immediately after the completion of university celebrations when students, singing and shouting “Hurrah!,” march in a crowd to the Palace Bridge and thence to Nevsky Prospect. In the evening, noisy intrusions into restaurants, places of amusement, the circus, and the Little Theater take place. Deep into the night the streets adjoining these establishments are cut off by an excited crowd, causing regrettable clashes and annoyance to the public. St. Petersburg society has long taken note of these disorders: it is indignant and blames the university and the entire student body, even though only a small part is involved.
The law makes provisions for such disorders and subjects those guilty of violating public order to imprisonment for 7 days and fines of up to 25 rubles. If such disorders involve a large crowd which ignores police orders to disperse, the participants are subject to terms of imprisonment for up to one month and fines of up to 100 rubles. And if the disorder has to be quelled by force, then those guilty are subject to terms of imprisonment of up to three months and fines of up to 300 rubles.
On February 8, the police are obliged to preserve peace in the same manner as on any other day of the year. Should order be disturbed, they are obliged to stop the disturbance at any cost. In addition, the law provides for the use of force to end disorders. The results of such a clash with the police may be most unfortunate. Those guilty may be subject to arrest, the loss of privileges, dismissal and expulsion from the university, and exile from the capital. I feel obliged to warn the student body of this. Students must respect the law in order to uphold the honor and dignity of the university.
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The tactless admonition infuriated the students. When on February 8 Sergeevich mounted the speakers’ rostrum, they booed and hissed him for twenty minutes. They then streamed outside singing “Gaudeamus Igitur” and the “Marseillaise.” The crowd attempted to cross the
Palace Bridge into the city but, finding it blocked by the police, proceeded instead to the Nikolaev Bridge. Here more police awaited them. The students claimed that in the ensuing melee they were beaten with whips, and the police that they were pelted with snowballs and chunks of ice.
Greatly excited, the students held during the following two days assemblies at which they voted to strike until the government assured them that the police would respect their rights.4 Up to this point the grievance was specific and capable of being satisfied.
But the protest movement was promptly taken over by radicals in charge of an illegal Mutual Aid Fund (Kassa vzaimopomoshchi) who saw in it an opportunity to politicize the student body. The Fund was dominated by socialists, some of whom would later play a leading role in the revolutionary movement, among them Boris Savinkov, a future terrorist, Ivan Kaliaev, who in 1905 would assassinate Grand Duke Sergei, the governor-general of Moscow, and George Nosar (Khrustalev), who in October 1905 would chair the Petrograd Soviet.5 The leaders of the Fund at first dismissed the strike as a “puerile” exercise, but took charge once they realized that the movement enjoyed broad support. They formed an organizing committee to direct the strike and dispatched emissaries to the other schools with requests for support. On February 15, Moscow University joined the strike; on February 17, Kiev followed suit; and before long all the major institutions of higher learning in the Empire were shut down. An estimated 25,000 students boycotted classes. The strikers called for an end to arbitrary discipline and police brutality; they posed as yet no political demands.
The authorities responded by arresting the strike leaders. More liberal officials, however, managed to persuade them that the protests had no political purpose and were best contained by satisfying legitimate student grievances. Indeed, the striking students believed themselves to be acting in defense of the law rather than challenging the tsarist regime.6 A commission was appointed under P. S. Vannovskii, a former Minister of War, a venerable general with impeccable conservative credentials. While the Commission pursued its inquiries, the students drifted back to classes, ignoring the protests of the organizing committee. St. Petersburg University voted to end the strike on March 1, and Moscow resumed work four days later.7
Displeased by this turn of events, the socialists on the organizing committee issued on March 4, in the name of the student body, a Manifesto that claimed the events of February 8, 1899, were merely
one episode of the regime that prevails in Russia, [a regime] that rests on arbitrariness, secrecy [
bezglasnost’
] and complete lack of security, including even the absence of the most indispensable, indeed, the most sacred rights of the development of human individuality …
The Manifesto called on all the oppositional elements in Russia to “organize for the forthcoming struggle,” which would end only “with the attainment of its main goal—the overthrow of autocracy.”8 In the judgment of the police official reporting on these events, this Manifesto was not so much the expression of student disorders as a “prelude to the Russian Revolution.”9
The episode just described was a microcosm of the tragedy of late Imperial Russia: it illustrated to what extent the Revolution was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes. The government chose to treat a harmless manifestation of youthful spirits as a seditious act. In response, radical intellectuals escalated student complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the police into a wholesale rejection of the “system.” It was, of course, absurd to insinuate that student grievances which produced the university strike could not be satisfied without the overthrow of the country’s political regime: restoring the 1863 University Statutes would have gone a long way toward meeting these grievances, as most students must have believed, since they returned to classes following the appointment of the Vannovskii Commission. The technique of translating specific complaints into general political demands would become a standard procedure for Russian liberals and radicals. It precluded compromises and partial reforms: nothing, it was alleged, could be improved as long as the existing system remained in place, which meant that revolution was a necessary precondition of any improvement whatsoever.
Contrary to expectations, the Vannovskii Commission sided with the students, placing the blame for the February events on the police. It concluded that the strikes were neither conspiratorial in origin nor political in spirit, but a spontaneous manifestation of student unhappiness over their treatment. Vannovskii proposed a return to the 1863 University Statutes, as well as a number of specific reforms including the legalization of student assemblies and zemliachestva, reducing the amount of time devoted to the study of Latin, and abolishing the Greek requirement. The authorities chose to reject these recommendations, preferring to resort to punitive measures.10
On July 29, 1899, the government issued “Temporary Rules” which provided that students guilty of political misconduct would lose their military deferments. At the time of publication, it was widely assumed that the measure was intended to frighten the students and would not be enforced. But enforced it was. In November 1900, after a year and a half of quiet, fresh university disturbances broke out, this time in Kiev, to protest the expulsion of two students. Several universities held protest meetings in support of Kiev. On January 11, 1901, invoking the July 1899 ordinance, Bogolepov ordered the induction into the army of 183 Kievan students. When St. Petersburg University struck in sympathy, 27 of its students were similarly punished. One month later, a student by the name of P. V. Karpovich shot and fatally wounded Bogolepov: the minister was the first victim of the new wave of terrorism which in the next few years would claim thousands. Contemporaries regarded Bogolepov’s measures against the students and his assassination as marking the onset of a new revolutionary era.11
More university strikes followed at Kharkov, Moscow, and Warsaw. Hundreds of students were expelled by administrative procedures. In 1901, hoping to calm the situation, the government appointed Vannovskii, then seventy-eight years of age, to take Bogolepov’s place. Vannovskii introduced modifications in the university rules, authorizing student gatherings and relaxing the ancient language requirements. The concessions failed to appease the students; indeed, student organizations rejected them on the grounds that they indicated weakness and should be exploited for political ends.12 Having failed to calm the universities, Vannovskii was dismissed.
Henceforth, Russian institutions of higher learning became the fulcrum of political opposition. Viacheslav Plehve, the arch-conservative director of the Police Department, was of the opinion that “almost all the regicides and a very large number of those involved in political crimes” were students.13 According to Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, a liberal academic, the universities now became thoroughly politicized: students increasingly lost interest in academic rights and freedoms, caring only for politics, which made normal academic life impossible. Writing in 1906, he described the university strikes of 1899 as the beginning of the “general crisis of the state.”14
The unrest at institutions of higher learning occurred against a background of mounting oppositional sentiment in zemstva, organs of local self-government created in 1864. In 1890, during the era of “counterreforms,” the rights of zemstva were restricted, which caused as much unhappiness among its deputies as the 1884 University Statutes did among students. In the late 1890s, zemtsy began to hold semi-legal national conclaves with political overtones.15
The government at this point had two alternatives: it could seek to placate the opposition, so far confined mainly to the educated elements, with concessions, or it could resort to still harsher repressive measures. Concessions would have certainly been the wiser choice, because the opposition was a loose alliance of diverse elements from which it should have been possible, at a relatively small cost, to satisfy the more moderate elements and detach them from the revolutionaries. Repression, on the other hand, drove these elements into each other’s arms and radicalized the moderates. The T
sar, Nicholas II, was committed to absolutism in part because he believed himself duty-bound by his coronation oath to uphold this system, and in part because he felt convinced that the intellectuals were incapable of administering the Empire. Not entirely averse to some concessions if they would restore order, he lacked patience: whenever concessions did not immediately produce the desired results, he abandoned them and had recourse to police measures.
When in April 1902 a radical student killed the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin, it was decided to give the police virtually unlimited powers. The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve as Sipiagin’s successor signaled the beginning of a policy of unflinching confrontation with “society,” a declaration of war against all who challenged the principle of autocracy. During Plehve’s two-year tenure in office, Russia came close to becoming a police state in the modern, “totalitarian” sense of the word.
To contemporaries, Plehve was a man of mystery: even his date and place of birth were unknown. His past has come to light only recently as a result of archival researches.16 Of German origin, he had been raised in Warsaw. He attended law school, following which he served for a time as procurator. His bureaucratic career began in earnest in 1881 with the appointment to the post of director of the newly formed Department of Police, established to fight sedition. He is said to have feigned liberalism to qualify for this post under the relatively enlightened ministry then in office.17 Henceforth, he lived and worked in the shadow world of political counterintelligence. Introducing the technique of infiltration and provocation, he achieved brilliant successes in penetrating and destroying revolutionary organizations. He had excellent understanding of the issues touching on state security, an indomitable capacity for work, and skill in adjusting to the shifting winds of Court politics. The personification of bureaucratic conservatism, he was unwilling to grant the population a voice in affairs of state. Such changes as were required—and he did not oppose them in principle—had to come from above, from the Crown: in the words of his biographer, he was “not so much opposed to change as to loss of control.”18 While intolerant of public initiatives, he was prepared to have the government take direct charge of everything that required reforms in the status quo. The police in his view had not merely a negative function—that is, preventing sedition (kramola)—but also the positive one of actively directing the forces that life brought to the surface and that left to themselves could undermine the government’s political monopoly. In this extraordinary extension of police functions into the realm of positive management of society lay the seed of modern totalitarianism. Because Plehve refused to distinguish between the moderate (loyal) and radical opposition, he inadvertently forged a united front which, under the name Liberational Movement (OsvoboditeVnoe dvizhenie) would in 1904–5 compel the government to give up its autocratic prerogatives.
The Russian Revolution Page 3