*Galai, Liberation Movement, 262–63. The Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, the largest labor organization in Russia, with 700,000 members, had only 130,000 workers: the majority of its members were local hands, mostly peasants: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974), 269, note 53.
*Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, n. See Andrew M. Verner, Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, 370–76. Verner maintains that Witte misdated his first meeting with Nicholas and that it actually took place one day earlier (October 8), but this seems most unlikely, especially in view of the testimony of a third person, D. M. Solskii (Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, 25).
†Witte’s memorandum of October 9, 1905, is in KA, No. 11–12 (1925), 51–61. The above passage appears on p. 55. This is what Struve had written four months earlier: “Russia needs a strong government which will not fear revolution because it will place itself at its head … The Revolution in Russia must become the government”: Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 384. Struve’s program, from which Witte generously borrowed: Ibid., 376–85. The concept is an echo of the French Revolution: when, in February 1791, Louis XVI urged the National Assembly to pursue the work of reform, Brissot, the Girondist leader, declared: “The King is now the Head of the Revolution” (J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution, Oxford, 1947, 192).
*The entire St. Petersburg garrison at this time consisted of 2,000 men: Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 225. Cf. Vitte, Vospominaniia, II, 9–10, 26–27.
*The earliest Soviet had emerged in May 1905 in the textile center of Ivanovo-Voznesensk to manage the workers’ economic conflict with the employers. It had no political program. Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974), 40–42.
*In the revolutionary years 1905–6 as well as 1917, persons wearing glasses, called ochkastye, risked the fury of both monarchist and radical mobs: Albert Parry in the preface to A. Volskii [Machajski], Umstvennyi rabochii (New York-Baltimore, 1968), 15–16.
†L. Geller and N. Rovenskaia, eds., Peterburgskii i Moskovskii Sovety Rabochikh Deputatov 1905 g. (v dokumentakh) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 17. This position was grounded in the conviction of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, that left to follow their own inclinations, the workers would not make revolution but seek accommodation with capitalism. For this reason the revolution had to be done for them but not by them.
*Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, 26–27. Witte asserted that he opposed issuing the reform program in the form of a manifesto because such a document, written in succinct and solemn language, could not provide the rationale behind the reforms and might unsettle the population: Ibid., 33. Imperial manifestos were read at church services.
*G. G. Savich, ed., Novyi gosudarstevennyi stroi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), 24–25. The only demand of the September 1905 Zemstvo Congress which the October Manifesto ignored concerned the Duma’s control over the budget, but that power was granted to it later in the Fundamental Laws.
*This is what Witte told Nicholas during his audience of October 9: Verner, Nicholas II, 373–74.
*A survey of the rural disorders in 1905–6 carried a report from the Central Agricultural Region which stated that the “agrarian movement was caused by the fact that from all ends of Russia at a certain time the villages heard reports that in the cities people beat Yids [zhidov] and were allowed to steal their property without being punished”: Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1905-1906 gg., I (St. Petersburg, 1908), 48. Similar observations were made about agrarian violence in the Ukraine: Ibid., II, 290.
*Two weeks after he had explained the anti-Jewish pogroms as justifiable punishment, he noted with dismay that these pogroms were followed by the destruction of estates of Russian landlords: KA, No. 3/22 (1927), 174.
*Pankratova et al, eds., Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii, IV, Pt. 1, 650. The authors of this program apparently decided on their own that the Assembly would replace the monarchy with a republic.
2
Official Russia
The events we have described occurred in a country that in many respects was unique. Ruled (until 1905) by an absolute monarchy, administered by an all-powerful bureaucracy, and composed of social castes, Russia resembled an Oriental despotism. Its international ambitions, however, and the economic and cultural policies which these ambitions necessitated, injected into Russia a dynamism that was Western in origin. The contradiction between the static quality of the political and social order and the dynamism of the economy and cultural life produced a condition of endemic tension. It lent the country a quality of impermanence, of expectation: as one contemporary French visitor put it, Russia seemed somehow “unfinished.”1
Until the October Manifesto, Russia was an autocracy (samoderzhavie). The old Fundamental Laws defined her sovereign, formally designated Emperor (Gosudar’ Imperator), as “unlimited” (neogranichennyi) and “autocratic” (samoderzhavnyi). The first adjective meant that he was subject to no constitutional restraints; the second, that he was not limited institutionally.2 The Emperor’s authority received its original definition in 1716 in the Military Regulation of Peter the Great (Chapter 3, Article 20), which was still in force in 1900:
His Majesty is an absolute [
samovlastnyi
] monarch, who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill [
blagomnenie
].
The Emperor was the exclusive source of laws and ordinances. According to Article 51 of the old Fundamental Laws, “no post [mesto] or office [pravitel’stvo] of the realm may, on its own initiative, pass a new law, and no law can go into effect without the sanction of the autocratic authority.” In practice it proved impossible to enforce such a rigid absolutism in a country with 125 million inhabitants and the world’s fifth-largest economy, and in time, increasing discretionary authority was vested in the officialdom. Nevertheless, the autocratic principle was strictly insisted upon and any challenge to it, in word or deed, led to savage persecution.
On the face of it, the autocracy did not differ from the monarchies of ancien régime Europe, and it was thus widely regarded, in and out of Russia, as an anachronism. But viewed more closely, in the context of her own past, Russia’s absolutism showed peculiar qualities that distinguished it from that of the Bourbons, Stuarts, or Hohenzollerns. European travelers to Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ancien régime absolutism stood at its zenith, were impressed by the differences between what they were accustomed to at home and what they saw in Russia.3 The peculiar features of Russian absolutism in its early form, which lasted from the fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, were marked by the virtual absence of the institution of private property, which in the West confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority. In Russia, the very concept of property (in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over objects) was unknown until introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century by the German-born Catherine II. Muscovite Russia had been run like a private estate, its inhabitants and territories, with everything they contained, being treated as the property of the Crown.
This type of regime has been known since the time of Hobbes as “patriarchal” or “patrimonial.”* Its distinguishing feature is the fusion of sovereignty and ownership, the monarch viewing himself and being viewed by his subjects as both ruler of the realm and its proprietor. At its height patrimonial rule in Russia rested on four pillars:
1. Monopoly on political authority
2. Monopoly on economic resources and wholesale trade
3. The ruler’s claims to unlimited services from his subjects; absence of individual as well as group (estate) rights
4. Monopoly on public information
Having in the early 1700s laid claim to the st
atus of a European power, Russia had to be able to match her Western rivals in military might, economic productivity, and culture. This requirement forced the monarchy partially to dismantle the patrimonial institutions which had served it well as long as Russia had been essentially an Oriental power competing with other Oriental powers. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the monarchy recognized the right to property in land and in its other forms: the word “property” (sobstvennost’, from the German Eigentum) entered the Russian vocabulary at this time. Concurrently, the Crown began to withdraw from manufacture and trade. Although by Western standards the Russian state of 1900 still loomed large in the national economy, the country by then had a flourishing free market and corresponding capitalist institutions. Even while violating human rights, tsarism respected private property. The government also gradually gave up the claim to unlimited services from its subjects, freeing from compulsory state service first the gentry (dvorianstvo) (1762) and a century later (1861) the serfs. It continued to insist on the right to censor publications, but since it did not exercise this right either strictly or consistently, the flow of ideas was not seriously affected, the more so that there were few restrictions on foreign travel.
Thus, by 1900, with one exception, the patrimonial regime was a thing of the past: the exception was the country’s political system. While “manumitting” society economically, socially, and culturally, the Crown persisted in refusing to give it a voice in legislation and administration.* It continued to insist that it had the sole right to legislative and executive power, that the Tsar was “unlimited” as well as “autocratic,” and that all laws had to emanate from him. The incompatibility of Russia’s political constitution with her economic, social, cultural, and even administrative realities was widely recognized at the time as an anomaly by most educated Russians. For, indeed, how could one reconcile the advanced state of Russia’s industrial economy and culture with a political system that treated her inhabitants as incapable of governing themselves? Why did a people that had produced a Tolstoy and a Chekhov, a Tchaikovsky and a Mendeleev, need to be ruled by a caste of professional bureaucrats, most of whom had no higher education and many of whom were notoriously corrupt? Why could the Serbians, Finns, and Turks have a constitution and parliament but not the Russians?
On the face of it, these questions seem unanswerable, and yet they did have answers which, in view of what happened after 1917, deserve a hearing.
The educated and economically advanced elements of Russia’s population which clamored for political rights were a visible but small minority. The main concern of the Imperial administration was the fifty million Great Russian peasants concentrated in the central provinces, for it was on their tranquillity and loyalty that the internal security of the Empire ultimately depended.† The peasant had his grievances but they were not political: he could no more imagine a different system of government than a different climate. The existing regime suited him well because he could understand it from his personal experience in the peasant household, which was organized on the same model:
The sovereign’s authority is unlimited—like the father’s. This autocracy is only a prolongation of paternal authority.… From base to summit, the immense Empire of the North appears, in all its parts, and on all its tiers, constructed on one plan and in one style; all the stones seem to have come out of the same quarry, and the entire building rests on one foundation: patriarchal authority. With this side of her Russia leans toward the old monarchies of the East and decidedly turns away from the modern states of the West, which are all based on feudalism and individualism.
4
The Great Russian peasant, with centuries of serfdom in his bones, not only did not crave for civil and political rights, but, as will be indicated later on, held such notions in contempt. Government had to be willful and strong—that is, able to exact unquestioned obedience. A limited government, subject to external restraints and tolerant of criticism, seemed to him a contradiction in terms. To the officials charged with administering the country and familiar with these peasant attitudes, a Western-type constitutional order spelled one thing only: anarchy. The peasants would interpret it to mean the release from all obligations to the state which they fulfilled only because they had no choice: no more taxes, no more recruits, and, above all, no more tolerance of private property in land. Even relatively liberal officials regarded the Russian peasants as savages who could be kept in check only as long as they believed that their rulers were made of different “clay.”5 In many respects, the bureaucracy treated its population as the European powers treated their colonials: some observers actually drew parallels between the Russian administration and the British civil service in India.6 Even the most conservative bureaucrats realized that one could not forever base internal security on coercion and that sooner or later a constitutional regime was bound to come: but they were content to leave this matter to future generations.
The other obstacle to liberalization was the intelligentsia, broadly defined as a category of citizens, mostly upper- and middle-class and educated, in permanent opposition to tsarism, who demanded, in the name of the nation, that the Crown and bureaucracy turn over to them the reins of power. The monarchy and its officialdom regarded this intelligentsia as unfit to govern. Indeed, as events would demonstrate, the intelligentsia vastly underestimated the difficulties of administering Russia: it regarded democracy, not as the product of a slow evolution of institutions and habits, but as man’s natural condition, which only the existing despotism prevented from exerting its beneficial influence. Since they had no administrative experience, they tended to confuse governing with legislating. In the eyes of bureaucrats, these professors, lawyers, and publicists, if given access to the levers of power, would promptly let it slip from their hands and unleash anarchy, the only beneficiaries of which would be the radical extremists. Such was the conviction of the Court and its officials. There existed among the intelligentsia sensible, pragmatic individuals, aware of the difficulties of democratizing Russia and willing to cooperate with the establishment, but they were few and under constant assault from the liberals and socialists who dominated public opinion.
The Russian establishment of 1900 believed that the country simply could not afford “politics”: it was too vast, ethnically too heterogeneous, and culturally too primitive to allow for the free play of interests and opinions. Politics had to be reduced to administration carried out under the aegis of an impartial arbiter personified in the absolute ruler.
An autocracy required an autocrat: an autocrat not only in terms of formal prerogatives but also by virtue of personality; barring that, at least a ceremonial monarch content to reign while the bureaucracy ruled. As genetic accident would have it, however, on the eve of the twentieth century Russia had the worst of both worlds: a tsar who lacked the intelligence and character to rule yet insisted on playing the autocrat.
In the nineteenth century, strong rulers succeeded weak and weak strong with unexceptional regularity: the vacillating Alexander I was followed by the martinet Nicholas I, whose successor, Alexander II, had a gentle disposition. His son, Alexander III, personified autocracy: a giant of a man who twisted pewter tankards with bare hands, amused company by crashing through locked doors, loved the circus, and played the tuba, he had no qualms about resorting to force. Growing up in his father’s shadow, the future Nicholas II displayed early all the traits of a “soft” tsar. He had no lust for power and no love of ceremony: his greatest pleasures came from the hours spent in the company of his wife and children and from outdoor exercise. Though cast in the role of an autocrat, he was actually ideally suited for the role of a ceremonial monarch. He had exquisite manners and great charm: Witte thought Nicholas the best-bred person he had ever met.7 Intellectually, however, he was something of a simpleton. He treated autocracy as a sacred trust, viewing himself as the trustee of the patrimony which he had inherited from his father and was duty-bound to pass on to his successor. He enjoyed no
ne of its perquisites, confiding to a minister that if he did not think it would harm Russia, he would gladly be rid of his autocratic powers.8 Indeed, he seemed never as happy as after being compelled in March 1917 to abdicate. He learned early to hide his feelings behind a frozen mask. Although suspicious and even vengeful, he was basically a decent man, simple in his tastes, quiet and shy, disgusted with the ambitions of politicians, the intrigues of officials, and the general morals of the age. He disliked powerful personalities, keeping at arm’s length and sooner or later dismissing his most capable ministers in favor of amiable and deferential nonentities.
Brought up in a very circumscribed Court atmosphere he was given no opportunities to mature either emotionally or intellectually. At the age of twenty-two he impressed one high official as a
rather attractive officer [
ofitserik
]. He looks well in the white, fur-lined uniform of a Guards Hussar, but in general his appearance is so common that it is difficult to distinguish him in a crowd. His face is expressionless. His manners are simple, but he lacks both elegance and refinement.
9
Even when Nicholas was twenty-three, according to the same official, Alexander III bullied and treated him as if he were a child. When on one occasion the Tsarevich dared to defy his father by siding with the bureaucratic opposition, Alexander made his displeasure known by pelting him at dinner with bread balls.10 He spoke of his son contemptuously as a “girlie,” with a puerile personality and ideas, entirely unfit for the duties that were awaiting him.11
In consequence of his upbringing, the future Nicholas II was unprepared to ascend the throne. After his father had passed away, he told a minister he had no idea what was expected of him: “I know nothing. The late sovereign had not anticipated his death and had not initiated me into anything.”* 12 His instinct told him faithfully to follow his father in all matters, especially in upholding the ideology and institutions of patrimonial absolutism, and he did so long as the circumstances permitted.
The Russian Revolution Page 10