The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Stolypin had learned from experience that a prosperous village was a tranquil village. And, indeed, in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, the countryside, benefiting from improved yields, gave the authorities little trouble. But prosperity had a different effect on industrial centers located in the countryside. The massive hiring of new workers, most of them landless or land-poor peasants, injected into the labor force a volatile element. Between January 1910 and July 1914, the number of workers in Russia grew by one-third (from 1.8 to 2.4 million); in mid-1914, more than one-half of the workers of St. Petersburg were newcomers. These employees found even the Mensheviks and SRs too moderate, preferring the simpler, more emotional slogans of the anarchists and Bolsheviks.120 Their restlessness and sense of estrangement contributed to the increase in industrial strife on the eve of the war, notably in the first half of 1914.

  This said, grounds are lacking for maintaining that Russia in 1914 was less “stable” than at any time since 1900, except for 1905–6, and heading for revolution.121 This argument, mandatory in Communist histories, rests primarily on evidence of increased strike activity after 1910. It is unconvincing for several reasons:

  Industrial strikes do not necessarily signify social instability: more often than not, they accompany the progression of labor to a more advanced economic and social status. Poorly paid, unskilled, and unorganized workers rarely strike. There exists a demonstrated correlation between the formation of trade unions and strike activity.* By legitimizing trade unions, the Imperial Government also legitimized strikes, previously unlawful. Seen in this light, the increase in work stoppages (more than half of them one- or two-day affairs, in any event) may be more correctly interpreted as symptomatic of the maturation of Russian labor, which, judging by the Western experience, was likely in time to lead to greater social stability.

  In many Western industrial countries, the period immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I also saw a rise in labor unrest. In the United States, for example, twice as many workers struck in 1910–14 as in the preceding five years: in 1912 and 1913 there were more workers out on strike than at any time in the preceding thirty years.122 In Great Britain, too, strike activity showed a dramatic spurt in 1912, in terms of both workers involved and working days lost.123 Yet neither country was destabilized and neither experienced a revolution.

  In the final analysis, Russia’s social stability depended on the peasant: radical intellectuals acknowledged that no revolution in Russia was possible as long as the village remained quiet. And it is a demonstrable fact that the Russian village did not stir either immediately before the war or in the first two years after its outbreak. The half a million workers who were on strike in 1912 represented an insignificant minority compared with 100 million peasants who went peacefully about their business.

  Nor can much be inferred from instances of political restlessness in the liberal movement, as symbolized by the eccentric offer of A. I. Konovalov, the millionaire textile manufacturer, to provide financial subsidies to Lenin.124 This not untypical tactic of Russian liberals to pressure the authorities for political concessions by invoking the specter of revolution cannot be interpreted as signifying a radicalization of liberal opinion. Indeed, the very opposite trend was noticeable in Russia on the eve of the war—namely, a shift to conservatism. There is much evidence to indicate a growth of patriotic sentiment among educated Russians, including university youths.

  A similar shift to the right was noticeable in Russian thought and culture. The preoccupation with civic issues and the politicization of Russian life which had set in in the middle of the nineteenth century showed signs of waning even before it drew to a close. With the rise of the Symbolist school in poetry and the triumph of aesthetic standards in criticism, literature and art turned to different means and subjects: poetry replaced the novel as the principal vehicle of creative literature, while painting turned away from realism toward fantasy and abstraction. The challenge issued to artists and composers by Serge Diaghilev, Russia’s foremost impresario—“Astonish me!”—flew in the face of the didactic precepts upheld by the arbiters of Russian taste in the preceding generation. Other manifestations of this change were the preoccupation of novelists with sex and violence and the popularity among socialites of spiritualism and theosophy. Idealism, metaphysics, religion replaced positivism and materialism. Nietzsche was in high fashion.125

  The intelligentsia was reeling from the assault on it by the symposium Landmarks (Vekhi), brought out in 1909 by a group of liberals and ex-Marxists. A unique succès de scandale in Russian intellectual history, the book was a broadside attack on the Russian intelligentsia, whom it charged with narrow-mindedness, bigotry, lack of true culture, and a multitude of other sins. The book called on it to begin the arduous task of self-cultivation. The traditional intelligentsia, grouped around the socialist and liberal parties, rejected this appeal, as it did the dominant trends in modernist culture. It persisted in its old ways, the custodian of the stultified culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Maxim Gorky was one of the few prominent creative writers to associate himself with this outmoded trend. Other talented writers adopted “Modernism” and in their politics turned increasingly patriotic.

  And yet, notwithstanding social peace, economic progress, and the exuberance of her culture, on the eve of World War I Russia was a troubled and anxious country. Neither the violence of 1905 nor the reforms of Stolypin had solved anything: for the socialists the Revolution of 1905 might as well not have occurred, so meager were its results; for the liberals it was unfinished business; for the conservatives its only legacy was confusion. Since there seemed to be no way of peacefully reconciling the divergent interests of Russia’s 150 million inhabitants, another revolution was a distinct possibility. And the fresh memory of the “masses” on the march, sweeping everything before them in their destructive fury, was enough to sow terror in the hearts of all but a small minority.

  To the historian of this period, the most striking—and most ominous—impression is the prevalence and intensity of hatred: ideological, ethnic, social. The monarchists despised the liberals and socialists. The radicals hated the “bourgeoisie.” The peasants loathed those who had left the commune to set up private farms. Ukrainians hated Jews, Muslims hated Armenians, the Kazakh nomads hated and wanted to expel the Russians who had settled in their midst under Stolypin. Latvians were ready to pounce on their German landlords. All these passions were held in check only by the forces of order—the army, the gendarmerie, the police—who themselves were under constant assault from the left. Since political institutions and processes capable of peacefully resolving these conflicts had failed to emerge, the chances were that sooner or later resort would again be had to violence, to the physical extermination of those who happened to stand in the way of each of the contending groups.

  It was common in those days to speak of Russia living on a “volcano.” In 1908, the poet Alexander Blok used another metaphor when he spoke of a “bomb” ticking in the heart of Russia. Some tried to ignore it, some to run away from it, others yet to disarm it. To no avail:

  whether we remember or forget, in all of us sit sensations of malaise, fear, catastrophe, explosion.… We do not know yet precisely what events await us,

  but in our hearts the needle of the seismograph has already stirred

  .

  126

  *V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm vgodypervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), 169. Nicholas first made a personal appearance in the Duma in February 1916, ten years after the parliament had been established, in the midst of a grave political crisis brought about by Russia’s defeats in World War I.

  *There is a striking difference between the deputies to the first two Russian Dumas and those who in 1789–91 ran the French National Assembly. The Russians were overwhelmingly intellectuals without practical experience. The Third Estate, which dominated the Estates-General and the National Assembly, by contrast
, consisted of practical lawyers and businessmen, “men of action and men of affairs.” J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Oxford, 1947), 26–27.

  *According to M. Szeftel, the tsarist government authorized no oppositional political parties prior to its collapse in 1917 (The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906, Brussels, 1976, 247). They existed and functioned in a legal limbo.

  *According to Witte (Vospominaniia, II, Moscow, 1960, 545), this body was deliberately called “Council of Ministers” rather than “cabinet” further to distinguish Russia from Western constitutional states.

  *“I am in no sense in favor of absolutist government,” Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1884. “I consider parliamentary cooperation, if properly practiced, necessary and useful, as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible”: Max Klemm, ed., Was sagt Bismarck dazu?, II (Berlin, 1924), 126.

  *In March 1907, a worker incited by a right-wing politician named Kazantsev killed Grigorii Iollos, another Kadet Duma deputy, also Jewish. When he realized that Kazantsev had misled him into believing that Iollos was a police agent, the worker lured Kazantsev into a forest and murdered him.

  *Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskie Otchëty, 1907 god, II, Vtoroi Sozyv, Sessiia Vtoraia, Zasedanie 36 (St. Petersburg, 1907), 435–36. Stolypin’s statistics were somewhat strained: not all the natural population increase (which was actually higher than he estimated—namely, 18.1 per 1,000) occurred in the rural areas of central Russia. Still, his conclusion was correct, as the results of the agrarian expropriations of 1917 would demonstrate.

  *One of the misleading commonplaces in Russian historiography, promoted by Communist historians, is that Stolypin’s agrarian measures were meant to promote a class of kulaks, defined as rural usurers and exploiters. In fact, they had the very opposite purpose: to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury and exploitation.

  *The program, which disappeared after his death and was presumed lost, was made public forty-five years later by Stolypin’s secretary, A. V. Zenkovskii, in his Pravda o Stolypine (New York, 1956), 73–113. See further Kryzhanovskii, Vospominaniia, 130–32, 137–38, 218.

  * The New York Times, December 14, 1911, p. 1. This action was denounced in some Russian circles as intolerable interference in Russia’s internal affairs, and by a German conservative newspaper as reflective of the “parvenu spirit that rules not only American society but American politics”: Ibid., p. 2.

  *The SD deputies, tried after the dissolution of the Duma, when their parliamentary immunity had expired, were convicted and sentenced to hard labor: P. G. Kurlov, Gibel’ Imperatorskoi Rossii (Berlin, 1923), 94.

  *When told by Kokovtsov that this was an unwise move and that he would do better to accept the Tsar’s suggestions, Stolypin replied that he had no time to fight intrigues against him and was politically finished in any event: V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I (Paris, 1933), 458; A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i TretHa Duma (Moscow, 1968), 338.

  †Trepov was taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks and executed along with many other hostages at Kronshtadt on July 22, 1918: Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, I, 462. Durnovo died in 1915.

  *Kryzhanovskii Archive, Columbia University, Box 2, File 5. Kryzhanovskii carried out Stolypin’s request, saving only his letters to the Tsar: Ibid. Stolypin’s fear of being assassinated in Kiev may have been occasioned by the disinformation which his future killer supplied to the Okhrana, as described below.

  *A postmortem revealed that Stolypin’s heart and liver were so diseased that he would probably have died of natural causes before long: G. Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma (Washington, D.C., 1981), 207–8.

  †B. Strumillo in KL, No. 1/10 (1924), 230. In his fictional account of these events, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attributes Bogrov’s action to the desire to protect Jewish interests allegedly threatened by Stolypin’s ideal of a “Great Russia.” Solzhenitsyn thus “reconstructs” Bogrov’s thinking: “Stolypin had done nothing directly against the Jews; he has even succeeded in easing their lot somewhat. But this was not sincere. One must know how to identify an enemy of the Jews more deeply than from appearances. Stolypin promotes too insistently, too openly, too provocatively Russian national interests, Russian representation in the Duma, the Russian state. He is building, not a country free to all, but a national monarchy. Thus, the future of Jews in Russia depends on the will of someone who is not their friend. Stolypin’s development does not promise prosperity to Jews.” (A. Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoe koleso, Uzel I: Avgust Chetyrnadtsogo, Part 2, Paris, 1983, 126). There is no evidence to support this interpretation. Quite the contrary. Bogrov, who came from a thoroughly assimilated family (his grandfather had converted to Orthodox Christianity and his father belonged to the Kievan Nobles’ Club), was a Jew only in the biological (“racial”) sense. Even his given name, which Solzhenitsyn chooses to be the Yiddish “Mordko,” was the very Russian Dmitrii. In his depositions to the police, Bogrov stated that he had shot Stolypin because his reactionary policies had brought great harm to Russia. In a farewell letter to his parents written on the day of the murder, he explained that he was unable to lead the normal life which they had expected of him (A. Serebrennikov, Ubiistvo Stolypina: Svidetel’stva i dokumenty (New York, 1986), 161–62). The most likely source of the claim that Bogrov acted as a Jew and on behalf of Jewish interests is a false report in the right-wing daily, Novoe vremia, of September 13, 1911, that prior to his execution Bogrov told a rabbi he had “struggled for the welfare and happiness of the Jewish people” (Serebrennikov, loc.cit., 22). In reality, he had refused to see a rabbi before his execution (Rech’, September 13, 1911, itv Serebrennikov, loccit., 23–24.)

  *“Most strikes … arise in organized trades and industries. As trade unionism spreads to previously unorganized industries, it is often accompanied by strike waves”: J. A. Fitch in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIV (New York, 1934), 420. A similar conclusion is drawn, on the basis of U.S. experience, by J. I. Griffin in Strikes (New York, 1939), 98.

  6

  Russia at War

  Judging by the result of the war with Japan, which was defeat followed by revolution, it can hardly be disputed that for the men who in 1914 ruled Russia prudence dictated neutrality. The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1917 would be the collapse of Russia’s fragile political and economic structure under the strains of war. It can be argued, of course, that the deteriorating ability of tsarism to govern and the presence of a militant intelligentsia made revolution likely, war or no war. But even if this point is conceded, a revolution under peacetime conditions, without the mutiny of millions of conscripts, would likely have been less violent and would have offered moderate elements a better chance to pick up the reins of power. As will be shown below, some of Russia’s most perceptive statesmen realized this and desperately tried to keep their country out of the war.

  Why, then, did Russia intervene? Russian opinion then and later has been prone to seek the answer in external influences—namely, Russia’s economic and moral commitments to her allies. Socialist writers attribute tsarism’s involvement to the pressures of Western democracies whom Russia owed vast amounts of money. For Russian conservatives, Russia acted out of a selfless devotion to the alliance: to fulfill her pledges to France and England and save them from defeat, she risked her own destruction. This sacrifice, however, is said to have earned her no gratitude, for when Russia subsequently found herself hard pressed by the Germans and fell prey to extremists supported and financed by them, the Allies failed to come to her assistance.

  Such explanations are unconvincing. Imperial Russia entered into defensive alliances and honored her commitments neither in response to Allied pressures nor from altruistic motives, but from soundly perceived self-interest. Long before 1914 Russian statesmen had a good notion of the designs Germany had on her. These called for the dismemberment of the Empire and German economic mastery over Russia and her borderlands. Post-World War
II archival research has confirmed that German political, military, and business circles regarded the breakup of Russia and control of her resources as essential to Germany’s global aspirations. Berlin assigned high priority to neutralizing the Russian military threat and the related prospect of a two-front war as well as to gaining access to Russia’s human and material wealth with which to match that of France and Britain.1

  Given Germany’s Russlandpolitik after the dismissal of Bismarck, the choice before the rulers of Russia was not whether to withdraw into isolation or to join in great-power politics, with all the risks that this entailed: that had been decided for her by Germany. Her choice lay between facing Germany alone or acting in partnership with France and possibly England. Posed in this manner, the question answered itself. Unless Russia was prepared to give up her empire, shrink to the territory of seventeenth-century Muscovy, and acquiesce to the status of a German colony, she had to coordinate her military plans with the Western democracies. The alternative was to stand by while Germany smashed France, as she was certain to do if her eastern flank was secure, and then transferred her armies east to dispose of Russia. This was well understood in Russia long before the outbreak of the war. In 1892, as the two countries were moving toward an alliance, Alexander III had observed:

  We must, indeed, come to terms with the French, and, in the event of a war between France and Germany, at once attack the Germans so as not to give them the time first to beat France and then turn against us.

  2

  A Russian historian summarizes his country’s position before 1914 as follows:

  One must not forget that tsarist Russia prepared for the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in alliance with France, which, it was expected, would in the initial period of the war bear the more difficult task of repelling the pressure of nearly the entire German army. France experienced a certain degree of dependence on the conduct of Russia, on the level of her effort in the fight against Germany [and] the distribution of her forces. The tsarist government, for its part, was no less interested than France in her armies surviving the first trial. This is the reason why the Russian command paid so much attention to the operations on the German front. One must also not leave out of account Russia’s striving to take advantage of the diversion of the main forces of the German army to the West to deal Germany a decisive defeat in the very first months of the war.… For this reason, characterizing the relations between Russia and France at the beginning of the war, it is more correct to speak of the mutual dependence of the Allies.