Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The spirit of the swinging 1860s had virtually no impact on the downtrodden masses. Only within the elite were there any real changes in social attitudes, and then only within a small radical splinter. One example of such a change concerned the status of women. The previous century had witnessed symbolic change: before 1725 no woman had sat on the imperial throne; in the ‘Empress Era’ from 1725 to 1796 there were no fewer than four tsaritsas – Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. This female phalanx, however, did not mean there were any fundamental changes in the sexism of Russian society; the tsar was regarded as above gender rather than a gender role model. And after Catherine II no woman ever mounted the throne again.

  It was to be half a century after the death of Catherine that real change came, and that among those most bitterly opposed to the Romanovs. A few women joined the revolution: just as rebellious boys let their hair grow long, rebellious girls cut theirs short. Typical among them was Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a governor-general of St Petersburg. Born in 1854, she celebrated her twentieth birthday by being thrown into jail in the clamp-down that followed the Going to the People campaign. From then on she spent much of her life in jail or on the run, until on 1 March 1881 she stood on a street corner near the Catherine canal in St Petersburg and gave the signal to two People’s Will comrades to throw their bombs at the tsar’s carriage. They missed the carriage but the tsar got out to inspect the damage, whereupon another revolutionary threw his bomb and Alexander II was killed instantly. Sophia Perovskaya was arrested and, along with the other conspirators, hanged a few weeks later. At the age of twenty-seven she became the first woman in modern Russia to be executed for crimes against the state.

  The period from the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to the Russian Revolution in 1917 was one of the most critical in Russian history. Conservatives and liberals, socialists and anarchists, reactionaries and progressives were jumbled together in a volatile brew of hopes and fears. The Romanov autocracy stumbled to its end assailed on all sides by the forces of dissent. And yet for most of the period political activity was mere froth on the stagnant waters of Russian economic life. It is easy to imagine that as the twentieth century approached Russia was a seething mass of discontent, but just as cowboys and Wild West gunfights were totally unrepresentative of contemporary America so revolutionaries and anarchist bombs were no reflection of what was happening in Russian society as a whole. Political activists formed a tiny minority of the population. The left fractured into a multiplicity of nihilists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, social revolutionaries, Mensheviks and so on, and the very act of fracturing made their numbers seem greater than they really were. The proponents of gentle change – those advocating constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy and often some form of capitalism – were an equally small minority.

  The history of Russia is largely the history of the tsars. Their core beliefs were the nation’s beliefs. The nature of the nation depended on them. Quite literally they determined what Russia was; the nation’s very frontiers moved in line with their aspirations and fears, their successes and failures. Ivan the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great all redrew the shape of the Russian empire. In America too individual leaders made their impact on history, but inevitably on a smaller scale. American history is as much the history of parties and movements as it is of great men (unlike Russia, in America there have, as yet, been no great women at the helm). As the nineteenth century progressed parties became more important in Russia, but as long as autocracy survived they remained peripheral. Russian political movements and parties in any case were very different from American parties.

  American party political dynamics were transformed by the civil war. The Democrats stood for the defeated, segregationist south and Republicans for the pious, rural mid-west and the aggressive, successful, industrial north-east. In particular the Republicans stood for the aggressive, successful industrialists of the north-east, and so the Democrats became the champions of the urban underclass and of the immigrants pouring into cities like New York, Boston and Chicago.

  Although the divisions between the parties were frequently bitter, in the main they lacked the profoundly ideological character of Russian political parties. American parties have, almost from the first, been groupings of interests rather than ideas. Political power became something used not to change society but to protect or promote particular sectional interests. Political affiliations were badges that distinguished one group from another but had no particular intrinsic meaning. Thus it is possible to describe as ‘political’ the long running Lincoln County War in New Mexico (which included the killing of the pro-Democrat Billy the Kid by Republican sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881), but the events were not party political as would be conventionally understood. Similarly, in the same year Republican mine-owners in Arizona appointed a marshal to take on the supporters of the Democrat county sheriff, but there was virtually no difference ideologically between the two groups: the fact that in the Gunfight at the OK Corral Wyatt Earp and his brothers represented Republican interests and their gunfighter opponents Democrat is incidental.

  This is not to say that there were no ideological divisions between American parties, but in general these divisions reflected sectional interests or were secondary to them. In 1888, for example, the presidential election was fought on straightforward issues of economic policy. The Democratic candidate President Grover Cleveland wanted to reduce the tariffs levied on imports and the Republican Benjamin Harrison did not. Those policies reflected the interests of their backers: Republican industrialists did not want to face competition; Democratic voters wanted cheaper goods. In the event the two candidates effectively tied (Cleveland had the most votes but Harrison had a majority in the electoral college). The election was then decided not on the basis of ideology or party platforms; instead New York City Democrats were simply bribed to change sides.

  The development of political movements in Russia did not imply a move toward American-style political parties. Russian history is sometimes imagined as a gradual transition from the eastern barbarism of the Mongols and Ivan the Terrible, through the flirtations with the west of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to arrive at a nascent parliamentary democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century, a democracy snuffed out by Lenin and, especially, Stalin. It is an attractive picture implying a natural progression towards western values, interrupted during the Soviet era but now free to continue towards its final fulfilment. Unfortunately the picture is just not true. The nineteenth century in Russia saw a flowering of culture – most people asked to name a Russian composer, novelist or playwright would choose a figure from that period – but politically there was no similar blossoming. To flourish democracy’s seed must fall on fertile ground and put down roots over decades or even centuries. The seeds of democracy were present in Russia, but they fell on stony ground and never truly rooted. Going into the twentieth century Russia was no more prepared for popular government than it had been a century earlier. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 his son, Alexander III, imposed a repression openly dedicated to destroying any signs of progress towards parliamentary democracy. Censorship was rigorously enforced. Education at all levels felt the full weight of the state’s authority

  Autocracy was not an ideology slowly disintegrating in the face of the advance of western civilisation. After all, the emancipation of American slaves had just been accompanied by the horrific slaughter of the civil war, whereas Russian serfs were emancipated by nothing more violent than the stroke of a pen. To the proponents of autocracy the difference showed the wisdom of entrusting government to a man chosen by God to guide his nation along the paths of righteousness.

  The most articulate advocate of autocracy wrote not in the seventeenth or eighteenth century but towards the end of the nineteenth. Konstantin Pobedonostsev was a law professor who became director general of the Russian Orthodox Church and tutor to the tsar’s childr
en. He exercised a massive influence over the thinking of the last two tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, and that influence was by modern western standards monstrously reactionary. Society, he argued, had been ordered by God from the highest to the lowest because that is the most effective way to organise human existence. Everyone should know his or her place. Education was largely a waste of time. Educating children beyond the level they needed to fulfil their role in society not only wasted resources but created aspirations that could not be satisfied. The children of miners, he wrote, should spend time down the mines getting accustomed to their future workplace rather than learning physics, which they would never use. To western minds such ideas seem bizarre or even barbaric, but Pobedonostsev was not an ignorant reactionary ranting in the darkness. He quoted Socrates and Antoninus. His writings were peppered with references to John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. He published a detailed critique of the religious views of the British historian John Robert Seeley (although Seeley’s famous advocacy of imperialism must have been closer to Pobedonostsev’s heart). Pobedonostsev’s views on politics are alarming but coherent: the best form of government is the government of a wise and supreme autocrat; democracy is a sham. Individual votes in a democracy are valueless; they only acquire value in the aggregate; and thus the essence of democracy is the manipulation of groups of voters by those who wish to obtain or retain power. This constant manipulation of public opinion, Pobedonostsev argued, led to demagoguery and the debasement of political ideals. This demagoguery was fostered by the press. Journalists and newspaper proprietors had the power to defame, with no right of appeal allowed to those they defamed. Freedom of the press thus became another sham.

  Concepts that Americans in particular often regard as divinely ordained – universal suffrage, the rule of law, free speech – were denied not because a megalomaniac tsar was determined to cling on to power but because an important part of society firmly believed that he should be exercising that power. The whole point of society was not to protect the rights of individuals but to promote the collective welfare. Right up to the fall of tsardom there was no common agreement that the law was even intended to produce justice in the western sense. As late as 1909 a distinguished professor of constitutional law was teaching that the proper function of law in Russia was not to ensure justice but to maintain order.

  But the maintenance of order was something the Romanov regime was increasingly unable to deliver. For centuries tsarist control had relied on two factors – its monopoly of military force and the lack of any coherent counterforce. As long as the Russian population was thinly scattered over the enormous expanse of the Russian empire any internal threat could be isolated and dispatched. Towards the end of the nineteenth century that changed. Enormous factories in and around St Petersburg and Moscow provided breeding grounds for organised dissent, and when the contagion spread to the army and navy the end of the Romanovs was nigh. The factor that changed the face of Russia for ever was the force that had already determined the soul of America: industrialisation.

  The Soul of Industry

  One of the key messages of modern American imperialism is that America became the world’s most advanced industrial nation because of its free market economy, and that to achieve similar riches other nations must open themselves up to the same free market. However, as Stiglitz clearly shows in his bestseller Globalization and Its Discontents, in the nineteenth century it was the US federal government that created economic growth, not the free market. Furthermore the term ‘free’ when applied to the economy does not mean now what it meant when America was establishing its economic predominance. Today the term means free trade, vigorous competition, minimum state intervention and an absence of corruption – conditions which (except perhaps for the absence of corruption) almost inevitably favour US multinationals. The nineteenth-century free market in America was very different. Shielded behind protective tariffs, supported by state subsidies (often dispensed in highly dubious circumstances), robber barons were left free to wield monopoly power to build enormous private empires.

  After Independence one of the first acts of the new Congress had been to impose customs tariffs. It also gave preferential treatment to American traders by setting the tariffs at lower levels for imports arriving aboard American ships. One of the southern complaints before the civil war was that high import tariffs protected northern manufacturers but meant southerners could not buy cheaper goods from overseas. Alexander Hamilton had wanted high tariffs to protect infant industries ‘in order to increase national wealth, induce artisans to immigrate, cause machinery to be invented and employ women and children’. Hamilton’s proposals were not adopted in their entirety at the time, but the fact is that the US economy developed with exactly the sort of selective protection that it now stops other countries enjoying.

  Russian industry was also protected from international competition by the state. One of the first industries to benefit from large-scale mechanisation in both countries was cotton weaving, which grew rapidly in Russia after a high tariff was imposed on cotton imports in 1822. By 1913 Russia ranked fourth in the world for textile production after Britain, the United States and Germany. The ability of America and Russia to gain such a high market share in an industry that Britain had once so comprehensively dominated was largely thanks to protective tariffs. In 1913 average tariff rates on imported manufactures were zero in Britain, 13 per cent in Germany, over 20 per cent in France, 44 per cent in the US and 84 per cent in Russia.

  That Russia should have been following policies so contrary to the spirit of modern free markets is not surprising, but what is often forgotten is that the American industrial economy was born in conditions more like today’s Russia than today’s America. In the last decades of the nineteenth century corruption in America was legendary. A whisky scam in St Louis defrauded the government of millions of dollars in taxes with the connivance of senior officials, including President Grant’s private secretary (who like most of those involved managed to escape punishment). In 1872 it was discovered that nearly half of the federal government’s subsidy of $50m for constructing the Union Pacific railway had gone missing. One of those implicated was James Garfield, but that did not stop him being elected president (although four months into his term he was assassinated by someone who had been unable to bribe his way into government service). Grant’s secretary of war was found to have received kickbacks from men given monopolies to trade on the native reservations, and in the notoriously corrupt naval dockyards a million feet of lumber purchased for the Boston yard simply disappeared.

  Many of the most notorious nineteenth-century plutocrats – like John Rockefeller, who in a series of secret deals gained control of the US oil industry, and Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who dominated the US steel industry after introducing the radical new manufacturing processes invented in Britain by Sir Henry Bessemer – are remembered today for the charitable foundations that bear their names. But charity for Rockefeller and Carnegie was very much an afterthought, and just as representative were unreconstructed oligarchs like William Vanderbilt, who controlled much of America’s transportation and sponsored imperial adventures in Central America, and Jay Gould, a railway speculator who manipulated, bribed and stole his way to a $25m fortune. Gould’s exploits included cornering the market in gold to force the price up, and then using inside knowledge to sell out before the federal authorities responded. The business practices of the robber barons make modern American financial scandals seem tame. Rockefeller at one time exercised so much power that he was able to make the railway companies pay him a levy based on the amount of oil they carried on behalf of his competitors – equivalent to Coca-Cola taxing supermarkets for every Pepsi sold.

  One of the most infamous plutocrats controlled a sector that produced nothing at all: John Pierpoint Morgan was the robber barons’ banker. Morgan, born into the New England plutocracy and educated in Britain, Switzerland and Germany, made his
first fortune during the civil war, having avoided enlistment by paying somebody to take his place, a common practice among his class. Morgan became the robber barons’ chief financial fixer, putting together cartels that controlled key industries like railroads, shipping and utilities. In partnership with Rockefeller and Carnegie he created United States Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company.

  For much of the period between the civil war and the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt it was men like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller who determined the course of American history rather than the ever-changing occupants of the White House. Most political leaders did what they were told. US senators at that time were selected by state legislatures rather than by direct election, and very few reached the Senate without ‘support’ from local industrialists or left the senate poorer than when they had entered.

  Particularly powerful were the railway oligarchs. It is worth quoting at length the words of one of America’s most eminent historians Samuel Eliot Morison:

  The power of an American transcontinental railway over its exclusive territory approached the absolute. A railroad could make an industry or ruin a community merely by jiggling freight rates. The funds at their disposal, often created by financial manipulation and stock watering, were so colossal as to overshadow the budgets of state governments. Railway builders and owners had the point of view of a feudal chieftain. Members of state legislatures were their vassals, to be coerced or bribed into voting ‘right’ if persuasion would not serve. In their opinion, railroading was a private business, no more a fit subject for government regulation than a tailor’s shop. They were unable to recognise any public interest distinct from their own. In many instances the despotism was benevolent; and if a few men became multimillionaires, their subjects also prospered. But others were indifferent to all save considerations of private gain. By distributing free passes to state representatives, paying their campaign expenses and giving ‘presents’ to their wives, they evaded taxation as well as regulation. By discriminating freight charges between localities and individuals, they terrorised merchants, farmers and communities. Through the press and professions they wielded a power over public opinion comparable to slave-owners over the old South.