Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  It is quite possible that Nicholas II hoped that a short sharp shock would quell the developing unrest. If this was the case he had miscalculated. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out throughout the empire, particularly in the more recently conquered territories like Poland and Finland. Closer to home the first workers’ councils or soviets appeared in St Petersburg and called the whole city out on strike, thrusting to the fore the deputy chairman of the St Petersburg soviet, Leon Trotsky. Sailors on the battleship Potemkin famously mutinied, and unions were formed not only among the factory workers and peasants but also among groups as diverse as doctors and ballet dancers. Nicholas had undammed a torrent that looked as though it would sweep him away. Two million people were on strike by the end of the year. The tsar’s first reaction to Bloody Sunday was to panic and then to issue a defiant declaration of the absolute primacy of autocracy. As the protests mounted, however, he was forced to issue what became known as the October Manifesto, agreeing to transform Russia into a constitutional monarchy with free elections. This won over the doctors and dancers, and further militancy by the St Petersburg and Moscow soviets fizzled out or was brutally crushed. But Nicholas at heart remained an autocrat, and when the protests had subsided he reiterated his commitment to the supremacy of the autocracy and reined back the reforms promised in the October Manifesto.

  The tsar’s prime minister, Peter Stolypin, tried to head off rural unrest by giving more land to the peasants and encouraging further settlement of Siberia. In stark contrast with American colonisation of the west, Siberia’s bleak climate dissuaded mass migration even after the discovery of rich mineral reserves. The vast territory was only slowly populated, partly through voluntary migration, partly through convict labour but mainly through forced migration: between 1824 and 1899 around 720,000 settlers were simply told to uproot themselves and move to Siberia, many accompanied by their families. Slightly less draconian measures were introduced when the Siberian Resettlement Bureau was set up in 1896 and three-quarters of a million people settled along the route of the Trans-Siberian railway in the next four years. Stolypin’s reforms were too little too late, and in 1911 he was assassinated at the opera in the presence of the tsar. His murder well illustrated the chaotic state of political life in the last days of the Romanov regime. His assassin was a revolutionary socialist who doubled as an agent of the Okhrana secret police. At his trial before a military court it was alleged that his objective had been to incite a revolution against the monarchy, although had that been the case he would surely have shot the tsar. Rumours soon started to circulate that the murder had been arranged by Stolypin’s rival at court – Rasputin (who was himself murdered by court opponents soon after). As Stolypin’s assassin was promptly executed and Nicholas II personally ordered any further investigation to be stopped, the truth may never be known.

  Nicholas had underestimated the forces ranged against him, but so had most people. Around the world dissidents were embracing the ideas of the socialist left and labour turmoil was rampant. As industrialisation had progressed so much faster in the west Russia was the last place most revolutionary socialists expected their revolution to start. On paper the conditions looked far more propitious in America. The United States had a revolutionary tradition, and within living memory had torn itself apart in the name of the downtrodden masses on the southern plantations. Socialist principles of equality and justice were inherently compatible with the prevailing ideology of democracy. The capitalist bosses were as rapacious as any in the world, and the working conditions in factories and mines as bad as anywhere else. In the Pennsylvania coalfields children as young as six were employed as ‘coal breakers’ in conditions as bad or worse than anything endured by southern slaves or Russian peasants. Throughout America there were groups espousing anarchist or socialist ideologies remarkably similar to their Russian contemporaries, much of their literature confidently proclaiming that a socialist millennium was not far away. Violent confrontations between the authorities and striking workers were as common on the streets of Pittsburgh as St Petersburg.

  Numerically the left at the turn of the century was probably stronger in America than in Russia. Political activity of all kinds was far more prevalent in the United States, and socialist and anarchist groups of varying hues sprang up and disappeared again. The Socialist party had members all over the country and not just in the big cities; it has been claimed, somewhat improbably, that at one time nearly a third of the adult population of Oklahoma belonged to the party. A socialist textbook called The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam:A Little History for Big Children sold half a million copies. In 1911 thirty-three American cities had socialist mayors. Milwaukee was notorious for its corruption until the socialists swept to power in 1910 and remained there for more than a quarter of a century.

  In the 1900 presidential election the Social Democrat Eugene Debs received 0.6 per cent of the popular vote and the Socialist Labour candidate Joseph Maloney 0.3 per cent. Small votes to be sure (even added together they won far fewer votes than John Woolley the Prohibition candidate), but the social democratic parties in Europe were also small in their early days. Just two years earlier the grandly named First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party, the party that would eventually drive the Bolshevik revolution, had just nine delegates. As the First World War loomed many on the American left were convinced that revolution was on its way and victory over the oligarchs was within their grasp.

  To the majority of Americans such expectations were pure fantasy. And it was not only their opponents that regarded American socialism as a lost cause. In early 1917 one dedicated revolutionary, sitting in his rented apartment on New York’s 164th Street, despaired of the American socialist movement. Its leaders, he complained, resembled less a working-class vanguard than an assembly of ‘successful dentists’ who considered President Woodrow Wilson more authoritative than Karl Marx. When news arrived of the uprising in Petrograd that heralded the Bolshevik revolution he quickly gathered his family, rushed to the docks and bade farewell to America without regret. Like Lenin – himself hurriedly returning from exile – the other mastermind of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, was on his way home.

  CHAPTER 11

  COMMUNISM AND CORPORATISM

  Until the beginning of the twentieth century the values of America and Russia could be easily described: democracy or autocracy at home and imperialism abroad. For centuries Russian autocrats had imposed their will on an ever-expanding empire and, although much younger, America too had ever-expanded its frontiers. The imperial values of both nations were remarkably similar but their domestic values could hardly be more different.

  Autocracy was an uncomplicated concept: rule by an omnipotent autocrat. But what was democracy? Rule by the people, the demos, was easy to proclaim but not so easy to define. Democracy was less a philosophical framework than a language that provided slogans – liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness, malice towards none – without prescribing substance. In the name of government by the people slaves were bought and sold, native tribes were eradicated, brother fought brother in a bloody civil war and colossal fortunes were amassed with startling amorality.

  Where autocracy was constant democracy seemed infinitely malleable. The last tsar Nicholas II lacked the bloodthirsty sadism of Ivan the Terrible or the messianic vision of Peter the Great, but he was equally convinced of his divine right to rule. The prescriptions of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the great theorist of autocracy, would have sounded eminently reasonable to Catherine the Great generations earlier. By contrast the democracy of John D. Rockefeller bore very little resemblance to the democracy of Thomas Jefferson. The values of democracy mutated, and as they did so they refined the imperial values that underlay America’s relations with the rest of the world – the overt imperialism of Andrew Jackson marching into Florida or of Winfield Scott in the halls of Montezuma gave way to the ‘banana republics’ of the United Fruit Company and the global intriguing of Standard Oil.r />
  As the nineteenth century drew to an end the autocracy of the Romanovs and the democracy of the robber barons faced new challenges as industrialisation sparked massive intellectual ferment. Socialists and anarchists in all their varied hues snapped at the heels of established authority and threatened to bring it down. In the event the malleability of democracy carried it through; the rigidity of tsarist autocracy caused its collapse. A new force appeared on the world’s stage threatening to destroy capitalism and promising to end the era of empires. The promises of communism soon rang hollow, but the threat of communism – equally hollow – shaped the century to come. The dogmas of communists and anti-communists would tint the ideological prism through which all modern history is viewed.

  Bolshevism Arrives

  Lenin and Trotsky returned to Russia to find a situation of near total chaos. Not only had the centuries-old political institutions collapsed but the old ideological certainties had disappeared overnight. Throughout the western world into which Peter the Great had pushed Russia, new political forces of burgeoning industry and organised labour were stirring, each adopting, or having thrust upon them, novel and still developing doctrines and dogmas.

  The American oligarchs known as the robber barons and their less powerful Russian equivalents were beginning to espouse theories of economic and social life centring on ‘free markets’ which inevitably had political implications. Heavily influenced by the survival-of-the-fittest determinism prevalent in the science of the age, they evolved an ideology in which corporate capitalism was not just a way to make a few individuals extraordinarily rich but a blueprint for organising society and ensuring its ever-increasing collective prosperity. In the United States the well-being of its citizens and the well-being of its corporations became two sides of the same coin. As President Coolidge was to say, ‘The business of America is business,’ or more bluntly, as Alfred P. Sloan, the president of General Motors, is claimed (perhaps erroneously) to have said, ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America.’ In America this developing ideology of ‘corporatism’ became over time inextricably interwoven with the ideology of democracy, so freedom and free markets became almost synonymous. In Russia full-blooded corporatism of this type never developed, partly because Russian industrialists never achieved the political power of their American counterparts but more importantly because the ideology of autocracy was far less amenable to infiltration by a corporatist philosophy whose very essence was the dispersal of power among competing corporate entities. Ideological developments in America occurred on the ‘right’, to use a convenient if sometimes ambiguous term; in Russia they occurred on the ‘left’.

  The various left-wing groups in Europe and North America were united in their opposition to raw capitalism but in little else. They brought together men and women with an enormous variety of beliefs, and as a consequence left-wing history was a long succession of splits, disputes, faction-fights, regroupings, alliances and internecine warfare. Almost by definition the one attribute they lacked was self-discipline. Lenin changed all that. At the second congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour party held in London in 1903 he split the party by his insistence on the professionalisation of revolution, and created the Bolsheviks for whom party discipline was supremely important. In the name of a socialist revolution he had in effect bolted the ideology of autocracy on to the inchoate stirrings of organised labour. The Communist party became the means of driving Russian history forward, just as the corporation would drive the development of America. It was a giant philosophical leap, but one that until the autumn of 1917 remained an aberration on the fringes of radical thinking.

  Very little of the turmoil that Lenin and the other émigrés discovered when they returned to Russia was due to the activities of the party. Contrary to the Soviet version of history the Bolsheviks did not bring tsarism down; in the events leading up to the tsar’s abdication they played a very marginal role. Indeed, even on the left there were far more influential factions, for example the anarchists and the Social Revolutionaries (who unlike the various Marxist groups believed that the peasantry could be the backbone of the revolution). Nor did tsarist autocracy collapse under the impact of the First World War: comparatively speaking Britain and France were facing greater losses. There were food riots immediately before the tsar abdicated and there was mounting disquiet over the progress of the war, but most of those pressing the tsar to abdicate wanted the war fought more assiduously not less. The reality is that three hundred years of Romanov history just crumbled away. The inept stream of Alexanders and Nicholases who had sat on the imperial throne since Alexander I’s triumph over Napoleon dwindled into nothingness. To put it crudely the tsar, Nicholas II, was useless and his German-born wife even more so, and those around him simply got fed up. Right up to his murder in 1916 the mad monk Rasputin had more influence with the royal family than many of the tsar’s own ministers. The Russian Revolution owed more to the degeneracy of the Romanov autocracy than to the potency of competing ideologies.

  Nicholas is sometimes pictured as a well-meaning if somewhat remote figure; a monarch with the same high intent as his wife’s grandmother Queen Victoria, but unable to deal with the currents of revolution around him. The truth is more complicated, for Nicholas was above all an autocrat dedicated to maintaining a form of government that had long disappeared in Britain and which new social pressures and the Romanovs’ increasing feebleness made impossible to maintain in the Russian empire. He believed that he could and should control events, but in truth events controlled him.

  Industrial and technological change had set in motion a train of events that could not be reversed. Similar developments had occurred or were occurring in the United States, but there they provoked very different reactions. It is only a little too simplistic to say that the Romanov regime instinctively tried to turn the clock back, whereas the instinctive reaction of Americans was to speed the clock forward. There were reactionary forces in both countries determined to return to a simpler, better world, but in Russia that reactionary sentiment – almost entirely absent in Washington – was central to government thinking. All would be well if the nation could be returned to the values of Mother Russia – autocracy, empire and the Orthodox Church. In its increasingly desperate attempts to avert unrest the Russian regime turned to ever more reactionary means. It is worth examining one of these in some detail and to reflect on the sharp contrasts with superficially similar events in America.

  On Easter Day in 1903 an orgy of violence was unleashed against Jews in Bessarabia and later in other parts of the empire, all with the tacit approval of the tsar. Nicholas was anxious to distract attention from problems elsewhere and the Jews were a welcome scapegoat. Jewish families were butchered and thousands fled the country, the overwhelming majority to the United States. Small-scale pogroms had occurred in Europe for centuries. One of the most infamous occurred at York in England in 1190. They were particularly common in rural Poland and Russia, and their frequency increased when Alexander III came to the throne in 1881 but it was under his successor, the last tsar, Nicholas II, that the full terror of mass pogroms was launched. Not only were Nicholas II and Alexander III rabid anti-semites themselves but they were convinced that stirring up anti-semitism would deflect criticism of their increasingly ineffective rule. In fact what it did was provide a reservoir of disillusioned Jews in which radical groups could trawl. Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Grigory Zinoviev, Emma Goldman and a host of others were drawn into revolutionary struggle. One secret police report from 1905 showed that of 5,246 dissidents under surveillance in their region 1,676 were Jewish.

  Although pogroms in Russia were not new, those that began at Kishinev on Easter Day were notable not just for the numbers of men, women and children massacred and driven into exile but for the more or less open support given by the government. Ludicrous fabrications about the ritual murder of Christian children were printed in the heavily controlled newspapers. The interior minister, Vyach
eslav Plehve, claimed that in parts of Russia up to 90 per cent of the revolutionaries were Jewish, and on his specific orders the police stood idly by as the bloodbaths commenced. (At least this is the commonly accepted version of events. Some recent studies have suggested that, despite the tsar’s personal anti-semitism, the role of the state in instigating the pogroms has been greatly exaggerated. Evidence of Plehve’s involvement, for example, has been exposed as ‘bogus’ according to Niall Ferguson, who adduces Plehve’s cordial meeting with Zionist leader Theodore Herzl as evidence.) Whatever the truth, some Jewish activists were no admirers of the interior minister, and in July 1904 one of them, a leader of the Social Revolutionaries named Evno Azef, took his revenge by ordering Plehve’s assassination.

  The word pogrom is usually thought of in its original context of attacks on Jews in eastern Europe and Russia (pogrom is Russian for devastation), but it can be used for any violent attack on a minority community. Blacks in America were repeatedly subject to pogroms. The Tulsa pogrom of 1921 was one example but by no means the only one. Another took place on the site of the ‘prehistoric’ city of Cahokia, now East St Louis, Illinois, in July 1917. Local employers had been importing southern blacks to take on the most menial jobs, paying wages that no white man would accept. In the East St Louis Massacre white mobs rampaged through black areas torching homes and dragging men, women and children on to the street where they were shot, stoned, beaten and lynched. Local newspapers reported 200 deaths, although the true number is probably around half of that. Afterwards 7,000 blacks fled across the Mississippi, most never returning to the remains of their homes.