A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

The office Urusov assumed went back to the medieval era, although its exact form was altered many times. In a country as vast and difficult to govern as Russia the tasks of tax collection and maintaining law and order were obviously beyond the capabilities of the tiny medieval state. So they were farmed out to governors, plenipotentiaries of the Tsar, who in exchange for their service to the state were allowed to 'feed' themselves at the expense of the districts they ruled (usually with a great deal of violence and venality). The inability of the state to build up an effective system of provincial administration secured the power of these governors. Even in the nineteenth century, when the bureaucracy did extend its agencies to the provinces, the governors were never entirely integrated into the centralized state apparatus.

  The provincial governors were in charge of the local police, for whom they were technically answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. They also served as chairmen on the provincial boards whose work fell within the domain of the other ministries, such as Justice, Finance and Transportation. This fragmentation of executive power increasingly obliged the governors to negotiate, persuade and compromise — to play the part of a modern politician — during the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless, because of their close connections with the court, they could still ignore the demands of the ministries in St Petersburg — and indeed often did so when they deemed that these clashed with the interests of the noble estate, from which all the provincial governors were drawn. Stolypin's local government reforms, for example, which he tried to introduce after 1906, were effectively resisted by the governors who saw them as a challenge to the domination of the nobility. A. A. Khvostov, one of Stolypin's successors at the Ministry of the Interior, complained that it was 'virtually impossible' to prevent the governors from sabotaging the work of his ministry because of their lofty protectors' at the court: 'one has an aunt who is friendly with the Empress, another a gentleman-in-waiting for a relative, and a third a cousin who is an Imperial Master of the Horse.' The governors' extraordinary power stemmed from the fact that they were the Tsar's personal viceroys: they embodied the autocratic principle in the provinces. Russia's last two tsars were particularly adamant against the idea of subordinating the governors to the bureaucracy because they saw them as their most loyal supporters and because, in the words of Richard Robbins, 'as the personal representatives of the Sovereign, the governors helped keep the emperors from becoming dependent on their ministers and gave [them] a direct connection to the provinces and the people'. Two of Alexander Ill's counter-reforms, in 1890 and 1892, greatly increased the governors' powers over the zemstvos and municipal bodies. Like his son, Alexander saw this as a way of moving closer to the fantasy of ruling Russia directly from

  the throne. But the result was confusion in the provincial administration: the governors, the agencies of the central ministries and the elected local bodies were all set against each other.16

  The power of the imperial government effectively stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors had their offices. Below that there was no real state administration to speak of. Neither the uezd or district towns nor the volost or rural townships had any standing government officials. There was only a series of magistrates who would appear from time to time on some specific mission, usually to collect taxes or sort out a local conflict, and then disappear once again. The affairs of peasant Russia, where 85 per cent of the population lived, were entirely unknown to the city bureaucrats. 'We knew as much about the Tula countryside', confessed Prince Lvov, leader of the Tula zemstvo in the 1890s, 'as we knew about Central Africa.'17

  The crucial weakness of the tsarist system was the under-government of the localities. This vital fact is all too often clouded by the revolutionaries' mythic image of an all-powerful old regime. Nothing could be further from the truth. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only 4 state officials at the turn of the century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France. The regular police, as opposed to the political branch, was extremely small by European standards. Russia's expenditure on the police per capita of the population was less than half of that in Italy or France and less than one quarter of that in Prussia. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements stretched across nearly 2,000 square miles. Many of them did not even have a horse and cart. True, from 1903 the constables were aided by the peasant constables, some 40,000 of whom were appointed. But these were notoriously unreliable and, in any case, did very little to reduce the mounting burdens on the police. Without its own effective organs in the countryside, the central bureaucracy was assigning more and more tasks to the local police: not just the maintenance of law and order but also the collection of taxes, the implementation of government laws and military decrees, the enforcement of health and safety regulations, the inspection of public roads and buildings, the collection of statistics, and the general supervision of 'public morals' (e.g. making sure that the peasants washed their beards). The police, in short, were being used as a sort of catch-all executive organ. They were often the only agents of the state with whom the peasants ever came into contact.18

  Russia's general backwardness — its small tax-base and poor communications — largely accounts for this under-government. The legacy of serfdom also played a part. Until 1861 the serfs had been under the jurisdiction of their noble owners and, provided they paid their taxes, the state did not intervene in

  the relations between them. Only after the Emancipation — and then very slowly — did the tsarist government come round to the problem of how to extend its influence to its new 'citizens' in the villages and of how to shape a policy to help the development of peasant agriculture.

  Initially, in the 1860s, the regime left the affairs of the country districts in the hands of the local nobles. They dominated the zemstvo assemblies and accounted for nearly three-quarters of the provincial zemstvo boards. The noble assemblies and their elected marshals were left with broad administrative powers, especially at the district level (uezd) where they were virtually the only agents upon whom the tsarist regime could rely. Moreover, the new magistrates (mirovye posredniki) were given broad judicial powers, not unlike those of their predecessors under serfdom, including the right to flog the peasants for minor crimes and misdemeanours.

  It was logical for the tsarist regime to seek to base its power in the provinces on the landed nobility, its closest ally. But this was a dangerous strategy, and the danger grew as time went on. The landed nobility was in severe economic decline during the years of agricultural depression in the late nineteenth century, and was turning to the zemstvos to defend its local agrarian interests against the centralizing and industrializing bureaucracy of St Petersburg. In the years leading up to 1905 this resistance was expressed in mainly liberal terms: it was seen as the defence of 'provincial society', a term which was now used for the first time and consciously broadened to include the interests of the peasantry. This liberal zemstvo movement culminated in the political demand for more autonomy for local government, for a national parliament and a constitution. Here was the start of the revolution: not in the socialist or labour movements but — as in France in the 1780s — in the aspirations of the regime's oldest ally, the provincial nobility.

  The Emancipation came as a rude shock not just to the economy but also to the whole of the provincial civilization of the gentry. Deprived of their serfs, most of the landed nobles went into terminal decline. Very few were able to respond to the new challenges of the commercial world in which as farmers — and less often industrialists and merchants — they were henceforth obliged to survive. The whole of the period between 1861 and 1917 could be presented as the slow death of the old agrarian elite upon which the tsarist system had always relied.

  From Gogol to Chekhov, the figure of the impoverished noble landowner
was a perennial of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He was a cultural obsession. Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard (1903) was particularly, and subtly, resonant with the familiar themes of a decaying gentry: the elegant but loss-making estate is sold off to a self-made businessman, the son of a serf on the very same estate, who chops down the orchard to build houses. Most of the

  squires, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov's play, proved incapable of transforming their landed estates into viable commercial farms once the Emancipation had deprived them of the prop of free serf labour and forced them into the capitalist world. They could not follow in the footsteps of the Prussian Junkers. The old Russian serf economy had never been run, in the main, with the intention of making profits. Nobles gained prestige (and sometimes high office) from the number of serfs they owned — whence the story of Chichikov in Gogol's Dead Souk (1842), who travels around the estates of Russia buying up the lists of deceased serfs (or 'souls' as they were then called) whose death had not yet been registered — and from the ostentation of their manor houses rather than the success of their farms. Most seigneurial demesnes were farmed by the serfs with the same tools and primitive methods as they used on their own household plots. Many of the squires squandered the small income from their estates on expensive luxuries imported from Europe rather than investing it in their farms. Few appeared to understand that income was not profit.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the squires had fallen hopelessly into debt. By 1859, one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and aristocratic banks. This, more than anything, helped the government to force Emancipation through against considerable opposition from the gentry. Not that the conditions of the liberation were unfavourable to the landowners: they received good money for the (often inferior) land which they chose to transfer to the peasants.* But now the squires were on their own, deprived of the free labour of the serfs and their tools and animals. They could no longer live a life of ease: their survival depended on the market place. They had to pay for tools and labour and learn the difference between profit and loss. Yet there was almost nothing in their backgrounds to prepare them for the challenge of capitalism. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting and went on spending in the same old lavish way, furnishing their manor houses in the French Empire style and sending their sons to the most expensive schools. Once again their debts increased, forcing them to lease or sell off first one or two and then more and more chunks of land. Between 1861 and 1900 more than 40 per cent of the gentry's land was sold to the peasants, whose growing land hunger, due to a population boom, led to a seven-fold increase in land values. There was a similar rise in rental values and, by 1900, two-thirds of the gentry's arable land had been rented out to the peasants. It was ironic that the depression of agricultural prices during the 1880s and the 1890s, which forced the peasants

  * Under the terms of the Emancipation the serfs were forced to pay for their newly acquired land through a mortgage arrangement with the state, which paid the gentry for it in full and directly. Thus, in effect, the serfs bought their freedom by paying off their masters' debts.

  to increase the land they ploughed, also made it more profitable for the squires to rent out or sell their land rather than cultivate it. Yet despite these speculative profits, by the turn of the century most of the squires found they could no longer afford to live in the manner to which they had grown accustomed. Their neo-classical manor houses, with their Italian paintings and their libraries, their ballrooms and their formal gardens, slowly fell into decay.19

  Not all the squires went willingly to the wall. Many of them made a go of running their estates as commercial enterprises, and it was from these circles that the liberal zemstvo men emerged to challenge the autocracy during the last decades of the century.

  Prince G. E. Lvov (1861—1925) — who was to become the first Prime Minister of democratic Russia in 1917 — typified these men. The Lvovs were one of the oldest noble Russian families. They traced their roots back thirty-one generations to Rurik himself, the ninth-century founder of the Russian 'state'. Popovka, the ancestral home of the Lvovs, was in Tula province, less than 120 miles — but on Russia's primitive roads at least two days' travel by coach — from Moscow. The Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana was only a few miles away, and the Lvovs counted the great writer as one of their closest friends. The manor house at Popovka was rather grand for what, at only 1,000 acres, was a small estate by Russian standards. It was a two-storey residence, built in the Empire style of the 1820s, with over twenty rooms, each with a high ceiling, double-doors and windows, overlooking a formal garden planted with roses and classical statues at the front. There was a park behind the house with a large white-stone chapel, an artificial lake, an orangery, a birch avenue and an orchard. The domestic regime was fairly standard for the nineteenth-century provincial gentry. There was an English governess called 'Miss Jenny' (English was the first language Lvov learned to read). Lvov's father was a reform-liberal, a man of 1864, and spent all his money on his children's education. The five sons — though not the only daughter — were all sent off to the best Moscow schools. Luxuries were minimal by the spendthrift standards of the Russian noble class: the standard First Empire mahogany furniture; one or two Flemish eighteenth-century landscapes; a few dogs for the autumn hunt; and an English carriage with pedigree horses; but very little to impress the much grander Tolstoys.

  Yet, even so, by the end of the 1870s, the Lvovs had managed to clock up massive debts well in excess of 150,000 roubles. 'With the abolition of serfdom,' recalled Lvov, 'we soon fell into the category of landowners who did not have the means to live in the manner to which their circle had become accustomed.' The family had to sell off its two other landed estates, one in Chernigov for 30,000 roubles, the other in Kostroma for slightly less, as well as a beer factory in Briansk and the Lvovs' apartment in Moscow. But this still left

  them heavily in debt. They now had to choose between selling Popovka or making it profitable as a farm. Despite their inexperience, and the onset of the worst depression in agriculture for a century, the Lvovs had no doubts about opting for the latter. 'The idea of giving up the home of our ancestors was unthinkable,' Lvov wrote later. The farm at Popovka had become so run down from decades of neglect that when the Lvovs first returned there to run it even the peasants from the neighbouring villages shook their heads and pitied them. They offered to help them restore the farm buildings and clear the forest of weeds from the fields. The four eldest brothers took charge of the farm — their father was too old and ill to work — while Georgii studied law at Moscow University and returned to Popovka during the holidays. The family laid off the servants, leaving all the housework to Georgii's sister, and lived like peasants on rye bread and cabbage soup. Later Lvov would look back at this time as a source of his own emancipation — his own personal revolution — from the landowners' culture of the tsarist order. 'It separated us from the upper crust and made us democratic. I began to feel uncomfortable in the company of aristocrats and always felt much closer to the peasants.' Gradually, by their own hard labour in the fields, the Lvovs restored the farm. They learned about farming methods from their peasant neighbours and from agricultural textbooks purchased in Moscow by Georgii. The soil turned out to be good for growing clover and, by switching to it from rye, they even began to make impressive profits. By the late 1880s Popovka was saved, all its debts had been repaid, and the newly graduated Georgii returned to transform it into a commercial farm. He even planted an orchard and built a canning factory near the estate to make apple puree for the Moscow market.20 What could be a more fitting counter to Chekhov's vision of the gentry in decline?

  Prince Lvov became a leading member of the Tula zemstvo during the early 1890s. The ideals and limitations which he shared with the liberal 'zemstvo men' were to leave their imprint on the government he led between March and July 1917. Prince Lvov was not t
he sort of man whom one would expect to find at the head of a revolutionary government. As a boy he had dreamed of 'becoming a forester and of living on my own in the woods'. This mystical aspect of his character — a sort of Tolstoyan naturalism — was never extinguished. Ekaterina Kuskova said that 'in one conversation he could speak with feeling about mysticism and then turn at once to the price of potatoes'. By temperament he was much better suited to the intimate circles (kruzhki) of the zemstvo activists than to the cut-throat world of modern party politics. The Prince was shy and modest, gentle and withdrawn, and quite incapable of commanding people by anything other than a purely moral authority. None of these were virtues in the eyes of more ambitious politicians, who found him 'passive', 'grey' and 'cold'. Lvov's sad and noble face, which rarely showed signs

  of emotion or excitement, made him appear even more remote. The metropolitan and arrogant elite considered Lvov parochial and dim — the liberal leader Pavel Miliukov, for example, called him 'simple-minded' (shliapa) — and this largely accounts for Lvov's poor reputation, even neglect, in the history books. But this is both to misunderstand and to underestimate Lvov. He had a practical political mind — one formed by years of zemstvo work dedicated to improving rural conditions — and not a theoretical one like Miliukov's. The liberal V A. Obolensky, who knew Lvov well, claimed that he 'never once heard him make a remark of a theoretical nature. The "ideologies" of the intelligentsia were completely alien to him.' Yet this practicality — what Obolensky called his 'native wit' — did not necessarily make Lvov an inferior politician. He had a sound grasp of technical matters, bags of common sense and a rare ability to judge people — all good political qualities.21

  Lvov was not just an unlikely revolutionary: he was also a reluctant one. His ideals were derived from the Great Reforms — he was born symbolically in 1861 — and, in his heart, he was always to remain a liberal monarchist. He believed it was the calling of the noble class to dedicate itself to the service of the people. This sort of paternal populism was commonplace among the zemstvo men. They were well-meaning and dedicated public servants, of the sort who fill the pages of Tolstoy and Chekhov, who dreamt of bringing civilization to the dark and backward countryside. As the liberal (and thus guilt-ridden) sons of ex-serf-owners, many of them no doubt felt that, in this way, they were helping to repay their debts to the peasants. Some were ready to make considerable personal sacrifices. Lvov, for example, spent three months a year travelling around the villages inspecting schools and courts. He used some of the profits from the estate at Popovka to build a school and install an improved water system for the nearby villages. Under his leadership in the 1890s, the Tula zemstvo became one of the most progressive in the whole country. It established schools and libraries; set up hospitals and lunatic asylums; built new roads and bridges; provided veterinary and agronomic services for the peasantry; invested in local trades and industries; financed insurance schemes and rural credit; and, in the best liberal tradition, completed ambitious statistical surveys in preparation for further reforms. It was a model of the liberal zemstvo mission: to overcome the backwardness and apathy of provincial life and integrate the peasantry, as 'citizens', into the life of 'the nation'.