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

by Orlando Figes

  The optimistic expectations of the zemstvo liberals were, it is almost needless to say, never realized. Theirs was a vast undertaking, quite beyond the limited capabilities of the zemstvos. There were some achievements, especially in primary education, which were reflected in the general increase of zemstvo expenditure from 15 million roubles per annum in 1868 to 96 million per annum by the turn of the century. However, the overall level of spending was

  not very high,considering the zemstvos' wide range of responsibilities; and the proportion of local to state taxation (about 15 per cent) remained very low compared with most of Europe (where it was over 50 per cent).22 There was, moreover, a fundamental problem — one which undermined the whole liberal project — of how to involve the peasants in the zemstvo's work. The peasants after the Emancipation were kept isolated in their village communes without legal rights equal to the nobility's or even the right to elect delegates directly to the district zemstvo. They saw the zemstvo as an institution of the gentry and paid its taxes reluctantly.

  But an even more intractable problem for the zemstvos was the growing opposition of the central government to their work under the last two tsars. Alexander III looked upon the zemstvos as a dangerous breeding place of liberalism. Most of his bureaucrats agreed with him. Polovtsov, for example, thought that the zemstvos had 'brought a whole new breed of urban types — writers, money-lenders, clerks, and the like — into the countryside who were quite alien to the peasantry'. The government was very concerned about the 70,000 professional employees of the zemstvos — teachers, doctors, statisticians and agronomists — who were known collectively as the Third Element. In contrast to the first two zemstvo Elements (the administrators and elected deputies), who were drawn mainly from the landed nobility, these professionals often came from peasant or lower-class backgrounds and this gave their politics a democratic and radical edge. As their numbers increased in the 1880s and 1890s, so they sought to broaden the zemstvos' social mission. In effect they transformed them from organs for the gentry into organs mainly for the peasantry. Ambitious projects for agricultural reform and improvements in health and sanitation were advanced in the wake of the great famine which struck rural Russia in the early 1890s. Liberal landowners like Lvov went along with them. But the large and more conservative landowners were very hostile to the increased taxes which such projects would demand — after more than a decade of agricultural depression many of them were in dire financial straits — and campaigned against the Third Element. They found a natural and powerful ally in the Ministry of the Interior, which since the start of Alexander's reign had campaigned to curtail the democratic tendencies of local government. Successive Ministers of the Interior and their police chiefs portrayed the Third Element as revolutionaries — 'cohorts of the sans-culottes' in the words of Plehve, Director of the Police Department and later Minister of the Interior — who were using their positions in the zemstvos to stir up the peasantry.

  In response to their pressure, a statute was passed in 1890 which increased the landed nobles' domination of the zemstvos by disenfranchising Jews and peasant landowners from elections to these assemblies. It also brought the zemstvos' work under the tight control of a new provincial bureau, headed by

  the provincial governor and subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, which was given a wide veto over the appointment of zemstvo personnel, the zemstvos' budgets and publications, as well as most of their daily resolutions. Armed with these sweeping powers, the Ministry and its provincial agents constantly obstructed the zemstvos' work. They imposed stringent limits on their budgets on the grounds that some of their expenditures were unnecessary. Some of this was extremely petty. The Perm zemstvo, for example, had its budget capped for commissioning a portrait of Dr Litvinov, the long-serving director of the provincial lunatic asylum. The Suzdal zemstvo was similarly punished for using fifty roubles from a reserve fund to help pay for the building of a library. The police also blocked the zemstvos' work. They arrested statisticians and agronomists as 'revolutionaries' and prevented them from travelling into the countryside. They raided the zemstvo institutions — including hospitals and lunatic asylums — in search of 'political suspects'. They even arrested local noblewomen for teaching peasant children how to read and write in their spare time.23

  The counter-reforms of Alexander's reign, of which the 1890 Statute was a cornerstone, were essentially an attempt to restore the autocratic principle to local government. The provincial governor, whose powers over the zemstvos and the municipal bodies had been greatly increased by the counter-reforms, was to play the role of a tsar in miniature. The same idea lay behind the institution of the land captains (zemskie nachal'nikt) as a result of another counter-reform in 1889. They remained the central agents of the tsarist regime in the countryside until 1917, although after the 1905 Revolution their powers were considerably diluted. Appointed by the provincial governors and subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, the 2,000 land captains, mainly from the gentry, were given a wide range of executive and judicial powers over the peasants, to whom they were known as the 'little tsars'. Their powers included the right to overturn the decisions of the village assemblies, to discharge elected peasant officials, and to decide judicial disputes. Until 1904 they could even order the public flogging of the peasants for minor misdemeanours, such as (and most commonly) for trespassing on the gentry's land or for failing to pay their taxes. It is hard to overstress the psychological impact of this public flogging — decades after the Emancipation — on the peasant mind. The peasant writer Sergei Semenov* (1868—1922), whom we shall encounter throughout this book, wrote that his fellow peasants saw the land captains as 'a return to the days of serfdom, when the master squire had lorded it over the village'. Semen* Kanatchikov, another peasant-son we shall encounter, also voiced the resentment caused by the captains' feudal treatment of the peasantry. One peasant, who had been arrested for failing to remove his hat and bow before the land captain while he delivered a lecture to

  * Semenov is pronounced Semyonov and Semen is Semyon.

  the village, asked Kanatchikov: 'What's a poor peasant to a gentleman? Why he's worse than a dog. At least a dog can bite, but the peasant is meek and humble and tolerates everything.'

  Worried by the damage the land captains were causing to the image of the regime in the countryside, many of the more liberal bureaucrats — and even some of the conservatives — pressed for their abolition during the first decade of Nicholas's reign. They pointed to the low calibre of the land captains — who were often retired army officers or the lesser sons of the local squires too dim to advance within the regular bureaucracy — and warned that their readiness to resort to the whip might provoke the peasants to rebel. But Nicholas would not hear a word against them. He saw the land captains as the 'knight servitors' of his personal power in the countryside. They would give him a direct link with the peasantry — a link which the 'wall' of the bureaucracy had blocked — and help to realize his dream of a popular autocracy in the Muscovite style. Through their power he sought to restore the traditional order of society, with the landed gentry at its head, thereby counteracting the democratic trends of the modern world.24

  The counter-reforms of Alexander's reign were a vital turning point in the pre-history of the revolution. They set the tsarist regime and Russian society on the path of growing conflict and, to a certain extent, determined the outcome of events between 1905 and 1917. The autocratic reaction against the zem-stvos — like the gentry's reaction against democracy with which it became associated — had both the intention and the effect of excluding the mass of the people from the realm of politics. The liberal dream of the 'Men of 1864' — of turning the peasants into citizens and broadening the base of local government — was undermined as the court and its allies sought to reassert the old paternal system, headed by the Tsar, his clergy and his knights, in which the peasants, like children or savages, were deemed too primitive to play an active part. The demise of the lib
eral agenda did not become fully clear until the defeat of Prime Minister Stolypin's reforms — above all his project to establish a volost zemstvo dominated by the peasantry — between 1906 and 1911. But its likely consequences were clear long before that. As their pioneers had often pointed out, the zemstvos were the one institution capable of providing a political base for the regime in the countryside. Had they been allowed to integrate the peasants into the system of local politics, then perhaps the old divide between the 'two Russias' (in Herzen's famous phrase), between official Russia and peasant Russia, might at least have been narrowed if not bridged. That divide defined the whole course of the revolution. Without a stake in the old ruling system, the peasants in 1917 had no hesitation in sweeping away the entire state, thereby creating the political vacuum for the Bolshevik seizure

  of power. Tsarism in this sense undermined itself; but it also created the basic conditions for the triumph of Bolshevism.

  iii Remnants of a Feudal Army

  'I promise and do hereby swear before the Almighty God, before His Holy Gospels, to serve His Imperial Majesty, the Supreme Autocrat, truly and faithfully, to obey him in all things, and to defend his dynasty, without sparing my body, until the last drop of my blood.' Every soldier took this oath of allegiance upon entering the imperial army. Significantly, it was to the Tsar and the preservation of his dynasty rather than to the state or even to the nation that the soldier swore his loyalty. Every soldier had to renew this oath on the coronation of each new Tsar. The Russian army belonged to the Tsar in person; its officers and soldiers were in effect in vassalage to him.25

  The patrimonial principle survived longer in the army than in any other institution of the Russian state. Nothing was closer to the Romanov court or more important to it than the military. The power of the Empire was founded on it, and the needs of the army and the navy always took precedence in the formulation of tsarist policies. All the most important reforms in Russian history had been motivated by the need to catch up and compete in war with the Empire's rivals in the west and south: Peter the Great's reforms had been brought about by the wars with Sweden and the Ottomans; those of Alexander II by military defeat in the Crimea.

  The court was steeped in the ethos of the military. Since the late eighteenth century it had become the custom of the tsars to play soldiers with their families. The royal household was run like a huge army staff, with the Tsar as the Supreme Commander, all his courtiers divided by rank, and his sons, who were enrolled in the Guards, subjected from an early age to the sort of cruel humiliations which they would encounter in the officers' mess, so as to inculcate the principles of discipline and subordination which it was thought they would need in order to rule. Nicholas himself had a passion for the Guards. His fondest memories were of his youthful and carefree days as Colonel in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. He had a weakness for military parades and spared no expense on gold braid for his soldiers. He even restored some of the more archaic and operatic embellishments to the uniforms of the elite Guards regiments which Alexander III had thought better to abolish in the interests of economy. Nicholas was constantly making fussy alterations to the uniforms of his favourite units — an extra button here, another tassel there — as if he was still playing with the toy soldiers of his boyhood. All his daughters, as well as his son, were enrolled in Guards regiments. On namedays and birthdays they wore their

  uniforms and received delegations of their officers. They appeared at military parades and reviews, troop departures, flag presentations, regimental dinners, battle anniversaries and other ceremonies. The Guards officers of the Imperial Suite, who accompanied them everywhere they went, were treated almost as extended members of the Romanov family. No other group was as close or as loyal to the person of the Tsar.26

  Many historians have depicted the army as a stalwart buttress of the tsarist regime. That was also the view of most observers until the revolution. Major Von Tettau from the German General Staff wrote in 1903, for example, that the Russian soldier 'is full of selflessnesss and loyalty to his duty' in a way 'that is scarcely to be found in any other army of the world'. He did 'everything with a will' and was always 'unassuming, satisfied and jolly — even after labour and deprivation'.27 But in fact there were growing tensions between the military — in every rank — and the Romanov regime.

  For the country's military leaders the root of the problem lay in the army's dismal record in the nineteenth century, which many of them came to blame on the policies of the government. Defeat in the Crimean War (1853—6), followed by a costly campaign against Turkey (1877—8), and then the humiliation of defeat by the Japanese — the first time a major European power had lost to an Asian country — in 1904—5, left the army and the navy demoralized. The causes of Russia's military weakness were partly economic: her industrial resources failed to match up to her military commitments in an age of increasing competition between empires. But this incompetence also had a political source: during the later nineteenth century the army had gradually lost its place at the top of government spending priorities. The Crimean defeat had discredited the armed services and highlighted the need to divert resources from the military to the modernization of the economy. The Ministry of War lost the favoured position it had held in the government system of Nicholas I (1825—55) and became overshadowed by the Ministries of Finance and the Interior, which from this point on received between them the lion's share of state expenditure. Between 1881 and 1902 the military's share of the budget dropped from 30 per cent to 18 per cent. Ten years before the First World War the Russian army was spending only 57 per cent of the amount spent on each soldier in the German army, and only 63 per cent of that spent in the Austrian. In short, the Russian soldier went to war worse trained, worse equipped and more poorly serviced than his enemy. The army was so short of cash that it relied largely on its own internal economy to clothe and feed itself. Soldiers grew their own food and tobacco, and repaired their own uniforms and boots. They even earned money for the regiment by going off to work as seasonal labourers on landed estates, in factories and mines near their garrisons. Many soldiers spent more time growing vegetables or repairing boots than they did learning how to handle their

  guns. By reducing the military budget, the tsarist regime created an army of farmers and cobblers.

  The demoralization of the army was also connected to its increasing role in the suppression of civilian protests. The Russian Empire was covered with a network of garrisons. Their job was to provide more or less instant military assistance for the provincial governors or the police to deal with unrest. Between 1883 and 1903 the troops were called out nearly 1,500 times. Officers complained bitterly that this police duty was beneath the dignity of a professional soldier, and that it distracted the army from its proper military purpose. They also warned of the damaging effect it was likely to have on the army's discipline. History proved them right. The vast majority of the private soldiers were peasants, and their morale was heavily influenced by the news they received from their villages. When the army was called out to put down the peasant uprisings of 1905—6 many of the units, especially in the peasant-dominated infantry, refused to obey and mutinied in support of the revolution. There were over 400 mutinies between the autumn of 1905 and the summer of 1906. The army was brought to the brink of collapse, and it took years to restore a semblance of order.28

  Many of these mutinies were part of a general protest against the feudal conditions prevailing in the army. Tolstoy, who had served as an army officer in the Crimean War, described them in his last novel Hadji-Murad. The peasant soldiers, in particular, objected to the way their officers addressed them with the familiar 'you' (tyi) — normally used for animals and children — rather than the polite 'you' (vyi). It was how the masters had once addressed their serfs; and since most of the officers were nobles, and most of the soldiers were sons of former serfs, this mode of address symbolized the continuation of the old feudal world inside the army. The first thing a recruit did
on joining the army was to learn the different titles of his officers: 'Your Honour' up to the rank of colonel; 'Your Excellency' for generals; and 'Your Radiance' or 'Most High Radiance' for titled officers. Colonels and generals were to be greeted not just with the simple hand salute but by halting and standing sideways to attention while the officer passed by for a strictly prescribed number of paces. The soldier was trained to answer his superiors in regulation phrases of deference: 'Not at all, Your Honour'; 'Happy to serve you, Your Excellency.' Any deviations were likely to be punished. Soldiers could expect to be punched in the face, hit in the mouth with the butt of a rifle and sometimes even flogged for relatively minor misdemeanours. Officers were allowed to use a wide range of abusive terms — such as 'scum' and 'scoundrel' — to humiliate their soldiers and keep them in their place. Even whilst off-duty the common soldier was deprived of the rights of a normal citizen. He could not smoke in public places, go to restaurants or theatres, ride in trams, or occupy a seat in a first- or second-class