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

by Orlando Figes

  Only the socialist parties in Russia embraced the ideas of national autonomy and independence, although even they tended to subordinate the national question to the broader democratic struggle within Russia. It is hardly

  surprising, then, that the national movements for liberation should have formed such a central part of the revolutionary movement as a whole. Indeed this was the pretext for their persecution by the Right: simply to be a Pole or, even worse, a Jew was to be a revolutionary in their eyes. This socialistic aspect of the nationalist movements is worth underlining. For the late twentieth-century reader might be tempted to assume, on the basis of the collapse of Communism and the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe, that they must have been opposed to socialist goals. What is striking about the nationalist movements within the Russian Empire is that their most successful political variants were nearly always socialist in form: Joseph Pilsudski's Polish Socialist Party led the national movement in Poland; the Socialist Party became the national party of the Finns; the Baltic movements were led by socialists; the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries were the leading Ukrainian national party; the Mensheviks led the Georgian national movement; and the Dashnak socialists the Armenian one. This was in part because the main ethnic conflict also tended to run along social lines: Estonian and Latvian peasants against German landlords and merchants; Ukrainian peasants against Polish or Russian landlords and officials; Azeri workers, or Georgian peasants, against the Armenian bourgeoisie; Kazakh and Kirghiz pastoralists against Russian farmers; and so on. Parties which appealed exclusively to nationalism effectively deprived themselves of mass support; whereas those which successfully combined the national with the social struggle had an almost unstoppable democratic force. In this sense it is worth repeating, given the understandably bad press which nationalism has received in the twentieth century, that for the subject peoples of the Tsarist Empire, as indeed of the Soviet Empire, nationalism was a means of human liberation from oppression and foreign domination. Lenin himself acknowledged this when, paraphrasing the Marquis de Custine, he called Imperial Russia a 'prison of peoples'.46

  * * * Most of the national movements in the Tsarist Empire began with the growth of a literary cultural nationalism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Romantic writers, students and artists, alienated by the life of the cities, travelled to the countryside for refreshment and inspiration. They idealized the simple rustic lifestyle of their peasant countrymen and added folk themes to their works in an effort to create a 'national style'. This appropriation of the native culture — of folksongs and folklore, local customs and dialects, peasant crafts and costumes — was more than a passing fashion for the pastoral. It was part of a broader project by a newly conscious urban middle class: the creation of a set of ethnic symbols as the basis of their own national ethos and identity. This was their 'imagined community'. The urban intelligentsia did not so much observe peasant life as reinvent and mythologize it in their own image. The folk culture of the countryside, which they believed was the ancient origin of their

  nation, was in fact often little more than the product of their own fertile imagination. It was increasingly the urban middle classes, rather than the peasants, who dressed up in folk costumes when they went to church, and who filled their homes with furniture and tableware in the 'peasant style'. It was they who flocked to the ethnographic and folk museums which were opened in cities throughout Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.* But if instead of these museums they had gone into the villages themselves, to observe this folk culture, so to speak, in its native habitat, they would have found it was disappearing fast. The old handicrafts were dying out under competition from cheaper industry. The peasants were increasingly wearing the same manufactured clothes as the urban workers, buying the same food in tins and jars, the same factory furniture, household utensils and linen. It was only the urban middle classes who could afford to buy the old handicrafts.47

  The essentially bourgeois character of this kind of nationalism was clearly visible in Finland. The Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed more self-rule and autonomy than any other part of the Tsarist Empire because on its capture from Sweden in 1808—9 the Russians confirmed the same rights and privileges that had been granted to the Finns by the more liberal Swedes. These cultural freedoms enabled the growth of a small but nationally conscious native intelligentsia, which took its inspiration from the publication of such Finnish folk-epics as the Kalevala, and which, from the 1860s, became increasingly unified through the national campaign for the Finnish language to be put on an equal footing with the historically dominant Swedish.48

  In the Baltic provinces there was a similar cultural movement based around the campaign for native language rights in schools and universities, literary publications and official life. It was directed less against the Russians than the Germans (in Estonia and Latvia) or the Poles (in Lithuania), who had dominated these regions before their conquest by the Russians in the eighteenth century. Here the native languages had survived only in the remote rural areas (the native elites had been assimilated into the dominant linguistic culture). They were really no more than peasant dialects, closely related but locally varied, not unlike the Gaelic of the Irish and the Scots. During the nineteenth century linguists and ethnographers collected together and standardized these dialects in the form of a written language with a settled grammar and orthography. Ironically, even if the peasants could have read this 'national language', most of them would have found it hard to understand, since it was usually either based on just one of the dominant dialects or was an artificial construction, a sort of

  * Warsaw established the first Ethnographic Museum in 1888. It was followed by Sarajevo in 1888, Helsinki in 1893, Prague and Lvov in 1895, Belgrade in 1901, St Petersburg in 1902, and Krakov in 1905.

  peasant Esperanto, made up from all the different dialects. Nevertheless, this creation of a literary native language, and the publication of a national literature and history written in its prose, helped to start the process of nation-building and made it possible, in future decades, to educate the peasantry in this emergent national culture. In Estonia the cultural landmarks of this national renaissance were the publication of the epic poem Kalevipoeg by Kreutzwald in 1857, and the foundation, in the same year, of an Estonian-language newspaper, Postimees, aimed at peasant readers. In Latvia there was also a native-language newspaper, Balss (The Voice), from 1878, which, like the Latvian Association, was committed to the idea of uniting the peoples of the two provinces of Livonia and Kurland — which then comprised the territory of Latvia — to form a single Latvian nation. Finally, in Lithuania, which for so long had been dominated by the Poles, a national written language was also developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century (just to spite the Poles it was based on the Czech alphabet) and a native literature began to appear.49

  As on the Baltic, so in post-partition Poland, the nation was an idea and not yet a place. Poland existed only in the imagination and in the memory of the historic Polish kingdom which had existed before its defeat and subjugation to the great powers of Eastern Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. Its spirit was expressed in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, in the patriotic hymns of the Catholic Church, and — or so at least the patriots claimed (for he was half-French) — in the music of Chopin. This cultural nationalism was a comfort for the Poles, and a substitute for politics. Very few people were engaged in public life, even fewer in open dissent against Russia. Censorship and the constant danger of arrest forced the literate population to withdraw into the world of poetry (as in Russia, literature in Poland served as a metaphor for politics). The 1830 Polish uprising, even the great 1863 uprising, were the work of a relatively small nationalist minority, mostly students, officers, priests and the more liberal noble landowners. Neither won much support from the peasantry, who had little concept of themselves as Poles and who, in any case, were much more interested in gaining their own land and freedom from the nobles
than in fighting for a cause led by noblemen and intellectuals.50

  This first and primarily cultural expression of aspiring nationhood was nowhere more in evidence than in the Ukraine, no doubt in part due to the fact that of all the Empire's subject nationalities the Ukrainians were the closest culturally to the Russians. The Russians called the Ukraine 'Little Russia', and made it illegal to print the word 'Ukraine'. Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, was the tenth-century founding place of Russian Christianity. The cultural differences between Russia and the Ukraine — mainly in language, land rights and customs — had really only developed between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the western Ukraine fell under Polish-Lithuanian domination.

  Thus the Ukrainian nationalists had their work cut out to make a case for these distinctions as the basis of a separate national culture.

  They took inspiration from the Ukrainian national movement in neighbouring Galicia. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Galicia had been granted relatively liberal rights of self-government. This had allowed the Ukrainians, or 'Ruthenians' (dog-Latin for 'Russians') as they were known by the Austrians, to promote their own Ukrainian language in primary schools and public life, to publish native-language newspapers and books, and to advance the study of Ukrainian history and folk culture. Galicia became a sort of 'Ukrainian Piedmont' for the rest of the national movement in tsarist Ukraine: a forcing-house of national consciousness and an oasis of freedom for nationalist intellectuals. Lviv, its capital, also known as Lemberg (by the Germans) and as Lvov (by the Russians), was a thriving centre of Ukrainian culture. Although subjects of the Tsar, both the composer Lysenko and the historian Hrushevsky had found their nation in Galicia. The nationalist intellectuals who pioneered the Ukrainian literary language in the middle decades of the nineteenth century all borrowed terms from the Galician dialect, which they considered the most advanced, although later, as they tried to reach the peasantry with newspapers and books, they were forced to base it on the Poltavan folk idiom, which, as the dialect of the central Ukraine, was the most commonly understood. The seminal texts of this national literary renaissance were published by the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius prior to its dissolution by the tsarist authorites in 1847. The romantic poetry of Taras Shevchenko, which played the same role as Mickiewicz's poetry in Poland in shaping the intelligentsia's national consciousness, was the most important of these. Ukrainian-language publications continued to appear, despite the legal restrictions on them. Many were published by the Kiev section of the Russian Geographical Society, whose increasingly nationalist members devoted themselves to the study of Ukrainian folk culture, language and history.51

  In the non-European sectors of the Empire this cultural stage of the national movements was much slower to take off. The Armenian intelligentsia had welcomed the extension of tsarist rule to the eastern half of their country after the Russian defeat of Persia in 1827. They now had a Christian ruler to protect them from the Turks, and, or so they hoped, to free the larger half of the Armenian people who remained subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The defence of Armenian culture remained centred on the Gregorian Church and its schools, which, at least until the Russification campaign of the 1880s, aligned the Armenians with the Russians as fellow Christians against the Turks. In neighbouring Georgia, by contrast, language rather than religion was the key to the evolution of national identity. The Georgian Church, unlike the Armenian, had been merged with the Russian Orthodox; while the Georgian social system,

  the historic product of a specific type of feudalism, had been, albeit imperfectly, assimilated into the Russian system of estates during the half-century following Georgia's annexation in 1801. The Georgian nobles, ruined by the Emancipation of their serfs in the 1860s, dominated the intelligentsia. Theirs was a nostalgic nationalism: the romantic poetry of Chavchavadze and Baratashvili lamented the lost greatness of the Georgian kingdoms in the Middle Ages. Finally, in Azerbaijan, conquered by Russia in the 1800s, the emergence of a national consciousness was complicated by the domination of Islam, which tended towards supranational forms and blocked the growth of a secular culture and a written language for the masses. To begin with, ironically, it was the Russians who encouraged the Azeris' secular culture to develop, promoting the plays of Akhundzada, the 'Tatar Moliere', and commissioning histories of the Azeri folk culture and language, as a way of weakening the influence of the Muslim powers to the south.52

  Here, more than anywhere, the incipient nationalist intelligentsia found its ability to influence the peasant masses hampered by the general backwardness of society. This was a problem throughout the Tsarist Empire. Isolated in their remote settlements, without schools or communications with the broader world, the vast majority of the peasants had no concept of their nationality. Theirs was a local culture dominated by tradition and the spoken word. It was confined to a small and narrow world: the village and its fields, the parish church, the landowner's manor and the local market. Beyond that was a foreign country. In Estonia, for example, the peasants simply called themselves maarahvas, meaning 'country people', while they understood the term saks (from Saxon — i.e. German) to mean simply a landlord or a master; it was only in the late nineteenth century, when the Tallinn intellectuals spread their influence into the villages, that these terms took on a new ethnic meaning. Much the same was true in Poland. 'I did not know that I was a Pole till I began to read books and papers,' recalled one peasant in the 1920s. The people of his region, not far from Warsaw on the Vistula, called themselves Mazurians rather than Poles.53

  In Belorussia and the northern Ukraine there was so much ethnic and religious intermingling — in an area the size of Cambridgeshire there might be a mixture of Belorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Jewish and Lithuanian settlements — that it was difficult for anything more than a localized form of ethnic identity to take root in the popular consciousness. One British diplomat — though no doubt a great imperialist and therefore somewhat contemptuous of the claims of small peasant nations like the Ukraine — concluded that this was still the case as late as 1918:

  Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is

  a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked 'the local tongue'. One might perhaps get him to call himself by a proper national name and say that he is 'russki', but this declaration would hardly yet prejudge the question of an Ukrainian relationship; he simply does not think of nationality in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia. Again, if one tried to find out to what state he desires to belong — whether he wants to be ruled by an Ail-Russian or a separate Ukrainian government — one would find that in his opinion all governments alike are a nuisance, and it would be best if the 'Christian peasant folk' were left to themselves.

  Such localized forms of identity were even more marked in the Muslim regions of the Caucasus (among the Chechens, Daghestanis and Azeris) as well as in much of Central Asia where tribal fiefdoms remained dominant, despite the superimposition of tsarist administrative structures.54

  Clearly, then, the process of exposing the peasantry to this emergent national culture, centred in the cities, and of getting them to think in national terms, depended upon the general opening up of their narrow village culture to the outside world. This was a pan-European phenomenon during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Eugen Weber has shown in his splendid book Peasants into Frenchmen. It was contingent on the extension of state education in the countryside, on the growth of rural institutions, such as clubs and societies, markets and co-operatives, peasant unions and mass-based parties, which were integrated at the national level, and on the penetration of roads and railways, postal services and telegraphs, newspapers and journals, into the remote rural areas.

  In Poland, for example, the development of a national consciousness amon
g the mass of the peasantry followed the spread of rural schooling and rural institutions such as the co-operatives, and the increased movement of the peasants into towns. In Georgia the rise of popular nationalism was linked to similar processes. The Georgian peasants were becoming increasingly integrated into the market economy, selling cereals, fruit, wine and tobacco to Armenian traders, while Tiflis itself, once a predominantly Armenian city, developed a Georgian working class from the poorer and immigrant peasants. As in Tiflis, so in Baku, the domination of Armenian merchants and industrialists served as a focus for the growing national and class consciousness of the immigrant Azeri peasants who flooded into the oil-industrial suburbs of Baku during the last decades of the century. In the Tatar regions of the Volga the origins of pan-Turkic nationalism were to be found in the Jadidist movement, which advocated the secular education of the native masses in opposition to the old elite schooling

  provided by the Muslim religious leaders. By 1900 the Volga Jadidists controlled over a thousand primary schools. Meanwhile, in the Kazan Teachers' School and at Kazan University, there were the makings of a native and increasingly rebellious Tatar intelligentsia, although Kazan itself was mainly Russian.55

  In the western Ukraine (Galicia) the development of the peasants' national consciousness went hand in hand with the formation of a network of rural institutions such as reading clubs, credit unions, co-operative stores, choirs, insurance agencies, volunteer fire departments and gymnastic societies, which were linked with the national movement. The Ukrainian-language newspaper Baktivshchyna ('Fatherland') was the nationalists' main route into the village: it attracted a mass peasant readership through its close attention to local affairs which it mixed with a subtle propaganda for the national cause. The readers of Baktivshchyna, like the members of the reading clubs and the other primary institutions of the national movement, were mainly the new and 'conscious type' of peasants — young and literate, thrifty and sober, and, above all, self-improving — who emerged from the parish schools around the turn of the century. They formed the village cohort of the national movement, together with the local priests, cantors and teachers, who slowly took over local government from the local mayors and their (mainly Jewish) henchmen in the villages, most of whom had been appointed by the Polish landowners. In this sense the national movement was thoroughly democratic: it brought politics to the village.56