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

by Orlando Figes

  The most remarkable thing about the Ukrainian national movement, both under Austrian and tsarist rule, was that it remained based on the peasants. Most nationalist movements are centred on the towns. In the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917 — the first democratic elections in the country's history — 71 per cent of the Ukrainian peasants voted for the nationalists. In the end, of course, when it came to the naked power struggles of 1917—21, this would be the national movement's fundamental weakness: the history of almost every country shows that the peasants are too weak politically to sustain a revolutionary regime without the support of the towns. But in the earlier period, when the main concern of the national movement was to build up a popular base, this distinctive peasant character was a source of strength. Ninety per cent of the Ukrainian people lived in rural areas. The towns of the Ukraine were dominated by the Russians, the Jews and the Poles; and even those few Ukrainians who lived there, mostly professionals and administrators, easily became Russified. Thus to be a Ukrainian meant in effect to be a peasant (i.e. doubly disadvantaged). Indeed this was symbolized by the fact that the original Ukrainian word for 'citizen' (hromaijanyn), which in all other European languages is derived from the word for a city, was based on the word for the village assembly (hromada). The Ukrainian national movement developed as a peasant movement against the influence of the 'foreign' towns. Nationalist agitators

  blamed all the evils which the peasants associated with towns — the oppression of the state, the wealth and privilege of the nobility, the greed and swindling of usurers and merchants — on the Russians, Poles and Jews who lived there. They contrasted the pure and simple lifestyle of the Ukrainian village with the corruption of this alien urban world; and as the influence of the latter grew, with the penetration of capitalism, of factory-made goods and city fashions, into the Ukrainian countryside, so they were able to present this as a threat to the 'national way of life'. More and more traditional crafts would be pushed aside, they said, by manufactured goods. The 'honest' Ukrainian shopkeeper would be superseded by the 'cheating' Jewish one. The co-operative movement, which became the backbone of the Ukrainian nationalist organization in the countryside, was developed with the aim — and the rhetoric — of protecting the simple peasants from exploitation by the Jewish traders and money-men.57

  But it would be unfair to suggest that the nationalists' appeal to the peasantry was based solely on xenophobia and hatred of the towns. The peasant land struggle, for example, was intertwined with the nationalist movement in the Ukraine, where three-quarters of the landowners were either Russians or Poles. It is no coincidence that the peasant revolution on the land erupted first, in 1902, in those regions around Poltava province where the Ukrainian nationalist movement was also most advanced. The national movement strengthened and politicized the peasant-landlord conflict. It linked the struggle of an individual village to the national liberation movement of the whole of the Ukrainian people against a foreign class of landowners and officials. How did the nationalists make this link? Let's take two examples of their rhetoric. One concerns the peasants' conflict with the landowners over the forests and pasture lands. During the Emancipation in the Ukraine the landowners had enclosed the woods and pastures as their private property, thus depriving the peasants of their traditional rights of access to these lands, granted under serfdom, for timber and grazing. By helping the peasants in their long and bitter struggles for the restoration of these rights, the nationalists were able to involve them in their own broader political movement. Indeed it is telling that much of the romantic, nationalist folk culture of this period played on the theme of the forests and the pastures as a primal symbol of the native soil: nothing would have stirred up more the passions and emotions of the peasantry. A second example concerns the causes of rural poverty. Nationalist agitators explained their poverty to the peasants in the broader context of the semi-colonial exploitation of the Ukraine. They told them that more than half its agricultural surplus was exported to Russia or abroad; and that the Ukrainian peasant was poor because of the high taxes on Russian goods, such as kerosene, vodka and matches, which forced him to sell most of his foodstuffs in order to provide for his basic household needs. The peasant would be better off in an independent Ukraine. Through their exposure

  to such arguments, the Ukrainian peasants increasingly interpreted their own economic struggles in a broader national context — and as a result they gained both strength and unity. One recent scholar has found, for example, that the peasants would co-ordinate their voting patterns throughout a whole district in order to secure the defeat of the more powerful Polish-Jewish or Russian candidates in local government elections.58

  The nationalist struggle for language rights was also a liberation movement for the peasants. Unless the peasants could understand the language of the government and the courts, they had no direct access to political or civil rights. Unless they could learn to read in their own tongue, they had no hope of social betterment. And unless they could understand their priests, they had reason to fear for their souls. The public use of their native language was not just a matter of necessity, however. It became an issue of personal pride and dignity for the Ukrainian peasant, and this gave the nationalists a profound base of emotional support. As Trotsky himself later acknowledged, looking back on the events of 1917: 'This political awakening of the peasantry could not have taken place otherwise . . . than through their own native language — with all the consequences ensuing in regard to schools, courts, self-administration. To oppose this would have been to try to drive the peasants back into non-existence.'59

  * * * The rise of these nationalist movements need not have spelled the end of the Russian Empire. Not even the most advanced of them had developed as a mass-based political movement before the reign of the last Tsar. Most of them were still mainly limited to cultural goals, which were not necessarily incompatible with the continuation of imperial rule. There was no historical law stating that this cultural nationalism had to evolve into fully fledged national independence movements against Russia. Indeed it was clear that many of the nationalist leaders saw that their country's interests would best be served by preserving the union with Russia, albeit with looser ties and more autonomy. But tsarist ideology would not tolerate such autonomy — its ruling motto of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality' meant subordinating the non-Russian peoples to Russia's cultural domination. More than anything else, it was this policy of Russification, pursued increasingly by the last two tsars, that politicized the nationalist movements and turned them into enemies of Russia. By 1905 nationalist parties had emerged as a major revolutionary force in most of the non-Russian borderlands. By its failure to come to terms with nationalism, the tsarist regime had created another instrument of its own destruction. The same was true of its clumsy handling of the liberal movement before 1905: by repressing this moderate opposition it helped to create a revolutionary one. Sir John Maynard, who as an Englishman writing in the twilight of the British Empire was in a good position to appreciate the dangers of colonial nationalism,

  went so far as to say that half the causes of the Russian Revolution resided in the policies of the last two tsars towards their non-Russian subjects.60

  There was nothing new in the policy of Russification. It had always been a central aim of the tsarist imperial philosophy to assimilate the non-Russian peoples into the Russian cultural and political system, to turn them into 'true Christians, loyal subjects, and good Russians', although different tsars laid different emphases on the three principles of the policy. There was an ethnic hierarchy — parallel to the social one — within the tsarist ruling system that ranked the different nationalities in accordance with their loyalty to the Tsar and gave each a different set of legal rights and privileges. At the top were the Russians and the Baltic Germans, who between them occupied the dominant positions in the court and the civil and military services. Below them were the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the Armenians, an
d so on. The Empire's five million Jews, at the bottom of its ethnic hierarchy, were subject to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discriminations which by the end of the nineteenth century embraced some 1,400 different statutes and regulations as well as thousands of lesser rules, provisions and judicial interpretations. They — alone of all the ethnic groups — were forbidden to own land, to enter the Civil Service, or to serve as officers in the army; there were strict quotas on Jewish admissions into higher schools and universities; and, apart from a few exceptions, the Jews were forced by law to live within the fifteen provinces of the western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Poland which made up the Pale of Settlement. This was a tsarist version of the Hindu caste system, with the Jews in the role of the Untouchables.61

  As the regime's fears about nationalism grew, however, during the later nineteenth century, so its policies of Russification were gradually intensified. One cause for anxiety was that the Russians were losing their demographic domination as a result of the Empire's territorial expansion into Asia, especially, with its high birth-rates and overpopulation. The census of 1897 showed that the Russians accounted for only 44 per cent of the Empire's population and that, even more alarmingly, they were one of the slowest-growing ethnic groups.62 The Slavophile nationalists, who were responsible for shaping the Russification campaigns of the last two tsars, argued that in this age of growing nationalism and imperial competition the Russian Empire would eventually break up unless something was done to preserve the cultural domination of the Russians. In short, they argued that Russian nationalism should be mobilized as a political force and consolidated at the heart of the tsarist ruling system as a counterweight to the centrifugal forces of the non-Russian nationalities.

  Along with the persecution of their religion, the banning of the non-Russians' native language from schools, literature, streets signs, courts, and public offices, was the most conspicuous and the most oppressive of the Russification

  policies pursued after 1881. The language ban was particularly clumsy. One of its effects was to block the path for the growing native-language intelligentsia to make its way up through the education system and bureaucracy, so that it was drawn increasingly into the nationalist and revolutionary opposition. Trying to stamp out the native language was not just an insulting and demoralizing policy as far as the non-Russians were concerned; it was ridiculous as well. Polish students at Warsaw University, for example, had to suffer the absurd indignity of studying their own native literature in Russian translation. High-school students could be expelled for speaking in Polish in their dormitories, as the Bolshevik leader and founder of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, discovered. Even Anton Denikin, the future leader of the Whites, who as a Russian in a Warsaw district high school during the mid-1880s was obliged to monitor the conversations of his Polish classmates, thought that the policy was 'unrealistically harsh' and always wrote down 'nothing to report'. But if forbidding high-school students to speak in Polish was merely harsh (at least they had learned to speak in Russian), to do the same to railway porters (most of whom had never learned Russian, which as 'public officials' they were ordered to speak) was to enter into the cruelly surreal. This was not the only act of bureaucratic madness. In 1907 the medical committee in Kiev Province refused to allow cholera epidemic notices to be published in Ukrainian with the result that many of the peasants, who could not read Russian, died from drinking infected water.63

  Of all the non-Russian nationalities, the Jews suffered the most from this Great Russian chauvinist backlash during the last years of tsarism. The Jews were widely, if mistakenly, blamed for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. They were the victims of hundreds of pogroms throughout the Ukraine in that year. Contrary to the old and well-established myth, none of these pogroms — and there were to be many more (e.g. in Kishinev in 1903 and throughout the Empire in 1905—6) — was ever instigated by the government. True, the authorities were slow to restore order and few pogromists were ever brought to trial. But this was not part of a conspiracy, just a reflection of the authorities' ineffectiveness and their general hostility to Jews. During the 1880s, at a time when both the German and the Austrian Empires were beginning to dismantle their legal restrictions on the Jews, the tsarist regime was continuing to add to its own cumbersome structure of institutionalized anti-Semitism. The last two tsars were vocal anti-Semites — both associated the Jews with the threats of urban modernity, capitalism and socialism — and it became fashionable in official circles to repeat their racial prejudices. Nicholas II, in particular, was increasingly inclined to see the anti-Jewish pogroms of his reign as an act of patriotism and loyalty by the 'good and simple Russian folk'. Indeed, at the time of the Beiliss Affair in 1911—13, when a Jew was dragged through the Kiev courts on trumped-up charges of ritual murder, Nicholas was clearly looking to

  use the widespread anti-Semitism within the population at large, drummed up by extremist nationalist groups such as his own beloved Union of the Russian People, as a banner to rally the masses against the opponents of his faltering regime (see pages 241—6).64

  Hardly surprising, then, that such a large and prominent part in the revolutionary movement should have been played by the Jews.* Even Witte, speaking in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, was forced to admit that if the Jews 'comprise about 50 per cent of the membership in the revolutionary parties' then this was 'the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed.' The Jewish Bund was Russia's first mass-based Marxist party. Established in 1897, it had 35,000 members by 1905. It declared the Jews to be a 'nation' and demanded full national autonomy for them, with Yiddish as the official language, within a Russian federation. Such demands were rejected by the Russian Marxists (including Iulii Martov and Leon Trotsky, who were themselves Jews), who put class interests above nationalist ones and who, in any case, were deeply hostile to the Jewish nationalism of the Bundists (Georgii Plekhanov accused them of being Zionists who were afraid of sea-sickness). The result was that the two Marxist movements went their separate ways. There was also a large Zionist movement, which the tsarist regime had allowed to grow after the early 1880s because it advocated Jewish emigration in reponse to the pogroms; although it too was banned in 1903 on the grounds that inside Russia it served as a vehicle for Jewish nationalism.65

  It was not just the Jews who were turning to nationalism in response to the growing discrimination against them at the turn of the century. Throughout the Empire the effect of the Russification campaign was to drive the non-Russians into the new anti-tsarist parties. Virtually the whole of the Finnish population rallied to the Young Finns, the Social Democrats and the Party of Active Resistance, against the imposition of Russian rule and military conscription, in contravention of Finland's rights of self-rule, after 1899. In the Baltic provinces the native population turned to the Social Democrats to defend their national rights against the tsarist state. In Poland they turned to the Polish Socialist Party, which argued that the Polish problem could only be solved by the combination of a social and a national revolution. In the Ukraine it was the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, established in 1902, which made the early running in the national and social revolution, playing a key role in the peasant

  * Although, of course, it must never be forgotten that while many revolutionaries were Jews, relatively few Jews were revolutionaries. It was a myth of the anti-Semites that all the Jews were Bolsheviks. In fact, as far as one can tell from the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, most of the Jewish population favoured the Zionist and democratic socialist parties. As the Chief Rabbi of Moscow once remarked, not without his usual Jewish humour: 'The Trotskys make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.' (Melamed, 'St Paul and Leon Trotsky', 8.)

  uprisings of 1902, although it was quickly overshadowed by the Ukrainian National Party and the Ukrainian Social Democrats. In Georgia the Social Democrats led the national revolution, which was both anti-Russian and socialist, in 1904-6. Even the Armenians,
who had always been the most loyal to their Russian masters, rallied to the Dashnaks after 1903 in opposition to the Russification of their local schools. In short, the whole of the Tsarist Empire was ripe for collapse on the eve of the 1905 Revolution. Its peoples wanted to escape.

  3 Icons and Cockroaches

  i A World Apart

  Early one morning in March 1888 Mikhail Romas left Kazan and sailed thirty miles down the Volga River as far as the village of Krasnovidovo. There he hoped to change the life of the peasants by setting up a co-operative store. Romas was a Populist, a member of the clandestine People's Right group, who had recently returned from twelve years in prison and exile for trying to organize the peasants. Siberia had not made him change his views. At Krasnovidovo he aimed to rescue the villagers from the clutches of the local merchants by selling them cheap manufactured goods and organizing them into a gardeners' cooperative selling fruit and vegetables direct to Kazan.

  He took with him Alexei Peshkov, later to become known as the writer Maxim Gorky (1868—1936), who was then, at the age of twenty, already known as an 'old man' (Tolstoy once said of him that he seemed 'to have been born a grown-up'). In his first eight years Gorky had experienced more human suffering than the literary Count would see in the whole of his eight decades. His grandfather's household in Nizhnyi Novgorod where he had been brought up after the death of his father, was, as he described it in My Childhood, a microcosm of provincial Russia — a place of poverty, cruelty and cholera, where the men took to the bottle in a big way and the women found solace in God. By the age of nine, Gorky had already been put out to work, scavenging for rags, bones and nails, and occasionally thieving timber from the banks of the Volga. Then his mother had died and his grandfather had sent him out into the world to fend for himself. Like countless other abandoned orphans, Gorky had roamed around the booming industrial towns of the Volga, a shoeless street urchin dressed in rags. He had worked as a dish washer on a steamboat, as a stevedore, a watchman, a cobbler's assistant, an apprentice draughtsman, an icon painter, and finally as a baker in Kazan, where Romas had found him and taken pity on the lad after he had tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest.