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

by Orlando Figes

  famine — separating it from the hungry masses. As in South Africa under apartheid, there was always a time-bomb of violent revolution ticking in the cupboard of liberal politics.

  Two main groups stood in the forefront of this public campaign during the decade leading up to the Revolution of 1905: the liberal 'zemstvo men' and the students.

  The 'zemstvo men' were unlikely pioneers of the revolution. Most of them were noble landowners, progressive and practical men like Prince Lvov, who simply wanted the monarchy to play a positive role in improving the life of its subjects. They sought to increase the influence of the zemstvos in the framing of government legislation, but the notion of leading a broad opposition movement was repugnant to them. Prince Lvov's mentor, D. N. Shipov, who organized the zemstvos at a national level, was himself a devoted monarchist and flatly opposed the liberal demand for a constitution. The whole purpose of his work was to strengthen the autocracy by bringing the Tsar closer to his people, organized through the zemstvos and a consultative parliament. In many ways he was trying to create from below the same popular autocracy which Nicholas was aiming to impose from above in the last years of his reign. Central to his liberal Slavophilism was the notion of Russia as 'a locally self-governing land with an autocratic Sovereign at its head'. He believed in the ancient communion between the Tsar and his people, a union which, in his view, had been broken only by the 'autocracy of the bureaucracy'.13

  There was plenty of ground, then, for the autocracy to reach an accommodation with the 'zemstvo men'. But, as so often during its inexorable downfall, the old regime chose repression instead of compromise and thus created the political hostility of the zemstvos. The chief architect of this suicidal policy was the all-powerful Ministry of the Interior, which regarded the zemstvos as dangerous havens for revolutionaries and subjected them to a relentless campaign of persecution. Armed with the statute of 1890, the provincial governors capped the zemstvos' budgets, censored their publications and removed or arrested the elected members of their boards.

  The famine crisis brought a temporary halt to this conflict, for the government relied on the zemstvos as agencies of food and medical relief. But, by expanding their activities, the crisis also encouraged the zemstvos to reassert their own demands for autonomy and reform. The lead was taken by the zemstvo professionals — the teachers, doctors, statisticians and agronomists commonly known as the Third Element — whose radical influence on the zemstvo assemblies was increased as a result of their direct participation in the relief campaigns. They were followed by many landowners, who blamed the famine on the government's failure to protect the nation's farmers and were worried that the destitute peasants would seize their estates. They now rallied behind the

  zemstvos to defend the agrarian interests of provincial society against the industrializing bureaucracy of St Petersburg. The more liberal nobles, like Prince Lvov, went on to demand the creation of an all-class zemstvo at the volost level (which they believed would help to integrate the peasants into local government) and the convocation of a national assembly. This was the inspiration behind the Tver Address, presented to Nicholas II on his accession to the throne by the country's most progressive zemstvo leaders. In a speech that infuriated public opinion the new Tsar denounced such 'senseless dreams' and emphasized his 'firm and unflinching' adherence to the 'principle of autocracy'. Within days, the Ministry of the Interior resumed its persecution of the zemstvos. Shipov's All-Zemstvo Organization was banned soon after its foundation in 1896, forcing the reluctant revolutionary into the arms of the more radical constitutionalists. Together they formed Beseda (Symposium) in 1899, a clandestine discussion circle of liberal 'zemstvo men', including some of the grandest names of the Russian aristocracy, as well as Prince Lvov, which met in the Moscow palace of the Dolgorukov princes. To begin with, Beseda confined its discussion to zemstvo affairs. But in 1900 the government once again stepped up its campaign of persecution, ordering the dismissal of hundreds of liberals from the zemstvos' elected boards, and this inevitably forced the genteel symposium to confront political questions. Over the next two years it would become the leading force in the constitutional movement, as a wide range of public men, from civic leaders to the captains of industry, rallied behind its call for reform.14

  The universities had been the organizational centre of opposition to the tsarist regime since the 1860s. In the Russian language the words 'student' and 'revolutionary' were almost synonymous. Like everyone else, the students had been politicized by the sheer scale of human misery which the famine exposed. The lecture-rooms became hotbeds of socialist agitation and there was a new mood of rebelliousness against the university authorities, which since 1884 had been under police control. Alexander Kerensky (1881—1970) recalls the camaraderie of the dormitory at St Petersburg University: 'The students lived as a friendly, closely united community, with its own favourite men as leaders in matters of communal concern ... If something exceptional happened in the country that touched and hurt the moral feelings of youth, if some order of the educational authorities touched our corporate pride, then all the students rose as one man.'

  Kerensky's early life had many similarities with that of Lentn, who would become his arch-rival in 1917. He was born in the same town of Simbirsk eleven years after Lenin. His father was the headmaster of Lenin's gymnasium and an acquaintance of Lenin's father, who was the Chief Inspector of Schools in Simbirsk. In 1889 Kerensky's father was promoted to the same post in

  Tashkent, where the young Kerensky went to school. As with the adolescent Lenin, there was 'nothing at this stage to suggest the future career of Kerensky as a minister of the revolution', one of his teachers recalled. 'He happily complied with the strict discipline of the school, went enthusiastically to church,* and even sang in the church choir.' At the age of fourteen, Kerensky's heart was set on an acting career. He even signed a letter to his parents: 'The future Artist of the Imperial Theatre. A. Kerensky'.16 His belief in his destiny — which would drive his actions in 1917 — had clearly taken root at an early age. Kerensky never made it into the theatre, although as an actor on the revolutionary stage he was to prove as self-dramatizing as any provincial thespian. In 1899 he went up to St Petersburg University to read history and philology, the subjects his father had studied there, although in the second year he switched to law. This too set the pattern for the future: changing from history to law is, obviously, the move of a careerist.

  In the year Kerensky matriculated the students at St Petersburg became embroiled in a series of campus demonstrations. On 8 February it was customary for the students to mark the anniversary of the foundation of the university by holding celebrations in the city centre. But in 1899 the government was in no mood for a student street party and banned the event. When some students tried to defy the ban by marching into the city they found their way blocked by police, who beat them with whips. Greatly agitated, the students began a protest strike, which spread to other universities. Their grievances were still not political; they would have been satisfied by an official apology for the brutality of the police and the restoration of the academic and student freedoms removed from the universities in 1884. This, at least, was the finding of a commission appointed later to look into the troubles. Instead the government arrested the student leaders and threatened future demonstrators with military conscription. The students were outraged and, encouraged by socialist agitators, began to condemn the political system root and branch. Even Kerensky, who until this point had been more interested in the theatre than in politics, joined the campus protest. 'Last year's insult has not been forgotten, and cannot be,' he wrote to his parents in February 1900. 'The repressions were uncivilized, that is what disturbs us, and those who ordered them (i.e. the ministers) do not deserve respect!'17 Once again, the heavy-handed tactics of the government turned a minor protest into a full-blown opposition movement.

  The following November there were fresh student demonstrations at Kiev and other universities. B
ogolepov, the Minister of Education, responded in January 1901 by enlisting more than 200 student leaders into the army. One month later a student called Karpovich shot Bogolepov in the neck, fatally

  * As he would throughout his life.

  wounding him in the first of a new wave of terrorist actions. The public were generally unmoved by the murder (Kerensky and his student comrades even saw Karpovich as a saint); its outrage was provoked by Bogolepov's repressions. 'I feel, you see,' wrote Gorky to Bryusov, 'that to send students into the army is disgusting, it is a flagrant crime against individual freedom, an idiotic measure of power-sated scoundrels.' On 4 March, two days after Bogolepov's death, Gorky took part in a massive demonstration in St Petersburg. The capital came to a standstill as 3,000 students converged in front of the Kazan Cathedral. Red flags were unfurled, the Marseillaise was sung, and Gorky made a speech condemning the government s actions. In the crowd were a large number of bourgeois liberals sympathetic to the students and dozens of present and future luminaries of the revolutionary movement. Suddenly, a squadron of mounted Cossacks appeared from behind the cathedral and charged into the crowd, hitting out on all sides with their batons. Struve was one of those struck. As people scrambled for cover some of the crowd broke into the cathedral itself, where a service was in progress. Thirteen people were killed, hundreds came away with bloodied faces and, in all, some 1,500 students were imprisoned, many of them in the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was the first time that such a large number of respectable bourgeois citizens had found themselves within its famous penitentiary walls. The students' parents and friends visited them daily with lavish food hampers. A well-known tobacco manufacturer, whose son had been jailed, sent 10,000 de-luxe cigarettes and repeated the gift at regular intervals. Thousands of books arrived, allowing the students to catch up with their long-neglected studies, although, according to one of the students, they spent most of their time in chess tournaments and concerts. The whole adventure was described by him as 'a kind of student picnic'.18

  For many of the students this was their first shocking confrontation with the coercive power of the state. It was to prove a radicalizing experience. Thousands of students joined the SR Party, whose Combat Organization took the lead in a campaign of terror which soon claimed the life of D. S. Sipiagin, the Minister of the Interior. Others joined the Social Democrats. But the real home of the democratic students was the Union of Liberation, established in 1903. It was the brainchild of Struve, one of a small but influential group of liberal defectors from the Marxist movement at the turn of the century. He argued that a violent social revolution would be disastrous for Russia. What it needed was a period of social and political evolution on European lines, during which the workers campaigned for their rights within the capitalist system and the whole democracy was united in a constitutional movement. This was the message of Struve's journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), published in Germany, which had inspired the foundation of the Union. Antagonized by the campaign of police persecution organized by Plehve, Sipiagin's successor at the Ministry of the

  Interior, the Union gradually moved to the left and, in 1904, embraced the programme of a constitution based on universal suffrage, self-determination for the nationalities, and far-reaching social reforms.

  * * * It was at this moment that Russia went to war with Japan. Plehve is often said to have planned this as 'a little victorious war to stem the revolution'. But its origins were more complex — and its consequences just the opposite. Russia's economic penetration of the Far East, made possible by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway during the 1890s, was bound to bring her into conflict with Japan, which had ambitions in Korea and Manchuria. But a war could have been avoided if Russia's foreign policy had been in competent hands. Instead it was left to a narrow court cabal, led by Alexander Bezobrazov, a well-connected speculator with lumber interests in Korea, and this group of lobbyists persuaded the Tsar to reject the Japanese offer of a compromise, thus making war unavoidable. That Nicholas had decided to take a personal interest in the matter only made things worse; unfortunately foreign policy was the one area of government where the Tsar felt competent to lead from the front. Because he had toured the Far East in his youth, he even believed himself to be something of an expert on the region. General Kuropatkin, the Minister of War, believed that Nicholas wanted to extend his Empire across the whole of Asia, conquering not only Manchuria and Korea but also Tibet, Afghanistan and Persia. Most of his ministers encouraged such ambitions. It was a way of flattering the Tsar — who after all had very few talents. Nicholas's cousin, the Kaiser Wilhelm, also played along with his imperial fantasies, since he wished to divert Russia from the Balkans. On one occasion he had cabled the Tsar from his yacht: 'The Admiral of the Atlantic greets the Admiral of the Pacific.'19

  When the war began, in January 1904, with the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria, the Tsar and his advisers took victory for granted. Kuropatkin claimed he would need only two Russian soldiers for every three Japanese, so superior were they to the Asians. Government posters portrayed the Japanese as puny little monkeys, slit-eyed and yellow-skinned, running in panic from the giant white fist of a robust Russian soldier. Another displayed a swarm of spider-like 'Japs', faces twisted in fear, struggling to escape from underneath a huge Cossack hat. The caption read 'Catch them by the hatful!' This patriotic mood, with its racist overtones, swept through liberal society. Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Moscow University and a founding member of Beseda, contended that Russia was defending the whole of European civilization against 'the yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols armed by modern technology'. The academic leaders of Kiev University described the war as a Christian crusade against the 'insolent Mongols'. Even the Legal Marxist Struve felt obliged to bow to the patriotic

  mood, urging his followers to rally behind the nation and its armed forces whilst continuing to oppose the autocracy.* The provincial zemstvos went even further in their patriotic efforts. To help the Red Cross on the Manchurian Front thirteen of them formed a combined medical brigade of 360 doctors and nurses led by Prince Lvov. It was the first time the zemstvos had been allowed to organize themselves at a national level. The Prince pleaded with the Tsar to let the brigade go and so moved him by his own patriotic sentiments that Nicholas ended up hugging him and kissing him and wishing him well. The mission, which won high praise from the military leaders, turned Lvov into a national hero and enabled the zemstvos to wrap themselves in the national flag.20

  Had the war been won, the regime might have been able to make political capital from this patriotic upsurge. The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen East. The Mongol invasion, which the Muscovite state had been formed to repel, had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and its culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal such as Trubetskoi to convince himself that this war was nothing less than a defence of Russia's European identity against the Asian hordes. And it was only a short step from this to the view that the Christian tsarist state was the champion of that identity.

  But winning the war was far harder than Russia's rulers imagined. The military turned out to be poorly equipped with modern weaponry, and there were terrible logistical problems in running a war from 6,000 miles away. The biggest problem was the sheer incompetence of the High Command, which stuck rigidly to the military doctrines of the nineteenth century and wasted thousands of Russian lives by ordering hopeless bayonet charges against well-entrenched artillery positions. The Commander-in-Chief himself, Admiral Alexeev, knew almost nothing about the art of war. Afraid of horses, he had to suffer the indignity of inspecting his cavalry on foot. Alexeev's promotion had been largely due to the patronage of the Grand Duke Alexis, whom he once rescued from the French police after the Grand Duke had bee
n involved in a drunken brawl in a Marseille brothel. Alexeev had offered himself up for arrest, claiming that the maitresse of the brothel had confused his name with that of the Grand Duke.21

  As the war went from bad to worse, the liberal opposition revived, accusing the government of incompetence in its handling of the campaign. There was plenty of evidence to support the charge, including the futile despatch of

  * For this Struve was treated by the government as a defeatist. He was even approached by a Japanese spy.

  the Baltic Fleet on a seven-month trip around the world to relieve Port Arthur. The only shots the squadron fired hit some English fishing trawlers in the North Sea, which the commander had mistaken for Japanese torpedo boats. The case went to international arbitration (the Dogger Bank Inquiry) and Russia was forced to pay damages of £65,000. Even the country's leading entrepreneurs, who had in the past relied on the state for protection, now joined in the chorus of criticism as they suffered the economic dislocations of the war. A. I. Guchkov (1862—1936), a wealthy Moscow industrialist who fought for the Boers against the British and ran a field hospital in Manchuria, was particularly critical of the monarchy for its failure to equip the military with the tools of modern warfare. The future leader of the Octobrist Party was echoed by much of the press, which blamed the bureaucratic system for Russia's military decline. The gossip in the salons was cruel. On the news that the Tsar had sent the troops icons to boost their morale, General Dragomirov quipped: 'The Japanese are beating us with machine-guns, but never mind: we'll beat them with icons.' The autocracy had shown itself incapable of defending the national interest and joining the opposition now came to be seen, in the words of one official, as something 'noble and patriotic'.22