A fourth important focus of reform was the military, which had acquitted itself so badly during the Crimean War and was plainly in need of thoroughgoing reconstruction. The military leaders, indeed, proved to be energetic reformers, eager to rebuild the army and to borrow freely on Western models. The result was a protracted and far-reaching set of reforms—measures for technological rearmament, administrative reorganization, professionalization of military schools. But one essential reform—replacement of a huge standing army without reserves by universal military training—proved politically difficult, chiefly because the reform abrogated the nobility’s right not to serve (conferred in 1762 and deemed a fundamental privilege). Nonetheless, military reforms prevailed: the Universal Military Training Act of 1874 established all-class conscription, with the terms of service determined solely by education, not social origin or rank. The statute inadvertently had the effect of strengthening peasant interest in popular education, since a two-year elementary schooling could reduce the term of service from six to two years.
A fifth reform was the reform of city government in 1870. The main problem with the existing urban system was that it excluded important residential categories (above all, the nobility) from tax and other obligations, thereby weakening the social and fiscal basis of city government. A commission established in 1862 first conducted a massive survey of public opinion (obtaining formal reports from commissions in 509 cities and towns) and then designed a new self-governing order based on the election of a city council (with curiae weighted according to property ownership). Like the zemstvo, the city council was to provide basic social services, promote commerce and industry, and generally assume responsibility for the development of its own city.
A sixth reform was censorship, which had exercised so notorious and pernicious an influence in pre-reform Russia. The late 1850s had already witnessed a gradual relaxation of censorship (as the regime tolerated public comment on serf emancipation and other reform plans), but the pressure for reform accelerated with the proliferation of journals and newspapers in the 1860s. To a considerable degree, the government found it practically impossible to engage in pre-censorship. It therefore issued the ‘Temporary Regulations’ of 1865, which abolished most pre-censorship in favour of punitive measures (involving suspensions or closing). Although censorship was by no means eliminated, the new regulations significantly enhanced the ability of the press to publish quickly and, within limits, to exercise some freedom of expression.
The seventh reform concerned the Russian Orthodox Church, which had internalized many norms, structures—and problems—of state and society. Critics emphasized the deplorable condition of seminaries, the caste-like profile of the parish clergy (who had to marry and whose own sons replaced them), the corrupt and inefficient condition of ecclesiastical administration and courts, and the poor support accorded most parish clergy. Special commissions designed a broad range of reforms, including the establishment of parish councils in 1864 (to raise funds for local needs), the reform of ecclesiastical schools in 1867 (modernizing curriculum and opening the schools to youths from all social classes), the formal abolition of the clerical caste in 1867, and a radical reorganization of parishes in 1869 (essentially combining small, uneconomic parishes into larger units). Still more reforms were in preparation, including a liberalization of ecclesiastical courts and censorship.
These Great Reforms thus affected a broad set of social, administrative, and cultural institutions. Most reflected a common set of principles—vsesoslovnost′ (‘all-estateness’, i.e. all estates were to participate), glasnost (‘publicity’, i.e. with societal participation in planning and implementing reform), and clear willingness to draw upon Western models. Moreover, most reforms aspired to shift power—and responsibility—from the state to society or particular social groups. Aware that the state lacked the capability or even financial means to modernize, the reformers endeavoured to liberate society’s own vital forces and to create structures (from the zemstvo to parish councils) where local initiative could sponsor development.
Economic Development
Although the government appeared to have won the political struggle, in fact deep structural changes were dramatically reshaping society and economy—and not necessarily in the direction of stability or controllable change. By the late 1890s the realm would be shaken by profound unrest—from the factory to the village—that ultimately derived from the pattern of economic and social change in the preceding decades. The key dynamic here was the explosive combination of agricultural crisis and industrialization.
The roots of the agricultural crisis clearly go back to the very terms of emancipation: emancipation transferred the land to the peasant commune, not the individual peasant. The system was partly designed so as to ensure payment, for communal ownership also meant communal (not individual) responsibility for tax and redemption payments. This arrangement greatly facilitated tax-collection (sparing the state the onus of tracking down individual defaulters); given collective accountability, the commune had a powerful motive for ensuring that land was apportioned according to the ability to use it (i.e. according to the number of able-bodied workers in a family). Since family composition naturally changed over time (through births, marriages, and deaths), the commune periodically redistributed land to take these changes into account. Communal landownership also had another appealing feature: it guaranteed each peasant the right to a fair share of land and therefore served to avoid creating a landless proletariat. Indeed, the statute made it virtually impossible for a peasant to alienate his land even if he so wished.
While this arrangement ensured tax-collection and averted the formation of a rural proletariat, it was nevertheless fraught with significant long-term consequences. First, it tied the peasant to the village: since he could not alienate the land, he could not relocate permanently to the city (but, at most, obtain seasonal passports from his commune). Because of this impediment to migration to the city and because of the high rate of demographic growth (the population nearly doubled between 1863 and 1913), the inevitable result was the shrinking average size of peasant allotments—from 5.1 dessiatines (1860) to 2.7 (1900). Although the peasantry did purchase and lease private lands, such acquisitions failed to compensate for the steady demographic growth in the peasantry. The result, heard all across the empire by the late nineteenth century, was the central battle-cry of rebellious peasants—‘Land! Land! Land!’
Apart from encouraging peasants to eye jealously the huge fields of the nobility, the individual utilization of small allotments meant that the peasantry (despite their aggregate holdings) could not take advantage of economies of size and afford new technology. Moreover, communal landholding also proved highly inefficient: to ensure that each peasant had a share of the different kinds and quality of communal land, to link land allotment with a family’s labour resources, the Russian commune divided its fields into tiny strips (sometimes a yard wide) and periodically redistributed these (taking strips from families with fewer workers and giving them to families with more). This system of land utilization may have been socially just, but it was also economically regressive: it wasted much land on pathways, discouraged individual peasants from improving their strips (which were only temporary allotments), and forced all the peasants to observe the traditional three-field system (to avoid cross-fertilization, no peasant could violate communal practices).
The nobility, at least in theory, were far more advantageously positioned: they retained at least one-third of their entire arable land and obtained capital as compensation for the land redeemed by peasants. While many did seek to modernize and rationalize their estates, they soon encountered serious problems. One was a dearth of investment capital: much of the compensation vanished to cover old debts, and venture capital was as yet difficult to obtain. Labour constituted an additional problem; emancipation had taken away the ‘free’ corvée and obliged landowners to hire peasant workers, who were exceedingly expensive and notoriously unpr
oductive. Nor were most estates easily linked to the domestic or foreign grain markets; until the railway knitted the empire together and cut transportation costs, many landowners had little incentive to modernize their estates in hopes of increasing productivity and output.
Saddled with all these disadvantages, peasant and gentry agriculture were soon to experience the most devastating factor of all: the collapse of the world grain markets in the 1870s and 1880s. The key was a steady increase in supply, as the railway and new oceanic shipping enabled a massive influx of grain from North American and other grain-producing areas outside Europe. The result was a sharp drop in grain prices between 1870 and 1890—about 38 per cent for wheat, 29 per cent for rye, and 41 per cent for barley. By the late 1870s a noble official in the blackearth province of Orel wrote that ‘anyone who looks at [this district] might well think that it has been ravaged by a hostile army—so pitiful has its position become’. The steady rise in peasant arrears (overdue tax and redemption payments) and a sharp increase in noble bankruptcies signalled the emergence of a full-scale agrarian crisis.
Industrialization, which had been so retarded and even discouraged by the pre-reform regime, faced considerable obstacles. The country still lacked a proper institutional infrastructure; its regressive business law made it possible to establish a mere thirty-two corporations by 1855. Nor was it easy to mobilize and attract venture capital, either from domestic or foreign sources, because of the lack of a domestic banking network and Russia’s low credibility on international money markets. Transportation, especially the virtual non-existence of railways (the only line before 1855 ran between the two capitals), meant that key resources (such as iron ore and coal) and markets could not be easily and economically linked. Russia was also technologically backward; it still imported 70 per cent of all machinery and relied heavily upon outmoded technology. And labour, whether under serfdom or emancipation (which deliberately restricted mobility), was problematic in terms of quantity, skills, and cost.
As in agriculture, emancipation did not primarily seek to serve economic needs or to foster development. Indeed, its initial impact on industrial production proved negative: emancipation of factory serfs brought production at many plants to a standstill, especially in the important metallurgical plants in the Urals. Still, the regime now had a new and deeper appreciation for the importance of industrialization, especially in the wake of the débâcle of the Crimean War. As one highranking official explained: ‘Russia is not Egypt or the Papal States—to be content to purchase materials for her entire army from abroad; we must build our own factories to make arms in the future.’ Supported by the military lobby and a small but influential corps of economists, the government was far more sensitive to the needs of industrial and commercial development.
Although the aggregate growth was relatively modest (especially in the 1860s and 1870s), by the mid-1880s the country embarked on an extraordinarily high rate of growth. A considerable part of the growth was concentrated in the vital area of transportation; the total of railway lines increased nearly thirteenfold (from 2,238 versts in 1861 to 28,240 versts in 1887). Simultaneously, the industrial base grew substantially: from 15,000 to 38,000 enterprises (with a corresponding increase in fixed capital, labour force, and output). The corporate structure also expanded substantially; during the years 1861–73 alone, the number of joint-stock companies increased from 78 (with capital of 72 million roubles) to 357 (with 1.1 billion roubles capital). Altogether, industrial production roughly doubled in the quarter-century after emancipation.
Nevertheless, the ‘take-off was yet to come. If 1913 industrial production was 100, by 1885 the empire had only achieved 21 per cent of that output. Despite the growth, Russian industry still suffered from such perennial problems as the lack of venture capital and low labour productivity. Both the heavy and light industrial branches relied heavily upon old technology, had a low level of mechanization, and made only limited use of steam power. Russia still had to import much of its machinery and even a substantial proportion of its iron and steel from abroad. Moreover, for the first time, the industrial sector was now becoming vulnerable to international business cycles; the economic depression in the empire in the 1870s coincided closely with that in Western Europe. Finally, industrialists also faced a remarkably soft domestic market; the mounting economic woes of the countryside—whether in peasant communes or on gentry manors—limited demand for the goods of the factory.
Despite the weakness of the countryside and gains in the factory, the country grew even more dependent upon grain exports. These had already risen from 16 to 31 per cent in the pre-reform period (1801–60); over the next three decades grain rose to represent 47 per cent of all exports, thereby constituting the backbone of foreign trade and the vital linchpin in the balance of payments. Like the rest of Europe, Russia also gravitated from free trade to protectionism, with an inexorable rise from the low tariffs of the 1850s and 1860s—first to a 10 per cent tariff in 1881, then 20 per cent in 1885, and finally to a prohibitive tariff of 33 per cent in 1891.
Society
The Great Reforms sought to permit some social change, but it also endeavoured to ensure that it was slow and gradual. Hence many of the reforms were consciously ‘all-estate’ (vsesoslovnyi), not ‘non-estate’ (vnesoslovnyi); that is, they deliberately sought to include all estates, but to include people qua members of the estate, not to disregard estates altogether. Hence the zemstvo included nobles, peasants, and townspeople, but segregated them in separate electoral curiae. And, as a famous contemporary painting by one of the ‘itinerants’ (peredvizhniki) showed, the social distances remained great indeed.
The nobility itself underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation. Juridically, it not only lost the right to own serfs but also surrendered important privileges and perquisites, especially those pertaining to its special access to civil and military service. The new legislation opened schools, including the élite military officer schools, to non-nobles; the inexorable result was a steady influx of non-nobles into institutions of higher learning and, subsequently, into the military and civil service. The change was most dramatic in that old bastion of noble privilege, the officer corps, where the proportion of hereditary nobles shrank from 81 per cent in the 1860s to a mere 12 per cent by the end of the century. The nobles not only forfeited old privileges but also had to bear new responsibilities and burdens. Most notable was the retraction of their right not to serve by the Universal Military Training Act of 1874. Economically, as already pointed out, many nobles fared badly under the conditions of post-emancipation agriculture; especially once the international grain crisis descended on Russia, their debts mounted rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in bankruptcies (from a handful in the 1870s to 2,237 in 1893) and in land sales (by 1905 nobles had sold over 40 per cent of their land held at emancipation). Little wonder that, amidst such distress, the nobility proved such fertile ground for opposition in the zemstvo and, from the 1890s, would spearhead the first phase of the ‘liberation movement’.
A second component of the élite was the ‘nobility of the pen’—the bureaucracy. Although it had early on become differentiated from the landholding nobility (and, especially at the provincial level, had been recruited from non-nobles), this ‘democratization’ accelerated sharply after 1855 and inexorably recast officialdom, even the élite bureaucracy in the two capitals. Although the very top rungs of the civil service remained the purview of blue-blooded nobles, the middling and lower ranks now drew primarily on other groups, especially the offspring of clergy, townsmen, and the educated professions. But even more remarkable than the change in social composition was the enormous growth in aggregate size of the civil service, which swelled from just 112,000 in 1857 to 524,000 in 1900 in the Table of Ranks (plus many others in lower positions). The ‘state’, which in pre-reform Russia had been chiefly myth, was rapidly being reified, even in the countryside, where the bureaucracy was gradually coming face to face with the peasantry.
A third component of élite society consisted of men of means—the old merchants but also the new stratum of rich industrialists and bankers. A relatively thin stratum of society, this ‘bourgeoisie’ actually consisted of several different groups. One important component included Muscovite industrialists and merchants, whose roots went back to the period of Nicholas I and who derived their wealth chiefly from the production and sale of consumer goods (especially textiles) on the domestic market. By all accounts they tended to be more conservative, even in religious matters (with a disproportionate share of Old Believers). Another group was quite different—the St Petersburg industrialists and financiers, who were active in banking and heavy industry. Since much of their activity depended on good relations with the government, they tended to be very conservative politically. The third, highly visible, group consisted of non-Russians, both those from minority groups (especially Jews) and from foreigners (like the Nobel family). In relative terms, this commercial-industrial élite remained very small and, for the most part, remote from politics.
Russia A History Page 25