Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  The ‘semi-privileged’ social orders included the clergy of the Orthodox Church—the parish clergy as well as those serving in monasteries and convents. Although the Great Reforms had endeavoured to improve their status and material condition (indeed, publicists spoke of an ‘emancipation’ of the clergy, not unlike that of the serfs), in fact the reforms had catastrophic consequences. Above all, the reforms failed to improve the material condition of clergy, for neither the state nor the people proved willing to change the form or amount of material support. The parish statute of 1869, which proposed to amalgamate parishes into larger and more viable economic units, likewise proved a dismal failure: while it did reduce the number of clerical positions and hence increase the ratio of parishioners to priests, it failed to generate greater income, as parishioners pronounced traditional sums sacred or even reduced them. The seminary reform of 1867 may have improved the curriculum, but it also shifted much of the financial burden of seminaries to the parish clergy. At the same time, the reform gave the clergy’s sons new opportunities to leave the clerical estate, and they did so in vast numbers (comprising 35 per cent of university students in 1875, for example). As this mass ‘flight of the seminarians’ gained momentum, the Church suddenly encountered an acute shortage of candidates and had to ordain men of inferior education. By the 1880s observers could already discern an absolute decline in the educational level of the clergy, a process that would continue unabated until the end of the ancien régime and indeed beyond.

  Another semi-privileged stratum consisted of the new professions, which gained markedly in numbers, status, and self-awareness in the decades after 1855. Previously, most professions had not even enjoyed legal recognition or, at most, simply comprised a subordinate unit of the civil service (for example, doctors and surveyors). After 1855 their number rapidly proliferated, in no small measure because of the rapid expansion of institutions of higher learning and specialized training. As a result, between 1860 and the end of the century, the total number of university and technical-school graduates increased from 20,000 to 85,000; beyond these graduates were many more who failed to graduate or who had an élite secondary-school education. Many of these discovered greatly expanded opportunities for employment not only in state service and the private sector, but also in the new organs of local self-government—the zemstvo and city council, which became a major employer for teachers, doctors, statisticians, agronomists, and the like. By the 1880s, for example, the zemstvo employed some 23,000 white-collar professionals, including 15,000 teachers, 1,300 doctors, and 5,000 registered ill-trained medical practitioners (fel′ dshery). Some, most notably lawyers and doctors, raised their corporate juridical status by establishing a professional organization, with the right not only to regulate but also to represent their profession. Because of their growing size, importance, and organization, the new professional intelligentsia was rapidly becoming a major force in Russian society and politics. It would play a central role in the liberation movement from the 1890s.

  The rank-and-file ‘burghers’ (meshchane) constituted a highly variegated group in the towns, ranging from petty merchants and skilled artisans to the unemployed, unskilled, and unwanted. Certainly their number was increasing sharply, as the cities themselves grew rapidly in size, even more rapidly than the population as a whole. It remained more protean than powerful; while wielding little influence in state and society, it did absorb the steady influx of migrants from the countryside and also became a major source of the upwardly mobile into the new semi-professions and civil service.

  The largest, and most disprivileged, segment of society was of course the peasantry. Apart from the economic problems bequeathed by emancipation, the peasants also suffered from legal discrimination (special obligations like the poll-tax, for example) and subordination to the commune. Despite the reformers’ attempt to inhibit a sudden social transformation of the traditional village, the peasantry none the less did undergo some far-reaching changes. One was a gradual stratification; despite the levelling effect of the commune, the village came to have its own ‘have-much’ and ‘have-nothing’ families, along with the mass of ‘have-littles’. And the families themselves began to change, with the gradual breakup of the patriarchal, extended family and formation of smaller, independent family units. Peasant society also came inexorably to reflect changes in urban culture, as increased contact with the city (especially through seasonal labour) helped to disseminate a new material culture, attitudes, and values to the countryside. Partly because of such changes, but also because of the Universal Military Training Act (which reduced service on the basis of education) and the opportunities open to the literate and schooled, the peasantry began to abandon its traditional antipathy towards the school as a useless luxury. Although the reduction of illiteracy was an enormous task, the new schools did have a distinct impact.

  Another group, the workers, had antecedents in the pre-reform era, with some forebears going back to the metallurgical and textile plants of the eighteenth century. The steady, if modest, industrial growth from the 1850s to the 1880s brought a substantial increase in the number of workers, from roughly 700,000 in 1865 to 1,432,000 in 1890. While many of these were seasonal (returning part of the year to cultivate their communal plot of land), a small but growing number had been born in the city or had permanently relocated there. The workers also displayed the explosive volatility for which they would later become so renowned; the St Petersburg textile strike of 1870, a watershed in Russian labour history, heralded the onset of a new era of spontaneous outbursts and, ultimately, more conscious and organized strikes.

  The condition and consciousness of women, more generally, underwent a significant transformation during these decades. From the mid-1850s the impact of the women’s movement in the West gradually became apparent, especially among those in élite status groups. By 1866 the first women’s journal appeared, followed shortly after by a ‘Proclamation’ (admittedly penned by a man) and the major infusion of radical women into the revolutionary movement. Still more important was the emergence of female professionals; though banned from the civil service, they appeared in increasing numbers in certain professions (especially teaching), sometimes acquired a Western medical degree, or turned to a popular female career equally popular in the West—monasticism and church service. But all this change had to overcome the opposition of society and regime, which still excluded women from the university and resisted proposals to improve their civil rights. Typical was the failure to reform the laws on divorce and separation, which were highly restrictive and left many women defenceless against abusive spouses and loveless marriages.

  The empire’s numerous minorities had long been a subject of intense concern. Although the ‘Great Russians’ comprised a majority (and, together with Ukrainians and Belorussians, nearly three-quarters of the population in European Russia), the empire had a huge and highly differentiated bloc of minorities. Some, like the Ukrainians and Belorussians, were Orthodox by faith and, despite some stirrings in a tiny nationalist intelligentsia, as yet did not pose a serious threat to the territorial integrity of the realm or its internal political stability. And many of the ‘internal’ minorities, located within Russian-dominated areas, had already been Russified to a considerable degree. The government also sought to suppress neo-Slavophile chauvinism, especially demands for repressive measures against various minorities; typical was Alexander’s sharp rebuke in 1869 to Iurii Samarin for his inflammatory book, The Borderlands of Russia.

  Indeed, in some regions the government launched far-reaching reforms to ameliorate the condition of selected minorities. Certainly the most remarkable beneficiaries were Jews, who, ever since the establishment of the Pale of Settlement in the late eighteenth century, had suffered from a crescendo of disabilities and discriminatory laws, especially in the reign of Nicholas I. In 1856, shortly after coming to the throne, Alexander II vowed ‘to review all the existing decrees on the Jews with the general goal of fusing this people wi
th the indigenous population’, and in fact did approve a series of important reforms. That same year his government abolished the discriminatory rules on military conscription, which had drafted Jewish youths not only at a higher rate but also at a younger age, as part of a deliberate strategy to subject the ‘cantonists’ to forcible conversion.

  From the mid-1850s the government even began to dismantle the restrictions of the Pale of Settlement—although only for selected, valuable members of the Jewish community: first-guild merchants (1859), certain categories of artisans (1865), and finally all Jews with a university degree (1879). Similar concessions were extended to certain other minorities. For example, in the grand duchy of Finland, where a Swedish élite held sway, Finnish was adopted for use in provincial government and courts (1856), later in customs and schools; in 1863 it was formally recognized, along with Swedish, as one of the two official languages.

  But the era of Great Reforms included repression as well as concession, especially when the government encountered overt opposition and organized resistance. By far the most volatile area was Congress Poland: long a hotbed of open discontent and the site of a major rebellion in 1830–1, the Poles had jubilantly celebrated news of Russia’s defeats in the Crimean War and, despite state attempts at conciliation, became still more rebellious in the first years of the new regime. Tensions steadily mounted in the area and finally exploded in the Polish rebellion of 1863. Although this insurrection was more easily suppressed than that of 1830–1, it none the less precipitated a systematic campaign of repression: abolition of the Polish governmental councils (1867), reorganization of the area into ten Russian administrative provinces (1868), conversion of Warsaw University into a Russian institution (1869), and introduction of the Russian judicial system (1876). Blaming the Catholic Church for fanning anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox sentiments, the government took steps to neutralize this threat by confiscating Catholic property and imposing new controls on its administration (1864–5). The area continued to seethe with discontent and remained a constant source of instability and ferment. The state also resorted to force in the Caucasus, which had been annexed decades earlier, but remained a cauldron of unrest and armed resistance. Although a military campaign in 1857–62 achieved a modicum of control, Russian power remained tentative and vulnerable.

  The 1860s and 1870s also marked the expansion of Russian rule into Central Asia, which had long been subject to Russian influence and pressure, but only now came firmly into its orbit of control. Although the motive may have been partly commercial (an interest in its capacity for cotton production), far more important was the need to establish a firm and reliable border in the area. Whatever the motive, between 1864 and 1873 Russia gradually reduced the three khanates (Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand) to a protectorate status, with unmistakable Russian predominance.

  The Revolutionary Movement

  Even as the government embarked on the Great Reforms, it encountered not only dissatisfaction among peasants and nobles, but also opposition from an important new force in society—radical youth who collectively came to be called the ‘intelligentsia’. Although Russia had had its share of radicals before, they had not constituted a self-conscious social group, with a distinctive identity and subculture. By the 1860s, however, they had gained sufficient critical mass and developed a new social identity, first as ‘the new people’ (from N. G. Chernyshevskii’s novel, What is to be Done? [1863]) and eventually as the ‘intelligentsia’. Set apart by a special subculture (with distinctive dress, speech, mores, and values), still drawn disproportionately from the upper reaches of society, the intelligentsia none the less conceived of itself as a supraclass force and charged with representing the interests of ‘society’, especially its lower orders. Sharing a common Weltanschauung (which provocatively abjured their fathers’ idealism and romanticism in the name of science and materialism), they believed that they could escape the elusive, ethereal forces of history and, with the aid of science and rational planning, construct society and state along entirely new lines. The model for young radicals was skilfully etched in Ivan S. Turgenev’s famous novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), with the sharp contrast between the older generation and the archetypical lower-class antithesis, Bazarov.

  The radicals of the 1860s, still few in number but concentrated in the capitals, marked the first real effluence of an organized revolutionary movement. For the most part these early radicals waged the fight with proclamations, like that of Young Russia in 1862: ‘With full faith in ourselves and our strength, in the people’s sympathy for us, in the glorious future of Russia (to whose lot it has fallen to be the first country to achieve the glorious work of socialism), we will utter a single cry: “To the axe!!” and then strike the imperial party without restraint … in the city squares … in the narrow streets of the cities, in the broad avenues of the capital, in the villages and in the small towns’. These early revolutionaries, however, also established the first conspiratorial organizations to wage a battle against autocracy in the name of the people. Alarmed by the upsurge of student disorders, revolutionary proclamations, scattered acts of random violence (from the fires of St Petersburg in 1862 to the failed assassination of Alexander II in 1866), the government grew increasingly repressive in seeking to contain this new and growing wave of radicalism.

  The 1860s were only a pallid harbinger of what would come in the 1870s. In contrast to the 1860s, this next stage was marked by an idealization of the peasantry and, especially, hopes that they were on the verge of a bloody Jacquerie against the nobility and autocracy. Later encapsulated in the term ‘populism’ (narodnichestvo), the movement of the 1870s emphasized both the significance of the peasant commune (as an embryonic unit of communism), but also the moral and spiritual strength of the people. The movement indeed affected a whole generation of intellectuals, from writers wont to celebrate the peasantry to zemstvo statisticians intent upon demonstrating the economic superiority of communal agriculture. But for the populist radicals eager to demolish autocracy and truly emancipate the people, it was axiomatic that the peasantry itself was a vital revolutionary force that at most required the co-ordination of the intelligentsia.

  In the first phase the radicals were deeply influenced by the teaching of Peter Lavrov, whose Historical Letters (1869) emphasized the duty of the intelligentsia—who had acquired their culture and education at the expense of the common folk—to repay their enormous debt by bringing culture and education to the folk. Although Lavrov’s challenge to ‘repentant noblemen’ initially encouraged attempts to disseminate books and literacy, it eventually mushroomed into a more radical campaign of ‘going to the people’ in 1874–6. That new phase drew less from Lavrov than from the anarchist teachings of M. Bakunin and P. Kropotkin, who believed that the peasantry was innately revolutionary and needed only encouragement. As a result, several thousand members of the urban intelligentsia flooded into the countryside—as teachers, blacksmiths, and the like—for the purpose of fusing with the people. Despite some positive response by the peasantry, the police easily identified and arrested most of these urban misfits and effectively decimated the rank-and-file activists. Though nominally still espousing confidence that revolution could still come from below, the intelligentsia now turned to terrorism—violent attacks on high-ranking officials, the emperor included—in a vain, but desperate attempt to ignite popular revolt and obtain vengeance for the uncompromising violence and repression of the state. Organized in a conspiratorial organization called ‘Land and Freedom’ (Zemlia i volia), the terrorists waged war on the autocracy and bureaucracy even as some of their number continued attempts to ignite a popular Jacquerie from below.

  By 1879, however, revolutionary populists turned increasingly to terrorism and, for all practical purposes, abandoned hope of popular insurrection. As the organization’s very name ‘the People’s Will’ (Narodnaia volia) suggested, the revolutionaries now envisioned themselves as the agents of revolution acting on behalf of the peasantry. This
phase of the populist movement drew on the teachings of P. Tkachev, who emphasized that Russia’s very backwardness meant the lack of a strong bourgeoisie or nobility and hence the lack of a real social base for autocracy. ‘In reality’, he wrote, ‘the [state’s] power is only apparent and imagined; it has no roots in the economic life of the people, and it does not embody the interests of any class’. But this desperate paroxysm of violent terrorism also derived from fear: their encounter with the village (reinforced by the vignettes of populist writers and the numbers of the zemstvo statisticians) revealed that the commune was beginning to dissolve, that the collective was giving way to the kulak. Russia’s very development posed the danger that the commune, its special path to the future, was heading unmistakably towards disintegration. It was thus becoming increasingly urgent, the populists believed, that they strike down the very embodiment of the hateful state—the emperor himself.

  Counter-Revolution and Counter-Reform

  Although the crescendo of revolutionary violence provided one major reason for the government’s retreat from the liberal reformism of the 1860s, it was not the only or even the primary reason. No less important was the simple fact that the liberal reforms had failed to work as anticipated or, indeed, had sometimes created new problems while aggravating old ones. Moralizing historians have long been wont to blame the revolutionary intelligentsia for Russia’s failure to tread the Western liberal path, but in fact the reforms—themselves deeply influenced by Western models—proved highly dysfunctional and destructive.

  The zemstvo reform that established elected bodies of self-government is a case in point. In part, the government was dismayed to find that these organs promptly proceeded to raise political demands—above all, that the edifice be crowned by a national zemstvo. Although the government for the moment was able to stifle such pretensions, in moments of crisis—as in the late 1870s—the zemstvo liberals seized upon the government’s weakness and vulnerability to renew their demand for political, not mere administrative, reform. No less important, the zemstvo failed to exercise its authority and in fact proved highly lethargic, falling far short of expectations. While most nobles had little interest in levying local property-based taxes to build schools for peasants, the latter lacked the means to build schools that seemed to offer no immediate material benefit.