Judicial reform proved equally dismaying. In part, contemporaries were deeply alarmed by an apparent explosion in the crime rate, a perception magnified in turn by lurid reporting in the press. Apart from the dissolution of the squire’s police powers over the peasantry, some contemporaries were wont to blame the judicial system itself, especially the purported (but exaggerated) leniency of the jury system. More worrisome for the government was the apparent inability of the judicial system to combat political crime and revolutionary terrorism; as a result, the government transferred crimes against the state to a government body (1872) and erected military tribunals to deal with terrorists (1878). When the revolutionaries used public trials as a political stage, when a jury acquitted a female terrorist who had shot and wounded the governor of St Petersburg, the government became still more disenchanted with its system of Western justice. That disillusionment extended to virtually all the other reforms as well—the liberal censorship that tolerated attacks on the government, the universities that produced so many radical revolutionaries, the church reform that left priests in even worse straits than before, and the emancipation that appeared responsible for the plight of both nobles and peasants.
All this served to erode the reform ethos of the 1860s, even among those who had participated in designing the reforms. A former Minister of Interior, P. A. Valuev, was now more sensitive to the dilemmas of stimulating social initiative from below: ‘The Russian people, for centuries, have been accustomed to strong authority and its uniform application everywhere. Only government authority, balanced in its weight and with equal, forceful influence on all the far-flung parts of our state, will be able to guide society to its further development on a true and lawful path’. Even more radical was the shift in sentiment of K. P. Pobedonostsev, who had helped design the liberal judicial reform of 1864 but within a few years had become the chief spokesman for conservative retrenchment.
Although the government had begun to revise and repair the Great Reforms earlier, the watershed came in the acute political crisis of the late 1870s. The regime found itself now confronted not only by a relentless political terrorism but also by growing restiveness in educated society—at least partly because of yet another débâcle in foreign affairs, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. The conflict had promised to protect Russia’s coreligionists from persecution in the Ottoman Empire, and restore Russia’s place as a great power; despite the high costs incurred, however, all these gains were undone at the congress of Berlin. By 1879 educated society (which included conservative, not just liberal elements in the nobility) were adamantly demanding political reforms like a constitution and a national assembly. Pobedonostsev, the arch-enemy of such demands, wrote to the emperor’s heir that ‘what I hear [in St Petersburg] from high-placed and learned men makes me sick, as if I were in the company of half-wits and perverted apes. I hear everywhere the trite, deceitful, and accursed word—constitution’. Indeed, some of the more liberal segments (headed by nobles from Tver) had even entered into clandestine contact with the revolutionary populists.
When repression alone failed to stifle the revolutionary movement, in February 1880 Alexander II appointed a new Minister of Interior, M. T. Loris-Melikov, to deal with the crisis. His tactic, known as the ‘dictatorship of the heart’, continued the war against revolutionaries but also made a calculated attempt to solicit the support of Russia’s more conservative, propertied elements in society. Although wrongly described as a parliamentary reform, his plan essentially foresaw a series of consultative commissions (not unlike those that preceded emancipation) to help advise the government on the proper course of action. Both the preparatory and general commissions would include regular state officials and members elected by the zemstvo and city councils; their task was to make a systematic review of the Great Reforms. This scheme was not, however, intended as a permanent institution; as Loris-Melikov himself explained, ‘it would be unthinkable for Russia to have any form of popular representation based on Western models’. Reassured, Alexander II approved the proposal on 1 March 1881.
That same day the terrorists finally got their quarry: a bomb mortally wounded the emperor, who died a few hours later. Although his successor, Alexander III (1881–94), at first hesitated, he was eventually persuaded by Pobedonostsev to reaffirm the fundamental principles of autocracy in a manifesto of 29 April 1881. The manifesto, implicitly a repudiation of Loris-Melikov’s plan and indeed of the Great Reforms, led immediately to the resignation of the liberal ministers and to the formation of a far more conservative government. The path was now open for a far-reaching revision of the earlier legislation.
Although contemporaries (especially liberals) characterized the new measures as a ‘reaction’, they did not constitute a ‘restoration’ of the old order. It was, of course, plain to all that neither serfdom nor the order it sustained could be reestablished. What the new government did seek to do, however, was to reassert the primacy of dynamic state leadership and autocracy. The ‘counter-reforms’ in censorship (1882) and education (1884), for example, specifically sought to emphasize the state’s power and dispensed with earlier hopes that society would show initiative and responsibility. Particularly important on the agenda was the re-establishment of firm police power; the ‘temporary regulations of 14 August 1881’ created ‘extraordinary’ security powers which, in fact, were renewed every three years and expanded to a growing list of areas until the regime finally fell in 1917. Indeed, the regime of Alexander III was wont to cultivate and reward proizvol—the gratuitous display of arbitrariness and power—among its officials. Reassertion of the autocratic principle had increasingly assumed the form of a counter-Rechtsstaat, a volte-face in policy that was all the more anathema and provocative for liberal, educated society.
The 1880s also signalled an important new era in state policy towards national minorities. Although Alexander II had dealt brutally with the rebellious Poles, he had not engaged in systematic, coercive Russification and even made significant concessions in some instances. His son’s government, by contrast, launched a far more aggressive campaign, one that crossed the divide from administrative to cultural Russification. Perhaps the most striking example of the change in policy concerned the Baltic Germans, an élite that had served the empire loyally and that had enjoyed the special confidence and protection of Alexander III’s predecessors. From the mid-1880s, however, St Petersburg took vigorous measures to ‘Russify’ the area, requiring that Russian be used in state offices (1885–9) and elementary and secondary schools (1887–90), that the imperial police and judicial system be adopted (1889), and that the German university of Dorpat be Russified as Iurev University (1889–93). Simultaneously, the government reversed its earlier concessions to Jews. The most important repressive measures included the 1887 quotas limiting the number of Jewish students in secondary schools and universities (10 per cent in the Pale, 5 per cent outside, and 3 per cent in the two capitals). Later measures included rules to exclude Jews from the bar (1889), zemstvo (1890), and city councils (1892). Similar encroachments were made on other groups, even those like the Finns, who had hitherto enjoyed special protection, but now were exposed to a gradual Russification that would reach a crescendo in the late 1890s.
But paternalistic autocracy also made concessions, at least for its putative base of ‘loyal subjects’. For the nobles it created a new Noble Bank (with special low-interest rates) and, in an imperial manifesto of 1885, made new promises of a greater role: ‘The Russian nobles [will] preserve their preponderance in the military command, local governments, courts, and in the dissemination (through example) of the precepts of faith and fidelity’. The government also made concessions to the lower social groups as well—such as the Peasant Bank (1883) to assist in land purchases and the abolition of the poll-tax (1885). Disturbed by unrest among factory workers and influenced by the social policy in Bismarckian Germany, the government also adopted a number of far-reaching laws to restrict child labour and other labour abuses i
n 1882–6. By 1890 repression, moderated by such social concessions, appeared to have restored stability to the realm: disorders in the factory and village were at a nadir, even the revolutionary movement appeared to constitute no real match for the regime’s police forces.
But the dominant element, especially in contemporary perception, was ‘reaction’—blind attempts to repress and refasten the shackles of the old order. This reversion was all the more intolerable because it seemed to reverse the gains of the 1860s and 1870s. It was, indeed, in many instances outright counterproductive. While seeking to reconstruct the multinational empire into a homogeneous state, with uniform Russian culture and administration from border to border, the government was merely succeeding in accelerating the development of national consciousness and revolutionary sentiments, even among the most loyal minorities in the empire. To a very considerable degree, the geographic periphery was becoming the political centre: the rebellious sentiments, combined with weakness of state control, was turning the borderlands into the staging-ground and bastion of revolution. The revolutionary movement would recruit heavily from these borderlands as the ancien régime gradually slid towards the abyss of 1917.
8. Revolutionary Russia 1890–1914
REGINALD E. ZELNIK
Rapid industrialization, though vital for military power abroad, ignited deep-rooted unrest in both town and country. By 1905 this ‘modernizing autocracy’ suffered humiliating defeat in the East and revolutionary upheaval at home. In the aftermath, despite grudging if important concessions, the regime failed to establish the social solidarity—or submission—needed to survive the onslaught of modern warfare.
Introduction and Background
ANY analysis of imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth must include the obvious but essential reminder that Russia was still an autocracy (samoderzhavie). This was not simply a garden-variety old regime, with a divinely anointed absolute monarch at the top and a system of legally defined social estates (sosloviia= Stände), headed by the nobility defining its social hierarchy. It was also an old regime whose sovereigns, even the most ‘liberal’ (Alexander II), self-consciously resisted the dilution of their sovereign power, the delegation of that power to intermediary institutions, and its limitation by any constitutional mechanism. Although laws abounded, and had even been codified, until 1906 Russia’s rulers refused to recognize as definitive any body of law that could not be subordinated to or reversed by the autocratic will, as it often was. There was, again until 1906, no equivalent of a Reichstag, no universal manhood suffrage (indeed no suffrage of any sort at the national level), no legal parties to outlaw (as German Social Democracy had been outlawed in 1878), no labour unions or other free associations of workers to persecute and harass.
It was also a regime that deeply distrusted and only grudgingly tolerated any kind of independent civic association organized from below, not only by the lower classes, but even by society’s élites. It was still more distrustful of organizational activity that brought those élites into contact with ‘the people’ in social contexts free from state supervision or that seemed likely to escape the reach of government oversight and control. It was, in short, a polity in which invisible mechanisms of cultural hegemony, civic normalization, embourgeoisement, positive or negative integration—or whatever other metaphor one chooses to suggest the idea of social control without flagrant resort to force majeure—were neither readily available nor easily deployed.
The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s did, however, represent a significant change in the mode of government, marking Russia’s entry into a new era. During this period the serfs were freed, the zemstvo was introduced as an element of civil society at the local level, trial by jury and a relatively independent judiciary and bar were authorized, and the free professions were permitted to begin an open if vexed existence, with their own professional associations. It was also a period when some branches of government attracted a new breed of enlightened bureaucrat, less reluctant to open his mind to new ways and ideas, even while forced to submit to the domination of officials of an earlier stamp.
All these developments seemed to contradict the principle of unbridled autocracy, while a (more or less) capitalist industrialization, first in the 1870s and 1880s, then more intensively in the 1890s, moved powerfully, if never decisively, against the grain of old status-based hierarchies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these dramatic (and to important elements of the government) disturbing changes, indeed in part because of them, there was enormous reluctance to allowing the winds of change to blow in the direction of a liberalized political system, where society might seek to fulfil its aspirations independently of the state.
This is not to say that the state could snuff out all the ventures of society, of unofficial Russia acting in an organized capacity and a ‘civilizing spirit’. For with the slow but continuing development of Russia’s public sphere (in a word, of glasnost’), each decade from the 1870s—even the ‘reactionary’ 1880s and 1890s—witnessed the appearance, sometimes even with official approval, of new initiatives from below. They came mainly from members of the educated élite (less often from peasants or workers), many of them openly dedicated to high-minded public causes, to social progress, and to forging positive links between the ‘people’ (narod) and ‘society’. As long as such activity respected certain limits, even if never fully trusted by the government, it was tolerated to some extent, even during the so-called era of ‘counter-reforms’ of the late 1880s and 1890s.
The traditional version of the story of late imperial Russia, one that highlights the promise of the Great Reforms, but then goes on to recount the erosion of that promise in the age of ‘reaction’, is not without its virtues: the Great Reforms did promise constructive and enlightened (if not necessarily liberal) change, and the decades of the 1880s–1890s did witness a reversal of certain reforms of the previous reign, especially in the areas of local self-government and higher education.
Yet some important qualifications must be added to this seductively clear picture. From the very outset the Great Reforms were beset by serious contradictions: the coexistence of peasant courts and special administrative punishment with a new, Western-model jury system; abolition of serfdom but preservation of special disabilities for peasants—an internal passport system, compulsory redemption payments, and obligatory membership in communes; acceptance of a new property-based franchise as the foundation of local government, but reaffirmation of institutions based on the traditional juridical estates (not to mention the de facto dominance of the hereditary gentry, barely 1 per cent of the population). At the same time, even during counter-reforms and reaction, radical changes overtook society, economy, and government policy and continued to move the country in a more Westerly, ‘progressive’, modern (if not truly liberal) direction. In sum, at almost every point between the emperors’ most dramatic manifestos—the Emancipation manifesto of 1861 and the October manifesto of 1905—Russian society was in a state of tension, with multiple protagonists and antagonists, some of them seeking a radical reconfiguration of power and policy.
Industrial Progress and Rural Hunger
Around the time of the ‘counter-reform’ of 1890, the revised zemstvo statute, the tensions in Russian society became increasingly apparent. The ‘Witte era’ (1892–1903) was about to begin. These were the years marked by the influence, if not full political dominance, of the controversial but eminent Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte (Vitte), the former railway executive whose provocative developmental economic policies raised the ire of so many gentry and caused so much friction within the government itself. The policies of his predecessor, Ivan Vyshnegradskii (1887–92), anticipated those of Witte and also exposed their problematic consequences. Among the most important policy initiatives launched by Vyshnegradskii and continued by Witte was the pressure, applied through taxation, to force peasants to market grain at low prices. These ministers of finance also imposed a hi
gh protective tariff, which grew with time and made it increasingly difficult for market-oriented grain producers to purchase much-needed machinery and chemical fertilizers abroad. The ‘modernizing’ purpose here was to further economic progress by improving Russia’s balance of trade and by promoting domestic industries. But the consequence was to alienate both gentry and peasantry, the tsar’s élite servitors and his poorest subjects, respectively. Though often in conflict with each other over such issues as land use, both groups felt squeezed by the ministry’s developmental policies (a situation, grosso modo, that could be traced back to Peter the Great). And as always, the image of poor peasants victimized by government policy provided grist to the mill of the liberal and radical intelligentsia, with their keenly felt obligation to the people and reluctance to equate ‘progress’ with capitalist development (the populist writer Nikolai Mikhailovskii being a good case in point). In this instance, however, the criticism of modernizing ‘bureaucracy’, from both the right and the left, conservatives and liberal alike, did not mean that the state was walking sensibly down the middle of the road. It was not.
The accumulating resentments multiplied in 1891–2, when large parts of the Russian countryside, some twenty provinces in all, experienced this period’s greatest famine (followed by devastating cholera and typhus epidemics), a human catastrophe with casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Historians still argue about responsibility—whether famine was the product of government policies or the deeper cyclical malfunction of a backward agrarian structure. Apart from the famine as such, they argue about whether the peasants’ lot was actually worsening by ‘objective’ measurements (for example, caloric intake), about the meaning of rural overpopulation (was demographic growth a sign of ‘progress’—a reflection of declining mortality?), and even about the best methods for measuring such assessments. This debate will continue, a scholarly controversy that echoes England’s classic ‘standard-of-living’ debate. But whatever the truth about ‘objective’ conditions, there can be no doubt that contemporaries were deeply alarmed about the famine and its aftermath, or that their ‘subjective’ perception fuelled resentment against state programmes that seemed inherently harmful to society in general and to ‘the people’, especially the peasants (over 80 per cent of the population), in particular. The Ministry of Finance won few friends with its programme for economic progress.
Russia A History Page 27