Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  This negative assessment of state policy in the 1890s readily reinforced existing attitudes of the educated public. Russia’s radical intellectuals (best typified by the sometime liberal, sometime radical, N. K. Mikhailovskii), but even many moderates (not to mention the eccentric, politically enigmatic figure of Leo Tolstoy), generally placed a low premium on economic development, widely viewed as attainable only at the common people’s expense. Less surprising but no less important was the low value placed on economic progress by conservative intellectuals, whose fear of what today is called the evils of modernization or Westernization—Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes readily to mind—sometimes made them odd allies with people who otherwise stood far to their left.

  From a political perspective, the most important result of the famine was revitalization of the zemstvo, earlier a locus of nongovernmental public activity and liberal aspirations, but in the 1880s restricting itself to ‘small deeds’. Ineffective in efforts to combat famine when utilizing only its own resources, by late 1891 the government was once again driven to encourage the very kind of grass-roots, voluntary social action that it normally distrusted—from the relief work of district zemstvos and university students to the charitable efforts of national cultural figures such as Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Society was summoned back to life to take part in a national war on poverty.

  Throughout the most hard-hit areas of Russia, the hungry blackearth and Volga provinces, the zemstvos took the lead (although, as Richard Robbins has argued, the degree of successful co-operation between zemstvo and central government is often underestimated). The point, however, is not that the zemstvos’ efforts were universally successful (far from it), but that their self-confidence, self-assertion, and self-importance were given an enormous boost, so much so that in the immediate post-famine years, some zemstvos again challenged the central government.

  The advent of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894 encouraged zemstvos and other civic bodies to convert their newly acquired prestige into a political force. In keeping with their as yet modest goals, perhaps encouraged by the recent flashes of co-operation with the government, their approach—except for the aggressive Tver zemstvo—was the traditional supplication: a hopeful request to the new, little-known young monarch to include them in his policy deliberations. His notorious response in January 1895 rejected such aspirations as ‘senseless dreams’ and reaffirmed the autocratic principles of his beloved father, Alexander III. This insensitive response was only the first of several dramatic moments (the 1896 Khodynka Field tragedy, when hundreds of spectators were trampled to death at the Moscow coronation ceremonies, was the next) that disrupted constructive dialogue between state and society in the first ten years of Nicholas’s rule.

  Revival of the Left

  The events of 1891–2, with the continued rigidity of autocratic governance in the years that followed, helped to revive the radical left, which, like the more moderate zemstvo movement, had been licking its wounds in the 1880s. True, the People’s Will and other like-minded, terror-oriented grouplets (including a short-lived conspiratorial student band in 1887 dominated by Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s elder brother) had never entirely ceased their plotting. But until the new mood of the 1890s, they had entertained precious little hope, certainly less than in the 1870s, of effective contact with the ‘people’ (whether peasants or workers) on the one hand, or with zemstvos and other moderates or liberals on the other. From the mid-1890s, however, radicals saw new opportunities: alliances, however uneasy, with increasingly disaffected liberals to their right; contact, however awkward, with the ‘people’, especially the growing numbers of factory workers in and near the rapidly industrializing larger cities. Except for the earlier stages of the 1905 Revolution, co-operation between liberals and socialist radicals never seemed brighter than in the early 1890s. The so-called ‘People’s Rights Party’ (1893–4), a populist-oriented organization that jettisoned terrorism, stressed the importance of political freedom and welcomed both radicals and moderates to join its ranks. Although that party was short-lived, the entire period from 1892 to early 1905 saw on-again-off-again efforts of the more flexible radicals, both populist and Marxist, and the more daring liberals to find common ground. At the same time, more cautious liberals courted the more enlightened members of the bureaucracy, who in turn were willing to co-operate with ‘trustworthy’ leaders of the zemstvo movement, especially the so-called neo-Slavophiles. It was as if every point on the Russian political spectrum, save the most extreme ones, was occupied by someone desperately seeking to hold hands with allies to the right and to the left.

  Labour Unrest

  Thanks to Witte’s initial success, in the 1890s Russia experienced a rate of industrial growth never to recur until the 1930s. Indeed, industrial production: increased at an average of 8 per cent per annum, higher even than that of the USA. Did this rapid growth augur progress or conflict? As in other countries, the answer was both: ‘progress’, as Russia’s national economy closed the gap somewhat with other European countries, but also ‘conflict’ as Russian cities experienced the tell-tale warning signs of urban blight, working-class dissatisfaction, and gathering social tensions.

  The renewed labour unrest that erupted in some of the factories of centra Russia, including Moscow, in the mid-1890s, was dwarfed by a succession of city-wide strikes in St Petersburg’s textile industry in 1896–7. Never before had labour unrest been so widespread and so well co-ordinated in a single Russian city, indeed, not in just any city but in the imperial capital, seat of royal authority and centre of imperial administration.

  But were these strikes of great political significance? Historians have debated this point, opinions ranging from those who see them as spontaneous and purely economic, to those who read them as early successes of a young Russian Marxism. Although the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) was not officially founded until 1898, Marxist circles were already in full flower in the capital by mid-decade. While the influence of early Russian Marxism should not be exaggerated, Allan Wildman has clearly demonstrated that the spontaneous labour movement was aided, abetted, and to some degree even inspired by Marxist agitators, some of whom had been closely connected with the young Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov.

  But of still greater historical importance was the strikes’ indirect political significance: Russians of all persuasions saw them as a major historical moment, pregnant with either promise or peril, depending on the observer’s politics. Not that these perceptions were always consistent or predictable. In government circles, for example, some interpreted the strikes as a ‘wake-up call’, warning of the dire consequences of continuing Witte’s policies, while others saw them as evidence of the need for enlightened labour legislation to meet the needs of a modern industrializing society. A few officials, at times including Witte himself, went so far as to contemplate the legalization of labour unions, while the Minister of Interior proposed to shorten the working day (a logical extension of labour legislation on women and minors promulgated in the 1880s). A limit on the working day was introduced in 1897; (partial) legalization of unions did not come until 1906, however, and then in a very different context.

  In the wake of the Petersburg strikes of 1896–7, even conservative officials who loathed Witte’s industrialization schemes recognized the need to contain working-class unrest. As often happened, such awareness was motivated by a mixture of direct Russian and vicarious European experience. Just as the Paris Commune of 1871 had precociously alerted Russians to potential dangers in their own urban centres, the spread of social democracy and labour militancy among ‘disloyal’ German workers, when added to such events as the Petersburg strikes, convinced conservatives in the Ministry of Interior, most notably the notorious Sergei Zubatov, that police-supervised associations were needed to stem the tide of unrest. To men like Witte, however, the very idea of placing the fate of industrial labour in the hands of the police (later described by critics as ‘police socialism’) was
a foolish provocation. Moreover, such approaches seemed like yet another expression of gentry hostility to Witte’s policies, so rampant in the Ministry of Interior. Lacking a clear alternative, the Witte faction vacillated between advocacy of simple repression and of such daring moves as the legalization of unions. The tension between Witte and Zubatov over labour policy was emblematic of a larger tension between the Ministry of Interior and the Finance Ministry, with the basic direction of social and economic policy at issue.

  The Role of Foreign Policy

  Given the social and political strains produced by Witte’s policies, historians have asked whether they were necessary. Might an alternative path have been followed? Even if one forgoes foreign-policy determinism (Primat der Auβenpolitik), one must still concede that Russia’s relations with the outside world, and especially with the European powers, configured the context for the policies of the Finance Minister, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes at a further remove. Russia’s frail finances severely restricted the risks that the government could assume in foreign policy, especially with respect to the critical areas of the Balkans and the Black Sea, but also with respect to expansion in the Far East. At the same time, Russia’s presumptive but precarious position as a ‘great power’ provided an underlying motivation for the pursuit of economic development, industrial strength, and financial independence.

  To be sure, Russia’s rulers always had the theoretical option of abdicating their great-power aspirations. But to do so would have threatened to undermine the entire regime, dynasty and all. It is hard to imagine a Romanov ruler openly agreeing to renunciation of great-power status, which would have entailed the closing of the Black Sea to Russian shipping, the resurrection of an independent Poland, perhaps even the abandonment of Peter the Great’s Baltic conquests and withdrawal from Central Asia. It took little imagination to itemize the potential losses from such an abdication—not to mention the symbolic significance of the forswearing of Russia’s traditional role, ever since the eighteenth century, as protector of Christian minorities from their Ottoman oppressors. A Russian ruler who openly repudiated these ambitions effectively abandoned his claim to be emperor, and to rule—and, quite conceivably, the moral and political support of the gentry élite.

  Such considerations belie the historical possibility of a very different course. There were indeed real choices to be made, but they were between a bold, adventuristic, risk-taking policy that courted the twin dangers of humiliation and bankruptcy, and a more cautious, conservative policy that postponed immediate gratification and gambled on economic development as the key to future claims to power. The latter policy underlay Witte’s domestic programme, though a cautious posture was increasingly difficult to maintain as Russia became entangled in Asian adventures.

  The successful pursuit of a cautious foreign policy also required stable relations with Germany. Yet those relations were strained by the Russo-German tariff war, already under way when Vyshnegradskii took office in 1887, at a time when there was little reason to be sanguine about Russia’s international position. A war scare with England two years earlier had added yet another chapter to the story of Russian humiliations in Paris in 1856 and Berlin in 1878. By the time Witte succeeded Vyshnegradskii, the Russian military—despite the misgivings of political conservatives and enemies of republicanism—had begun its turn to France, a move long favoured by Pan-Slavs and liberals alike. In 1892, even a cautious Foreign Ministry (still ever mindful of the need to get on well with Germany) concluded its first, quite limited entente with Paris. By the end of the decade Russian economic as well as foreign policy were more oriented towards France than ever, with French bankers, businessmen, and government officials filling gaps created by the withdrawal of Germans. This of course meant more potential conflict with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and—though there were temporary respites in the tariff wars from 1894 to 1901—ultimately with Germany itself, thereby creating a vicious circle that made loans from France all the more imperative. But until the turn of the century, it was still too early to foresee the potential conflict brewing with Japan over the two countries’ competing ambitions in the Far East.

  Revolutionary ‘Parties’

  In the 1890s these foreign-policy issues were of little concern to the Russian left. As was their wont, radicals were more attentive to the fate of peasants and workers, with workers attracting an ever-greater share of their attention. If labour policy and attitudes towards workers exposed and intensified divisions in the government, they also produced divisions on the left, which had never been without its internal conflicts over how best to relate to the people that it aspired to lead or represent. Even in the 1870s, when revolutionaries envisioned the peasantry as the repository of their ‘Utopian’ dreams, they had already become heavily involved in the lives of urban workers, especially those in St Petersburg. This involvement entailed closer and closer contacts in that city between a marginalized group of young factory workers and a self-marginalized group of student intelligentsia, with the two groups interacting within the confines of the clandestine ‘circle’ (kruzhok), meeting in the overcrowded apartment of some of the members. These gatherings were the spiritual descendants of the intelligentsia circles of the age of Nicholas I, yet differed to the extent that they now drew many genuine plebeians into their orbit. Though the strategies and tactics varied over time (for example, armed rebellion vied with peaceful propaganda, tight conspiracy with openness), the circles had a powerful, persistent institutional presence right up to the revolutionary events of 1905, and to some extent beyond. Often heterogeneous in its class composition, the ‘all-class’ circle or ‘mixed-class’ circle soon gave birth to an illegitimate offspring—the circle composed exclusively of workers, who often struggled to define themselves in opposition to the intelligentsia-dominated, socially mixed groups that had spawned them.

  By increasing the size and concentration of the working class, Witte’s policies expanded the arena of radical activity and opened the door to a Marxist perspective on the left. By the eve of 1905 the left included competing revolutionary strategies, each eventually embodied in a ‘party’: the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR, or simply the SRs, formally constituted in 1901) and two rival factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (products of the party’s schism in 1903). ‘Party’ is placed in quotation marks to emphasize that none was a party in the traditional West European political sense, that is, an organization that existed for the competitive pursuit of national elective office: there was no such office before 1906. Instead, these parties were underground organizations, seeking to overthrow the existing system and—here came some monumental disagreements—replace it either temporarily, with a liberal-democratic, constitutional polity and market economy (a ‘bourgeois phase’), or permanently, with a ‘socialist’ order (in any case a clearly non-capitalist socioeconomic system). Among European Marxists, nowhere was the issue of the succession of revolutionary ‘phases’ more hotly debated than in Russia, yet another expression of the reworking of West European experience into a relatively backward socioeconomic context.

  The SRs, identifying strongly with populist traditions of the 1870s and the terrorism of People’s Will, welcomed signs of worker rebelliousness, but treated workers as but another component part of the larger ‘people’, whose centre of gravity remained in the huge peasant majority. Both workers and peasants, from the SR perspective, were victims of state-sponsored capitalism, a system that lacked a broad social base or other redeeming feature and could still be short-circuited either by revolutionary action or reversal of government policy. Most SRs were of the ultra-revolutionary persuasion. They were often high-energy revolutionary performers, and their patience with any schemes for a ‘transitional’ or temporary phase, postponing socialism to some more distant point in time, was, for the moment, very thin. There was, to be sure, a handful of populist-oriented publicists in the 1890s who believed in peace
ful persuasion and other lawful means, but these ‘Legal Populists’ had lost much of their influence by the end of the century.

  Some Marxists, those who became the Mensheviks, did not believe Russia ready for ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ revolution and set as their proximate goal a ‘bourgeois’ revolution, whereby not workers—their ostensible constituency—but the enemy camp of capitalists would be the immediate beneficiary. Strictly speaking, the Mensheviks were following the logic of Orthodox Marxism, or that, at least, was their own perception. Capitalism was evil, of course, but a necessary evil, which carried the seeds of a socialist future in its womb. Rapid economic growth was therefore a sign of progress, auguring a liberal, bourgeois revolution (though one that the working class might have to lead!) in the near term, a proletarian revolution sometime thereafter. This complex analysis led some ‘Legal Marxists’ (Peter Struve, despite his early misgivings about the ‘cowardice’ of the Russian bourgeoisie, is the most illustrious example) away from socialism and all the way into the liberal, non-revolutionary camp. It was an analysis, however, that would not necessarily appeal to workers, even those who eschewed revolutionary rhetoric and practice.