Within certain limits, many Russian political groups, including liberals and Marxists, sympathized with the national and religious minorities and incorporated defence of their rights in their platforms, including in some cases the right to national autonomy and even independence. Marxists defended the right of nations to self-determination in principle (though just what constituted a viable ‘nation’ was always a thorny question), while urging their comrades among the national minorities to work for proletarian unity rather than secession and independence.
SRs, because they tended to favour a loosely organized, federal political system, found it easy to co-operate with the minorities. Kadets, however, increasingly vulnerable to the currents of Russian nationalism and generally wedded to the goal of a liberal but unitary state, tempered their sympathy for minorities with an uneasy hostility to the more radical demands, especially in the case of Poles and Ukrainians. Octobrists, whose statist nationalism was much more brazen than that of Kadets, were firmly opposed to most minority aspirations; that chauvinist spirit was increasingly apparent in the Octobrist-dominated Third Duma, especially in its measures to reduce Finland to the status of a mere province.
Constitutional Russia?
The apparent defeat of the revolution at the end of 1905 (in fact still far from a total rout) did not mean that the government felt sufficiently confident to risk rescinding its October promises. To do so, in any case, was to hazard the loss of the still less than solid support of Octobrists, many of whom were uneasy about becoming identified as a government party. In 1906 the government therefore kept its promise to hold elections for the lower house (the State Duma), to grant broader (though by no means unrestricted) rights of free expression and assembly, to allow workers to form unions, and to confer various other rights. The old State Council, formerly appointed by the tsar, was transformed into an upper house; one half was still appointed by the tsar, the balance elected from mostly conservative institutions on a very restricted and undemocratic franchise. Although imperial ministers were still appointed by the tsar, they were now allowed to function as a cabinet, with a chairman (in effect, a Prime Minister) whose power derived, personality aside, from his critical position between the other ministers and the sovereign.
Did all this mean that Russia now had a ‘constitution’? Historians who have argued over this word have really been arguing about something else: the likelihood of Russia’s non-violent evolution into a liberal polity between 1906 and 1914 (when the disruptions of war thoroughly changed the terms of debate), a question to which we will return. For brevity’s sake, Western historians sometimes subsume this debate under the catch-phrase ‘optimism’ (no revolution) versus ‘pessimism’ (inevitability of revolution). Suffice it to say that, insofar as ‘constitution’ means a set of fundamental laws that are meant to be binding on the government as well as the people, Russia formally acquired such a system on 23 April 1906. But the more important issue is not the formal definition of this system but its durability, stability, and capacity to function.
One source of instability was formal: the infamous Article 87, which empowered the tsar to dissolve the Duma and promulgate new laws in the interval between elections. Because the same article also required that, for such laws to be valid, the next Duma must approve them within two months, Article 87 by itself did not directly undermine the new order, but it did create a situation where an insecure or embattled regime could promulgate a law to change the Fundamental Laws themselves, and thereby alter the composition of the next Duma. Such an action was illegal, tantamount to a coup d’état, which was precisely the term employed when the ‘Prime Minister’, Peter Stolypin, did just that on 3 June 1907. There was yet another formal source of instability; the Fundamental Laws invested the tsar (still called ‘autocrat’) and his appointed ministers with what appeared to be full power over diplomacy and war, but made any increase in the military budget contingent on the approval of the Duma.
The Stolypin Reform
No less important than the contradictions inherent in the Fundamental Laws were the political and social challenges that brought these problems to the surface. Foreign policy questions had saturated domestic politics from 1890 to 1905, and they continued to do so in the post-revolutionary years. Despite or perhaps because of Russia’s recent military defeat, the aspiration to renewed great-power status and to participation in Weltpolitik continued unabated. Russia’s military position, however, was weaker than ever, especially in the light of losses suffered in the Russo-Japanese War. The consequent growth of the deficit made the costs of rearmament very difficult to meet. If this deficit was ever to be overcome, the economy had to recover and social stability had to be restored.
First and foremost this meant seeking a fresh solution to the peasant land problem. The question, in the new post-1905 context, was whether the solution to land hunger, so vehemently expressed by peasant insurgency in 1905 (and there was much more to come in 1906), should be attained by the compulsory redistribution of gentry land, and if so, whether with compensation (the liberal or Kadet position) or without (the radical position).
No one, whether in or out of government, could fail to see that the agrarian status quo was no longer tenable, as the termination of redemption payments even before 1905 bears witness. But the post-1905 government, and the extremely astute Stolypin in particular (first as head of the Ministry of Interior, but soon thereafter as Russia’s third ‘Prime Minister’—following Witte and the less than competent Ivan Goremykin)—had a solution, indeed one that Witte himself had advocated earlier. The central idea was to reallocate not gentry lands but communal lands, and to transfer them to individual peasant proprietors in the form of compact, enclosed, self-standing farmsteads. The reform was promulgated without Duma approval in November 1906, but was later approved and extended by the conservative Third Duma. This complex approach, Stolypin’s so-called ‘wager on the strong’, was intended to create a productive class of hard-working, individualistic, free farmers (‘yeomen’ if one likes them, ‘kulaks’ if one does not), a new class of property owners with a strong stake in the existing system, men whose legal personalities and citizenship status in contrast to the peasants emancipated in the 1860s and their descendants—would cease to differ from those of other landowners.
This was, in the jargon of the Russian left, a ‘bourgeois’ reform, sponsored and supervised by the state, but with powerful implications for a Russian future where social position would derive from capital and labour, not from the status ascribed by birth. It was, in a sense, the belated fulfilment of the original promise of 1861, a promise that the government had feared to fulfil lest disruption of the communal structure foster proletarianization, unrest, even rebellion. But now that serious unrest and rebellion had been taking place even in the presence of the communal order, a major rationale for the status quo had been eliminated, at least in the eyes of many conservatives.
Who, then, was left to support the ‘anachronistic’ commune? A surprisingly broad range of groups, from the PSR on the left to anti-individualist conservatives on the right. Almost every political programme that called for confiscation of gentry lands, whether with or without compensation, entailed the transfer of those lands to village communes (or to larger townships consisting of communes), not to individual peasants. Even liberals who looked forward to a system of individual proprietorship saw this as the result of a natural evolutionary process, not aggressive state measures (though it should be noted that the Stolypin programme was based, in part, on voluntary compliance). Peasants themselves were no doubt torn, but to the extent that they were represented in the first two Dumas by the new ‘Trudovik’ (Labour) Party and by large numbers of peasant and peasant-oriented independents, they often resisted both the spirit and the letter of Stolypin’s master plan.
It was this resistance—dramatized by the failure of the government’s efforts to seek collaboration with some Kadets and other moderates—that impelled Stolypin to carry out his ‘
coup’, that is, to dissolve the Second Duma (more radical than the First) and revise the electoral law to ensure a more conservative composition. Peasants had once been the regime’s golden hope; but having demonstrated that, be they monarchist or otherwise, they could not be relied on to vote with the government, they were now deprived of much of their electoral weight. The same fate befell the rebellious minorities. The landed gentry, who were never fully trusted by the state, but who now exhibited signs of disillusionment with the Kadets (for example, by routing Kadet candidates in zemstvo elections) and a greater readiness to rally to their tsar, gained vastly disproportionate electoral rights. The change in franchise redounded to the benefit of the Octobrists and parties to their right. The new law was complex, but the result was a ‘loyal’ Duma, with moderate Octobrists (fortified by the adherence of many industrialists) and conservative Nationalists providing Stolypin with a safe majority, at least for the moment. Kadets were now reduced in number, subdued in spirit, and internally divided; SDs and SRs, though fielding candidates, elected too few delegates to give them an effective voice.
The Period of the Third Duma: 1907–1912
Despite strict limitations on its competence (military matters as such were excluded), serious policy issues were discussed in the halls of the Third Duma (1907–12), the only one to survive for its full five-year term (the Fourth came close). But some of these issues led to serious conflict, demonstrating the fragility of the government’s relationship with even a conservative Duma. Three particularly controversial issues were: (1) control over budgetary matters, especially the debate over the naval budget in 1909, which raised the issue of the Duma’s competence more than issues of substance (though the navy’s desire to sponge up resources badly needed by the army was a perennial source of strife); (2) the so-called Western zemstvo crisis of 1911, where the Council of State sought, successfully at first, to thwart Stolypin’s plan, which was to extend elected zemstvos to six Western border provinces, but without enhancing the power of Polish Catholic noble landowners; (3) Stolypin’s and the Duma’s long efforts, also thwarted by the State Council, to extend the zemstvos to the lower township (volost′) level. Without engaging the complex details of these divisive issues, suffice it to say that each revealed the lack of a clear consensus that could unite the upper and lower houses with each other or with Stolypin’s cabinet (itself very divided), or any of these institutions with the tsar, given the strange vagaries of mood at the imperial court. At the same time, it must be granted that agreement was possible on some important matters, including the agrarian reform and (during the Fourth Duma) a progressive workers’ insurance law, partially modelled on the programmes of Bismarck.
If the situation is addressed more generally, it makes sense to say that the politics of the Third (and Fourth) Duma regularly presented the Octobrists, now the pivotal party in the Duma, with the same choice: either to turn rightward to co-operate with the Nationalists (essentially a pro-government and Stolypinoriented coalition), or to turn leftward to the Kadets (essentially an oppositionist coalition, though moderate in tone and ‘loyal’ in content). In most respects the Duma’s extreme right and extreme left were irrelevant to these coalitions, neither being truly committed to the compromise politics of a parliament, preferring the direct-action politics of the street. As a result, the other major players in this political drama were the government (Stolypin’s, and later Kokovtsev’s, cabinet) and the State Council, consistently dominated by a conservative-to-reactionary majority that either favoured the government or criticized its policies from the perspective of the respectable right. Since all laws had to be approved by both houses, the State Council could sabotage any serious liberal legislative initiative that the Duma promoted (as it did on occasion).
Problems of the Pre-War Period: 1912–1914
By the time the Fourth Duma was elected in 1912, some evidence had accumulated that the system erected by Stolypin was starting to work, but there also was plenty of evidence that it could not—hence the unending historiographical debate between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. For the latter, the most dramatic evidence was the assassination of Stolypin himself in September 1911 by an SR, probably one of Russia’s ubiquitous double agents. Although none of Stolypin’s successors had comparable abilities, historians have suggested that even had Stolypin lived he was well on his way to dismissal. Relations with his erstwhile Octobrist allies had hit an all-time low, almost driving the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov (sometime chairman of the Duma and in a sense the first of the ‘pessimists’) to despair. Stolypin’s Duma calculus had shifted from Octobrists to the more narrowly based Nationalists. Stolypin was distrusted by the State Council’s conservative majority, his own cabinet, and courtiers close to the very tsar who had appointed him. Other ‘pessimist’ evidence may be adduced, including renewed unrest in the universities: by 1910–11, especially in Moscow, professors and students (among them, since 1905, a substantial number of women) protested against government efforts to rescind the concessions made to them in 1905; they were now in a virtual state of war with the Minister of Education, Lev Kasso.
Even before the Fourth Duma had convened, Stolypin’s successors faced yet another alarming problem: the resuscitation of a militant labour movement in the capital and elsewhere. The trigger was news that government troops had massacred over a hundred striking miners at the Lena goldfields in March 1912. The explosion of strikes and demonstrations led to stunning Bolshevik victories, at the expense of the more moderate Mensheviks, in elections to the Duma, union governing boards, and newly organized workers’ insurance boards. This revitalized unrest continued to intensify right up to the outbreak of war in 1914, providing the most persuasive evidence for the pessimist school.
On the ‘positive’ side of the ledger, optimists can cite evidence, if not of great achievements, then at least of some stabilization in the political and social status quo. Duma factionalism and wrangling had failed to pose a successful challenge to government authority; the opposition parties were bitterly divided and in disarray; revolutionary activity was virtually dormant for several years; even some of the radical intelligentsia questioned their own past values; and the Third Duma had made some progress in certain areas, especially in elementary education. Most tellingly, the agrarian reform, if by no means a proven success at this early stage, had finally received the Duma’s blessing and was in the process of being implemented without provoking significant peasant unrest (for a while turning even Lenin, in a peculiar sense, into an unwilling ‘optimist’).
On the international scene, as on the domestic, evidence could be cited of both success and failure. The greatest failure had come in 1908, when a series of diplomatic misunderstandings left Russia helplessly embarrassed when Vienna unilaterally annexed the disputed Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Competition between the army and the navy often attaining a high degree of rancour (contributing to the divisiveness of Duma politics), was depleting the budget and demoralizing the military. (Military historians generally agree that the navy’s demands were particularly unrealistic.) Earlier plans for establishing Russian hegemony over Mongolia and Manchuria were forcibly scaled down. Key Russian decision-makers were bitterly divided over how far to the west Russia should commit itself to a fortified defensive perimeter against Germany and Austria.
On the other hand, important diplomatic problems appeared to be resolved. Beginning in 1907 relations with Japan and England had significantly improved, and in 1909 Paris, though still a wary ally (witness France’s restraint at the time of the 1908 annexation crisis), agreed to advance Russia a generous five-year loan. This was an enormous boost to Russia’s economy, facilitating several successive years of industrial recovery (though even that recovery, because industrialists were reluctant to share its rewards with their workers, contributed to the militancy of the strike movement that destabilized urban Russia a few years later). Finally, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, while in some ways frightening to Ru
ssian military planners, had the consequence of committing them to a ‘Western’-oriented strategy and, for better or worse, a readiness for full rather than partial mobilization in the event of a major international crisis.
Literature and the Arts
Perhaps the most difficult spheres of Russian life to place squarely in the framework of the optimist–pessimist debate are literature and the arts. Without doubt, the reign of Nicholas II (and especially its last decade or so) witnessed extraordinary artistic creativity, so much so that cultural historians routinely use such terms as ‘silver age’, ‘second golden age’, and ‘cultural renaissance’. In poetry in particular, but also in fiction, theatre, music, and the plastic arts (characteristically, the walls between these fields were often scaled), new ‘modernist’ modes of expression, with Symbolism in the lead, asserted themselves among the cultural élite. Modernism boldly challenged the hegemony of realism, positivism, and a socially oriented and utilitarian civic art that had dominated Russian aesthetics for decades. As part of this challenge, modernists introduced religious, metaphysical, and philosophically idealist perspectives into artistic and intellectual discourse (as, for example, in the collection of essays published in 1902 entitled Problems of Idealism). It should be said, however, that such intellectual experimentation had little effect on the taste of a new mass reading public, a group that expanded rapidly with the growth of primary education and the popular press.
If the first essential steps in a modernist direction preceded the 1905 Revolution, the years that followed were particularly creative, with avant-garde writers such as Andrei Bely Zinaida Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov producing some of their most creative (and controversial) work. The Symbolist perspective that now dominated soon spawned a series of competing, often polemicizing movements (Acmeism, Futurism, and others), but all purportedly rejected what they viewed as the prosaic civicmindedness of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Not surprisingly, many readers, including members of the political intelligentsia, were hostile to the modernists, viewing their artistic products as esoteric, self-indulgent, and out of touch with popular needs (not to mention popular tastes).
Russia A History Page 30