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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Orlovsky, Daniel T., 1947– editor.
Title: A companion to the Russian Revolution / edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Blackwell companions to history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The long term causes of the Russian revolution reach deeply into the history of Tsarist Russia. The powerful Tsarist state was confronted by economic and social change as it sought to maintain its position as a great imperial power. The abolition of serfdom in the 1860s brought fundamental changes to Russian society, while urbanisation accelerated the development of a middle class and brought millions of working people to Russia’s cities.”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016205 (print) | LCCN 2020016206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118620892 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118620847 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118620854 (epub)
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The Role of the Russian Artistic and Literary World in 1917
17 Revolution in the Borderlands: The Case of Central Asia in a Comparative
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Notes on Contributors
Sarah Badcock is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on Russia in the late Imperial and revolutionary periods. She is interested in comparative perspectives on questions of punishment, free and unfree labor, penal cultures, and visual history. She has published a number of books including A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (2016). Her research on ordinary people’s experiences of the Russian revolution was published as Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (2007). Badcock’s interest in regional perspectives on the Russian revolutions culminated in the co‐edited volume Russian Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015).
Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Russian History and for many years was head of the sector on the study of the October Revolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He is the author of many works on the Russian Revolution including Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow 1997), Voina, porodivshaia revoliutsiiu. Rossiia, 1914–1917 (with Leonteva T.G., Moscow 2015), and Khaos i etnos. Etnicheskie konflikty v Rossii. 1917–1918 gody Usloviia vozniknoveniia. Khronika. Kommentarii (Moscow 2010).
Marco Buttino is member of the Global History Laboratory of the University of Turin and until 2017 was Professor of Modern History at the same university. He has written on various aspects of the social history of the USSR and Central Asia. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Quaderni Storici and of the international board of different historical journals. Among his publications are: Revolyutsiya naoborot. Moscow, 2008 (Italian edition Naples 2003); Samarcanda, storie in una città dal 1945 ad oggi, Roma, Viella, 2015 (soon to appear in English).
Frederick C. Corney is Professor of European and Russian History at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA, where he is also Chair of the Department of History. He specializes in the history of Russia, particularly the revolutionary period through the 1920s, and in the sub‐disciplines of cultural and collective memory. He has published a monograph, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, and has edited, introduced, and translated a volume of writings from the 1920s entitled Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution
Murray Frame is a Reader in History at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His publications include Russian Culture in War and Revolution 1914–22 (co‐editor), 2 vols (2014), School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (2006), and The St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (2000). He is currently working on a history of the militia during the Russian Civil War.
Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA. His primary interests are religious and social history in modern Russia. He has written numerous articles and books and is currently working on a volume entitled Bolsheviks and Believers, 1917–1941, as well as two multi‐year projects funded by the Russian Science Foundation.
Lutz Häfner received a PhD in modern East European history from Hamburg University in 1992. He has taught East European history at the Universities of Bielefeld, Leipzig, and Gießen and is currently working as Senior Researcher in Göttingen. His publications include Society as Local Event: The Volga Cities Kazan and Saratov, 1870–1914 (Böhlau, 2004). A book on food consumption and adulteration of food products in Tsarist Russia is also in progress.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is Research Professor of Modern Russian and Soviet History Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He has had multiple books published such as The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (1981), revised edition The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (2017), and Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005) for which he won the Robert Ferrell Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His most recent book is Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution (2017).
Ben Hellman, PhD, Docent, is Associate Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the University of Helsinki. Main publications: Meetings and Clashes: Articles on Russian Literature (Helsinki 2009); Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (Brill 2013); Hemma hos Tolstoj. Nordiska möten i liv och dikt (Stockholm 2017); Poets of Hope and Despair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (second ed., Brill 2018).
Michael C. Hickey is Professor of Russian History at the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. His main areas of interest are the Revolution in Smolensk and Jews in the Revolutionary era, and he has written several essays on this topic. His book, Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution , won the 2012 American Library Association’s RUSA Award as one of the year’s Outstanding Reference Sources.
Michael Hughes is Professor of Modern History at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of numerous monographs on Russian history and Anglo‐Russian relations including Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (1997); Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution: Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894–1917 (2000); and Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (2014).
Tomi Huttunen is Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Helsinki. He specializes and has published widely on the Finnish translation history of Russian literature, on historical avant‐garde, semiotics of culture, Russian rock poetry, and contemporary literature.
Hannu Immonen is Research Fellow Emeritus at the Academy of Finland. His current research interests focus on the issues of Russian and Finnish military history during 1870–1905. His publications include: The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–1914 (Helsinki 1988); Mechty o novoi Rossii. Viktor Chernov (1873–1952) (St. Petersburg: izd‐vo Evropeiskogo universiteta v St. Petersburg, 2015); and articles on the history of post‐1800 Finland.
Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii is Professor at the European University of St. Petersburg and Senior Research Fellow at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a well‐known scholar of the Russian Revolution and the author of Comrade Kerensky, Erotica, Symbols in the Russian Revolution; his article ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Antibourgeois Consciousness in 1917’ in The Russian Review is often cited in publications on Russian history. Kolonitsky is a member of the editorial board of Kritika as well as a member of the editorial board of the international project ‘Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922: The Centennial Reappraisal.’
Erik C. Landis is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author of Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh 2008), as well as essays and articles on various aspects of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
Lars T. Lih lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His recent book publications include Lenin Rediscovered (2006) and Lenin (2011). Lately he has been researching for a study of the Bolshevik outlook in 1917. At present, he is preparing a collection of his articles under the title Deferred Dreams
Mikhail N. Loukianov is Professor in the Faculty of History and Political Science at Perm State University, Russia. He is the author of Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma, 1907–1914 (Stuttgart 2006) and a number of articles, including ‘Conservatives and “Renewed Russia” 1907–1914,’ Slavic Review 61, no 4 (Winter 2002): 762–86, ‘The First World War and the Polarization of the Russian Right, July 1914–February 1917,’ Slavic Review 75, no 4 (Winter 2016): 872–95, and ‘Russian Conservatives and the Great War’ in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 4: The Struggle for the State, ed. by P. Waldron, C. Read, A. Lindenmeyr (Bloomington 2018), pp. 23–60.
Aleksi Mainio is a historian at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has specialized in the early twentieth-century history of Finland and Russia.
Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of history at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) and winner of the 2012 Reginald Zelnik Prize for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history. She is co‐editor with Daniel Vandersommers of the article collection Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (Toronto and Montreal: McGill‐
Queens University Press, 2019) which includes her chapter ‘Sculpting Dinah with the Blunt Tools of the Historian.’
Nikolay Vasilyevich Mikhailov, born in 1956 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), graduated from the historical faculty of Leningrad State University (1978). In 1980–87 he worked as a guide and researcher at the State Museum of History of Leningrad. He was Candidate of Historical Sciences (1995), and has been senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) from 1999 to the present. Research interests include history of the social, labor, and revolutionary movement in Russia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, local history, and St. Petersburg studies.
Andrei Borisovich Nikolaev is Professor and Head of the Department of Russian History, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg. He is a specialist in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. His main scientific works include: Revoliutsiia i vlast’: IV Gosudarsevennaia duma 27 fevralia–3 marta 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RGPU im. A.I. Herzen, 2005); K.F. Luchivka‐Nesluhovskij – pervyj polkovnik Fevral’skoj revoljucii. Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography. 7 (2014): 64–98.
Daniel Orlovsky was born in Chicago and educated at Harvard (AB, AM, PhD). He studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, CA while in the US Marine Corps. At Southern Methodist University since 1976, he served as Department Chair (1986–97) and Director of the SMU in Oxford summer school at University College, Oxford (1994–present). He has been Visiting Professor of History at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Texas at Austin and continues to make frequent research trips to Russia and Helsinki, Finland. His research interests include the Russian Provisional Government, bureaucracy, the role of white‐collar workers/lower middle strata in Russian and Soviet history, and the intersection of institutions, society, and politics across the divide of the Russian Revolution.
William E. Pomeranz is Deputy Director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Washington DC, USA. He previously practiced international law in the United States as well as in Moscow, Russia. His research interests focus on Russian legal history and present‐day Russian commercial and constitutional law. He is the author of Law and the Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (2019). He also has appeared and provided commentary on numerous media outlets.
Christopher J. Read is Professor of Twentieth‐Century European History at the University of Warwick. His research has focused on both the history of the Russian
intelligentsia and the social history of the Russian Revolution. He has published several books including Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia (1979); Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia 1914–1926 (1990); From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution (1996); War and Revolution in Russia: 1914–22 – The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power (2013); and Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin (2017). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Matthew Rendle is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. He has published numerous articles on various aspects of revolutionary Russia and is the author of Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s Civil War (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2020). He is also the co‐editor of the journal Revolutionary Russia , and a series editor for the BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.
Aaron Retish is Associate Professor of Russian History at Wayne State University, USA. He authored Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 as well as articles on law and the courts in the revolutionary era. He co‐edits Revolutionary Russia and serves on the Board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan, USA and Associated Scholar of the St. Petersburg Institute of History, RAN. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the European University at St. Petersburg. In addition to his work in modern Russian and Soviet history, he is the author (with Francis X. Blouin) of Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives which received the W.G. Leland Award from the Society of American Archivists.
Jonathan D. Smele is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His areas of interest are the Russian revolutions and civil wars. He is a member of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution and edited its journal, Revolutionary Russia, from 2002 to 2012. His most recent books are The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (2015) and Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916–1926.
Laurie Stoff is Principal Lecturer and Honors Faculty Fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College, USA. She specializes in Russian, East European, and women’s and gender history. Her main research interest is on how gender and war intersect for Russian women during World
War 1. She has written They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War 1 and the Revolution (2006) and Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More Than Binding Men’s Wounds (2015). For the latter, she was awarded the Best Book in Slavic Studies by the Southern Conference of Slavic Studies and the Smith Award for Best Book in European History by the Southern Historical Association. She is also lead editor for a volume entitled Military Experience which explores the experiences of different participants in the war.
Geoffrey Swain is Emeritus Professor of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. He focused his research on the history of Russia and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. He has written numerous works on the history of Eastern Europe including Eastern Europe since 1945 (2018) and A Short History of the Russian Revolution (2017).
Ian D. Thatcher is Professor and Research Director of History at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. His research focuses on the history of Russian social democracy, the 1917 Revolution, and the history of the Soviet Union. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution and of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
The late Mark von Hagen was Professor of History and Global Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Earlier, he served as Director of the Harriman Institute and Professor of History at Columbia University. A leading scholar in the rebirth and redefinition of the study of the Russian Empire and its borderlands, especially Ukraine, he wrote Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 and War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918. In 2008, he was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies and served on the editorial board of Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, and Kritika.
Peter Waldron is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His books include Radical Russia: Art, Culture and Revolution (Sainsbury Centre, 2017); Russia of the Tsars (Thames & Hudson, 2011); Governing Tsarist Russia (Palgrave, 2007); Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (N. Illinois University Press, 1998); and The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917 (Palgrave, 1997).
Frank Wcislo is Associate Professor of History and Russian Studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. He is the author of Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914 (1990 and 2014) and Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergie Witte, 1849–1915 (2011). He was a member of the editorial board for the publication project of the Witte Memoirs (2003) by the St. Petersburg Institute of History.
Elizabeth White is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the West of England, UK. Her research focuses on modern Russian and European social and cultural history. She is the author of The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921–39 (2010) and A Modern History of Russian Childhood (2020) as well as numerous articles on the history of Russian childhood, refugees, and humanitarianism.
Stephen F. Williams is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before that he taught at the University of Colorado Law School from 1969 to 1986. In addition to his career in law, Williams has studied Russian history. Among his works on the subject are The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (2017) and Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (2006).
Editor’s Acknowledgments
My greatest debt is to the successive generations of scholars who have done so much to clarify and reinterpret this most difficult historical phenomenon, the Russian Revolution. A subject never offering easy answers, the Revolution more often than not inspires a despairing humility, perhaps reflected in the essays here presented. I give deep thanks also to the contributors whose patience and support throughout the unimaginably long process of publication are more than I deserved. I am deeply sorry to note the recent death of one of our dear friends and contributors, Mark von Hagen.
Special thanks to several close friends among Revolution scholars, Bill Rosenberg, Boris Kolonitskii, Chris Read and Toshi Hasegawa, who shared so many global venues and projects, and who so generously asked questions and offered wisdom over the Centennial years. Finally, my gratitude to Jennifer Manias, of John Wiley, the Publisher, whose crucial intervention brought this project to completion.
IntroductIon the russIan revolutIon at 100
Daniel Orlovsky
The Centennial of the Russian Revolution has resulted in the publication of books, conferences, events, and projects around the globe. The essays collected here provide original views of both the historiography and the state of current research on key components of the Revolutionary experience. Though the focus is on 1917 itself, for reasons discussed below, the volume offers substantial coverage of the Revolution as a longer-term process embracing not only the years of the Great War and Civil War, but also the longerterm origins as well as the extension of the Revolution proper into the era of New Economic Policy (NEP). We cover in detail such themes as the borderlands and provinces, gender, popular and high culture, religion, law, ideologies and parties, social movements, the military, foreign policy, symbols, and discourse. In addition questions of memory and commemoration of the Revolution are taken up as well as what we might term the ‘afterlife’ of the Revolution or its capacity to continue to influence events, to serve as a model, to provide a script for the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and/or the creation of new ones.
There was much interest in how the Centennial would be celebrated in Russia and what would be the attitude of ‘official’ Russia or the Putin regime. The government chose to downplay the anniversary, preferring to set up a commission in late 2016 with the idea of building a monument of reconciliation of Reds and Whites in the Civil War in The Crimea. Official discourse pointed instead to the dangers of Revolution, the idea of reconciliation of the opposing forces in the Revolution and Civil War, and criticism of violence. Preservation of a strong Russian state was another primary goal. This went along with a reopening of memory on World War I, Russian sacrifices there and a pointed attack on Lenin for stoking the violence of the Civil War.
In 1996 November 7 became the Day of Reconciliation and Concord and in 2004 ceased to be a public holiday and
was replaced by the Day of People’s Unity celebrating the end of the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. Even more recently in 2018, the anniversary celebrated the defense of Moscow in 1941.
The official consensus viewed 1917 as a misguided attempt to alter the course of Russian history and ‘Gosudarstvennost’ (sanctity of the state). This was preceded by an earlier commission to combat falsification of history and promotion of a vague unity of historical development and reference to the tragedy of social schism represented by 1917 and the Civil War. Much of this was articulated in a series of interventions by the Minister of Culture V. Medinskii. Legacies were both positive and negative; grand Soviet achievements as well as the violence and repression of the Soviet era. Official Russia drew a line under it and proposed to move on, building a wall of sorrow but proposing no further prosecution in the court of history (Ryan, 2018).
Still, there remained the question of popular responses to the Centennial, responses that were difficult for the state to control, and the actual position of the academic community in Russia and beyond.
New Scripts, Themes, Narratives
The question of periodization: Recent scholarship has shifted focus away from 1917 itself (both February and October) to a more elongated time period that emphasizes Revolution as process. The time period varies, 1914–22, 1905–21, 1890–1928, and in the conception of one of our contributors, J. Smele, 1916–26. In Smele’s creative vision there was no Revolution at all, rather a protracted series of overlapping civil wars. Here the emphasis is on 1917, though the volume takes the longer‐term process seriously and devotes many chapters to both short‐ and longer‐term
causes and outcomes of the 1917 Revolutions. 1917 was unique in the history of the Revolution as process, the explosion which produced the discourses of Revolution and Counter‐Revolution and the Revolution itself as historical actor. The undertheorized Civil War and immediate aftermath of 1917 are also crucial as a Revolution phase II, where Revolution continues in the role of actor and the themes of 1917 are played out, power and social and cultural transformation, not to mention the fate of Empire and the multiple revolutions of the borderlands. Here we try to reverse that tendency to bury or lose 1917, the uniqueness of the Revolution in the longer time period embracing the First World War and the Civil War or even more distant dates, or to erase from the docket not just 1917 but Revolution completely, preferring instead to call the whole long era one of multiple revolutions (see here von Hagen and Buttino especially) or Civil Wars.
This introduction focuses on several of the main takeaways (new scripts, themes, narratives) from the Centennial reset or reexamination in place of a complete summary of the volume contents. I review some of these in no particular order. The new work transcends older categories such as party, class, dual power, and the triumphalist narratives both Soviet and Bolshevik. There is an exciting new research area I call Microhistory (different from the first wave of studies of Revolution in the provinces – Hickey, Retish, Penter, Badcock, Raleigh, for example). Here we see the actual daily workings of the infrastructure, Peter Holquist’s parastatal complex both as background to 1917, the state of power relations in given localities on the eve of Revolution, and precisely how these power relationships developed during 1917 and after. This work is based on new, deep local archival materials. But more importantly, it focuses squarely on primary institutions, cooperatives, town dumas, Soviets, other associations in their contested space, and discourses of power, for example, that previously remained less thoroughly examined in the literature. These very new microhistories (Dickins 2017; Schrader, 2018, 2019, for example) integrate the social and occupational with political and institutional infrastructure. and ther e are the vastly important areas of culture and religion (see here especially the essays by Hellman and Huttunen, Frame, and on religion by Freeze), central to any realistic or theoretical discussion of revolutionary transformation.
The Revival or revaluation of February as centerpiece of the Revolution are reflected in such diverse authors as Solzhenitsyn, Lyandres, Hasegawa, Dukes, and Nikolaev. This includes questions of political antecedents and power struggles that shaped the first Provisional Government and the major role of the Duma both in February Days and in ongoing events. We have witnessed the recovery and highlighting of February as the ‘real revolution’ – or as a Revolution in its own right not just as a ‘second’ Russian Revolution (the first being 1905) and a mere prelude to October. There is a need here especially to counter the
Soviet dominant October narrative which feminized and minimized February (with the brilliant exceptions of Burdzhalov, Startsev, and a few others).
Here, Waldron and Wcislo provide the deep and more immediate background to the 1917 events. T. Hasegawa reviews the February Days, bringing into focus the conflicts over power based on the most recent scholarship. a.B. Nikolaev makes the case for ongoing Duma influence and direct participation in the February Revolution. We cover the creation of Dual power and critique of that model (Hasegawa and Thatcher) to include many powers, absence of power, an ongoing struggle for authority and legitimacy. Solzhenitsyn presents an interesting case. Writing on the 90th anniversary of the Revolution in 2007 he too elevates February over October with the publication of his ‘reflections’ which provide his own summary of his views distilled from his recently translated and published novel March, 1917 (part of the long historical fictional project, The Red Wheel). among Solzhenitsyn’s worthy interventions are his notion of the Revolution as a force field that seized minds. although much has been made of the author’s blame of liberals, westernizers, intellectuals for February, a careful reading reveals plenty of criticism of Nicholas II, the military, members of the royal family (including Mikhail, directly accused of illegally and morally ending the monarchy), and especially of state authority, which failed abjectly. Solzhenitzyn’s portrait supports our notion of the Revolution itself as an active force in history. He also argues that the Provisional Government paved the way for the Bolsheviks by appearing at once as a dictatorship more powerful than the Tsar and as a destroyer of legitimate and necessary authority by undermining the Ministry of Internal af fairs, the police, and local administration. He of course judges as immoral the arrest of the Tsar, who he argues did not similarly treat his political opponents. In the end, he follows the argument of Boris kolonitskii that loss of love and the Tsar’s nerve (read weakness) carried great responsibility for the February Revolution.
Semion Lyandres’s publication of the only recently recovered oral testimonies of revolutionary actors provides further new insight into the revolutionary process. Here we learn definitively that plots to overthrow the monarchy existed and were actually put into play just prior to February. We learn of the role of Captain D.V. kossikovskii who moved a cavalry unit to Petrograd prior to the February 27 soldiers’ uprising, then moved it out on March 1 to the strategic position along the path the Imperial train was to pass. and on Febr uary 27, Nekrasov, Guchkov, and Tereshchenko attempted to establish a temporary dictatorship under General Manikovskii.
Rodzianko and Miliukov knew of and supported plots to remove Nicholas and this sheds light on the Duma Committee’s decision to seek abdication. Finally, Rodzianko’s opposition to Mikhail taking the throne on March 3 was not a reversal of his previous position to preserve the monarchy,
but consistent with his position to seek political power by elevating the prestige of the Duma. Lyandres in a series of works has outlined in detail the role as plotter of Prince L’vov and the three‐way struggle for power between Miliukov, Rodzianko, and L’vov (going back into 1916), having profound results during the February Days.
Now it is common among even Russian scholars to compare February to more recent and even present-day examples – Iran, Portugal, the color Revolutions in the Middle East, Ukraine, Central asia, as well as yeltsin against the parliament in 1991 and 1993. We move away from the idea of October’s inevitability and more toward February as either a violent, explosive, unpredictable process or an unfinished or open-ended democratic Revolution, one that may have needed illiberal measures (as in 1993) to introduce liberalism. This also requires rethinking the Constituent assembly experience.
Prominent in the new view of the revolution is what might be termed the Buldakov syndrome, or the rejection of explanations based upon linear development, progress, parties, and leaders. Buldakov in his many works, including his contribution to this volume, substitutes the archaic, emotions, ochlocracy (a favorite term), the crowd, atavistic cultural factors, and the like for the traditional analytic categories. Buldakov wants to study the Revolution (and not just February, but October and the Civil War) not from the top or bottom but from inside, hence his rejection of rational elements and the politics we have studied for one hundred years, but the archaic passions around ‘incomprehensible power.’ He rejects the idea of alternatives as an object of study.
along these lines and opening new fresh approaches are the study of rumors (kolonitskii), especially the idea that rumors created new active facts or ‘truths’ and realities, some of what we label today as fake news. Rumor, often fueled by emotion and violence, played a large role in the collapse of the Old Regime, the post February process, and the Bolshevik seizure of power. The establishment of a leader cult with far-reaching implications in the Soviet period was also a product of February, most notably in the example of a.F kerenskii. This is revealed in the magisterial work of B.I. kolonitskii. add to this the work of W.G. Rosenberg on the build‐up of mass emotions among soldiers in particular who felt acutely the terror of war and deficits of economic and political justice in the Revolutionary process. T. Hasegawa in a more recent work in the microhistory vein chronicles the growth of crime (anarchy, violence) after February and links the Provisional Government’s failures to cope with it as a key factor in its power deficit and eventual demise. This criminal activity, as in other policy areas, would require Bolshevik responses and institutional solutions.
There is new emphasis on what I call the Endgame of 1917, or renewed study of September and October, the alternative particularly of an all socialist government
as articulated by the Mensheviks Martov and Dan, but supported by a broad element of professionals, white collar workers, and others on the left and left center in 1917. This was viewed as a non‐Soviet solution to the power question. Soviets were class institutions and hence unsuitable for a state building project. Plus, they had demonstrated administrative incompetence (the notion that they were taking over the country administratively already in 1917 is portrayed as a myth). a br oad‐based democratic state building project based upon the proletariat plus white collar plus professionals was required. another aspect of the new Endgame vision is deeper study of the so‐called ‘failed’ institutions of September and October 1917, the Democratic Conference and the Council of the Republic (or Pre‐Parliament). Here we find more myth breaking on such subjects as the meaning and viability of coalition and serious policy discussions and proposals for the all socialist/democratic project. also in play is renewed interest in the Military Revolutionary Committee, the primary mechanism of the power seizure. This helps balance our vastly augmented knowledge of the February Days with some equivalent for October that is not a complete buy-in to the triumphal Bolshevik October narrative.
Then there is the question of global causality and impact and longer-term views, including the era of violence (both from the right and the left) immediately after 1917 and fascism, all borrowing heavily from the Bolsheviks. US capitalism and globalism evolved in opposition to Communism and vice versa, each system defining itself as the polar opposite of the ‘other,’ while absorbing or mimicking key traits of its opponent. This pattern provided a script for modern politics and later for Revolutions modeled on both February and October as may be seen in both Cold War competition in Europe and the Third World, including 1968, Ostpolitik, Czechoslovakia (Velvet), detente and Helsinki, Poland, 1991 and 1993, and in post‐Soviet/Cold War color Revolutions in such far-flung places as post‐Soviet space and the Middle East.
The Russian Revolution was a model for taking and maintaining power in its October and, less frequently cited or understood, February scripts. This went beyond ideology to include visceral feelings of extreme injustice (sometimes calling forth pre‐modern analogs) or programs of national liberation.
another approach is to internationalize the Revolution both in terms of broad influences leading up to 1917 (pamphlets for example) and raising institutional and historical comparisons and attempts to build public opinion, or create one in favor of republican models and the like.
Further, the state intervention/modernity school sees the Revolution and outcomes as a variant of global patterns, and holds to this even while adding in extreme ideologically motivated violence. The global nexus remains key to 1917, 1991, and to Putin’s regime today.
These explanations are structural and not deterministic, multi‐causal, based on global crises and forces. These more than events on the ground dictated 1917 just as they do today (Rendle, 2017).
There is the issue of influence. Can we say that the Russian Revolution has left a permanent mark on global history as we might say of the French or american Revolution?
To deny this despite the failure of the Soviet experiment seems triumphalist and overdetermined. Despite the absence of direct analogies in the recent or contemporary ‘revolutions’ there is the renewed hope of liberation promised by the memories and models of both February and October, especially the former in relation to the toppling of authoritarian regimes.
Part I
SignS, near and Far
Chapter One
Long‐Term Causes of the russian revoLution
Peter Waldron
At the beginning of March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Romanov dynasty’s 300‐year rule over Russia came to an abrupt end. Less than eight months later, the Bolshevik party brusquely swept away the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy and began the process of establishing the world’s first socialist state. The political cataclysms that transformed Russia in 1917 illuminate significant issues about the ways in which revolutions occur, although the interpretation that the Soviet state placed on 1917 over the following decades complicated understanding of the revolutions. The victors of 1917 – Lenin and his successors – argued that their triumph was inevitable and that the history of Russia was a single process leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October revolution. The Soviet interpretation of Russian history concentrated on identifying every component cause of revolution and subjecting it to intense and detailed analysis. This approach to history did not allow that Russia had different possibilities for its development, but instead forced a single, linear explanation of the past onto circumstances that were complex and often uncertain. Soviet historians read history backward, seeing the October revolution as the inevitable consequence of centuries of historical development. For most of the twentieth century, this conceptual framework also helped to shape the understanding of Russian history outside the Soviet Union. The political antagonisms between the USSR and the western world polarized discussion of the Russian revolution, with history often becoming a function of politics. The Marxist–Leninist prism through which the USSR understood its own history produced a reaction in the west, and it was only in the last decades of the century – as the Soviet Union declined and fractured – that more nuanced views of the Russian revolution came to the fore (Suny 2006, 43–54). Soviet historians minutely dissected every hint of revolt in the Russian past, alert to the slightest expressions of discontent that could demonstrate the deep roots of the October
revolution. Russia’s social structures were analyzed in great detail to provide evidence of the long‐held commitment of peasants and working people to the overthrow of the Tsarist state. The Soviet state had to reconcile Marxist political ideas, with their focus on the primacy of an industrial working class in making revolution, with Russia’s overwhelmingly agrarian society. Lenin himself had performed complex ideological maneuvers to explain how a socialist revolution could take place in the least industrialized of the European great powers, and the Soviet Union recognized that it was continually striving toward the achievement of the utopia of full communism (Harding 1981, 110–34). Marx’s explanation of human history argued that economic change lay at the base of the historical process and that politics was a function of economic change and part of the superstructure of society. For a regime that was so intensely political as the Soviet Union, politics played a surprisingly subordinate role in explaining the causes of revolution. The Bolshevik party stood as the vanguard of the working class and of the revolutionary process, but the political regime that Lenin and his party overthrew in 1917 was, for them, doomed to certain failure by the inevitability of economic upheaval and could do nothing to rescue itself. Tsarism – and its pale replacement in the Provisional Government – was fated to collapse. The Soviet explanation of revolutionary change was thus peculiarly one‐dimensional: the inevitability of the collapse of Tsarism was mirrored by the certainty of proletarian victory. The problems in this explanation of revolution were manifold, not least in its unsophisticated assessment of the nature of the Tsarist state.
A central question in explaining the success of revolution in 1917 is to understand why the mighty autocratic Romanov regime collapsed with such speed, leaving the way open for authority to disintegrate during the spring and summer of 1917. The nineteenth-century Russian state was
recognized as being the most powerful in Europe, and the grip that successive monarchs maintained on their empire was acknowledged as being ruthless and brutal. Russia’s borders had witnessed sustained expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the growing power of the Romanov regime enabled its armies to expand in northern Europe, to take control of great swathes of Central Asia, and to consolidate its position in the Far East. The Russian army was the largest in Europe and its military might was feared by the other Great Powers, even though Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean war in the 1850s. In February 1917, however, military commanders lost their grip on the garrison of Petrograd and with troops mutinying, the regime was unable to maintain control of its capital city. Within 72 hours of mutiny breaking out, Nicholas II signed his abdication decree (Hasegawa 1981, 487–507). The experience of war since summer 1914 offers some explanation for the rapid downfall of the Tsarist regime, but the roots of revolution run much deeper and the eventual fragility of the imperial Russian state had more profound structural origins. Pressure from sections of Russian society provides some explanation for the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, but the state itself was vulnerable to assault by that point. The nature of revolutionary change – wherever it occurs – is confused and uncertain. No actor in the revolutionary process has any knowledge of how the historical events in which they are participating will turn out and, indeed, people may not see themselves as being part of a revolution. In 1917, when mass media were in their infancy and when communication in Russia was slow and rudimentary, actors in the drama were themselves often unaware of the wider context of their actions. The Soviet state imposed a single and simplistic narrative of change upon all of Russian history before 1917, minimizing the part played in the historical process by contingency, and reduced the significance of individual actions in bringing about social and political change. The passage of time allows us to identify patterns in the past and to see perspectives that were not open to those people who participated in the events of 1917 themselves. But the random event – the stray bullet or the misunderstood conversation – still plays a part in the shaping of the present and, thus, the past. Applying a corrective to the dominant historical narratives of the Russian revolution should not blind us to the ways in which individual actions have steered events in unthought‐of directions.
The Russian state had its origins in the Muscovite princedom that proved able to subdue the other city states of the Russian heartland. Kazan, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl were all overwhelmed by the power of Moscow during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Muscovite Grand dukes gradually emerged as the pre‐eminent Russian power. Moscow had geographical advantages at the center of the Russian lands, while its rulers were ambitious and prepared to wage war to advance their cause. The forests and slow‐moving rivers of central Russia did not provide formidable
obstacles to determined troops and the lack of significant natural features, together with the weakness of Moscow’s rivals, made Muscovite expansion easy. The geography of Russia, with its gentle undulations and the absence of any significant hills or impassable rivers, had allowed the Mongols to seize control of large areas of the Russian lands during the thirteenth century and, after their suzerainty had been overthrown, Russia’s geography presented few challenges to an expansionist princedom. Territorial expansion became a persistent characteristic of the Muscovite and Russian states, and over the coming centuries it was able to grow with ease, taking control of the great expanses of the Siberian landmass, conquering the Caucasus, and seizing much of Central Asia. The defeat of Sweden by Peter the Great at the start of the eighteenth century transformed Russia into a great European power far removed from its origins in the Muscovite principality. Imperial power became a vital feature of the Russian state and maintaining and expanding the empire required very significant military and financial resources (Lieven 2000, 268–71). The priority of the Russian state was to sustain its imperial and international position: Russian wealth and prestige increasingly derived from its vast empire and the state configured itself to focus on this.
This was a difficult task for the Russian regime. By the mid‐eighteenth century Russia covered more territory than any other state on the globe, yet it remained sparsely populated. The severe climate that affected much of Russia meant that Russian agriculture was precarious and the livelihood that Russia’s farmers extracted from the land was unpredictable (Moon 1999, 120–33). Raw materials formed the bulk of Russian trade with the wider world, with timber and furs playing especially important roles. Industrialization came late to the Russian empire, only really taking a hold of the economy in the closing decade of the nineteenth century (Crisp 1976, 5–54). The state’s potential for raising revenue from its population was therefore limited. The weakness of Russia’s economy, together with the empire’s sparse population, presented significant challenges in levying taxation. Until late in the nineteenth century, the Russian state relied heavily on indirect taxation to sustain itself. This was easier to collect than direct taxes, but rendered the state vulnerable to the vagaries of demand by the Russian population. The regime had to be rigorous and determined in order to sustain its revenues and this required significant coercive power. The Russian regime depended on its army, both to maintain its empire and its international standing among the great powers, but also to ensure that it could keep rebellion in check at home. In 1881 Russia’s army comprised 844,000 men and the annual process of conscription required significant resources to provide a regular supply of men to fight. It was only in 1874 that the state felt able to move away from a system of conscription for 25 years to service for 6 years in the regular army, followed by a period in the reserves (Fuller 2006, 542–6). Ensuring a steady supply of
men and money to maintain the Russian state’s imperial and international ambitions provided the mainsprings for a political structure that possessed the authority to impose its will across Russian society.
The autocratic regime that developed in Russia from the sixteenth century concentrated its authority in a single person – the monarch – and ensured that all power derived from the ruler. Russia had no form of national legislative assembly until 1906, and political parties were prohibited until 1905. Until the last decade of the regime’s existence, law was made by the monarch and there was no formal system of checks and balances to constrain the power of the sovereign. Monarchs who alienated Russia’s noble elite could be deposed – as with Peter III in 1762 – or assassinated – Paul I was strangled in his own bedroom in 1801 – but Russian monarchs were essentially immune to broad popular influence. In these circumstances, the bureaucracy that administered Russia was able to acquire substantial autonomy and its overwhelmingly conservative ethos sustained the apparatus of autocracy. The currents of political thought unleashed by the Enlightenment found no practical outlet in Russia where, although Catherine II debated politics with her closest associates, she never seriously contemplated applying the principles of government by consent to Russia (de Madariaga 1981, 139–83). The French revolution of 1789 merely confirmed to Russia’s rulers that they were correct in maintaining the principles of autocracy and refusing to make any concessions to popular opinion. The revolts and revolutions that convulsed western and central Europe during the nineteenth century reinforced the Russian regime’s commitment to autocracy, serving as a warning to Russia’s conservative ideologues of the course events could take if Russia proceeded down the path of modernization. The Russian state imposed severe restrictions on its people: books and newspapers were censored, associations and meetings were subject to firm control by the government, and it was difficult for ordinary Russian subjects to gain any sort of redress against the state (Waldron 2007, 117–35). Even after the legal reforms of the 1860s, when trial by jury and an independent judiciary were introduced, the state found ways to hedge the new system around with restrictions and to maintain its arbitrary methods of government. Russian provincial officials possessed very considerable powers over the population under their control, reflecting the authority of the monarch, and ordinary Russians could easily be subjected to ‘administrative justice’ without any possibility of access to the court system.
The Russian autocracy’s instinct was to impose its authority on its population as vigorously as it could, but the limitations of its own bureaucratic capacity meant that there were restrictions on its power. The great expanses of the expanding Russian empire made communication difficult between St. Petersburg and the provinces, while the state was eventually unable to remain immune from pressure to allow some form of popular participation in the government of Russia’s
cities and provinces. The autocratic state had relied on its nobility to maintain order in the countryside and had allowed the gentry to form their own local corporate bodies, with each provincial and district noble assembly headed by an elected marshal of the nobility. The autonomy of these noble organizations was limited, since the Russian nobility were well aware that their authority was dependent on the favor of the monarch and were unwilling to jeopardize their privileged position by antagonizing the regime. In the 1860s, however, Tsar Alexander II established formal, elected local government bodies, albeit on a very restricted franchise. Russia’s towns and cities gained municipal councils, while their equivalent – zemstva – were set up in the provinces and districts of most of European Russia. These organizations were the preserve of the Russian social elite, but they introduced the concept of elected representation into the Russian state and, while the deeply conservative Alexander III tried to limit their authority, the principle of autocracy had been breached (Petrov 1994, 197–211). Russia’s monarchs, however, remained convinced of the necessity of autocratic rule for Russia. Successive Tsars believed that they had been ordained to their position by God and that they had a duty to pass on their domains to their heirs undamaged and intact. As the tide of European political thinking turned against absolutism during the eighteenth century, Russia’s monarchs understood that it was no longer sufficient simply to justify their rule by an appeal to the importance of maintaining the status quo. The Romanovs developed an intellectual rationale for their autocratic regime, arguing that Russia could only be governed by an absolute monarchy. The nature of the Russian lands, they asserted, with their sparse population and harsh climate, made it difficult to maintain any sort of stable political regime and thus only a system which could exercise untrammeled power could sustain itself in the physical conditions of Russia. Russia’s rulers also argued that the Russian people were by nature anarchic and thus needed to be governed firmly and without any concession to popular sentiment. In 1730, v.N. Tatishchev – a protégé of Peter the Great – argued that ‘great and spacious states with many envious neighbors could not be ruled by aristocracy or democracy, particularly where the people is insufficiently enlightened by education and keeps the law through terror, and not from good conduct, or knowledge of good and evil. Spain, France, Russia, and since olden days Turkey, Persia, India, China are great states, and cannot be governed otherwise than by autocracy’ (dukes 2015, 29). The Russian regime combined its justification of autocratic power with its support for the Orthodox Church, using the church’s apparatus and clergy to proclaim the message of obedience to the state and the necessity of submitting to lawful authority. These views were formally articulated during the 1830s by Count Sergei Uvarov, the Minister of Education, and his ideas of ‘Official Nationality’ acted as the lodestone for the Russian regime until his downfall in 1917.
At the same time, Russia’s monarchs sought to identify themselves with the Russian population and to demonstrate that, despite the social gulf that existed between the sovereign and ordinary Russians, the Russian people could be confident that the Tsar had their best interests at heart. Russia’s monarchs cultivated a patriarchal image, representing themselves as the ‘little father’ of their people, and this helped to engender a popular monarchism among many Russians (Field 1989, 1–26). The Tsar was viewed as a figure who stood above the day to day activities of government, and this helped the autocratic regime to succeed in sustaining its credibility among the state’s populace. The monarchy was able to disassociate itself from the often harsh and arbitrary actions of government officials and to maintain an unexpected degree of loyalty from much of the Russian population who continued to revere the ‘little father’ of the sovereign. This image of the monarch, connected to the people of the empire by religion and nationhood, was able to give the Russian state a degree of stability and to reduce the likelihood of revolt (Wortman 2000, 525–7). At the same time, however, it suggested a stagnant and deeply conservative society, based on an unchanging polity.
The ambivalent relationship between Russia and the rest of the world presented the state with significant challenges. Formal contact with western Europe had begun during the sixteenth century, as both merchants and formal envoys found their way to Moscow from abroad. The riches of Russia’s natural environment were a powerful magnet for stimulating trade with Europe, with fur and timber proving especially lucrative. Over the following century Russia gradually expanded its power on its western borders, aided by the decline of Poland–Lithuania. The turning point in Russian attitudes to the west came with the reign of Peter I at the end of the seventeenth century. Peter believed that Russia could become both a military and economic power in Europe and he was prepared to take practical steps to achieve this. The young Tsar traveled to western Europe, spending almost a year in Britain and the Netherlands in the late 1690s, and returned to Russia filled with ideas about how Russia could learn from western industry and technology. Peter created a Russian navy from scratch, and military and naval men from the west were instrumental in improving Russia’s armed forces. At the same time, the Tsar was well aware that military power required an industrial base to produce the weaponry and equipment needed by modern armies and navies, and he sought to improve Russia’s weak industrial base by encouraging the development of industries that could contribute particularly to military needs. Peter’s outlook was revolutionary: he was convinced that Russia could only prosper if it followed western models – and this required cultural change from Russians themselves. In a symbolic move, Peter ordered his nobles to shave off their beards and thus cast off one of the external features that differentiated Russian men from their western contemporaries. Peter himself was clean‐shaven and it was only in 1881 that
a bearded monarch – Alexander III – again occupied the Russian throne.
Peter was determined to put his developments to practical use and Russia went to war with Sweden in the first decade of the eighteenth century, delivering a severe drubbing to the forces of Charles XII at the battle of Poltava in 1709 and establishing Russia as a significant power in northern Europe (Hughes 2008, 55–81). The legacy of Peter the Great haunted the Tsarist state for the rest of its existence and introduced a profound ambivalence into Russia’s identity. While Peter had lauded European economic and military models of development, the way in which Europe’s political structures were changing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discomforted the Russian regime. The revolutionary cataclysm that destroyed the French monarchy after 1789 and the waves of revolt and revolution that swept across much of Europe in the century after the French revolution were, for many Russians, proof that Russia should stand apart from European models of development and, instead, rely on its own traditions and heritage to advance. The rationale for monarchs and the governing elite to stand against the growing tide of republicanism and democracy was obvious, and for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Russia was ruled by monarchs who were determined to stand firm against the tide of modern social and political ideas and movements that were transforming much of Europe. Nicholas I gained the soubriquet of the ‘gendarme of Europe’ for his resistance to rebellion and his willingness to put down revolt, and it was only Alexander II who was prepared to make real reforms to Russian society during the 1860s. The ‘Great Reforms’ that were implemented during the 1860s and 1870s introduced an ambivalence into Russian government and society. New local government and judicial institutions were able to operate with a significant degree of autonomy from the regime, and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 struck at one of the foundations of the Russian state, yet the autocracy itself remained convinced of its own virtues and utility for Russia.
An appeal to Russian tradition was also part of the ideas of radical politicians during the nineteenth century. The early Marxists, such as Georgii Plekhanov, who argued against the conservative Romanov regime did want to promote industrial revolution along western lines and to reshape Russian society to reflect the contours of the states in the west. Many Russians, however, argued for the exceptional nature of Russia and believed that social and economic change should be based on Russia’s own tradition as an agrarian society and economy. The Russian Populists that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century represented apparently contradictory opinions. They were fiercely opposed to the oppressive Tsarist regime and believed that revolution was needed to overthrow the Romanov autocracy, but the vision that the Populists advanced for the new society that would supplant the Tsarist order was for a peasant‐based socialism, rather than for full‐blown industrial revolution on
the British or German model (venturi 1960, 33–5). The legacy of Peter the Great found its expression in many different parts of Russian society and thinking. Educated Russians spoke French and were proud of their knowledge of European ideas and culture, while the Tsarist state attempted to censor books and journals imported from Europe that contained writing that they believed would threaten the Russian regime. Successive Russian monarchs wanted Russia to play a part on the European stage as a great power, and tried to emulate the military prowess of their European neighbors, but – until 1905 – they were never prepared to acknowledge the aspirations of their people for some form of political representation. The Slavophile currents of thought that stressed Russia’s uniqueness and its separate identity were in conflict with the Petrine legacy that saw Russia’s destiny as closely bound up with the European model of social and economic development. At times, the Russian state appeared to accept the need to follow Europe: Alexander II’s decision to emancipate Russia’s serfs in the 1860s was significantly motivated by the desire to escape the stigma of ‘backwardness’ that serfdom symbolized, in comparison to the societies of western Europe (Moon 2001, 56–69). In the 1890s, the economic policy pursued by Sergei Witte, the ambitious Minister of Finance, involved attracting foreign investment and foreign business to Russia, tying the Russian economy into the international economic system (Wcislo 2011, 153–69). In 1894 a formal political alliance with republican France, the antithesis of the autocratic Russian monarchy, appeared to cement Russia’s integration into the mainstream of European thinking. But the Russian regime drew the line at domestic political change. In 1905, when revolt seized hold of Russia, Nicholas II had to be forced into making political reforms and, as soon as order was restored, his regime sought to claw back the concessions it had made and to reimpose traditional autocratic government (Ascher 1992, 337–58).
This fundamental ambivalence about Russian identity and Russia’s relationship with the wider world provided fracture lines that divided both the state and wider society. The fierce debates about the path of Russian development were not simply reflected in abstract discussion, but had a direct impact on the lives of ordinary Russians. The Tsarist state recognized the dangers to its own existence that were posed by the outside world: the popular revolts that had convulsed Europe in the wake of the French revolution of 1789 appeared to be a warning of the dangers that came with modernization and the Russian state consistently tried to limit the influence of outside ideas on its population. Publications were censored and there were significant restrictions on the establishment of associations and groups and on holding any sort of public meeting. The Russian regime limited the civil rights of its people, believing that the interests of the state took precedence over individual liberty (Butler 1989, 1–12). When rebellion did break out, the regime was ruthless in suppressing it: the Pugachev
revolt in the 1770s ended with the execution of its leader and severe reprisals against the rebellion’s participants. After the decembrist revolt in 1825, its five leaders were hanged and others sent to exile in Siberia for long periods. In 1905 and 1906 squadrons of cossack troops were sent into the countryside to put down revolts with great force.
The state was, however, unable to prevent ideas percolating across the Russian border and it could not isolate Russia from wider currents of thought, any more than it could stop Russians becoming aware of events taking place in the wider world. While Catherine II tried to restrict discussion of the ideas of the Enlightenment to a small number of the Russian social elite, growing literacy and the pressure for a better educated society made it impossible to prevent a wider dissemination of ideas across Russian society. The moves toward westernization that Peter the Great had promoted came to a stuttering halt later in the eighteenth century as Russia’s social structures remained unreformed, with serfdom fashioning the rural world for both the peasants and nobility. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a growing middle class and a developing urban working class were both becoming infused with ideas from outside Russia. Political liberalism and ideas about constitutional government began to permeate the Russian educated population, while the nascent working class was fertile ground for Marxism. The complexity of the relationship between Russia and Europe produced paradoxical results: economic modernization was essential if Russia was to continue to be a great military power, but the social consequences of industrial change were unwelcome to the Russian state. Liberal ideas about constitutional government and popular representation appealed to many of the prosperous Russian business and professional classes, but the intransigence of the Tsarist regime stimulated frustration among these groups and prompted some of them to adopt more radical political positions. Even during the First World War, when Russia was faced with its most severe crisis, the Tsarist state was deeply reluctant to allow voluntary and professional groups real access to power. As the war went on, the regime was almost more fearful of the domestic political threat posed by liberal political groups than of the German troops that were marching across its territory.
The cleavages in Russian society ran deep. The great majority of the Russian population were peasant farmers, living an often precarious existence. The extremities of the Russian climate made for a short growing season and this, together with poor soils in much of northern and eastern Russia, made agriculture a risky business. Until the 1860s, most Russian peasants were serfs and the property of either noble landlords or the state itself. Serfdom had a pernicious influence on Russian society, since it deprived the serfs themselves of any rights as individuals and allowed serf owners to treat their serfs simply as items of property. While there were examples of nobles who treated their serfs well, for many Russians the experience was one of great poverty
and grinding humiliation (Hoch 1968, 160–86). Serfdom provided the state with a method of maintaining order in the countryside, without having itself to go to the expense and complexity of maintaining a police force and army in every part of Russia, since the noble serf owners performed the function themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, serfdom was deeply controversial since it was identified as the touchstone for Russia’s perceived backwardness in comparison to western Europe. ‘Serfdom,’ wrote the liberal Konstantin Kavelin, ‘is the stumbling‐block to all success and development in Russia’ and the mere existence of serfdom symbolized the intellectual and cultural gulf that separated Russia from the other great powers, while it was also argued that serfdom inhibited the growth of the Russian economy and prevented both agrarian innovation and the development of a free labor market that would contribute to industrial growth (Kavelin 1898, 33). The decision to emancipate the serfs was taken in the wake of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war, but the discussions inside the government about the way in which it should be implemented reveal the continuing fears harbored by many of Russia’s elite about the consequences of making such a radical reform. Powerful arguments were advanced that the serfs should be freed, but not provided with land to work on: noble interests, it was argued, should take precedence. The prospect of a landless rural proletariat, however, worried Russia’s rulers deeply and they were prepared to override noble objections so that the eventual 1861 emancipation settlement that freed the serfs did allow for them to receive an allotment of land (Emmons 1968, 209–11). This eventual settlement was not, however, wholly favorable to the peasantry. The state could not itself afford to compensate the nobility for the land which was transferred to the newly freed peasantry, and thus the peasants themselves were saddled with making annual redemption payments for their land for a period of 49 years. This burden was deeply resented by Russia’s peasant farmers and it ensured that they maintained a simmering discontent about the way in which emancipation had been enacted for decades after 1861. The land question lay at the heart of Russian politics and it represented the greatest area of discord between the regime and its rural population.
Making the transition from serfdom was difficult both for the former serfs and for their owners. Many Russian farmers believed that they had been given short shrift when land was distributed to them as part of the emancipation settlement, and they found it a demanding task to farm efficiently. This was not helped by the persistence of the traditional communal structures of Russian agriculture: the collective ethos that dominated the countryside provided advantages to peasant farmers by allowing self‐regulation of the basic elements of their lives through the village commune, but it did bind peasants to collective decisions about farming and constrained innovation. Russian farmers found ways of adapting to the communal system and Russian agriculture did develop
after emancipation (Leonard 2011, 132–40). during the second par t of the nineteenth century, there was a slow process of differentiation among Russian peasant farmers, as some were able to buy or rent additional land while other farmers were forced out of agriculture and had to seek other sources of work and income. Russian agriculture was under pressure as the population grew and more Russians moved to work in cities, meaning that, even with improved technology, farmers had to work hard to produce enough grain to feed the empire. It took only episodes of poor weather to disrupt an already finely balanced agricultural system and, as in the volga region in the early 1890s, produce famine (Wheatcroft 1991, 130–6). Russia’s noble landowners also found the process of adapting to a world without serfdom to be difficult and disruptive. Without the free labor of serfs, many estate owners discovered that farming was an unrewarding business and in the decades after 1861 the nobility gradually divested itself of landholdings, so that by 1900 they held only 60 percent of their pre‐emancipation land. Russia’s nobility too had to search for new ways to earn a living: some chose to enter Russia’s growing professions while others tried the new world of industry or business. For some nobles, however, the changing rural world was difficult to adapt to, and the purposeless lives that Chekhov depicted in his plays were not uncommon on decaying noble estates across the Russian countryside. The loss of economic power by the nobility in the rural world was accompanied by a loosening of the social and political control that they had been able to exer t over the peasant population. Although Alexander III instituted land captains – minor rural officials – in 1889 to try to reassert authority in the countryside, these men were never able to acquire the same power as the landed nobility and were widely despised by the peasantry (Pearson 1989, 204–9). The changes wrought by emancipation were slow to develop and the tens of millions of people living in the Russian countryside found their lives changing gradually and at an uneven pace in the second half of the nineteenth century. But for a population that was accustomed to stability, the changes to both the economic and social structures of the rural world were disruptive and far‐reaching.
The process of rural change was accompanied by concentrated and rapid urbanization in Russia. The need to maintain a powerful army and navy was a consistent priority for the Russian state, but in the 1890s Sergei Witte, the ambitious Minister of Finance, argued that the continuing weakness of the agrarian sector made it imperative for Russia to embark on a much more concerted program of industrialization and his macroeconomic policy was designed to promote rapid industrial revolution. There had been persistent migration – often seasonal – from countryside to city since the 1860s as emancipated peasant men sought work to enhance their incomes. This process accelerated in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and Russia’s largest cities expanded very quickly (Bradley 1985, 133–41). By 1900
Moscow and St. Petersburg both had populations of more than one million and were among the ten largest cities in Europe, while Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, and Riga each had populations of more than 250,000. Much of the focus in the late nineteenth century was on mining and metallurgical industries, as Russia sought to construct an industrial base, and this helped to concentrate Russia’s developing working class in large industrial enterprises. The social impact of industrialization in Russia mirrored the experience of other newly industrializing societies: living conditions for the new urban population of Russia were frequently hard and unpleasant. Wages were low and factory owners expected their workers to work long hours in what were often unhealthy and dangerous environments. Housing conditions were cramped and insanitary, as Russia’s cities could not cope with the large numbers of new migrants from the countryside. Few Russian cities had satisfactory sewage systems by the end of the nineteenth century and outbreaks of infectious disease were common, with cholera claiming the lives of more than 100,000 people across the empire in 1910. The process of urbanization and industrialization was deeply disruptive to existing social structures: economic necessity forced many men to leave their familiar village environments and their families and threw them into the difficult world of industrial labor with its uncertainties and very different rhythms from farming life. Russia’s late industrialization, however, gave a different character to its developing working class. By the late nineteenth century, socialist ideas had been clearly articulated and were a significant element in provoking discontent across Europe. The new Russian working class was able to take immediate advantage of ideas that provided them with an intellectual rationale for opposing a political regime that they saw as oppressive and responsible for the harsh lives that they endured. The first explicitly Marxist Russian political group was formed covertly in 1883 and socialist parties were able to gain adherents among the working populations of Russia’s biggest cities. The imperial capital, St. Petersburg, contained a very large population of working people, many of whom were employed in the demanding shipbuilding, armaments, and metallurgical industries and they proved to be especially enthusiastic recruits to the labor movement (Bonnell 1983, 73–103). The ‘many‐thousand human swarm shuffling in the morning to the many‐chimneyed factories’ that Andrei Bely described in his novel Petersburg was to pose a potent threat to the empire’s social elite in its capital city (Bely 1978, 11).
St. Petersburg and Russia’s other large cities were also the focus for a growing and diverse middle class. The development of Russian business, along with the gradual exodus of gentry from the countryside, brought about significant growth in the professions and commerce. The law, banking, medicine, and teaching all became important during the second half of the nineteenth century and attracted well‐qualified people who had benefitted from Russia’s improving
education system to their ranks. Some of these professional groups were concentrated in Russia’s biggest cities, but many people also worked in the countryside and in small towns. The zemstva and city councils all employed substantial numbers of professional people including agronomists, teachers, and medical assistants who were in regular contact with Russia’s farmers (Timberlake 1991, 169–77). Education was also being very gradually extended across Russia and the first national census taken in 1897 showed that just over 20 percent of the population was literate. This, however, concealed very wide differences between groups of Russians; young men living in the cities had the highest rates of literacy, while rural women were the least likely to be able to read and write (Brooks 1985, 4–22). Change was coming to Russian society as elements of Russia’s huge population were becoming independent and were acquiring an autonomy from the state. These new groups introduced an instability to Russian society: the traditional social structures dominated by an elite of landed nobility and tens of millions of peasant farmers were being subverted as the rural world underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation and industry and business came to play a more important part in Russia. The push for rapid industrial growth supported by Witte during the 1890s was instrumental in accelerating the rate of change in Russian society. Traditional structures were, however, often resistant to change and the Russian nobility found its political position given reinforcement in the deeply conservative atmosphere that permeated the autocracy after 1881.
The multi‐national empire that Russia had acquired was vulnerable to the nationalist ideas that developed in Europe during the nineteenth century. War had given Russia possessions in Europe, and in Central Asia Russia’s troops met with only limited resistance as they pushed forward the empire’s boundaries during the 1860s and 1870s.
While imperial growth gave Russia considerable prestige, greater economic strength and increased its status as a Great Power, Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Estonians, and many others came to resent rule from St. Petersburg and became increasingly fractious subjects of the Tsar. The ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of the empire provided a formidable set of problems for its rulers (Kappeler 2001, 329–41).
The Russian regime barely succeeded in establishing firm control over the Caucasus, and it faced continual difficulties as it tried to turn its national minorities into loyal subjects. during the 1880s and 1890s, Alexander III’s regime sought to ‘Russify’ the empire’s nationalities by attempting to impose the Russian language and the Orthodox religion across the empire, but the state was never able to construct a single imperial identity that was accepted by a majority of its subjects. Russia’s borderlands in both Europe and Asia were continual sources of discontent and the multi‐national empire was not immune from the nationalist stresses that were consuming Europe as modernization advanced. Russia’s imperial tensions were exacerbated by a foreign
policy that involved Russia in costly wars. Both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had been able to expand Russia’s power through war, and Alexander I was part of the alliance that put an end to Napoleon’s power, but Russia proved unable to sustain its international military success. defeats in the Crimea in the 1850s and by Japan in 1904–5 showed the fragility of Russian military and imperial power (Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2006, 559–69).
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was recognizably modernizing. The evident success of western states, both militarily and in their wider economic accomplishments, was undeniable. Russia’s rulers understood that they had to match their rivals’ industrial might if they were to be able to sustain their position among the Great Powers. Economic progress could not, however, be divorced from social change and some of the Tsarist state’s political elite questioned whether the social consequences of industrialization were worth the economic advantages that it brought. The dilemma that had been bequeathed to Russia by Peter the Great continued to resonate: by 1900 it was clear that, for Russia’s western competitors, an unavoidable consequence of industrial power was pressure from their evolving societies for political change. The Tsarist state, however, was determined to resist every call for political reform. Alexander II’s forays into reform in the 1860s were regarded by his successors as deeply unwise and Russia’s two final Tsars – Alexander III and Nicholas II – were adamant that economic change need not be accompanied by any reduction in their autocratic power. The traditional Russian establishment attempted to draw distinctions between elements of Peter the Great’s legacy: while they wanted to maintain Russian military might, they did not believe that political modernization was an inevitable concomitant of the economic progress needed to sustain Russian power. The Russian state refused to countenance any form of popular engagement in national government, repeatedly rejecting calls from zemstvo and city council members for their political experience to be utilized on a national scale. Russia’s provincial and city politicians were far from being outspoken radicals: most of them had deep roots in the noble social elite of the empire and had an innate understanding of the dynamics of Russian society. Their loyalty to the Tsarist regime was, however, increasingly tested as Alexander III and Nicholas II both rejected even the mildest calls for political reform.
At the same time, the web of social relationships that had sustained stability across the empire was gradually loosening, as Russia’s farmers emerged from the constraints of serfdom and Russia’s great cities absorbed millions of migrants from the countryside. The bonds that had bound Russians to their masters – whether in the villages or in far-away St. Petersburg – were disintegrating and were not being replaced with new structures to ensure the continuing political loyalty of its subjects. State and people were gradually being pulled apart from each other,
and the regime’s efforts to enhance its authority by its emphasis on history and tradition proved to be ineffective. during the Romanov ter centenary celebrations in 1913 the image of the Tsar as the historical embodiment of Russia reinforced the idea of the regime as archaic and anachronistic. The authority of the Tsarist state became increasingly brittle during the nineteenth century: censorship, emergency powers, and the arbitrary exercise of authority became the hallmarks of the Romanov regime. The apparent power of the Russian state was increasingly, however, simply a veneer. The roots of the much‐feared apparatus of Tsarist oppression in Russian society were withering, while the state itself was encouraging a process of economic and social change that was giving birth to new and vocal challenges to authority. The last Romanovs believed that they need not engage with the modern world. Their continued assertion that Russia could stand immune from wider currents of ideas and could sustain a conservative nationalism in the face of modernity was to prove fatal. The Russian state’s carapace of authoritarian rule had increasingly little substance to it.
References
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Bonnell, victoria E. 1983. Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Oraganizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bradley, Joseph. 1985. Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brooks, Jeffrey. 1985. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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de Madariaga, Isabel. 1981. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
dukes, Paul. 2015. A History of the Urals: Russia’s Crucible from Early Empire to the Post‐Soviet Era. London: Bloomsbury. Emmons, Terence. 1968. The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Field, daniel. 1989. Rebels in the Name of the Tsar. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Fuller, William C., Jr. 2006. ‘The Imperial Army.’ In The Cambridge History of Russia, vol II, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, edited by dominic Lieven, 530–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hughes, Lindsey. 2008. The Romanovs: Ruling Russia 1613–1917. London: Hambledon Continuum.
Kappeler, Andreas. 2001. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Harlow: Longman.
Kavelin, Konstantin. 1898. Sobrannye sochineniia, vol 2. St. Petersburg. Leonard, Carol S. 2011. Agrarian Reform in Russia: The Road from Serfdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, dominic. 2000. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals London: Yale University Press.
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Petrov, Fedor A. 1994. ‘Crowning the Edifice: the Zemstvo, Local Self‐Government, and the Constitutional Movement, 1864–1881.’ In Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, edited by Ben Eklof, John Bushnell and Larissa Zakharova, 192–213. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Schimmelpennick van der Oye, d avid. 2006. ‘Russian For eign Policy, 1815–1917.’ In The Cambridge History of Russia,
vol II, Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 , edited by d ominic Lieven, 554–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. 2006. ‘Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century: How the “West” Wrote Its History of the USSR.’ In The Cambridge History of Russia, vol III, The Twentieth Century, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, 5–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chapter Two
The FirsT russian revoluTion, 1890–1914
Frank Wcislo
Many contemporaries of the 1917 revolution had lived through and still remembered the searing tumult that had convulsed the empire during the years 1905–7. Tectonic shifts in society, economy, and culture; war and military defeat undermining monarchical legitimacy; institutional restructuring of government and politics; and social upheaval sweeping all classes of the imperial population: some in 1917 certainly wondered whether history was repeating itself. Especially given the role historians accord to the experiential knowledge of memory, what they often call the first Russian revolution and date to the years 1905–7 requires a chronology of greater duration to understand its causes and consequences. The generational experience of 1890–1914, the political, socio‐economic, and cultural transformations it witnessed, and the revolutionary upheaval of 1905–7 around which it pivoted assumes historiographical significance in the literature of Russian history because together these events did constitute the prehistory, and thus fundamentally the experience, of the larger revolutionary crisis that began with the onset of the Great War in 1914.1
The State and the Parties
The Russian Empire was a unitary state, welded together through a dynastic monarchy and administered by a ministerial‐bureaucratic police state of some 900,0000 civil servants.2 Formally, the Russian sovereign was an autocrat with unlimited powers. In political fact, his state stoutly repudiated the very idea of popular sovereignty, and the elected parliamentary institutions that throughout Europe gave it some form of voice. The Russian state can be regarded, as many historians of the era did, as an independent historical actor not only impacting but also giving reality to the ideas of polity and national economy that shaped the public
A Companion to the Russian Revolution, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
discourse and cultural identities of the day.3 Its interests as the new century dawned were varied, interconnected, and often worked at cross‐purposes with each other. They can be grouped together under three, generally acknowledged rubrics.
First, following the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and especially from the 1880s onward, the imperial state abetted a sweeping program of industrial modernization to bolster its own power. Through its fiscal, financial, monetary, and regulatory mechanisms, the state ‘sponsored’ – invested in, subsidized, and sometimes directly owned and operated – an expanding corporate‐state industrial infrastructure, especially concentrated in railroads, road and water transportation, banking and finance, technical education, domestic and international commerce, and heavy industry. Buttressed by the conversion of the ruble currency to the gold standard in 1896, such expansive state involvement attracted, as it was designed to do, foreign capital investment in the empire’s rich natural resources and cheap labor, which further enhanced Russian ‘commercial‐industrial development.’ It also created a financial co‐dependency between republican France, the most represented among the European powers in tsarist capital markets, and the Russian Empire, its military ally since 1896.4
Encouraging industrial capitalism, however, subjected the state to its risks, and this accentuated a second imperative: the assurance of public order and popular welfare throughout a realm subject to rapid and unpredictable socio‐economic transformation. As historians have documented copiously, new classes characteristic of the age, and traditional elites challenged by it, were changing the cultural and socio‐economic landscapes of urban and rural life in the long nineteenth century. An expanding industrial working class of more than 2 million people, and small professional, technical, and artistic ‘middling classes,’ were transforming
the empire’s expanding large cities and provincial towns, where new discourses of cultural and political experimentation made themselves heard, in arenas as disparate as the theater, the professional association, the mass‐market newspaper, the university lecture hall, and the illegal factory strike meeting.5 The state used its administrative and fiscal organs to regulate, utilize, police, and spy upon these developments. Industrial modernity manifested itself in the countryside as well. The demographic revolution that doubled the size of the empire’s population in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the growing commercialization and capitalization of a labor‐intensive, conflict‐ridden rural capitalism, signaled this shift. so too did the post‐emancipation decline of the hereditary landowning nobility (dvorianstvo).
An elite whose wealth was rooted in agricultural land had seen its ranks sell over two‐thirds of their 1861 acreage by 1914. still retaining title to some 40 percent of all arable land in European Russia, however, it remained a powerful economic and cultural agrarian presence. Its landed estates supplied local peasantries surrounding them rentable land, opportunities for labor and cash income, and what nobles at least considered their enlightened and benevolent patronage. Especially from the 1880s onward, the nobility’s social and political standing as ‘the first estate (soslovie) of the realm’ provided a focus for conservative critics of industrial modernity. They termed the preservation of an agrarian society resting on hierarchy, decorum, public order, and their private property to be an interest of state. The state serviced this definition of order and welfare as well. Concentrated in provincial capitals and county (uezd) seats, its domestic administrative organs obliged a segregated structure of local peasant self‐administration (soslovnaia obosoblennost’ krest’ian) to patrol the myriad public, fiscal, criminal regulations governing their villages, as well as the communal arable and redemption debt that had been settled upon them to finance the 1861 emancipation. Behind these structures stood the power of standing army garrisons, and the so‐called Extraordinary statutes, which since 1882 had provided the state legal means to suspend the rule of law in favor of administrative and military fiat.6
In an age of European imperialism and the challenges nationalism posed to it, the third concern of the tsarist state was its international standing as a European great power. Encompassing a Eurasian population fractured into ethnic, linguistic, and confessional communities, the Russian Empire (rossisskaia imperiia) was a unitary state with institutional pillars that favored Russian ethnic hegemony. An official imperial nationalism assigned Russian ethnicity primacy, manifested in the person and rituals of monarchy, bureaucratic and military elites, the language of government and culture, the Russian or thodox state religion, and even the presumed natural commonality, some argued, that under Russian leadership existed among all slavic peoples. some in government and society even included in these cultural assumptions the expanding individual wealth being created
by Russian industrial capitalism. Empire, and imperial wealth, they argued, could counter the alluring visions of sovereignty and citizenship that nationalism offered the large non‐Russian communities of the empire. A majority view, however, saw the ‘borderlands’ as sources of instability, because rival states could foment nationalist sentiments among minority communities in order to subvert internal order. such was Germany in Poland, lithuania, and the Baltic provinces, or Austria‐Hungary in Ukraine, or the ottoman Empire in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The predominant government response to such perceived challenges was ‘russification,’ a set of administrative, cultural, linguistic, and police policies designed to accelerate the cultural assimilation of national minorities into Russian imperial culture. Those ethnic minorities affected by it as often regarded this as chauvinistic nationalism run amuck. Increasingly so from the 1880s onward, the police state discriminated against displays of national culture in language, religion, literature and the arts, education, and especially politics.7
such was the state. As to the parties, the same subterranean societal transformations were impacting, in places creating, an imperial civic politics. Historians often overplay the image of a largely agrarian Russia, its population barely two generations removed from serfdom and still divided into semi‐medieval official estates (sosloviia) and other legal categories (sostoianiia) that ascribed social standing and political obligation. These were important markers of identity, to be sure, but late imperial society, at the same time, was an increasingly modern, Victorian world whose topography objectively suggested emerging new political realities. The political ideologies spawned by the French Revolution – liberalism, socialism, nationalism, populism, and conservatism – always had influenced Russian intellectual thought, but all of them, given that they ultimately were explanatory and predictive of the unresolved societal transformation the empire then was experiencing, did so decisively in the two decades prior to 1905. When, as was the case in the Russian Empire, public advocacy of popular sovereignty was still subject to censorship, a parliamentary or national politics could not develop in a normative fashion. What evolved instead was a proto‐politics. Constituencies, parties, and leaders all were nascent; the lines dividing one ideology from another inchoate; and the tactics to mobilize organizations and movements behind any one ideological perspective fluid and opportunistic. Typically, historians trace the emergence of three proto‐political variants – social democratic, populist, and liberal – before and immediately after the turn of the century. All were influenced by pan‐European ideologies. All three sought to appeal broadly across the perceived interests of classes and groups, while targeting a core of the population in whose name each spoke – workers for social democrats, peasants and ‘toiling masses’ for socialist‐revolutionaries, and propertied citizens for liberals. Critical to each was the impact of the traditions
of the nineteenth‐century Russian intelligentsia upon the formation of leadership cadres, who found in the encounter with predictive social science, especially Marxist political economy, teleological paradigms that made inevitable a truly public, mass, imperial civic life powerful enough eventually to displace the hegemony of the autocratic state. All three, not coincidentally, saw the underground newspaper as a crucial tactical and strategic instrument of political leadership, organization, and mobilization.8 of the three, chronologically the first to emerge was a genuine European socialist par ty, betokening Marxism’s significant influence in Russian intellectual life by the turn of the century. The Russian social Democratic Workers’ Party (RsDRP) formed initially in 1898 at a secret party congress in Minsk. The leading adherents of Russian socialism made their home in this party – Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Iulii Martov, Vladimir (lenin) Ulianov, Alexander Potresov, and Vera Zasulich. By 1904, its party platform called for a democratic republic created by a constituent assembly elected on the basis of the so‐called ‘four‐tail’ suffrage of universal, equal, direct, and secret elections for all men and women, aged 20 or older. It advocated the abolition of all estates (sosloviia), the equality of all citizens, an array of personal freedoms (person, dwelling, religion, speech, press, assembly, union, and strike), and the secularization of civic life via the separation of church and state. Its legislative goals addressed the perceived needs of the empire’s majority population of working classes and peasantry: a progressive income tax; comprehensive workplace legislation that included an eight‐hour day and forty‐two-hour week; the elimination and compensation of redemption payments; and the confiscation and sale to ‘land‐hungry’ peasants of church, state, and crown lands. The right of national self‐determination was guaranteed, however vaguely, to all nations in the empire.9
What of socialism, an ideology that profoundly influenced both European and Russian intellectual life in this era? Its ideological tenets, rooted in Marx’s sociological systems‐analysis of industrial capitalism, rendered Russia the least likely European country to become socialist, given her still relatively small industrial economy and working classes. Even more problematic was the combination of autocratic state, which blockaded any hint of a parliamentary politics, with an historically weak bourgeoisie, which was presumably at best indifferent to the political interests of labor, dependent upon state largesse, and thus as likely to abort as birth the fully democratic parliamentary republic that was socialism’s essential precondition. Russia plainly was not England, France, or even semi‐parliamentary Germany. How in Russia could socialists be the leaders of an empire‐wide political opposition to autocracy powerful enough to overthrow it? All agreed to a tactical sleight of hand and argued that revolution in Russia was a two‐stage process, the first of which necessarily destroyed tsarist absolutism and inaugurated the era of a democratic republic that would open a
second stage of building socialism. Both contemporaries and historians have noted the voluntarism at the heart of Russian social democracy. To accelerate, even force the flow of history was an assumption that allowed the party to build a party program resting on a working-class, socialist politics as the mobilizing center of an all‐nation civic movement against autocracy, the ‘hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeoisie revolution’ as the slogan had it. How quickly the second stage of building a socialist polity would come to fruition – and whether this would be achieved by evolutionary or revolutionary means – famously split the party at its II Congress in Brussels in 1903.
lenin, then a 33-year-old Marxist radical only recently escaped from siberian exile, had authored his well‐known polemic, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, the previous year. In it, he vituperated against the reformist, ‘trade‐unionist,’ and parliamentary social democracy of Germany, which he viewed as incompatible with conditions of tsarist police oppression, a weak Russian capitalist class compromised by its incestuous relationships with the state, and the dissipated revolutionary consciousness of Russian workers motivated solely in such conditions by localized concerns for wages and shop‐floor conditions. such par ticularism, lenin adroitly understood, made any kind of empire‐wide political opposition difficult, much less a labor movement powerful and uncompromising enough to mobilize both the class and the all‐nation movement it would spark. only a centralized, underground, professional organization – lenin’s revolutionary party – could impart to such workers a revolutionary working‐class consciousness, in which the interests of the class, and the intellectuals who constructed their views of it, were already inextricably intertwined. lenin maligned what would become an ever louder critique of his position, namely that the drive to impose consciousness from above rather than encourage it from below through the very local interests and organizations he sought to overcome dangerously mimicked the absolutism he strove to overthrow. never theless, at the 1903 party congress, indicatively enough on the question of the composition of the editorial board of the party’s newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), lenin used rules of order to induce his majority opponents to walk out of the proceedings and then declared his minority position to be the majority. Thus was first born a distinction in the RsDRP between revolutionary Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and evolutionary Mensheviks (Minorityites) that eventually spawned two very different ideological visions of Russian social democracy.10
The second proto‐party developed from populism, Russia’s oldest nineteenth‐century intellectual tradition. Intellectual historians have detailed the emergence of a radical populist ideology in the half‐century before and after the 1861 abolition of serfdom. It was rooted in the belief, first developed by slavophile thinkers, that the peasant land commune was an indigenous foundation for
