A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

11 The Era of the Great Reforms

Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War caused a tremendous political shock in the country. It was not the scale of the defeat but its revelation of the weakness of a political system that prized its unique conservatism on the European scene and its supposed military might above all. It was the autocracy that was defeated, all the more so because the long siege of Sevastopol demonstrated to many Russians that the army still had the spirit to fight, a spirit hampered by the backwardness of society and government. Russia’s backwardness was not only the result of the slow evolution of economy and society under the tutelage of Tsar Nicholas. The greatest problem was that the world was changing very quickly in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the most rapid changes were taking place in Great Britain, Russia’s primary imperial rival. Railroads were transforming the landscape in all of Western Europe and the United States, building on and stimulating the rapid modernization of iron and steel production, thereby raising output to new heights. Besides railroads, all sorts of machines came into existence – improved steam engines, telegraph equipment, and huge metal-hulled ships. Britain and other powers imported increasing amounts of food and raw materials from colonies and distant countries in the Western hemisphere, sending out masses of cotton and wool cloth, machinery, and innumerable consumer goods. Society evolved to support all this growth, with high-speed presses to produce daily newspapers and rapidly expanding educational systems to produce engineers, lawyers, politicians, and an educated public to use the new products. In this new world, Russia was lagging behind. The reformers in the government realized all this and saw that Russia needed the new production techniques and a new economy simply to survive as a major power. They also realized that technology alone was not enough: Tsar Nicholas had built railroads, but had not succeeded in transforming the Russian economy. Russia would need a new legal system, a modernized and expanded educational system, and even some forms of public discussion of major issues. What Russia could not stand, the reformers believed, was a new political system. Most of them admired the emerging constitutional regimes in Europe, but believed that Russia was far too primitive with its illiterate peasantry, outmoded agriculture, and thin layer of educated people. Such a society could not sustain a free, constitutional government. For the foreseeable future, it would have to remain an autocracy.

With the death of Tsar Nicholas in February 1855, a new regime came to power with his son Alexander. Alexander II would preside over the greatest changes in Russia since the time of Peter the Great – changes that brought the country into the modern world, hesitantly and only partially, but nevertheless across the threshold toward industrial capitalism and the beginnings of a modern urban society. The new tsar was as often against as for these changes, and had to be pushed all the way, but nevertheless he did allow himself to be convinced and to make the decisive moves. Ultimately the tsar decreed the reforms, but like the reformers he intended to preserve autocracy intact and keep society, even upper-class society, out of political decisions. This was a difficult and ultimately impossible goal, for Russian educated society emerged now for the first time as a force in the political and social process, even if it was a force of limited power. Its emergence, even if modest, was a revolution in Russian politics and a revolution with wide implications.

At first the initiative for reform came from the government. During the Crimean War, however, Herzen and other émigré radicals had raised their voices, and inside the country even conservatives among the gentry and intelligentsia began to circulate memoranda proposing reforms of various kinds. None of this had any effect, as these groups were too small and had little echo even among the educated sectors of the social elite. The situation changed with the Peace of Paris in March 1856, which put an end to the war. The war had revealed that the unreformed autocracy was no longer capable of maintaining Russia’s position in the world, and would have to develop a more modern economy. Serfdom was the main obstacle. Soon after the signing of the peace, Tsar Alexander spoke to the assembled gentry of the province of Moscow (that is, to much of the top aristocracy) in his first major public pronouncement. The mere fact of such a pronouncement was unusual and the content even more so. He warned the nobles that the peasant question now had to be addressed. It was much better, he told them, that it be resolved from above than from below. In other words, the state had to reform the countryside or the nobles would face a peasant revolt.

The virtually simultaneous relaxation of censorship meant that the issues raised in the tsar’s speech as well as other pressing concerns could now be addressed, albeit cautiously. Debate appeared in unexpected places such as the publications of the Ministry of the Navy, headed by the tsar’s more liberal brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. While Alexander’s government, or at least part of it, was convinced of the need for reform, every step met opposition from conservatives within the corridors of power and also from the gentry, who now could express their views publicly and still had access to the court and the important ministries. The first committee appointed by the tsar in January 1857, to deal with the peasant questions was thus secret. The reformers in the government showed their hand only at the end of the year, when the Ministry of the Interior sent a memorandum to one of the provincial governors ordering him to require the local gentry to form committees to provide suggestions on the emancipation of the serfs, its desirability, and paths to achieve it. The Ministry published the memorandum in its official printed register, and now the gentry and the educated part of the population knew what was afoot.

Not surprisingly most noblemen were against the idea of emancipation, and hoped that if it did come, all the land would remain in the hands of the gentry. This would be a landless emancipation like that earlier in the Baltic provinces, and peasants would have to rent their land from the gentry or go to work as day laborers. The government reformers did not like this idea, for they feared that it would produce a vast landless proletariat that would be the source of endless revolts and upheavals. Instead the committee, blandly called the “Editorial Committee,” proposed that the peasants be freed with land, for which they would have to pay the landowners, and furthermore they would have to pass through a period of temporary obligation to the owners of the estates. The redemption payments would be spread over sixty years, the state giving the gentry a lump sum that the peasants were to repay to the treasury. This plan evoked intense hostility among the gentry, who thought it would undermine their livelihood and their place in Russian society. Throughout 1859–60 battles raged in the committee, in government ministries, and the court itself.

The reformers were a powerful and well-connected group. Much of the responsibility fell on the Ministry of the Interior, whose vice-minister was Nikolai Miliutin. Miliutin’s brother Dmitrii, a professor at the General Staff Academy and adjutant to the Minister of War, had come to the attention of Grand Dutchess Elena Pavlovna, and in the 1850s attended her “Thursdays,” the weekly gathering of her friends and allies. In the new atmosphere, the Grand Dutchess’s salon added political reform to its agenda, and Nikolai Miliutin, a well-educated and progressive younger official, joined his brother in the Grand Dutchess’s good graces. Both Miliutins had strong reformist views, and Nikolai was appointed to the Editorial Committee on its inception. In the committee Nikolai Miliutin could count on the support of its chairman, General Iakov Rostovtsev, an officer whose career had not been in the field but in the role of adjutant to Tsar Nicholas and who had been close to Alexander in his years as heir to the throne. During the Crimean War he rather unexpectedly became a strong reformer and exploited his access to the new tsar to the fullest. Grand Duchess Elena also monitored the progress of reform, and her network of informants at the palace insured that the reformers knew who was trying to influence the tsar and in what direction. Dmitrii Miliutin, after several years in the Caucasus, in 1860 went on to head the Ministry of War. With Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich in charge of the Navy, both military ministries as well the Minstry of the Interior were in the reform camp. The reformers were a tightly interconnected group, well educated, highly placed, and ready for action.

Figure 10. Alexander II and his dog Milord.

At the beginning of 1860 General Rostovtsev died suddenly, but the committee continued its work moving on toward a reformist solution. Then in September the tsar appointed his brother Konstantin to chair the committee, and by that act ensured an outcome favorable to emancipation. The result was a swift conclusion to support the original idea of emancipation with land for the peasants on the basis of redemption payments, as the reformers had proposed two years before. The proposal went to the Council of State, the highest body of government, which debated the proposal for several weeks. On February 17, it voted against the proposal. The majority wanted more land for the gentry and the Council sent the two opinions on to the tsar, the majority against and the minority for emancipation with land for the peasants. The fate of twenty million serfs hung in the balance, for Russia was an autocracy, and the tsar had no obligation to accept the majority of the Council of State, or the minority for that matter. After two days of deliberation, Alexander II chose to accept the minority report and signed the decree of emancipation. In the tsar’s mind, disaster loomed if he went with the majority: the peasants should not be made “homeless and harmful to the landowners as well as to the state.” The government decided to wait until the beginning of Lent to announce the decree, and it was read in churches everywhere in the country beginning on March 5/17, 1861. The hope was that the Lenten atmosphere would encourage a quiet response to the decree among the people. Whatever the reason, there were only a few minor disturbances among the peasantry.

The balance of power inside the government was the only thing that really mattered, but the reformers also looked to societal support and in some sectors they found it. Early in 1856 the exiled radical Herzen realized that reform was coming in Russia and he decided to help it along. His first act was to use his base in London to begin publishing a series of essays, Voices from Russia, that provided background information and uncensored discussion of the current problems. Herzen understood that his own views were too extreme for most of his potential audience, so he found contributors who were liberals rather than radicals, even quite moderate liberals. In 1857 he began to publish a monthly newspaper, Kolokol (the Bell), which did reflect his own views, though in many cases he held his fire to avoid alienating the readers. Both the essays and Kolokol were smuggled into Russia and quickly became widely available. The Third Section acquired copies and circulated them to high officials and even to the tsar himself. Herzen’s vivid prose and clear perspective gave him popularity with many readers who did not share his particular views, his peasant socialism, and his opposition to autocracy. His was not the only voice heard, for the (at first temporary) relaxation of censorship allowed newspapers and journals to appear in increasing numbers. This new phenomenon was not only a function of change in the censorship rules, for technological innovations in printing now made daily newspapers possible for the first time in Russia. They were, to a large extent, commercial enterprises, and many of the editors learned to combine sale-ability with liberal ideas. Newspapers whose editors were critical of the authorities from a conservative point of view began to appear as well. Many topics were beyond the pale, such as the personalities and views of the tsar himself and the imperial family, but the editors were able to find ways to discuss current issues and at the same time present a mass of information on Russian life and on the affairs of the world. In the conditions of wide debate over the reforms, even a bare account of village life or a criminal trial could take on relevance to the reform process. Detailed accounts of Western politics, of English parliaments, French foreign policy, or even American presidential elections offered Russian readers regular accounts of political systems different from their own. The reformers inside the state bureaucracy were not unhappy with these developments, as the press allowed them to assess the degree of support or lack of it for their actions, although they had no intention of following suggestions from anyone outside the government. Much of their effort went to keeping the gentry and the aristocrats from influencing opinion or the reform process, as they correctly believed the nobility, high and low, to be mainly against reform. Thus the government reformers kept the government’s deliberations as secret as they could.

Until the actual emancipation decree of 1861 the government, however secretive, enjoyed the guarded support of emerging opinion among the educated classes. After that moment tensions began to arise between the government and the pro-reform wing of the educated classes, for many of the liberals felt that the reforms did not go far enough. At the same time the pro-reform elements of society began to divide into moderate and radical wings. Herzen was highly critical of the inadequacies of the emancipation, and his views contributed to the formation of a radical camp inside Russia. Most liberals, the intelligentsia, and the liberal minority of the nobility, continued to support the government and enthusiastically plunged into the reform process, the nobles serving on local committees to implement the reforms. Moreover, the government continued with additional reforms, the next steps being the reform of the judiciary, local government, and the army.

Other factors, however, complicated the politics of the reform. In January 1861, there were a series of disturbances in Warsaw, the first such manifestations of Polish discontent since the 1830 revolt. Tsar Alexander and the ministers sent Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to Warsaw as viceroy with the hope that he could manage a compromise that would introduce some reform into Russian Poland and defuse discontent. The attempt was a failure, and a new revolt broke out in 1863. This revolt undermined Grand Duke Konstantin’s authority in St. Petersburg, and he never again played a major role. It also created a permanent split between Herzen and the liberals, for Herzen supported the Polish effort and the liberals came out for Russian national interest. Kolokol quickly declined into insignificance. Fortunately for Russia the revolt was largely a matter of small guerilla groups operating within the countryside, and in the western Ukrainian provinces the peasants even joined the government troops against the rebels. By the end of 1864 Russian authorities had restored order in Poland, and in the meantime they even managed to decree two important measures for the rest of the Empire, judicial reform and the establishment of a new form of local government.

The new decrees established a series of local administrative boards, the zemstvos, which were to take care of roads, bridges, public schooling, health, and other matters of local concern. The innovation was that the members of the boards were to be elected. Most delegates to the zemstvos were noblemen, but the newly emancipated peasantry was also regularly represented. Liberals correctly complained that the zemstvos were too closely supervised by the bureaucracy and lacked many of the powers needed to carry out even their modest tasks. The provincial governors and the Ministry of the Interior kept a close watch on the new institutions and had the power to override their decisions. At the same time the zemstvos took on an important role in Russian life, both for the practical problems they addressed and as elected institutions. Whether the government liked it or not, they became centers of modest political activity and provided the local nobility with an outlet for their energies and the experience of political and administrative activity. The zemstvos also employed large numbers of experts from the intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, and statisticians, and this group also became a force for the politicization of the zemstvos as time went on. Ultimately the zemstvos became centers for liberal political organization.

More radical were the judicial reforms. Nicholas I had codified the laws, but the judicial system remained largely as Catherine II had left it at the end of the eighteenth century. The judiciary was not completely separated from administration, the judges lacked independence and often legal training as well, and judicial procedure still depended on written testimony. Proceedings were not public, and the judges decided cases without a jury. The 1864 decree changed all that, paradoxically giving Russia one of the most progressive judicial systems in Europe. Trials were henceforth conducted in public as an adversarial trial with both a public prosecutor and a defense attorney. In the great majority of criminal cases the decisions on guilt or innocence were made by a jury. The Ministry of Justice appointed the judges, but they could not be removed except for misbehavior. Overnight, Russia acquired a legal system up to European standards and a legal profession. Trials, criminal and civil, became news and were reported in the newspapers, often at length. Unfortunately this brilliant judicial system had to enforce laws that were far from progressive in many areas from family law to commercial matters, but the many areas of ambiguity in the legislation allowed judges to reshape the law in a more modern direction. A more basic flaw in the system was the continued existence of laws allowing the state administration to issue various punishments outside the courts. The most notorious was the use of administrative exile, by which the provincial governors and the Minster of the Interior could sentence anyone they found problematic to exile (not prison) for a number of years merely by decree. Liberal publicists and zemstvo activists increasingly found themselves the target of this practice.

The other exception to the new system was the formation of a separate court system for the peasants, the township courts. These courts were to formalize the older informal village courts, with a panel of judges elected from among the peasants and a clerk (often the only literate person in the court) to record its actions. Peasants were to settle all civil cases and minor crimes in these courts, which worked not by the law of the state but by the customs of the villages orally transmitted, or simply on the basis of “conscience.” Their decisions could not be appealed to state courts. The township courts often decided cases on the basis of the reputation of the plaintiff and defendant, and the main punishment was flogging. This system kept the peasantry separate from the rest of society, conserving the village community and its values.

In the zemstvos and the new courts some part of the public finally had a sphere of activity, even if it was not political activity. Even this modest public sphere could not function easily without the press. In April 1865, the government finally promulgated permanent censorship laws. The statute itself was an amalgam of two contradictory principles, both Western in origin. The new laws abolished prior censorship that had been largely rendered unworkable by high-speed presses and the new political situation, but retained penalties for undermining respect for the state, the family, and religion. How were these to be enforced? The statute provided for settling the main issues in the new courts, which meant that the state would have to bring a case to a trial open to the public. The attempts to control critical journalists by this method were a failure and soon abandoned, for the courts either found the defendants innocent or if guilty, imposed largely symbolic punishments. The state had recourse to other methods, however, for the statute had taken censorship from the Ministry of Education and placed it under the Ministry of the Interior, the principal body in charge of preserving public order. The statute had also borrowed from French legislation a whole series of administrative measures including fines and warnings to editors that allowed the authorities to bypass the court system. After the initial failures in the court, these administrative sanctions triumphed, including eventually the prohibition of specific works of radical literature. The new censorship rules suppressed much public debate, but were never intended to eliminate it entirely.

Perhaps the most complicated reform issue after the emancipation of the serfs was that of the army. Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin made his first proposal in 1862, and though it was approved by the tsar, it took until 1874 to be fully implemented. The core of the proposal was the replacement of the twenty-five-year service of the soldiers with a reserve system based on a limited term that was ultimately determined at six years. The conservatives wanted to keep the army a caste, in which peasants were made into soldiers commanded by nobles, while Miliutin saw such an army as reactionary and slated to repeat the defeats of Crimea. He saw no reason why free peasants could not serve and then return to their villages to resume farming. It was his powerful will, and the tsar’s determination to maintain an effective army, that kept the military reform on track through many political vicissitudes.

Vicissitudes there were. Almost immediately with the appearance of public discussion of reform in 1858–59 the debate went beyond the parameters of government-sponsored liberal reform and conservative resistance. Both liberals outside the bureaucracy and young radicals began to present ideas that went far beyond what the ministers pondered behind the closed doors of government committees. Much of the reason for the challenge lay in the transformation of educated society, the formation of an intelligentsia defined by education and profession – often of plebeian origin and unconnected to the nobility. The core of the intelligentsia were the professionals – teachers, doctors, scientists, and engineers – but the term came to include anyone with some sort of education beyond the basic level, and of course it included students. Young men and (for the first time) women, mostly in and around the universities rejected not only state leadership but were also part of a new culture, for this was the generation that abandoned the interest in German idealist philosophy that had inspired Herzen and Bakunin as well as many liberals, and turned instead to the natural sciences. Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons gave the term “nihilists” to this new generation for their rejection of the pieties of the past. The accusation was that they believed in nothing (in Latin “nihil”). Ferment began among the university students who had been granted a great deal of freedom in the post-Crimean era. In the autumn of 1861 a number of rather minor disturbances at St. Petersburg University led the authorities to close the university and begin to look for radical activity there and at other universities and academies. Small groups of radicals, no more than a few dozen individuals, also began to spread revolutionary manifestoes, convincing the government that vast plots were afoot. In most Russian university cities communes of students with more or less radical ideas came into existence in these years, partly for purely economic reasons but also from conviction that a simple communal life was the path to the future. The students knew about Herzen and read widely in Western liberal and radical literature, but their hero was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose ideas continued to inspire radicals long after he was lost to Siberian exile.

From the time of his emergence as a leading journalist in 1853, in the pages of the Contemporary, still one of the leading journals, Chernyshevsky had become the dominant intellectual and cultural figure of the radical intelligentsia and remained so for nearly a generation. The son of a priest and the graduate of a seminary rather than a secular high school, Chernyshevsky managed to enter St. Petersburg University, and ultimately acquired a master’s degree in literature. In the pages of the Contemporary, however, his writing covered far more than literature. He wrote on philosophy, economics, and politics when he could, especially West European politics, on which it was easier to publish than on Russian politics. He also devoted a great deal of space to the peasant question, the economic, administrative, and social issues involved in the emancipation. Contrary to the views of liberal economists in the government and in educated society, Chernyshevsky advocated the preservation of the Russian peasant community with its communal landownership and agriculture and village-level decision making. Chernyshevsky, in this respect close to Herzen, believed that Russia could construct a kind of agrarian socialism built around the village community and thus avoid the horrors of industrialization familiar from Victorian England and continental societies. Chernyshevsky was also a revolutionary, though he never created an actual revolutionary organization, but he did look forward to the overthrow of the tsarist regime and sympathized with those who tried to take an active role in the process.

Chernyshevsky’s most powerful contributions to the emerging revolutionary movement were his articles in the Contemporary. The radicals around the journal were convinced that the natural sciences were the key to all knowledge, that the social sciences were simply a backward area that would soon catch up to biology and chemistry. Their view of man was ruthlessly biological: there were no spiritual entities, and indeed their objection to religion seems to have been founded more on disbelief in the soul than in God. Chernyshevsky and his colleagues also held an essentially utilitarian view of art, the task of which was to transform the consciousness of the readers with its arguments and its presentation of the images of reality as it actually was. By 1862 the government had become aware that he was the most important figure among the radicals, and decided to put an end to his activity. The Third Section had him arrested on suspicion of relations with Herzen and of agitating to arouse the people against the government, but they could find very little against him. Relations with Herzen could not be proven and Chernyshevsky’s articles were not in themselves criminal. After some months they found a police agent among the radicals, already arrested on another charge, who claimed to have letters from Chernyshevsky’s hand and a manifesto calling on the peasants to rise. Using these documents as evidence, the Third Section brought up a new charge, and Chernyshevsky was convicted of trying to inspire rebellion. The sentence was fourteen years labor in the mines (a sentence that was later commuted) and perpetual exile in Siberia. Chernyshevsky was allowed to leave Siberia only in 1883, six years before his death.

The most complete expression of the values of the new generation came in Chernyshevsky’s novel, What is to be Done?, written in the prison of the fortress of St. Peter and Paul after his arrest in 1862. The novel managed to be published legally through an error of the censor, even though it presented a case for the complete reorganization of society and a plan of the future. The idea was to construct a series of communal production workshops and living arrangements that would liberate the individual from the constraints of poverty and the traditional family. Chernyshevsky’s novel was as much a feminist as a socialist tract. The emancipation of women, even from the upper classes, was a central part of his platform, for Chernyshevsky saw himself as the advocate of individual liberation to a society of “rational egoism” as much as the advocate of peasant and worker emancipation. The book became the Bible of a whole generation and its characters, the devoted revolutionary, the emancipated husband, the new woman – all these provided the youth of the time not only with ideals but also specific models of behavior, which many followed to the letter. Long hair for men and short for women, contempt for upper class manners and dress to the point of rudeness and general sloppiness became the fashion among students and gave the tone to a whole generation. Chernyshevsky’s arrest and exile deprived the radicals of a public voice, and also led to the emergence of a whole underground and émigré literature that circulated among students and youth throughout the empire.

The radicals would soon capture the center stage of Russian life and culture and even provoke a series of “anti-nihilist” novels designed to demonstrate their limitations and errors. The post-Crimean decade, however, was also the period of formation of Russian liberalism, which had much greater support than the radicals among the intelligentsia: the professors, doctors, and teachers who made up its core. The liberal generation was also deeply affected by the new scientism of the era, which seemed to find a European model in Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and French positivism. The first and primary leader of the liberals, however, remained true to the older Hegelianism of his youth, albeit in the liberal rather than radical interpretation. This was Boris Chicherin, a professor of law whose conception of Russian history neatly fit his political ideas and legal training. His idea was simply that early Russian history to Peter the Great, had been the history of the development of statehood. Autocracy was a primitive survival from the later phases of this era, necessary in its time but now becoming outdated. Peter’s reign had signaled the beginning of the development of legality within the autocratic structure, a development that was reaching its maturity in his own times with the great reforms. The task of the reform generation was to move this process forward, so that the further development of society would raise Russia to the level of civilization suitable for a constitution. The constitution was for the future, the task of the present was to move along the process of reforming the state, not to blow it up.

Chicherin’s ideas or some variant of them were easy to fit with the general fascination with progress in nineteenth-century Europe, and the liberals felt they were part of a worldwide process that sooner or later would triumph in Russia too. These ideas were the inspiration of the zemstvo activists, as well as the journalists and writers who gathered around the new newspapers and the more intellectual “thick journals.” The latter were ideally suited for the age, as the censorship was much more interested in daily newspapers and popular literature than the thick journals. Long learned discussions of local government in England or economic problems of the Russian countryside were much easier to get through censorship (thus Karl Marx’s Capital was legally published in Russia). The most popular of the thick journals was the Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), founded in 1866. Every month its subscribers received three or four hundred pages of high-level journalism and even scholarly articles on current topics, novels, and verse that included the future classics of Russian literature and usually a novel translated from some Western language. The journal was full of useful information, long articles in which the authors discussed not only the alleged subject at hand but also many excursions into various types of useful knowledge – scientific, social, economic, even medical. In the drawing rooms of the provincial gentry and the libraries of gymnasium teachers throughout the Empire, journals of this sort were a lifeline, a connecting link with the larger world in Russia and beyond, and an inspiration for dogged persistence in zemstvo work and other humble attempts to make a modern society of Russia.

Conservative thought, as well, radically changed after Crimea. Unlike the liberals – numerous and in general agreement with one another – the conservatives remained a series of small mutually hostile groups alongside several idiosyncratic thinkers who lacked a following. The most important group was still the Slavophiles, who found a constituency among the bankers and textile millionaires of Moscow. The millionaires subsidized their journals and allowed them to keep their ideas before the public even if their circulation never reached the same volume as the liberal publications. The Slavophiles were generally supportive of the reform process, but they thought that too much of it was the result of mechanical adoption of Western models. Nationalism was increasingly the dominant feature of Slavophile ideology. They also feared farther moves in certain areas, especially any liberal (government or outside) measures that might weaken the peasant community, for them the basis of Russia’s unique harmony in a world of political and social strife. Their general support of the autocracy and its policy was by no means uncritical, and earned them considerable official suspicion and hostility.

A more powerful advocate of conservative ideas was Mikhail Katkov, who until the Polish revolt was a liberal spokesman. In the wake of the revolt Katkov and his Moscow News (Moskovskie Vedomosti), subsidized by the Russian government in spite of occasional clashes, became the principal public voice of Russian nationalism and the idea of autocracy. Katkov advocated a sort of “westernizing” conservatism, one where Russian would acquire an industrial social order but retain the authoritarian form of government of the past, modernized by modern administrative methods. In many ways Katkov admired Bismarck’s Germany and hoped that Russia would imitate it, not least in its strident nationalism. Katkov’s nationalism was nastier than the vague “nationality” principle of Uvarov and Nicholas I. Katkov was relentlessly anti-Polish and anti-Semitic, and for all of his admiration of Germany, he was relentlessly hostile to the Baltic German aristocracy still so prominent in Russia’s government and army, as well as at court. He also favored an aggressive foreign policy and came to advocate a strongly anti-German policy. The government was not always happy with Katkov (the Baltic German issue was a constant irritant) as it did not admit the propriety of even friendly criticism, but it could not do without him. For the conservative gentry and officialdom, Katkov was an oracle. None of the other conservative voices, even Dostoevsky’s, had his following.

The conservatives and the government were most of all afraid of the revolutionary movement, which they correctly perceived as a political, social, and cultural threat. Indeed the communes of radical students inspired by Chernyshevsky’s novel were very far from the privileged world of the court or the liberal journalists and their readers. The students operated by strict equality, including that of men and women. Their communes were broader than the revolutionary movement, including many members with only vague political views, but they formed an ideal recruiting ground. The expansion of the universities meant that many of the students were much more plebeian than their predecessors – the children of priests, minor officials, and noblemen whose incomes, to say the least, did not match their status. After 1859 women gradually entered universities, and their presence, entirely in accord with radical ideology, led to a major role for women in the revolutionary movement and gave it a distinctive style.

The young revolutionaries operated entirely underground. The reform of Russian society had not led to the appearance of legal public politics, for the state retained all power in its hands and political parties were not permitted. Not only liberals and radicals, but even conservatives were prevented from forming any sort of political associations, even in support of the state. Among the principal victims of the censorship was the Slavophile leader Ivan Aksakov, who supported the autocracy and was highly conservative and openly anti-Semitic. Aksakov nevertheless believed that he should have the right to criticize the autocracy in the press. The government saw things differently, and Aksakov’s publications eventually came to an end. The liberals enjoyed broad support among the intelligentsia, especially its core of professionals, and controlled a number of key newspapers and periodicals, but they had no organization. The closest to a liberal (or conservative) forum was the zemstvo, whose meetings sometimes took on a political air, but the police and administration made sure that these attempts came to nothing. The only political actors outside the government were the revolutionaries.

In the early years, the 1860s, the main radical groups were small, only a few dozen members at the most, and were short-lived. They were also conspiratorial and dominated by a few charismatic leaders, some of them young men of very questionable character and motives, the most famous being Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev convinced his followers that he represented a revolutionary “central committee” under whose orders he worked. In fact it existed only in his imagination. In late 1869 he told his small group that one of their number was an informer for the police and that they should murder him, which they did. The result was that the police, while investigating the murder, uncovered the organization. Nechaev fled abroad, leaving his followers to their fate – exile in Siberia. Even the anarchist Bakunin, who at first thought that Nechaev represented some sort of new wave in Russia, finally realized that he was mentally unbalanced and morally depraved.

The few small groups like Nechaev’s were doomed to failure, but events also kept the incipient radical movement from taking off in the first decade of its existence. The occasion was the attempt to assassinate the tsar on April 4, 1866. The would-be assassin was one Dmitrii Karakozov, a minor nobleman from the Volga region who had been involved in various radical groups, mostly composed of students, for several years. His comrades, who were more serious personalities than the like of Nechaev, actually opposed the idea and tried hard to dissuade him. They failed, and Karakozov shot at Tsar Alexander as he was leaving the Summer Garden but he missed. He was immediately captured and the tsar spoke to him, asking him if he was a Pole. Karakozov replied that he was pure Russian, and the police now knew that they were dealing with terrorism, a new phenomenon in the Russian revolutionary movement. Karakozov believed that killing the tsar would inspire a popular revolt, or at worst weaken the government and thus force further reform. The opposite happened, for it produced a government shakeup and the appointment of several less liberal ministers and the reactionary count Petr Shuvalov to head the Third Section. The pace of reform notably slowed.

By 1870 enough experience had accumulated among the radicals to suggest that the conspiratorial methods were unsavory and ineffective. The issue in any case was to spread radical ideas among the people, primarily among the peasantry. The result was the formation of new organizations whose members decided that the young radicals should “go to the people.” Thus in 1874 thousands of young men and women began to learn practical skills and move to rural areas to try to fit into peasant society. Concrete political goals were placed far in the future, and the radicals concentrated on spreading their ideas. The effort lasted for several years, and was a complete failure. The peasants were at best unreceptive, suspicious of outsiders, especially from higher social levels (no matter how plebeian the students were, they were still not peasants). Many of them turned the radicals (or “populists”) over to the police.

By the summer of 1876 it was clear that going to the people had failed and the remains of the group in St. Petersburg created a formal organization called Zemlia i Volia (“Land and Freedom”). The authorities noticed the actions of the new group and arrested many of them, holding mass public trials in 1877 that featured the veterans of “going to the people” as well as newer detainees. The trials were a disaster for the government as prisoner after prisoner presented impassioned and well-reasoned explanations for the misery of Russia’s people and their plans for the future. The government struggled against the movement with inadequate forces and antiquated methods, but it could not break its spirit. The conditions and practices of the Russian prisons were primitive and caused much suffering, something widely known in society as well as in revolutionary circles, and it gave the rebels a halo of martyrdom. Then in early 1878 one of the prisoners in St. Petersburg was ordered to be flogged by general Trepov, the governor-general. A few weeks later a young woman walked into his office during the period reserved for petitioners, and in revenge shot him several times with a revolver. The general survived his wounds, but the young woman, Vera Zasulich, became the object of yet another public trial. The jury failed to convict her, and she escaped abroad. From then on the government avoided the civilian court system and tried revolutionaries in military field courts.

Zasulich’s act inaugurated three-and-a-half years of a fantastic duel between the revolutionaries and the police. Most of the populists were now convinced that the social revolution could not occur without the destruction of the Russian autocracy. Unless Russia became a federal and democratic republic, the radicals would never have the freedom of action to preach social renewal. Therefore they shifted their effort from preaching radical social ideas to propaganda for political revolution, and most important, for a program of terror against the state. They did not target random populations: the objects of terror were only the officials of the state, and among those, mainly the ones responsible for political control and repression, that is policemen, governors of provinces, the Minister of the Interior, and the tsar himself. The terror campaign produced a split in the movement, with the majority in favor of terror forming a new organization, Narodnaia Volia (“People’s Will”) and the minority, which wanted to stick to the old policy of agitation and propaganda, keeping the old name, Land and Freedom. Most of the latter soon emigrated.

The People’s Will then began a coordinated campaign of terror that came increasingly to focus on the tsar himself. Alexander responded slowly to the campaign, believing that his fate was in God’s hands and in any case the traditions of the court made strict security very difficult. As before, the tsar frequently rode about St. Petersburg with only a squad of Cossacks and resisted any greater measures for his protection. His attention was focused on government and his private life, for the death of the empress in 1880 allowed him to finally marry his longtime mistress, Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaia, which legitimized their children. The attempts on his life continued and after several failures terror came even to the Winter Palace. Stepan Khalturin, one of the few revolutionaries actually of peasant origin, managed to disguise himself as a carpenter and get access to the palace, where he exploded a bomb early in 1880, killing many soldiers of the guards but missing the tsar. A small band of revolutionaries had caused a crisis in the state, too old-fashioned even after the reforms to operate effectively against the terrorists and too autocratic to command or even solicit universal support. This time, however, the government responded immediately. Alexander replaced the Third Section with a Department of Police under the Ministry of the Interior and established a Supreme Executive Commission under general Count Michael Loris-Melikov. Loris-Melikov, an Armenian who knew numerous European and Caucasian languages, had an excellent military record from the Caucasian wars, the Russo-Turkish War, and a recently successful administrative career. His plan was to fight the revolutionaries both by repression and a return to the reform process that had been stalled for nearly a decade. Thus liberal journalists dubbed his program “the dictatorship of the heart.” Soon Loris-Melikov moved up to head the Ministry of the Interior, and began to circulate plans for greater reform. By February 1881, he had constructed a plan for a consultative legislature based on the zemstvos to be called together to provide support for the state and to show society that the government was truly committed to reform. Perhaps Russia would change, but fate determined otherwise.

Narodnaia Volia had paid no attention to Loris-Melikov and the rumors of reform. In any case the prospect of reform did not cheer them, for it might help the government survive and further economic reform might damage the peasant commune. Narodnaia Volia’s Executive Committee under Alexander Zheliabov and Sofia Perovskaia put all its resources into killing the tsar, and on March 1, 1881, they succeeded. As Alexander was returning to the Winter Palace along the Catherine Canal in Petersburg, one of the revolutionaries threw a bomb at his carriage. Several of his guards and a fourteen-year-old boy were killed, many were wounded, and the tsar got out of the carriage to see what had happened. A second terrorist in the crowd threw another bomb at him, fatally wounding the tsar and killing himself. Alexander was carried to the Winter Palace with his legs blown off and soon died. The last words of the tsar who had freed the peasants, and, however haltingly, transformed Russia were, “it is cold, it is cold…take me to the Palace…to die.”

Now his son Alexander came to the throne as Alexander III, and after some initial discussion, any talk of reform or legislatures came to an end and Loris-Melikov lost his position. The assassins were publicly hanged. The educated classes were appalled that the revolutionaries had killed the tsar, while many of the peasants believed that it was a conspiracy of the nobles acting in revenge for the emancipation of the serfs. Another effect of the assassination was the first great wave of pogroms against the Jews in the Ukrainian provinces of southern Russia. It was a fitting beginning to more than a decade of conservative politics and attempts at counter-reform. Yet counter-reform ultimately achieved little. It was a tribute to the strength of the original reforms and their anchoring in law that most of them could not be undone. The zemstvos, for example, were continually harassed by the minions of the Ministry of the Interior, but they continued to exist and work. The new institutions had become part of the fabric of Russian society, whose increasing progress kept them alive. In spite of the use of censorship and forms of repression like administrative exile for liberals and radicals alike, the press flourished and expanded, providing a forum for the discussion of as much of the government’s policies as it could get away with. Alexander III’s autocracy could retard the development of Russian society, but could not stop it.