A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

15 Autocracy in Decline

The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to formulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism, political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the implications of the further modernization of society that resulted in part from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy.

Alexander III had become the heir to the throne in 1865 on the death of his older brother. Alexander was already twenty at the time and the product of a rather narrow military education unlike that provided for his brother. In 1866 he married Princess Dagmar of Denmark (Mariia Fedorovna after her conversion to Orthodoxy), leading to a stable marriage with a woman of intelligence and extremely conservative views. The young heir was no intellectual, but he did come in contact with Slavophile ideas at court and through his tutor in jurisprudence, Konstantin Pobedonostev. Through the guards and other aristocrats he became friends with the conservative publicist (and the most prominent gay in the St. Petersburg aristocracy), Prince V. M. Meshcherskii. These were highly principled radical conservatives, with nothing but contempt for freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government, all of which they saw as shams and likely to lead to revolution. In their view what was needed was the unity of society and the monarch, which they saw as the essence of autocracy. By the 1870s they formed a powerful opposition to the more liberal ministers around Alexander II, powerful largely because of their association with the heir. As part of his attempt at balanced government, Tsar Alexander II appointed Pobedonostsev head of the Synod, a position he held for the next twenty-four years. After Alexander III came to the throne, Pobedonostsev used his position at the Synod to retain constant access to the tsar, offering him advice on all sorts of subjects well beyond the ecclesiastical issues under his purview. In the eyes of liberal society and many government officials, he had far too much power and influence, all of it in a conservative direction. “Prince of Darkness” was one of his milder nicknames.

In reality Alexander listened to Pobedonostsev and Meshcherskii, but in his decisions usually went along with the ministers, conservative to be sure but unwilling to tear down the structure so carefully built up by the previous reign. Those structures still left many areas where the ministers and local administrators could act on their own discretion – in relations with the zemstvos, cases of administrative exile of liberals and socialists, and others. Here the tsar and his officials almost always chose the harsher and more authoritarian line. The 1881 “Temporary Regulations” were directed against the revolutionaries and allowed provincial governors to declare states of “reinforced security,” which allowed them to imprison subversives without trial, transfer security cases to military courts, and shut down universities and businesses. The regulations lasted until 1917. At the same time, few “counter-reforms” were actually enacted. University autonomy was further restricted, and the tsar issued a decree establishing noblemen as appointed “land captains” to monitor law enforcement in the villages. The decree did, as intended, reinforce the power of the gentry in the countryside, and other regulations tinkering with local administration strengthened the bureaucracy against the zemstvo, but none of these measures was a major change. In the cities the government eventually raised the property qualification for elections to the city Dumas and prohibited Jews from sitting in the Dumas but left the basic structure intact. The reactionary character of the reign of Alexander III lay in the absence of response to ongoing social and economic change rather than any concerted attempt to return to a previous era.

Part of the new reign was also increasingly shrill official nationalism, including official anti-semitism. Again this was more a change in tone than substance, for little in the way of new measures or policies appeared, but a more rigorous enforcement of discriminatory legislation against Jews, such as the restrictions on settlement beyond the confines of the Pale did appear. In 1887 the government introduced the formal quota for Jews at universities in addition to the new laws on city government. There were other occasional forays into Russification. The latter was often more declaratory than real, for the Russian empire lacked the resources to form a firm policy in this area. Proposals to substitute Russian-language for German-language schools in the Baltic provinces, a particular campaign of Russian nationalists at the time, failed because the Ministry of Education pointed out that it lacked the resources for either teachers or school buildings. Thus the schools in the Baltic provinces remained in local, that is to say German, hands. The continued prominence of German and other non-Russian aristocrats at the court, in the army, and diplomatic corps also put a very sharp limit to the amount of “Russianness” the government could claim or try to enforce.

It was in foreign and economic policy that the years of Alexander III brought the most changes. In the years after Crimea Prince Gorchakov had kept the country firmly in the traditional camp of friendship with Prussia, at the same time trying to ease the tension with Britain and France. In the latter he was only partially successful, and the ambiguous position of Bismarck’s Germany at the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 undermined the old alliance of Berlin and St. Petersburg. As Germany grew closer to Austria in the course of the 1880s, the relationship fell under even greater strain, for both Russia and Austria had designs on the Balkans. The competition between Russia and the two German powers led to the end of Russian influence in Bulgaria in 1886. The resultant cooling in Russo-German relations left Russia effectively isolated in Europe. The new Germany, however, had been built on victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and thus had in France an implacable enemy. Both Russia and France quickly recognized a common interest, and in 1893 the great republic and the autocracy of the east signed a treaty that made them allies against Germany. The political constellation that had lasted on the European continent since 1815 came to an end, and the first seed was sown that would lead to war in 1914. To this day the Alexander III Bridge in the center of Paris serves as a reminder of that fatal alliance.

The alliance was not yet, however, a trigger of war, for none of the potential enemies wanted it as yet. The dynastic ties between Berlin and St. Petersburg remained, and allowed both sides to retain the illusion that things might eventually work out. The respective armies, however, thought differently, for the Russian army had begun to rethink its western defenses starting in the 1870s, when Germany and Russia were still allies, and the German army also moved quickly to plan for a two-front war. For the time being, however, the attention of governments and societies was more focused on the Far East. Here two quite separate issues came together, Sergei Witte’s economic plans and the rise of Japan.

Sergei Witte was perhaps the last really dynamic and thoughtful statesman in the Russian Empire, a man with great plans and abilities as well as a giant ego, who never easily worked with others on an equal basis. Contemptuous of the other ministers of state – in large part justifiably – he formulated his plans with his staff and worked directly with the tsar. How he came to this position is a story in itself. Witte always claimed that his ancestors were Dutch and came to Russia through the Baltic provinces. In fact his grandfather was simply a middle-class Baltic German (perhaps with Dutch ancestry) who served as a tutor in Russian noble families. The young Witte finished Odessa University in natural science, not administrative law like most future officials. He also seems to have participated in a shadowy right-wing society called the “Union of St. Michael the Archangel,” but then went to work for the South Western Railway, a private railroad running between Odessa and Kiev. This gave him a sense of the workings of capitalist enterprise that few high Russian officials could duplicate. Alexander III first appointed him to the government’s railroad department and his rise was swift: by 1892 he was Minster of Finance at the age of forty-three, a notable achievement in an increasingly elderly government. Like earlier favorites of the tsar, his power rested entirely on the trust of the monarch, for Witte was too arrogant, too uncouth, and too unused to the subtleties of Petersburg politics to find allies among the ministers. He regarded most of them as timid incompetents, but failed to realize that without them he had only the tsar on whom to rely. With Alexander III on the throne, this attitude seemed sensible.

Witte’s great project was the Transsiberian Railroad, begun already in 1891. This enormous line of track, stretching across the whole of northern Asia, was to become in many ways his monument. Against many skeptics he pushed the project through, first with the support of Alexander III and then with that of his son Nicholas II. Witte’s plans were not merely to improve communications with the farthest point of the empire. A radical change was needed to be sure, for the only ways to get from European Russia to the Pacific were to go by horse and riverboat over several months, or to take a steamer from Odessa through the Suez Canal around India and China. Witte intended to develop Siberia, both for its natural resources and its potential as a settlement area to relieve the peasants’ hunger for land. At the same time he was aware that the European powers were carving up China into spheres of influence and he did not want Russia to miss acquiring its share. Thus the last leg of the new railroad’s route was to run from Lake Baikal through Manchuria to Vladivostok, leaving a line inside Russian territory for later. The aim was to take Manchuria as Russia’s share of China and a space for a new, more modern style of colonialism. Witte’s aim had been “peaceful penetration” of China for economic reasons, but the Russian military wanted a naval base, and in 1896 managed to lease Port Arthur, on the south coast of Manchuria, from China. Russia seemed to have a firm position in the Far East.

Figure 16. Count Sergei Witte, probably in New Hampshire for the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905.

The only problem with this brilliant plan was Japan. Exactly in the 1890s Japan was making its own first steps toward empire in Asia, with its defeat of China and increasing informal power in Korea. The presence of a Russian railroad, Harbin, and a naval base at Port Arthur was a serious irritant to the Japanese and a direct consequence of Witte’s policies. For the time being, however, peace remained, and Russia, Japan, and the European powers worked together to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900).

Figure 17. Tsar Nicholas II on the imperial yacht Shtandart.

In 1894 Alexander III died. Though his policies kept Russia from moving forward in almost all areas but industrialization and empire building, he was at least a firm leader capable of making difficult decisions, as Witte recognized. His son, Nicholas II, was a man of very different character. He utterly lacked his father’s ability to take charge and make use of his ministers. Alexander had gone along with them on most occasions but had also been willing to accept a minority view and support it. Nicholas often simply agreed with whoever spoke to him last, and then changed his mind again. He shared his father’s views of the worthlessness of legislatures, freedom of speech, and human rights and tended to see the hidden hand of the Jews in liberalism and socialism. Had he not been the tsar, he would have made an ideal conservative country gentleman, for he was also gracious, kind, and a good family man. His wife Alexandra, the German princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, encouraged all these characteristics, as she was equally conservative and equally devoted to her family.

Unfortunately Alexandra’s devotion to her family and her limited horizons were not helpful in dealing with the hemophilia that her son, the heir to the throne Alexei, had from birth. Her response was to turn to a series of faith healers, each one more influential than the last. To top it off, the fully justified fear of terrorists increased the isolation of Nicholas and his family, in turn making it even harder for them to understand what was happening around them. The endless round of trips to the Crimea and elsewhere, the occasional court entertainments and family excursions on the imperial yacht did not leave much space for contact with the people. The only public appearances were carefully staged, often as part of religious ceremonies, which gave both tsar and people an utterly false sense of the country’s needs and public opinion.

At first, however, everything went well. Nicholas was a great enthusiast for the Far East and its development and supported Witte to the hilt. He even supported the Minister’s controversial placing of Russia on the gold standard in 1897, a measure designed to encourage investment and industrialization but a decision that was not necessarily good for the agrarian interests that the nobility defended. After 1900 the tsar’s support for Witte began to erode. The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve, a career official and powerful personality, to head the Ministry of the Interior gave Witte a strong rival, and by the middle of 1903 Nicholas had removed the Minister of Finance from office. Plehve’s only solution to Russia’s problems was more repression, both of revolutionaries and middle and upper class liberals.

All of these opposition groups rapidly grew and consolidated in the 1890s. The first to organize were the Marxists, who rejected terror in favor of organizing workers to strike and fight employers and the state in collective action. The Marxists who managed to meet and adopt a general program in 1898 were then immediately arrested and the various Marxist groups did not come together again until 1903. When they met in London that year a new figure came to the fore, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University with experience in the underground and exile. This was Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, whose revolutionary pseudonym was Lenin. The son of a high school science teacher and inspector of public schools in Simbirsk on the Volga, Lenin had gone from Siberian exile to Western Europe to edit a socialist journal, Iskra (Spark), through which he and Marxism acquired a following among the students and few workers who were the seedbed of the revolutionary movement. At the congress in London the party was refounded with a more elaborate program and structure, and the first disagreements broke out. The aim of the Marxists was to overthrow the tsar and establish a democratic republic (a “bourgeois revolution”). That is to say, they believed that until this task was completed, they should not try for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the introduction of socialism. The enemy for now was the tsar. Thus they would be operating under the autocracy, continuously at war with the police, and Lenin believed that the party should be primarily an underground movement of professional revolutionaries. His opponents, with their most accomplished leader Iulii Martov, thought that Lenin was exaggerating the need to concentrate on the underground struggle and wanted a looser party. In the vote on the question Lenin won by a narrow majority, and his followers thus acquired the name Bolsheviks (bol’she meaning “more”) and Martov’s followers Mensheviks (men’she meaning “less”). This dispute did not yet engage the few worker activists, and remained the province of the party’s intelligentsia. For that is what the leaders were in these early years. Martov’s father was a prosperous Jewish businessman and journalist in the Russian-language Jewish press, and he himself attended the gymnasia in St. Petersburg and had a year at the university before he was arrested for revolutionary activity. Trotsky came from a family of Jewish farmers, the descendents of settlers in New Russia from the time of Alexander I. The graduate of an elite Lutheran high school in Odessa, Leon Trotsky, like Lenin and Martov, was typical of the early revolutionary leaders.

The Marxists were not the only political group to form. In 1901 the revolutionary groups who looked back to the old populist tradition of the 1870s came together to form the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. They continued to believe that capitalism was an artificial transplant on peasant Russia, and in theory would concentrate their efforts on the villages. In practice they found the peasants hard to organize, and most of their followers were in the urban factories. The SRs, as they were called, also absorbed some Marxist ideas to produce an eclectic ideology no less appealing for its lack of consistency. They also continued to believe that terror against government officials was a useful tool, and alongside the SR party agitators in the factories the Fighting Organization waged a relentless war against the government with a series of spectacular assassinations. The police naturally concentrated most of its attention on this group, and from 1903 to 1908 the head of the Fighting Organization was a police agent named Evno Azef.

The last to form an organization, not surprisingly, were the liberals. Their appearance on the political scene was part of the larger ferment in middle and upper class Russia that grew rapidly toward the end of the century. Since the 1860s innumerable professional groups and societies had come into existence, organizations of chemists and engineers, doctors and agronomists. The businessmen were particularly active in forming lobby groups to pressure for favorable economic policies, protective tariffs, and a more modern (and friendly to business) legal framework for their activity. The business groups were not merely groups of manufacturers or bankers dealing privately with the government, they met in conventions, using the great Nizhnii Novgorod fair and the many exhibitions as fora for public discussion of their needs. The newspapers reported extensively on these meetings, which addressed Russia’s many needs but studiously avoided constitutional issues. Many of these organizations were initially supported or even created by the Ministry of Finance as a measure to encourage progress, and the members were mostly intensely loyal in their politics. In the course of time, however, business and other organizations broadened the discussion of social and economic issues, expressing the frustration of these levels of society with a government that they increasingly perceived as too conservative and too slow to respond to the needs of a changing society.

Some of the liberal leaders in the intelligentsia and the gentry began to think that time had come to organize in a more political fashion. For decades they had hoped that the zemstvos would evolve into a system of representation of the public or that new, more liberal measures would come from the government that would replace arbitrariness with basic rights and consultation of the people in some form. None of this transpired, but the zemstvos did provide a forum in which many liberal noblemen and others learned to deal with the innumerable local issues that gave them experience with public life and with the government’s unwillingness to share power to any large extent. By 1901 they had given up, for the government refused to budge, and a small group of liberal activists formed an underground group, the Union of Liberation. Opposed to terror and revolutionary methods, they decided that only an illegal group could get beyond specific issues and conduct the needed discussion and supplement publications smuggled in from abroad.

By 1904 networks of activists of varying persuasions covered the Russian interior’s major cities, and on the western and southern fringes nationalist and socialist groups among the Poles, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, and others added another dimension of instability. Then on January 27 (February 9), 1904, the Japanese navy attacked the Russian base at Port Arthur and sank most of the Russian squadron. Russia was now at war with Japan on the other side of the globe from St. Petersburg. The only line of communication was the Transsiberian Railroad, much of it still a single track and not all of it completed. The Russian army, far from its bases and lumbered with elderly generals, suffered a series of further defeats through the year. In July an SR terrorist assassinated Plehve, and Nicholas appointed the more tolerant Prince Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii in his place. The appointment came unexpectedly and in large part was owed to the efforts of Nicholas’s mother, the dowager Empress Maria. At the same time as Sviatopolk-Mirskii seemed to move toward some mildly liberal measures, another crisis was brewing in St. Petersburg.

The police in the capitals had long been frustrated by the success of the Social Democrats and the SRs among the workers of the city. In spite of continuous arrests they seemed to be making modest progress and alarmed the authorities by their dogged persistence and the readiness of workers to listen to them. Then the head of the political police for Moscow, Sergei Zubatov, had the idea of building a labor union controlled by the police. It would provide some modest social services to the workers to alleviate their conditions while inculcating in them loyalty to the Orthodox Church and the tsar. In St. Petersburg the leader of the union was father Georgii Gapon, who quickly came to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the workers and pose a serious threat to the revolutionaries. Thus when a spontaneous strike broke out at the huge Putilov machine works on the southern fringe of the city, Gapon was in a dilemma. The policy of the police unions was to oppose strikes (seen simply as violations of public order in Russian law), but if he chose that path he knew he would lose the support of the workers to the radicals. He chose to go along with the strike but conceived the idea that the workers should present their grievances to the tsar himself. Gapon assumed that the tsar would listen and do something, which would appease the workers and settle the strike. As the workers approached the Winter Palace in the snow on January 9/22, 1905, the response of the government, nervous about the unrest in the city, was to line up soldiers in front of the palace and order them to open fire on the unarmed crowd. Over a hundred were killed and many more wounded.

Within a few days workers all over the country, from Poland to Siberia, went out on strike by the hundreds of thousands. These were spontaneous movements with no unions, no strike pay, and virtually no leadership. The police union was immediately discredited, and the revolutionary parties were swamped, as they had only a few thousand activists in the whole country.

The Revolution of 1905 that ensued was an extraordinarily complex event. The urban strike movement was enormous, especially considering the lack of experience at such actions on the part of almost all workers, and the inadequacy of organizational structures. In the villages for the first time peasant unrest became widespread enough to provoke massive campaigns of military repression, even if SRs and others still found it extremely difficult to actually organize the peasants. Most of the non-Russian areas experienced the same upheavals as the interior of the country, with nationalist or socialist forces predominant in different areas at different times. The liberal middle classes generally supported all these upheavals, if only passively, and solidly blamed the government for the bloodshed. The government found itself extremely isolated, though Tsar Nicholas tried to hold on to the fantasy of the loyal peasantry corrupted by the intelligentsia and the Jews.

To complicate everything, the war with Japan continued and went from bad to worse. In the spring the Japanese inflicted a major defeat on the Russian army at Mukden. To replace the lost Far Eastern squadron, the navy sent the Baltic Fleet on an epic voyage around Africa and Southern Asia to the theater of operations. There it encountered the Japanese navy at Tsushima in May 1905, and was almost entirely destroyed. At this point, Nicholas and his government realized that they had no option but to make peace, and with Theodore Roosevelt as intermediary, the peace was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 23 (September 2), 1905. Russia lost the base at Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, but kept its Manchurian railroad and its buildings in Harbin.

These events took place against a background of rapidly growing unrest. In the spring nearly a million workers struck for greater or lesser times in St. Petersburg alone. Some of these were political strikes, but most were about wages and particularly about condescending and rude treatment at the hands of the factory administrations. Peasant seizure of land and attacks on the houses of the nobility reached a peak over the summer and spread throughout central Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Caucasus. In Georgia whole areas were out of control of the government, and bandits flourished alongside peasant rebels. Starting in Baku, Armenians and Azeris attacked one another, killing thousands. In the Baltics the ethnic antagonism of German landlords and Latvian and Estonian peasants added extra viciousness to the violence, and Russian Cossacks were put in the position of defending Baltic German nobles. The high point of the summer of 1905 was the mutiny of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin, later immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s film. The sailors demanded better conditions and an end to autocracy, supporting strikers in Odessa before they sailed off to internment in Rumania. This and other military mutinies, continuing into 1906, kept the government at bay.

In August Nicholas, under pressure from his government and his mother, issued a manifesto conceding a representative legislature, but with very limited powers. The manifesto had no effect, and in the autumn the strike movement in the cities resumed with even greater force. In October the strikes turned into a general strike, now a political strike directed against autocracy with calls for a democratic republic. In the absence of other organizations, the St. Petersburg workers began to form councils (in Russian, soviets) at the factory level and then came together to form a city soviet. The Social Democrats were dubious about the soviets at first, but the Mensheviks realized their potential. The most vigorous leader in the St. Petersburg soviet of workers’ deputies was Leon Trotsky, a vivid and powerful orator and one of the main leaders of the Mensheviks. Lenin and his followers quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Finally on October 17/30 the tsar conceded that Russia would have to have a representative legislature, to be called the Duma, and some sort of constitution. The general strike came to an end, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to keep pushing the revolution farther. The result was an insurrection in the factory districts in the west of Moscow in December 1905, suppressed with considerable force by the army and police.

The October Manifesto changed Russian politics completely, perhaps more so than Nicholas had intended. Witte now came back to power in the new office of Prime Minister. Liberal and conservative groups began to form parties, and some of the revolutionaries came at least partially out of the underground. The new parties founded newspapers and enrolled members, preparing for the elections. The beginnings of mass politics brought more sinister forces as well in the form of the Union of the Russian People and many lesser groups of the same type. These were the “Black Hundreds,” devoted to autocracy and Orthodoxy and proclaiming the Jews the source of all of Russia’s problems. Intensely nationalistic, they opposed equality for all the national minorities, but singled out the Jews for bloody pogroms which they believed would put an end to revolution, in their mind the work of the Poles and the intelligentsia, but most of all the Jews. Two Jewish deputies to the Duma fell victim to their terror as well as hundreds in the pogroms. At least four hundred Jews died in the Odessa pogrom alone. While ineffective at combating revolution, the Black Hundreds added another element of violence and chaos to Russian politics.

The government had promised Russia a constitution, and Witte and the ministers produced one that the tsar would agree to. This was Russia’s first constitution, the Fundamental Laws, written by Witte and other government officials and proclaimed on the opening day of the new Duma – April 27, 1906. In the new structure, the Duma was to pass laws, and if the Council of State agreed, they were sent to the tsar for his approval, without which they were not valid. The Council of State became an upper house, appointed by the tsar mainly from the great dignitaries of the state but with some representatives of the nobility, businessmen, and the universities. Rather inconsistently the document proclaimed the tsar an autocrat, but he now had to make laws through the Duma. His power remained predominant, for the Fundamental Laws reserved to the tsar foreign policy, the power to make war and peace, command of the army, and all administrative appointments. For the first time the tsar had something like a cabinet with a prime minister (Witte at first), but the ministers were all responsible to the tsar, not to the Duma.

This was a highly conservative constitution, though not as odd in the Europe of 1906 as it later seemed. The concentration of military and foreign policy power in the hands of the monarch was also a feature of the German and Austrian constitutions, and even in Sweden the ministers were still responsible to the king, not the parliament. What made the Russian system more distinctive was the failure of the cabinet to emerge as a united force (results depended on personalities) and the complex system of electoral franchise for the Duma. The Duma was elected not simply from regions or with property qualifications for voting, but by a complex of regional districts, indirect voting, and the curial system. For each social group (peasants, townspeople, workers, nobles) there was a curia, and the voters cast their ballots within a curia. Still believing in the loyalty of the peasantry and its social conservatism, the elections to the first Duma that took place in winter 1905–06 were based on a distribution of seats that favored the peasantry. Nicholas was convinced that only the upper and middle classes opposed autocracy, but the peasants were on his side.

The outcome of the elections presented the government with a Duma that was impossible to work with. Boycotts by the revolutionary parties meant that the liberals, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats, officially the Party of Popular Freedom), were the largest party in the Duma, while the peasants, only slowly moving into parties, were the largest group. For the Kadets, the government’s concessions to constitutionalism were far too small, and the peasant deputies surprised everyone by voting for any measure that would give them land. Many did express loyalty to the tsar, but they also wanted the land, something Nicholas and Witte had not bargained on. Nicholas dissolved the Duma in July, hoping new elections would prove more favorable. Witte resigned, and his replacement was Petr Stolypin, a former provincial governor with a reputation for crushing rebellion but also for an interest in reform. The first sign of the latter was the law he sponsored in the fall of 1906 allowing peasants to leave the village community and set up independent farms.

The strike movement and the rural disturbances gradually died down in the course of late 1906. Stolypin sent out punitive battalions into the countryside to repress peasant rebels, with executions carried out on the spot. The elections to the second Duma, however, did not produce the results that Stolypin and the government hoped for. If anything, the new Duma was even more radical than the first. The peasant deputies were now organized into the “Labor Group” that demanded all land for the peasantry. Finally on June 3, 1907, Stolypin dissolved the Duma, and there was virtually no reaction from the public. The revolution had spent its force.

The 1905 Revolution had been a bloody affair, with some fifteen thousand killed, most of them peasants executed or simply killed during government reprisals in the countryside. Several thousand revolutionaries were also executed, and many workers perished in conflicts over strikes or in the various insurrections. Some landowners in the countryside suffered as well, and much property was destroyed. In late 1905 an “All-Russian Peasant Union” had come into existence, which enrolled several hundred thousand members and demanded the surrender of all the land to the peasantry. The Union tried to avoid violent tactics, but its members grew increasingly radical into 1906 and allied with the Labor Group in the Duma. The Peasant Union too was suppressed. The most important outcome was the radical change in Russian politics. The virtual disappearance of censorship and the elections to the Duma and its debates took politics from the halls of the court and the offices of the bureaucracy into the public, even into the streets for the duration of the revolution. Whole social classes began to think differently: the nobility stopped flirting with liberalism and quickly united behind slogans of autocracy, nationalism, and preservation of the social order. The urban middle and working classes lost their passivity and began to participate in political action and to support some of the more radical parties. The businessmen formed small parties of their own and lobby groups, the peasantry heard the speeches of the Peasant Union activists and the SRs, and learned to vote for its interests in the land issue. The various national minorities now had active political parties: in Georgia the Mensheviks combined socialism with nationalism to become the far and away strongest force. In Latvia the Social Democrats allied with the Bolsheviks and dominated the labor movement. In Poland all the political parties came out into the open, and the National Democrats competed with some success against socialist groups for the allegiance of the workers. Among the Muslim peoples of the empire, the progressive intelligentsia put up candidates for the Duma and won, going on to form a Muslim Duma group that united Tatars, Bashkirs, Crimeans, Azeris, and North Caucasus mountaineers to press for equal status. Like many of the autonomist groups, they allied with the Russian Kadets and participated actively in Duma debates.

However much power the tsar and his ministers retained – and it was considerable – they now had to contend with a wholly new political situation, and few of them, Nicholas least of all, were prepared for it.

The next seven years after the dissolution of the second Duma were Russia’s only peacetime experiment in constitutional government with an open press and active public organizations. The fate of the country depended on the ability of Stolypin and others to deal with this new reality. Stolypin’s repression of the revolution met with apparent success: hundreds of activists were executed, especially from the SR terrorist group, and all radical parties lost members in droves to prison, exile, disillusionment, and simple exhaustion. The dissolution of the Duma in 1907 went along with a new, even more indirect and undemocratic electoral system. Some fifty percent of the seats in the new Duma went to the nobility, while the representation of peasants was radically cut, as were the number of seats assigned to the national minority areas in the south and west. The new Duma was overwhelmingly noble, Russian, and very conservative. Most nobles and many businessmen supported the Octobrist party (so-called in their support of the tsar’s October Manifesto), but there was also an extreme right, mostly noblemen, that included leaders of the Black Hundreds. Stolpyin seemed to have a perfect situation in which to carry out his modest reforms, maintain the power of tsar and government, and move toward a more Russian nationalistic policy in the empire. In fact he accomplished little beyond his agrarian program, which proved to be of limited effect. The result of the endless bargaining of Prime Minister and Duma was only to drive a wedge between him and the upper classes. His reforms were too radical for the nobles and yet not strong enough to placate society and the liberals in the Duma. The climax was his 1911 plan to introduce the zemstvo into the western provinces, areas where nobles were predominantly Polish. In order to stack the zemstvo boards against the Poles, Stolypin proposed to increase the number of peasant deputies, Ukrainians and Belorussians whom Stolypin saw as more loyal to the tsar than Polish nobles. At the same time, the zemstvo would relieve the administrative burden on the state and hopefully placate the liberals. In the event, the scheme was too clever to succeed. He managed to get it through the Duma only to have it fail in the Council of State. Stolypin resigned in protest, knowing that Nicholas thought him indispensable. The tsar begged him to return, but Stolypin would not agree unless Nicholas removed some of the extreme conservatives from the government, prorogued the Duma, and enacted the western zemstvo bill by his emergency powers. The tsar agreed, but the incident confirmed his growing suspicion that Stolypin’s plans were too far reaching, and he was too powerful and not trustworthy. Before their disagreements reached a crisis, an SR terrorist assassinated Stolypin in September at a performance in the Kiev opera house.

With Stolypin gone, the tsar turned to lesser figures to run the government. He particularly disliked the institution of a prime minister, and appointed to the office men who would not dominate the cabinet. The result was drift. None of the problems facing Russian society were addressed, and the government was increasingly isolated. In educated society the perception grew, even among conservatives, that the tsar and government did not understand the country and lived in a world of their own. No major issues were addressed, and government measures achieved neither reform nor successful repression. Attempts to use nationalism and anti-semitism to garner popular support backfired. In 1911 the investigation of a murder in Kiev led to accusations of ritual murder against Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish supervisor in a brick factory. The Ministry of Justice in Petersburg and the police “organized” a trial and pamphlets appeared about ritual murder and other supposed crimes of the Jews. Russia, however, now had a relatively free press and the liberal dailies mounted a furious counter campaign. Passions were so inflamed among the intelligentsia that the performance of a play based on the works of Dostoyevsky was shut down in St. Petersburg, on the grounds that the great writer’s anti-semitic nationalism gave support to the prosecution. The trial took place in the fall of 1913 in a regular criminal court in Kiev. The jury remained unconvinced by the prosecution’s evidence and acquitted Beiliss. The result was a major humiliation for the government.

To top it all off, the presence of Grigorii Rasputin at the court added an element of the grotesque to an already bad atmosphere. Rasputin was a wandering monk from Siberia who was introduced into the court at the end of 1905. Empress Alexandra had always been interested in faith healing and hoped that he could help her son, the heir Aleksei. She soon came to believe that Rasputin alone could stop the bleeding. Rasputin thus had unlimited access to the imperial family, in spite of his heterodox religious views and stories (largely true) of drinking bouts and womanizing. The security police set up a whole detachment to watch the monk with the purpose of stopping the rumors as they discredited the tsar and his wife. Rasputin was a real concern to the monarchists and conservatives in the government and Duma and they managed to bring the issue to the floor of the assembly, in the process enraging the tsar. He never realized that they were trying to save the prestige of the throne and instead interpreted their acts as disloyalty. Rasputin, rumors aside, had no political effect that can be traced, but his presence and the real and exaggerated stories further undermined the monarchy.

If the liberals and conservatives in the Duma, for all their frustrations, found in the new order a vast arena for political activity, the revolutionary parties were demoralized, losing thousands of members, especially from the intelligentsia. The leadership went into exile in the West, spending their time trying to keep the movement alive. The movements fissured: Trotsky abandoned the main Menshevik movement and founded his own newspaper in Vienna, commenting from cafés on world politics. The Bolsheviks were particularly contentious, torn by philosophical disputes as well as party tactics and organization. Lenin wrote an entire book denouncing the attempt of some Bolshevik intellectuals to integrate the epistemology of the German physicist Ernst Mach into Marxism. Only around 1912 did the various factions coalesce into organized parties and reestablish a network in Russia. For the Bolshevik party the moment came that year at a conference in Prague that finally consolidated the Bolshevik structure and program, reaffirming Lenin’s belief in the need for an underground party. The Prague conference also marked the beginnings of a generational shift among the Bolsheviks, for the intelligentsia leadership of Lenin’s youth gradually gave way to a younger group that was more plebeian (if not exactly proletarian). They usually lacked university education but were experienced in the ways of the underground and used to making contact with the workers in continuous struggle with the police. One of these was a Georgian Bolshevik, Soso Djugashvili, known as Koba – a shoemaker’s son from the Caucasus. As he made his mark on the movement throughout Russia, he took a new revolutionary pseudonym, Stalin. As Joseph Stalin he would be known to history.

During the time that Stolypin was struggling to control the Duma, the formation of political blocs in Europe continued. Nicholas and the Kaiser repeatedly tried for a rapprochement, but the attempts came to nothing. In 1907 Russia and Britain signed a treaty dividing up spheres of influence in Iran, thus eliminating a major object of their imperial rivalry. The result was not exactly an alliance, but it did put an end to the decades old “Cold War,” and in the presence of an Anglo-French agreement, meant that Russia, with Britain and France, now faced Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were plenty of areas of conflict, the most important being the Balkans. Russia had allied with Serbia, which stood right in the path of any Austrian or German expansion in that area, and both had great ambitions focused on the Ottoman Empire. Germany hoped to make the Turks semi-allies and semi-dependents in their larger rivalry with Great Britain. In 1909 Austria, with German backing, humiliated Russia by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, since 1878 an Austrian protectorate. A series of local wars in the Balkans added to the growing tension. Then in June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, made a tour of the new Bosnian province. As his motorcade proceeded along the narrow street by the river at Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, stepped out from the crowd with a revolver and shot him dead. For Russia as for the rest of Europe, it was a fatal shot.