Reform, war and revolution in Russian empire from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 2

The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?

LARISA ZAKHARQYA

The abolition of serfdom in 1861, under Alexander II, and the reforms which followed (local government reforms, the judicial reform, the abolition of cor­poral punishment, the reform of the military, public education, censorship and others), were a 'watershed', 'a turning point' in the history of Russia. This is the verdict of the reformers themselves and their opponents, people who lived at the time in Russia as well as beyond its borders, and many researchers. This theme remains crucial for historians. But in particular periods such as during the 1905 Revolution or Gorbachev's perestroika, interest in the his­tory of Alexander II's reforms has acquired a particular topicality and political colouring. At such times instead of the already established term 'the Great Reforms', new terminology emerges particularly in the academic literature for wider audiences such as 'revolution from above', 'a revolutionary break with the past' and 'coup d'etat'.¹

However, mainstream scholarship still accepts the more subtle term 'the Great Reforms'.² If the question of the suitability of the term for designating this epoch is unlikely to evoke serious doubts and disagreements, that is not true of the issues raised in the title of this chapter as well as others (includ­ing the personal role of Alexander II in the realisation of the reforms, the interconnection among them, their subsequent fate), on which there is no consensus in the academic literature. It is sufficient to refer to contemporary Western and Russian research whose authors consider the boundary between 'the pre-reforms' of Nicholas I, 'the Great Reforms' of Alexander II and the

1 N. Ia. Eidelman,'Revoliutsiiasverkhu' vRossii (Moscow: Kniga, 1989); T. Emmons, '"Revoli- utsiiasverkhu" vRossii: razmyshleniia o knige N. Eidelmanaiodrugom',in Vrazdum'iakh o Rossii (XIX vek) (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1996), pp. 365-6; B. G. Litvak, Perevorot 1861 goda v Rossii: pochemu ne realizovalas' reformatorskaia al'ternativa (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991).

2 L. G. Zakharova, B. EklofandJ. Bushnell(eds.), VelikiereformivRossii, 1856-1874 (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1992), American version: B. Eklof, J. Bushnell and L. Zakharova (eds.), Russia's GreatReforms, 1855-1881 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Both books were based on the papers presented at an international conference at Pennsylvania University.

'counter-reforms' of Alexander III relative and even artificial. They present the whole process of reforms as an unbroken continuum spanning the entire nineteenth century.[1] This approach contradicts the other, more traditional one, which views the epoch of the Great Reforms as delimited on the one side by the failure of the Nicholas system with the conclusion of the unsuccessful Crimean War and on the other by the tragic end of the Tsar-liberator on 1 March 1881. There is no doubt that this subject demands further attention and additional research. In this chapter, I will attempt to give my own view of the complex, contested questions that to date remain inadequately addressed in the historiography of the period.

The reasons and preconditions for the abolition of serfdom

Tsar Alexander II himself was the initiator of the transformations in Russia. The question as to what induced the autocratic monarchy to abolish serf­dom, which had been its foundation-stone for centuries, has been sufficiently elucidated in the literature. The defeat in the Crimean War (1853-6), which interrupted the one-and-a-half-century-long victorious advance to the Black Sea and was incurred on home territory; the surrender of Sebastopol; the conditions of the Peace of Paris of 18 (30) March 1856, which deprived Russia of its fleet and naval bases on the Black Sea and parts of Bessarabia and shed doubt on Russia's prestige as a great power: all these things exposed the extent to which Russia was lagging behind other European countries. The outdated equipment and system of recruitment for the army, the absence of a railway network and telegraph communications with the south of the country (dis­patches from military leaders from the Crimea to the Winter Palace took seven and a half days by courier, whereas telegraph communications about the siege of Sebastopol were coming from Paris, the enemy capital) as well as many other indicators of the country's backwardness left little doubt as to the need for change. 'Sevastopol had an impact on stultified minds.' This pithy expression of V O. Kliuchevskii referred to every layer of Russian society, including the gov­ernment. 'The former system had outlived its time' - this was the judgement of one of the former apologists of this system, the historian M. P. Pogodin.[2]

Alexander II, who ascended to the throne on 19 February 1855 inherited a difficult legacy.

Later, soon after the abolition of serfdom, the minister of finance M. Kh. Reutern wrote in a report to the tsar: 'If the government after the Crimean War had wished to return to the traditions of the past, it would have encountered insurmountable obstacles, if not openly, then at the very least in the form of passive opposition, which over time may even have shaken the loyalty of the people - the broad foundation, on which the monarchical principle is based in Russia.'⁵ But even earlier, in 1856, N. A. Miliutin, the main author of the Great Reforms, acknowledged in a memorandum that the further preservation of serfdom and continued delay of the reforms could lead to an uprising of the peasantry within fifteen years.⁶ The explanation for the abolition of serfdom as a response to the rise in peasant disturbances, which dominated Soviet historiography, has now been superseded. In the Western literature, the concept of 'a revolutionary situation' and of the decisive role played by actions taken by the peasantry, which supposedly forced the government to undertake reforms, has been convincingly criticised in the work of Daniel Field, Terence Emmons and Dietrich Beyrau, all of whom spent time at Moscow University under P. A. Zaionchkovskii in the 1960s and 1970s.⁷

Alexander II embarked on the emancipation reforms not because he was a reformer in principle but as a military man who recognised the lessons of the Crimean War, and as an emperor for whom the prestige and greatness of the state took precedence over everything. Particular aspects of his character played a significant role, including his kindness, warmth and receptivity to humane ideas and the effects of his education under the guidance of V A. Zhukovskii. A. F. Tiutcheva aptly defined this characteristic in Alexander II's nature: 'The instinct of progress was in his heart.' Not a reformer by calling or temperament, Alexander II became a reformer in response to the demands of the time. His character, upbringing and world outlook equipped him with a sufficient understanding of the given situation to take non-traditional decisions. He lacked fanaticism or a rigid conception ofpolitics and this allowed him to pursue new and radical paths, though still within the framework of the

5 RGIA, Fond 560, op. 14, d. 284,1.1.

6 GARF, Fond. 722, op. 1, d. 230, ll. 1-22.

7 D. Field, TheReforms ofthe 1860s: Windows ofthe RussianPast. Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 89-104; T. Emmons, 'The Peasant and Emancipation', in W. Vucinich, The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 41-71; D. Beyrau, Agrarnaia struktura i krest'iianskii protest:k usloviiam osvobozhdeniiakrest'iianv 1861 godu: Noveishie podkhodykizucheniiu istorii Rossii i SSSR v sovremennoi zapadnoevropeiskoi istoriografii (Yaroslavl: Izd. Iaroslavskogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, 1997), pp. 3-51.

autocratic-monarchical system and while remaining true to his predecessors' traditions.

Speaking in Moscow in front of the leaders of the nobility shortly after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1856, the tsar said: 'There are rumours that I want to announce the emancipation of the peasants. I will not say to you that I am completely against this. We live in such an age that this has to happen in time. I think that you agree with me. Therefore, it is much better that this business be carried out from above, rather than from below.'[3]This short speech tells us much that is important in the history of the 1861 reforms: about the fact that the initiative came from Alexander II himself; that he imposed his will on the nobility; that he recognised the necessity to forestall the initiative of the peasantry, and that he took into account the overall trends of the century. Subsequent events show that Alexander II did not step back from this first declaration about the abolition of serfdom. Some years later in a rather didactic tone he wrote to Napoleon III: 'the true condition of peace in the world lies not in inactivity, which is impossible, and not in dubious political manoeuvrings . . . , but in practical wisdom, which is necessary in order to reconcile history, this unshakeable behest of the past, with progress - the law of the present and the future.[4] These words affirm Alexander II's confidence in the correctness of the course undertaken by him to transform Russia, as do many of his handwritten letters to his brother, the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, and to his viceroy in the Caucasus and friend Prince A. I. Bariatinskii.[5] In general the role of Alexander II in the Great Reforms has not been sufficiently explored in the literature.

What were the preconditions of the reform? There is no single opinion on the objective socioeconomic preconditions for the emancipation of the serfs. Soviet historians wrote about the crisis of the feudal-serf system. The majority ofWestern historians (following P. Struve and A. Gershchenkron) have come to the conclusion that serfdom as an economic system was still fully viable on the eve of the 1861 reforms.[6] This problem clearly needs further research bringing to bear data on macro- and micro-socioeconomic development during the pre-reform decades. The effects of the banking crisis at the end of the 1850s on the preparation of the reforms has been convincingly and comprehensively studied in the works of Steven Hoch.[7]

The question of the economic goals and perceptions of the reformers them­selves has been illuminated well in the work of Olga Crisp, A. Skerpan and Bruce Lincoln. Economic liberalism and the recognition of the role of private initiative in the development of the economy formed the core of their views. In this light the assertion that the liberal bureaucracy was not aware of the realities of the Russian situation and was only copying the experience of the West looks highly dubious. Rather it can be said that the key reformers took into account the experience of Europe but acted in the awareness of Russian realities and traditions, with which they were very well acquainted. Above all this concerns the Statutes of 19 February. For example, already at the begin­ning of the 1840s Nikolai Miliutin and A. P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii carried out detailed on-the-spot studies of serf estates. With this same aim in mind, in the summer of i860 A.V Golovnin was sent with Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich to the central provinces. Before he wrote his 1855 memorandum on the emancipation of the peasants, K. D. Kavelin had direct experience with serf-based agriculture.

On the whole, thanks primarily to the work of Bruce Lincoln, it is now clear that a key precondition of the Great Reforms was the existence of cadres, people who were prepared to take upon themselves the massive work of the transformation of Russia, a project which their predecessors in the first half of the nineteenth century had tried to embark on but had not managed. This stratum of progressive, educated people, united in their common views about the forthcoming transformations and the methods for carrying them out, began to take shape in the heart ofthe bureaucratic apparatus during the reign of Nicholas I in the 1830s and especially in the 1840s. It was characterised by the practically identical conceptions of the 'liberal' or 'enlightened' bureaucracy.[8]Certain ministries (state domains, internal affairs, justice and navy) and the State Chancellery formed its core. The liberal bureaucracy was not shut off from society: it co-operated closely with liberal public figures, academics and writers. These links were maintained through personal contacts, interactions in groups and in fashionable salons (especially the salon of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna). Iu. F. Samarin, K. D. Kavelin, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, P. N. Mel'nikov (Pecherskii), V I. Dal' and others were members of the bureaucracy at different times. This collaboration of civil servants (among whom Dmitrii and Nikolai Miliutin stood out particularly) and social and academic figures found an outlet in the Russian Geographical Society which was set up in 1845 under the chairmanship of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich. Terence Emmons, a leading expert on the 1861 peasant reform, is convinced that the 'bureaucratic "third element"', which had formed during Nicholas's reign 'can undoubtedly be considered one of the preconditions of the i860 reforms'.[9]Although the study of the enlightened bureaucracy in Russian historiography has far from been exhausted, there is no doubt about the pivotal role it played in the transformations.

Another such precondition was the institutional reforms which were carried out in the reign of Alexander I, including the creation of ministries in which the cadres of the future reformers were trained. It is also important to note the significance ofthe legacy of M. M. Speranskii. He put large-scale reforms of the state system on the agenda during the reign of Alexander I and during the subsequent reign ordered and codified legislation by producing the Com­plete Collection of Laws (Pol'noe sobranie zakonov) and the Code of Laws of

the Russian Empire (Svod zakonov). He also did his bit in the education of

the future Tsar-liberator (for a year and half Speranskii gave the heir to the throne lectures on law). In addition, the educational reforms in the first half ofthe nineteenth century created the institutions (universities, School of Law, Tsarskoe Selo Lycee) from which many of the key reformers graduated.[10]

Among the preconditions for the abolition of serfdom, the accumulated experience of discussion and decision-making regarding the peasant problem in the first half ofthe nineteenth century also played a significant role. The Decree of 1803 on 'Free Agriculturalists' and of 1842 on 'Obligated Peasants', which were not binding on landowners and as a result had little effect, nevertheless meant that ideas about emancipation linked to land-redemption and about the unbreakable link of the peasant with the land had been affirmed in legislation. Local reforms also created models: the abolition of serfdom in the Baltic provinces (Livonia, Kurland and Estonia) in 1816-19 and the introduction of inventories in the south-west of the country (in Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia) in 1847-8 were obligatory for landowners and provided two models for the solution of the peasant problem which would be taken into account at the time of the preparation of the abolition of serfdom. The reform of the state peasantry, carried out by P. D. Kiselev in 1837 created the model of peasant self-government. The materials from the Secret Committees (particularly of 1835 and 1839), which in 1856 were transferred from the II Department of the Emperor's Personal Chancellery to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where the preparation of the emancipation of the serfs was started, also received some attention.[11]

How does the legislation of 1861 relate to the preconditions of the reform that were taking shape in the middle of the century? This is the main question of the next section of my work.

The programme and conception of the reformers, the legislation of 19 February 1861 and the other Great Reforms

Terence Emmons rightly observed that 'recently historians have begun to pay particular attention to the interconnections among the reforms of the i86o-i87os'. The view that serfdom was the 'cornerstone' of the state struc­ture (the army, laws, administration), and that it was impossible to leave them unchanged because they simply could not function as before, has been increas­ingly corroborated in the historiography and is virtually undisputed. However, Emmons stresses that this is only part of the truth and in concentrating too much attention on it we risk losing 'sight of that "ideology" of reforms, which usually unites all large-scale transformations in one epoch and one system'.[12]This important conclusion deserves close attention.

In order to analyse this question we need to consider the ideas of the reformers, their understanding of the aims of the reforms, their views on the interrelationships of all the transformations and the prospects for Russia's development. Without research into this aspect of the history of the Great Reforms, it is impossible to appreciate their depth and scale. One must not forget that the reforms were carried out by an autocratic monarchy, and that the reformers could not clearly and openly state their final aims in the legislation.

For this reason many fundamental aspects of the Statutes of 19 February 1861, of the Zemstvo Statute of 1864 and other legislative acts have been somewhat obscured.

Take one of the outstanding leaders of the Great Reforms, the minister of war under Alexander II, the historian, professor and brilliant memoirist D. A. Miliutin. In the middle of the 1880s, in retirement after the death of Alexander II and the change of course, he wrote in his memoirs, The Law of 19 February 1861 could not have been a separate, isolated act, it was the foundation-stone of the restructuring of the entire state system' (my emphasis). Miliutin considered that in order to understand 'our state regeneration' which happened in the first ten years of the reign of Alexander II, it was necessary to examine 'the course of the three main reforms - the peasant reform, the zemstvo reform and the judicial reform.'[13] V O. Kliuchevskii came to an even broader conclusion about the interconnections of the reforms: 'The peasant reform was the starting point and at the same time the final aim of the whole transformation process. The process of reform had to begin with it, and all the other reforms flowed from it as inevitable consequences and were supposed to ensure that it was carried out successfully. These reforms would find support and justification in the peasant reform's successful realisation.'[14] Finally, in the contemporary research of Steven Hoch and M. D. Dolbilovthe preparation of the draft of the redemption scheme in the Editing Commissions is examined in close connection with the work of the Banking Commission.[15]

Apart from memoirs and letters, the ideas of the reformers are most fully and openly revealed in the unofficial chronicle of the Editing Commissions, which prepared the codified drafts of the Statutes of 19 February. This detailed, lively (virtually a stenographic report) record of the journals of the 409 meet­ings which took place in the nineteen-month existence of this non-traditional institution in the history of autocracy contains the actual words of the partici­pants - their remarks, jokes, quarrels, and the arguments between the sides.[16]This chronicle was created at the initiative of the members of the Editing

Commissions, who recognised the scale of the tasks that lay before them and their responsibility 'in the eyes of the people', to 'the public' and the nobility of Russia, and in the face of Europe.[17]

The chairman and members of the Editing Commissions often stated that although currently engaged in the transformation of the private serfs' world they were concerned with the fate of all categories of peasants - that is state peasants, appanage peasants and others, who exceeded the numbers of serfs (the peasantry as a whole made up 80 per cent of the population). V A. Cherkasskii declared that the drafts of the Editing Commissions signified 'a general revolution' in land relations. The Chairman of the Commission Ia. I. Rostovstev formulated the task even more broadly: 'It is our duty to sort out all the questions concerning the peasantry, because the statute on the eman­cipation of the serfs must change our entire Code of Laws.'[18] N. A. Miliutin, straight after his dismissal on 2 May i86i, wrote to Cherkasskii expressing his concern about the fate ofthe peasant-reform initiative: 'Now there is no longer that same internal mechanism which led inevitably to the decisive break - there are no Editing Commissions, which set the reform on its way' (my empha­sis).[19] In general Rostovtsev considered that 'the creation of the Russian narod (people, nation) began in 1859'.[20] Here it is worth remembering the task that Speranskii laid down in his list of not yet completed projects at the beginning of the nineteenth century: 'To create our own nation [offree people - L.Z.], in order to then give it a form of government.'[21]

The 'General Memorandum Covering the Drafts of the Editing Commis­sions', written by Samarin and signed by twenty-three members of the Com­missions at the last meeting on 10 October i860, revealed the concept under­lying the legislation. These men saw Russia as a special case because it was possible to decide the question of the abolition of serfdom and the future arrangement of land relations in one legislative act - through peasant redemp­tion of plots and the preservation of a significant portion of gentry, that is, noble, landholding. They noted:

In other states governments followed this path in several stages, and so to speak groped their way because such a reform had never been experienced before in practice, and at the beginning it was impossible to envisage how the process would end. That is why the sequence of measures leading to the gradual broadening of the rights of the serfs and an improvement in their way of life has virtually everywhere given rise to unforeseen social crises. In this regard, Russia is luckier. By making use of the experience of other countries it has been given the possibility ...to embrace straightaway the entire path that lies ahead from the first step to the full curtailment of obligatory relations by means of the redemption of land.[22]

It is clear why research on land redemption led B. G. Litvak to the following evaluation of the 1861 reform: 'In fact, this was a process, at the outset ofwhich the emancipation of the individual from the power of the landowner was proclaimed . . . but whose final stage was the creation of communal and household land-ownership' (my emphasis).[23]

The legalposition ofthe peasants was transformed radically and consistently in the drafts of the Editing Commissions and in the Statutes of i9 February 1861. Personal dependence of peasants on the nobility ended immediately. The former serfs acquired a civic status, although the peasantry remained subject to certain specific estate (soslovie) obligations. Peasant self-government was introduced - at the volost' and village level (on the whole on the basis of the obshchina) with officials elected by the peasants, with assemblies and a peasant district (volost') court. In this part of the legislation much was borrowed from Kiselev's reform of the state peasantry. Peasant self-governing institutions were placed under the supervision of the local state administration and performed fiscal functions for the government, but they also served to defend the interests ofthe peasants against the landowners. In addition, they provided the basis for peasant participation in the new institutions for all the sosloviia - the zemstvo (local elected assembly) and jury courts.

At the same time as the opening of the Editing Commissions in March 1859, a commission for the preparation of the reform of local government under the chairmanship of N. A. Miliutin was set up under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its programme was co-ordinated with the peasant reform and laid the foundation for the Zemstvo Statute of 1 January 1864. It was only thanks to this co-ordination that the participation of the peasants in the zemstva was secured, as at the time they were still not landowners and therefore did not have a property qualification. The link with the judicial reform consisted not only of the participation of peasants in juries. The reformers created a completely new institution for the realisation ofthe peasant reform - the Peace Mediators, who were called upon to regulate the relations between the landowner and his former serfs by means of drawing up charters and redemption acts for working out the details of the land settlement on individual estates. Although nobles themselves, the peace mediators were not selected by the noble assemblies but were appointed by the state with the help of the local administration. In 1861 it was proposed that in three years' time they would be selected jointly by the nobility and the free peasantry. And although their exclusively noble status did not correspond to the general ideology of the Great Reforms, other principles surrounding their activity, such as openness and the fact that they could not be removed, ensured their independence from the administration and the noble assemblies and prepared the ground for the introduction of the justice of the peace and the new court system in Russia under the Judicial Statutes of 1864.[24]If we add to the above the abolition of corporal punishment on i7 April 1863 (Alexander II's birthday), the military service law of 1 January 1874 and the reform of education, it becomes clear that the Great Reforms opened the way to the creation of a civil society (although the reformers did not use this terminology). They were indeed aimed at the development of the people's national and civic consciousness, at instilling in them feelings of dignity and at overcoming traditions of servitude, which had been embedded in generations of Russian peasants.

Solving the land question was more difficult. It depended on gradualism and amendments over time and was complicated by the critical financial situation of the country after the Crimean War. The reformers themselves clung firmly to the idea of the emancipation of the peasants through the redemption of land. This idea was defined in 1855-6 in the memoranda of D. A. and N. A. Miliutin, K. D. Kavelin and Iu. F. Samarin (the last-mentioned held a slightly different position). However, the first public document which began the preparation for the reform-Alexander II's rescript to General-Governor V I. Nazimov of Vilno of20 November 1857-didnot contain a definite decisionontheland question. It would have been possible to move from it to emancipation based on guaranteed peasant usufract rather than outright property ownership by the peasants. The significance of the rescript was that it made public the government's intention to solve the peasant question, which had been discussed for so long but in secret. Henceforth openness became an independent force on which the reformers relied. In particular, 3,000 copies of the work of the Editing Commissions were immediately published following its meetings.

Throughout 1858 in society, in the periodical press, in the noble provincial committees and in government circles a struggle was waged over different solutions to the peasant question - with land or without land. At the beginning it seemed that the Baltic model (emancipation without land) was winning, the more so because the tsar himselfbelieved in this path which had been tried and tested in the Baltic provinces. However, a series of circumstances (the serious and protracted wave of peasant unrest in the province of Estonia, the rejection by appanage peasants of emancipation without land, the struggles among the fractions in the noble provincial committees) pushed Alexander by the end of 1858 towards the idea of land for the peasants and towards the adoption of the programme of the liberal bureaucracy.[25]

The liberal majority of the Editing Commissions believed that all peasant- farmers must enjoy usufract rights over land from the start of the reform process and ownership rights in time. They projected two types of landhold- ing in Russia's new agrarian sector: large gentry (noble) estates and small peasant holdings. They proposed to attain this goal peacefully, avoiding the revolutionary upheavals that had occurred in the countries of Western and Central Europe, and this was considered one of the principal features of the Russian reform. From the experience of European countries, they pointed to the positive results in France (the creation of small private land-ownership), and the methods of legislative measures in Prussia and Austria, which consisted of redemption of land by the peasants while preserving gentry landholding, yet avoiding the extremes of the Prussian variant - 'concentration of landed property in the hands of a few great landowners and big farmers' and the pro­liferation of landless agricultural labourers. As a result, the reform was built on the basis of 'existing realities', that is the preservation of much arable land in the hands of the nobility, and of the pre-reform plots in peasant ownership; the calculation of initial obligations and subsequent redemption payments on the basis of pre-reform dues (with a slight reduction); the participation of the state in the redemption operations in the capacity of creditor. The acquisition of full property rights to their plots through redemption payments by the peasants was seen as the reform's final outcome. Redemption was not obligatory for the gentry landowners. Alexander II said: 'While even one noble is against the redemption of peasant plots, I will not allow compulsory redemption.' At the same time the adoption of 'gradual' and 'voluntary redemption', that is of the principle of the 'self-financing' of redemption operations, was explained by the state's difficult financial situation. The reformers recognised that it was impossible at present for the treasury to subsidise the redemption operation, although the longer-term possibility was recognised.[26] Though they had to accept the limits dictated by the contemporary situation, the Editing Com­missions created an internal mechanism for the reform which guaranteed unin­terrupted progression toward the projected results. The reform was a process: perpetual peasant usufract at fixed rents quite soon persuaded landowners that redemption was in their own interests.

The peasants too had virtually no choice. Having set the aim of avoiding mass proletarianisation, and recognising at the same time that the economic conditions of emancipation were difficult and that the landowners would strive at all costs to crowd out the peasants, the reformers introduced into the law an article which forbade peasants to repudiate the allotments for nine years (this period was subsequently lengthened). The preservation of the obshchina (commune) in its role as a landowner (in addition to its other above-mentioned functions) served the same aim to a significant degree. By preserving the obshchina with its archaic rules about restrictions on peasant land and with joint responsibility for dues, the reformers understood that this would hinder the free development of an independent peasant economy. However, for the start of the reform the preservation of this institution, which was embedded in the organisation of the economy and in the consciousness and everyday life of the peasants, was considered unavoidable. At the same time the idea was not to conserve the obshchina forever. Leaving the obshchina was foreseen under certain conditions and with time this was to be made easier. In the milieu of the Editing Commissions the view predominated that with time obshchina land-ownership would yield to individual ownership, and the administrative functions ofthe village community would be concentrated in the volost'. Only Iurii Samarin gave his unreserved support to the obshchina. Speaking before the deciding vote about the fate of the obshchina, N. A. Miliutin said that 'by mutual consent it had been decided to leave this question to time and to the peasants themselves, . . . and that the legislation and the government had always rejected the adoption of any artificial or imposed measures for such a transition, and that this decision had been approved by the Emperor himself'.[27]

This conception of the solution to the land question, albeit with several adjustments introduced into the drafts ofthe Editing Commissions atthe Main Committee on the Peasant Question and at the State Council, was embodied in the Statutes of 19 February 1861. As a consequence of the amendments, the peasants' position became more difficult as a result of the reduction in the size of the allotment of land (the so-called 'cut-offs') and the increase in dues, including redemption payments.[28] Emmons rightly considers that 'from the point of view of the state there were in practice no alternatives to this programme'.[29] The reformers understood the burden on the peasants of the economic terms of the emancipation. Even during the course of the preparation of the reform, Miliutin foresaw the land-hunger of the peasants and considered that the state would have to use a portion of the treasury's lands to counter this phenomenon. But for Miliutin the key here was the transformation of the financial system. He tried to take control of three key spheres: the peasant question, local self-government and finance. However, the attempts by his patrons - Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich - to get him appointed as minister of finance were not successful. At the beginning of May 1866 when Alexander II considered appointing Miliutin as minister of finance, P. A. Shuvalov managed to convince the monarch to reject this idea, partly by himself threatening to resign.[30]

M. D. Dolbilov in his article about the plans for redemption from 1857 to 1861 plausibly suggested that what the reformers had in mind was the fundamental restructuring of the redemption operation in the not too distant future, at the earliest stage ofthe implementation ofthe abolition of serfdom. Valuev's diary supports this interpretation.[31] It is hard now to establish how Nikolai Miliutin conceived of the financial reforms, but his brother and political ally Dmitrii Miliutin, evaluating the financial and economic situation of the country in the 1860s, wrote twenty years later, that it was impossible 'to increase endlessly the burden of taxes which almost exclusively fall on the working, poorest class of the people, who are already impoverished'. He considered that the 'fundamental revision of our whole taxation system was the main task'.[32] At the beginning of the 1880s N. A. Miliutin's colleague N. Kh. Bunge would begin the reform of the tax system. But this was already in a different era. Peter Gatrell is correct in saying that 'no significant changes took place in taxation policy in the decade following the reform',[33] with the exception of the important excise reform of 1863, which ended the farming-out system for spirits and deprived the nobility of privileges in distillation. At the same time the introduction of excise duty enriched the treasury and encouraged private capital investment in the economy.[34]

The reformers' programme did not envisage transformation of the higher organs of state power, the convocation of an Estates General (Zemskii sobor) or of all-Russian representative institutions. At the same time the liberal bureau­crats discussed among themselves those forces that would further advance the reforms. Already in a memorandum of 1856, Nikolai Miliutin pinned his hopes on the monarchy, which, having taken the initiative with the transformations, would find support in the liberal, enlightened nobility. The same hope was mentioned in 'The General Memorandum' of October i860. The very cre­ation of the Editing Commissions, more than half of whose members were not officials (albeit appointed), an institution directly subordinate through its chairman to Alexander II, was to a certain degree the realisation of the ideas of the reformers about the new role of the autocratic monarchy. Moreover, as P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii has witnessed,

N. A. Miliutin was in no doubt that with the appropriate development of the activity of the local institutions under the patronage of a strong state power, the sovereign power itself would recognise the need to appeal to representatives of local interests and would share legislative functions with them in order further to develop its reforms, as it had now done for the first time with the convening of local committees and with the summoning of expert-members who were independent of the administrative structures of power.[35]

It is no coincidence that in 1880-1M. T. Loris-Melikov turned to the experience of the Editing Commissions and to the reforms of local self-government, linking his plans for comprehensive transformations with the experience of the Great Reforms. However, in i860 the reformers did not succeed in translating all their ideas into legislation. The sudden closure of the Editing Commissions in October i860, and the dismissal of N. A. Miliutin in April 1861 were testimony to the precariousness of their general calculations.

The world-view of the reformers was evidently not devoid of a utopian faith in the limitless possibility of the state to direct the course of historical development. Nikolai Miliutin with his characteristic perspicacity instantly understood the emerging danger. In December of that year he wrote to his brother, Dmitrii, the minister of war: 'It is necessary to fashion opinion, or perhaps a middle party, in parliamentary language "le centre", which we don't have here but the elements of which can evidently be found. Only the gov­ernment can do this, and it would be the best means of consolidation for the government itself.' In April 1863 in another letter, returning to these thoughts once again, he wrote with alarm: 'There is no greater unhappiness for Russia than letting the initiative slip out of the hands of the government.'[36] The stake placed by the reformers on the initiating role of the monarch and the liberal public turned out to be unreliable, laying bare the enlightened illusions which were characteristic of their generation. But at the time in Russia there were no other guarantees apart from the irreversibility of the legislation that had been adopted.

Legislation and life: the fate of the Great Reforms and the fate of the reformers

The implementation of specific reforms cannot be examined in detail in this chapter.[37] But in order to have an adequate understanding of the problem pre­sented here something must be said about the realisation of the great reforms in general. If one bears in mind the precise meaning of the 1861 legislation, it must be recognised that it did not anticipate the immediate transformation of gentry and peasant farming, let alone an immediate revolution in the economy as a whole. The final goal of the peasant reform was, however, quite definite: the creation of independent small, peasant farming alongside gentry farming. Until very recently, the prevailing view in the literature was that the reform was extortionate towards the peasantry, with inflated redemption payments for reduced plots, which led to land-hunger and ruination of peasant households on a mass scale. Modern methods of statistical analysis ofthe socioeconomic results of the peasant reform have allowed a number of historians to come to quite different conclusions. In reality, the abolition of serfdom by the terms of the statutes of 19 February led to the creation of self-sufficient peasant farming

and the prospect of the predominance of the peasant family farm in Russian

agriculture.[38]

In the legal sphere, the isolation of the peasant estate that was preserved by the statutes of 19 February was overcome to a degree through the imple­mentation of the zemstvo and judicial reforms. The proportion of peasant deputies in the zemstva was significant, although it was exceeded by noble representation (38 and 43 per cent, respectively). In some regions (central- industrial, southern-steppe, and southeastern) representation tended toward predominance by peasants, specifically peasant landowners. Peasant represen­tation was also significant in juries - in the provinces it was even predominant (over 50 per cent). At the same time, the existence of the volost' peasant-estate court created a dualism in the court system, preserving peasant isolation in this respect. This does not, however, justify the general conclusion that the peasant reform retarded the integration of the peasantry into civic life and fortified the schism in Russia between 'traditional' and 'westernized' society.[39] Separate peasant self-administration and the separate volost' court were introduced in the 1861 reform in connection with the termination of the hereditary power of the gentry landowner, which explains their expediency. They were not the final goal of the legislators, only a temporary, inevitable structure on the road to unitary citizenship.

Such an important measure as the abolition of the recruitment system for manning the army militated in the same direction of integrating the peasantry into the new, unitary organisation of Russian society. This last of Alexander II's reforms (the Statute of 1 January 1874) was considerably influenced by the international situation and the experience of European wars. The personal role of Alexander II was great in this reform: he stuck to his decision in the face of strong pressure from the opposition. In all other spheres of state life, reform activity from the 1860s onward continued by inertia, without the previous energy.

Alexander II's own disillusionment with the reforms and a major shift in his own personal state of mind occurred almost simultaneously and for a number of reasons. After the successful introduction of the reforms, the victorious conclusion in 1864 of the half-century war in the Caucasus, the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863-4 and the carrying out of the radical agrarian and other transformations in the Polish Kingdom, the establishment of the Sejm (assembly) and of the constitutional order in Finland in 1863, the Tsar- liberator came up against some unexpected difficulties and deep personal traumas. The Polish revolutionary response to his efforts at liberalisation was no doubt itself a disappointment. Much more important for Alexander, the Russian nobility, discontented with the emancipation of the serfs, voiced its claims for political rights. The zemstvo assemblies which had just been opened, especially the Petersburg zemstvo, showed a degree of independence which the government disliked.[40] In April 1865 the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, unexpectedly died at the age of twenty-one. A year later Dmitrii Karakozov shot at Alexander II near the gates of the Summer Garden. The news that Karakozov was a Russian shook Alexander II more than the attack itself. The enthusiasm and inspiration which had sustained the emperor in the first, most unclouded and fruitful ten years of his reign was dissipated.

In this depressed state, Alexander II gave in to the pressure from conser­vative forces. The decree of 13 May 1866 bears witness to the shift towards a conservative course. Karakozov's shot, as one of his contemporaries put it, 'favoured reaction'.[41] In the government the most influential figure became Count Petr Shuvalov, who was appointed head of the gendarmes and given overall responsibility for internal security straight after the attack. Shuvalov was an opponent of the liberal bureaucracy and the reforms carried out by it. The year 1866 was also a turning point in the personal life of the emperor. He was consumed by his passion for the young Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukov, which became stronger over time, often distracting him from affairs of state and at the same time weighing him down with the burden of a double life.[42]

In the Editing Commissions, the reformers had acknowledged that the current legislation would require further development. They hoped that this task would be carried out by an 'enterprising monarchy'. Their hopes were not realised.[43]

Though he accepted the legacy of Nikolai Miliutin in terms of the realisation of the peasant reforms and the preparation and implementation of the zemstvo reform, as minister of internal affairs, P. A. Valuev (Miliutin's irreconcilable opponent) immediately led the attack on the liberal peace mediators - a most important link in the peasant reform.[44] While it was not within his powers to infringe the Statutes of i9 February about the irremoveability and inde­pendence of the peace mediators, he began to reduce their number. Valuev's policy transformed the position of peace mediator: from an honourable post, which attracted intelligent and thoughtful people, into a mediocre adminis­trative function. The same phenomenon was observed with the introduction of other institutions created by the reforms - the zemstva and the new courts. From the first independent steps of the zemstva, the government displayed its distrust in them. D. A. Miliutin wrote, 'It was as if the government itself, having just established socially inclusive (vsesoslovnoe) self-government, had a sudden rethink - hadn't it taken a rather imprudent step. From the very beginning of the implementation of the new legislation it was considered necessary to fol­low the new institutions vigilantly, to hold them in check, so to speak.' Already by the end of 1865 in government policy 'instead of the gradual development and broadening ofthe zemstva, a systematic squeezing and restraining of them began'.[45]

Even more importantly, the peasant question, which demanded special attention and the development of the foundations which had been created in the 1861 reform, found itselfby the end ofthe 1870s on the fringes of government policy. Serious problems which had emerged were not addressed. Already in the middle of the 1860s, M. Kh. Reutern in his reports drew attention to the burden of the dues and redemption payments for the emancipated peasants. But neither the minister of finance himself, nor the government as a whole took any measures to resolve the difficulties that had arisen in the course of the implementation of the peasant reform and to achieve the final goal of the reform - the creation of an independent small peasant economy. The issue of the obshchina was raised but not resolved. After quite a lengthy discussion of the problems of peasant land-ownership the ministers of internal affairs, finance and justice were entrusted with working out a set of measures to ease the departure of peasants from the obshchina, that is the broadening of article 165 of the Statutes of 19 February. The minutes of the Council of Ministers to this effect were approved on 9 March 1874, but the matter was put on hold.[46]

The weakest link in the chain of reforms was finances, and it was only after the war of 1877-8, against a background of financial crisis, social and political discontent, and terrorist acts, that Alexander II and the government acknowledged the need to continue the Great Reforms. This attempt would be undertaken by M. T. Loris-Melikov with the agreement and approval of Alexan­der II. The most recent research has convincingly shown that Loris-Melikov's programme was not a set of separate measures, but a definite 'scheme', organ­ically linked to those reforms which had been carried out in the first decade of Alexander II's reign. The tsar himself expressed his understanding of this continuity, in particular in his confession to Loris-Melikov that 'there was one person in whom I had full confidence. That was Ia. I. Rostovtsev ... I have that same confidence in you and perhaps even more.'[47]

As N. A. Miliutin had done in the late 1850s to early 1860s, Loris-Melikov at the end of the 1870s considered it crucial to unite Russian society around a reforming government which rested on the support of public opinion. With­out neglecting to strengthen the police, he argued that it was impossible to defeat nihilism by police measures alone. 'Not only did the reforms of the 1860s need to be cleansed from subsequent deviations but their principles had to be developed further.' Loris-Melikov's programme envisaged a whole sys­tem of interrelated reforms. Above all it had in mind provincial reform: the reorganisation of the local administrative and social institutions, by removing the antagonism between the zemstva and the state administration, and the transformation of the police in the localities. The improvement of the peas­ant situation occupied a significant place in the programme: the salt tax was abolished and the tsar's agreement was given to a reduction in redemption payments and a number of other measures. The transformation of the taxation and passport systems was also planned, as was a more flexible policy in the borderlands.

The creation of preparatory commissions along the lines of the Editing Commissions of 1859-60 was proposed in order to facilitate the implementa­tion of this programme. Subsequently, a General Commission attached to the State Council would be created with the participation of representatives of the zemstva and town self-governments. This was what in the literature has been called the Loris-Melikov 'constitution' and what A.V Mamonov consid­ers a return to (and development of, I would add) Miliutin's concept of the 'enterprising monarchy'. On i March i88i, Alexander II approved the draft government report on the upcoming reforms but died a few hours later. The programme for the further development of the Great Reforms died with him for ever, although certain individual elements of it were realised by N. Kh. Bunge during his time as minister of finance between i88i and i886. Bunge's attempts to develop the i86i peasant reform (he was a believer in indepen­dent peasant farming) and modernise the taxation and banking systems only affected limited aspects of state policy, however, and were in any case compro­mised by the overall programme of counter-reforms carried out in the reign of Alexander III.[48]

By the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, it was understood by the few reformers still alive at the time that the possibility of continuing the reforms that had been decisively and radically begun by the abolition of serfdom had been lost. Russia entered the twentieth century, the century of revolutions and shocks, which they had tried so hard to avoid. In the first months of the i905 Revolution four elder statesmen gave an independent and realistic appraisal of the Great Reforms and of subsequent government policy. These statesmen - Count K. I. Pahlen, A. A. and P. A. Saburov and A. N. Kulomzin - had experienced the Great Reforms in their early years of ser­vice and subsequently participated in their implementation. They produced a memorandum for Nicholas II which stated that the empire's current crisis was rooted in the 'fateful misunderstanding' that the reason for i March i88i (i.e., the assassination of Alexander II) was 'the liberating policy of the tsar- reformer'. They criticised 'the government's endeavour over the last twenty- five years to limit the privileges and advantages which were bestowed on Russia in the epoch of the reforms of Alexander II'.[49]

The revolution wrested from the autocracy the Manifesto of i7 October i905 and led to the creation of the first Russian parliament (the Duma) and of a true ministerial cabinet and prime minister. The last great reformist states­man of the old regime, P. A. Stolypin, rose on the wave of the revolution­ary events and in the struggle with them. While adopting harsh police mea­sures in the struggle with terror, he worked out and began the realisation of fundamental changes. In the first place, as in the i860s, there was agrarian reform, which allowed peasants to leave the obshchina, strengthened peasant property-ownership and aided migration to Russian Asia. It was proposed to combine these paramount reforms with the expansion of local self-government and the extension of the reforms to the empire's borderlands. However, Stolypin's plans were not realised. He was killed in Kiev in 1911, where he had gone for the ceremonial opening of a monument to the Tsar-liberator in connection with the half-century jubilee of the abolition of serfdom. The final possibility for transformations had once again been lost. Russia would soon take part in the First World War and live through a revolution which would

sweep away the monarchy and shake the world.

***

The Great Reforms, which were organically linked to socioeconomic and political processes in the first half of the nineteenth century, were at the same time a turning point in the history of Russia. While they neither intended nor ensured a simultaneous transformation in all the spheres of public life, they laid the foundations for this turnaround and ruled out the possibility of a restoration of the pre-reform order. As a result of the transformations, 'a basic principle of Russian life was destroyed - the link of progress with serfdom'.[50]The modernisation of Russia continued on a new basis - labour freed from serfdom, the development of private initiative, the origins of civil society. In this context the year 1861 was a watershed, 'the beginning of a new history, a new epoch in Russia' - as many contemporaries understood the abolition of serfdom at the time and as many historians evaluated it later. However, the degree and the depth of the turning point remain to be clarified. In this regard there still remains much for scholars to do.

Among the questions which demand attention are study of the statesmen of the Great Reforms themselves and of the actual circumstances in which they put together their plans. It is probably worth listening more closely to the terms and concepts used by them, their understanding, their perception of reality. For example, it is important to understand how they conceived of 'the new system of agrarian relations', which was supposed to be the result of the implementation ofthe peasant reform, how they envisaged the coexistence of the landlord and peasant economies. The idea of the reformers about the reforms as a process which would necessitate constant modifications by the government also merits attention. Undoubtedly, when studying the Great

Reforms, as well as the counter-reforms, there is the challenge of adopting a differentiated approach to the different stages and 'levels' ofthe process: to the ideology which lay at the basis of the intended transformations, to the initial draft laws, to the laws as actually adopted (a significant distinction) and finally to how these laws were realised and faced the test of reality.

Such an approach enables one to avoid one-sidedness in the evaluation of the Great Reforms, sometimes observed in the historiography, when either the unbridgeable gulf between epochs or the complete continuity in the gradual advance of the autocracy on the path of reform is emphasised. The undoubted links between the abolition of serfdom and attempts at earlier legislation, the traditions and structures of the pre-reform order, do not contradict the con­cept of the transformation of various aspects of the country's life begun by the reforms. On the other hand, to acknowledge the inevitability ofmodifications to the reforms and the presence of pragmatic elements in the legislation of the i880-90s does not remove the fundamental difference between the Great Reforms and the counter-reforms. For example, it is true that legislative mea­sures were needed to strengthen the system of peasant self-government, and that the volost' court needed to be co-ordinated with the socially inclusive structures of the new court system. In the end, too, and despite the govern­ment's original intentions, the Statute of i890 did not signify a radical change to the zemstvo as created by the reform of i864. Realities neutralised the con­servative amendments which were adopted. But it is impossible to derive from these truths the argument that there were no basic differences between the policies of the i860s reformers and Loris-Melikov on the one hand, and the instigators of the counter-reforms on the other.

The ideological aims of Count D. A. Tolstoy underlying the revision of the Great Reforms were, for example, far from fully realised in the zemstvo legislation but had a much fuller impact in the spheres of education and censorship, where they created a gulf between the regime and the progressive intelligentsia. The dangerous consequences of this phenomenon were manifest in i900-6. The co-operation of the liberal bureaucracy and liberal social forces in the eras of Nikolai Miliutin and Loris-Melikov was abandoned, as was their systematic approach to reform. In the i880s Bunge continued the work of the Great Reforms, and Tolstoi and Pobedonostsev revised it. Thus, if it makes sense to speak of 'the epoch of Great Reforms', there is less reason to speak of 'the epoch of counter-reforms', which would imply co-ordination of the various aspects of internal policy under Alexander III. The course set on preserving the autocracy inviolate, which was proclaimed in the Manifesto of 29 April i88i and reinforced by the decree of i4 August i88i on states of emergency, signified the state's loss of initiative in the realisation of large-scale reforms. That initiative would pass to social forces. When Stolypin tried to regain the initiative for the monarchy he did not have the twenty years he asked for. Those twenty years had been lost between 1881 and 1905.

I would like to stress one more problem. Russian and Western historiogra­phy has accumulated a rich store of factual material, many valuable conclu­sions and observations. But these achievements remain disparate and isolated. A comparison of the results of the study of 'institutional' and 'social' history, a comparison of the work on different reforms and a more attentive attitude to the knowledge already established in the historiography, together with a broadening of the range of sources could all yield new approaches and new answers to the question posed in the title of this chapter.

Russian workers and revolution

REGINALD E. ZELNIK

'Workers', people who live off their daily labour and the sweat of their brows, have of course been present since the very dawn of Russian history Depending on the exact time and place, they have included slave labourers (largely extinct by the beginning of the eighteenth century), a wide variety of highly restricted serfs (numerically dominant from the sixteenth century to 1861 if we include peasants whose lord was the state), and free or 'freely-hired' (vol'nonaemnye) labourers, but 'free' only in the sense that their obligation to their employer, at least theoretically, was purely contractual, while they remained the bondsmen of their noble lords. Viewed more narrowly, however, defined not simply as people who worked for a living, but only as those employed in manufacturing and paid a wage, workers started to become important to the Russian economy and society mainly in the eighteenth century, beginning with the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725), who placed a high priority on the country's industrial development. But even under Peter and for many years to come, most workers employed in manufacturing and mining, even if paid in cash or in kind, were unfree labourers, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises or in factories owned by the government. Among those who experienced the worst conditions in this period of labour-intensive industrialisation were the 'possessional' (posessionnye) and 'ascribed' (pripisannye) workers - state peas­ants who, since Peter's time, had been bound to the factory or its owner, and who were compelled to pass this unfortunate status on down to their children.[51]Even those who were 'free' at least in the sense that they were free to negotiate their terms of employment with employers who had no extra-economic, that is, purely coercive controls over them, were almost all otkhodniki, the serfs of a landowner who controlled their freedom of movement, was given part of their wages as all or part of a quit-rent (obrok), and sometimes even negotiated the otkhodniki's terms of employment directly with the owner of the enterprise where they worked, leaving the workers with little or no power to negotiate with their employers. Although the practice of serf owners contracting out their serfs to non-noble manufacturers was outlawed in the early 1820s, the continued coexistence of institutions of (contractually) free and forced labour, often combined in the same individuals, at a time when forced labour (except for convicts) had virtually vanished from the European scene, was a notewor­thy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as 1861, when serfdom was abolished and almost all labour except in some military factories was placed on a contractual footing.

The number of freely hired factory workers in Russia expanded consider­ably in the 1830s and the decades that followed, though mainly in the grow­ing textile sector (especially the spinning and weaving of cotton cloth). One important stimulus was the decision of the British government to lift its ban on the export of cotton-spinning machinery in 1842. Since the manufacture of machinery was perhaps the least developed branch of Russian industry at that time, most Russian factories were still devoid of mechanisation before this shift, and, if we accept the favoured terminology of Soviet Marxist historians, should perhaps be thought of as manufactories rather than factories, since they depended on hand labour and outwork, were deficient in steam engines, and were often only minimally centralised.[52] Before the 1840s, those few factories (fabriki) that did employ steam-driven machinery, and were therefore likely to bring their workers together under a single roof, had depended to a large extent on the precarious practice of obtaining smuggled British machinery or importing lesser quality machines from Belgium or France. Hence the legalisation of machinery-export by Britain did mark an important stage in the evolution of an industrial landscape in Russia where large numbers of workers, still maintaining the subordinate legal status of serfs, to be sure, were gathered together in large numbers at a central location, most notably in St Petersburg and in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), especially the provinces of Moscow and Vladimir. The large majority of these were for many years to come the workers of Russia's growing number of cotton-spinning mills, with the mechanisation of weaving following only after some delay and probably not nearing completion until the 1880s. Little wonder, then, that despite ideological imperatives to push Russia's industrial revolution back in time in order to combat the concept of Russia's 'backwardness', serious Soviet economic and social historians have acknowledged the absence of a true proletariat in pre-reform Russia, substituting such compromise concepts as 'pre-proletariat' (predproletariat) and in some cases even arguing that pre- reform Russia was yet to experience a full-fledged industrial revolution, since the presence of a proletariat and a truly free labour market was a necessary sign of that historical phase.[53]

With the abolition of serfdom, the way was open in Russia to new spurts of industrial growth, a modest one in the 1870s and early 1880s, and a major one in the 1890s, during the incumbency of the pro-industrial finance minister Sergei Witte (1892-1903). One can question the extent to which the emanci­pation as such, meaning its contribution to labour mobility, was a primary stimulus of industrial growth, as contrasted to the state-supported railway construction that followed in its wake and was vigorously pursued in the 1890s, especially the Trans-Siberian line. Surely, despite their emancipation from personal bondage, the peasants' continued attachment to the rural com­mune (mir, obshchina) limited the degree to which conditions after 1861 would remove past restraints on the complete mobility of labour. The omnipresence of the commune prolonged the ties between the urban worker and his or her village, delaying the transformation of the majority of peasant-workers into a permanent, well-trained, urbanised labour force, fully assimilated into modern industrial life, all its bridges to village life having been burned.[54] Sheer numbers of available workers, however, were never an issue. By the 1890s, despite the persistence of communal restraints, and with Russia's industry - including mining, metallurgy and, in the Petersburg region especially, the manufacture of machinery, rails, rolling stock, ships and military hardware - expanding at a record pace of 8 per cent per annum, the rapid growth of the land-hungry rural population easily provided factories with a numerically adequate labour pool (while at the same time reducing the proportion of workers who were urbanised, literate and self-identified as permanent denizens of the industrial world).

Of course, viewed as a percentage of the overall population, the number of industrial workers was still small at the end of turn of the century. According to the 1897 national census (Russia's first), the empire's population was over 128 million, while the number of industrial workers (an elusive category, to be sure) was only somewhat over 2 million at the turn of the century. However, the social and political importance of these workers became increasingly evi­dent, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St Petersburg (the official capital), Moscow (the old capital and to many contemporaries still Russia's principal city), the ethnically mixed port cities of Baku and Riga, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland. And to this list should be added the miners of the Urals and the Don basin as well as two groups, the railway workers and the printers, who would become very influential politically - the former because of their rapidly expanding num­bers and strategic locations as the empire's railway network expanded from its Moscow hub, the latter because of their special role as an educated middling group located between the industrial working class and the intelligentsia.[55]

The most dramatic manifestation ofthe workers' social and political impor­tance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If a strike is loosely understood as any collective work stoppage carried out in defiance of one's employer, then strikes, like other worker actions (most notably flight before the expiration of a contract), certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dissatisfied workers put down their tools and in some cases fled both the factories and mines of their private employers and those owned by the state. Yet before the 1870s, to the extent that government offi­cials were disturbed by such developments at all - first in the mid-i84os and then again in the early 1860s - they were influenced more by the demonstra­tion effect of developments in Western Europe and the possible destabilising influence of the 1861 Emancipation than by actual labour unrest in Russia. To a great degree, such unrest as there was both before and in the wake of the Emancipation, much of it confined to railway construction workers and Ural miners, was viewed by the authorities, and not without reason, as an extension of peasant unrest rather than a discrete phenomenon in its own right. Nor was it viewed very differently in the 1860s by Russia's revolutionary youth, whose perception of the workers was limited to the still quite accurate notion that they were peasants who happened to be temporarily employed away from their villages and who, like the young revolutionary populist Petr Kropotkin, sometimes looked askance at the strike as an illusory weapon, one that was bound to end in failure, yet if promoted by intelligenty, would implant in workers the false hope that their lot could be improved under the existing

system. [56]

Labour unrest among industrial workers began to be taken more seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists of all stripes only in the 1870s, which is when the story of workers in Russia begins to become not only a social but a political narrative. Although it would be foolish to place an exact date on the transition, two events, both involving textile workers - one in 1870, one in 1872 - are particularly relevant.

In 1870 there was a major strike action at what was then St Petersburg's largest textile mill, the Nevsky cotton-spinning factory. Although most of the Petersburg region's larger factories were located at the outskirts of the city, in its industrial suburbs (with some important medium-sized factories located in the city's north-eastern Vyborg District), the Nevsky was exceptional in its location near downtown St Petersburg, at a site that gave it special visibility. In addition, the work stoppage was prolonged and sustained, was followed by a contested, adversarially structured trial of its leaders (made possible by the 1864 judicial reforms), and was widely covered in the press (made possible by the 1865 censorship reforms). In other words, though there had been countless work stoppages in Russian factories before, because it tookplace in the middle of the Great Reforms this was the first such event in Russia proper to enter the public arena and be incorporated into the new civic discourse that flow­ered during the reign of Alexander II. Strikes would henceforth be a political

issue.[57]

We must, of course, be careful about our use of language. At the time, the workers themselves did not use the term 'strike' - usually stachka or zabastovka in the Russian of those years, but occasionally shtreik - and there is no evidence that they thought of themselves as engaging in a new kind of activity, one that charged the participants with the energy that came from partaking in an international workers' movement or even in a pan-European trend. What is significant, however, is that the government authorities, in a sense ahead of the workers' own curve, did use such language, as did the contemporary Petersburg press. To be sure, when the authorities spoke of a stachka, their emphasis was on the conspiratorial connotation of the term, and at the trial of the leading participants the prosecutors did their best (though with only limited success) to criminalise the workers' action by treating it as a kind of conspiracy against the state. But if official thinking about such phenomena was still quite murky, the views of segments ofthe press were less so and, as in the case ofthe paper Novoevremia, which pointedly (and anxiously) described the Nevsky events as a dangerous new phenomenon: And a strike has befallen us, and God has not spared us!' Perhaps even more revealing of the shift that was taking place in the press's views of labour unrest was the reaction to much less dramatic work stoppages among some Petersburg clothing workers shortly before the Nevsky events. News of these actions had caused the newspaper Birzhevye vedomosti to make the questionable claim that this was 'the first example of workers strikes [stachki rabochikh]' in Russian history, and to cautiously advance the hope that 'for the moment, they will not give rise to the same kind of difficulties here as in West European countries'.[58]

From this time forth, it would be hard to find a work stoppage of any significant proportions that was not discussed both publicly and in the corri­dors of government agencies in the context of Russia's possible susceptibility to the European disease of labour unrest and the prophylactic devices that might best be designed to stave off an epidemic. Almost immediately, the government began to move in two divergent directions: on the one hand, harsh police measures, most notably arrest, imprisonment and administrative exile without trial, usually imposed by the office of governor, were brought to bear on the leaders of any future strike action, which was to be treated as a criminal conspiracy against the state, and not merely as an economic conflict, between workers and their employers, within civil society. On the other hand, expanding on the work of a mainly abortive commission of the early 1860s, the government created a series of high-level official commissions in the 1870s that, with some participation of and consultation with a narrow segment of the public (mainly manufacturers, but also academic and technical experts), were intended to devise the kind of factory legislation that might avert the disaffection of workers and discourage them from evolving into a dangerous, 'West European'-type of working class.

The second strike that aroused the fears of both government officials and opinion makers was the prolonged and (unlike the Nevsky strike) ultimately violent clash between textile workers and their employers at Estland Province's Kreenholm Cotton-Spinning and Weaving Factory, the largest textile mill at the time in all of Europe.[59] The dramatic nature of this event - with such striking features as a spectacular setting (a factory less than a hundred miles from St Petersburg, located on a riverine island, its machines powered by a giant waterfall), multiethnic participants on both sides (Russians, Estonians, Germans and a smattering of Finns), death and violence (a collapsed bridge with dozens of women workers drowned, workers hurling stones at soldiers and soldiers almost firing on workers) - magnified the danger (or promise) of worker protest unleashed by the events of 1870, and had the additional effect of propelling a number of disgruntled Kreenholm workers into the ranks of the radical movements that were beginning to arise in St Petersburg at around this time.

From i872 until the fall of the tsarist regime some forty-five years later, the interaction between workers and members of the radical intelligentsia (studenty, as they began to be called by workers whether or not they were actually studying at the time) would be a central element in the evolution of the revolutionary movement in Russia.[60] Out of this often troubled yet often productive relationship would evolve several phases of worker-student polit­ical play in two parallel universes dominated by two different kinds of youth: one, the student radicals, formally educated at Russia's leading institutions of higher learning; the other, the politicised workers, self-educated, or for­mally educated at adult-education centres ('Sunday schools', factory schools, schools of the Imperial Russian Technical Society), or informally educated (or propagandised) in illegal study circles (kruzhki) by the studenty themselves.

The political persuasions on the intelligentsia side of this equation would of course vary considerably over time: Populist in the 1870s and much of the 1880s, vaguely Marxist in the late 1880s and 1890s (in the 1890s and even earlier Russia's Populists had more than a touch of Marxism and Marxists more than a touch of Populism), and finally evolving into the somewhat more stable groupings of Social Democrats or SDs (as of 1903, both Bolsheviks and Men- sheviks) and Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) at the start of the new century.[61]Yet the broad structure of the relationship and the conflicts that inhered therein would be surprisingly consistent: radical intelligenty would define themselves as the bearers of the truth that guided and of the intellectual and organisa­tional machinery that drove the revolution, while viewing workers (workers and peasants in the case of Populists and SRs) either as the raw material they would have to forge into a powerful fighting force or as the essential yet still dormant bearers of a revolutionary message, a message that, if most workers were not yet conscious of it, would one day be revealed to them by a com­bination of experience at the workplace and study with already 'conscious' intelligenty and propagandised workers (sometimes defined as rabochie- intelligenty).

Workers, for their part, or at least the ones most politically aware and most attracted to revolutionary ideas, were repeatedly torn between a positive and a negative perception of the studenty, at times appreciating their concentrated, even passionate attention and gaining a higher sense of their own worth as a consequence, but at other times resenting their tutelage and striving to assert their class and even personal independence from their socially more privileged intelligentsia mentors.

By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonising compe­tition for worker allegiance had begun between radicals of various per­suasions (Bolshevik SDs, Menshevik SDs, SRs, and their rough equiv­alents among many of the non-Russian minorities), liberals, social and religious organisations, and the government, for working-class political sup­port. Indeed, the entire history of the Russian labour movement lends itself to an analysis framed as a competition between the agents of the Left and the agents of the state for the allegiance of the empire's rapidly growing numbers of industrial workers, whose numbers increased by about a mil­lion in the course of the 1890s. Certainly by the beginning of the new cen­tury, industrial workers - the proletariat as they were now often called by those who courted them and those who feared them - were viewed by

almost all political actors as pivotal players in the on-going struggle for

power. [62]

On the government side, as already suggested, there were ofcourse internal divisions, as there were on the Left, as to what strategies were best suited to win this competition with the revolutionaries. If police-driven suppression vied with enlightened, European-model labour legislation as the two main contending models of government action, the latter approach generally held the upper hand from about 1882 to 1900. To be sure, good old-fashioned suppression, sometimes very draconian, was always ready on hand when all else failed, and no labour action, especially violent unrest, would be permitted to attain its goals directly, lest the striking, demonstrating, or rioting workers be encouraged to repeat their successful strategies again and again. Yet in the wake of Russia's most serious strikes of the 1880s and 1890s - the Morozov strike of textile workers in Vladimir Province in 1885 and the great citywide textile strikes in St Petersburg in 1896-7 - new laws were introduced that, building in part on the work of the commissions of the 1870s, were aimed at preventing the abuse and exploitation of industrial workers at the hands of ruthless, inflexible employers.[63]

When this legislation had clearly failed to stem the tide of labour unrest and the on-going, potentially dangerous contacts (often troubled and tense, to be sure) between politicised workers and radical intelligenty, some govern­ment officials, most notably Sergei Zubatov of the Ministry of Internal Affairs' Department of Police, began to explore a new and very risky approach.[64]Instead of relying directly on the cruder forms of oppression, but at the same time by-passing the Factory Inspectorate and refusing to allow the workers access to their own, independent labour associations, Zubatov introduced a series of government-sponsored and closely supervised organisations for workers. Often (erroneously) referred to as 'police unions', these organisa­tions were particularly active in Moscow and in the towns of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, most notably Odessa and Minsk. It was Zubatov's aim to divert workers away from socialist agitators, including the so-called 'Bund' (the influ­ential branch of Social Democracy that had been operating successfully among Jewish workers in the Pale since 1897) by providing them with tamer social and intellectual activities such as public lectures, tea rooms and reading rooms, and by expressing enough sympathy for their cause as to give them the impression that it was the government and not the socialists that stood for the attainment of their true interests.[65]

Although Zubatov's efforts began on a successful note, with time his agents, many ofthem over-zealous, began to lose control ofthe situation, inadvertently giving the organised workers more rein than they originally intended and, in their efforts to prove that they were pro-labour, encouraging them to defy their employers. When sympathetic Zubatov-sponsored speakers such as the Moscow University political economy professor I. Kh. Ozerov lectured to the workers about the situation oflabour in West European countries where labour unions were permitted, this was a signal for some of his listeners to claim the same right to organise that existed by then in England, France and Germany. Factory owners, in turn, complained to the Finance Ministry that Zubatov's activities were poisoning the minds of their employees, complaints that set the stage for conflicts between the two most concerned ministries. In this context it is difficult, however, to assign either ministry with the designation 'pro' or 'anti' labour, since Witte himself, while hostile to Zubatov, began to seriously consider that Russia would be better off with a free labour movement, that is, with workers allowed to organise their own trade unions and even, though only under strictly limited circumstances, to engage in strikes. Though it would take the revolution of 1905 to bring about this concession - a rather feeble 1903 law allowing workers in some factories to elect their own 'elders' (starosty) was the only significant labour legislation between 1897 and 1906 - the conflict between the two ministries helped open the door to renewed labour unrest, which was particularly virulent in St Petersburg in the spring of i90i (the 'Obukhov defence') and in Rostov-on-Don and other parts of southern Russia in 1902-3.

The ill-fated Zubatov experiment did have an unforeseen consequence of monumental proportions, the so-called gaponovshchina, a series of events that affected the course of Russian history in a manner that took both govern­ment officials and revolutionaries completely by surprise. In 1904, as a spin-off to the already discredited project of police-sponsored labour activity in St Petersburg, a charismatic young priest named Father Gapon was encouraged to open tearooms for the workers of that city, social clubs where the inhab­itants of the city's various industrial neigbourhoods could safely engage in innocent, non-political sociability, far from the subversive influence of SDs, SRs or other radical intelligenty. An offspring of the zubatovshchina (Colonel Zubatov's attempt to control the labour movement by sponsoring police trade unions), this project came at a time when the relations between St Petersburg workers and the SD intelligentsia were in a state of temporary lull. Successful co-operation between Petersburg workers and the Marxist intelligentsia had been visible in the mid-i890s when the Marxist group called the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labour launched the policy of 'agitation' in support of workers' day-to-day grievances, culminating in the basically spontaneous though intelligentsia-assisted strikes of 1896-7. Soon thereafter, however, disagreements between workers and their frequently overweening intelligentsia mentors would lead to repeated conflicts between them, caus­ing many workers (with the support of some 'worker-phile' intelligenty) to be attracted to the kind of worker-centred ouvrierisme that was then gather­ing around the journal Rabochaia mysl' (Workers' Thought). These workers, who took seriously the Marxist slogan that the liberation of the working class was the task of the workers themselves, would accept the co-operation of the Marxist intelligentsia on their own terms only, a condition that not only future Bolsheviks like Vladimir Lenin but also future Mensheviks like Iulii Martov, Pavel Aksel'rod and Georgii Plekhanov, the 'father' of Russian Marxism, were unwilling to accept.[66]

Such conflicts with workers were complicated by other aspects of the SD intelligentsia's troubled situation between i898 and i904. Many oftheir leading cadres were either under arrest in Siberia or other venues or had fled abroad to Paris, Geneva, Zurich or London, with few opportunities for direct per­sonal contact with Russia's workers. The supposed founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) in Minsk in 1898, poorly attended, and including only one genuine worker, had proved abortive, while the Second Congress (Brussels and London 1903), while well attended, had culminated in the Party's split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions and the temporary withdrawal of the Jewish Bund from the Party's ranks. Per­haps more to the point, and in a sense underlying all these problems was the SD intelligentsia's difficulty in addressing the issue of how best to relate to the 'spontaneous' labour movement, with its tendency to deviate from the norms of intelligentsia-contrived 'consciousness' at times by spinning off in the allegedly apolitical direction of'Economism', at other times pulled in the direction of senseless violence and the destructive, self-defeating riot (bunt). Although by no means supported by all SD intelligenty, and himself highly critical of those intelligenty who did not share his views, it was Lenin who in his well-known polemical pamphlet Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done?) came closest to openly revealing the deeper problematics of worker-intelligentsia relations and unleashing the painful and divisive issue of spontaneity versus consciousness.[67]

As a result of these circumstances, with the issues of worker autonomy from the intelligentsia now merging with militant workers' emphasis on strikes and other mass actions, the time between the Petersburg textile strikes and the appearance of What Is to Be Done? was one of maximum tension between worker-phile (ouvrieriste) workers and those Marxist intelligenty who were most concerned to retain and expand their leadership role in the movement.

This is not to say that all co-operationbetween workers and Marxist intelligenty was discontinued, for in the entire period from the mid-i890s to 1905, that thread, while often damaged, was never broken.[68] But it is to say that by late 1904, when Father Gapon's leadership of St Petersburg workers had begun to take fire, he found a vacuum ofauthority among the workers and a hunger for someone to fill the shoes that might otherwise have been filled by revolutionary Social Democrats.

Under Gapon's charismatic leadership, thousands of Petersburg workers were organised into neighbourhood associations centred around local club­houses, tearooms and libraries that for the first time provided them with venues of social, cultural and eventually political interaction. Gapon himself was influenced and assisted by a small but dedicated group of workers and intelligenty who, having passed through the school of Social Democracy and found it wanting, remained nonetheless dedicated to the workers' cause as they now understood it. As the months went by, it began to dawn on the St Petersburg officials who had begun by supporting Gapon financially that instead of the calming, loyal, religious influence they had hoped for, they had created a sort of Frankenstein monster, sobering (literally) and religious to be sure, but a movement that was rapidly escaping their control. More and more Gapon's 'Assembly of Factory Workers' (Sobranie russkikhfabrichno-zavodskikh rabochikh) was being transmogrified into a giant labour union, with preten­sions to represent the interests of Petersburg workers against their employers. Hence when three of its members were fired from the giant (c. 12,000 workers) Putilov engineering works in late December, precipitating an illegal strike at a plant on which the government heavily relied for its shipbuilding and arma­ments production, Gapon (after some hesitation) assumed the role of what today might be called 'worker-priest', encouraging the spread of the strike to many other factories and organising a citywide protest demonstration. On 9 January 1905, thanks to nervous, trigger-happy troops and a government that simply did not get the picture, unarmed workers and their families who attempted to march, militantly but without violence, on the Winter Palace were repeatedly fired upon, with over a hundred demonstrators killed and many more injured. The day has gone down in history as Russia's notorious 'Bloody Sunday', the opening salvo of the revolution of 1905.[69]

Though it was led by a presumably apolitical priest, it would be a mistake to think ofthe workers' demonstration of 9 January as lacking in political content. The petition to the tsar that was carried by many of the demonstrators was replete not only with the class-centred particularistic demands of industrial labour (including, however, 'economic' demands with strong political conno­tations such as the eight-hour day and the right to form trade unions), it also contained, though couched in religious rhetoric, something closely resembling the political programme of Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), the recently formed organisation that best embodied Russian liberal opinion (regrouped in the form of the Kadet Party some ten months later). These included the demand for a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of a four-tailed suffrage as well as such basic rights as freedom of speech, assembly and religion. At the same time, the petition included demands - the elimination of redemption payments, for example - that spoke to the interests of the peasantry, the socio- legal group (soslovie) to which most workers still belonged and with which many still had genuine economic, familial and personal links. And, though the petitioners had received no direct input from either Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, their language included a hostile reference to the 'capitalist-exploiters of the working class'.[70] Although this and other rhetorical flourishes (including those of a liberal character) may well have reflected the influence of the Assembly of Factory Workers' cohort of disillusioned Marxists, the fact that so many workers appeared to be comfortable with such a seemingly incongruous mix of liberal, radical and traditional discourses - the languages of urban class warfare, 'bourgeois' civic values and 'humble' peasant pleading, accompanied by the visible parading and display of religious icons and portraits of the tsar - speaks volumes of the mixed, labile, internally contradictory state of mind of Russia's most 'advanced' workers as they unwittingly embarked on their and the twentieth century's very first revolution. Little wonder that Lenin craved a party that could provide Russian socialists with the closed continuity of 'consciousness' in the face of such volatile shifts of mood in the class they claimed to represent. [71]

If the revolutionary year began, then, with no clear victor in the struggle between the radical Left and the forces of order for the allegiance of Russia's ideologically still impressionable and unformed labour force, by the end of that year radicals would emerge as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating.[72] One way to think of the year 1905 is as an acceleration at hothouse temperatures of the earlier competition for worker allegiance, but this time with a decided advantage on the side of the revolutionaries thanks to the shattering of faith in the tsar precipitated by Bloody Sunday. One observes the government desperately dishing out new proposals to win back the workers but invariably falling behind the curve of disillusionment. Perhaps the most serious government initiative in i905 (prior to October) was the Shidlovskii Commission, an attempt launched at the end of January to bring the aspirations of volatile St Petersburg workers under control by harnessing them for the first time to an elected body of (male) worker representatives, chosen (in contrast to the feeble and unpopular law on starostas of 1903) by workers, without any input from employers (although together with government officials, employers would be represented on the commission itself). With worker representatives chosen via a complex two- stage system of voting based on the size of the factory, the commission was supposed to get at the roots of the workers' discontents and come up with new solutions to their most pressing problems.[73] This was a tacit admission by the government that the traditional notion of a worker population so rooted in its peasant traditions as to seek comfort in the goodwill of the tsar, a notion that may still have seemed to be plausible at the dawn of Bloody Sunday, was no longer adequate to the challenge faced by the regime.

Although workers at some St Petersburg factories were sometimes advised by liberal and left-leaning lawyers and other educated well-wishers, revolu­tionary activists representing the various socialist parties played almost no role in the first-stage elections to the commission that took place in the middle of February. If for a brief moment, it appeared as if the government might have out-manoeuvred the radical Left and recaptured some of its lost ground, however, events were moving too fast and basic distrust was too great for the government to hold on to its advantage. What it had succeeded in doing was to promote 'the first basically free elections ever held in Russia by workers',[74]but it then quickly managed to lose control of the process while providing workers with multiple venues where they could nurture their growing politi­cal sensitivities and feel the strength and empowerment that comes with open debate, voting and unconstrained political sociability. In one of those unusual sequencings that does seem to distinguish historical processes in modern Russia, workers now found themselves the only social group in the coun­try to have been granted a (relatively) democratic, if ephemeral, franchise under a notoriously autocratic system. Not content to follow the marching orders of the regime that had empowered them, Petersburg workers (from whom workers in other parts of Russia were quickly gaining inspiration) rejected the limitations that the government wished to place upon the new commission, guaranteed its failure by boycotting its meetings and often aired their grievances in language that called the entire political order into question, thereby replicating but also dwarfing the paradoxes of the zubatovshchina.

Instead of becoming a step in the direction of co-optation, the Shidlovskii elections actually contributed to what became the most important revolu­tionary innovation to emerge from the labour movement in 1905 - the soviet (sovet). Although the precise origins of the idea of a citywide representative workers' council are still a matter of some dispute, most historians of 1905 agree that the experience of electing factory delegates in February helped pave the way for Petersburg workers to elect their own representatives to the Petersburg soviet in October. The other important source of the con­cept was, of course, the citywide strike committee, which was the nuclear body from which the soviet developed, with few participants understand­ing at first that they were participating in the creation of a historically new institution. While some Soviet historians have tried to trace the antecedents of the Petersburg soviet a few months further back in time, to the Assembly of Delegates (Sobranie Upolnomochennykh) that oversaw the Bolshevik-supported (but not led) multi-factory general strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in May and June, Solomon Schwarz has demonstrated that the two institutions were qual­itatively different and that the Petersburg soviet was a first of its kind, that is, the first in which the members saw themselves as being not only a local strike committee, but an unauthorised instrument of local self-government, one that dared to substitute itself for the officially constituted authorities.[75]

In fact, the Petersburg soviet was the direct result of the October general strike that was launched on 8 October by Moscow printers and spread by railway workers on the Moscow-St Petersburg line, a strike that, thanks to the railway, soon fanned out into almost all the industrial centres of the Russian Empire. The soviet's origins were 'spontaneous' in the sense that unaffiliated Petersburg workers and not the revolutionary parties launched the initiative, first as a citywide strike committee (not without precedent) and then as a claimant to local, and to some degree, since St Petersburg was the capital city, even national, political authority (a phenomenon completely without precedent in Russia, though somewhat analogous to the Paris Commune of 1871). To be sure, all the major revolutionary groups were fairly quick to recognise the importance of the new organisation, though Bolsheviks - still more committed to the tactic of armed uprising and ambivalent about strikes at a time of revolution - more reluctantly so than others. They all - Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs - sought and achieved representation on the soviet's executive committee, with the nominal Menshevik but ultra-radical revolutionary Leon Trotsky, as is well known, playing a very prominent role as the soviet's vice- president.[76]

At least in St Petersburg, the brief period of the October general strike and the soviet's subsequent dominance of the city should be seen as the workers' moment of greatest triumph in 1905. The Petersburg soviet virtually became the governing body of that city for several weeks. However, the bloody sup­pression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers' triumphant period, as those workers who went to the barricades with SD, especially Bolshevik, support were crushed by artillery fire and the onslaught of loyal regiments hurried by train from St Petersburg to Moscow. If the tsar's belated but promising Manifesto of 16 October was extorted from him by the power ofthe labour movement, which was supported in diverse ways by radicals and liberals alike, the defeat of the Moscow workers and the near simultaneous arrest of the Petersburg soviet in December placed the government in a much better position to minimise the actual concessions, including workers' rights, projected in the manifesto.

Although labour unrest continued well into 1906,[77] workers would cease to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labour movement revived in the wake of the Lena Goldfield massacre of April 1912. Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some palpable if limited gains for workers. This included the government's recognition for the first time of their right, albeit within very tight restrictions, to form 'professional' unions and, though only in the private sector, to engage in non-political economic strikes, as well as their right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian parliament, the Duma, though under a very restricted franchise (rendered even narrower after Petr Stolypin's electoral coup of3 June 1907).[78]

As the country recovered from the throes of revolution, Russian industry, with the aid of a newly energised commercial banking system, began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century. By 1910 industry was again experiencing a robust expansion, although at a growth rate of 6 per cent per annum it fell significantly short of the 8 per cent growth rate of the 1890s. As the position of workers in the labour market became more favorable, they grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and government repression.

Nevertheless, it took the massacre of some one hundred goldminers in the spring of 1912 to resuscitate the still cautious labour movement. If in 1907­11 the labour movement had largely restricted itself to legal, above-ground activities, causing some Bolsheviks to level the exaggerated charge that the trade unions' Menshevik-oriented leaders were acting as 'liquidators' of the underground Party, Lena ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activ­ity and demonstrations, with workers often striking at a significantly higher rate than they had in the revolutionary year i905. This unrest took place in many parts of Russia and among virtually every category of worker, including the unskilled and semi-skilled textile women of the CIR. But once again the movement evolved most dramatically in St Petersburg, though in the summer of 1914 it took on a particularly aggressive form in Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the SRs, while working to the disadvantage of the more cautious and to some extent disillusioned Mensheviks, who increasingly feared that workers' irrational passions, which they saw as reflecting their close peasant origins, were moving them in a direction for which Russia's 'objective' conditions was not historically ripe. Those passions, it was felt, had been aroused irrespon­sibly by the Bolsheviks, and, to a degree that might prove counterproductive or even worse, were threatening to turn back the clock on Russia's progress toward democracy. Some historians, most famously Leopold Haimson, have suggested that Russian industrial centres were on the cusp of a new revolution, or at least of violent, irrepressible conflagration, when the onset of the First World War in the summer of 1914 put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged, as does Haimson, that labour unrest in the capital was dying down, at least for the moment, shortly before war was

declared.[79]

Be that as it may, once the war had begun to go badly for Russia, there were growing signs of the labour movement's revival, especially in 1916. By the mid­dle of February 1917, hungry St Petersburg (now 'Petrograd') workers, their wages lagging far behind a spiralling wartime inflation, were again engaged in significant strike activity. This unrest included women textile workers and, replacing drafted workers, recently recruited woman munitions workers, as well as the traditionally militant, male, metal- and machine-workers. By the last days of the month they were joining with other elements of the urban popula­tion, including sections of the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational demonstrations that led directly to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the tsarist regime.

Almost immediately, Petrograd workers, having played so prominent a role in the overthrow of tsarism, staked out their claim to a numerically disproportionate role in determining the character and fate of the new order. Working in co-operation with radical intelligenty among the SD and SR party activists, they resurrected an updated version of the soviets of i905, but this time with the hot-blooded participation of soldiers from the local garrison, many of whom lived in fear of transfer to the fighting front. Similar soviets quickly mushroomed throughout the empire.

Over the next few months, with the Petrograd soviet sharing 'dual power' with the new, unstable, and insecure Provisional Government, worker mili­tancy escalated rapidly, often following its own trajectory with scant attention to the desires of the left party leaders. Their militancy took many forms - strikes, riots, factory occupations, the creation of increasingly defiant fac­tory committees and, along with soldiers, participation in the organisations and demonstrations of the revolutionary parties, though never in lockstep with those parties. All of this uncontrollable activity added enormously to the difficulties of the Provisional Government, which, even as its composition moved leftward as moderate socialists agreed to assume cabinet positions, was simply unable to satisfy unremitting worker demands under wartime condi­tions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government in October i9i7 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent Assembly the followingJanuary, they would do so with a great deal of working- class support, though not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a 'soviet' government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker democracy within the factory. For workers as for others, the ensuing Civil War of 1918-21 was a period of bloodshed, hunger and, eventually, draconian measures, including the militarisation of labour, the introduction of stringent one-man management and the ending of truly free elections to the workers' soviets, all inflicted upon what had been its own primary constituency by an embattled, often desperate Bolshevik regime. Though indispensable to the 'Reds' in their life-and-death struggle against the 'Whites' in these years of bloody warfare, workers emerged from the Civil War demoralised and, in many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry and the con­sequent shortage of industrial jobs, declassed. Despite flurries of activity and even occasional resistance, workers now ceased to be a major independent force in the country's political life.

Police and revolutionaries

JONATHAN W. DALY

Soon after officers of leading noble families rebelled in December 1825, Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chan­cellery and a uniformed gendarmerie to conduct censorship, oversee the bureaucracy, keep track of the public mood and preserve state security. Dur­ing the first two decades of its existence, Nicholas's security police were not unpopular. At the end of Nikolai Gogol's Inspector General (Revizor, 1836), for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspec­tor appears as a symbol of justice. At any given moment during the sec­ond quarter of the century, one or two dozen people - mostly officials, society women, writers, journalists and well-connected nobles - provided sporadic, often gossipy information to the Third Section, sometimes quite

openly.[80]

Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830-1, the period from 1826 to 1840 witnessed almost no incidents of political opposition. The intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues. The execution of five Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826 had surely diverted many from the path of active opposition. As the close association between government and educated public began to break down, in the 1840s, thanks to the expansion of education, increased European influences and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. The Third Section was beginning to inspire dread but still was not an efficient security police institution. It was generally well informed about the private social gatherings of social elites. It could also make incisive assessments of the public mood, as when in early 1855 it warned of war-weariness within the population and urged bringing the Crimean War to a close.[81]

In 1866 in the midst of the Great Reforms, which created an independent judiciary and institutions of local self-government, a terrorist attempt against Alexander II led to minor police reforms: the creation of a forty-man security force (okhrannaia strazha) to protect the emperor and of special bureaus for security policing (Okhrannoe otdelenie) and regular criminal investigation (Sys- knoe otdelenie). Although the government appears to have intended earnestly to combat both grave regular and political crime, the robust development of political crime over the next several decades caused the lion's share of resources available for policing to flow to the security bureau. Within a decade and a half, it became the cornerstone of the security police system. Later in the year, the Gendarme Corps was reorganised, its staff increased. Finally, in 1868 a net­work of twenty-eight 'observation posts' (nabliudatel'nye punkty) was created in fourteen provinces.[82]

In 1869, before the onset of anything like systematic government repression, Mikhail Bakunin and S. G. Nechaev, in their 'Revolutionary Catechism', urged gathering rebels and brigands into a violent revolutionary force. Nechaev's People's Revenge group, which advocated the systematic destruction of the established social and political order and the physical annihilation of govern­ment officials, attracted many young people, four of whom he persuaded in 1869 to murder a confederate.[83] The Nechaev conspirators were tried and mostly exonerated, promptingthe government in 1871 to empower gendarmes to investigate state-crime cases and the justice minister in consultation with the director of the Third Section to propose administrative punishments in these cases. Until 1904, therefore, the majority of state-crime cases were handled administratively.

The next opposition movement was non-violent. In spring and summer 1874, thousands of young idealists, dressed as peasants and some trained in rustic craft and skills, set out to the countryside to bring light to, and learn from, the peasantry. Russian educated youths had 'gone to the people'. Hundreds were arrested and eventually tried, but the defendants won public sympathy. Those who remained committed to political opposition either fled abroad or went 'underground'. Among the latter, some remained covertly in villages; others embraced political terrorism. The first of these terrorist-conspirators, calling themselves Land and Freedom, began in 1877 to carry out acts of violence against senior officials. When a jury acquitted Vera Zasulich, who freely confessed to attempting to murder a prominent official in 1878, the government deprived people accused of committing attacks on government officials of the right to a jury trial. The terrorists countered with more attacks and the government with more emergency measures.⁵

Yet the security police, using primitive methods of surveillance, were no match for the terrorists: only in the 1870s did the police begin to build up a registry of political suspects (the police in Vienna for a half-century had been registering the entire population of the Austrian Empire). Moreover, the terrorists formed a tightly organised, highly disciplined, though small, band of almost religiously devoted crusaders who launched attack after attack. In desperation the police arrested thousands of (mostly non-violent) young radicals, thus alienatingthe educated public who therefore occasionally abetted the terrorists. After several attempts, their organisation - now called People's Will - assassinated Tsar Alexander II in March 1881.

But the tide was already turning. In August 1880 a centralised police insti­tution subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, with authority over both political and regular police forces, the Police Department, had replaced the Third Section. Henceforth the security service was just another wheel in the state machine. (The Gendarme Corps remained affiliated with the War Min­istry, however.) In October a second security bureau was established in Moscow. Grigorii Sudeikin, chief of the security bureau in St Petersburg and one of a rare breed of professionally sophisticated gendarme officers, penetrated the People's Will with informants and arrested several of its members by early 1881. While he failed to prevent the regicide, over the next two years Sudeikin, his assistant, Petr Rachkovskii, and their key informant, Sergei Degaev, demol­ished People's Will, which, although using Degaev to help murder Sudeikin, never fully recovered.

Several informants whose identities were discovered by revolutionaries went on to occupy key positions in the police apparatus. In contrast to gen­darme officers, men with military training and an abiding sense of hierar­chy and authority, erstwhile informants knew the revolutionaries' mentality

5 See Jonathan W Daly, 'On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia', SR 54 (1995): 602-29.

intimately, making them their most dangerous adversaries. Rachkovskii had worked briefly as an informant in 1879, then virtually created a security bureau in Paris, which he headed from 1884 to 1902. Sergei Zubatov, an informant for the Moscow security bureau in 1886-7, rose to head that bureau and trans­formed it into the heart and soul of the empire's security system. Zubatov, Rachkovskii and several others introduced into the system an inventiveness, a vitality, an enthusiasm, and a spirit of adventure and iconoclasm previously absent from Russia's security service.

The government's apparent inability to deal with the terrible famine of 1890-1 gave rise to underground organisations in the People's Will tradition and broad-based oppositional movements. Radical activists travelled to the famine- stricken areas, where they educated, healed and fed people and agitated for a revolutionary uprising. The peasants largely shunned them, however, driving some in summer 1893 to found the People'sJustice party aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Co-ordinated arrests crushed the organisation.

The number of gendarme inquests into political crimes rose from 56 cases involving 559 people in 1894 to 1,522 cases involving 6,405 people in 1903, an increase of 1,259% and 608%, respectively.[84] Still, until the turn of the cen­tury, the security police had revolutionary conspirators well under control. Rachkovskii in Paris with a dozen informants kept abreast of developments among the radical emigres and occasionally arranged their arrest in collab­oration with European police forces. The Police Department co-ordinated the information sent in from provincial gendarme stations, mail interception offices and the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and in Paris. It also recruited informants on an irregular basis. Often this was done without much genuine effort on the police's part. For example, in 1893 Evno Azef, a brilliant informant among leading Socialist-Revolutionaries, voluntarily offered his services.

The Social Democrats enjoyed more success in the late 1890s because the security service focused more on repressing Populists and neo-People's Will groups (though it also harassed the Marxists, especially in Moscow, prompting them to adopt strict methods of secrecy), and thanks to a shift in tactics towards agitation among artisans and workers, articulating their everyday concerns and frustrations in order to incite their anger and channel it towards revolt. This approach formed the core idea of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, created in St Petersburg in autumn 1895 to unite the disparate Social Democrat circles.[85] Despite continuous repression, which landed many experienced revolutionaries in exile, the movement helped pro­voke and organise massive strikes in St Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, leading many manufacturers unilaterally to shorten the regular work day in their fac­tories to eleven and a-half hours. The government extended this concession to the whole country in a law of 2 June 1897. Henceforth, however, the gov­ernment would deal with strike instigators largely by administrative means, not in the regular courts. The Police Department would also pay far more attention to the labour movement.

Meanwhile, Zubatov was reforming the methods of security policing. Pro­fessing a 'profound love for and faith in his cause', he imparted to several of his proteges in the security bureau an ardent commitment rarely encountered in gendarme officers. Zubatov's closest assistant, Evstratii Mednikov, a clever Old Believer of peasant stock, refined the use of plain clothes police agents, called surveillants (filery). Before the early 1880s, the gendarmes, despite their easily recognisable blue uniform, were rarely allowed to undertake plain clothes operations. At the Moscow security bureau, surveillants memorised the city's physical layout, includingrestaurants, bars, factories, taxi stations and tramway routes, as well as streets, alleys and courtyards, to enable them to manoeuvre freely around suspects. During training, experienced agents accompanied fresh recruits and taught them to recognise and commit to memory facial features through systematic study of physiognomy and by poring over photographs of revolutionaries. Finally, the novices learned to employ makeup and disguises. Surveillants jotted down their observations in diaries, tens of thousands of which are preserved in the police archives. They are generally little more than a dull catalogue of pedestrian occurrences in the life of persons under surveil­lance, yet security bureau clerks used them to prepare a welter of 'finding aids', including weighty name and place registers and complex diagrams of relations among opponents of the government. The number of such trained surveillants in Moscow rose from seventeen in 1881 to fifty in 1902, after which the number fluctuated between fifty and one hundred. (After the turn of the century, the St Petersburg bureau employed slightly more.)

To pursue radical activists out into the provinces, where the majority of provincial gendarme authorities were ineffective, in 1894 a mobile surveillance brigade (Letuchii otriadfilerov) was created at the Moscow security bureau. As a sort of moveable security bureau, it was designed to uncover distribution networks of revolutionary literature, illegal printing presses and propaganda rings. It permitted Zubatov to co-ordinate major operations across the empire - from surveillance to mass arrests. The key to its success was its mobility: those under surveillance were less likely to recognise a surveillant constantly on the move than one permanently stationed in one place. The brigade achieved its success with a staff of only thirty surveillants in 1894 and fifty in January 1901.

More important than surveillants were informants. Zubatov was a mas­ter at recruiting and guiding them, winning their confidence and maximising their usefulness. Sometimes he used chance meetings with industrial work­ers or personnel of important public organisations as opportunities to recruit them as agents. A certain number of informants simply proposed their ser­vices. The majority of agents began to work for the police after arrest - and under interrogation. Zubatov questioned political suspects as though leading a radical discussion circle, showering them with attention, offering them food and drink, and arguing passionately that the people never profit from revolu­tionary violence, that only the emperor was capable of implementing needed reforms in Russia. His enthusiasm and energy were extremely attractive to revolutionaries lacking deep convictions and permitted him to turn some of them away from the paths of political opposition.

Zubatov emphasised that case officers must win their agents' trust, protect them from discovery, assist them in adversity and increase their faith in the Russian monarchy. He urged his officers, according to one of them, to treat their informants as 'a beloved woman with whom you have entered into illicit relations. Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you will dishonour her . . . Take this to heart: treat these people as I am advising, and they will understand your needs, will trust you, and will work with you honestly and selflessly.'[86]

The number of informants was never great, and before Zubatov they were few indeed. Nikolai Kletochnikov, a revolutionary infiltrator who had access to the security police's most sensitive files in 1879-80, found a record of only ii5 permanent informants in the whole empire - at the height of terrorist attacks against the emperor and his officials.[87] Later, part-time police informants worked within nearly every major social group and profession, although even the security bureau in St Petersburg never employed more than 94 informants. The most important ones were students in the 1880s and 1890s and members of the two principal revolutionary parties (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and

Social Democrats) after the turn ofthe century. People became informants for a variety of reasons. Some agreed to inform in order to take revenge upon their erstwhile comrades (Zubatov claimed this of himself), some sought adventure or took a liking to their case officers, probably all feared punishment and desired material benefits. A few earnestly wished to serve their government in its struggle against the onslaught of revolutionary sedition.[88] Wages ranged from 5-10 roubles to 100-200 roubles (or up to 1,000 for a few 'stars') monthly. (By contrast, surveillants and skilled metalworkers earned 50 roubles per month.) Valuable, long-time informants could hope to receive a solid annual pension (from 1,000 to 3,000 roubles) or a one-time lump-sum subsidy (as much as 5,000 roubles).

Zubatov's development of new police methods, especially the systematic and extensive employment of informants, was undoubtedly the most signif­icant advance in Russian political policing since the creation of the Third Section. It also set him at odds with the majority of Russian security police­men, the gendarmes. Such policemen, even when lacking precise information about criminal activity, sometimes arrested dozens of people in order to dis­cover a few political criminals: that is, not on the basis of evidence of political wrongdoing, but in order to obtain evidence. Zubatov argued, by contrast, that suspects should be arrested or exiled administratively only upon discovery of strong evidence of their involvement in political crime, to avoid creating innocent victims and alienating the population from the government. Zubatov preferred to wait patiently for an underground group to come into posses­sion of incriminating evidence (illegal literature, forged passports, explosives or weapons) or for the arrival of a major revolutionary leader from abroad, before arresting its members. The point was to let the group reveal its purposes in order both to learn more about the broader movement of which it was a part and to catch it in flagrante delicto.

If Zubatov's methods were more effective and fruitful in the long run, they were also more dangerous. By allowing the revolutionaries room to manoeu­vre, the police risked letting them perpetrate crimes. Likewise, informants were obliged to participate more fully in the work of the illegal organisations, laying them open to charges of provocation. Given the difficulties and dangers inherent in the new approach, it is hardly surprising that many gendarmes continued to prefer the older, more heavy-handed methods. Yet Zubatov was surely right that by the mid-i890s the security police had to ascend to a higher level of professional sophistication. Whereas the opposition 'movement' had comprised a few dozen members under Nicholas I and only a few thousand under Alexanders II and III, it fell to Nicholas II's lot to rule an empire plagued by mass social discontent. The security system was no longer equipped to punish or otherwise neutralise all such 'suspicious' people in Russia. Further­more, as a former radical himself, Zubatov was convinced that much popular discontent was justified.

The massive strikes of 1896-7 underscored these points. Moreover, the Social Democrats were enjoying considerable success in spreading their revolution­ary theories and agitation among the ranks of the industrial workers. In this context, Zubatov conceived of an astonishing programme: to organise indus­trial workers on behalf of the government and to strive to improve the material conditions of their life in order to win them away from the revolutionary oppo­sition. He argued that only the absolutist monarchy, an institution above classes and estates, could advance the industrial workers' interests. The revolutionar­ies, he asserted, wished to use them only to further their own political goals. The patronage of Moscow's powerful governor-general, the emperor's uncle, Grand Duke Serge Aleksandrovich, permitted him to implement this bold policy.[89]

Apparently in response to a coalescing of revolutionary organisations in the late 1890s, in January 1898 the Police Department created a Special Section for co-ordinating security policing operations throughout the empire. The Spe­cial Section's staff of five assistants, seven clerks and three typists (1900) were nearly all civilians until 1905, when a few gendarme officers took important positions. The institution was cloaked in secrecy, its offices hidden, and its chief and his assistants, a few of them erstwhile informants, claiming to be professors, writers or merchants. While the actual fighting against the rev­olutionary opposition was left to Zubatov in Moscow, the Special Section in St Petersburg analysed, classified and interpreted data furnished by police insti­tutions, informants andperlustration; surveyed the various opposition groups and movements and prepared assessments of their strength and significance; compiled, organised and indexed information on social disorders, students, workers and the general mood of the Russian population; and co-ordinated the search for political criminals.

The Social Democrats held their first congress in Minsk on 1-2 March 1898, but the police immediately arrested every delegate - save three whom Zubatov deliberately left at liberty, in the hope that they would lead him to their col­leagues in revolution. Both police repression (Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and Aleksandr Potresov were exiled to Siberia) and philosophical and pro­grammatic differences among Social Democrats delayed the convocation of a second party congress until 1903. In the meantime, there erupted in February 1899 student disorders that marked the beginning of Russia's revolutionary era. They radicalised the bar by expanding the number of radical law students, stimulated the publication of the Social Democrat newspaper Iskra and pro­moted the formation of the Socialist-Revolutionary party and of the Liberation Movement by awakening Marxists, neo-Populists and left-wing liberals to the immense power available to opponents of the imperial government if only they roused the population against it. The government first overreacted to the student unrest, then relented: it conscripted into the army and expelled hundreds of students from the universities, only to readmit them in the fall.[90]The message was clear: the government was arbitrary and repressive, but not overly to be feared by committed radicals.

The Socialist-Revolutionary party grew up around the newspaper Revoliu- tsionnaia Rossiia, which began publication in late 1900 in Moscow and in early 1901 in Finland. The party evolved from two currents, the People's Will's tradition of political terrorism and a peasant-centred programme of revolu­tionary propaganda.[91] The party's programme of terrorism received its motor impulse from the assassination in February 1901 of the education minister, Nikolai Bogolepov, whom critics of his handling of the student disorders called 'Mr Absurd' (Nelepov). That summer, Zubatov admitted that despite a whole series of successful arrests the revolutionary movement was growing and con­solidating itself. Russia's revolutionaries viewed themselves as a kind of holy brotherhood of men and women dedicated to bringing down the imperial gov­ernment and to putting a more just order in its place. In their quest for right they expected to fall prey to snares and to suffer pain and privations, including arrest, imprisonment and exile. One counted devotion to the cause in terms of jails visited and places of exile known. The Bolshevik Viktor Nogin's tally, for example, reached fifty.[92]

By late 1901 and early 1902, industrial workers and university students joined forces in major demonstrations. In St Petersburg, radical intellectuals also took part. This seems to have been another important step along the road towards the i905 Revolution, when students, industrial labourers and liberal and radical intellectuals banded together to launch a united attack on the imperial government. To make matters worse, in spring i902 massive peas­ant disorders shook Poltava and Kharkov provinces. It was precisely at this moment that Lenin argued that the revolutionary movement would triumph only if a 'few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as the imperial secu­rity police, were allowed to organise it'.[93] It seems, however, that the greatest threat to the government was less the revolutionary conspirators, whom the Russian security police generally managed to control, but mass opposition movements.

Neither the provincial gendarme stations, nor the security bureaus, nor even Zubatov's mobile brigade could cope with the growing and diversi­fying opposition. Few provincial gendarmes were prepared to match wits with anti-government activists, and the mobile brigade was now stretched to the limit of its resources. Thus, in mid-i902 Zubatov persuaded the inte­rior minister, Viacheslav Plehve (his predecessor, Dmitrii Sipiagin, was assas­sinated in April 1902), to authorise the creation of a network of provincial security bureaus staffed by dynamic gendarme officers and surveillants trans­ferred from the mobile brigade. Zubatov was named Special Section chief in August and twenty bureaus were created. The new institutions occupied an ambiguous position within the imperial bureaucracy. In matters affecting 'state security' they were independent and authoritative - being empowered, 'in extreme circumstances', to launch searches or arrests outside their provinces without contacting either local authorities or the Police Department - but in all other affairs they were partially subordinated to the provincial gendarme station chiefs. This was a prescription for disastrous intra-bureaucratic rela­tions, and many gendarme chiefs were justifiably furious. Even so, the new bureaus, especially in Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav, seemed to deliver impressive results.

Yet within months Russia began its slide towards revolution. In July 1903 massive strikes swept the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus: a foretaste of the October 1905 general strike.[94] Zubatov urged moderation in dealing with the unrest, the more so as his labour experiment was well entrenched in Odessa. Yet on Plehve's orders, the general strike in that city was brutally crushed in mid-July. Zubatov rebelled. Plehve dismissed and banished him from the major cities of Russia, depriving the security system of its most talented direc­tor. A year later Plehve himself fell before an assassin's bomb. By November Mednikov lamented that the entire security system was crumbling before his eyes.[95] The conciliatory attitude of Plehve's successor, Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, merely encouraged oppositional sentiment, which had been building despite government repression, to burst forth into a fever of social militancy exac­erbated by Russia's sagging fortunes in its war with Japan. Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905) ignited massive popular unrest and throughout the year the opposition movements grew into a mighty phalanx of anti-government forces - agrarian and urban, educated and illiterate, left-liberal and revolutionary. Offi­cials were continuously threatened by terrorist attacks. From February 1905 to May 1906, 1,075 of them were killed or wounded.[96] Since the security police, by their very nature, were powerless to forestall spontaneous, disorganised outbursts of mass popular discontent, the government would have been less endangered had the regular police apparatus held firm. Yet it did not: under Alexander Bulygin, the entire Interior Ministry was in complete disorganisa­tion by late summer.

The crisis peaked in October i905 with a general strike that immobilised much of urban Russia and prompted the emperor to issue his October Man­ifesto, diminishing the power of officialdom and reinforcing the rights of his subjects.[97] Many police officials had no idea howto act or react: in early Novem­ber the Police Department denied rumours that the security police would be abolished. To make matters worse, terrible agrarian violence broke out in nearly every province of European Russia from late October through Decem­ber and an armed uprising erupted in Moscow in mid-December. The entire imperial order might have collapsed had not the hardline Petr Nikolaevich Durnovo been appointed interior minister in late October over the indignant protests of nearly all the public figures in Russia. The new interior minister and other proponents of law and order drew three conclusions from the anarchy of late 1905. First, signs of weakness and concessions to the opposition tended to undermine the government. Second, only decisive leadership and timely repression had a prayer of holding the system together. Third, the peasantry and petty urban dwellers could not be relied upon to oppose the radicals. In a word, only a harshly authoritarian state could survive in Russia given the strength of the opposition and the complexity of the social and economic problems facing the country. By January 1906, this view held sway within a large portion of officialdom.

The confrontation between government and revolutionaries remained bloody for another two years. The regular and especially military courts heard thousands of state-crime cases beginning in 1906. Whereas 308 alleged political criminals had passedbefore military judges in 1905,4,698 did so in 1906.[98] 'Puni­tive expeditions' restored order along the Trans-Siberian railway, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus and, most notoriously, in the Baltic region. In all perhaps 6,000 people were executed from 1905 to 1907, some 4,600 by court sentence and perhaps 1,400 without trial.[99] Even so, the revolutionary terror did not abate. As many as 1,126 government officials were also killed, and another 1,506 wounded, in 1906. These figures more than doubled the following year; non-official casualties were just as gruesome.[100] Russia was embroiled in a quasi civil war.

At the same time, state and opposition confronted one another uneasily in the State Duma, the new parliament of the Russian Empire. On 26 April, the less despised Petr Arkadievich Stolypin replaced Durnovo as interior minister and was appointed premier on 8 July, the day before the Duma's sudden disso­lution. During the inter-parliamentary period that followed, which witnessed massive agrarian unrest and mutinies in key naval bases, Stolypin intended to implement a whole raft of reforms, but his notorious first major act (one week after a terrorist attempt on his life which left twenty-seven people dead) was to institute military field courts for trying persons alleged to have committed violent attacks on state officials or institutions. The field courts, which were obliged to pass judgement in no more than two days and to carry out the sen­tence (usually death) within one day, operated until April 1907, and executed as many as 1,000 alleged terrorists.[101]

Stolypin is perhaps best known for this official campaign of counter-terror and for his land reforms or 'wager on the strong' peasants, but his admin­istration also reformed the security police system. From December 1906 to

January 1907, Stolypin's protege and director of the Police Department, Maksi- milian Trusevich, created eight regional security bureaus, each comprising six to twelve provinces and corresponding roughly to the spheres ofactivity ofthe Socialist-Revolutionary party. Their directors were the security bureau chiefs in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, Vilno, Riga, and the gen­darme station chief in Samara. The directors were supposed to co-ordinate and improve the operations and information-gathering of the several gen­darme stations and security bureaus within their jurisdictions but also had the right to order arrest and search operations. This angered gendarme sta­tion chiefs who were nearly all of higher rank. To alleviate these tensions and improve operations, Trusevich issued numerous directives and manuals on security police methods and organised periodic summit meetings.

The acrimony between government and public was even more bitter in the second Duma than in the first, and on 3 June i907 the emperor again peremptorily dissolved the assembly. Expecting massive popular disorders, Stolypin ordered administrative and police authorities to preserve public order at any cost.

Overall, however, a spirit of moderation prevailed among senior police offi­cials. A series of directives rebuked lower administrative and police authorities for taking indiscriminate recourse to administrative exile and for insufficiently strict observance of legal procedure. These strictures were directed primar­ily at provincial gendarme and security chiefs who often found it difficult to penetrate the revolutionaries' conspiratorial defences. The major security bureaus, by contrast, disposed of well-placed informants permitting them to focus their attention on genuine subversion. This was an extremely important distinction. The police system was able to function within the framework of a legal, constitutional order only in so far as its security police apparatus pos­sessed a reasonably effective intelligence-gathering capability. The efficiency of the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and a few provincial cities permitted them to undermine revolutionary organisations without harassing large numbers of innocent people. Only a really sophisticated police system can distinguish among mere malcontents and genuine subversives.

But perhaps Russia's security men were too sophisticated. The Social Demo­crat Osip Ermanskii thought so. In his experience, the security men who employed Zubatov's tactic often gave wider latitude than did ordinary gen­darme officers to revolutionary activists in the hope that they would incrim­inate themselves further. Yet, asked Ermanskii, 'who gained more from this policy, the government or the revolutionaries? . . . While the Police Depart­ment carefully gathered material and then subjected it to scientific analysis, we were permitted to place a mine beneath the very edifice of absolutism and capitalism whose safeguard and perpetuation that clever [police] system had been designed to ensure.'[102]

Of course, Ermanskii was viewing the system from the point of view of the collapse of the monarchy, an event far from inevitable. Beginning in late 1907 and early 1908, the government gained the upper hand in its struggle against the revolutionaries. One senior official reported in early 1908 that 'Every­where revolutionary newspapers bitterly complain about the intensification of the "reaction" and about the indifference of the population to the activity of revolutionaries, and this is a good sign of the return to tranquillity of the country.'[103] Indeed, the first issue of a new Socialist-Revolutionary partyjournal declared in April that 'The autocracy has re-established itself.'[104] Many radi­cal activists remained, but they were driven largely underground, and senior police officials felt sufficiently tranquil over the next two years to return most of the empire to normal law, to issue relatively few death sentences and to seek to prevent excessive use of administrative punishments. The government seemed very much in control, the revolutionaries had been routed and con­stitutionalism and the rule of law were not entirely jettisoned to accomplish this.

On 7 January 1909, the Socialist-Revolutionary party repudiated one of its most celebrated terrorist leaders, Evno Azef, as a police informant. The perfect 'double agent', he had enjoyed the complete trust of both police and party.[105] Azefs exposure discredited both the Socialist-Revolutionary party, which seemed to be swarming with traitors (some two dozen more informants were unmasked over the next four years), and a government that would make use of assassins to fight assassins. Meanwhile, senior police officials, worried that it would become harder to recruit new informants, reassured existing ones that the Police Department had been able to protect Azef for sixteen years but also warned them that all provocation would be punished severely. It seems, in fact, that the recruitment of police informants did not suffer much from the Azef affair: most of the ninety-four informants employed by the St Petersburg security bureau in 1913 - it had never employed a larger number - had been hired during the previous three years.

The Police Department's success in devastating the revolutionary organisa­tions did not cause it to become complacent. The Special Section cajoled, pro­voked, rebuked, encouraged and criticised the directors of both the regional and provincial security bureaus and the gendarme stations with great fre­quency and vigour. A steady stream of directives urged them to acquire more informants, to study the revolutionary organisations, to train more surveil- lants, to use conspiratorial methods, to send agents deep into the countryside, to co-operate more effectively, to provide more precise information and to use good judgement before searching suspects. Experienced gendarme officers were sent out to the provinces on inspection tours, a serious training course for gendarme officers was instituted in 1910 and for this purpose Special Sec­tion clerks drew up large, multicoloured diagrams of the major revolutionary parties.

The security system was definitely becoming more professional and pro­ductive, but its reputation suffered a further blow on i September i9ii when an erstwhile police informant, Dmitrii Bogrov, fatally shot Prime Minister Stolypin in Kiev. Public opinion waxed indignant that the security police were still relying on such unsavoury elements as Bogrov, that is, like Azef, a police informant out of control. The reactionary Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii called the security police 'the most harmful, immoral, and dangerous invention in the Russian bureaucratic system', a sort of 'Spanish Inquisition with a slight softening of manners'. Nikolai Gredeskul, a well-known Kadet jurist, admit­ted that in the face of massive political terror the government had had to adopt secret and underhand methods, but he added that this had led inevitably to the Azef and Bogrov affairs. Since political terrorism had by i9ii come largely to an end, the government, he argued, should put an end to its own covert operations.[106] Curiously, the Kadet was more sympathetic to the gov­ernment's predicament than was the monarchist. Gredeskul was right: it is essentially impossible to combat a conspiracy without resorting to conspir­atorial methods. This was true in the case of both People's Will and the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists. But once the latter had been disorganised, was it not possible for the police to renounce such methods as Gredeskul urged? Unfortunately, the Socialist-Revolutionaries never officially repudiated the use of terror, and many Social Democrat leaders continued to lay plans to orchestrate the violent overthrow of the imperial order. Thus, in the interest of state security, the imperial security police continued to deploy secret informants among them, and quite successfully: the major revolutionary par­ties in 1912 were so disorganised that they could not turn much to their benefit the deep popular outrage provoked by the massacre of 172 striking workers in the Lena Goldfields on 4 April 1912.[107]

Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, appointed deputy interior minister in January 1913, launched a series of reforms ofthe security police aimed at cutting costs, winningpublic support forthe government and restricting police reliance on informants. In March he prohibited the recruitment of informants in the military, despite a growing perception among senior police officials, expressed at two security conferences in late 1912, that the use of informants should be increased to combat the spread of sedition among enlisted personnel. In May, Dzhunkovskii prohibited deploying informants in secondary schools, which appears to have been an infrequent practice anyway. It might have seemed that he had in mind an all-out assault on the security system, for between May 1913 and February 1914 he abolished most of the provincial and regional security bureaus and transferred their functions to the provincial gendarme chiefs. Although some officials considered the regional bureaus ineffective, senior police officials incessantly criticised most provincial gendarmes, and an authoritative report of December 1912 had attributed the disorganisation of the revolutionary movement to the efficiency of the regional bureaus. In the short term, nevertheless, Dzhunkovskii's reforms seem not to have gravely weakened the security system, and for two reasons: the security bureaus in the imperial capitals remained strong (although Dzhunkovskii dismissed the very able St Petersburg bureau chief, Mikhail von Koten) and the regional bureaus were not abolished until January 1914 when the revolutionary organisations had already been severely weakened.

The logical response to harsh police repression for many revolutionaries lay in developing legal methods of protest and agitation. The Social Democrats founded Pravda in April 1912 and Luch in September, Bolshevik and Menshevik newspapers, respectively. The police watched them, naturally, seized individual issues and occasionally closed them down, but they repeatedly reopened under different names, a ruse the police were legally powerless to prevent. Pravda, for example, was closed down eight times during its two-year pre-revolutionary existence. The police's only recourse was to maintain informants within the editorial board. One informant, Miron Chernomazov, edited Pravda from May 1913 to February 1914.[108] Similarly, the Bolsheviks participated eagerly in the Fourth Duma, elected in late summer and early autumn 1912. One of the six Bolshevik deputies, Roman Malinovskii, by far the most talented and charis­matic, was, in fact, a police informant. In May 1914, however, Dzhunkovskii ordered his dismissal. The rumours attending this event stunned the Bolshe­vik leadership, as Azef's exposure had disconcerted Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, to the extent that Lenin, still dumfounded, barely reacted to the major political strikes of industrial workers in Petersburg and Moscow in June

1914.[109]

Historians disagree on whether the incidence of labour unrest between April i9i2 and June i9i4, greater than during the previous years, proves that the gov­ernment was unstable. All agree, however, that the declaration of war against Germany on i7 July i9i4 at least temporarily put an end to this and other popular unrest in Russia. The maintenance of public tranquillity was facili­tated by the immediate imposition throughout the empire of a state of either extraordinary security or martial law, which permitted the suppression of legal newspapers, trade unions and educational societies linked to revolution­ary groups.[110] The security police also arrested many remaining underground activists and worked to keep Bolsheviks and Mensheviks from uniting. By early 1916 the prospects for revolution seemed to many revolutionary activists very dim.

Yet the imperial system was on the eve of collapse. In September 1916, Aleksandr Protopopov, a favourite of Rasputin and an erratic administrator, became the fifth interior minister in thirteen months. The economic situation, already dismal, worsened throughout i9i6. By late November, a court security police report spoke of a 'food crisis', and on 5 February 1917 the Petrograd security bureau warned of coming hunger riots that could lead to 'the most horrible kind of anarchistic revolution'.[111] Large-scale strikes took place on 14 February, but efficient crowd control prevented their getting out of hand. On the night of 25 February the Petrograd Security Bureau arrested a hundred radical activists. The bureau's last report was prepared on the twenty-seventh amid a general strike, massive troop mutinies and the formation ofthe Duma's Provisional Committee and the Soviet. That evening crowds sacked and burned the security bureau headquarters in Petrograd.[112] Although Moscow and much of the rest of the empire temporarily remained calm, this concatenation of events marked the end of the imperial government.

On 4 and 10 March, the Provisional Government abolished the security bureaus, the Police Department and the Gendarme Corps; transferred gen­darme officers and enlisted men to the regular army; and dismissed all gov­ernors and vice-governors. On 18 March it created a bureau for counter­espionage, but against domestic threats to state security the new government left itself nearly defenceless.[113] This was because Russia's new leaders imagined that the collapse of the monarchy would usher in a new form of politics with­out internal threats to state security. In fact, the dismantling of the imperial police apparatus, as odious as its institutions may have been to many edu­cated Russians, was an invitation to takeover by political conspirators. The imperial security police could not forestall the February Revolution, because it was driven purely by mass discontent; a reasonably sophisticated security police almost certainly could have saved the Provisional Government from the October Bolshevik overthrow, which lacked the sort of mass participation that brought down the imperial dynasty and government in February.

War and revolution, 1914-1917

ERIC LQHR

With the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March 1917 in favour of the Grand Duke Michael and the latter's subsequent refusal of the crown, the Romanov dynasty came to an end. The struggle for power and for the definition of the new regime continued through more than four years of revolutionary turmoil and civil war. This chapter outlines Russia's involvement in the First World War, concentrating on the specific ways in which it caused the end of the old regime.

Any attempt to attribute causes must begin with a definition of the event to be explained. When describing 'the end of the old regime', historians are often primarily concerned with the social and national transformations of the revolutionary era that brought the end of the old social order. This chapter focuses on explaining the more specific political end point of regime change when the tsar abdicated and representatives of the national parliament (the Duma), in consultation with representatives of worker and soldier councils, formed a new provisional government. This event marked the end of the Romanov dynasty, the end of Imperial Russia, and the beginning of the social and national revolutions which swept the land through the rest of 1917 and beyond.

The proximate causes of February 1917

The immediate events leading to the abdication began with the confluence of several factors to bring large numbers of people into the Petrograd streets. First, heavy snows in early February 1917 slowed trains, exacerbating chronic wartime problems with flour supply to the cities. Many bakeries temporarily closed due to shortages of flour or fuel. On 19 February, the government announced that bread rationing would be introduced on 1 March, leading to panic-buying and long lines. Fuel shortages led several large factories to close down and the temperature suddenly rose after a long cold spell, both contributing to the number of people in the streets. On 23 February, walk­outs and demonstrations to protest against bread shortages coincided with a small International Women's Day protest march. The next day, these events led to strikes of nearly 200,000 workers. For the first time since 1905, massive demonstrations were held in the centre of the city, on the squares of Nevsky Prospect.

On 25 February, events on the streets remained difficult to classify. Was it another in the series of wartime demonstrations and strikes - which were growing in frequency in late 1916 to early 1917 but still tended to be of short duration because workers preferred not to undermine the troops at the front - or was it the beginning of a revolution? This case exceeded all previous wartime demonstrations and strikes in scale, and people from all walks of life filled the streets, not only protesting against the shortage of bread, but also raising banners calling for the downfall of the monarchy, singing the Marseillaise, cocking their caps to the side and struggling with police for control of public space. In several instances, Cossack soldiers showed their sympathy for the crowd. The proliferation of symbolic acts and the sheer number of people involved already by 25 February gave the sense that a revolution was under way.[114]

But many observers thought that the disorders were primarily focused on the bread shortages and even Aleksandr Shliapnikov, the leading Bolshevik in Petrograd, dismissed the idea that a revolution was at hand on the evening of 25 February. Recent bread riots had eventually run their course, and the commander of the Petrograd garrison, General Sergei Khabalov, thought that the correct course of action would be to continue to avoid confrontation with the crowds.

However, that night the tsar sent the fateful order to Khabalov to use troops to restore order. A small group of the most trusted soldiers was deployed on Sunday morning 26 February. In several places, they fired into the crowds, killing hundreds and invoking parallels to the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre that had set that revolution in motion. Troops had fired into crowds on other occasions during the war; most seriously when the Moscow garrison was ordered to fire into crowds on the third day of a massive 1915 riot against Germans. That time it succeeded in restoring order; this time it did not.[115]

The bulk of the Petrograd garrison remained in the barracks on 26 February, but heated discussions led to mutinies which spread rapidly through the gar­rison. By the twenty-seventh, the commanders and loyal officers completely lost control of the soldiers, many of whom joined the revolution in the streets. Soldiers freed prisoners, broke into the secret police headquarters and took over government buildings.

For four days, the situation in the capital was uncertain. Power flowed to the soldiers and the authority of the government rapidly melted away. By most accounts, the leaders of socialist parties only began to mobilise and play an active role on the twenty-seventh. A small group of party leaders declared themselves to be an executive committee ofthe Petrograd Soviet and claimed to speak for the workers and soldiers. It sent an appeal to workers to send representatives to an assembly of the Petrograd Soviet. The process of choosing delegates was extremely informal, resulting in a massive body, two- thirds of which were soldiers. It was such an unwieldy assembly that in practice, the executive committee ended up making nearly all decisions. The executive committee included representatives from a broad array of socialist parties, and they quickly decided not to make an outright bid for power. Some of the party leaders were influenced by the Marxist theory that Russia had to pass through a bourgeois stage (with a presumably bourgeois Duma government) before conditions would be ripe for a proletarian revolution. Many socialists (including the Menshevik defensists, who played a prominent part in these crucial days) feared the anarchy and violence that was already emerging on the streets, and wanted a restoration of order and governmental authority, in order to prevent a collapse of the war effort.

In an all-night negotiation, the executive committee ofthe Petrograd Soviet worked out a joint programme with the Provisional Committee of the Duma for the creation of a new provisional government. The result, declared early on 2 March, became the basic programme of the revolution. It fulfilled the liberal dream of full equality before the law for all citizens, declaring the immediate abolition of all legal differentiation based on religious, ethnic or social origins. It also granted amnesty for all political prisoners, freedom of speech, assembly, right to strike, and declared elections to organs of local self-government.[116]

While this new polity was forming, the tsar was isolated in Pskov. He remained obstinately opposed to abdication and even refused to make polit­ical concessions to the Duma late on 1 March. He changed his mind only when the army command turned against him. A small group of army com­manders, in close communication with the president of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, decided early on 2 March that the only solution was abdication.

That morning, the commander-in-chief of the army, Mikhail Alekseev, con­ducted something close to a coup d'etat, sending a circular to the leading army commanders making the case for Nicholas to abdicate and requesting that each send their response directly to the tsar. The commanders of the fronts, including the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, unanimously supported abdi­cation. Nicholas consented, insisting only that he abdicate in favour of the Grand Duke Michael rather than his haemophiliac son Alexis. The next day, the Grand Duke Michael met with the Provisional Government leaders and acquiesced to their majority opinion that he should also abdicate. This left gov­ernment authority solely in their hands until the convocation of a constituent assembly, which was to determine the future governmental system. The pro­mulgation of the two abdication manifestoes marked the formal political end of the old regime.

To reiterate, the immediate chain of events leading to the regime change began with the declaration of bread rationing, followed by the large number of people demonstrating, striking and observing events in the streets. The proximate cause of greatest weight in explaining the end of the monarchy was the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison and, consequently, the pressure applied by the military commanders upon Nicholas to abdicate on 2 March.

Without the mutiny, the demonstrations were probably not sufficient to cause the revolution - as the apparent success of the initial military interven­tion showed. The mutiny dramatically raised the stakes, radicalising and arm­ing the streets, and making it likely that the only way to preserve the monarchy was to send troops from the front to put down the rebellion forcibly. The tsar was willing to do this up to nearly the last moment, but the army commanders balked. The final crucial factor was the formation of the Provisional Govern­ment even before the actual abdication occurred. In a sense, it was stepping into the void left by the absence of the tsar from the capital and the more serious widely shared sense that the tsar and the monarchy had become a barrier to the effective mobilisation of society and industry for the war effort. Recognition of the willingness and ability of the moderate Duma leaders to take over the government in turn helped convince the army commanders to support the revolution.

Relative economic backwardness as a cause?

The first proximate cause, the bread shortage in Petrograd, is inextricably linked to a larger question about the significance of relative Russian eco­nomic backwardness as an underlying cause ofthe revolution. Many memoirs, foreigners' accounts and narratives portray the link between war and revolu­tion in terms of a relatively backward economy unable to hold up under the demands of total war or to produce the shells and weapons needed to compete on the battlefield. But, as Norman Stone has convincingly argued, in many battles, it was not so much a lack of shells, guns or technology that explains Russian defeats as failures of tactics, strategy and command efficiency. He puts the blame on the Russian generals and their strategies, such as the wasteful stockpiling of millions of rounds of ammunition and guns in a massive net­work of fortresses, which in the end had almost no tactical significance in the fighting. Moreover, old-style social prejudices and outmoded notions of honour contributed to prejudices against the enhanced role of artillery and defensive positioning. As on the western front, a senseless cult of the offensive led to countless wasted lives.[117]

But economic factors also mattered. While the Russian army was superior to the Ottoman army and arguably had a technological edge on the Habsburg army, it was significantly behind the German. At the beginning of the war, the average German division had more than twice the artillery of a Russian divi­sion, and Russia was never able to fully close the gap. Unless overwhelmingly outnumbered, technical superiority enabled German troops consistently to defeat Russian troops throughout the entire course of the war. The crucial role of high-powered precision artillery and shells and the drawn-out nature of the fighting behind entrenched defences rapidly turned the war into a pro­duction contest.

The mobilisation of Russian industry to increase production for the war effort began slowly and faced many obstacles. Only gradually did the gov­ernment turn to the kind of aggressive state measures to influence and direct economic activity towards the war that were so successful in Germany. Defence production was further constrained by the relatively poor financial state ofthe empire. Compared to other countries, Russia had only a very small domestic market for government debt, making it heavily reliant on foreign loans for extraordinary expenditures. This added to the costs and limited the extent of direct state action to expand the output of military products. Moreover, in the decades prior to the war Russia relied heavily on massive yearly inflows of loans and direct investments from abroad. In fact, foreign investment accounted for nearly half of all new capital investment in industry from the i890sto 1914.[118] The war brought a sharp and sudden end to this key source of industrial growth.

Germany had been the largest single source ofdirect investment in the Russian economy. Upon the outbreak of the war, German loans were frozen and by early 1915, the regime embarked on a radical campaign to nationalise businesses and industrial firms owned by enemy citizens. Moreover, from the Ottoman Empire's entry into the war in October 1914, the Straits were closed, leaving only distant Vladivostok and the northern ports of Archangel and Murmansk to receive allied shipments of war materiel. Archangel was frozen half the year and had only a single-track railway line incapable of handling even a portion of the burden. Murmansk had no railway link at all until a wartime project was completed in January 1917. As a result, even when allied shipments finally began to arrive in substantial quantities in mid-1915, many of them simply piled up at their ports of entry. The blockade of Russia was thorough and caused tremendous difficulties for Russian industries and businesses of all kinds by suddenly severing ties to suppliers, engineers, technicians and firms producing specialised items.

These problems were greatly exacerbated by the declaration of prohibition- first of nearly all types of alcoholic beverages during mobilisation, and then of vodka for the duration of the war. On the eve of the war, as throughout its long history, the Russian state had received roughly a quarter of its revenues from alcohol taxes and state sales of vodka. Most studies conclude that prohibition probably curbed some of the traditional drinking bouts as soldiers gathered and travelled to the front, and likely had some positive impacts on health and efficiency in the short run. But the cost to the treasury was immense. Moreover, as the war dragged on, home distilling and illegal markets for alcohol took on a massive scale. The continued sale of wine in elite restaurants added to social resentments, and crowds breaking into alcohol storage facilities contributed to the violence of mobilisation riots, pogroms and the 1915 riot in Moscow. By 1917, the cumulative effects of prohibition were extremely serious. One contemporary financial expert claims the cost reached 2.5 billion roubles by mid-1917, or 10 per cent of all expenditures on the war.[119]

Not least of the impacts of prohibition was that the massive demand for alcohol switched to consumer items and manufactured goods, thereby con­tributing to inflation - one of the most important links between the war and the revolution. Inflation, of course, had other important sources. Most fun­damentally, the lack of a domestic market for government debt, difficulties in acquiring foreign credit and the sharp reduction of exports all combined to leave the government with only one way to pay for its massive defence orders: expansion of the money supply. Russia abandoned the gold standard already on 27 July/8 August 1914 and by January 1917, the amount of money in circu­lation had more than quadrupled. Inflation affected the domestic situation in a number of ways. In April 1915, the first significant riots broke out in Moscow over price increases in shops and markets. Inflation riots became an increas­ingly common and important occurrence on the home front as the problems of the wartime economy accumulated.[120] It also contributed to ethnic violence. The right-wing press and police officials often blamed Jewish, German and foreign shopkeepers and speculators for inflation, especially after the head of the extreme right faction in the State Duma, A. N. Khvostov, was appointed minister of interior in October 1915. Liberals in the Ministry of Agriculture and in co-operatives, zemstvos (local elected assemblies) and other public organi­sations involved in food supply also campaigned against speculators and the market. All co-operated in attempts to require below-market price sales of grain to the army and state and, at the same time, to get rid of the 'mid­dlemen' involved in the pre-war grain market. Both efforts only exacerbated shortages and tensions in the countryside.[121]

Inflation also contributed to the problem of shortages of grain deliveries to the cities. The grain-delivery problem was not the result of an actual shortage of grain. With the blockade, massive exports were entirely shut off, leaving more than enough grain for both the army and for domestic consumption. The problem was the decline in the amount of that grain that was reaching urban markets. Here one of the key problems was that military commanders often used their martial law authority to ban 'exports' of grain from given areas thinking they could thus ensure its delivery to the army at artificially low prices. The civilian administration also tried to regulate prices and work around the commercial grain market. Peasants responded to these kind of administrative measures by waiting for higher grain prices. Unwilling to sell grain to buy industrial products at inflated prices, peasants in increasing numbers chose to store their grain, feed it to their livestock or illicitly convert it into alcohol rather than deliver it to market as inflation accelerated in late 1916 and early 1917.

Despite all the economic problems, Russia managed to increase output for defence, and to do so fairly rapidly. Moreover, by late 1915, Russia's allies were delivering substantial quantities of guns and ammunition. The situation recovered sufficiently that by June 1916, Russia was actually able to fight and win a major offensive on the Habsburg section of the front. The offensive led to nearly a million Austrian casualties and prisoners and forced Germany to send reinforcements to save the Habsburg army from complete collapse. On the eve of February 1917, the Russian army was holding the line. Russia was certainly not losing the war in a military sense. But inflation and the distorted grain market contributed both to the general level of discontent and to the key precipitant cause of the revolution: bread lines in Petrograd.

The rapidity of the wartime industrial expansion caused wrenching social changes. The rapid increases in production by the urban defence industry led to a massive influx of peasants to the cities, increasing the urban population by as much as 6 million by 1917. The institutions and infrastructure of the cities, which could barely cope with the rapid growth of the pre-war years, were simply overwhelmed. In this hothouse growth of the industrial workforce, women entered the workplace in large numbers, breaking down old gender norms. The proportion of women in industry rose from 27 per cent in 1914 to 43 per cent in 1917.[122] In the drive to produce military supplies, the rapidly growing workforce toiled in a dangerous environment where accidents were frequent and long hours the norm. Moreover, shortages of skilled labour and the impossibility of slowing production put many of the most politically active skilled workers in a relatively strong bargaining position. With official recognition on the war industry councils, the skilled workers of Petrograd were in some measure empowered by war conditions. They played an important role in the February crisis by taking control of the working class Viborg district on the twenty-fifth, then engaging in a general strike and crossing over from the working districts to take over the central avenues and squares of the capital. The election of worker councils on 27 and 28 February created a political alternative to the old regime and pressed the Duma leaders to form their own government. But it was the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which was the turning point in the revolution.

The Petrograd garrison and its mutiny

Why did the Petrograd garrison refuse to follow orders to suppress the demon­strations and strikes? The problem was not a lack of troops. There were roughly 180,000 men in Petrograd itself and another 150,000 in the suburbs. In fact, these large numbers were part ofthe problem. The Russian reserve system used Pet- rograd and other cities as places to keep troops before sending them to the front. So rather than a manageable force with some preparation for civilian duty, the barracks housed a massive number of some ofthe least reliable troops in the entire army. Many were new recruits who had almost no training. This reflected larger problems with the military as a whole that were building up as the war ground on. Attrition rates for trained officers and soldiers were high. By the end of i9i6, of nearly i5 million men who served in the army, over 2 million had been taken prisoner, over 1.5 million had died and 2 million were seriously ill or injured for a total of 5.5 million casualties.[123] The pointlessness of the endless slaughter makes it perhaps more incumbent upon the historian to explain why mutiny and rebellion did not occur sooner rather than to explain why it occurred when it did.

By 1916 the regime was increasingly desperate for new bodies for the army. Among other things, it abolished exemptions for primary breadwinners; these recruits tended to resent their obligation to serve and were more outspoken than the young. Exemptions previously granted to minorities also came under pressure. Most dramatically, the Kyrgyz in Central Asia rose in a major rebellion to resist their induction in i9i6. In the military campaign to suppress the rebellion, thousands were killed. The difficulty in finding reliable men to draft into the army by late i9i6 was a problem for the whole army but was particularly acute for the Petrograd garrison, where the Russian reserve system left the least trained and least reliable recent recruits. The Petrograd garrison included disproportionate numbers of convalescent soldiers recovering from injuries and expectingto be forced to return to the front, primary breadwinners and even Petrograd workers who had lost their draft exemptions as punishment for participation in strikes.[124]

Even so, it would be somewhat misleading simply to attribute the causes of the participation of soldiers from the garrison in the revolution to anti-war sentiments. For one thing, many studies of soldier loyalties have found that the key to explaining their behaviour lay in the dynamics of the primary unit. This is a powerful explanation for the occurrence of the first major mutiny in the Russian army well behind the front, where the sense of abandoning fellow soldiers was less direct. Likewise, the mutiny spread most rapidly to sailors of the Baltic fleet (in particular to the crews of the larger warships) - that is, to groups that had not seen action in the war. Police and army reports on the mood of the soldiers often reveal that they expressed their opposition to the tsar and regime along with hatred of the enemy. Among the troops, the notion that the tsar and his government had become the main impediments to the war effort became widespread. This idea took ribald form in the barracks, where rumours ran wild about treason at court and among generals with German names. Respect for the tsar disintegrated so thoroughly by February 1917 that patriotism and mutiny no longer seemed mutually incompatible for many rank-and-file soldiers.

The army command and the February Revolution

Patriotic motives of course much less equivocally lay at the core of an expla­nation of the actions of the army commanders during the February crisis. At the crucial moment on 1 March, the commander-in-chief of the army, M. V Alekseev, ordered General Ivanov to halt his march on Petrograd to put down the mutiny, then tried to convince the tsar to abdicate. When the tsar did not immediately agree, Alekseev sent his crucial telegram to all the major mili­tary front commanders asking their opinion on the future of the monarchy. The responses came quickly and unanimously argued that Nicholas should abdicate to save the nation and the war effort. In part, Alekseev and the other generals feared that sending frontline troops against the Petrograd garrison and civilians in the Petrograd streets would risk rapidly spreading the revolution to the army at the front. But the unified reaction of the army commanders was also the result of the powerful notion that had long been promoted among military reformers that modern wars could only be won by truly national citizen armies.

Some of the key generals - most importantly General Ruzskii, who was with the tsar on the day of the abdication - had come to believe that the tsar stood in the way of a successful national mobilisation against the enemy well before the February crisis. A key event in the development ofthis outlook had been the March 1916 removal of the popular war minister A. A. Polivanov, who had worked closely with the Union of Cities and Towns (Zemgor), War Industries Councils, and nationalist moderates and liberals. Discussions among military and opposition civilian leaders about the possibility of a coup d'etat had begun in earnest already in late 1916. The army command had come to see the tsar and the nation as separate, and even in opposition. As one of the most important generals, A. A. Brusilov, the hero of the successful summer 1916 offensive, reportedly said: 'if it comes to a choice between the tsar and Russia, I will take Russia'.[125]

The formation of the Progressive Bloc and the Provisional Government

One reason the generals thought such a choice could be made in the middle of the war was that a broad-based political opposition that supported the war had firmly established itself as an alternative to the tsar. The crucial turning point in the rise of the political opposition was the abandonment of the 'internal peace' (the pledge of most political and nationality parties to stop all oppositional activities and to stand firmly in support of the tsar) and the creation of a united opposition to the government in the form of the 'Progressive Bloc', a broad coalition of parties in the Duma.

This in turn was a direct result of the German decision to launch a major offensive against Russia in the spring of 1915 in an attempt to force Russian capitulation. Taken by surprise, outnumbered and vastly outgunned, the Rus­sian armies suffered defeat after defeat, retreating in rapid order from April to September 1915 until most of previously occupied Austrian Galicia, all of Russian Poland, Lithuania and much of Latvia had been lost. This 'Great Retreat' had enormous implications for domestic politics. First, it caused a massive wave of refugees to flee the front zones for the Russian interior. Esti­mates vary widely but likely exceeded 6 million civilians during the war.[126] The refugee crisis was greatly exacerbated by the military command, which had nearly unlimited powers over civilian affairs in a massive zone declared under military rule. While many refugees left of their own volition, the army also conducted targeted mass expulsions of at least a million civilian Jews, Germans and foreigners. Briefly in the summer of 1915 the army turned to a disastrous 'scorched-earth' policy that included driving the entire civilian population of certain regions to the interior. The army did little to stop a wave of dozens of violent pogroms against Jews in the front zones primarily instigated by Cossack army units with substantial participation of local populations. These policies stirred up ethnic tensions both in the predominantly non-Russian areas of refugee creation near the front and in the internal provinces inundated by millions of impoverished displaced people. Not only did inter-ethnic tensions often run high between refugees and native populations, but the refugees put an enormous financial and administrative strain on local governments and administrations throughout the country.

The retreat also caused a great wave of popular anger. The press - on all sides of the political spectrum - turned much more critical of the government. The defeats at the front were in part caused by shortages of key weaponry, and industrialists and Duma members alike began to call on the government to do more to organise and stimulate defence production - above all, to include society more closely in the process. In early June, the tsar made a series of key concessions, replacing conservatives in the Council of Ministers with moder­ates who were more willing to work with society. In July, the Duma reopened to a series of blistering speeches attacking the government for incompetence in its prosecution of the war. Behind the scenes, negotiations began for the formation of a broad national coalition of parties to form a political opposi­tion. This opposition united nearly three-quarters of the Duma membership in the Progressive Bloc, with representatives from moderate socialists on the left to Russian nationalists on the right. The Progressive Bloc renewed many of the liberal demands of 1905, demanding more powers for the Duma, more legal limitations on the state and military's extraordinary wartime powers in civilian affairs, amnesty for political prisoners, and full equality before the law for all religious and national groups.

The programme was classically liberal, and it expressed the growing sense that the tsar and his government stood in the way of a successful war effort. Only the granting of full civic equality and rights, and the granting of a fully representative government could inspire society and the army to mobilise with true enthusiasm and patriotism for the war effort. Nothing was more instructive of this underlying notion than the negotiations between the noto­rious right-wing Russian nationalist leader Vasilii Shulgin and Pavel Miliukov, leader of the radical liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party during the formation of the Progressive Bloc. As Shulgin recalls, he had been deeply suspicious ofMiliukov, whom he regarded as an unpatriotic political opponent until he heard Miliukov's ardently patriotic logic based on the idea that only a truly national effort that included society could bring victory.[127] If anything, the leader of the socialist Trudovik faction, Aleksandr Kerenskii (later the head of the Provisional Government), was an even stronger proponent of these ideas than Miliukov.

These moves were followed in the summer of 1915 by the creation of spe­cial councils with officials, private entrepreneurs and Duma deputies to deal with the economic crisis and co-ordinate national responses to the war effort. Four special councils - on transport, fuel, grain and, most importantly, war- industry - were created. The war councils included representatives of elected municipal and local government, from private industry, and even worker rep­resentatives. It was an important concession to the demands of liberals for a truly national war effort in which society had a significant role to play. The councils made significant contributions to turning around the dire situation in defence production.

At the same time, the government finally dropped its opposition to the formation of a national association to represent local elected bodies, allowing the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils (Zemgor) to form. Zemgor took on such tasks as caring for the welfare and needs of the massive wave of refugees that appeared in internal provinces and providing aid and nursing for convalescent soldiers. The special councils and Zemgor together not only helped bring thousands of employees and volunteers directly into the war effort but also gave the leaders of both these national organisations leadership experience and national recognition. They also worked in close co­operation with some of the more progressive branches of the administration such as the food supply administration ofthe Ministry of Agriculture, assuming what one historian has called 'parastatal' functions.[128] In some measure, liberal society was simply taking over the state.

In i905 the tsar granted constitutional concessions and appointed strong and competent ministers who accepted the new political realities. Ten years later, the tsar turned in the opposite direction. When the crisis of the German offensive passed, Nicholas misread it as the passing of the larger political crisis. His first move was to take personal command of the army in August 1915. His ministers saw this as a potential disaster. Not only would it create a power vacuum in the capital which they rightly feared might be filled by Alexandra and her favourite Rasputin, but they also saw the replacement of the popular Grand Duke Nicholas with the tsar - who had no real military qualifications for the post - as a move that would directly tie the fate and legitimacy of the monarchy itself to the fortunes of war. But they were unable to convince him to rethink his decision. Within months, the tsar had replaced the competent ministers that he had appointed in June with reactionaries who had no ties to liberal society - perhaps as a result of Empress Alexandra's prodding on behalf of Rasputin.[129] The most significant change was the replacement of the reasonable N. B. Shcherbatov as minister of interior with Khvostov, leader of the radical Right faction in the Duma, a chauvinist who used every chance to expound on his paranoiac conspiracy theories of Jewish, German and foreign domination of Russians. His repressive policies did much to undermine any remaining spirit of co-operation between the government and society. From late 1915 to February 1917, conflict between the government and society grew more and more intense.

Respect for the tsar continued to decline throughout the following year. Rumours spread throughout society about the pernicious influence and even defeatist or treasonous inclinations of Empress Alexandra and Rasputin, along with ministers and generals with German names. The tsar's rule had always depended to a certain degree upon the respect and dignity of his title and person. By late 1916, the tsar and court had become a laughing-stock. While no solid evidence of treason or even probes for a separate peace by Alexandra, Rasputin or others at court has surfaced, it is clear that they influenced min­isterial appointments from late 1915 through the end of 1916 and successfully pushed the wavering tsar to abandon competent moderate ministers willing to work with Zemgor, the War Industries Councils and the Progressive Bloc. The rumours about Alexandra and Rasputin help to explain the sensational response to Miliukov's speech in the Duma in November 1916, in which he directly accused the government of treason. Shortly thereafter, political actors of all persuasions began to take increasingly radical steps against the monarchy in the name ofthe nation and the war effort. Symbolic of this turn was the assas­sination of Rasputin by the leader of the extreme Right in the Duma, Vladimir Purishkevich, with the assistance of two relatives of the tsar: F. F. Iusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitrii Pavlovich. By the end of 1916, the monarchy had become fully discredited among liberal and conservative elites alike. At the same time, quasi-governmental organisations headed by liberal politicians had gradually taken over many key elements of the domestic war effort. This dual process - disintegration at the top and the coalescence of opposition from below - drove the politics of the February Revolution and made possible the decisive third step in the revolution, from mutiny to regime change.

The regime change itself was the single most important cause of the series of events that led to the disintegration of the state and the army, the agrarian revolution and the emergence of minority nationalist movements. With the loss of the tsar as the symbolic centre of authority and loyalty, little held the empire together. In creating the new government, the Duma leaders accepted a list of strict conditions imposed upon them by the leaders of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This compromise dissolved the police and declared elections to positions in local government. This undermined the two most important remaining pillars of authority, the administration and the police. Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet on 1 March, called for elections of soldier councils throughout the army and contributed directly to the collapse of authority among army officers. The collapse of the army and the bureaucracy was a complex process that continued through the end of 1917. The disintegration of authority facilitated the agrarian revolution, which swept the land during that year as peasants flooded back to the villages from the army and the city to participate in the expropriation of lands belonging to individual proprietors, gentry and the Church, and then reabsorb them into the commune, which rapidly reasserted its dominance over the countryside.

But the war not only led to the collapse of state authority. As in other countries, it also brought an expansion of the state's activities, in many ways paving the way for the revolutionaries' attempts to transform and shape the population, to watch over it, to cull it of enemies and to manage it more actively. For example, the politics of nationalising both rural and urban property got well under way during the war. The army used its broad powers to requisition, sequester and simply confiscate land, grain, horses and machinery and the civilian government enacted a set of measures to nationalise both lands and businesses belonging to enemy minorities. Likewise, as part of its wartime economic policy, the regime - with the support of public bodies - attempted to overcome 'middlemen' in the grain trade, and in effect the entire domestic grain market. The old regime ended up conducting a massive experiment in a state-administered grain monopoly replete with coercive measures to force grain delivery to the state. These measures can be seen as the first steps in a vicious cycle of increasingly violent interventions in the countryside that continued through the revolutionary era. The First World War not only brought the end of the Russian monarchy but also began the revolutionary creation of a new regime.