Russia: A History

Introduction and Background

ANY analysis of imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth must include the obvious but essential reminder that Russia was still an autocracy (samoderzhavie). This was not simply a garden-variety old regime, with a divinely anointed absolute monarch at the top and a system of legally defined social estates (sosloviia= Stände), headed by the nobility defining its social hierarchy. It was also an old regime whose sovereigns, even the most ‘liberal’ (Alexander II), self-consciously resisted the dilution of their sovereign power, the delegation of that power to intermediary institutions, and its limitation by any constitutional mechanism. Although laws abounded, and had even been codified, until 1906 Russia’s rulers refused to recognize as definitive any body of law that could not be subordinated to or reversed by the autocratic will, as it often was. There was, again until 1906, no equivalent of a Reichstag, no universal manhood suffrage (indeed no suffrage of any sort at the national level), no legal parties to outlaw (as German Social Democracy had been outlawed in 1878), no labour unions or other free associations of workers to persecute and harass.

It was also a regime that deeply distrusted and only grudgingly tolerated any kind of independent civic association organized from below, not only by the lower classes, but even by society’s élites. It was still more distrustful of organizational activity that brought those élites into contact with ‘the people’ in social contexts free from state supervision or that seemed likely to escape the reach of government oversight and control. It was, in short, a polity in which invisible mechanisms of cultural hegemony, civic normalization, embourgeoisement, positive or negative integration—or whatever other metaphor one chooses to suggest the idea of social control without flagrant resort to force majeure—were neither readily available nor easily deployed.

The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s did, however, represent a significant change in the mode of government, marking Russia’s entry into a new era. During this period the serfs were freed, the zemstvo was introduced as an element of civil society at the local level, trial by jury and a relatively independent judiciary and bar were authorized, and the free professions were permitted to begin an open if vexed existence, with their own professional associations. It was also a period when some branches of government attracted a new breed of enlightened bureaucrat, less reluctant to open his mind to new ways and ideas, even while forced to submit to the domination of officials of an earlier stamp.

All these developments seemed to contradict the principle of unbridled autocracy, while a (more or less) capitalist industrialization, first in the 1870s and 1880s, then more intensively in the 1890s, moved powerfully, if never decisively, against the grain of old status-based hierarchies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these dramatic (and to important elements of the government) disturbing changes, indeed in part because of them, there was enormous reluctance to allowing the winds of change to blow in the direction of a liberalized political system, where society might seek to fulfil its aspirations independently of the state.

This is not to say that the state could snuff out all the ventures of society, of unofficial Russia acting in an organized capacity and a ‘civilizing spirit’. For with the slow but continuing development of Russia’s public sphere (in a word, of glasnost’), each decade from the 1870s—even the ‘reactionary’ 1880s and 1890s—witnessed the appearance, sometimes even with official approval, of new initiatives from below. They came mainly from members of the educated élite (less often from peasants or workers), many of them openly dedicated to high-minded public causes, to social progress, and to forging positive links between the ‘people’ (narod) and ‘society’. As long as such activity respected certain limits, even if never fully trusted by the government, it was tolerated to some extent, even during the so-called era of ‘counter-reforms’ of the late 1880s and 1890s.

The traditional version of the story of late imperial Russia, one that highlights the promise of the Great Reforms, but then goes on to recount the erosion of that promise in the age of ‘reaction’, is not without its virtues: the Great Reforms did promise constructive and enlightened (if not necessarily liberal) change, and the decades of the 1880s–1890s did witness a reversal of certain reforms of the previous reign, especially in the areas of local self-government and higher education.

Yet some important qualifications must be added to this seductively clear picture. From the very outset the Great Reforms were beset by serious contradictions: the coexistence of peasant courts and special administrative punishment with a new, Western-model jury system; abolition of serfdom but preservation of special disabilities for peasants—an internal passport system, compulsory redemption payments, and obligatory membership in communes; acceptance of a new property-based franchise as the foundation of local government, but reaffirmation of institutions based on the traditional juridical estates (not to mention the de facto dominance of the hereditary gentry, barely 1 per cent of the population). At the same time, even during counter-reforms and reaction, radical changes overtook society, economy, and government policy and continued to move the country in a more Westerly, ‘progressive’, modern (if not truly liberal) direction. In sum, at almost every point between the emperors’ most dramatic manifestos—the Emancipation manifesto of 1861 and the October manifesto of 1905—Russian society was in a state of tension, with multiple protagonists and antagonists, some of them seeking a radical reconfiguration of power and policy.

Industrial Progress and Rural Hunger

Around the time of the ‘counter-reform’ of 1890, the revised zemstvo statute, the tensions in Russian society became increasingly apparent. The ‘Witte era’ (1892–1903) was about to begin. These were the years marked by the influence, if not full political dominance, of the controversial but eminent Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte (Vitte), the former railway executive whose provocative developmental economic policies raised the ire of so many gentry and caused so much friction within the government itself. The policies of his predecessor, Ivan Vyshnegradskii (1887–92), anticipated those of Witte and also exposed their problematic consequences. Among the most important policy initiatives launched by Vyshnegradskii and continued by Witte was the pressure, applied through taxation, to force peasants to market grain at low prices. These ministers of finance also imposed a high protective tariff, which grew with time and made it increasingly difficult for market-oriented grain producers to purchase much-needed machinery and chemical fertilizers abroad. The ‘modernizing’ purpose here was to further economic progress by improving Russia’s balance of trade and by promoting domestic industries. But the consequence was to alienate both gentry and peasantry, the tsar’s élite servitors and his poorest subjects, respectively. Though often in conflict with each other over such issues as land use, both groups felt squeezed by the ministry’s developmental policies (a situation, grosso modo, that could be traced back to Peter the Great). And as always, the image of poor peasants victimized by government policy provided grist to the mill of the liberal and radical intelligentsia, with their keenly felt obligation to the people and reluctance to equate ‘progress’ with capitalist development (the populist writer Nikolai Mikhailovskii being a good case in point). In this instance, however, the criticism of modernizing ‘bureaucracy’, from both the right and the left, conservatives and liberal alike, did not mean that the state was walking sensibly down the middle of the road. It was not.

The accumulating resentments multiplied in 1891–2, when large parts of the Russian countryside, some twenty provinces in all, experienced this period’s greatest famine (followed by devastating cholera and typhus epidemics), a human catastrophe with casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Historians still argue about responsibility—whether famine was the product of government policies or the deeper cyclical malfunction of a backward agrarian structure. Apart from the famine as such, they argue about whether the peasants’ lot was actually worsening by ‘objective’ measurements (for example, caloric intake), about the meaning of rural overpopulation (was demographic growth a sign of ‘progress’—a reflection of declining mortality?), and even about the best methods for measuring such assessments. This debate will continue, a scholarly controversy that echoes England’s classic ‘standard-of-living’ debate. But whatever the truth about ‘objective’ conditions, there can be no doubt that contemporaries were deeply alarmed about the famine and its aftermath, or that their ‘subjective’ perception fuelled resentment against state programmes that seemed inherently harmful to society in general and to ‘the people’, especially the peasants (over 80 per cent of the population), in particular. The Ministry of Finance won few friends with its programme for economic progress.

This negative assessment of state policy in the 1890s readily reinforced existing attitudes of the educated public. Russia’s radical intellectuals (best typified by the sometime liberal, sometime radical, N. K. Mikhailovskii), but even many moderates (not to mention the eccentric, politically enigmatic figure of Leo Tolstoy), generally placed a low premium on economic development, widely viewed as attainable only at the common people’s expense. Less surprising but no less important was the low value placed on economic progress by conservative intellectuals, whose fear of what today is called the evils of modernization or Westernization—Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes readily to mind—sometimes made them odd allies with people who otherwise stood far to their left.

From a political perspective, the most important result of the famine was revitalization of the zemstvo, earlier a locus of nongovernmental public activity and liberal aspirations, but in the 1880s restricting itself to ‘small deeds’. Ineffective in efforts to combat famine when utilizing only its own resources, by late 1891 the government was once again driven to encourage the very kind of grass-roots, voluntary social action that it normally distrusted—from the relief work of district zemstvos and university students to the charitable efforts of national cultural figures such as Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Society was summoned back to life to take part in a national war on poverty.

Throughout the most hard-hit areas of Russia, the hungry blackearth and Volga provinces, the zemstvos took the lead (although, as Richard Robbins has argued, the degree of successful co-operation between zemstvo and central government is often underestimated). The point, however, is not that the zemstvos’ efforts were universally successful (far from it), but that their self-confidence, self-assertion, and self-importance were given an enormous boost, so much so that in the immediate post-famine years, some zemstvos again challenged the central government.

The advent of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894 encouraged zemstvos and other civic bodies to convert their newly acquired prestige into a political force. In keeping with their as yet modest goals, perhaps encouraged by the recent flashes of co-operation with the government, their approach—except for the aggressive Tver zemstvo—was the traditional supplication: a hopeful request to the new, little-known young monarch to include them in his policy deliberations. His notorious response in January 1895 rejected such aspirations as ‘senseless dreams’ and reaffirmed the autocratic principles of his beloved father, Alexander III. This insensitive response was only the first of several dramatic moments (the 1896 Khodynka Field tragedy, when hundreds of spectators were trampled to death at the Moscow coronation ceremonies, was the next) that disrupted constructive dialogue between state and society in the first ten years of Nicholas’s rule.

Revival of the Left

The events of 1891–2, with the continued rigidity of autocratic governance in the years that followed, helped to revive the radical left, which, like the more moderate zemstvo movement, had been licking its wounds in the 1880s. True, the People’s Will and other like-minded, terror-oriented grouplets (including a short-lived conspiratorial student band in 1887 dominated by Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s elder brother) had never entirely ceased their plotting. But until the new mood of the 1890s, they had entertained precious little hope, certainly less than in the 1870s, of effective contact with the ‘people’ (whether peasants or workers) on the one hand, or with zemstvos and other moderates or liberals on the other. From the mid-1890s, however, radicals saw new opportunities: alliances, however uneasy, with increasingly disaffected liberals to their right; contact, however awkward, with the ‘people’, especially the growing numbers of factory workers in and near the rapidly industrializing larger cities. Except for the earlier stages of the 1905 Revolution, co-operation between liberals and socialist radicals never seemed brighter than in the early 1890s. The so-called ‘People’s Rights Party’ (1893–4), a populist-oriented organization that jettisoned terrorism, stressed the importance of political freedom and welcomed both radicals and moderates to join its ranks. Although that party was short-lived, the entire period from 1892 to early 1905 saw on-again-off-again efforts of the more flexible radicals, both populist and Marxist, and the more daring liberals to find common ground. At the same time, more cautious liberals courted the more enlightened members of the bureaucracy, who in turn were willing to co-operate with ‘trustworthy’ leaders of the zemstvo movement, especially the so-called neo-Slavophiles. It was as if every point on the Russian political spectrum, save the most extreme ones, was occupied by someone desperately seeking to hold hands with allies to the right and to the left.

Labour Unrest

Thanks to Witte’s initial success, in the 1890s Russia experienced a rate of industrial growth never to recur until the 1930s. Indeed, industrial production: increased at an average of 8 per cent per annum, higher even than that of the USA. Did this rapid growth augur progress or conflict? As in other countries, the answer was both: ‘progress’, as Russia’s national economy closed the gap somewhat with other European countries, but also ‘conflict’ as Russian cities experienced the tell-tale warning signs of urban blight, working-class dissatisfaction, and gathering social tensions.

The renewed labour unrest that erupted in some of the factories of centra Russia, including Moscow, in the mid-1890s, was dwarfed by a succession of city-wide strikes in St Petersburg’s textile industry in 1896–7. Never before had labour unrest been so widespread and so well co-ordinated in a single Russian city, indeed, not in just any city but in the imperial capital, seat of royal authority and centre of imperial administration.

But were these strikes of great political significance? Historians have debated this point, opinions ranging from those who see them as spontaneous and purely economic, to those who read them as early successes of a young Russian Marxism. Although the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) was not officially founded until 1898, Marxist circles were already in full flower in the capital by mid-decade. While the influence of early Russian Marxism should not be exaggerated, Allan Wildman has clearly demonstrated that the spontaneous labour movement was aided, abetted, and to some degree even inspired by Marxist agitators, some of whom had been closely connected with the young Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov.

But of still greater historical importance was the strikes’ indirect political significance: Russians of all persuasions saw them as a major historical moment, pregnant with either promise or peril, depending on the observer’s politics. Not that these perceptions were always consistent or predictable. In government circles, for example, some interpreted the strikes as a ‘wake-up call’, warning of the dire consequences of continuing Witte’s policies, while others saw them as evidence of the need for enlightened labour legislation to meet the needs of a modern industrializing society. A few officials, at times including Witte himself, went so far as to contemplate the legalization of labour unions, while the Minister of Interior proposed to shorten the working day (a logical extension of labour legislation on women and minors promulgated in the 1880s). A limit on the working day was introduced in 1897; (partial) legalization of unions did not come until 1906, however, and then in a very different context.

In the wake of the Petersburg strikes of 1896–7, even conservative officials who loathed Witte’s industrialization schemes recognized the need to contain working-class unrest. As often happened, such awareness was motivated by a mixture of direct Russian and vicarious European experience. Just as the Paris Commune of 1871 had precociously alerted Russians to potential dangers in their own urban centres, the spread of social democracy and labour militancy among ‘disloyal’ German workers, when added to such events as the Petersburg strikes, convinced conservatives in the Ministry of Interior, most notably the notorious Sergei Zubatov, that police-supervised associations were needed to stem the tide of unrest. To men like Witte, however, the very idea of placing the fate of industrial labour in the hands of the police (later described by critics as ‘police socialism’) was a foolish provocation. Moreover, such approaches seemed like yet another expression of gentry hostility to Witte’s policies, so rampant in the Ministry of Interior. Lacking a clear alternative, the Witte faction vacillated between advocacy of simple repression and of such daring moves as the legalization of unions. The tension between Witte and Zubatov over labour policy was emblematic of a larger tension between the Ministry of Interior and the Finance Ministry, with the basic direction of social and economic policy at issue.

The Role of Foreign Policy

Given the social and political strains produced by Witte’s policies, historians have asked whether they were necessary. Might an alternative path have been followed? Even if one forgoes foreign-policy determinism (Primat der Auβenpolitik), one must still concede that Russia’s relations with the outside world, and especially with the European powers, configured the context for the policies of the Finance Minister, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes at a further remove. Russia’s frail finances severely restricted the risks that the government could assume in foreign policy, especially with respect to the critical areas of the Balkans and the Black Sea, but also with respect to expansion in the Far East. At the same time, Russia’s presumptive but precarious position as a ‘great power’ provided an underlying motivation for the pursuit of economic development, industrial strength, and financial independence.

To be sure, Russia’s rulers always had the theoretical option of abdicating their great-power aspirations. But to do so would have threatened to undermine the entire regime, dynasty and all. It is hard to imagine a Romanov ruler openly agreeing to renunciation of great-power status, which would have entailed the closing of the Black Sea to Russian shipping, the resurrection of an independent Poland, perhaps even the abandonment of Peter the Great’s Baltic conquests and withdrawal from Central Asia. It took little imagination to itemize the potential losses from such an abdication—not to mention the symbolic significance of the forswearing of Russia’s traditional role, ever since the eighteenth century, as protector of Christian minorities from their Ottoman oppressors. A Russian ruler who openly repudiated these ambitions effectively abandoned his claim to be emperor, and to rule—and, quite conceivably, the moral and political support of the gentry élite.

Such considerations belie the historical possibility of a very different course. There were indeed real choices to be made, but they were between a bold, adventuristic, risk-taking policy that courted the twin dangers of humiliation and bankruptcy, and a more cautious, conservative policy that postponed immediate gratification and gambled on economic development as the key to future claims to power. The latter policy underlay Witte’s domestic programme, though a cautious posture was increasingly difficult to maintain as Russia became entangled in Asian adventures.

The successful pursuit of a cautious foreign policy also required stable relations with Germany. Yet those relations were strained by the Russo-German tariff war, already under way when Vyshnegradskii took office in 1887, at a time when there was little reason to be sanguine about Russia’s international position. A war scare with England two years earlier had added yet another chapter to the story of Russian humiliations in Paris in 1856 and Berlin in 1878. By the time Witte succeeded Vyshnegradskii, the Russian military—despite the misgivings of political conservatives and enemies of republicanism—had begun its turn to France, a move long favoured by Pan-Slavs and liberals alike. In 1892, even a cautious Foreign Ministry (still ever mindful of the need to get on well with Germany) concluded its first, quite limited entente with Paris. By the end of the decade Russian economic as well as foreign policy were more oriented towards France than ever, with French bankers, businessmen, and government officials filling gaps created by the withdrawal of Germans. This of course meant more potential conflict with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and—though there were temporary respites in the tariff wars from 1894 to 1901—ultimately with Germany itself, thereby creating a vicious circle that made loans from France all the more imperative. But until the turn of the century, it was still too early to foresee the potential conflict brewing with Japan over the two countries’ competing ambitions in the Far East.

Revolutionary ‘Parties’

In the 1890s these foreign-policy issues were of little concern to the Russian left. As was their wont, radicals were more attentive to the fate of peasants and workers, with workers attracting an ever-greater share of their attention. If labour policy and attitudes towards workers exposed and intensified divisions in the government, they also produced divisions on the left, which had never been without its internal conflicts over how best to relate to the people that it aspired to lead or represent. Even in the 1870s, when revolutionaries envisioned the peasantry as the repository of their ‘Utopian’ dreams, they had already become heavily involved in the lives of urban workers, especially those in St Petersburg. This involvement entailed closer and closer contacts in that city between a marginalized group of young factory workers and a self-marginalized group of student intelligentsia, with the two groups interacting within the confines of the clandestine ‘circle’ (kruzhok), meeting in the overcrowded apartment of some of the members. These gatherings were the spiritual descendants of the intelligentsia circles of the age of Nicholas I, yet differed to the extent that they now drew many genuine plebeians into their orbit. Though the strategies and tactics varied over time (for example, armed rebellion vied with peaceful propaganda, tight conspiracy with openness), the circles had a powerful, persistent institutional presence right up to the revolutionary events of 1905, and to some extent beyond. Often heterogeneous in its class composition, the ‘all-class’ circle or ‘mixed-class’ circle soon gave birth to an illegitimate offspring—the circle composed exclusively of workers, who often struggled to define themselves in opposition to the intelligentsia-dominated, socially mixed groups that had spawned them.

By increasing the size and concentration of the working class, Witte’s policies expanded the arena of radical activity and opened the door to a Marxist perspective on the left. By the eve of 1905 the left included competing revolutionary strategies, each eventually embodied in a ‘party’: the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR, or simply the SRs, formally constituted in 1901) and two rival factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (products of the party’s schism in 1903). ‘Party’ is placed in quotation marks to emphasize that none was a party in the traditional West European political sense, that is, an organization that existed for the competitive pursuit of national elective office: there was no such office before 1906. Instead, these parties were underground organizations, seeking to overthrow the existing system and—here came some monumental disagreements—replace it either temporarily, with a liberal-democratic, constitutional polity and market economy (a ‘bourgeois phase’), or permanently, with a ‘socialist’ order (in any case a clearly non-capitalist socioeconomic system). Among European Marxists, nowhere was the issue of the succession of revolutionary ‘phases’ more hotly debated than in Russia, yet another expression of the reworking of West European experience into a relatively backward socioeconomic context.

The SRs, identifying strongly with populist traditions of the 1870s and the terrorism of People’s Will, welcomed signs of worker rebelliousness, but treated workers as but another component part of the larger ‘people’, whose centre of gravity remained in the huge peasant majority. Both workers and peasants, from the SR perspective, were victims of state-sponsored capitalism, a system that lacked a broad social base or other redeeming feature and could still be short-circuited either by revolutionary action or reversal of government policy. Most SRs were of the ultra-revolutionary persuasion. They were often high-energy revolutionary performers, and their patience with any schemes for a ‘transitional’ or temporary phase, postponing socialism to some more distant point in time, was, for the moment, very thin. There was, to be sure, a handful of populist-oriented publicists in the 1890s who believed in peaceful persuasion and other lawful means, but these ‘Legal Populists’ had lost much of their influence by the end of the century.

Some Marxists, those who became the Mensheviks, did not believe Russia ready for ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ revolution and set as their proximate goal a ‘bourgeois’ revolution, whereby not workers—their ostensible constituency—but the enemy camp of capitalists would be the immediate beneficiary. Strictly speaking, the Mensheviks were following the logic of Orthodox Marxism, or that, at least, was their own perception. Capitalism was evil, of course, but a necessary evil, which carried the seeds of a socialist future in its womb. Rapid economic growth was therefore a sign of progress, auguring a liberal, bourgeois revolution (though one that the working class might have to lead!) in the near term, a proletarian revolution sometime thereafter. This complex analysis led some ‘Legal Marxists’ (Peter Struve, despite his early misgivings about the ‘cowardice’ of the Russian bourgeoisie, is the most illustrious example) away from socialism and all the way into the liberal, non-revolutionary camp. It was an analysis, however, that would not necessarily appeal to workers, even those who eschewed revolutionary rhetoric and practice.

Finally, there were the Bolsheviks, who, like the Mensheviks, claimed to spurn much of the populist legacy—glorification of the commune, rejection of a capitalist phase, terrorism. But the Bolsheviks shared the populists’ thoroughgoing impatience with intermediary, liberal-type solutions, their almost personal contempt for liberals, and even for revolutionaries who tolerated them (Lenin best embodied this contempt), and their furious rejection of any form of attentisme. As Marxists they had no choice but to share the Menshevik belief that the growth of capitalism in Russia was secure and augured progress; this indeed had been the central argument in Lenin’s huge, statistically burdened book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). But as Russian revolutionary maximalists they would seek every possible way to drive their insurrectionary train past the capitalist station with, at most, the shortest of stops.

None of the revolutionaries, and least of all the future SRs, could openly endorse Witte’s policies. But the two main groups of Marxists (there were still others, the most vital of which was the Jewish Social Democratic ‘Bund’) did greet the spread of capitalist industry as evidence of the predictive power and dialectical astuteness of their Marxist ‘science’ and welcomed the appearance of both industrial bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat as positive omens of impending class struggle. New labour unrest provided them with further evidence: the militant ‘Obukhov defence’ in St Petersburg in 1901 and general strikes in Rostov-on-the-Don and Odessa in 1903, Russia’s greatest year of labour unrest before 1905. Predictably, the industrial recession that set in around 1900, discrediting the Witte system in the eyes of many, was viewed by most Marxists not as a sign of the weakness of Russia’s economy (and its dependence on foreign capital), but as further evidence that a capitalist Russia was now enmeshed in the international business cycle. It was.

Militant Moderates: 1900–1904

The years 1900–4, while displaying great continuity with the 1890s, also witnessed some important new lines of development. One was a burgeoning aggressiveness and self-assertion on the part of liberal constitutionalists. Their centres of gravity were both the zemstvos (including zemstvo employees, generally more radical than their gentry employers) and the thriving professional associations of lawyers, doctors, academics, and journalists, all of them inspired by resurgent unrest among university students (which, after all, most professional intelligentsia had been). At the same time, these years also witnessed the revival of revolutionary terrorism. Usually conducted by a conspiratorial section of the PSR, this terrorism evoked unexpected sympathy among other, less radical members of educated society, many of whom were increasingly alienated from the autocratic state. And, perhaps most important, during these years Russia’s Asian policy became increasingly expansionist and aggressive, culminating in a fateful war with Japan in 1904–5. That war, and especially its glaringly unsuccessful conduct and the resulting national humiliation, served to raise the level of political unrest in almost every layer of society and within every political grouping, pushing Russian political dialogue several degrees to the left.

The immediate political beneficiary was the movement of liberal constitutionalists. Having started to stir again in the 1890s, they now came to life as never before and, I would argue, never again. By 1902 zemstvo activists—including zemstvo agronomists and other employees, the so-called ‘Third Element’—joined together with urban professionals and even some former Marxists to organize their own illegal, left-liberal paper (Liberation, published in Stuttgart under the editorial leadership of Struve). In one respect, namely their conception of a newspaper as ‘political organ’ and organizing centre for their movement, the ‘Liberationists’ were not very different from Lenin, who in his famous 1902 tract What is to be Done? treated the SD paper Iskra (the Spark) with the same tender adulation as Struve and his colleagues soon were treating Osvobozhdenie (Liberation).

Liberals also turned out to be ingenious at developing their own non-revolutionary yet militant tactics, of which the most effective was the ‘banquet campaign’ of November-December 1904 (inspired by a similar campaign before the French Revolution of 1848). They used the pretence of every plausible anniversary celebration—from the Emancipation to the 1864 judicial reforms—to assemble, in defiance of government restrictions, and draw society’s attention to the need for constitutional reform. Unsuccessful war had been a major catalyst for change half a century earlier, a lesson not lost on the constitutionalists of 1904–5. And whereas the assassination of Alexander II had purportedly thwarted reform, the new wave of assassinations (which included three imperial ministers and a grand duke and culminated in the SR murder of Plehve, the hated Minister of Interior, in July 1904) actually served to debase the government’s credit and quicken the winds of change. That even liberals like Pavel Miliukov seemed to welcome news of Plehve’s assassination was a sure sign of trouble ahead for the state.

The tsar’s decision to replace Plehve with a moderate, Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii (already known for his willingness to appease radical students), as the new Minister of Interior was less a reflection of the tsar’s enlightenment and flexibility than of his vacillation and despair. And it was interpreted as such by contemporaries. After a brief optimistic ‘spring’ based on a false hope that the new minister would be allowed to bring about some fundamental change, the process of political polarization resumed. The contentiousness of autocracy’s enemies now grew apace, as even moderates waited impatiently for the moment that would advance their cause.

Enter Father Gapon: A Road to Bloody Sunday

That moment was soon provided by St Petersburg’s industrial workers. In 1904, in what seemed like a reprise of the Zubatov experiment (defunct since the summer of 1903) without Zubatov, the charismatic Orthodox priest Georgii Gapon had succeeded in mobilizing thousands of members into his ‘Assembly of Russian Factory Workers’. Originally approved and even financed by the police (with the goal of weaning workers away from the radicals and bolstering their commitment to autocracy by providing safe outlets such as tea-rooms and public lectures), Gapon’s organization soon took on a life of its own. On the one hand, some of his most trusted aides turned out to be former Marxists who, though no longer very revolutionary, still provided workers with intense exposure to the Western model of a legal labour movement and notions of civil rights and constitutional order. On the other hand, the grass-roots movement—and in this respect gaponovshchina recapitulated the story of zubatovshchina—developed its own dynamic as defender of the interests of its worker-members.

Both worker militancy and the mood of the former Marxists could not fail to be influenced by society’s leftward swing, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of the capital. When in December 1904 some workers at the giant Putilov factory, members of Gapon’s Assembly, were dismissed, with little justification, in what appeared to be an effort to reduce the Assembly’s influence, the organization could not maintain its credibility unless it rose to the defence of the injured parties. In a sense, everything that had happened to the Assembly over the past year—its organization into neighbourhood branches, the swelling of its ranks, its members’ exposure to liberal and worker-centred political discourse—had conspired to prepare it for this moment of truth. To this concoction must be added the charismatic and sympathetic personality of Gapon himself, who came to embody all the workers’ conflicting and confusing aspirations, lending them palpable personification at a moment when the workers might otherwise have lacked unity and direction.

The outcome was a city-wide general strike in January 1905 and a dramatic decision, taken almost simultaneously at the grass-roots and upper levels of Gapon’s organization, to organize a mass march on the Winter Palace with a petition for Tsar Nicholas, ‘our father’. Undoubtedly drafted in large part by the workers’ ex-Marxist intellectual advisers, but also with ample feedback from many workers, the petition combined class-centred demands for higher wages and shorter hours (the eight-hour day, an ‘economic’ demand with special political resonance) with a liberal political programme that included a constitution and free elections based on direct, universal manhood suffrage.

The decision of the emperor was no less dramatic. It was to disregard the petitioners by failing to appear at the palace to receive the petition. Even more fateful was the decision to authorize military units to fire on advancing petitioners. Since the procession—which included women and children—not only was unarmed but carried Orthodox crosses and icons (Sergei Eisenstein’s filmed depiction of marchers carrying red flags and likenesses of Marx should be ignored) and sang patriotic songs, the order to shoot to kill proved particularly repulsive. Indeed, it turned public opinion against the tsar almost as soon as word got out that well over a hundred were dead and many more were wounded on this ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905).

The 1905 Revolution

The year 1905 defies succinct summary, in part because the situation changed so radically from month to month, even week to week, in part because each of the various historical actors—workers, peasants, soldiers, liberal intelligentsia, radical political parties, national minorities, students, even clergy—followed a distinct trajectory even if at times displaying a modicum of coordination. Still, whatever its vicissitudes, 1905 was a watershed in the history of late imperial Russia. By early 1906 these varied movements had driven their common enemy to grant a quasi-constitutional political order, based in principle on the rule of law and in some respects comparable to the troubled constitutional order in Germany. Hence it would not be amiss—though the point should not be overstated—to treat pre-and post-1905 Russia as having discrete historical characteristics.

What happened in 1905 to prepare Russia for change and what accounts for the limits of the change that occurred? Let us begin with the workers, whose January procession had transformed a liberal protest movement (which rarely transgressed the boundaries of civil disobedience) into outright acts of revolution. At issue is not who deserves more credit (or blame) for launching the revolution, workers or liberal professionals: each played an indispensable role and each encouraged the other. Rather, the task is to understand how labour’s clashes with the state drove the revolution in an ever more bellicose direction, forcing the authorities into moderate concessions such as creation of the ‘Shidlovskii Commission’ to hear the grievances of the workers’ elected representatives. In this classic example of ‘too little too late’, elections were held but the elected body never convened. As a result, the government not only augmented the frustration and anger of already embittered workers but also inadvertently provided them with their first large-scale experience of electoral activity (though a small number of factories had held elections in compliance with a 1903 law on factory elders). This electoral experience subsequently helped workers select and shape their own leadership and prepared them in the autumn for elections to the Petersburg ‘soviet’ (Russian for ‘council’). The latter was an extraordinary assembly of workers’ representatives, initially a city-wide strike committee, but soon evolving into what was virtually a shadow government, led for a while by the militant Marxist Leon Trotsky.

The fact that the soviet began as a strike committee shows that it was the strike movement above all that catapulted workers into the forefront in 1905. September was the key month, for it witnessed a nation-wide general strike, originating with Moscow printers but forming its central nervous system along the railway lines of which Witte had been so justly proud, with the old Moscow– St Petersburg line as the network’s spinal column. The strike gave birth to the Petersburg soviet in October, with other towns soon following the capital’s model. Although the term dvoevlastie was not used until 1917, the transformation of such soviets from strike committees into revolutionary governing bodies represented Russia’s first portentous experiment with ‘dual power’.

Although a Peasant Union had already been formed in July, September was also a pivotal month for the peasant phase of 1905. In general terms, it was the absence of government troops—off fighting the Japanese on Russia’s eastern frontiers until the war ended in August, then slowly returning to central Russia on the politically inflamed railways—and the example of unpunished worker defiance that facilitated the appearance of peasant unrest. But more specifically it was the end of the harvest season that triggered September’s intense wave of rural upheaval, including the widespread theft and destruction of gentry property. The confluence of these two great streams—peasant rebellion and working-class militance—drove the government to make concessions sufficiently meaningful to split the liberation movement.

Here the role of the liberal professionals becomes all-important. Their movement, first represented by the Union of Liberation, was transformed into that organization’s militant successor, the ‘Kadet’ or Constitutional Democratic Party (which also absorbed the organization of zemstvo constitutionalists). If the defiance of professionals and liberal zemstvo men in late 1904 had emboldened the labour movement, the militancy of workers and peasants later gave wavering liberals the courage to defy the government and form their own party. Although the movements of workers, peasants, and professionals remained distinct, in the autumn of 1905 they came close to walking hand in hand, however briefly, a cooperation already anticipated earlier in May by the creation of the ‘Union of Unions’, a coalition of organizations headed by Miliukov. That Union was more an association of professionals than of blue-collar workers, but it had a broad range of member organizations, and its inclusion of railwaymen gave the coalition not only symbolic but real material power.

Faced with these adverse circumstances, coupled with a resounding military defeat (though the peace with Japan signed in Portsmouth in August proved less humiliating than expected) and the painfully slow return from the front of reliable troops (some of whom were in a mutinous mood), the tsar now pledged the biggest concessions to society he had ever made. Earlier, even as recently as August, reform proposals by his government had consistently lagged behind society’s leftward-moving curve. Various configurations of advisory and consultative bodies had been discussed (most notably the so-called Bulygin Duma in August), but none granted genuine legislative independence, let alone election by anything resembling a democratic franchise.

On 17 October, however, Nicholas issued a manifesto containing a vague promise to grant an elected legislative body (elected not directly or equally, however, but at least on the basis of near universal male suffrage) as well as civil and religious liberties and—for the first time in Russian history—the right to organize unions and political parties. When the detailed electoral law was issued in December, it clearly favoured Russia’s already privileged classes, but was surprisingly generous to peasants, at least in comparison to workers.

Here at last was a document, the ‘October Manifesto’, with enough substance to divide the opposition. Because it fell far short of the fully-fledged Constituent Assembly (in effect the end of the autocratic system) demanded by most of the left, including Kadets, the Manifesto failed to put an immediate end to the revolution. But because it went as far as it did, it proved satisfactory to the regime’s more moderate critics, including many zemstvo constitutionalists who, having now grown wary of the destructive force unleashed by the popular classes in Russia’s city streets and villages, organized a political party called the Union of 17 October; its members (‘Octobrists’) vowed to co-operate with the government as long as it held to the Manifesto’s promises.

Although the government still faced a bloody struggle, it soon was able to recoup its forces sufficiently to arrest the Petersburg soviet and to suppress the December uprising of workers and revolutionaries in Moscow. Thanks in part to continuing upheaval among ethnic minorities and peasants, calm would not be fully restored for another year and a half, and then only with the aid of field courts martial and other draconian measures. But the back of the revolution had been broken, especially in the capital cities, and the army, despite some flashes of rebelliousness, was now obeying orders.

National Minorities

This account of 1905 would be incomplete without a word about the national minorities. Russia’s previous expansion had extended Romanov rule into Ukraine, Poland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Finland, Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia (the last two regions being special targets of internal peasant migration during this period). Like Austria-Hungary, Russia was truly a multinational empire, though one in which the dominant nation held a much greater numerical preponderance than did Germans in the Habsburg lands (according to Russia’s census of 1897, the population of 125 million included some 57 million ‘Great Russians’, plus another 22 million Ukrainians and 6 million Belorussians). At varying rates and intensity, minority discontent (in some cases reflected in massive emigration to America and elsewhere) was steadily mounting, especially once Alexander III had made coerced assimilation, though unevenly applied, official policy. Particularly aggrieved were Poles (whose rights were sharply curtailed after the 1863 uprising), Finns (whose status as a semi-independent grand duchy was subjected to major encroachments), and Jews (who though always subject to official discrimination, fell victim to a series of bloody pogroms in 1881–2 and most notoriously in Kishinev in 1903, and were exposed to a new series of discriminatory measures beginning with the infamous ‘May Laws’ of 1882). Poles, Finns, and Jews played particularly active roles in 1905, but other minorities, especially in Transcaucasia and the Baltic region (most notably the Latvians), also had significant nationalist, socialist, and liberal (sometimes all three simultaneously) movements. In the autumn of 1905 Jews were again the victims of pogroms (though the degree of government connivance remains uncertain).

Within certain limits, many Russian political groups, including liberals and Marxists, sympathized with the national and religious minorities and incorporated defence of their rights in their platforms, including in some cases the right to national autonomy and even independence. Marxists defended the right of nations to self-determination in principle (though just what constituted a viable ‘nation’ was always a thorny question), while urging their comrades among the national minorities to work for proletarian unity rather than secession and independence.

SRs, because they tended to favour a loosely organized, federal political system, found it easy to co-operate with the minorities. Kadets, however, increasingly vulnerable to the currents of Russian nationalism and generally wedded to the goal of a liberal but unitary state, tempered their sympathy for minorities with an uneasy hostility to the more radical demands, especially in the case of Poles and Ukrainians. Octobrists, whose statist nationalism was much more brazen than that of Kadets, were firmly opposed to most minority aspirations; that chauvinist spirit was increasingly apparent in the Octobrist-dominated Third Duma, especially in its measures to reduce Finland to the status of a mere province.

Constitutional Russia?

The apparent defeat of the revolution at the end of 1905 (in fact still far from a total rout) did not mean that the government felt sufficiently confident to risk rescinding its October promises. To do so, in any case, was to hazard the loss of the still less than solid support of Octobrists, many of whom were uneasy about becoming identified as a government party. In 1906 the government therefore kept its promise to hold elections for the lower house (the State Duma), to grant broader (though by no means unrestricted) rights of free expression and assembly, to allow workers to form unions, and to confer various other rights. The old State Council, formerly appointed by the tsar, was transformed into an upper house; one half was still appointed by the tsar, the balance elected from mostly conservative institutions on a very restricted and undemocratic franchise. Although imperial ministers were still appointed by the tsar, they were now allowed to function as a cabinet, with a chairman (in effect, a Prime Minister) whose power derived, personality aside, from his critical position between the other ministers and the sovereign.

Did all this mean that Russia now had a ‘constitution’? Historians who have argued over this word have really been arguing about something else: the likelihood of Russia’s non-violent evolution into a liberal polity between 1906 and 1914 (when the disruptions of war thoroughly changed the terms of debate), a question to which we will return. For brevity’s sake, Western historians sometimes subsume this debate under the catch-phrase ‘optimism’ (no revolution) versus ‘pessimism’ (inevitability of revolution). Suffice it to say that, insofar as ‘constitution’ means a set of fundamental laws that are meant to be binding on the government as well as the people, Russia formally acquired such a system on 23 April 1906. But the more important issue is not the formal definition of this system but its durability, stability, and capacity to function.

One source of instability was formal: the infamous Article 87, which empowered the tsar to dissolve the Duma and promulgate new laws in the interval between elections. Because the same article also required that, for such laws to be valid, the next Duma must approve them within two months, Article 87 by itself did not directly undermine the new order, but it did create a situation where an insecure or embattled regime could promulgate a law to change the Fundamental Laws themselves, and thereby alter the composition of the next Duma. Such an action was illegal, tantamount to a coup d’état, which was precisely the term employed when the ‘Prime Minister’, Peter Stolypin, did just that on 3 June 1907. There was yet another formal source of instability; the Fundamental Laws invested the tsar (still called ‘autocrat’) and his appointed ministers with what appeared to be full power over diplomacy and war, but made any increase in the military budget contingent on the approval of the Duma.

The Stolypin Reform

No less important than the contradictions inherent in the Fundamental Laws were the political and social challenges that brought these problems to the surface. Foreign policy questions had saturated domestic politics from 1890 to 1905, and they continued to do so in the post-revolutionary years. Despite or perhaps because of Russia’s recent military defeat, the aspiration to renewed great-power status and to participation in Weltpolitik continued unabated. Russia’s military position, however, was weaker than ever, especially in the light of losses suffered in the Russo-Japanese War. The consequent growth of the deficit made the costs of rearmament very difficult to meet. If this deficit was ever to be overcome, the economy had to recover and social stability had to be restored.

First and foremost this meant seeking a fresh solution to the peasant land problem. The question, in the new post-1905 context, was whether the solution to land hunger, so vehemently expressed by peasant insurgency in 1905 (and there was much more to come in 1906), should be attained by the compulsory redistribution of gentry land, and if so, whether with compensation (the liberal or Kadet position) or without (the radical position).

No one, whether in or out of government, could fail to see that the agrarian status quo was no longer tenable, as the termination of redemption payments even before 1905 bears witness. But the post-1905 government, and the extremely astute Stolypin in particular (first as head of the Ministry of Interior, but soon thereafter as Russia’s third ‘Prime Minister’—following Witte and the less than competent Ivan Goremykin)—had a solution, indeed one that Witte himself had advocated earlier. The central idea was to reallocate not gentry lands but communal lands, and to transfer them to individual peasant proprietors in the form of compact, enclosed, self-standing farmsteads. The reform was promulgated without Duma approval in November 1906, but was later approved and extended by the conservative Third Duma. This complex approach, Stolypin’s so-called ‘wager on the strong’, was intended to create a productive class of hard-working, individualistic, free farmers (‘yeomen’ if one likes them, ‘kulaks’ if one does not), a new class of property owners with a strong stake in the existing system, men whose legal personalities and citizenship status in contrast to the peasants emancipated in the 1860s and their descendants—would cease to differ from those of other landowners.

This was, in the jargon of the Russian left, a ‘bourgeois’ reform, sponsored and supervised by the state, but with powerful implications for a Russian future where social position would derive from capital and labour, not from the status ascribed by birth. It was, in a sense, the belated fulfilment of the original promise of 1861, a promise that the government had feared to fulfil lest disruption of the communal structure foster proletarianization, unrest, even rebellion. But now that serious unrest and rebellion had been taking place even in the presence of the communal order, a major rationale for the status quo had been eliminated, at least in the eyes of many conservatives.

Who, then, was left to support the ‘anachronistic’ commune? A surprisingly broad range of groups, from the PSR on the left to anti-individualist conservatives on the right. Almost every political programme that called for confiscation of gentry lands, whether with or without compensation, entailed the transfer of those lands to village communes (or to larger townships consisting of communes), not to individual peasants. Even liberals who looked forward to a system of individual proprietorship saw this as the result of a natural evolutionary process, not aggressive state measures (though it should be noted that the Stolypin programme was based, in part, on voluntary compliance). Peasants themselves were no doubt torn, but to the extent that they were represented in the first two Dumas by the new ‘Trudovik’ (Labour) Party and by large numbers of peasant and peasant-oriented independents, they often resisted both the spirit and the letter of Stolypin’s master plan.

It was this resistance—dramatized by the failure of the government’s efforts to seek collaboration with some Kadets and other moderates—that impelled Stolypin to carry out his ‘coup’, that is, to dissolve the Second Duma (more radical than the First) and revise the electoral law to ensure a more conservative composition. Peasants had once been the regime’s golden hope; but having demonstrated that, be they monarchist or otherwise, they could not be relied on to vote with the government, they were now deprived of much of their electoral weight. The same fate befell the rebellious minorities. The landed gentry, who were never fully trusted by the state, but who now exhibited signs of disillusionment with the Kadets (for example, by routing Kadet candidates in zemstvo elections) and a greater readiness to rally to their tsar, gained vastly disproportionate electoral rights. The change in franchise redounded to the benefit of the Octobrists and parties to their right. The new law was complex, but the result was a ‘loyal’ Duma, with moderate Octobrists (fortified by the adherence of many industrialists) and conservative Nationalists providing Stolypin with a safe majority, at least for the moment. Kadets were now reduced in number, subdued in spirit, and internally divided; SDs and SRs, though fielding candidates, elected too few delegates to give them an effective voice.

The Period of the Third Duma: 1907–1912

Despite strict limitations on its competence (military matters as such were excluded), serious policy issues were discussed in the halls of the Third Duma (1907–12), the only one to survive for its full five-year term (the Fourth came close). But some of these issues led to serious conflict, demonstrating the fragility of the government’s relationship with even a conservative Duma. Three particularly controversial issues were: (1) control over budgetary matters, especially the debate over the naval budget in 1909, which raised the issue of the Duma’s competence more than issues of substance (though the navy’s desire to sponge up resources badly needed by the army was a perennial source of strife); (2) the so-called Western zemstvo crisis of 1911, where the Council of State sought, successfully at first, to thwart Stolypin’s plan, which was to extend elected zemstvos to six Western border provinces, but without enhancing the power of Polish Catholic noble landowners; (3) Stolypin’s and the Duma’s long efforts, also thwarted by the State Council, to extend the zemstvos to the lower township (volost′) level. Without engaging the complex details of these divisive issues, suffice it to say that each revealed the lack of a clear consensus that could unite the upper and lower houses with each other or with Stolypin’s cabinet (itself very divided), or any of these institutions with the tsar, given the strange vagaries of mood at the imperial court. At the same time, it must be granted that agreement was possible on some important matters, including the agrarian reform and (during the Fourth Duma) a progressive workers’ insurance law, partially modelled on the programmes of Bismarck.

If the situation is addressed more generally, it makes sense to say that the politics of the Third (and Fourth) Duma regularly presented the Octobrists, now the pivotal party in the Duma, with the same choice: either to turn rightward to co-operate with the Nationalists (essentially a pro-government and Stolypinoriented coalition), or to turn leftward to the Kadets (essentially an oppositionist coalition, though moderate in tone and ‘loyal’ in content). In most respects the Duma’s extreme right and extreme left were irrelevant to these coalitions, neither being truly committed to the compromise politics of a parliament, preferring the direct-action politics of the street. As a result, the other major players in this political drama were the government (Stolypin’s, and later Kokovtsev’s, cabinet) and the State Council, consistently dominated by a conservative-to-reactionary majority that either favoured the government or criticized its policies from the perspective of the respectable right. Since all laws had to be approved by both houses, the State Council could sabotage any serious liberal legislative initiative that the Duma promoted (as it did on occasion).

Problems of the Pre-War Period: 1912–1914

By the time the Fourth Duma was elected in 1912, some evidence had accumulated that the system erected by Stolypin was starting to work, but there also was plenty of evidence that it could not—hence the unending historiographical debate between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. For the latter, the most dramatic evidence was the assassination of Stolypin himself in September 1911 by an SR, probably one of Russia’s ubiquitous double agents. Although none of Stolypin’s successors had comparable abilities, historians have suggested that even had Stolypin lived he was well on his way to dismissal. Relations with his erstwhile Octobrist allies had hit an all-time low, almost driving the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov (sometime chairman of the Duma and in a sense the first of the ‘pessimists’) to despair. Stolypin’s Duma calculus had shifted from Octobrists to the more narrowly based Nationalists. Stolypin was distrusted by the State Council’s conservative majority, his own cabinet, and courtiers close to the very tsar who had appointed him. Other ‘pessimist’ evidence may be adduced, including renewed unrest in the universities: by 1910–11, especially in Moscow, professors and students (among them, since 1905, a substantial number of women) protested against government efforts to rescind the concessions made to them in 1905; they were now in a virtual state of war with the Minister of Education, Lev Kasso.

Even before the Fourth Duma had convened, Stolypin’s successors faced yet another alarming problem: the resuscitation of a militant labour movement in the capital and elsewhere. The trigger was news that government troops had massacred over a hundred striking miners at the Lena goldfields in March 1912. The explosion of strikes and demonstrations led to stunning Bolshevik victories, at the expense of the more moderate Mensheviks, in elections to the Duma, union governing boards, and newly organized workers’ insurance boards. This revitalized unrest continued to intensify right up to the outbreak of war in 1914, providing the most persuasive evidence for the pessimist school.

On the ‘positive’ side of the ledger, optimists can cite evidence, if not of great achievements, then at least of some stabilization in the political and social status quo. Duma factionalism and wrangling had failed to pose a successful challenge to government authority; the opposition parties were bitterly divided and in disarray; revolutionary activity was virtually dormant for several years; even some of the radical intelligentsia questioned their own past values; and the Third Duma had made some progress in certain areas, especially in elementary education. Most tellingly, the agrarian reform, if by no means a proven success at this early stage, had finally received the Duma’s blessing and was in the process of being implemented without provoking significant peasant unrest (for a while turning even Lenin, in a peculiar sense, into an unwilling ‘optimist’).

On the international scene, as on the domestic, evidence could be cited of both success and failure. The greatest failure had come in 1908, when a series of diplomatic misunderstandings left Russia helplessly embarrassed when Vienna unilaterally annexed the disputed Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Competition between the army and the navy often attaining a high degree of rancour (contributing to the divisiveness of Duma politics), was depleting the budget and demoralizing the military. (Military historians generally agree that the navy’s demands were particularly unrealistic.) Earlier plans for establishing Russian hegemony over Mongolia and Manchuria were forcibly scaled down. Key Russian decision-makers were bitterly divided over how far to the west Russia should commit itself to a fortified defensive perimeter against Germany and Austria.

On the other hand, important diplomatic problems appeared to be resolved. Beginning in 1907 relations with Japan and England had significantly improved, and in 1909 Paris, though still a wary ally (witness France’s restraint at the time of the 1908 annexation crisis), agreed to advance Russia a generous five-year loan. This was an enormous boost to Russia’s economy, facilitating several successive years of industrial recovery (though even that recovery, because industrialists were reluctant to share its rewards with their workers, contributed to the militancy of the strike movement that destabilized urban Russia a few years later). Finally, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, while in some ways frightening to Russian military planners, had the consequence of committing them to a ‘Western’-oriented strategy and, for better or worse, a readiness for full rather than partial mobilization in the event of a major international crisis.

Literature and the Arts

Perhaps the most difficult spheres of Russian life to place squarely in the framework of the optimist–pessimist debate are literature and the arts. Without doubt, the reign of Nicholas II (and especially its last decade or so) witnessed extraordinary artistic creativity, so much so that cultural historians routinely use such terms as ‘silver age’, ‘second golden age’, and ‘cultural renaissance’. In poetry in particular, but also in fiction, theatre, music, and the plastic arts (characteristically, the walls between these fields were often scaled), new ‘modernist’ modes of expression, with Symbolism in the lead, asserted themselves among the cultural élite. Modernism boldly challenged the hegemony of realism, positivism, and a socially oriented and utilitarian civic art that had dominated Russian aesthetics for decades. As part of this challenge, modernists introduced religious, metaphysical, and philosophically idealist perspectives into artistic and intellectual discourse (as, for example, in the collection of essays published in 1902 entitled Problems of Idealism). It should be said, however, that such intellectual experimentation had little effect on the taste of a new mass reading public, a group that expanded rapidly with the growth of primary education and the popular press.

If the first essential steps in a modernist direction preceded the 1905 Revolution, the years that followed were particularly creative, with avant-garde writers such as Andrei Bely Zinaida Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov producing some of their most creative (and controversial) work. The Symbolist perspective that now dominated soon spawned a series of competing, often polemicizing movements (Acmeism, Futurism, and others), but all purportedly rejected what they viewed as the prosaic civicmindedness of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Not surprisingly, many readers, including members of the political intelligentsia, were hostile to the modernists, viewing their artistic products as esoteric, self-indulgent, and out of touch with popular needs (not to mention popular tastes).

Related to, if distanced from, the modernist rejection of traditional Russian aesthetics was a concurrent rebellion against the traditional assumptions of the left and liberal intelligentsia. Because it originated within the intelligentsia itself, that rebellion sometimes took the form of severe self-criticism. In 1909 a group of prominent intellectuals—among them Struve, Sergei Bulgakov, and other veteran leftists who now harboured painful second thoughts—published Vekhi (Signposts), a symposium that repudiated their past commitment to Marxism and atheism, their lack of national spirit, and their former narrowly political aesthetics; the collection unleashed a stormy backlash, not only from the far left, but also from the likes of Miliukov.

The affinity between the modernists and their civic-minded cultural rivals may have been greater than either side cared to admit. They not only had similar backgrounds, they shared the typically Russian notion that art and literature must perform a specially high moral mission for the nation. Though their solutions differed, they assumed that the writer was duty-bound and able to resolve the apparent antagonism between life and art. And, notwithstanding their programmatic differences, they all tended to view the existing order, and especially the governing bureaucracy, with some contempt. By no means did Russia’s Bloks and Maiakovskiis serve as props of the old regime. In sum, neither the splits in the ranks of the cultural intelligentsia nor the defensive postures adopted by liberal and radical people of letters in the face of the modernist challenge were necessarily good news for the government.

In the last analysis, the optimist–pessimist debate, though perhaps unavoidable, is a thought-experiment, a kind of metaphysical sparring match inseparable from counter-factual speculation about Russia’s likely fate in the absence of world war. It must be pointed out, however, that a serious ambiguity, even confusion, is often found in how the optimists pose the question. Is proof for their position to be found in the trajectory of economic, social, and political progress that was followed from 1907 to 1914? If so, the evidence, on balance, is rather thin. Their case is strongest in the economic realm (especially if one concentrates on heavy industry and ignores the explosive issue of dependency on foreign investment) and in the visible signs of a vibrant, modern urban culture—advertisement, commercial press, cinemas. But the optimists have greater difficulty when they try to build their case on the government’s capacity to ensure social peace and on the political stability brought about by the coup d’état of 3 June 1907. Here the point is not simply that urban social stability lasted only until 1912 or that the rift between privileged society and court (thanks to the influence of Rasputin and the empress) was growing wider. For even if we granted the government’s capacity, prior to the war, for maintaining a precarious social peace (for upholding order, if not law), this would not serve as evidence that problems were being solved or progress was being made. Indeed, it was precisely the government’s ability to maintain order through coercion, while restricting progress and upholding autocratic rule, that allowed so many social and political sores to fester, thereby promoting maximalist visions of social and political change.

It was a sign of weakness, then, not strength, that the Russian regime that went to war in the summer of 1914 had successfully resisted becoming a functioning constitutional monarchy. Nicholas II may have succeeded in achieving his goal of January 1895, not only to retain but even to invigorate the symbols and rituals of monarchy that adorned his English cousin; he also retained, while wielding it ineptly, much of the power of personal rule. Despite a promising beginning in 1906, the symbolic and the substantive spheres of authority were never fully separated in Russia, neither in real life nor in the fantasy-life of a monarch who in June 1914, contemplating yet another coup, came close to abrogating the legislative powers of the Duma, just as the nation was poised to join in a momentous struggle for its very survival.