Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 3

TSARISM’S MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY

The Russian empire is everywhere in ferment. Unrest and apprehension prevail in all classes. This applies equally to labor, students, the nobility, including the highest Court society, industrialists, merchants, shopkeepers, and, last but not least, the peasants . . . The only proven method of dealing with this situation, which is often proposed abroad, is the granting of a constitution; if this were done here, the consequences would almost certainly be revolution.

Austro-Hungarian attache in St. Petersburg, memo to Vienna, 19021

RUSSIAN EURASIA—104 NATIONALITIES SPEAKING 146 languages, as enumerated in the 1897 census—was the world’s most spectacular kaleidoscope, but in truth, empire everywhere presented a crazy patchwork.2 The key to empire in Russia, too, was not the multinationalism per se but the political system. The onset of Russia’s modern state administration is usually attributed to Peter I, or Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), even though major changes attributed to him often had roots in his father’s and even his grandfather’s reign.3 Peter is also credited with Westernization, even though he distrusted the West and used it as a means to an end: namely, the source of technical skills.4 Peter, whose mother was a (distant) Tatar descendant, did render Russia even more European culturally. Institutionally, he regularized a state administration on the Swedish model. And he introduced a Table of Ranks, a ladder of incentives to enhance competition for honor and privilege and to open state service to new men. By detaching status from birthright—or to put it another way, by making birthright a reward conferred by the state—Peter extended the governing authority’s capacity. But he undercut all his own state building by involving himself in everything. As one foreign ambassador observed, Peter “finds daily, more and more, that in the whole realm not one of his blood relatives and boyars can be found to whom he can entrust an important office. He is therefore forced to take over the heavy burden of the realm himself, and to put his hand to a new and different government, pushing back the boyars (whom he calls disloyal dogs).”5 In 1722, Peter unilaterally upgraded himself to “Emperor” (Imperator), a claim of parity with the (nonreigning) Holy Roman emperor. (He opted for “Emperor of All the Russias” rather than a proposed “Emperor of the East.”) Above all, Peter built up his own persona, partly via court hazing rituals—dildo debauches, mock weddings—which accentuated the centrality of and access to the autocrat’s person.6 The drive for a strong state became conflated with an intense personalism.

Peter’s method of state building also reinforced the circumstance whereby Russia’s elites remained joined at the hip to the autocratic power. Russia never developed a fully fledged aristocracy with its own corporate institutions that would, eventually, decapitate the absolutism (although, finally, in 1730 some nobles in Russia did try).7 True, Russia’s gentry accumulated as much wealth as their counterparts in Austria or even England. And unlike in Austria or England, the Russian gentry also produced cultural figures of world distinction—Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Skryabin, Mussorgsky. Further, Russia’s gentry was an open estate: even bastards (such as Alexander Herzen) could attain noble status. But a still greater difference was that England’s aristocracy acquired political experience as a ruling class in a constitutional monarchy. Russia’s serf owners were all-powerful on their estates, but, ultimately, they lived under the autocrat’s sufferance. Elite status in Russia was predicated on rendering service in exchange for rewards—which could be withdrawn.8 In addition to serving the sovereign by employment in the state, Russian nobles had to work constantly just to maintain their standing in the hierarchy. True, most of Russia’s privileged families managed to survive through the centuries under the autocrats. Still, not all Russia’s elite clans did survive, and the difference between prosperous endurance versus exile or imprisonment could seem arbitrary.9 Russia’s high and mighty needed still higher-placed patrons to protect their property holdings and, sometimes, their very persons.

Multitudes of observers, including Karl Marx, asserted that “modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.”10 They were wrong: the post-Petrine Russian state and its capital, St. Petersburg, more closely resembled European absolutism than ancient Muscovy. But that circumstance was obscured. Russia’s “soulless” pushers of paper, “brainless” bootlickers, and “craven” collectors of state decorations took an immortal drubbing in belles lettres, nowhere better than in Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General. Court circles too mocked Russia’s parvenu “Your Excellencies.” Aside from these memoirs and Gogol’s sublime pen, which continue to beguile historians, we can find other important voices. Prince Boris A. Vasilchikov, for example, an aristocrat elected to the local governing council (zemstvo) near his estate, and later the governor of Pskov, had shared the contempt for imperial officialdom before he got inside. “During my two years’ service as a minister I gained a very high opinion of the qualities of Petersburg officialdom,” he wrote. “The level of personnel of the Petersburg chancelleries and ministries was extremely high as regards knowledge, experience and fulfillment of official duties . . . besides this, I was struck by their immense capacity for hard work.”11 To be sure, Vasilchikov also observed that few imperial Russian functionaries possessed broad horizons and many officials who did have vision remained averse to risk, unwilling to venture their views against opinions expressed above them.12 Sycophancy could reach breathtaking heights. And officials relied upon school ties, blood and marriage relations, cliques, all of which could cover for mistakes and incompetence. Nonetheless, the authority of all-important patrons and protectors often stemmed from accomplishments, not just connections. Facts cannot compete with great stories from Gogol but they can be stubborn: imperial Russia developed a formidable fiscal-military state that proved capable of mobilizing impressive resources, certainly compared with its rivals the Ottoman or Habsburg empires.13

As late as the 1790s, when Prussia—with 1 percent of Russia’s size in land—had 14,000 officials, the tsarist empire had only 16,000 and just a single university, which was then a mere few decades old, but over the course of the 1800s, Russian officialdom grew seven times more rapidly than the population, and by 1900 had reached 385,000, leaping some 300,000 only since 1850. True, although many of Russia’s maligned provincial governors developed great administrative experience and skill, the low-prestige provincial apparatuses under them continued to suffer an extreme dearth of competent and honest clerks.14 And some territories were woefully undergoverned: in the Ferghana valley, for example, the most populous district of tsarist Turkestan, Russia posted just 58 administrators and a mere 2 translators for at least 2 million inhabitants.15 Overall, in 1900, while imperial Germany had 12.6 officials per 1,000 people, imperial Russia still had fewer than 4, a proportion reflecting Russia’s huge population—130 million versus Germany’s 50 million.16 The Russian state was top heavy and spread thin.17 Most of the provincial empire was left to be governed by local society, whose scope of governance, however, was restricted by imperial laws and whose degree of organization varied widely.18 Some provinces, such as Nizhny Novgorod, did remarkably well.19 Others, such as Tomsk, were mired in disabling corruption. Incompetence flourished most at the very top of the system. Many a deputy undertook machinations to depose his superior, which reinforced the inclination to hire mediocrities into the upper ranks, at least as top deputies, nowhere more so than in the tsars’ appointments of ministers.20 But despite the absence of a civil service examination in Russia—such as the one that guided recruitment of officialdom in imperial Germany and Japan—administrative needs did slowly begin to dictate hiring on the basis of university education and expertise.21 Russia’s functionaries (chinovniki) began to be recruited from all social ranks, and countless thousands of plebeians became nobles because of their state service, a path upward that would be tightened but never closed.

At the same time, unlike the absolutism in Prussia, Austria, Britain, or France, Russia’s autocracy endured deep into modern times. Prussia’s Frederick the Great (r. 1772–86) had called himself “the first servant of the state,” thereby marking the state’s separate existence from the sovereign. Russia’s tsars would hand out a Siberian silver mine’s worth of medals to state officials but, jealous of their autocratic prerogatives, they hesitated to recognize a state independent of themselves. The “autocratic principle” held even through the gravest crises. In 1855, when Alexander II succeeded his father, a dying Nicholas I had said to his son, “I want to take with me all the unpleasantness and the troubles and pass on to you an orderly, calm and happy Russia.”22 But Nicholas I had embroiled the empire in a costly Crimean War (1853–56), seeking to take advantage of a contracting Ottoman empire. Britain led a European concert against St. Petersburg, and Alexander II, at a loss of 450,000 imperial Russian subjects, found himself forced to accept defeat just before the conflict tipped into a world war.23 After the debacle—Russia’s first lost war in 145 years—Alexander II was constrained to countenance a series of Great Reforms, including a belated serf emancipation. (“It is better that this come from above than from below,” the tsar warned the unconvinced nobles, who were scarcely mollified by the huge redemption payments the state collected on their behalf from peasants.)24 But the tsar’s own autocratic prerogatives remained sacrosanct. Alexander II permitted an unprecedented degree of domestic freedom in the universities, the press, the courts, but as soon as Russian subjects exercised that civil freedom, he pushed back.25 The Tsar-Liberator—as he came to be known—refused a constitution, because, as his interior minister noted, Alexander II “was genuinely convinced that it would harm Russia and would lead to its dissolution.”26 But the tsar would not even let state law be applied to state officials, lest that diminish the autocrat’s dispensation.27 On the contrary, the granting of some local self-rule, some independence to the judiciary, and some autonomy to universities, alongside the freeing of the serfs, made a reassertion of autocratic power seem all the more urgent to Alexander II. Thus, the Great Reform moment to establish a parliament when it might have stuck—in the 1860s, and again in the 1880s—was fatally missed.28

Russia lacked not only a parliament but even a coordinated government, so as not to infringe on the autocrat’s prerogatives. To be sure, Alexander II had approved a Council of Ministers to coordinate government affairs, but the effort (1857) was stillborn. In practice, the tsar shrank from relinquishing the power of having individual ministers obviate the collective body and report to him directly, and privately; the ministers colluded in the government reform’s sabotage, not wanting to forgo the influence gained via private access to the autocrat.29 Meetings of the Council, like any imperial audiences, mostly involved efforts to divine the “autocratic will,” to avoid the catastrophe of being on the wrong side of decisions. Only the most skillful could manage, every now and then, to implant an idea as the tsar’s own.30 Courtiers and “unofficial” advisers, meanwhile, continued to make policy, even for the ministries, and the Russian government’s operation remained uncoordinated and secretive—from officialdom. Tsarism suffered a debilitation it could not overcome: the imperatives of autocracy undermined the state. Of the resulting political regime, wags called it fairly simple: autocracy, tempered by occasional assassination. Open season had commenced in 1866, with the first of six attempts on Alexander II. He was finally blown to bits in 1881. Alexander III survived several close calls, including one in the company of his son Nicholas, the future tsar. In 1887, after a failed plot on Alexander III, Alexander Ulyanov, a member of the underground People’s Will—and the elder brother of the-then seventeen-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov (the future Lenin)—refused an offer of clemency and was hanged. The inflexible autocracy had many enemies, including Iosif Jughashvili. But its most dangerous enemy was itself.

MODERNITY AS GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVE

By the turn of the century, at least 100 political murders had been notched in imperial Russia. After that the pace picked up, as terrorist-assassins pursued what they called disorganization—provoking the police to make arrests and shed blood, which, in twisted terrorist logic, would galvanize society to revolt. The next royal family member hit was Moscow’s governor, Grand Duke Sergei, a younger son of Alexander II (and an uncle of Nicholas II), who was decapitated by a bomb right inside the Kremlin in 1905. Until that year, politics in Russia was essentially illegal: political parties and trade unions were banned; censorship meant that few options for political discourse existed, other than tossing a “pomegranate” at an official’s carriage and watching the body parts fly. (Grand Duke Sergei’s fingers were found on a nearby rooftop.)31 In response, the tsarist authorities had reorganized the political police, creating a formidable new body, the Okhrannoe otdelenie, which the terrorists promptly dubbed the okhranka— meaning, pejoratively, “the little security agency.” Of course, not only Russia but also the European dynasties (Bourbon France, Habsburg Austria) had invented the practice of “policing,” that is, using the institution of the police to help direct society; by comparison with its European peers, Russia’s political police were not especially nefarious.32 The okhranka intercepted mail via secret “black cabinets”—modeled on France’s cabinets noires—where operatives steamed open letters, read invisible ink, and cracked revolutionaries’ codes (such as they were).33 Inevitably, Russia’s police chiefs discovered their mail was perlustrated, too, and some tsarist officials took to sending letters to third parties that obsequiously flattered their bosses.34 Even working along with Russia’s regular Department of Police and Special Corps of Gendarmes, the shadowy okhranka never attained the societal coverage of its better-endowed French counterpart.35 But the okhranka’s mystique enhanced its reach.

Many okhranka operatives were highly educated, forming a kind of “police intelligentsia,” compiling libraries of revolutionary works in order to discredit the revolutionaries’ ideas.36 Operatives incorporated the latest international tradecraft, using E. R. Henry’s book on fingerprinting from the London police and file methods from the German police.37 Terror fighting proved sullying, however: the okhranka often felt constrained to allow terrorists to complete their assassinations so the police could track terror networks as fully as possible.38 Worse, many okhranka infiltrators carried out the political murders themselves, to prove their bona fides and remain in a position to continue surveillance. Tsarist police assassinating other tsarist officials was a nasty business that exacerbated the internal divisions of rivalrous police cabals. The upshot was that senior okhranka operatives themselves were placed under surveillance, though fewer of them turned rogue than were murdered by their own turncoat agents.39 The okhranka also suffered the disdain of Tsar Nicholas II, who almost never deigned to meet his okhranka chief.40 And yet, though almost entirely without connections at court, the okhranka was the only part of the state genuinely moored in society. Moreover, despite the police agency’s entanglement with the terrorists it was supposed to fight, and its alienation from the regime it was supposed to protect, the okhranka scored success after success.41 It cast effective clouds over genuine revolutionaries by falsely naming them as police agents, and supported those revolutionary elements whose ascendancy would hurt the terrorist organizations. Stalin would be dogged his entire life, and beyond, by rumors that he was an undercover police agent (accusations his many enemies failed to prove).42 Lev Trotsky, too, came under suspicion of police collaboration.43 As one former okhranka chief boasted, “the revolutionaries . . . fell to suspecting each other, so that in the end no conspirator could trust another.”44

Adroitly sowing discord among naturally fractious revolutionaries and stage-managing terrorists, however, could never redress the tsarist order’s most profound vulnerability. The autocracy’s core problem was not that it fell under political assault, or that authoritarianism was ipso facto incompatible with modernity, but that Russia’s autocracy was deliberately archaic. Tsarism choked on the very modernity that it desperately needed and, to an extent, pursued in order to compete as a great power.45

What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest. Colonies, from the point of view of the colonizers, were not just geopolitical assets (in most cases), but in the words of one historian, also “a form of conspicuous consumption on a national scale”—markers of geopolitical status, or the lack thereof, which drove an aggressiveness in state-to-state rivalries, as those on the receiving end could attest.46 Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process—moving from “traditional” to “modern” society—but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.47

Consider the invention of systems to manufacture steel (1850s), a strong and elastic form of iron that revolutionized weapons and made possible a global economy by transforming shipping. Steel took off thanks in part to the invention of the electric motor (1880s), which made possible mass production: the standardization of core aspects of products, the subdivision of work on assembly lines, the replacement of manual labor by machinery, the reorganization of flow among shops.48 These new production processes boosted world steel production from half a million tons in 1870 to twenty-eight million by 1900. But the United States accounted for ten million; Germany, eight; and Britain, five; a small number of countries had almost all the steel. To this picture one could add the manufacture of crucial industrial chemicals: synthetic fertilizers for boosting agricultural yields, chlorine bleach to make cotton, and explosives (Alfred Nobel’s nitroglycerine dynamite, 1866) for mining, railroad construction, and assassinations. As some countries succeeded at modern industry, the world became divided between advantaged industrializers (Western Europe, North America, Japan) and disadvantaged raw material suppliers (Africa, South America, much of Asia).

Competitive modern attributes also included finance and credit facilities, stable currencies, and stock companies.49 But in many ways, the new world economy rested upon peasants in the tropics who supplied the primary products (raw materials) necessary for industrial countries and, in turn, consumed many of the goods produced from their raw materials. Commercialization spurred specialization away from subsistence—in China, for example, vast acreage of subsistence agriculture had been converted to cotton to feed the English cotton mills—with the result that the spread of markets made possible huge increases in production. But that spread also undercut diverse crop raising (to minimize subsistence shortfalls) and reciprocal social networks (to enhance survival), meaning markets undercut the traditional methods for coping with cyclical drought, which was chronic. El Niño airflows (the recurrent warming of the Pacific Ocean) export heat and humidity to parts of the world, creating an unstable climate for farming: torrential rains, floods, landslides, and wildfires, as well as severe droughts. The upshot was three waves of famine and disease (1876–79, 1889–91, 1896–1900) that killed between 30 and 60 million people in China, Brazil, and India. In India alone, 15 million people died of famine, equal to half the population of England at the time. Not since the fourteenth-century Black Death or the sixteenth-century disease destruction of New World natives had there been such annihilation. Had such mass death occurred in Europe—the equivalent of thirty Irish famines—it would be regarded as a central episode of world history. Besides the effects of commercialization and weather, additional factors came into play: The collapse of a U.S. railroad bubble, for example, led to an abrupt decline in demand for key tropical products. Above all, colonial rulers compounded the market and climate uncertainties with inept and racist rule.50 Only in Ethiopia in 1889 was absolute scarcity an issue; these were not “natural” famines but man-made ones, the consequences of a world subjected to great power domination.

Modernity’s power could be woefully mismanaged. While India was experiencing mass starvation, between 1870–1900, grain exports to Britain were increased, from 3 million to 10 million, supplying one-fifth of British wheat consumption. “Famine,” admitted one British official in 1907, after thirty-five years of service, “is now more frequent than formerly and more severe.”51 But the British themselves were responsible. They had built the fourth largest railroad network in India to take advantage of their colony, but this technology that could have brought relief instead took food away. The British viceroy in India, Lord Lytton, opposed on principle local officials’ efforts to stock grain or interfere with market prices. He demanded that the emaciated and the dying work for food because, he insisted, food relief would encourage shirking from work (not to mention cost public funds). When starving women attempted to steal from gardens, they were subjected to branding, and sometimes had their noses cut off or were killed. Rural mobs assaulted landowners and pillaged grain stores. British officials observed the desperation and reported it back home. “One madman dug up and devoured part of a cholera victim, while another killed his son and ate part of the boy,” one report from India noted. The Qing rulers in China had resisted building railroads, fearing their use in colonialist penetration, so the capacity in China for famine relief was limited. Huge peasant revolts broke out—the Canudos war in Brazil, the Boxer rebellion in China (where posters noted: “No rain comes from Heaven. The Earth is parched and dry.”). But the peasants could not, at that time, overthrow formal or informal imperialism.

Markets and a world economy made possible previously unimaginable prosperity, but most of the world had a difficult time appreciating the benefits. To be sure, the new world economy was not all encompassing. Many pockets of territory lived outside the opportunities and the pressures. Still, the world economy could feel like a force of nature. Electricity spurred soaring demand for copper (wires), drawing Montana, Chile, and southern Africa into the world economy, a chance for newfound prosperity, but also for subjecting their populations to wild price swings on world commodities markets. The consequences were huge. Beyond the waves of famine, the collapse of one bank in Austria in 1873 could trigger a depression that spread as far as the United States, causing mass unemployment, while in the 1880s and 1890s, Africa was devastated by recessions outside the continent—and then swallowed up in an imperial scramble by the modernity-wielding Europeans.52

Imperial Russia faced the modernity challenge with considerable success. It became the world’s fourth or fifth largest industrial power, thanks to textiles, and Europe’s top agricultural producer, an achievement of Russia’s sheer size. But here was the rub: Russia’s per capita GDP stood at just 20 percent of Britain’s and 40 percent of Germany’s.53 St. Petersburg had the world’s most opulent court, but by the time the future Stalin was born, Russia’s average lifespan at birth was a mere thirty years, higher than in British India (twenty-three), but no better than in China, and well below Britain (fifty-two), Germany (forty-nine) and Japan (fifty-one). Literacy under Tsar Nicholas II hovered near 30 percent, lower than in Britain in the eighteenth century. The Russian establishment knew these comparisons intimately because they visited Europe often, and they evaluated their country not alongside third-rate powers—what we would call developing countries—but alongside the first-rank. Even if Russian elites had been more modest in their ambitions, however, their country could have expected little respite in the early twentieth century, given the unification and rapid industrialization of Germany and the consolidation and industrialization of Japan. When a great power suddenly knocks at your country’s door, with advanced military technology, officers who are literate and capable, motivated soldiers, and well-run state institutions and engineering schools back home, you cannot cry “unfair.” Russia’s socioeconomic and political advance had to be, and was, measured relative to that of its most advanced rivals.54

Even contemporary revolutionaries recognized Russia’s dilemmas. Nikolai Danielson, the lead translator of Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, worried that his preferred path for Russia of an unhurried, organic evolution to socialism via the peasant commune (a small-scale, decentralized economic organization) could not survive the pressures of the international system, while Russia’s bourgeoisie was not up to the challenge either. “On the one hand, emulating England’s slow-paced, 300-year process of economic development might leave Russia vulnerable to colonial domination by one or another of the world’s great powers,” Danielson wrote in a preface to the 1890s Russian edition of Das Kapital. “On the other, a headlong, Darwinian introduction of ‘western-style’ free markets and privatization might produce a corrupt bourgeois elite and a destitute majority—without any increase in productivity rates.” Russia seemed to face a frightful choice between colonization by European countries or new depths of inequality and poverty.55

For the tsarist regime, the stakes were high and so were the costs. Even after conceding the Great Reforms, Russia’s rulers continued to feel increasing fiscal limits to their international aspirations. The Crimean War had clobbered state finances, but the revenge victory in the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78) cost Russia still more treasure. Between 1858 and 1880, Russia’s budget deficit soared from 1.7 to 4.6 billion rubles, which required huge foreign borrowing—from Russia’s geopolitical rivals, the European great powers.56 Corruption meant that substantial sums of state money went unaccounted for. (Treatment of state revenue as private income was perhaps most outlandish in the Caucasus, a sinkhole of imperial finance.)57 True, Russia escaped the fate of the Ottomans, who became a financial and geopolitical client of Europe, or of the Qing (1636–1911), who doubled the size of China, in parallel to Russia’s expansion, only to go flat broke and be subjected to a series of profoundly unequal international treaties, including at the hands of Russia.58 By the early 1900s, Russia’s state budget tended to be in surplus, thanks to taxes on sugar, kerosene, matches, tobacco, imported goods, and above all, vodka. (The Russian empire’s per capita alcohol consumption was lower than elsewhere in Europe but the state ran a monopoly on sales.)59 At the same time, however, Russia’s army budget eclipsed state expenditure on education by a factor of ten. And even then, the war ministry incessantly complained of insufficient resources.60

Competitive great-power pressures did help drive an expansion of Russia’s higher education system in order to produce state functionaries, engineers, and doctors.61 But the autocracy came to dread the very students it desperately needed. When the autocracy tried to strangle moves for university autonomy, students went on strike, which led to campus lockdowns.62 Of those arrested in the Russian empire between 1900 and 1905, the vast majority were under thirty years of age.63 Similarly, industrialization had taken off from the 1890s, giving Russia many of the modern factories critical to international power, yet industrial workers were striking, too, for an eight-hour workday and humane living conditions, leading to lockdowns. Rather than permit legal organizations and try to co-opt the workers—as was initially tried by a talented Moscow okhranka chief—the autocracy fell back upon repressing the workers whom the state’s own vital industrialization was creating.64 In the countryside, whose harvest remained the state’s preeminent economic determinant, Russian grain exports fed large swaths of Europe while domestic food consumption grew, despite comparatively lower Russian yields on sown land.65 But in spring 1902, in the fertile Poltava and Kharkov provinces of the south, peasants burst into mass rebellion, looting and burning gentry estates, demanding land-rent reductions as well as free access to forests and waterways, thereby prompting the novelist Lev Tolstoy to address petitions to the tsar.66 The next year in western Georgia’s Kutaisi province, among the forty square miles of vineyards and tea leaves of Guria, peasants were provoked by inept tsarist repression, and rebelled. The province lacked even a single industrial enterprise, and the uprising threw the Social Democrats for a loop. But after the peasants gathered, drew up demands, elected leaders, and took mutual oaths to loyalty, Georgian Social Democrats sought to lead them. Rents paid to landowners were reduced, freedom of speech was allowed, and the police were replaced by a new “red” militia in an autonomous “Gurian Republic.”67

Imperial Russia had more than 100 million rural inhabitants living under extremely diverse conditions. Every country undergoing the modernization compelled by the international system was torn by social tensions. But Russia’s tensions were magnified by the autocratic system’s refusal to incorporate the masses into the political system, even by authoritarian means. And many would-be revolutionaries who had abandoned peasant-oriented Populism for worker-centric Marxism faced a rethinking.

CRUSHING DEFEAT IN ASIA

For Russia, the inherent geopolitical imperative of achieving the attributes of modernity was rendered still costlier because of its geography. Great Britain’s attempted containment of Russia failed: the Crimean War defeat on Russian soil had helped provoke a spasm of Russian conquest into Central Asia (1860s–80s) on top of a seizure of the Amur River basin from China (1860). But those land grabs had deepened Russia’s challenge of having sprawling geography and a difficult neighborhood. The Russian empire—unlike the world’s other great continental power—was not safely nestled between the two great oceans and two harmless neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Russia simultaneously abutted Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. Such a circumstance should have argued for caution in foreign policy. But Russia had tended to be expansionist precisely in the name of vulnerability: even as forces loyal to the tsar had seized territory, they imagined they were preempting attacks. And once Russia had forcibly acquired a region, its officials invariably insisted they had to acquire the next one over, too, in order to be able to defend their original gains. A sense of destiny and insecurity combined in a heady mix.

Russia had reached the Pacific in the seventeenth century but never developed its vast Asian territories. Dreams of trade with the Far East went unrealized, owing to the lack of reliable, cost-effective transport.68 But then Russia built the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1903) linking the imperial capital with the Pacific.69 (The United States had completed its transcontinental railroad in 1869.) Military and strategic considerations dominated Russia’s railroad project as military circles clamored for a railroad not out of fear of Japan but of China. (Opponents of the railroad favored a naval buildup.)70 But some officials put forward visions of force marching Siberia’s economic development (in 1890, all of Siberia had 687 industrial enterprises, most of them artisanal and nearly 90 percent of them in food-processing and livestock).71 The Trans-Siberian proved to be the most expensive peaceful undertaking in modern history up to that time, involving colossal waste, unmechanized exertion, and press-ganged peasant and convict labor, all of which paralleled construction of the contemporaneous Panama Canal (and presaged Stalin’s pharaonic Five-Year Plans).72 Russia’s engineers had been dispatched on study trips to the United States and Canada in the 1880s, but back home they employed none of the lessons on the need for stronger rails and sturdy ballast.73 Still, against domestic opposition and long odds, the line had been built, thanks to the willpower and clever manipulations of Finance Minister Sergei Witte.

Witte had been born in 1849 in Tiflis to a Swedish-Lutheran family (on his father’s side) that had converted to Orthodoxy and served the Russian state in midlevel positions on the empire’s southern frontier. His mother’s family had higher status. Witte completed gymnasium in Kishinev and university in Odessa, where he began his long career by managing the Odessa railroads, making them profitable. In 1892, in the aftermath of the famine of 1891, he became finance minister in St. Petersburg. Just forty-three years old, with low imperial rank initially, widely dismissed as some kind of “merchant” (kupets), and with Ukrainian-accented Russian, Witte nonetheless became the dominant figure in turn-of-the-century imperial Russian politics, forcing even foreign policy into the purview of his finance ministry.74

Witte did not have the entire field to himself, of course. Just in terms of the executive branch of the state, he had to reckon with the ministry of internal affairs, the umbrella for the okhranka, as well as the regular police. In many ways, Russian governance, and even Russian politics, pivoted on the two great ministries, internal affairs and finance, and the rivalry between them. Both finance and internal affairs connived to expand at the central level, and to extend their writ into locales.75 On the occasion of their joint one hundredth jubilee in 1902, each published a history of itself. Internal affairs told a story of imposing and maintaining domestic order, especially in rural Russia; finance, of the productive exploitation of Russia’s natural and human resources, whence revenues could be collected.76 Despite being overwhelmingly a peasant country, Russia had no separate agricultural ministry per se, though it did have an evolving, relatively small-scale (until 1905–6) ministry that was responsible for land, most of which belonged to the state or the imperial household.77 A ministry of communications (railways) as well as one of commerce and industry existed as satellites of the powerful finance ministry. By the early 1900s, the budgetary resources commanded by the finance ministry exceeded by several times those available to internal affairs and its police.78 The finance ministry was the great bureaucratic empire within the Russian empire.79

Witte also had to contend with the court. He came from a merely middling family background, was ill mannered, and had married a Jewish woman, all of which raised hackles in court society. But the physically imposing Witte, who had a massive head and torso, on short legs, imposed order on imperial budgets, filling state coffers by introducing the alcohol monopoly.80 Also, he vastly broadened a recent finance ministry practice of vigorously pushing industrialization, and he did so by attracting foreign capital, playing off the French and Germans. Witte saw foreign debt as a way to help spur the accumulation of native capital. He also cherished the state machinery. Above all, Witte emphasized the geopolitical imperative of industrializing. “No matter how great the results so far, in relation to the needs of the country and in comparison with foreign countries our industry is still very backward,” he wrote in a memorandum in 1900, urging Nicholas II to maintain protective tariffs. Witte added that “even the military preparedness of a country is determined not only by the perfection of its military machine but by the degree of its industrial development.” Without energetic actions, he warned, “the slow growth of our industries will endanger the fulfillment of the great political tasks of the monarchy.” Russia’s rivals would seize the upper hand abroad and achieve economic and possibly “triumphant political penetration” of Russia itself.81 Like Stalin would, Witte lopsidedly prioritized heavy and large-scale industry at the expense of light industry and the welfare of the overwhelmingly rural population. Witte’s ministry put out deliberately inflated consumption statistics to cover up the burdens imposed.82 As it happened, Witte also scribbled his orders in pencil directly on the memoranda of subordinates (“Discuss this again”) (“Write a summary abstract”), and worked late into the evenings, both viewed as distinguishing traits of the future Soviet dictator. Witte further anticipated Stalin by a habit of pacing his office while others in attendance had to sit.

Witte imagined himself a Russian Bismarck, drawing inspiration from the Iron Chancellor’s use of the state to promote economic development as well as his foreign policy realism. Witte also championed, at least rhetorically, what he called Bismarck’s “social monarchy”—that is, a conservative program of social welfare to preempt socialism.83 Witte possessed immense administrative abilities as well as the profound self-regard required of a top politician.84 Besides being awarded the Order of St. Anne, first class—a tsarist precursor of the Order of Lenin—he received more than ninety state awards from foreign governments (unthinkable in the Soviet context). In turn, using finance ministry funds, he bestowed medals, state apartments, country homes, travel allowances, and “bonuses” on his minions, allies, clans at court, and journalists (for favorable coverage). From the finance ministry’s offices on the Moika Canal, Witte enjoyed a grand vista onto the Winter Palace and Palace Square, but he also assiduously frequented the salons in the nobles’ palaces lining the Fontanka Canal. In the autocracy, for a minister to become a genuinely independent actor was near impossible. Witte depended utterly on the tsar’s confidence (doverie). Witte understood that another key to power entailed remaining well informed amid a deliberate non-sharing of information inside the government.85 This required a broad informal network coursing through all the top layers of society. (“As a minister,” wrote Witte’s successor at the finance ministry, “one had no option but to play a role in Court and in Petersburg society if one was to defend the interests of one’s department and maintain one’s position.”)86 In other words, in tsarist government relentless intrigues were not personal but structural, and Witte was a master: he developed close links to dubious types in the okhranka, whom he employed for a variety of purposes, but his underlings in the finance ministry, too, had been tasked with overhearing and recording conversations of rivals, which Witte would edit and send to the tsar. After a decade of high-profile power at the top of the Russian state, which elicited endless attacks against Witte by rivals and societal critics of his harsh taxation policies, Nicholas II would finally lose confidence in him in 1903, shunting him to a largely ceremonial post (Witte “fell upward,” contemporaries said). But his historic run at the finance ministry lasted a decade, making him one of Stalin’s most important forerunners.

Witte emulated not just Bismarck but also his British contemporary in Africa, the diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), and looked upon the Far East as his personal imperial space.87 In order to shorten the route from St. Petersburg to the terminal point at Vladivostok (“rule the east”), Witte constructed a southerly branch of the Trans-Siberian right through the Chinese territory of Manchuria. Under the slogan of “peaceful penetration,” he and other Russian officials imagined they were preempting Russia’s rival imperialists (Britain, Germany, France) from carving up China the way they had the African continent.88 Other Russian officials, while insisting that each forcible conquest had to be followed by another, in order to be able to defend the original gains, competed to gain the tsar’s favor, one-upping Witte’s supposedly measured push into China. The war ministry seized, then leased, Port Arthur (Lushun), a deep warm-water entrepot on China’s Liaodong Peninsula, which jutted ever so strategically into the Yellow Sea. But Russia’s overall increasingly forward position in East Asia, in which Witte was complicit, ran smack up against not the European powers that so transfixed St. Petersburg elites, but an aggressive, imperialist Japan.89

Japan was in no way a power on the order of the world leader, Great Britain. Living standards in Japan were perhaps only one fifth of Britain’s, and Japan, like Russia, remained an agriculture-dominated economy.90 Japan’s real wages, measured against rice prices, had probably been only one third of Britain’s in the 1830s, and would still be only one third in the early twentieth century. Still, that meant that during Britain’s leap, real wages in Japan had improved at the same rate as real wages improved in the leading power.91 Although Japan was still exporting primary products or raw materials (raw silk) to Europe, within Asia, Japan exported consumer goods. Indeed, Japan’s rapidly increasing trade had shifted predominantly to within East Asia, where it gained widespread admiration or envy for discovering what looked like a shortcut to Western-style modernity.92 Japan was also rapidly building up a navy, just like Germany. (The conservative modernizer Bismarck was in his day the most popular foreign figure in Japan, too.)93 Moreover, as an ally of Britain, rather than be subjected to informal imperialism, Japan led a shift in East Asia toward free trade, the ideology of the strong. Japan had defeated China in a war over the Korean Peninsula (1894–95) and seized Taiwan. Already in the 1890s, Russia’s general staff began to draft contingency planning for possible hostilities with Japan, following the shock of Japan’s crushing defeat of China. But partly for wont of military intelligence on Japan, although mostly because of racial prejudice, Russian ruling circles belittled the “Asiatics” as easily conquerable.94 Whereas the Japanese general staff had estimated no better than a fifty-fifty chance of prevailing, perhaps hedging their bets, Russian ruling circles were certain they would win if it came to war.95 The British naval attache similarly reported widespread feeling in Tokyo that Japan would “crumple up.”96 Of all people, Nicholas II should have known better. As tsarevich, he had seen Japan with his own eyes, during an unprecedented (for a Russian royal) grand tour of the Orient (1890–91), where the sword of a Japanese assassin nearly killed the future tsar, and left a permanent scar on his forehead. (A cousin in Nicholas’s party parried a second saber blow with a cane.) But as tsar, facing possible war, Nicholas dismissed the Japanese as “macaques,” an Asian species of short-tailed monkey.97

Russo-Japanese negotiators had tried to find a modus vivendi through a division of spoils, exchanging recognition of a Russian sphere in Manchuria for recognition of a Japanese sphere in Korea, but each side’s “patriots” kept arguing that they absolutely had to have both Manchuria and Korea to protect either one. Japan, which felt its weakness in the face of a combination of European powers encroaching in East Asia, would likely have compromised if Russia had been willing to do so as well, but it remained unclear what Russia actually would settle for. A clique of courtier intriguers, led by Alexander Bezobrazov, exacerbated Japan’s suspicions with a scheme to penetrate Korea while enriching themselves via a forestry concession. Bezobrazov held no ministerial position, yet Nicholas, as an assertion of “autocratic prerogative,” afforded the courtier frequent access, cynically using Bezobrazov to keep his own ministers, Witte included, off balance. Nicholas II’s changeable and poorly communicated views, and his failure to keep his own government informed, let alone seek its members’ expertise, rendered Russia’s Far Eastern policy that much more opaque and incoherent.98 Japanese ruling circles decided, before negotiations for a deal with Russia had been exhausted, and after prolonged internal debate and disagreement, to launch an all-out preventative war. In February 1904, Japan severed diplomatic relations and attacked Russian vessels at anchor at Port Arthur, a quick strike against the slow-moving Russian giant to demonstrate its underestimated prowess, before possibly seeking third-party mediation.99 Russia’s Pacific fleet fell to the Japanese, who also managed to land infantry on the Korean Peninsula to march on Russian positions in Manchuria. The shock was profound. “It is no longer possible to live this way,” editorialized even the archconservative Russian paper New Times on January 1, 1905. That same day, Vladimir Lenin called the autocracy’s immense military structure “a beautiful apple rotten at the core.”100 Russia dispatched its Baltic fleet halfway around the world, 18,000 nautical miles. Seven and a half months later, upon reaching the theater of hostilities in May 1905, eight modern battleships, built by St. Petersburg’s skilled workers, were promptly sunk in the Tsushima Strait with the colors flying.101

The Russian state had subordinated everything to military priorities and needs, and the Romanovs had tied their image and legitimacy to Russia’s international standing, so the Tsushima shock was devastating.102 On land, too, the Japanese achieved startling victories over Russia, including the Battle of Mukden, then the largest military engagement in world history (624,000 combined forces), where Russia enjoyed a numerical advantage.103 The stinging Mukden defeat came on the anniversary of Nicholas II’s coronation.104

This debacle in the very arena that justified the autocracy’s existence—great power status—not only exposed tsarism’s political failings but threatened political collapse. Strikes had erupted at the military factories producing the weaponry for the war, so that by January 8, 1905, Russia’s wartime capital was bereft of electricity and information (newspapers). On Sunday, January 9, 1905, seven days after a besieged Port Arthur fell to Japanese forces, thousands of striking workers and their families assembled at six points in the working-class neighborhoods, beyond the Narva and Nevsky gates, to march on the Winter Palace in order to present a petition to the “tsar-father” for the improvement of workers’ lives, protection of their rights, and dignity by means of the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.105 They were led by a conservative priest, carried Orthodox icons and crosses, and sang religious hymns and “God Save the Tsar” as church bells tolled. Nicholas II had repaired to his main residence, the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city, and had no intention of meeting the petitioners. The haphazard authorities on hand in the capital decided to seal off the city center with troops. The priest’s group got only as far as the Narva Gate in the southwest, where imperial troops met them with gunfire when they sought to proceed farther. Amid dozens of bodies, the priest exclaimed, “There is no God anymore, there is no Tsar!” Shooting also halted unarmed marching men, women, and children at the Trinity Bridge, the Alexander Gardens, and elsewhere. Panic ensued and some petitioners trampled others to death. Around 200 people were killed across the capital that day, and another 800 were wounded—workers, wives, children, bystanders.106 St. Petersburg’s “Bloody Sunday” provoked far greater strikes, the looting of liquor and firearm shops, and all around fury.

Nicholas II’s image as father of the people would never be the same. (“All classes condemn the authorities and most particularly the Emperor,” observed the U.S. consul in Odessa. “The present ruler has lost absolutely the affection of the Russian people.”)107 In February 1905, the tsar vaguely promised an elected “consultative” Duma or assembly, which sent alarms through conservative ranks, while failing to quell the unrest. The next month, all universities were (again) locked down.108 Strikers closed down the empire’s railway system, forcing government officials to travel by riverboat to meet with the tsar in his suburban palace. In June 1905, sailors seized control of the battleship Potemkin, part of the Black Sea fleet—which was all Russia had left after the loss of its Pacific and Baltic fleets—and bombarded Odessa before seeking asylum in Romania. “The chaos was all-encompassing,” one police insider wrote, adding that political police work “ground to a halt.”109 Strike waves swept Russian Poland, the Baltics, and the Caucasus, where “the whole administrative apparatus fell into confusion,” recalled Jordania, the leader of Georgia’s Marxists. “A de facto freedom of assembly, strike and demonstration was established.”110 The governor of Kutaisi province of the Caucasus went over to the revolutionaries. In Kazan and Poltava provinces, the governors had nervous breakdowns. Others lost their heads. “You risk your life, you wear out your nerves maintaining order so that people can live like human beings, and what do you encounter everywhere?” complained Governor Ivan Blok of Samara. “Hate-filled glances as if you were some kind of monster, a drinker of human blood.” Moments later Blok was decapitated by a bomb. Placed in a traditional open casket, his twisted body was stuffed into his dress uniform, a ball of batting substituted for his missing head.111

The homefront had imploded. On the war’s two sides, some 2.5 million men had been mobilized, with each side suffering between 40,000 and 70,000 killed. (Around 20,000 Chinese civilians also died.) In fact, because Japan could not replace its losses, its big victories like Mukden may have actually edged Tokyo closer to defeat.112 But if Nicholas II was tempted to continue the war to reverse his military setbacks, he had no such opportunity. The failure of the Japanese to have sabotaged the Trans-Siberian—one of the critical transport modes for the enemy’s troops and materiel—remains mysterious.113 But the peasants were refusing to pay taxes and would destroy or damage more than 2,000 manor houses. Already by March 1905, the interior ministry had concluded that owing to uprisings, military call-ups had become impossible in thirty-two of the fifty provinces of European Russia.114 European credits, on which the Russian state relied for cash flow, dried up, threatening a default.115 On August 23, 1905 [September 5, in the West], Russia and Japan signed a peace treaty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brokered by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Invited to intercede by Japan, Roosevelt proved eager to curb Tokyo’s might in the Pacific (a harbinger of the future). Russia was well represented by Witte, who regained his lost luster and made the best of a bad situation.116 Russia had to acknowledge defeat, but was absolved of paying war indemnities, while the only Russian territory relinquished was half of remote Sakhalin Island (a penal colony). Still, the defeat reverberated internationally (far more than the Ethiopian victory over Italy in 1896). Russia became the first major European power to be defeated in a symmetric battle by an Asian country—and in front of the world press corps. In a typical contemporary assessment, one observer called news of the victory “of a non-white people over a white people” nothing less than “the most important event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime.”117

LEFTIST FACTIONALISM

Japan’s military attache in Stockholm was spreading bushels of money to tsarism’s array of political opponents in European exile, but he expressed considerable frustration. “All of the so-called opposition parties are secret societies, where no one can distinguish opponents of the regime from Russian agents,” the attache reported to superiors, adding that the revolutionaries—or provocateurs?—all went by false names. In any case, his work, which okhranka mail interception exposed, proved utterly superfluous.118 Russia’s revolutionaries got far more assistance from the autocracy itself. While Russia’s army, the empire’s main forces of order, had been removed beyond its borders—for a war with Japan on the territories of China and Korea—Russia’s revolutionaries were kept out of the battle. Even married peasants more than forty years old were targets of military recruiters, but subjects without permanent residence and with a criminal record were free to pursue rebellion at home.

The twenty-seven-year-old future Stalin, as described in a tsarist police report (May 1, 1904):

Jughashvili, Iosif Vissarionovich: [legal status of] peasant from the village of Didi-Lido, Tiflis county, Tiflis province; born 1881 of Orthodox faith, attended Gori church school and Tiflis theological seminary; not married. Father, Vissarion, whereabouts unknown. Mother, Yeketerina, resident of the town of Gori, Tiflis province . . . Description: height, 2 arshins, 4.5 vershki [about 5' 5"], average build; gives the appearance of an ordinary person.119

Although his date of birth (1878) and height (5'6") were wrongly recorded, this deceptively “ordinary person,” precisely because of his political activities, was exempt from military service—and as a result could position himself to be right in the thick of the 1905 uprising. The Georgian branch of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party assigned him to Chiatura, a hellhole in western Georgia where hundreds of small companies employed a combined 3,700 miners and sorters to extract and haul manganese ore.

Witte’s father, the midlevel tsarist official, had opened Chiatura’s manganese deposits around the middle of the nineteenth century.120 By 1905, thanks to Sergei Witte’s integration of Russia into the new world economy, the artisanal, privately held mines had come to account for no less than 50 percent of global manganese output. Tall piles of the excavated ore dominated the “skyline,” waiting to be washed, mostly by women and children, before being exported for use in the production of German and British steel. With wages averaging a meager 40 to 80 kopecks per day, rations doused in manganese dust, and “housing” under the open sky (in winter workers slept in the mines), Chiatura was, in the words of one observer, “real penal labor (katorga)”—but the laborers had not been convicted of anything.121 Even by tsarist Russia standards, the injustices in Chiatura stood not. When the workers rebelled, however, the regime summoned imperial troops as well as right-wing vigilantes, who called themselves Holy Brigades but were christened Black Hundreds. In response to the physical attacks, Jughashvili helped transform Social Democratic agitation “circles” into red combat brigades called Red Hundreds.122 By December 1905, the worker Red Hundreds, assisted by young radical thugs, seized control of Chiatura and thus of half of global manganese output.

Only the previous year, Jughashvili had been calling for an autonomous Georgian Social Democratic Workers’ Party separate from the All-Russia (imperial) Social Democrats—a vestige, perhaps, of his Russification battles at the seminary and in Georgia more broadly. But Social Democrats in Georgia rejected a struggle for national independence, reasoning that even if they somehow managed to break away, liberty for Georgia would never stick without liberty for Russia. Georgian comrades condemned Jughashvili as a “Georgian Bundist” and forced him to recant publicly. The future Stalin wrote out a Credo (February 1904) of his beliefs, evidently repudiating the idea of a separate Georgian party; seventy copies were distributed within Social Democratic Party circles.123 Other than youthful romantic poetry, and two unsigned editorials in Lado’s Brdzola that were later attributed to Stalin, the Credo was one of his first-ever publications (subsequent party historians assembling his writings never found it). This mea culpa was followed by an extended essay—which essentially launched his punditry career—in Georgian, dated September-October 1904, and titled “How Social Democracy Understands the National Question.” Jughashvili targeted a recently formed party of Social Federalists whose Paris-based periodical demanded Georgian autonomy in both the Russian empire and in the socialist movement. He strongly repudiated the idea of separate “national” leftist parties, and resorted to sarcasm about Georgian nationalism.124 In April 1905, a pamphlet addressed to the Batum proletariat noted that “Russian social democracy is responsible not only to the Russian proletariat but to all peoples of Russia, groaning under the yoke of the barbarian autocracy—it is responsible to all of humankind, to all of modern civilization.”125 Russia, not Georgia. The Credo episode had been a turning point.

In Chiatura, meanwhile, organizing mass direct action, Jughashvili was in his radical element—he helped transform nearly every mine into a battleground of Social Democratic Party factions, importing loyalists from his previous underground activity, especially Batum. Some observers marveled at his clique’s intense loyalty. All the same, the Chiatura workers elected as their leader not Jughashvili but a tall, thin, charismatic Georgian youth named Noe Ramishvili (b. 1881). Ramishvili won over the mine workers partly by touting the superior role that his “Menshevik” faction of Caucasus Social Democrats accorded to rank-and-file workers in the party.126 Jughashvili, who adhered to the Bolshevik faction of Caucasus Social Democrats, cursed his rivals as “worker-lovers.”127 From Chiatura, he wrote reports to the Bolshevik faction leader Vladimir Lenin, in European exile, about the life-and-death struggle—not against the tsarist regime, but against Menshevism.128

Bolshevik-Menshevik factionalism had broken out two years earlier, in July 1903, in a club room in London at the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party’s Second Congress (the first one since the founding effort, attended by nine people in Minsk in 1898). Beyond the reach of the tsarist police, the delegates adopted a charter and program (“The dictatorship of the proletariat is the prerequisite of the social revolution”), but two strong personalities, Lenin and Martov, clashed over party structure. The row started over a proposal by Lenin to reduce the editorial board of the periodical Iskra from six to three (Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov), a sensible proposition that nonetheless exploded in the hall (the minutes record “threatening shouts” and cries of “shame”). But the differences went deeper. All Russian Social Democrats viewed capitalism as an evil to be transcended, but Marxism held that history was supposed to proceed in stages and most of Russia’s Marxists, following the elder statesman Plekhanov, held to the proposition that socialist revolution could triumph only after a “bourgeois revolution” had first taken place and accelerated Russia’s capitalist development. In that view, Russia’s workers were supposed to help Russia’s weak bourgeoisie bring about constitutionalism, so that, decades hence, the workers could then transcend capitalism and advance to socialism. But what if the workers proved unable to take up this role? Martov captured the nub, writing that the “reconciliation of revolutionary-democratic with socialist tasks”—that is, the bourgeois revolution with the socialist revolution—“is the riddle which the fate of Russian society has posed to Russian social democracy.”129

The question of workers’ role in the historical process had already split the German Social Democrats. In Germany, it seemed that proletarians were not developing revolutionary but merely trade union consciousness (and capitalism was not breaking down)—a position stated plainly by Eduard Bernstein, who concluded that socialists ought to embrace amelioration and evolution, achieving socialism via capitalism, not organizing capitalism’s annihilation. Karl Kautsky, a rival to Bernstein, branded him a Marxist “revisionist,” and insisted that socialism and then communism would still be reached via revolution. Tsarist conditions, meanwhile, did not allow a Bernstein “revisionist” approach in Russia, even had Lenin been so inclined—and he was not—because trade unionism and constitutionalism remained illegal. Lenin admired Kautsky, but went further, arguing for a conspiratorial approach because imperial Russia was different from Germany in the severity of the restrictions on freedom. In What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin foresaw revolution if “a few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as the imperial security police, were allowed to organize it.”130 His stance was denounced as un-Marxist—indeed, as Blanquist, after the Frenchman Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), who had dismissed the efficacy of popular movements in favor of revolution by a small group via a temporary dictatorship using force.131 In some ways, however, Lenin was just reacting to the intense worker militancy in the Russian empire, such as the May Day march in Kharkov in 1900—about which he had written—and the violent clashes the next year between workers and police in Obukhov. True, Lenin did at times seem to be saying, like Bernstein, that workers, left to their own devices, would develop only trade union consciousness. But this made Lenin more, not less, radical. Most fundamentally, Lenin sought a party of professional revolutionaries to overcome the well-organized tsarist state, whose hyperrepressiveness militated against ordinary organizational work.132 Lenin, however, could not convince the others: at the 1903 Congress, even though there were only four genuine workers out of fifty-one delegates, Martov’s vision—a party organization more capacious than just “professional” revolutionaries—won the vote in a slim majority (28 to 23). Lenin refused to accept the result and announced the formation of a faction, which he called Bolsheviks (majoritarians) because he had won a majority on other, secondary questions. Martov’s majority, incredibly, allowed itself to become known as Mensheviks (minoritarians).

Charges, countercharges—and misunderstandings—related to the split in summer 1903 would reverberate for the better part of a century. The okhranka could scarcely believe its good fortune: the Social Democrats had turned on each other! It was no longer enough for Social Democrat revolutionaries merely to struggle to evade arrest, while competing against rivals on the left like Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), now they also had to battle the “other faction” in their own party at every party committee throughout the empire and abroad, even when they had a hard time articulating Bolshevik-Menshevik differences.133 Of course, sectarianism among revolutionaries was as common as cuckolding. Still, Lenin’s schismatism angered his heretofore close friend Martov, as well as Martov’s allies, because they had just conspired with Lenin to curb the power of the Jewish Bund inside Russian Social Democratic ranks (only five Bundist delegates had been allowed to attend the 1903 Social Democratic Congress, despite the large Jewish proletariat).134 And then—betrayal. Martov and his faction rejected various offers of mediation. Lenin’s doctrinal position unmistakably involved a bid for power in the movement, but the split had begun as, and remained, at least partly personal. The internal polemics became mutually vicious—accusations of lies, treachery.

Once word of the split became widely known, Lenin was roundly denounced. In 1904, Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born revolutionary who would not meet Lenin for three more years, condemned his vision of organization as “military ultra-centralism.” Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes—suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition. Plekhanov would soon call Lenin a Blanquist. Lenin, for his part, worked diligently from his base in Geneva to recruit the strategically important, populous Caucasus branch of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party to his side, writing of the “reptilian vileness” of the party’s Central Committee (his opponents). He might well have succeeded: after all, many members of Lenin’s faction were exiled from European Russia to the Caucasus, where they spread Bolshevik influence. The future Stalin—who missed the 1903 London congress (he was in a tsarist remand prison)—got to know Lev Kamenev, an adherent of Lenin’s faction, in Tiflis in 1904. But in January 1905, the leader of Georgian Marxists, Noe Jordania, returned to Georgia from European exile and steered the vast majority of Caucasus Marxists away from Lenin to Menshevism. Jughashvili had already clashed with Jordania as early as November 1901 by championing a narrower intelligentsia-centric party. Now he bucked Jordania again, remaining in the Bolshevik faction. For Jughashvili, therefore, the divide was partly personal, too. Doctrinally, the Leninist position of favoring professional revolutionaries over workers also suited Jughashvili’s temperament and self-image.

Inevitably, Lenin’s alleged personal influence came to be cited as the explanation for Jughashvili’s early loyalties: the future Stalin is said to have long admired the Bolshevik leader from afar. But if he felt any hero worship for Lenin from a distance, their first encounter blunted it.135 The two met in December 1905 at the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Tammerfors, in Russian-ruled Finland, where Jughashvili was one of the three delegates of the Bolshevik faction of the Caucasus.136 Lenin had returned from Swiss exile to Russia only in November 1905, having chosen to sit out most of the revolutionary events of that year. Just shy of thirty-six, he was nearly a decade older than Jughashvili.137 (The “patriarch” of all delegates, Mikho Tskhakaya from the Caucasus, was thirty-nine.) But Jughashvili observed at the Party Congress how provincial delegates, himself among them, attacked the elder Lenin’s policy proposals and how the Bolshevik leader backed down, rationalizing that he was an emigre out of touch. “I expected to see the mountain eagle of our party, a great man, not only politically but physically, for I had formed for myself a picture of Lenin as a giant, as a stately, representative figure of a man,” Stalin would recall. “What was my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary individual, below average height, distinguished from ordinary mortals by, literally, nothing.”138 (Stalin’s writings between 1906 and 1913 would contain a mere two citations of Lenin.) Eventually, of course, Lenin would become Stalin’s indispensable mentor, but it would take time for the Georgian—and most everyone else on the left—to appreciate Lenin’s history-bending force of will. In any case, even as Russia’s would-be Social Democratic revolutionaries were fighting tooth and nail among themselves over the nature of the coming revolution (bourgeois or socialist) and over party structure (inclusive or “professional”), tsarist political authority had already fallen into headlong disintegration, making revolution imminent.

DISINTEGRATION AND RESCUE

While Jughashvili was organizing Red Hundreds in Chiatura, on October 8, 1905—following the signing of the Russo-Japanese peace treaty—a general strike shut down St. Petersburg. Within five days, more than 1 million workers had walked out empirewide, paralyzing the telegraph and rail systems. Troops could neither be brought home from the war—more than 1 million Russian soldiers were still in the Far Eastern theater, after the cessation of hostilities—nor deployed for internal police duty. Around October 13, a St. Petersburg soviet (or council) was established as a strike-coordinating committee; it would last some fifty days, and for two weeks of that period be headed by Lev Trotsky, a prolific writer and prominent Social Democrat who recently had returned from exile.139 Warnings of a crackdown were announced on October 14, and the next day the authorities shuttered the capital’s prestigious university for the year. Establishment figures, including members of the extended Romanov family, urged Nicholas II to make political concessions to close the breach between regime and society. In all of Europe, only the Ottoman empire, the Principality of Montenegro, and the Russian empire still lacked a parliament. Told to countenance changes that infringed on the autocratic principle and established a coordinated government, the tsar wrote to his mother, the Danish-born dowager empress, “Ministers, like chicken-hearts, assemble and discuss how to achieve unity of all ministers instead of acting decisively.”140 Fresh from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the newly ascendant, proautocratic Sergei Witte moved to seize the moment, suggesting to the tsar that he had two choices to save the autocracy: grant a constitution, civil liberties, and above all, a coordinated ministerial government, or find someone who could implement a crackdown.141 On October 15, Nicholas II asked his most trusted courtier, the hard-line Dmitry Trepov, Witte’s archrival, whether Trepov—recently named governor-general of the capital—could restore order short of a civilian massacre. The latter replied on October 16 that “sedition has attained a level at which it is doubtful whether bloodshed could be avoided.”142

The tsar wavered. He commissioned a draft manifesto for a merely consultative Duma.143 Apparently, he also turned to his uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, to assume dictatorial powers under a military dictatorship, to which the latter replied that the army had been depleted by the ongoing war in the Far East, and that if the tsar did not consent to Witte’s program of political concessions, the grand duke would shoot himself.144 Reluctantly, on October 17, crossing himself, Nicholas II signed the Manifesto on the Improvement of State Order, published the next day, “imposing”—in autocratic parlance—civil liberties as well as a bicameral legislature. No longer “consultative,” as originally proposed back in February, the State Duma would be a lower house of “people’s representatives” to be elected, albeit by a narrow suffrage—narrower than absolutist Spain had granted in 1680 for its towns in the New World—but with the right to issue laws. The franchise was granted to male citizens over twenty-five years of age, excluding soldiers and officers, but elections proceeded through four electoral colleges, and extra weight was given to communal, as opposed to individual, peasants.145 At the same time, Russia’s State Council—heretofore a largely ceremonial advisory body of appointed elites, as depicted in Ilya Repin’s 1903 wall-sized oil painting—would become an upper house. The plan was that the upper house would serve as a conservative brake on the Duma. Half the new State Council’s members would continue to be appointed by the tsar from among former ministers, governors-general, ambassadors—that is, “venerable old men, white haired or bald, with wrinkled skin and often bent with age, wearing uniforms and adorned with all of their decorations,” as one insider described them. The other half was to be elected by designated bodies: the Orthodox Church, provincial assemblies, the stock exchange, the Academy of Sciences. By comparison, the United States would pass the Seventeenth Amendment providing for the direct election of senators in 1911; the entire British House of Lords was filled by hereditary peers.146

Far less dramatically, but no less consequentially, the tsar also conceded—for the first time—a unified government with a prime minister. Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who as deputy interior minister was tasked with outlining the need for and structure of a cabinet, assailed the “fragmentation” and fratricide of Russia’s ministries. He warned that the convocation of a Duma would—like France’s calling of the Estates General in 1789—provide a potent forum. The government had to be strong and united to manage the legislature, or else there could be French-style consequences for the monarchy. But ministers wanted strong government not solely because of a perceived need to manage the legislature. The model that Witte had in mind was Prussia’s, which afforded the minister-president the authority—used to great effect by Bismarck—to control all contact between individual ministers and the monarch.147

A strong cabinet coordinated by a prime minister might seem an obvious necessity in any modern state, but globally it had arisen relatively recently. In Great Britain, the prime ministership owed its largely unplanned origins to the circumstance that King George I (r. 1714–27), of the Brunswick House of Hanover (a German state), could not speak English (he spent at least half the year in Hanover), so responsibility for chairing cabinet sessions fell to a newly created post of prime or first minister, a circumstance that would become institutionalized. Prussia acquired a prime minister equivalent—minister-president—and a cabinet of ministers in stages from 1849 through 1852 in an improvisation to deal with the surprise advent of a legislature in 1848.148 (Russia’s stillborn cabinet government of 1857 had not even included a prime minister.) But whereas the British prime minister post was awarded to the majority leader in the House of Commons, meaning he owed his status not to royal whim but to elected parliamentary majorities, Prussia’s minister-president was appointed or removed by the monarch alone, without consideration of parliamentary (electoral) majorities.

Russia followed not the British example—a genuinely parliamentary system—but the Prussian one. True, the Duma could summon ministers for a report, but the tsar retained absolute power over ministers’ appointment or dismissal, as well as an absolute veto over legislation, the right to dismiss the Duma and announce new elections, and the right to declare martial law. In addition, the ministers of foreign affairs, war, the navy, and the court fell outside the prime minister’s portfolio. These circumstances allowed Nicholas II, not without Witte’s connivance, to delude himself into thinking the concessions had not contravened his coronation oath to uphold autocracy. But he had: the work of Russia’s then fourteen ministers—with the enumerated exceptions—would be coordinated by someone other than the tsar.149

That person turned out to be Witte, whom Nicholas II chose as Russia’s first-ever prime minister.

Nicholas II had asked Witte to draft the October Manifesto, but knowing the tsar all too well and probably desirous of maintaining some distance from the document, Witte had passed the drafting task to an associate who happened to be staying at his home.150 Still, Witte edited the drafts and was universally seen as the prime mover.151 And yet, although at the pinnacle of power, Witte found himself suspended in the air, fully supported by no one—not by the stunned establishment, who were mostly proponents of unbridled autocracy and who, additionally, disliked Witte for his pedigree, gruffness, and Jewish wife; not by the narrow stratum of constitutionalists, who were still waiting for the promised constitution to be drafted and enacted; not by the elected representatives to the Petersburg Soviet, who in many cases expected the Duma would be a “bourgeois” sham; not by the striking workers and students, whose general strike had ebbed but who still desired social justice; and not by the rebellious peasantry, who freely interpreted the October Manifesto as a promise of pending land redistribution, which sparked new agrarian disturbances.152 Witte was not even fully supported by Nicholas II, who promoted him yet still found him insolent. Nonetheless, by sheer force of personality, especially his drive to be informed, Witte proved able to impose coordination on much of the government, even in foreign policy and military affairs, whose ministers technically did not even report to the prime minister.153

Whatever Witte’s impressive abilities, however, the introduction of a prime minister, alongside the promise of the still-to-come Duma, did not restore public order. On the contrary, opposition became more violent after the proclamation of the October Manifesto. The tsarist autocracy was saved—literally—by a tough conservative official who had once been fired for abusing his police power in connection with sexual indiscretions. Pyotr Durnovó (b. 1845), the scion of ancient nobility and a naval academy graduate, had been at sea during the 1860s Great Reforms. He then forsook the navy and became a longtime director of police (1884–93). After one of the “black cabinets” that he oversaw intercepted a love letter to the Brazilian charge d’affaires from Durnovó’s own mistress, he had the police break into the diplomat’s apartment to steal the rest of her correspondence. The woman complained about the theft to her diplomat paramour, who at a court ball raised the matter with Tsar Alexander III. The latter is said to have remarked to his interior minister, “Get rid of this swine within twenty-four hours.”154 Durnovó retreated abroad, dismissed from state service, seemingly forever. Yet in 1895, after Alexander III’s surprise death from illness at age forty-nine, Durnovó managed to resume his career, rising to deputy interior minister. On October 23, 1905, Witte named him acting interior minister, against the vociferous objections of liberals, and the hesitancy of Tsar Nicholas II.155 Within three days, the Baltic sailors mutinied. By October 28, Durnovó had crushed their chaotic mutiny, ordering hundreds of executions. He contemplated an empirewide crackdown, but Witte (initially) insisted that Durnovó act within the parameters of the October Manifesto—after all, it had been signed by the tsar. Soon, however, Durnovó began to implement harsher measures, which, of course, greatly pleased the signatory of the October Manifesto, as well as much of state officialdom, once the measures appeared to be successful. “Everyone started to work, the machinery went into high gear” recalled one top okhranka official. “Arrests began.”156 Indeed, between the tsar’s promise of a constitution (October 1905) and the promulgation six months later of the Fundamental Laws—Nicholas II refused to allow it to be called a constitution—Durnovó’s police arrested many tens of thousands (by some estimates, up to 70,000).157 Durnovó also sacked numerous governors and, more important, goaded the rest to seize back all public spaces.

Durnovó showed initiative. In mid-November 1905, when a new strike shut down the postal and telegraph system, he broke it by organizing citizen replacements. On December 3—the day after the Petersburg Soviet called for workers to withdraw their savings from state banks—he arrested around 260 deputies to the Soviet, half the membership, including Chairman Trotsky. Many officials warned this would provoke a repeat of the October 1905 general strike, but Durnovó countered that a show of force would shift the political dynamic. On December 7, 1905, an uprising broke out in Moscow, and Durnovó’s critics looked prescient. But he went to Nicholas II at Tsarskoe Selo to report and seek instructions—without Prime Minister Witte, his (nominal) superior, whom Durnovó no longer bothered to consult even though by now Witte had come around to a hard-line approach. Durnovó did not even appear at the meetings of the government (Council of Ministers), or explain his absences therefrom.158 The tsar, predictably, was keen to encourage the pre-1905 practice whereby ministers like Durnovó reported directly and privately to him. Nicholas II wrote to his mother, the dowager empress, “Durnovó—the interior minister—acts superbly.”159 Now, confronted by an uprising in Russia’s ancient capital, Durnovó ordered it crushed: some 424 people were killed and 2,000 wounded.160 Crackdowns took place all around the empire as well. “I earnestly request, in this and similar cases, that you order the use of armed force without the slightest leniency and that insurgents be annihilated and their homes burned,” Durnovó bluntly instructed officials in Kiev province. “Under the present circumstances, the restoration of the authority of the Government is possible only by these means.”161 In Georgia, imperial troops bloodily recaptured the manganese mining settlement of Chiatura, removing the political base of Jughashvili and his Bolshevik followers. Imperial forces and Black Hundreds also routed the Georgian Menshevik peasant-citadel of the Gurian Republic. Crushed, the world’s first-ever peasant republic led by Marxists, as one scholar wrote, would find echoes “in the fields, hills, and jungles of Asia.”162 For now, however, by the end of 1907, mass peasant uprisings had been snuffed out across the empire.163 It was a stunning achievement.

• • •

RUSSIA’S AUTOCRACY had undergone a near-death experience. Altogether, an army of nearly 300,000, a size close to the land force that had battled the Japanese, was needed to suppress domestic unrest.164 Such a vast mobilization for repression and regime survival would have been impossible had Russia’s foes on its western flank, Germany and Austria-Hungary, decided to take what would have been easy advantage of the situation. Not even an actual attack from the West, merely a mobilization, would have paralyzed and likely doomed the tsarist regime.165 Equally critical, the Russian forces of domestic repression were the same peasants in uniform who had been mutinying when—and because—the tsarist regime had appeared weak, and who now, when the regime showed its teeth again, resumed enforcing state order against rebellious workers, students, and fellow peasants.166 Durnovó rallied them. This is one of those moments in the play of large-scale historical structures when personality proved decisive: a lesser interior minister could not have managed. When “the regime had tottered on the brink of an abyss,” Vladimir Gurko, his deputy rightly concluded, it “was saved by . . . Durnovó, who adopted an almost independent policy and by merciless persecution of the revolutionary elements re-established a certain degree of order in the country.”167

But this was also a moment when a statesman’s talent, rather than shortcomings, proved detrimental to his country. Durnovó’s rescue of Russia’s autocracy—when it should have fallen—would end up having the perverse consequence of preparing the country for a far worse crash during a far worse war, which would serve as a template for a radical new order. Of course, it is impossible to know what would have transpired had Durnovó’s exceptional resoluteness and police skill not saved tsarism in 1905–6. Still, one wonders whether the history of one sixth of the earth, and beyond, would have been as catastrophic, and would have seen the appearance of Stalin’s inordinately violent dictatorship. Be that as it may, the respite Durnovó furnished to Russia would prove short-lived, frenetic, and full of rampant insecurities. “Long before the World War,” recalled one contemporary, “all politically conscious people lived as on a volcano.”168