The Empire Must Die: Russia's Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917

PREFACE

I am not a historian, but a journalist. As such, this book was written according to the rules of journalism: as if the characters were alive and I had been able to interview them—rather like my previous book, All the Kremlin’s Men.

Fortunately, most of my protagonists told their own stories, having left behind detailed diaries, letters, memoirs, and public statements. In order to recreate the picture of early twentieth-century Russia, I tried to read as many of the available sources as I could. There is no doubt that although many people lied (especially in their memoirs), most did so sincerely, convinced that they were telling the truth.

My primary objective was to view the world through contemporary eyes. I did not have a ready-made answer to the question of why the Russian revolution happened. I did not have a theory that I wanted to prove to the reader; that would have required some fact-filtering. On the contrary, it took me a great deal of work to clear the picture of prejudices and stereotypes, and to peel away the layers of sediment deposited by dozens of professional historians. Many had their own preconceived concepts and off-the-shelf answers. Many looked upon Russia’s revolution as a single, irreversible process.

My protagonists knew—or rather, know—nothing about this. They live their own lives, little suspecting that many years later they will be considered grains of sand in the historical process.

The book starts at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating time. Many of Russia’s young metropolitan intellectuals—the “noughties” generation—are apolitical and totally unlike the older generation of dissidents. They consider politics to be yesterday’s game, something old-hat and unfashionable. But politics enters their lives uninvited as the tsarist regime stifles creative freedom, banning and blocking arbitrarily. The result is a gradual swelling of mass protest—the first in Russian history, which is only bolstered by the regime’s cack-handed response. During this brief window of opportunity, Russia has a civil society that is active, demanding, and self-aware. Many of the most vibrant figures from this time are forgotten or willfully misunderstood in Russia today.

Russian intellectuals are outraged by the unprovoked shooting of a workers’ demonstration on 9 January 1905, Bloody Sunday, after which the protest mood becomes overwhelming. The creative class demands general elections, a parliament, freedom of speech, and equality before the law. What’s more, it is sure that it will have its way. But the euphoria lasts barely a year. The authorities seem to reach out at first, but soon backtrack on their promises. Yesterday’s optimism gives way to bitter disappointment, and society braces itself for a crackdown. At that point, for many, the time has come to topple the regime.

Curiously, this period—from 1905 to 1914—is regarded by some contemporaries as the most prosperous time in the history of the Russian Empire, a “corpulent” decade, while others see it as a gloomy age of repression, electoral rigging, and nod-and-wink justice. Power and influence fall into the hands of religious radicals and witch-hunters, who demand that cultural figures be biblically “chastised with scorpions” for daring to insult the authorities or the feelings of Orthodox believers. Many intellectuals leave Russia for Europe, where they engage in endless debates about the fate of their homeland. Bizarrely, Europe is also home to many imperial family members and courtiers, who shock the locals with their lavish lifestyle. The intellectual and aristocratic Russian elites are hardly in Russia at this time.

This existence—carefree for some, forlorn for others—comes to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I, which no one expects. It is not the war itself that plunges Russia into the abyss, but the fact that the Russian state, with its veritable army of bureaucrats and officials, is unable to cope. The early frontline successes are derailed by corruption and incompetence.

Post factum, the course of history seems logical. Armed with hindsight, we are able to trace the hatching of plans and the exposing of plots; good and evil are clearly labeled. But on stepping into the shoes of history’s participants, our preconceived concepts turn to dust. Nothing is preordained. Everyone is fallible and error-prone. No one can foresee the future even a couple of days ahead. No one can map out their own life—let alone that of a dying empire—because the circumstances are in such flux. Even Lenin is convinced of his imminent failure just hours before his ultimate triumph.

In turning the stories of the dramatis personae into a narrative, I have not attempted to write a complete history of the Russian state. Russian history, in my view, already concentrates too heavily on the state, or rather on the Sovereign, in whatever guise. Russians are accustomed to viewing their history as a set of biographies of leaders—an elegant array of tsars, general secretaries, and presidents behind which Russian society is obscured. What did the people want? What did they fear? For me, what they did and how they went about doing it are far more important than the dreams and desires of the inhabitants of Tsarskoye Selo or the Kremlin. This book is an attempt to tell the history of Russian society, an attempt to study what it strove for and why, by force of popular pressure, the empire had to die.

I selected as my protagonists the most luminous members of society: the leaders and shapers of public opinion—not only politicians, but also writers, journalists, artists, and preachers.

This book is certainly not an academic work. For the sake of the reader, I have taken the liberty of using modern vocabulary and modern geographical names. At the same time, I do not adhere to the customs often found in historical literature: for example, I call the characters by the names that they called themselves and each other, and not as they are usually known in historical literature. Also, in order to speak to the reader in a clear and modern language I provided all the money sums with their today’s equivalents. It should be mentioned that these calculations do not pretend to be absolutely precise, giving only approximate numbers.

This work is the result of the efforts of a huge number of people. First of all, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues from the Future History Lab. We have spent the past two years developing Project1917 (project1917.com)—a unique database of diaries, letters, memoirs, and articles written by people in 1917. All the materials are structured as a series of social media exchanges, creating an online drama that offers a glimpse inside 1917 through the eyes of its inhabitants.

This book would not have been written without the editorial direction of Karen Shainyan, the tenacious editing of Anna Shur, or the help of Pavel Krasovitsky, who performed heroic research in the archives, and organizational efforts of Vera Makarenko. In writing this book, I was greatly assisted by the professional advice of the illustrious historians Kirill Solovyov and Boris Kolonitsky. I also wish to thank Clive Priddle and the whole PublicAffairs team for their patience and professionalism. And I am endlessly grateful to Thomas Hodson for his careful and creative translation of the book into English.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my daughter, Liza. I hope that it will be of interest to her—and her generation. If they can avoid the mistakes that we and the people herein are guilty of, the world will be better for it.