The Russian Revolution

2

Official Russia

The events we have described occurred in a country that in many respects was unique. Ruled (until 1905) by an absolute monarchy, administered by an all-powerful bureaucracy, and composed of social castes, Russia resembled an Oriental despotism. Its international ambitions, however, and the economic and cultural policies which these ambitions necessitated, injected into Russia a dynamism that was Western in origin. The contradiction between the static quality of the political and social order and the dynamism of the economy and cultural life produced a condition of endemic tension. It lent the country a quality of impermanence, of expectation: as one contemporary French visitor put it, Russia seemed somehow “unfinished.”¹

Until the October Manifesto, Russia was an autocracy (samoderzhavie). The old Fundamental Laws defined her sovereign, formally designated Emperor (Gosudar’ Imperator), as “unlimited” (neogranichennyi) and “autocratic” (samoderzhavnyi). The first adjective meant that he was subject to no constitutional restraints; the second, that he was not limited institutionally.² The Emperor’s authority received its original definition in 1716 in the Military Regulation of Peter the Great (Chapter 3, Article 20), which was still in force in 1900:

His Majesty is an absolute [samovlastnyi] monarch, who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill [blagomnenie].

The Emperor was the exclusive source of laws and ordinances. According to Article 51 of the old Fundamental Laws, “no post [mesto] or office [pravitel’stvo] of the realm may, on its own initiative, pass a new law, and no law can go into effect without the sanction of the autocratic authority.” In practice it proved impossible to enforce such a rigid absolutism in a country with 125 million inhabitants and the world’s fifth-largest economy, and in time, increasing discretionary authority was vested in the officialdom. Nevertheless, the autocratic principle was strictly insisted upon and any challenge to it, in word or deed, led to savage persecution.

On the face of it, the autocracy did not differ from the monarchies of ancien régime Europe, and it was thus widely regarded, in and out of Russia, as an anachronism. But viewed more closely, in the context of her own past, Russia’s absolutism showed peculiar qualities that distinguished it from that of the Bourbons, Stuarts, or Hohenzollerns. European travelers to Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ancien régime absolutism stood at its zenith, were impressed by the differences between what they were accustomed to at home and what they saw in Russia.³ The peculiar features of Russian absolutism in its early form, which lasted from the fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, were marked by the virtual absence of the institution of private property, which in the West confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority. In Russia, the very concept of property (in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over objects) was unknown until introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century by the German-born Catherine II. Muscovite Russia had been run like a private estate, its inhabitants and territories, with everything they contained, being treated as the property of the Crown.

This type of regime has been known since the time of Hobbes as “patriarchal” or “patrimonial.”* Its distinguishing feature is the fusion of sovereignty and ownership, the monarch viewing himself and being viewed by his subjects as both ruler of the realm and its proprietor. At its height patrimonial rule in Russia rested on four pillars:

1. Monopoly on political authority

2. Monopoly on economic resources and wholesale trade

3. The ruler’s claims to unlimited services from his subjects; absence of individual as well as group (estate) rights

4. Monopoly on public information

Having in the early 1700s laid claim to the status of a European power, Russia had to be able to match her Western rivals in military might, economic productivity, and culture. This requirement forced the monarchy partially to dismantle the patrimonial institutions which had served it well as long as Russia had been essentially an Oriental power competing with other Oriental powers. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the monarchy recognized the right to property in land and in its other forms: the word “property” (sobstvennost’, from the German Eigentum) entered the Russian vocabulary at this time. Concurrently, the Crown began to withdraw from manufacture and trade. Although by Western standards the Russian state of 1900 still loomed large in the national economy, the country by then had a flourishing free market and corresponding capitalist institutions. Even while violating human rights, tsarism respected private property. The government also gradually gave up the claim to unlimited services from its subjects, freeing from compulsory state service first the gentry (dvorianstvo) (1762) and a century later (1861) the serfs. It continued to insist on the right to censor publications, but since it did not exercise this right either strictly or consistently, the flow of ideas was not seriously affected, the more so that there were few restrictions on foreign travel.

Thus, by 1900, with one exception, the patrimonial regime was a thing of the past: the exception was the country’s political system. While “manumitting” society economically, socially, and culturally, the Crown persisted in refusing to give it a voice in legislation and administration.* It continued to insist that it had the sole right to legislative and executive power, that the Tsar was “unlimited” as well as “autocratic,” and that all laws had to emanate from him. The incompatibility of Russia’s political constitution with her economic, social, cultural, and even administrative realities was widely recognized at the time as an anomaly by most educated Russians. For, indeed, how could one reconcile the advanced state of Russia’s industrial economy and culture with a political system that treated her inhabitants as incapable of governing themselves? Why did a people that had produced a Tolstoy and a Chekhov, a Tchaikovsky and a Mendeleev, need to be ruled by a caste of professional bureaucrats, most of whom had no higher education and many of whom were notoriously corrupt? Why could the Serbians, Finns, and Turks have a constitution and parliament but not the Russians?

On the face of it, these questions seem unanswerable, and yet they did have answers which, in view of what happened after 1917, deserve a hearing.

The educated and economically advanced elements of Russia’s population which clamored for political rights were a visible but small minority. The main concern of the Imperial administration was the fifty million Great Russian peasants concentrated in the central provinces, for it was on their tranquillity and loyalty that the internal security of the Empire ultimately depended.† The peasant had his grievances but they were not political: he could no more imagine a different system of government than a different climate. The existing regime suited him well because he could understand it from his personal experience in the peasant household, which was organized on the same model:

The sovereign’s authority is unlimited—like the father’s. This autocracy is only a prolongation of paternal authority.… From base to summit, the immense Empire of the North appears, in all its parts, and on all its tiers, constructed on one plan and in one style; all the stones seem to have come out of the same quarry, and the entire building rests on one foundation: patriarchal authority. With this side of her Russia leans toward the old monarchies of the East and decidedly turns away from the modern states of the West, which are all based on feudalism and individualism.⁴

The Great Russian peasant, with centuries of serfdom in his bones, not only did not crave for civil and political rights, but, as will be indicated later on, held such notions in contempt. Government had to be willful and strong—that is, able to exact unquestioned obedience. A limited government, subject to external restraints and tolerant of criticism, seemed to him a contradiction in terms. To the officials charged with administering the country and familiar with these peasant attitudes, a Western-type constitutional order spelled one thing only: anarchy. The peasants would interpret it to mean the release from all obligations to the state which they fulfilled only because they had no choice: no more taxes, no more recruits, and, above all, no more tolerance of private property in land. Even relatively liberal officials regarded the Russian peasants as savages who could be kept in check only as long as they believed that their rulers were made of different “clay.”⁵ In many respects, the bureaucracy treated its population as the European powers treated their colonials: some observers actually drew parallels between the Russian administration and the British civil service in India.⁶ Even the most conservative bureaucrats realized that one could not forever base internal security on coercion and that sooner or later a constitutional regime was bound to come: but they were content to leave this matter to future generations.

The other obstacle to liberalization was the intelligentsia, broadly defined as a category of citizens, mostly upper- and middle-class and educated, in permanent opposition to tsarism, who demanded, in the name of the nation, that the Crown and bureaucracy turn over to them the reins of power. The monarchy and its officialdom regarded this intelligentsia as unfit to govern. Indeed, as events would demonstrate, the intelligentsia vastly underestimated the difficulties of administering Russia: it regarded democracy, not as the product of a slow evolution of institutions and habits, but as man’s natural condition, which only the existing despotism prevented from exerting its beneficial influence. Since they had no administrative experience, they tended to confuse governing with legislating. In the eyes of bureaucrats, these professors, lawyers, and publicists, if given access to the levers of power, would promptly let it slip from their hands and unleash anarchy, the only beneficiaries of which would be the radical extremists. Such was the conviction of the Court and its officials. There existed among the intelligentsia sensible, pragmatic individuals, aware of the difficulties of democratizing Russia and willing to cooperate with the establishment, but they were few and under constant assault from the liberals and socialists who dominated public opinion.

The Russian establishment of 1900 believed that the country simply could not afford “politics”: it was too vast, ethnically too heterogeneous, and culturally too primitive to allow for the free play of interests and opinions. Politics had to be reduced to administration carried out under the aegis of an impartial arbiter personified in the absolute ruler.

An autocracy required an autocrat: an autocrat not only in terms of formal prerogatives but also by virtue of personality; barring that, at least a ceremonial monarch content to reign while the bureaucracy ruled. As genetic accident would have it, however, on the eve of the twentieth century Russia had the worst of both worlds: a tsar who lacked the intelligence and character to rule yet insisted on playing the autocrat.

In the nineteenth century, strong rulers succeeded weak and weak strong with unexceptional regularity: the vacillating Alexander I was followed by the martinet Nicholas I, whose successor, Alexander II, had a gentle disposition. His son, Alexander III, personified autocracy: a giant of a man who twisted pewter tankards with bare hands, amused company by crashing through locked doors, loved the circus, and played the tuba, he had no qualms about resorting to force. Growing up in his father’s shadow, the future Nicholas II displayed early all the traits of a “soft” tsar. He had no lust for power and no love of ceremony: his greatest pleasures came from the hours spent in the company of his wife and children and from outdoor exercise. Though cast in the role of an autocrat, he was actually ideally suited for the role of a ceremonial monarch. He had exquisite manners and great charm: Witte thought Nicholas the best-bred person he had ever met.⁷ Intellectually, however, he was something of a simpleton. He treated autocracy as a sacred trust, viewing himself as the trustee of the patrimony which he had inherited from his father and was duty-bound to pass on to his successor. He enjoyed none of its perquisites, confiding to a minister that if he did not think it would harm Russia, he would gladly be rid of his autocratic powers.⁸ Indeed, he seemed never as happy as after being compelled in March 1917 to abdicate. He learned early to hide his feelings behind a frozen mask. Although suspicious and even vengeful, he was basically a decent man, simple in his tastes, quiet and shy, disgusted with the ambitions of politicians, the intrigues of officials, and the general morals of the age. He disliked powerful personalities, keeping at arm’s length and sooner or later dismissing his most capable ministers in favor of amiable and deferential nonentities.

Brought up in a very circumscribed Court atmosphere he was given no opportunities to mature either emotionally or intellectually. At the age of twenty-two he impressed one high official as a

rather attractive officer [ofitserik]. He looks well in the white, fur-lined uniform of a Guards Hussar, but in general his appearance is so common that it is difficult to distinguish him in a crowd. His face is expressionless. His manners are simple, but he lacks both elegance and refinement.⁹

Even when Nicholas was twenty-three, according to the same official, Alexander III bullied and treated him as if he were a child. When on one occasion the Tsarevich dared to defy his father by siding with the bureaucratic opposition, Alexander made his displeasure known by pelting him at dinner with bread balls.¹⁰ He spoke of his son contemptuously as a “girlie,” with a puerile personality and ideas, entirely unfit for the duties that were awaiting him.¹¹

In consequence of his upbringing, the future Nicholas II was unprepared to ascend the throne. After his father had passed away, he told a minister he had no idea what was expected of him: “I know nothing. The late sovereign had not anticipated his death and had not initiated me into anything.”* ¹² His instinct told him faithfully to follow his father in all matters, especially in upholding the ideology and institutions of patrimonial absolutism, and he did so long as the circumstances permitted.

To make matters worse, Nicholas was dogged by bad fortune from the day of his birth, which happened to fall on the name day of Job. Everything he tried turned to dust and he soon acquired the reputation of an “unlucky” tsar. He came to share this popular belief. It greatly affected his self-confidence, fostering in him a mood of resignation interrupted by periodic bursts of stubbornness.

To assert his independence, Nicholas traveled in 1890–91 to the Middle East and Far East, the latter of which some diplomats viewed as Russia’s proper sphere of influence—a view he shared. The journey almost ended in tragedy when he was assaulted by a deranged Japanese terrorist.

On the day of his coronation in 1895, a terrible accident occurred when a crowd estimated at 500,000, assembled at Khodynka Field outside Moscow to receive souvenirs, panicked, trampling or choking to death nearly 1,400 people.¹³ Ignoring the tragedy, the Imperial couple attended the Coronation Ball that evening. Both events were considered an evil omen.

Perhaps because it was known how badly the high-handed Alexander III had treated his son, on coming to the throne in 1894 Nicholas II enjoyed the reputation of a liberal. He quickly disabused these expectations. In an address to a zemstvo delegation in January 1895, he dismissed talk of liberalization as “senseless dreams” and pledged to “safeguard the principle of autocracy as firmly and steadfastly” as his late father had done.¹⁴ This ended his brief political honeymoon. Although he rarely pronounced on political matters, he made it no secret that he regarded Russia as the dynasty’s “patrimony.” One example of this attitude was his decision to give three million rubles paid Russia by Turkey as part of a peace settlement as a present to the Prince of Montenegro, at the request of two Russian grand dukes married to the Prince’s daughters. It was with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from disposing of money belonging to the Russian Treasury in such a cavalier manner.¹⁵ It was not the only instance of anachronistic patrimonialism in his reign.

13. The future Nicholas II as tsarevich (in front, wearing white uniform) entertained by his uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (on his right).

Given his diffident personality and lack of appetite for power, Nicholas might have proven willing to come to terms with the opposition were it not for his spouse, who was destined to play a major and very negative role in the final years of the old regime. A granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of Queen Victoria, Alexandra Fedorovna (Alix) was born in the German principality of Hesse and in Russia was always looked upon, by society and the masses, as “the German woman.”* Haughty and cold, she managed in no time to alienate St. Petersburg society: as her estrangement increased, her entourage became limited to a confidante, Anna Vyrubova, and, later, Rasputin. She was rarely seen to smile and in photographs usually looks away from the camera. Suffering from headaches and what she believed to be a weak heart, she developed an addiction to pills. She had a strong inclination to mysticism. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, left a thumbnail sketch of Alexandra: “Moral disquiet, constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, constant thought given to the invisible and supernatural, credulousness, superstition.”¹⁶ Isolated at the Imperial residence in Tsarskoe Selo from everyone except courtiers, she developed a faith in a mythical Russian “people,” who, it was her firm conviction, boundlessly loved the Imperial family. She mistrusted everyone else, including Nicholas’s relatives, whom she suspected of scheming to remove him from the throne.

None of which would have mattered much were it not that the Empress saw herself obliged to compensate for her husband’s vacillating character by keeping him from making political concessions and eventually taking a direct hand in appointments: she frequently exercised a wife’s prerogative of turning her husband against people to whom, for one reason or another, she had taken a dislike. Treating Nicholas as a good-natured child (she liked to draw him as a baby in arms), she manipulated her husband by playing on his sense of duty and his suspicious nature. Although born and raised in Western Europe, she quickly assimilated the most extreme patrimonial attitudes of her adopted country. Time and again she reminded Nicholas of his heritage: “You and Russia are one and the same,” she would exhort him.¹⁷ After giving birth to a male heir, she made it her mission in life to safeguard unalloyed the institution of autocratic monarchy until the time when he would ascend the throne. By her actions she greatly contributed to widening the breach between the monarchy and society until it became unbridgeable: by 1916, even the staunchest monarchists, including many grand dukes, would turn against her and plot to have her removed. Her historic role in this respect was not dissimilar to Marie Antoinette’s.

To humor her, Nicholas usually followed his wife’s advice, but not slavishly; on rare occasion he could even oppose her wishes. They were a very loving couple, completely devoted to one another and usually of one mind. Both despised “public opinion,” which they identified with St. Petersburg society and the intelligentsia and viewed as an artificial “wall [sredostenie] erected to separate from them the adoring people.”* It has been said that when Nicholas used the word “intelligentsia” he made the same face as when pronouncing the word “syphilis.” He thought it should be erased from the Russian dictionary.¹⁸

Given the misfortune that dogged Nicholas in all his endeavors, it caused no great surprise that it also afflicted his domestic life. His wife bore four daughters in succession but there was no male heir. In desperation, she turned to charlatans, one of whom, a French physician by the name of Dr. Philippe, assured her that she was pregnant with a boy. Alexandra expanded in bulk until a medical examination in the ninth month revealed she had had a sympathetic pregnancy.¹⁹ When in 1904 a boy was finally born, he turned out to suffer from hemophilia, an incurable disease of which she had been the transmitter. The blow deepened Alexandra’s mysticism, but also her determination to see the child, christened Alexis, resplendent on the throne as Tsar of All the Russias.

The courtiers surrounding Nicholas II reinforced these preferences for anachronistic political practices. At the Tsar’s Court immense stress was laid on decorum and the observance of ritualistic forms:

The circle of intimates [of the Imperial family] consisted of dull-witted, ignorant remnants of dvoriane clans, lackeys of the aristocracy, who had lost the freedom of opinion and conviction, as well as the traditional notions of estate honor and pride. All these Voeikovs, Nilovs, Mosolovs, Apraksins, Fedoseevs, Volkovs—colorless, untalented slaves—stood at the entrances and exits of the Imperial Palace and protected the integrity of autocratic power. This honorary duty they shared with the Fredericks, Benckendorffs, Korfs, Grotens, Grünwalds—pompous, smug [Baltic] Germans who had sunk firm roots at the Russian Court and wielded a peculiar kind of influence behind the stage. The highly placed lackeys were united by a profound contempt for the Russian people. Many of them did not know Russia’s past, living in a kind of dumb ignorance of the needs of the present and indifference for the future. For the majority of them, conservative thought meant simply mental inertia and immobility. For people of this ilk, autocracy had lost sense as a political system, because their mental level was incapable of rising to general ideas. Their life flowed from one episode to another, from decorations to shifts on the ladder of ranks and honors. From time to time, the flow of events for them was interrupted by some shock—an uprising, a revolutionary upheaval, or a terrorist attempt. These portentous symptoms spread among them fear, even alarm, but never aroused their deep interest or attracted their serious attention. In the final analysis, everything reduced itself to hopes placed on a new energetic administrator or skillful police chief.²⁰

The monarchy governed Russia with the assistance of five institutions: the civil service, the security police, the gentry, the army, and the Orthodox Church.

The bureaucracy (chinovnichestvo) descended from the household staff of medieval princes, originally slaves, and it retained into the twentieth century strong traces of its origin. It continued to act, first and foremost, as the personal staff of the monarch rather than as the civil service of the nation. Its members had little sense of the state (gosudarstvo) as an entity separate from and superior to the monarch (gosudar’) and his bureaucracy.²¹

On being admitted into the service, a Russian official swore loyalty, not to the state or the nation, but to the person of the ruler. He served entirely at the pleasure of the monarch and his own immediate superiors. Bureaucratic executives had the authority to dismiss subordinates without being required to furnish reasons and without giving the officials concerned the opportunity to defend themselves. The Service Regulations denied a discharged official all means of redress:

Officials who, in the opinion of their superiors, are incapable of carrying out their obligations, or who, for whatever reason, are [deemed] unreliable [neblagonadëzhnye], or who have committed a misdemeanor their superior is aware of but which cannot be factually proven, may be discharged from the service by qualified superiors at the latters’ discretion.… Officials who have been simply dismissed from the service at the discretion of their superiors without being informed of the reasons cannot lodge a complaint against such action. Their petitions for reinstatement in their previous posts or for a court trial not only must be left without action but must not even be accepted by the Governing Senate of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancery.…*

As if to emphasize that civil servants were descended from bonded domestics, an official, no matter how prominent, could not resign from the service without permission. As late as 1916, ministers, most of whom by then were at odds with the Tsar’s policies, had to request his permission to quit, which in a number of cases he refused to grant—a situation difficult for a European even to imagine.

Except for judges and certain categories of specialists, Russian officials were not required to furnish proof of educational qualifications. Unlike contemporary Western Europe, where appointment to the civil service called for either a school diploma or the passing of an examination, or both, in Russia admission requirements were perfunctory. To qualify for the post of Chancery Servitor (Kantseliarskii sluzhitel’), the stepping-stone to the lowest rung on the service career ladder, a candidate had only to demonstrate the ability to read and write grammatically and to have mastered the rudiments of mathematics. For advancement to the next higher rank, he had to pass an examination that tested for knowledge expected of a graduate of a grammar school. Once established in the lowest civil service rank, an official or chinovnik was not obliged to demonstrate any further competence, and moved up the career ladder in accord with the rules of seniority and the recommendations of his superior. Thus, Imperial officials were appointed and advanced on the basis of undefined criteria which in practice centered on complete loyalty to the dynasty, blind obedience in the execution of orders, and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

As personal servants of the Tsar, officials of the Imperial civil service stood above the law. A chinovnik could be indicted and put on trial only with the permission of his superior.²² Lacking such authorization, the judiciary was powerless to indict officials. Permission to try officials was rarely forthcoming, and this for two reasons. Since all appointments were made, at any rate in theory, by the Tsar, the failure of a bureaucrat properly to perform his duties reflected adversely on the Tsar’s judgment. Second, there was always the risk that if he were allowed to defend himself in court, the accused official could implicate his superiors. In practice, therefore, guilty officials were quietly transferred to another post or, if sufficiently distinguished, promoted to impressive but meaningless positions in the Senate or Council of State.²³ In such matters the Tsar himself had to bow to custom. Following a train accident in which he almost lost his life, Alexander III wanted to bring to trial the Minister of Transport. He was ultimately dissuaded on the grounds that a public trial of a minister who had held his post for fourteen years would mean that he had “undeservedly enjoyed the confidence of the monarch”²⁴—that is, that the Tsar had shown poor judgment. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the unaccountability of the Russian officialdom to the law or any body external to itself represented the principal difference between the Russian and Western European civil services. In fact, it was only one of many manifestations of the patrimonial spirit still embedded in the Russian state.

The Russian bureaucracy, especially in the last years of the monarchy, had in its ranks many well-educated and dedicated officials. These were especially numerous in the ministries and the agencies located in St. Petersburg. Bernard Pares, the English historian of Russia, on his frequent visits there before 1917, observed that when out of uniform a chinovnik often turned out to be an intellectual, troubled by the same thoughts that agitated society at large. In uniform, however, while performing his duties, he was expected to act haughtily and insolently.* The conditions of service, especially the absence of security, did, in fact, encourage servility toward superiors and rudeness toward everyone else. To the outside world, a chinovnik was expected to act with complete self-assurance:

Always the underlying intent was to present the “Government” as an all-wise, deliberate and ultimately infallible group of servants of the state, selflessly working in unison with the monarch for the best interests of Russia.²⁵

An essential element of this self-image was secrecy, which helped maintain the illusion of an authority that knew neither discord nor failures. There was nothing that the bureaucracy dreaded more than glasnost’, or the open conduct of public affairs, for which public opinion had been clamoring since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Beginning in 1722, when Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, Russia’s officialdom was divided into hierarchic grades called chiny, of which nominally there were fourteen but in fact only twelve, Ranks 11 and 13 having fallen into disuse. It had been Peter’s intention that as officials qualified for higher responsibilities they would receive the rank appropriate to the office they occupied. But the system quickly became perverted, with the result that Russia acquired a civil service ranking system that was probably unique in the world. To gain the support of the bureaucracy for her dubious claim to the throne, Catherine II introduced in the 1760s the principle of automatic promotion: henceforth, the holder of a chin was advanced to the next higher grade on the basis of seniority, after he had held a given rank a specified length of time, regardless of whether or not he was assigned greater responsibilities. Unlike the usual practice in bureaucratic establishments where a person moves up in grade as he assumes higher duties, in Imperial Russia he rose in grade more or less automatically, without regard to his functions: promotion was not from post to post, but from rank to rank.²⁶ This made the Russian civil service a closed caste: with minor exceptions, to be eligible for a government position one had to hold chin.²⁷ Ordinary subjects, no matter how well qualified, were excluded from participating in the country’s administration, except in the rare instances of direct appointment by the Tsar. Only those willing and able to make it a lifelong career were able to join the government. Others were barred from public service and therefore deprived of opportunities to acquire administrative experience.

Appointments to the top four ranks (of which in 1903 there were 3,765 holders)²⁸ could not be attained by regular advancement: since they entitled to hereditary nobility, they were made personally by the Tsar. Ranks 14 through 5 were open to regular career promotions, procedures for which were prescribed in minute detail. In most cases, a prospective functionary of non-noble origin began his career as a Chancery Servitor in some government bureau. This post carried no chin. He remained in it anywhere from one to twelve years, depending on his social status and education, before becoming eligible for promotion to Rank 14: hereditary nobles with completed secondary education served only one year, whereas boys discharged from the Imperial Choir because of a change in voice had to serve twelve. Once installed, a chinovnik worked his way up the career ladder one rung at a time. The Service Regulations determined how long an official remained in each rank (three years in the lower ones, four in the higher), but advancement could be speeded up for outstanding performance. In theory, it required twenty-four years from one’s first appointment until the attainment of the highest career rank (Chin 5). Ranks 14 through 5 bestowed personal (non-hereditary) ennoblement.

One could qualify for direct entry into the civil service by virtue of either appropriate social status or education. Sons of nobles (dvoriane) and personal nobles (lichnye dvoriane) were the only ones eligible for admission to Rank 14 or higher regardless of education. Others qualified by virtue of educational attainments. In theory, civil service careers were open to all subjects without distinction of nationality or religion, but an exception was made for Jews, who were ineligible unless they had a higher education, which in practice meant a medical degree. Catholics were subject to quotas. Lutherans were very much in demand and a high proportion of the officials in St. Petersburg chanceries were Baltic Germans. Excluded, unless they met the educational criteria (university degree or completed secondary schooling with honors), were members of the urban estates, peasants, and all persons who had received their secondary education abroad.

While on duty, holders of rank (which included university professors) were required to wear uniforms, the cut and color of which was prescribed in fifty-two articles of the Service Regulations. They had to be addressed in a specified form appropriate to their rank, the titles being translated from German. Each rank had its perquisites, which included minutely regulated precedence rules.

Remuneration consisted of salary, expense accounts, and living quarters or a suitable housing allowance. Salary differentials were enormous, officials in Rank 1 receiving over thirty times the pay of those in Rank 14. Few officials held landed properties or had other sources of private income: in 1902, even of those in the four topmost ranks, only one in three owned land.²⁹ On leaving the service, like faithful domestics high officials usually were given monetary rewards by the Tsar; thus, Minister of Justice Nicholas Maklakov received on his retirement 20,000 rubles, Minister of the Interior Peter Durnovo, 50,000, and the Court’s favorite, Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin, 100,000.³⁰ For distinguished service there were also other rewards, notably medals of various designations, strictly graded in order of importance and precedence: their description occupies no fewer than 869 paragraphs in the Service Regulations.

The civil service was thus a closed caste, separated from the rest of society, access to which and promotion within which were strictly regulated on the basis of social origin, education, and seniority. This caste—225,000 strong in 1900, including members of the police and the gendarmerie—was a personal staff of the monarch subject neither to the laws of the land nor to any external supervision. It served at the monarch’s pleasure. The institution was a carryover from medieval times, before the emergence of a distinction between the person of the ruler and the institution of the state.

The legacy of patrimonialism was also apparent in the structure and operations of the principal executive agencies, the ministries.

In the medieval principalities of northern Russia, where political authority was exercised by virtue of ownership, administration had been divided into puti or “paths.” Arranged geographically (territorially) rather than functionally, they served first and foremost the purposes of economic exploitation. The men in charge were stewards responsible for a given area. They had no corporate existence and they did not act as a body. Such practices survived in Russia’s administrative structure after the introduction of ministries in 1802. The administration of Russia in the nineteenth century was organized in a vertical manner, with almost no lateral links, the lines of command converging at the top, in the person of the monarch. This arrangement hampered cooperation among the ministries and hence the formulation of a coherent national policy, but it had the advantage of preventing the officialdom from acting in concert and thereby impinging on the Tsar’s autocratic prerogatives.

With one exception, the Ministry of the Interior, Russian ministries did not much differ in structure and operation from the corresponding institutions in the West. But in contrast to the West, Russia had no cabinet and no Prime Minister. There existed a so-called Committee of Ministers, which also included heads of other central agencies, with a casually appointed chairman, but it was a body with no authority. Attempts to give Russia a regular cabinet in the 1860s and again in the 1880s had no success because the Court feared such a body would weaken its authority. The very idea of a cabinet or even ministerial consultations was regarded as subversive. “Unlike other absolute monarchs,” a French observer wrote in the 1880s,

the Russian emperors have never had prime ministers. From instinct or system, in order to retain, in deed as well as in theory, their authority unimpaired, they all undertake to be their own prime ministers.… Russia, nevertheless, does feel the need of a homogeneous cabinet, as a means toward that unity of direction in which the government is so deficient … such a council, with or without official premiership, would of necessity modify all the relations between sovereign and ministers, as its members, collectively responsible, would be fatally led to assume toward the Emperor a more independent attitude. They would gradually feel responsible before society and public opinion no less than before the sovereign, who might thus slip into the part of a constitutional monarch, without the official restraint of either constitution or parliament. In fact, this reform, seemingly unassuming, would almost amount to a revolution …³¹

This, as we have seen, is precisely what happened in 1905, when, forced to present a united front against the newly created Duma, the monarchy consented to the creation of a Council of Ministers under a chairman who was Prime Minister in all but name. But even though it had to make this concession, it never reconciled itself to this arrangement and in a few years reverted to the old practices.

Until 1905, the ministers reported directly to the Tsar and received from him their instructions: they had no agreed-upon common policy. Such a practice inevitably gave rise to confusion, since the Tsar was bound to issue them incompatible or even contradictory orders. Under this arrangement, each minister sought the Tsar’s ear for his own ends, without regard for the concerns of his colleagues. Foreign policy was made by at least three ministries (Foreign Affairs, Finance, and War), while domestic matters were caught up in constant feuding between the ministries of the Interior and Finance. Essentially, each ministry acted as it saw fit, subject to the Tsar’s personal approval. “Being responsible to the Emperor alone, and that only individually, [the ministers] really [were] mere secretaries, almost private clerks of the Tsar.”³²

Russian ministers and their associates had an even lower opinion of their status. Their diaries and private communications are filled with complaints about the medieval arrangement under which the country was treated as the Emperor’s private domain and they as his stewards. They were bitter about the way they were treated, about the peremptory manner with which the Tsar gave them instructions, and angry over the absence of regular ministerial consultations. Peter Valuev, Minister of the Interior under Alexander II, referred to Russia’s ministers as the “sovereign’s servants”—les grandes domestiques—rather than les grandes serviteurs de l’état, whose relationship to him was “Asiatic, semi-slave or primitively patriarchal.”³³ It is this situation that one official had in mind when he said that Russia had “departments” (vedomstva) but no government (pravitel’stvo).³⁴ Such was the price Russia had to pay for maintaining so late into the modern era the regime of patrimonial monarchy.

Within their bureaus, ministers enjoyed immense power: one Russian compared them to Ottoman pashas lording over their pachalícs.³⁵ Each had in the provinces a network of functionaries responsible only to him and not to the provincial governors.³⁶ They could hire and fire employees at will. They also had great latitude in disposing of the moneys budgeted for their ministries.

Because Russia was so visibly run by a bureaucracy, it is possible to overestimate the extent to which the country was bureaucratized. The Russian civil service was unusually top-heavy, with a high proportion of the bureaucracy located in St. Petersburg. The Empire was relatively under-administered.³⁷

Such neglect of the provincial administration was due to fiscal constraints: Russia simply could not afford the expenditures required to administer properly a country of such distances and poor communications. After Peter I had taken Livonia from Sweden he discovered that the Swedes had spent as much on running this small province as his government allowed for administering the whole Empire: this meant that any hope of adopting Swedish administrative models had to be given up.³⁸ In 1763, proportionate to her territory, Prussia had nearly one hundred times as many officials as Russia.³⁹ Around 1900, the proportion of administrators in relation to the population in Russia was almost one-third that of France and one-half that of Germany.⁴⁰ Because of inadequate resources, Russians adopted a very simple model of administration. They placed in each province a powerful governor, with broad discretionary powers, and deployed across the country military garrisons to help him preserve order. There were also small contingents of police and gendarmerie, and agents of such ministries as Finance, Justice, and War. But essentially the countryside was self-administering through the institution of the peasant commune, which was held collectively responsible for the payment of taxes and delivery of military recruits, and the canton or volost’, which performed simple judiciary and administrative functions. None of this cost the Treasury anything.

This meant, however, that the authority of the Imperial Government, for all practical purposes, stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors and their staff had offices: below that level yawned an administrative vacuum. Neither the district (uezd), into which provinces were subdivided, nor the volost’, the principal unit of rural administration, had any regular agents of the central government: these showed up periodically, on forays as it were, to carry out specific missions, usually to collect tax arrears, and then disappeared from view. Indeed, the volost’ itself was not a territorial but a social entity, since it included only peasants and not the members of the other estates living within its territory. Some intellectuals and officials, aware of the anomaly of such an arrangement, urged the government to introduce as the lowest administrative unit an all-estate volost’, but this advice was ignored because the authorities preferred that the peasants remain isolated and self-governing. In the words of one experienced bureaucrat, there was in Russia “no common unifying authority comparable to the German Landrat or French souspréfet, capable of coordinating policies in the interest of central authority”:

There was no apparatus of local administration but only officials of various [central] agencies: financial, judiciary, forestry, postal, etc., who were unconnected, or else the executive organs of various types of self-government, dependent more on the voters than on the government. There was no common binding authority.⁴¹

The absence of government agents in the small towns and the countryside would make itself painfully felt after 1905, when, attempting to win majorities in the new parliament, the monarchy found it had no mechanism to mobilize potential supporters against the ubiquitous liberal and radical intelligentsia.

In terms of its attitudes and programs, the Imperial bureaucracy can be divided into three groups.

The majority of chinovniki, especially those serving in the provinces, were careerists pure and simple, who joined to benefit from the prestige and privileges that went with government service. Monarchists in 1916, in 1917 most of them would place themselves at the disposal first of the Provisional Government and then of the Bolsheviks. They usually supplemented their meager salaries with bribes and tips.* It is difficult to speak of their having an ideology or mentality, save to say that they saw themselves as responsible for protecting the state from “society.”*

There was a wide gulf separating the provincial officialdom from that ensconced in the ministries and chanceries of St. Petersburg. One historian notes that “men who started work in the provinces rarely moved to central agencies. In the provinces at mid-century, only at the highest levels do we find any significant group that had started work in the center.”⁴² This situation did not change in the final decades of the old regime.

It is in the higher ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom that one can discover something resembling an ideology. Before the Revolution this was not considered a subject worthy of investigation, since the intelligentsia considered it to be obvious that Russia’s bureaucrats were a herd of self-seeking dunderheads. Events were to prove the intelligentsia a poor judge in such matters: for on coming to power in February 1917, it allowed the state and society to disintegrate in a matter of two or at most four months—the same state and society that the bureaucrats had somehow managed to keep intact for centuries. Clearly, they knew something that the intelligentsia did not. The Menshevik Theodore Dan had the honesty to admit in retrospect that “the extreme reactionaries of the tsarist bureaucracy much sooner and better grasped the driving forces and the social content of [the] coming revolution than all the Russian ‘professional revolutionaries,’ and, in particular, the Russian Marxist Social Democrats.”⁴³

Theodore Taranovsky distinguishes in the upper layers of the Russian bureaucracy toward the end of the nineteenth century two principal groups: one which espoused the ideal of a police state (Polizeistaat), the other which wanted a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat).⁴⁴ They agreed that Russia required firm autocratic authority, but the former stressed repression, while the latter preferred to bring society into some kind of limited partnership. Their differing programs derived from different perceptions of the population: the right-wing conservatives saw it as a savage mob while the liberal-conservatives felt it could be nurtured and taught citizenship. By and large, the more liberal bureaucrats were better educated, many of them having completed legal and other professional training. The conservatives tended to be administrative “generalists,” lacking in professional skills or higher education.

The advocates of the police state saw Russia as under permanent siege by her inhabitants, believed ready to pounce and tear the country apart at the slightest hint that government authority was weakening. To prevent this from happening, Russia had to be ruled with an iron hand. They were not troubled by charges of arbitrary behavior: that which their opponents labeled “arbitrariness” (proizvol) they saw as the correct technique for managing a country as spacious and undisciplined as Russia. Law to them was an instrument of administration rather than a higher principle binding both rulers and ruled, in the spirit of the police chief of Nicholas I who hearing complaints that his agents were acting unlawfully retorted, “Laws are written for subjects, not for the government!”⁴⁵ They treated all criticism of the bureaucracy by “society” as camouflage to disguise the critics’ political ambitions.

The police state, as they conceived it, was an eighteenth-century mechanism, managed by professionals, which provided minimum opportunity for the free play of political, social, and economic forces. They objected to every institution and procedure that disturbed administrative unity and the smooth functioning of the bureaucratic chain of command, such as the independent judiciary and organs of local self-government. To the extent that such institutions had a right to exist, they had to be subordinated to the bureaucracy. They opposed glasnost’ on the grounds that revelations of dissent within the government or admission of failure would undermine its most precious asset, namely prestige. Centralized bureaucratic administration was in their view unavoidable until such time as “the population’s general level has risen, until there [are] in the provinces enough genuine public servants, until society [has developed] intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.”⁴⁶ Officials of this school pleaded for time without indicating how, under their strict tutelage, the population could ever develop “intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.” They wanted to preserve the existing social caste system, with the leading role assigned to the landed gentry and the peasantry kept isolated. Their headquarters were in the Ministry of the Interior.

The bureaucratic conservatives and their supporters on the extreme right wing of public opinion relied heavily on anti-Semitism as an instrument of politics. Although modern anti-Semitism originated in France and Germany, it is in Russia that it first entered official ideology. To the conservatives, Jews presented the single most dangerous threat to that political and social stability which they regarded as the main concern of state policy. Jews destabilized Russia in two capacities: as revolutionaries and as capitalists. The police authorities were convinced that they formed the principal element in the revolutionary parties: Nicholas II only echoed them when he claimed that nine-tenths of the revolutionaries and socialists in Russia were Jews.⁴⁷ But Jews also upset the socioeconomic equilibrium of Russia by introducing free market operations. The obvious contradiction in the claim that the members of the same religious group were both beneficiaries and mortal foes of capitalism was resolved in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a scurrilous forgery concocted at the end of the nineteenth century by the tsarist police, which claimed that in the pursuit of their alleged historic mission—the destruction of Christianity and world domination—Jews resorted to every conceivable means, even to the extent of organizing pogroms against themselves. The monarchists, “lacking a monarch who could have embodied the autocratic principle with vigor and infectious conviction, … had only anti-Semitism and the notion of universal evil, with the Jews as its carriers, to make sense of a world which was escaping their control and intellectual grasp.”⁴⁸ The infamous Beilis case, prosecuted in the courts in 1913, in which an obscure Kievan Jew was charged with the “ritual murder” of a Ukrainian youth, was the culmination of this desperate search for a scapegoat.* Although (with some minor exceptions) the Imperial Government did not encourage, let alone instigate, anti-Jewish pogroms, its unconcealed policy of discrimination against Jews and tolerance of anti-Semitic propaganda conveyed to the population the impression that it approved of them.

Liberal-conservative bureaucrats rejected such a system as hopelessly out of date. In their judgment, a country as complex and dynamic as modern Russia could not be governed by bureaucratic whim, in disregard of the law and without popular involvement. The liberal-conservative trend in the bureaucracy first emerged, in the 1860s, at the time of the Great Reforms. It was reinforced by the emancipation of serfs in 1861, which deprived the monarchy of the services of 100,000 serf-owning landlords who had previously performed on its behalf, free of charge, a variety of administrative functions in the countryside. At that time P. A. Valuev was of the opinion that

already now, in the conduct of administration, the Sovereign is Autocrat in name only; that is, autocracy manifests itself only in bursts, in flashes. But given the growing complexity of the administrative mechanism, the more important questions of government elude, and must of necessity elude, the Sovereign’s immediate attention.⁴⁹

Which was to say that the sheer mass of administrative business required authority to be more widely distributed.

The liberal-conservatives conceded that the Tsar had to remain the exclusive source of laws, but they insisted that laws, once promulgated, were binding on all the officials included. This was the distinguishing quality of the Rechtsstaat. They also had a higher opinion of Russia’s capacity for self-government and wanted the educated part of the population to be brought into participation in a consultative capacity. They disliked the estate system as an anachronism, preferring that the country move toward common and egalitarian citizenship. They attached particular importance to the gradual elimination of the special status and isolation of the peasantry. The liberal-conservatives had their bastions in the Council of State (which framed laws), the Senate (the highest court of appeals), and the ministries of Justice and Finance.⁵⁰

Historic developments favored the liberal bureaucracy. The rapid growth of the Russian economy in the second half of the nineteenth century alone raised doubts about the feasibility of running Russia in a patrimonial manner. It was very well for Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the main ideologue of patrimonial conservatism, to argue that in Russia “there cannot exist separate authorities [vlasti], independent of the central state authority [vlast’].”⁵¹ This principle may have been enforceable in a static, agrarian society. But in a capitalist economy such as developed in Russia in the late nineteenth century with the government’s active encouragement, every corporation, every business entrepreneur, every commercial bank made, on its own, decisions affecting the state and society: they acted as “independent authorities” even under the autocratic regime. The conservatives instinctively understood this and resisted economic development, but they fought a losing battle inasmuch as Russia’s international standing and fiscal stability had come increasingly to depend on the growth of industry, transport, and banking.

Perhaps the monarchy would have moved decisively in the direction favored by its more liberal servants were it not for the revolutionary movement. The wave of terror that struck Russia in 1879–81 and again after 1902 had no parallel in the world to that time or since. Each terrorist assault played into the hands of those advocating repression. In August 1881, Alexander III put in place a set of emergency rules that made it possible for the officials in turbulent areas to impose martial law and govern as they would enemy territory. These laws, which remained on the statute books until the demise of the monarchy, foreshadowed some of the salient features of the modern police state.⁵² They greatly enhanced the arbitrary power of the right-wing bureaucrats, offsetting the gains of the liberals from economic and educational progress.

The contrary pulls to which the late Imperial Government was subjected can be illustrated in the example of legal institutions. In 1864, Alexander II gave Russia her first independent judiciary system, with juries and irremovable judges. It was a reform that the conservatives found especially galling because it created a formal enclave of decision-making independent of the monarch and his officials. Pobedonostsev accused the new courts of violating the principle of unity of authority: in Russia, irremovable judges were an “anomaly.”⁵³ In terms of autocratic principles he was undeniably correct. The conservatives succeeded in having political offenses removed from the jurisdiction of civilian courts and transferred to administrative courts, but they could not undo the court reform because it had become too embedded in Russian life, and, in any event, they had no realistic alternative.

The squabbling between the two bureaucratic camps was typified by the rivalry between the ministries of the Interior and of Finance.

The Ministry of the Interior was an institution sui generis, virtually a state within a state, resembling less a branch of the executive than a self-contained system within the machinery of government.⁵⁴ While the other ministries had clearly defined and therefore limited functions, Interior had the general function of administering the country. In 1802, when it came into existence, it had been responsible for promoting economic development and supervising transport and communications. Its sphere of competence was immensely broadened in the 1860s, partly as a result of serf emancipation, which deprived landlords of administrative authority, and partly in response to the revolutionary unrest. By 1900, the Minister of the Interior was something of a Chief Imperial Steward. The ambitions of the holders of the post knew no bounds. In 1881, in the wake of a campaign of terror that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, the Minister of the Interior, N. P. Ignatev, proposed that in order to extirpate dissent not only in society but also in the government, which he believed was filled with subversives, his ministry be authorized to engage, in effect, in what one historian has described as “administrative-police supervision … of all other government agencies.”⁵⁵ A proposal in the same spirit was made twenty years later by Minister of the Interior Viacheslav Plehve on behalf of the governors.⁵⁶ Both proposals were rejected, but it is indicative of the authority of the ministry that they dared to make them. It was logical that after 1905, when the equivalent post of Prime Minister was created, its holder usually also held the portfolio of the Interior.

The Minister of the Interior headed the national administration by virtue of authority to appoint and supervise the country’s principal administrative officials, the governors. These tended to be selected from among the less educated and more conservative bureaucrats: in 1900, half of them had no higher education. Governors chaired provincial boards (gubemskie pravleniia) and a variety of committees, of which the most important were the bureaus (prisutstviia) charged with overseeing the industrial, military, and agricultural affairs of their province. They also had responsibility for the peasants: they appointed, from among trustworthy local landed gentry, land commandants (zemskie nachal’niki), who acted as wardens of the volost’ administration and enjoyed broad authority over the peasantry. The governors also supervised the zemstva. In case of unrest, they could request the Minister of the Interior to declare their province under either Reinforced or Extraordinary Safeguard, which resulted in the suspension of all civil rights and rule by decree. With the exception of the courts and agencies of fiscal control, the governors encountered few barriers to their will. Through them, the Minister of the Interior ran the Empire.*

Within the purview of the Interior Minister fell also the supervision of non-Orthodox subjects, including the Jews, as well as the dissenting branches of the Orthodox faith; censorship; and the management of prisons and forced labor camps.

But the greatest source of the Interior Minister’s power derived from the fact that after 1880 he was in charge of the police: the Department of Police and the Corps of Gendarmes, as well as the regular constabulary force. In the words of Witte, “the Minister of the Interior is the Minister of Police of an Empire which is a police state par excellence.”* The Department of Police was unique to Russia: only Russia had two kinds of police, one to protect the interests of the state, the other to maintain law and order among the citizens. The Police Department was charged exclusively with responsibility for combating crimes against the state. It constituted, as it were, a private security service of the patrimonial sovereign, whose interests were apparently perceived as separate from those of his subjects.

The constabulary was to be seen mainly in the urban centers. “Outside the cities the central authorities relied essentially upon a mere 1,582 constables and 6,874 sergeants to control a village population of ninety million.”⁵⁷ Each district (uezd) had, as a representative of the Interior Ministry, a police chief called ispravnik. These officials enjoyed broad powers, including that of issuing internal passports, without which members of the lower classes could not travel thirty kilometers beyond their place of residence. But as is clear from their numbers, they would hardly have been said to police the countryside.

As constituted in 1880, the security police consisted of three elements, all subject to the Minister of the Interior: the Department of Police in St. Petersburg, the Okhrana (security police) with branches in some cities, and the Corps of Gendarmes, whose personnel was distributed in all the metropolitan areas. A great deal of Russian administration was carried out by means of secret circulars sent to the officials in charge of security from the minister’s office.

There was a certain amount of duplication among the three services in that all had the mission of preventing anti-governmental activities, which included industrial strikes and unauthorized assemblies. The Okhrana, at first established only in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, and later installed in other cities, engaged principally in counterintelligence, whereas the Gendarmes were more involved in formal investigation of individuals apprehended in illegal activities. The Gendarmes had a paramilitary force to control railroads and to quell urban disorders. There were 10,000 to 15,000 gendarmes in the Empire. Each city had a Gendarme official, clad in a familiar light blue uniform, whose responsibility it was to gather information on all matters affecting internal security. The force was very thinly distributed. Hence in time of massive unrest the government had to call in the regular army, the force of last resort: and when the army was engaged in war, as happened in 1904–5 and again in 1917, the regime was unable to cope.

The security services evolved over time into a highly effective political counterintelligence using an array of techniques to combat revolutionaries, including a network of informants, agents who shadowed suspects, and agents provocateurs who infiltrated subversive organizations. The police intercepted and read private mail. It employed as informers residential superintendents. It had branches abroad (it maintained a permanent bureau in Paris) and collaborated with foreign police to keep track of Russian revolutionaries. In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, through arrests and penetration it succeeded in virtually eliminating the revolutionary parties as a threat to the regime: suffice it to say that both the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist organization and Lenin’s chief deputy in Russia were on the police payroll. The security police was the best informed and politically the most sophisticated agency of the Imperial Government: in the years immediately preceding the Revolution it submitted remarkably prescient analyses of Russia’s internal conditions and prospects.

Of all the services of the Russian bureaucracy, the police were the least constrained by law. All its operations, affecting the lives of millions, were carried out free of external controls, save those of the Minister of the Interior and the director of the Department of Police. Under regulations issued in 1881, the police organs had no judiciary powers. However, in areas subject to the August 1881 provisions for “Safeguard,” high officials of the Corps of Gendarmes had the right to detain suspects for two weeks, and for two weeks longer with a governor’s authorization. After one month, a detainee was either released or turned over to the Ministry of the Interior for further investigation. Once that was completed, if the evidence warranted, the suspect was brought to trial either before a court (sometimes the Senate) or before administrative boards of the Ministry of the Interior composed of two representatives each of that ministry and the Ministry of Justice: a bureaucratic body functioning in a judiciary capacity.⁵⁸ Under such procedures, Russians could be sentenced for up to five years of administrative exile. The population had no recourse against the security organs, least of all in areas placed under Safeguard, where the police could act with complete impunity.

The authority of the Minister of the Interior was enhanced by virtue of the fact that his police and gendarmerie were the only vehicles for enforcing directives of the other ministries. If Finance ran into a taxpayers’ revolt, or War had trouble recruiting, they had to go to Interior for help. In the words of a contemporary source,

the outstanding position of the Ministry of the Interior is determined not only by the number, variety, and importance of its functions but also and above all by the fact that it administers the police force, and that the enforcement of all government decrees, regardless of which ministry’s competence they happen to fall under, is, as a rule, carried out by the police.⁵⁹

In the closing decades of the century, Interior Ministers supported and implemented various “counterreforms” designed to emasculate the liberal reforms of the 1860s. Among them were restrictions on zemstva, the introduction of land commandants, expulsion of Jews from areas where law forbade them to reside, and repression of student unrest. Had they had their wish, Russia would have been frozen not only politically but also economically and socially.

The inability of the Interior Ministers to carry out their programs provides a telling commentary on the limitations that life imposed on the practices of patrimonial autocracy. From considerations of state security, its proponents opposed nearly every measure designed to modernize the Russian economy. They fought currency reform and the adoption of the gold standard. They disliked railroads. They opposed foreign borrowing. Above all, they resisted industrialization on the grounds that it hurt cottage industries, without which peasants could not make ends meet, led to dangerous concentrations of industrial labor, and enabled foreigners, especially Jews, to penetrate and corrupt Russia.

There were weighty reasons of state why this resistance was ignored. Russia had no choice but to industrialize. Witte, the Minister of Finance and chief advocate of industrialization, made his case largely in political and military terms, because he knew that they would appeal to Nicholas II. In February 1900, in a memorandum to the Tsar, he argued, consciously or unconsciously echoing the nineteenth-century German political economist Friedrich List, that

without her own industry [Russia] cannot achieve genuine economic independence. And the experience of all nations indicates palpably that only countries which enjoy economic independence have also the capacity fully to unfold their political might.*

To prove his point, Witte pointed to China, India, Turkey, and Latin America.

Persuasive as this argument was, fiscal exigencies were even more so: Russia urgently needed capital to balance the budget, to broaden the revenue base of the Treasury, and to ease the tax burden of the peasant. The alternative was state bankruptcy and possibly widespread agrarian unrest. Thus fiscal considerations overrode the interests of internal security, pushing the Imperial Government to take the “capitalist” road with all its social and political consequences.

Russia has suffered chronic budgetary deficits ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. There were the immense costs of serf emancipation, the provisions of which committed the government to advance the landlords 80 percent of the value of the land given to their ex-serfs: this money the peasants were supposed to repay over forty-nine years, but they soon fell into arrears. Then there was the costly Balkan War of 1877–78, which caused the Russian ruble to lose 60 percent of its value on foreign exchanges. The government also incurred heavy expenses in connection with its involvement in railroad construction.*

Russia lacked the capital to meet such expenditures. Her revenues rested on a very narrow basis. Direct taxes in 1900 accounted for only 7.9 percent of state income, a fraction of what advanced industrial countries drew from this source. The bulk of the revenues derived from taxes on consumption: sales taxes and customs duties (27.2 percent), proceeds of the liquor monopoly (26 percent), and operations of railways (24 percent). This covered the ordinary expenses but not the military outlays and the costs of railroad construction. Russia partly made good the deficit with sales of grain abroad: in 1891–95 she exported on the average 7 million tons of cereals a year, and in 1902, as much as 9.3 million.⁶⁰ Most of the revenue, directly and indirectly, came from the peasant, who paid a land tax as well as taxes on articles of necessity (salt, matches, kerosene) and vodka. In the 1870s and 1880s, Russian Finance Ministers obtained the money with which to try to balance the budget mainly by increasing taxes on articles of consumption, which had the effect of forcing the peasant to sell grain that the government then exported. The famine of 1891–92 made clear the limits to such practices: the peasants’ ability to pay, it was now acknowledged, had been exhausted. Fears arose that the continuation of the policy of squeezing the peasant could lead to chronic famines.

On taking over the Ministry of Finance in 1892, Witte adopted a different policy: rather than squeeze the countryside, he borrowed abroad and worked to increase the country’s wealth through industrialization. The development of productive capacities would, he was convinced, improve living standards and, at the same time, enhance government revenues.⁶¹ He had initially believed that Russia could raise the capital for her industrialization at home, but he soon realized that domestic financial resources were insufficient⁶²—not only because capital was in short supply but because affluent Russians preferred to invest in mortgages and government bonds. The need for foreign loans became especially pronounced after the crop failures of 1891 and 1892, which forced a temporary curtailment of grain exports and resulted in a fiscal crisis.† Russia’s foreign borrowing, which until 1891 had been on a modest scale, now began in earnest.

To create the impression of fiscal solvency, the Imperial Government occasionally falsified budgetary figures, but its main device to this end was a unique practice of dividing the state budget. The expenses comprised under the “ordinary” budget were more than covered by domestic revenues. Those incurred in maintaining the armed forces and waging war, as well as building railroads, were treated as “non-recurrent” and classified as “extraordinary.” This part of the budget was met from foreign borrowing.

To attract foreign credit, Russia required a convertible currency.

By maintaining in the 1880s a foreign trade surplus, largely with the help of grain exports, and by intensive gold mining, Russia managed to accumulate enough bullion to adopt in 1897 the gold standard. This measure, carried out by Witte in the teeth of strong opposition, made the paper ruble convertible on demand into gold. It attracted massive foreign investments in state obligations as well as securities. Stringent rules on bank-note emissions and an excellent record of debt servicing earned Russia a high credit rating, which enabled her to borrow at interest rates only slightly above those paid by Germany (usually 4 or 4.5 percent). The bulk of the foreign money—four-fifths of that invested in state bonds—came from France; the remainder was supplied by British, German, and Belgian investors. In 1914, the total debt of the Russian Government amounted to 8.8 billion rubles, of which 48 percent or 4.2 billion ($2.1 billion or the equivalent of 3,360 tons of gold) was owed to foreigners: at the time, it was the largest foreign indebtedness of any country in the world.⁶³ In addition, in 1914 foreigners held 870 million rubles of state-guaranteed securities and 422 million rubles of municipal bonds.

Fiscal needs also drove the government to encourage industrial expansion as a means of broadening its tax base. Here, too, foreign capital flowed readily, for European investors believed that Russia, with its huge population and inexhaustible resources, needed only capital and technical know-how to become another United States.⁶⁴ Between 1892 and 1914, foreigners placed in Russian enterprises an estimated 2.2 billion rubles ($1.1 billion), which represented approximately one-half of the capital invested in these enterprises during the period.⁶⁵ The largest share (about one-third) of these investments went into mining, mainly petroleum and coal; the metalworking, electrical, and chemical industries as well as real estate also benefited. French capital accounted for 32.6 percent of that money, English for 22.6 percent, German for 19.7 percent, and Belgian for 14.3 percent.⁶⁶ Witte estimated in 1900 that approximately one-half of all Russian industrial and commercial capital was of foreign origin.*

Such heavy foreign involvement in the economy led conservative and radical opponents of Witte alike to claim that he had transformed Russia into a “colony of Europe.” The charge had little merit. As Witte liked to point out, foreign capital went exclusively for productive purposes† —that is, enhancing Russia’s productive capacity and therefore her wealth. It was in large measure owing to the growth of the non-agrarian sectors of the economy, made possible by the infusion of foreign capital, that the revenues of the Treasury between 1892 and 1903 more than doubled (from 970 million to 2 billion).⁶⁷ It has also been pointed out that foreign investors did not simply “milk” the Russian economy by repatriating their profits, but reinvested them, which had a cumulatively beneficial effect.* In this connection, it is often ignored that the economic development of the United States also benefited greatly from foreign investments. European investments in the United States in mid-1914 are estimated to have been $6.7 billion.† twice the capital invested by Europeans in Russia. “In considerable measure the funds for the national expansion and development [of the United States],” writes an economic historian, “had been obtained from abroad.”⁶⁸ And yet the role of foreign capital is rarely mentioned in American histories and never led to charges that it had made the United States a “colony” of Europe.

The opening phase of the Industrial Revolution in Russia got underway around 1890 with a rapid spurt in industrial production. Some Western European economists have calculated that during the decade of the 1890s Russian industrial productivity increased by 126 percent, which was twice the rate of the German and triple that of the American growth.⁶⁹ Even allowing that Russia started from a much lower base, the rise was impressive, as the following figures indicate:

GROWTH OF RUSSIAN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION⁷⁰

Between 1890 and 1900, the value of Russian industrial output more than doubled (from 1.5 billion to 3.4 billion rubles).^‡

In 1900, Imperial Russia was the world’s largest producer of petroleum, her annual output exceeding that of all the other countries combined. It is generally agreed by economic historians that on the eve of World War I, by which time the value of her industrial production had risen to 5.7 billion rubles, Russia had the fifth-largest economy in the world, which was impressive even if, proportionate to her population, her industrial productivity and income remained low. Thus, in 1910, Russia’s per capita consumption of coal was 4 percent of the American, and of iron, 6.25 percent.*

As the conservatives feared, Russia’s reliance on foreign capital had political consequences, intensifying the pressures on the Imperial Government to come to terms with its own society—that is, to liberalize. Investors everywhere have little tolerance for political instability and civil unrest, and when threatened with them, either withhold capital or demand a risk premium. Every internal crisis, especially if attended by popular disturbances, led to the fall in the price of Russian state obligations, forcing the government to pay higher interest. In consequence of the Revolution of 1905, Russian bonds floated in Europe the next two years had to be heavily discounted. Foreign investors preferred that the Imperial Government operate in a lawful manner and with public support institutionalized in a parliament. Thus by reaching out to the parliamentary democracies for capital, Russia became susceptible to influences promoting parliamentary forms of government. Quite naturally, the Ministry of Finance, the main agent in these fiscal operations, became a spokesman for liberal ideals. It did not quite dare to raise the slogans of constitutionalism and parliamentarism, but it did press for curtailing bureaucratic and police arbitrariness, respect for law, and extending equality to the ethnic minorities, especially the Jews, who were a major force in international banking.

Thus the requirements of the Treasury drove the Russian Government in the opposite direction from that demanded by its ideology of autocratic patrimonialism and urged on it by conservative bureaucrats. A government whose philosophy and practices were under the spell of patrimonial absolutism had no alternative but to pursue economic policies that undermined such absolutism.

The Russian army was, first and foremost, the guarantor of the country’s status as a great power. Witte had the following to say on the subject:

In truth, what is it that has essentially upheld Russian statehood? Not only primarily but exclusively the army. Who has created the Russian Empire, transforming the semi-Asiatic Muscovite tsardom into the most influential, most dominant, grandest European power? Only the power of the army’s bayonet. The world bowed not to our culture, not to our bureaucratized church, not to our wealth and prosperity. It bowed to our might …⁷¹

The military establishment was to an even greater extent than the bureaucracy the personal service of the autocrat, if only because the Tsars took a very personal interest in the armed forces and favored them over the bureaucracy, whose interference and pressures often annoyed the Court.⁷² All the trappings and symbols of the military, beginning with the oath sworn by officers and soldiers, were filled with the patrimonial spirit:

In the military oath, which had to be renewed upon the death of every sovereign, inasmuch as it was sworn to the person [of the ruler], the Emperor appears solely as the Autocrat, without the Fatherland being mentioned. It was the mission of the military to safeguard “the interests of His Imperial Majesty” and “all the rights and privileges that belong to the Supreme Autocracy, Power and Authority of His Imperial Majesty.” The swearer of the oath committed himself to defend these prerogatives whether they already existed or were still to be acquired or even claimed—i.e., “present and future.” [In the oath] the state was treated simply as the Emperor’s command [Machtbereich]: it was mentioned only once along with the Emperor, moreover in a context that assumed their identity of interests …⁷³

With a standing army of 2.6 million men, Russia had the largest military establishment in the world: it was nearly equal to the combined armies on active service of Germany and Austria-Hungary (1.9 and 1.1 million, respectively). Its size can be accounted for by two factors.

One was slowness of mobilization. Great distances aggravated by an inadequate railroad network meant that in the event of war Russia required much more time than her potential enemies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, to bring her forces to full combat strength: in the early years of the century, Russia’s mobilization was expected to take seven times as long as Germany’s.*

The other, no less weighty consideration had to do with internal security. Since the early eighteenth century, the Russian army was regularly employed in quelling popular disorders. Professional officers intensely disliked such work, considering it demeaning, but the regime had no choice in the matter since the police and gendarmes were inadequate to the task. During periods of widespread civil disturbances, the army was regularly employed for this purpose: in 1903, one-third of the infantry and two-thirds of the cavalry stationed in European Russia engaged in repressive action.† Furthermore, the government frequently appointed officers as governors-general in areas prone to violence. The government welcomed retired officers in the civil service, offering them equivalent chin and precedence over regular bureaucrats. While the security police concentrated on preventing sedition, the military was the monarchy’s main instrument of repression.

To ensure the loyalty of the armed forces, the authorities distributed non-Slavic inductees in such a manner that at least 75 percent of the troops in every unit were “Russians”—i.e., Great Russians, Ukrainians, or Belorussians. In the officer corps, the proportion of the East Slavic component was maintained at 80–85 percent.⁷⁴

The officer corps, 42,000 men strong in 1900, was a professional body in many ways isolated from society at large.⁷⁵ This is not to say that it was “feudal” or aristocratic, as it is often pictured. The military reforms carried out after the Crimean War had as one of their objectives opening the ranks of the officer corps to commoners; to this end, education was given as much weight in promotion as social origin. At the end of the century, only one-half of the officers on active duty were hereditary nobles,⁷⁶ a high proportion of them sons of officers and bureaucrats. Even so, there remained a certain distinction between officers of high social standing, often serving in elite Guard Regiments, and the rest—a distinction which was to play a not insignificant role in the Revolution and Civil War.

A commission required a course of training in a military school. These were of two kinds. The more prestigious Military Academies (Voennye Uchilishcha) enrolled graduates of secondary schools, usually Cadet Schools, who planned on becoming professional officers. They were taught by civilian instructors on the model of the so-called Realgimnaziia, which followed a liberal arts curriculum. Upon completion of their studies, graduates received commissions. The Iunker Academies (Iunkerskie Uchilishcha) had nothing in common with Prussian Junkers, enrolling mostly students of plebeian origin who, as a rule, had not completed secondary schooling, either for lack of money or because they could not cope with the classical-language requirements of Russian gymnasia. They admitted pupils of all social estates and religious affiliations except for Jews.* The program of study in these institutions was shorter (two years), and their graduates still had to undergo a stint as warrant officers before becoming eligible for a commission. The majority of the officers on active duty in 1900—two-thirds by one estimate, three-quarters by another—were products of the Iunker Academies; in October 1917 they would prove themselves the staunchest defenders of democracy. The upper grades of the service, however, were reserved for alumni of the Military Academies.

The military uniform carried little prestige in Russia. Salaries were too low to permit officers who had no independent means to aspire to a gentleman’s life: with a monthly wage of 41.25 rubles, an infantry second lieutenant earned not much more than a skilled worker. Officers of field rank could barely make ends meet or even feed themselves properly.⁷⁷ Foreign observers were struck by the lack of a sense of “honor” among Russian officers and their willingness to tolerate abuse from superiors.

The most prestigious service was with the Guard Regiments, commissions in which required social standing as well as independent income.⁷⁸ Nearly all the officers serving in the Guards were hereditary nobles: their system of cooptation kept out undesirables. Guard officers billeted in comfortable quarters in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw enjoyed certain privileges, among them accelerated promotion. These, however, were gradually whittled down, and abolished by the time World War I broke out.

The uppermost elite of the late Imperial Army was made up of alumni of the Military Academies, especially the two-and-a-half-year course of studies at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, which prepared specialists for high command posts. Admission was open to officers with three years of active duty who passed with distinction an appropriate examination: only one in thirty applicants qualified. Social origin made no difference: here “the son of an emancipated serf served … together with members of the Imperial family.”* The 1,232 graduates of the General Staff School—Genshtabisty—on active duty in 1904 developed a strong esprit de corps, helping each other and maintaining a solid front against outsiders. The brightest among them were assigned to the General Staff, which had responsibility for developing strategic policy. The rest took command posts. Their preponderance among officers of general rank was striking: although constituting between 5 and 10 percent of the officers on active duty, they commanded, in 1912, 62 percent of the army corps, 68 percent of the infantry divisions, 77 percent of the cavalry divisions, and 25 percent of the regiments. All seven of the last Ministers of War were alumni of the General Staff Academy.⁷⁹

General Anton Denikin, the leader in 1918–19 of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, claimed that relations between officers and enlisted men in the Imperial Army were as good as if not better than similar relations in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, and the treatment of the troops less brutal.⁸⁰ Contemporary evidence, however, does not support this claim. The Russian authorities insisted on observing very strict rank distinctions, subjecting soldiers to treatment that reminded some observers of serfdom. The men were addressed by officers in the second person singular, received an allowance of three or four rubles a year (one-hundredth of the pay of the most junior officer), and in some military districts were subjected to various indignities such as having to walk on the shady side of the street or to ride on streetcar platforms.⁸¹ The resentments which these discriminatory rules bred were a major cause of the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison in February 1917.

For the historian of the Revolution, the most important aspect of the late Imperial Army was its politics. Students of the subject agree that the Russian officer class was largely apolitical: not only did it not involve itself in politics, it showed no interest in it.† In officers’ clubs, political talk was considered in poor taste. Officers looked down on civilians, whom they nicknamed shpaki, most of all on politicians. Moreover they felt they could not uphold their oath to the Tsar if they became embroiled in partisan politics. Taught to regard loyalty to the powers that be as the supreme virtue, they were exceedingly ill prepared to cope with the conflicts that erupted in 1917. As long as the struggle for power was undecided, they stood on the sidelines. Once the Bolsheviks took over, many went into their service, since they were now “the authority” (vlast’), which they had been trained to obey. The specter of Russian Bonapartism, which so frightened Russian revolutionaries, was a figment of the imagination of intellectuals raised on the history of the French Revolution.

14. Dancing class at Smolnyi Institute, c. 1910.

After 1905 there emerged in the military a group of patriotic officers whose loyalty extended beyond the throne. Like the liberal bureaucrats, they saw themselves as serving the nation rather than the Crown. They were regarded with great suspicion.

The fourth instrument of tsarist authority, the gentry or dvorianstvo, was an eroding asset.*

Like the bureaucracy, the Russian gentry descended from a medieval service class which had performed for the princes a great variety of missions, principally military duty.⁸² Their service was lifelong and compensated mainly by income from fiefs, worked by serfs, who technically remained the Crown’s property. They were not a nobility in the true sense of the word because they had no corporate rights: such benefits as they enjoyed were perquisites of service. The dvoriane rose to a privileged position in the late eighteenth century when the monarchy, eager to divert their attention from politics, admitted them into partnership. In return for the gentry conceding the Tsars complete control over the sphere of high politics, they were given title to their estates as well as de facto ownership of the serfs (then about one-half of the population) and granted a corporate charter of rights, which included release from the obligation of bearing state service. The Golden Age of the dvoriane was between 1730 and 1825. Even then, the vast majority lived in poverty: only one-third had landed estates with serfs and of that number only a minority had enough land and serfs to live in any style.⁸³ Many rural gentry were hard to distinguish from their peasants.

The decline of the Russian gentry began in 1825, as a consequence of the Decembrist Revolt in which young members of the most distinguished noble families took up arms against the monarchy in the name of constitutional and republican ideals. Stung by this “betrayal,” Nicholas I increasingly came to rely on the professional bureaucracy. The economic death knell of the dvorianstvo rang in 1861 when the monarchy, overruling gentry opposition, emancipated the serfs. For although the number of gentry who owned serfs was not very large and most of those who did had too few to live off their labor, the monopoly on serf ownership was the most important advantage which that class had enjoyed. After 1861 the gentry retained certain valuable benefits (e.g., assured admission into the civil and military service), but even so it began to lose status as a privileged social estate.

This was a highly deplorable trend to most Russian conservatives, for whom the survival of Russia depended on a strong monarchy and on the support of privileged and prosperous landed gentry. In the closing three decades of the nineteenth century, much was written on this subject: this literature represented the last gasp of gentry conservatism, a doomed effort to revive the age of Catherine the Great.⁸⁴ The argument held that the landed gentry were the principal bearers of culture in the countryside. They could not be replaced by the bureaucracy because the latter had no roots in the land and merely “bivouacked” there: indeed, the bureaucracy itself was becoming radicalized due to the government’s preference for officials with higher education over those with proper social credentials. The decline of the gentry inevitably paved the way for the triumph of the radical intelligentsia who, working as rural teachers and professional staff of the zemstva, incited the peasantry instead of enlightening it. Such conservatives criticized the Great Reforms of Alexander II for diluting social distinctions. Their plea was for a return to the tradition of partnership between Crown and gentry.

This argumentation had an effect, the more so in that it received political backing from organized landowning groups close to the Court.⁸⁵ The latter managed to fend off social legislation injurious to their interests; but in this case, too, life was running in the opposite direction and it would be wrong to ascribe great influence to the conservative gentry on the regime of Nicholas II. The conservatives fantasized about restoring the partnership between the Crown and the gentry, but Russia was moving, however haltingly, toward social egalitarianism and common citizenship.

For one, an increasing number of gentry turned their back on the conservative ideology, adopting constitutional and even democratic ideals. The zemstvo movement, which gave a major impetus to the 1905 Revolution, had in its ranks a high proportion of dvoriane, scions of Russia’s oldest and most distinguished families. According to Witte, at the turn of the century at least one-half of the provincial zemstva, in which nobles played a leading role, demanded a voice in legislation.⁸⁶ Ignoring these realities, the monarchy continued to treat the gentry as a dependable pillar of absolutism. In 1904–5, when the necessity of granting the country a representative institution of some sort could no longer be ignored, some advisers urged giving the gentry a preponderant number of seats. It took an old grand duke to remind Nicholas that the nobles stood in the forefront of the current disturbances.⁸⁷

No less important was the fact that the gentry were steadily losing ground in the civil service and in land ownership.

The need for technically proficient administrative personnel forced the government, in hiring civil servants, increasingly to favor education over ancestry. As a consequence, the share of dvoriane in the bureaucracy steadily declined.⁸⁸

The gentry were pulling out of the countryside as well: in 1914, only 20 to 40 percent of Russian dvoriane still lived on the land, the rest having moved to the cities.⁸⁹ Under the 1861 Emancipation settlement the gentry had retained about one-half of their land; for the other half, which they were forced to cede to the liberated serfs, they received generous compensation. But the gentry did not know how to manage: some experts thought that in Great Russia it was impossible in any event to make a profit from agriculture using hired (rather than bonded) labor. Whatever the reason, the gentry disposed of their estates to peasants and others at a rate of approximately 1 percent a year. At the beginning of the century, they retained only 60 percent of the properties that had been theirs in 1861. Between 1875 and 1900, the proportion of the country’s privately owned (i.e., non-communal) land held by the gentry declined from 73.6 percent to 53.1 percent.⁹⁰ In January 1915, the gentry (including officers and officials) owned in European Russia 39 million desiatiny* of economically useful land (arable, woodland, and pasture), out of a total of 98 million—only slightly more than the peasants held in private ownership.⁹¹ The landowning gentry were a vanishing breed, squeezed from the countryside by the twin forces of economic pressure and peasant hostility.

Of the several institutions serving the Russian monarchy, the Orthodox Church enjoyed the greatest measure of popular support: it provided the main cultural link with the 80 million Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians professing the faith. The monarchy attached great importance to the Church by bestowing on it the status of the Established Church and granting it privileges not enjoyed by official Christian churches elsewhere.

The religiousness of Great Russians is a matter of dispute, some observers arguing that the peasant was deeply Christian, others viewing him as a superstitious agnostic who observed Christian rituals exclusively from concern for life after death. Others yet hold that the Great Russian population was “bi-religious,” with Christian and pre-Christian elements of its faith intermingled. The matter need not detain us. There is no dispute that the masses of the Orthodox population—the great majority of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians—faithfully observed the rituals of their church. Russia before the Revolution was visually and aurally filled with Christian symbols: churches, monasteries, ikons, and religious processions, the sound of liturgical music and the ringing of church bells.

The link between state and religion derived from the belief that Orthodoxy (Pravoslavie) was the national faith of Russia and that only its adherents were true Russians. A Pole or a Jew, no matter how assimilated and patriotic, remained in the eyes of the authorities as well as the Orthodox population an outsider. Membership in the Orthodox Church was a lifelong bond from which there was no escape:

Everybody is free to remain true to the religion of their fathers, but forbidden to make new proselytes. That privilege is reserved for the Orthodox Church alone; it is explicitly so stated in the text of the law. Everybody may enter that church; nobody may leave it. Russian Orthodoxy has doors which open only one way. The confessional laws fill out several chapters of vols, x., xiv., and xv. of the voluminous collection known as “the Code.” Every child born of Orthodox parents is perforce Orthodox; so is every child born of a mixed marriage. Indeed, such a marriage is possible only on this condition.… One article of the Code forbids Orthodox Russians to change their religion; another states the penalties incurred for such offences. The stray sheep is, in the first instance, paternally exhorted by his parish clergy, then made over to the consistory, then to the Synod. A term of penance in a convent can be inflicted. The apostate forfeits all civic rights; he cannot legally own or inherit anything. His kindred may seize on his property or step into his inheritance.… It is a crime to advise anybody to abandon the Orthodox religion; it is a crime to advise anybody against entering it.⁹²

The Imperial Government did not interfere with the religious observances of the other faiths, but as if to underscore the indissoluble link between Orthodoxy and Russianness, it classified all the other religions as “foreign confessions.”

The Russian regime was not “Caesaropapist,” in the sense of combining secular and spiritual authority, for the Tsar had no say in matters of dogma or ritual: his power was confined to the administration of the Church. Nevertheless, it is true that since the time of Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was to an extreme degree dependent on the state. By abolishing the Patriarchate and confiscating Church properties (a task completed by Catherine II) Peter made the Church beholden to the monarchy administratively as well as financially. The highest body regulating its affairs, the Holy Synod, was since Peter’s day chaired by a secular person, often a retired general, who functioned as a de facto Minister of Religion. The administrative structure of the Church paralleled that of the civil administration, in that the boundaries of the dioceses coincided with those of the provinces (gubernii). As was true of the bureaucracy, clergymen could be promoted, in this case from bishop to archbishop and then to metropolitan, without regard to the responsibilities entrusted to them, clerical title being treated like chin—that is, as a personal distinction rather than as an attribute of office.⁹³ The clergy were duty-bound to report to the police any information of conspiracies against the Emperor or the government, including that obtained during confession. They also had to denounce the appearance of suspicious strangers in their parishes.

The Orthodox Church was financially dependent on the government for salaries and subsidies, but derived most of its revenues independently.⁹⁴ All bishops and higher ecclesiastical dignitaries received generous salaries as well as living allowances, which they supplemented with incomes from Church and monastic properties. The parish clergy, too, was on state pay. In 1900, state appropriations to the Church amounted to 23 million rubles. This sum provided approximately one-fifth of the Church’s income—a respectable amount but hardly an explanation why the clergy stood by the monarchy in the 1905 Revolution.⁹⁵

The principal political responsibility of the Church was indoctrination. The Imperial Government eschewed in schools and the military establishment anything resembling national or ideological propaganda from fear that arguments used to justify the status quo would invite counterarguments. The fact that the country was a multinational empire also inhibited appeals to nationalism. The government preferred to act as if the existing political and social arrangement were a given. Only religious indoctrination was permitted, and that was the function the Orthodox clergy, especially in the classroom.

The Orthodox Church became first heavily engaged in popular education in the 1880s, after a decade of revolutionary turmoil. To counteract the influence of both radical propagandists and secular teachers on the rural population, the government charged the Church with operating a network of primary schools. At the turn of the century, slightly more than one-half of the grade schools in the Empire, with approximately one-third of the pupils, were under Church supervision.⁹⁶ Heavy stress was placed on ethics as well as language training (Church Slavonic and Russian). Their teachers, however, were so miserably paid compared with those employed by secular schools that they had difficulty competing and kept losing pupils to their rivals.

Students of the Orthodox faith in all primary and secondary schools were required to take courses in religion, usually taught by clergymen. (Pupils of other faiths had the option of having religion taught by their own teachers.) The instruction stressed, along with moral precepts, loyalty to and respect for the Tsar. These feeble efforts were the best that the Imperial Government had to offer in the realm of political indoctrination.

In times of internal unrest, the Church played its part in support of law and order through sermons and publications. The Church depicted the Tsar as the vicar of God and condemned disobedience to him as a sin. In this connection, the Orthodox Church frequently resorted to anti-Semitic appeals. The most anti-Semitic of all the Christian churches, it played a major part in excluding Jews from Russia prior to the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century and keeping them confined to the provinces of what had been Poland (the “Pale of Settlement”) afterward. The clergy blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, and without endorsing pogroms, did not condemn them either. In 1914, the Synod authorized the construction of a church to commemorate the victim of Beilis’s alleged “ritual murder.”⁹⁷ In 1905 and after, Orthodox publications placed on Jews responsibility for the revolutionary ferment, accusing them of conspiring to destroy Christianity and take over the world.

The last decade of the Imperial regime saw developments within the Church that from the government’s point of view augured ill for the future.

The formal monopoly of the Established Church on the dogmas and rituals of the Orthodox religion had long been challenged by two heresies, that of the Old Believers and those known collectively as Dissenters or Sectarians. The Old Believers (staroobriadtsy as they called themselves or raskol’niki—“splitters”—as they were labeled by the official Church) descended from those Russians who in the seventeenth century had rejected the ritualistic changes introduced by Patriarch Nikon. Although persecuted and discriminated against, they held their own and even managed, surreptitiously, to make converts. They developed a strong spirit of cohesion and, as is often the case with persecuted minorities, became successful at business. The Sectarians divided into numerous branches, some of which resembled Protestant sects, others of which reverted to pre-Christian practices, accompanied by all kinds of sexual excesses. Official censuses placed the number of Old Believers and Sectarians at 2 million (1897), approximately one-half of them Old Believers, but their actual number was certainly much higher, for the government, treating adherents of these groups as apostates, did not hesitate to falsify statistics. Some estimates place their memberships as high as 20 million. If correct, this would mean that at the turn of the century approximately one out of four Great Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians was outside the official Church. Not surprisingly, the Church was in the forefront of those urging the persecution of the Old Believers and Dissenters, who were making serious inroads on its membership.

There also developed within the Church, especially among the parish clergy, dangerous oppositional trends. Enlightened clergymen pressed for reforms in the status of the Church: worried about too close an identification with the monarchy, they demanded greater independence. After 1905, the government was disturbed to see some clergymen elected to the Duma take their seats alongside liberal and even radical deputies and join in criticizing the regime.

But the clerical hierarchy remained staunchly conservative, as became evident every time lay Christians wanted the Church to pay less attention to ritual and more to good works. In 1901, the Synod excommunicated Leo Tolstoy, the most influential religious writer in Russia, on the grounds that he incited the population against social distinctions and patriotism.

The close identification of the Orthodox Church with the state proved a mixed blessing. While it gave the clerical Establishment all kinds of benefits, it linked its destiny too closely to that of the monarchy. In 1916–17, when the Crown would come under assault, the Church could do very little to help: and when the monarchy sank, it went down with it.

In the eyes of foreign observers Russia of 1900 was a mixture of contradictions. A French commentator compared her to “one of those castles, constructed at different epochs, where the most discordant styles are seen side by side, or else those houses, built piecemeal and at intervals, which never have either the unity or convenience of dwellings erected on one plan and at one rush.”⁹⁸ The Revolution of 1905 was an explosion of these contradictions. The fundamental question facing Russia after the October Manifesto was whether the settlement offered by the Crown would suffice to calm passions and resolve social and political conflicts. To understand why the prospect for such a compromise was poor, it is necessary to know the condition and mentality of the two main protagonists, the peasantry and the intelligentsia.

*The origins and evolution of Russian patrimonialism are the theme of my Russia under the Old Regime (London and New York, 1974).

*The zemstva and Municipal Councils, organs of local self-government introduced in 1864–70, performed important cultural and economic functions (education, sanitation, etc.) but had no administrative authority.

†Russia was a multinational empire in which the dominant nation, the Great Russians, constituted at the turn of the century 44.4 percent of the population. The majority were other Orthodox Slavs (Ukrainians, 17.8 percent, and Belorussians, 4.7 percent); Poles (6.3 percent); Muslims, mostly Turkic speaking and Sunni (11.1 percent); Jews (4.2 percent); and various Baltic, Caucasian, and Siberian nationalities. The total population of the Empire, according to the first census taken in 1897, was 125.7 million (exclusive of Finland, which was a separate Grand Duchy under the Russian Tsar, and the Central Asian Muslim protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara). Of the 55.7 million Great Russians, some 85 percent were peasants.

*Compare this with the strikingly similar remark of Louis XVI. On being informed of his father’s death, he exclaimed: “What a burden! And I have been taught nothing! It seems as though the universe were about to fall upon me”: Pierre Gaxotte, The French Revolution (London-New York, 1932), 71.

*In fact, Nicholas himself had hardly any Russian blood in his veins: since the eighteenth century, through intermarriage with German and Danish families, Russian monarchs were Russians in name only. Their opponents liked to taunt them as the “Gottorp-Holstein” dynasty, which, genealogically speaking, was not far from the truth.

* A. A. Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London, 1935), 127–31. Witte recalls that when he used the expression “public opinion” in the Tsar’s presence, Nicholas responded with passion: “And what is public opinion to me?”: S.lu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, II (Moscow, 1960), 328.

*The rules governing the Russian bureaucracy were formalized in Volume III of the Code of Laws: Ustav o sluzhbe po opredeleniiu ot pravitel’stva: Izdanie 1896 goda, Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1913). All further references are to this edition. In Imperial Russia the term neblagonadëzhnyi had legal standing and could lead to the dismissal from any state institution, including the universities. It was formally defined by Minister of the Interior N. P. Ignatev, in 1881: P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880kh godov (Moscow, 1964), 395.

* Bernard Pares, Russia and Reform (London, 1907), 328. According to one contemporary source, some Russian officials believed that treating their own population brutally enhanced the country’s standing abroad. Western powers, which provided Russia with loans, were said to be impressed by strength: “the more cruelly affairs were conducted inside Russia, the more her respect grew in Europe”: Die Judenpogrome in Russland, I (Köln-Leipzig, 1910), 230. There is, indeed, a relevant Russian proverb: “Beat your own people and others will fear you.”

*H.-J. Torke makes the interesting suggestion that the notorious venality of Russian officials was at least in part due to their self-identification with the state and the resulting difficulty of distinguishing private property from public: Jahrbücher, 227.

*It must be noted, however, that in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy it was not uncommon to find officials who resented the existing regime and sympathized with the opposition: Sergius A. Korff, Autocracy and Revolution in Russia (New York, 1923), 13–14.

*On this, see Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation (New York, 1966). It is testimony, however, of the independence of the Russian judiciary of the time that notwithstanding immense pressure brought on it by the bureaucracy and the Church, the court acquitted Beilis. The role of anti-Semitism in late Imperial politics is dealt with in Heinz-Dietrich Loewe’s Antisemitismus und Reaktionäre Utopie (Hamburg, 1978), which lays stress on the identification of Jews with international capital, and Hans Rogger’s Jewish Policies and Right-wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

*Exempt from his authority were the governors-general placed in charge of selected areas and accountable directly to the Tsar. In 1900, there were seven of them: one in Moscow, three in the troublesome western provinces (Warsaw, Vilno, and Kiev), and three in remote Siberia (Irkutsk, the Steppe, and the Amur River region). Combining civil with military authority, they resembled viceroys.

*S. Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, III (Moscow, 1960), 107. In 1905 Witte refused the post of Minister of the Interior because he did not want to become a policeman.

*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 133. Von Laue cites Witte to the effect that “a modern body politic cannot be great without a well-developed national industry”: Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York-London, 1963), 262.

*Bertrand Gille, Histoire Economique et Sociale de la Russie (Paris, 1949), 163–65. According to Geoffrey Drage [Russian Affairs (New York-London, 1904) 287], in 1900, 60.5 percent of the Russian railroad network was state property.

† In September-November 1891, as the news of the crop failures spread abroad, the price of 4 percent Russian bonds dropped from 97.5 to 87, raising the return from 4.1 percent to 4.6 percent: René Girault, Emprunts Russes et Investissements Français en Russie, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1973), 197.

*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 135. John P. McKay [Pioneers for Profit (Chicago, 1970), 37] believes that in 1914 “foreigners held at least two-fifths of the total of nominal capital of corporations operating in Russia.”

† Vitte, Vospominaniia, II, 501. Although basically correct, this claim is an exaggeration, since the Extraordinary Budget, based on foreign borrowings, also paid a good part of the defense expenditures. It was also used for debt servicing.

*McKay, Pioneers, 383–86. McKay stresses, in addition to capital investments, the great contribution made by foreigners in bringing to Russia advanced industrial technology: Ibid., 38283.

†Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life, 3rd ed. (New York, 1951), 541. Other historians estimate that in 1914 Europeans held between $4.5 and $5.5 billion in U.S. bonds: William J. Shultz and M. R. Caine, Financial Development of the United States (New York, 1937), 502.

‡Leo Pasvolsky and Harold G. Moulton, Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction (New York, 1924), 112. To these figures must be added the value of products turned out by cottage industries (kustarnaiapromyshlennost’), which Pasvolsky estimates at approximately 50 percent of the above: Ibid., 113.

*Based on statistics in Jürgen Nötzold, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypian (Berlin, 1966), 110.

*See below, Chapter 6.

†P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii (Moscow, 1973), 34. Zaionchkovskii provides a table showing Russian army involvement in suppressing disorders between 1883 and 1903 (Ibid., 35). The subject is treated at length in William C. Fuller’s Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1985).

*In 1886 the Russian army had at most twelve Jewish officers: Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, 201–2.

*Matitiahu Mayzel in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, XVI, No. 3/4 (1975), 300–1. According to Zaionchkovskii (Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, 320n.–321n.), the number of nobles attending the Academy at the turn of the century was very small.

†This was in contrast to the Japanese army, which paid great attention to ideological indoctrination: Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, N.J., 1985). Russian soldiers received no indoctrination: A. I. Denikin, Staraia armiia (Paris, 1929), 50–51.

*According to the 1897 Census there were in the Empire 1,220,000 hereditary dvoriane (of both sexes), of them 641,500 native speakers of “Russian” (i.e. Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian): N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia Vseobshchaia Perepis’ Naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g.: Obshchii Svod, II (St. Petersburg, 1905), 374. Dvoriane thus constituted nearly 1 percent of the population.

*One desiatina equals 2.7 acres or 1.1 hectares.