Narodnaia Volia had paid no attention to Loris-Melikov and the rumors of reform. In any case the prospect of reform did not cheer them, for it might help the government survive and further economic reform might damage the peasant commune. Narodnaia Volia’s Executive Committee under Alexander Zheliabov and Sofia Perovskaia put all its resources into killing the tsar, and on March 1, 1881, they succeeded. As Alexander was returning to the Winter Palace along the Catherine Canal in Petersburg, one of the revolutionaries threw a bomb at his carriage. Several of his guards and a fourteen-year-old boy were killed, many were wounded, and the tsar got out of the carriage to see what had happened. A second terrorist in the crowd threw another bomb at him, fatally wounding the tsar and killing himself. Alexander was carried to the Winter Palace with his legs blown off and soon died. The last words of the tsar who had freed the peasants, and, however haltingly, transformed Russia were, “it is cold, it is cold…take me to the Palace…to die.”
Now his son Alexander came to the throne as Alexander III, and after some initial discussion, any talk of reform or legislatures came to an end and Loris-Melikov lost his position. The assassins were publicly hanged. The educated classes were appalled that the revolutionaries had killed the tsar, while many of the peasants believed that it was a conspiracy of the nobles acting in revenge for the emancipation of the serfs. Another effect of the assassination was the first great wave of pogroms against the Jews in the Ukrainian provinces of southern Russia. It was a fitting beginning to more than a decade of conservative politics and attempts at counter-reform. Yet counter-reform ultimately achieved little. It was a tribute to the strength of the original reforms and their anchoring in law that most of them could not be undone. The zemstvos, for example, were continually harassed by the minions of the Ministry of the Interior, but they continued to exist and work. The new institutions had become part of the fabric of Russian society, whose increasing progress kept them alive. In spite of the use of censorship and forms of repression like administrative exile for liberals and radicals alike, the press flourished and expanded, providing a forum for the discussion of as much of the government’s policies as it could get away with. Alexander III’s autocracy could retard the development of Russian society, but could not stop it.
12 From Serfdom to Nascent Capitalism
The city of St. Petersburg exemplified the transformation of Russia in the decades after the emancipation of the serfs. As the nineteenth century progressed, it changed from an administrative capital of government buildings and aristocratic residences with a seaport into a major industrial center served by railroads as well as the ever-expanding port and the older canal system.
Though built as a seaport on the Baltic, the shape of the older St. Petersburg was created by the Winter Palace and the ring of military and government buildings around it. Most of these were classical in style, and three or four-stories high at most. Peter had wanted to concentrate the actual government on the north side of the Neva River, on Vasil’ev Island, but the site was too remote in the absence of permanent bridges, and in any case the government needed to be near the center of power, the tsar. Thus the Winter Palace, on the south side of the river and near the western end of Nevskii Prospekt, the main street, quickly became the center of the city. The General Staff of the army and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were right across the Palace Square, the Ministry of Finance nearby, as well as the Senate, the Council of State, and other major offices. Only the expanded Ministry of the Interior came to occupy new buildings on the Fontanka River farther to the south. Trade and commerce, until mid-century, were concentrated along Nevskii Prospekt and on Vasil’ev Island, the latter home to the city’s large German and foreign merchant population.
The transformation of the city began to speed up after the Crimean War, as railroad building and new industries began to change the landscape. In these years St. Petersburg’s port was a great asset, for much of the equipment and raw materials for the new industries came from abroad. The great industrial boom of the 1890s changed all that, as Russia began to rely more on internal resources. Metallurgy and machine building became the city’s biggest industries. Located primarily on the outskirts, the huge factories with smoking chimneys replaced the suburban villas, forests, and villages of former times. The port turned into a giant ship-building yard. Factories with newer technology, such as the electric industries, were built in the center of the town, so that the city never acquired the radical social segregation characteristic of Western cities at the time. The industrial boom also brought a tremendous expansion in banking and finance, centered still on Nevskii Prospekt and the adjoining streets.
The economic boom changed the city in other ways. The population doubled between the 1890s and 1914, from about a million to around two million. Most of these new residents were workmen, living in barracks near the main factories, often without their families who remained back in their native villages. At the other end of the social scale, the newly rich bankers and railroad kings bought or built grand mansions on the river near the center of town. Many of the great aristocrats were heavily invested in the new industries, and their increased wealth showed itself in ever more luxurious residences in and around the city. The boom also brought a new middle class into being, employees of the new businesses, engineers and technicians, and the many schoolteachers, doctors, and retailers who served them. The burgeoning population and its needs brought a boom in construction, especially along the central streets and on the northern edge of the city. The new buildings displayed the architectural fads of the time, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, and often the Russian versions of art nouveau. The strictly classical St. Petersburg was becoming a much more eclectic city, but the classical core remained. Builders were not allowed to build higher than the Winter Palace, so there were limits to the scope of change. The result was also a city very much less densely built up than Paris or Berlin, even if much of it lacked formal public parks.