Figure 16. Count Sergei Witte, probably in New Hampshire for the Portsmouth Treaty in 1905.
The only problem with this brilliant plan was Japan. Exactly in the 1890s Japan was making its own first steps toward empire in Asia, with its defeat of China and increasing informal power in Korea. The presence of a Russian railroad, Harbin, and a naval base at Port Arthur was a serious irritant to the Japanese and a direct consequence of Witte’s policies. For the time being, however, peace remained, and Russia, Japan, and the European powers worked together to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900).
Figure 17. Tsar Nicholas II on the imperial yacht Shtandart.
In 1894 Alexander III died. Though his policies kept Russia from moving forward in almost all areas but industrialization and empire building, he was at least a firm leader capable of making difficult decisions, as Witte recognized. His son, Nicholas II, was a man of very different character. He utterly lacked his father’s ability to take charge and make use of his ministers. Alexander had gone along with them on most occasions but had also been willing to accept a minority view and support it. Nicholas often simply agreed with whoever spoke to him last, and then changed his mind again. He shared his father’s views of the worthlessness of legislatures, freedom of speech, and human rights and tended to see the hidden hand of the Jews in liberalism and socialism. Had he not been the tsar, he would have made an ideal conservative country gentleman, for he was also gracious, kind, and a good family man. His wife Alexandra, the German princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, encouraged all these characteristics, as she was equally conservative and equally devoted to her family.
Unfortunately Alexandra’s devotion to her family and her limited horizons were not helpful in dealing with the hemophilia that her son, the heir to the throne Alexei, had from birth. Her response was to turn to a series of faith healers, each one more influential than the last. To top it off, the fully justified fear of terrorists increased the isolation of Nicholas and his family, in turn making it even harder for them to understand what was happening around them. The endless round of trips to the Crimea and elsewhere, the occasional court entertainments and family excursions on the imperial yacht did not leave much space for contact with the people. The only public appearances were carefully staged, often as part of religious ceremonies, which gave both tsar and people an utterly false sense of the country’s needs and public opinion.
At first, however, everything went well. Nicholas was a great enthusiast for the Far East and its development and supported Witte to the hilt. He even supported the Minister’s controversial placing of Russia on the gold standard in 1897, a measure designed to encourage investment and industrialization but a decision that was not necessarily good for the agrarian interests that the nobility defended. After 1900 the tsar’s support for Witte began to erode. The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve, a career official and powerful personality, to head the Ministry of the Interior gave Witte a strong rival, and by the middle of 1903 Nicholas had removed the Minister of Finance from office. Plehve’s only solution to Russia’s problems was more repression, both of revolutionaries and middle and upper class liberals.
All of these opposition groups rapidly grew and consolidated in the 1890s. The first to organize were the Marxists, who rejected terror in favor of organizing workers to strike and fight employers and the state in collective action. The Marxists who managed to meet and adopt a general program in 1898 were then immediately arrested and the various Marxist groups did not come together again until 1903. When they met in London that year a new figure came to the fore, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University with experience in the underground and exile. This was Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov, whose revolutionary pseudonym was Lenin. The son of a high school science teacher and inspector of public schools in Simbirsk on the Volga, Lenin had gone from Siberian exile to Western Europe to edit a socialist journal, Iskra (Spark), through which he and Marxism acquired a following among the students and few workers who were the seedbed of the revolutionary movement. At the congress in London the party was refounded with a more elaborate program and structure, and the first disagreements broke out. The aim of the Marxists was to overthrow the tsar and establish a democratic republic (a “bourgeois revolution”). That is to say, they believed that until this task was completed, they should not try for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the introduction of socialism. The enemy for now was the tsar. Thus they would be operating under the autocracy, continuously at war with the police, and Lenin believed that the party should be primarily an underground movement of professional revolutionaries. His opponents, with their most accomplished leader Iulii Martov, thought that Lenin was exaggerating the need to concentrate on the underground struggle and wanted a looser party. In the vote on the question Lenin won by a narrow majority, and his followers thus acquired the name Bolsheviks (bol’she meaning “more”) and Martov’s followers Mensheviks (men’she meaning “less”). This dispute did not yet engage the few worker activists, and remained the province of the party’s intelligentsia. For that is what the leaders were in these early years. Martov’s father was a prosperous Jewish businessman and journalist in the Russian-language Jewish press, and he himself attended the gymnasia in St. Petersburg and had a year at the university before he was arrested for revolutionary activity. Trotsky came from a family of Jewish farmers, the descendents of settlers in New Russia from the time of Alexander I. The graduate of an elite Lutheran high school in Odessa, Leon Trotsky, like Lenin and Martov, was typical of the early revolutionary leaders.
The Marxists were not the only political group to form. In 1901 the revolutionary groups who looked back to the old populist tradition of the 1870s came together to form the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. They continued to believe that capitalism was an artificial transplant on peasant Russia, and in theory would concentrate their efforts on the villages. In practice they found the peasants hard to organize, and most of their followers were in the urban factories. The SRs, as they were called, also absorbed some Marxist ideas to produce an eclectic ideology no less appealing for its lack of consistency. They also continued to believe that terror against government officials was a useful tool, and alongside the SR party agitators in the factories the Fighting Organization waged a relentless war against the government with a series of spectacular assassinations. The police naturally concentrated most of its attention on this group, and from 1903 to 1908 the head of the Fighting Organization was a police agent named Evno Azef.
The last to form an organization, not surprisingly, were the liberals. Their appearance on the political scene was part of the larger ferment in middle and upper class Russia that grew rapidly toward the end of the century. Since the 1860s innumerable professional groups and societies had come into existence, organizations of chemists and engineers, doctors and agronomists. The businessmen were particularly active in forming lobby groups to pressure for favorable economic policies, protective tariffs, and a more modern (and friendly to business) legal framework for their activity. The business groups were not merely groups of manufacturers or bankers dealing privately with the government, they met in conventions, using the great Nizhnii Novgorod fair and the many exhibitions as fora for public discussion of their needs. The newspapers reported extensively on these meetings, which addressed Russia’s many needs but studiously avoided constitutional issues. Many of these organizations were initially supported or even created by the Ministry of Finance as a measure to encourage progress, and the members were mostly intensely loyal in their politics. In the course of time, however, business and other organizations broadened the discussion of social and economic issues, expressing the frustration of these levels of society with a government that they increasingly perceived as too conservative and too slow to respond to the needs of a changing society.