Russia's fin de siecle, 1900-1914
MARK D. STEINBERG
The critical years from the turn of the century to the eve of the First World War were a time of uncertainty and crisis for Russia's old political, social and cultural order, but also a time of possibility, imagination and daring. A chronological narrative of events is one way to retell this contradictory story. Still useful too is rehearsing the old debate about whether Russia was heading towards revolution in these pre-war years (the 'pessimistic' interpretation as it has been named in the historiography and in much classroom pedagogy) or was on a path, had it not been for the burdens and stresses of war, towards resolving tensions and creating a viable civil society and an adequately reformed political order (the 'optimistic' narrative). The conventional narrative of successive events and likely outcomes, however, suggests more coherence, pattern and telos than the times warrant. To understand these years as both an end time and a beginning, and especially to understand the perceptions, values and expectations with which Russians lived these years and entered the war, the revolution and the new Soviet era, we must focus on the more complexly textured flux of everyday life and how people perceived these experiences and imagined change.
History as event
The years 1900-14 are full of events marking these times as extraordinary years of change and consequence. In 1903, as part of the government's ongoing efforts to strengthen the state by stimulating the expansion of a modern industrial economy, the great Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, symbolising both the growth of the railroad as an engine of industrial development (the driving idea of the minister of finance, Sergei Witte) and the imperial reach of the state.1 In the same year, in direct opposition to this growing power of the state,
1 T. H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
members of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, meeting at its second congress in Brussels and then London (the stillborn founding congress was in 1898), created an organisation designed to incite and lead democratic and social revolution in Russia, though it also split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, over questions of how disciplined and closed such a party should be.[1]
The year 1904 saw the start of the Russo-Japanese war, a disastrous conflict sparked by Russia's expansion into China and Korea in the face of Japan's own regional desires, further fuelled by Russian overconfidence and racist contempt for the Japanese. The assassination by revolutionaries in the summer of 1904 of the notoriously conservative minister of internal affairs, Viacheslav Plehve, and his replacement by Prince Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who openly spoke as few tsarist officials had before of finding ways for the voice of 'society' to be heard, initiated what many expectantly called a political 'spring' in relations between state and society. A 'banquet campaign', inspired by the French example of 1847-8, was staged by increasingly well-organised liberals, who gathered over dinner and drinks to make fervent speeches and pass resolutions calling for democratising political change.[2] And then came the 'Revolution' of 1905, an unprecedented empire-wide upheaval, set in motion by the violent suppression on 9 January ('Bloody Sunday') in St Petersburg of a mass procession of workers with a petition for the tsar. The revolution had many faces: workers' and students' strikes, demonstrations (both dignified and rowdy) stretching through city streets, spates of vandalism and other periodic violence, assassinations of government officials, naval mutinies, nationalist movements in the imperial borderlands, anti-Jewish pogroms and other reactionary protest and violence, and, by the end of the year, a series of armed uprisings, violently suppressed.[3] These revolutionary upheavals extracted a remarkable concession from the government: Nicholas Il's 'October manifesto', which for the first time in Russian history guaranteed a measure of civil liberties and a parliament (the State Duma) with legislative powers.
The years following the 1905 Revolution were marked by a succession of contradictory events. New fundamental laws in 1906 established the legislative Duma but also restricted its authority in many ways - not least of which was the complete lack of parliamentary control over the appointment or dismissal of cabinet ministers. Trade unions and strikes were legalised, but police retained extensive authority to monitor union activities and to close unions for engaging in illegal political activities or even allowing political speeches at meetings. Greater press freedom was guaranteed, but in practice was subject to constant harassment, punitive fines and closure for overstepping the bounds of tolerated free speech. In the early summer of 1907, the new prime minister, Petr Stolypin, seeking to defuse persistent criticism of the government by liberals and the Left in the first and second State Dumas (the first Duma closed after seventy-three days, the second lasted three months), revised the electoral law, reducing representation by peasants, workers and non-Russian nationalities, and increasing that of the gentry, hoping to ensure that the new Duma would be more compliant. Stolypin's 'coup', as it was dubbed, proved effective, in the short term, in quietening the Duma. Stolypin was similarly effective, again at least in the short term, in 'pacifying', as it was then called, continuing political and social unrest in the country During 1906-7, disagreeable publications were shut down by the hundreds and summary courts martial tried and sentenced hundreds of individuals accused of sedition. In the first few months, more than a thousand people were executed, inspiring grim ironic talk of 'Stolypin's necktie' - the noose. These repressions were not without reason: assassinations or attempts on the lives of tsarist officials were frequent during 1906. Characteristically, Stolypin paired his political authoritarianism with a commitment to modernising social reform in Russia, visible above all in laws he was able to pass designed to break up the traditional peasant commune in the hope of leading rural society away from dangerous communalism and out of what many saw as its destabilising backwardness.[4]
The relative stability of the years between 1907 and the start of war in 1914 - a time when many who dreamed of change spoke of Russia as mired in political darkness, stifling repression, of bleak hopelessness - were marred (or brightened, depending on one's point of view) by unsettling events. Terrorist assassinations continued, in defiance of Stolypin's harsh repressions; indeed in 1911, Stolypin himself was fatally shot, in the presence of the tsar, while at a theatre in Kiev. The year before, the writer Lev Tolstoy's death inspired widespread public acts of mourning for a man who had been excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901 for his influential denial of much of Church dogma and ritual in favour of an ethical religion of inward purity and virtuous practice; adding to his sins and popularity, Tolstoy had made use of his status as a moral prophet to openly criticise the brutality of the government of Stolypin and Nicholas II. A new wave of strikes broke out beginning in 1910, though especially in the wake of news of the violent death of over a hundred striking workers attacked by government troops in 1912 in the Lena goldfields in Siberia. But perhaps the most ominous events of these years, which filled the daily press, took place abroad. Russians closely followed the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. For many, these were struggles for independence by Slavic Orthodox nations, necessarily and justly backed by Russia. But many also saw in these distant conflicts threatening signs of a much greater European war.
The political ideology of autocracy
1
Leopold Haimson,
2
Abraham Ascher,
4
Abraham Ascher,