As we look beneath the surfaces of these events, it is useful to begin with ideas about the nature of state power in Russia, which were more complex than is allowed by the simple definition of Russia's political order as an 'autocracy'. The Fundamental Laws continued to insist that the Russian emperor (as the tsar was also called since Peter the Great) was a monarch with 'autocratic and unlimited' power, a redundancy meant to suggest both the lack of formal bounds to his authority and the personal nature of his sacred authority and will. In the wake of the manifesto of 17 October 1905, the stipulation that the tsar's authority was 'unlimited' was reluctantly dropped: the new Fundamental Laws of 1906 defined the monarch as holding 'Supreme Autocratic Power', impressive but not 'unlimited', for the law also recognised the new authority of the legislative State Duma.[5]
In practice, even before the 1905 Revolution, the tsar's power was not boundless in its reach nor could it all emanate directly from his own person. Although all servants of the state were in theory accountable to the tsar, Russia's legions of officials and bureaucrats necessarily exercised considerable practical power. It is impossible to speak, for example, ofthe policies ofthe imperial regime in its final decades without recognising the influence of ministers such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Sergei Witte or Petr Stolypin. Their influence, however, was contradictory. On the one hand, Pobedonostsev, a tutor to Nicholas II as well as to his father and the lay official (ChiefProcurator) in charge ofthe Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905, fought vigorously and, for many years, effectively against any concessions to civil liberties and constitutionalist reform, which he viewed as a dangerous course inspired by the fundamental philosophical error, derived from the Enlightenment, of belief in the perfectibility of man and society.[6] By contrast, Witte and Stolypin, leading government ministers, each eventually holding the post of prime minister (Witte 1903-6 and Stolypin 1906-11) and both loyal to the principle that Russia required and that God had willed a strong state, recognised the need for political and social reform to restore stability to Russia after 1905. Witte's advice, to which Nicholas turned in desperation amidst the upheavals of 1905, was crucial to the decision to issue the October manifesto. And without Stolypin's 'drive and persistence' and 'commanding presence', a recent historian has written, the state's policy of intertwined reform and repression in the years 1906-11 is 'inconceivable'.[7]
Still, the tsar retained, even after 1905, substantial power. He alone appointed and dismissed ministers and he, not the Duma, controlled the bureaucracy, foreign policy, the military and the Church. He retained, by law, veto power over all legislation, the right to dissolve the Duma and hold new elections, and the right to declare martial law. He felt growing regret in his final years for the concessions he made in 1905-6 under duress and did much to undo them. Indeed, it has been argued persuasively that Nicholas II (supported and encouraged by prominent conservative figures) was ultimately a force for instability in the emerging political order of late Imperial Russia. While ministers like Witte and Stolypin and the legislators of the Duma worked to construct a stable polity around the ideal of a modernised autocracy ruling according to law and over a society of citizens, Nicholas II was at the forefront of those embracing a political vision that sought to resituate legitimate state power in the person of the emperor. To put this in more political-philosophical terms, 'rather than accommodating the monarchy to the demands for a civic nation', Nicholas II and his allies 'redefined the concept of nation to make it a mythical attribute of the monarch'.[8]
As a symbolic and performative accompaniment to these ideas, and to quite tangible policies of authoritarian control, the last tsar engaged in an elaborate effort to demonstrate publicly that the legitimacy and even efficacy of his immense authority was grounded not in constitutional relationships with various constituencies of the nation or the empire but in his own personal virtue (devotion to duty, orderliness in private and public life, familial devotion and love, religious piety) and in the mystical bond ofmutual devotion and love uniting tsar and 'people' (by which was meant mainly those whom Nicholas called the 'true Russian people'). Public rituals of national 'communion' and 'love', often gesturing to an idealised pre-modern past, proliferated, such as Easter celebrations in the pre-Petrine capital of Moscow signalling the tsar's communion with the nation and tradition, or journeys of remembrance and dynastic nationalism into the Russian heartland during the 1913 tercentenary of Romanov rule, or the ceremony on Palace Square at the outbreak of war in 1914 when Nicholas, with tears in his eyes, exchanged ritual bows with his people.[9]Nicholas II was not alone, of course, in imagining Russia's salvation to lie in an ideal of the paternal state standing above society - free and independent of government bureaucracy, fractious political parties, selfish social groups and individuals and even law itself- to defend the common good, care for the poor and downtrodden and advance principle over vested interest. Ultimately, the official embrace of this vision of the Russian political nation would contribute to the rejection of monarchy in 1917. But its echoes would also play a part in how state and party were envisioned later in the twentieth century.
Intellectuals and ideologies of dissent
Russia's growing class of educated men and women offered a wealth of alternative visions of power and society to those of the monarch, the state and their conservative supporters. In spirit, many educated liberals and radicals in the early twentieth century felt themselves to be heirs to the traditions of the nineteenth-century 'intelligentsia', a group distinguished not by education alone, nor even by a shared interest in ideas, but by a cultural and political identity constituted in opposition to a repressive order and in the pursuit of the common good and universal values. Like these forebears, they often suffered as individuals for daring to criticise and act against the established order. Still, they managed to meet together, to form clandestine 'circles' (kruzhki), and to organise a series of oppositional parties, ranging from liberals to Social Democrats and neo-populists to militant communists and anarchists.
On the moderate Left, liberals were divided over strategy and tactics - reflected especially in the post-1905 split between the Left-liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) and the relatively pro-government Union of 17 October (Octobrists). But they shared a common set of goals for transforming Russia into a strong and modern polity: the rule of law replacing the arbitrary will of autocrat, bureaucrats and police; basic civil rights (freedom of conscience, religion, speech, assembly) for all citizens of the empire; a democratic parliament (Kadets viewed the system established after 1905 as incomplete); strong local self-government (many liberals were involved in the zemstvo councils of rural self-government or in city councils); and social reforms to ensure social stability and justice, such as extension of public education, moderate land reform to make more land available to peasants and protective labour legislation. They also believed strongly in the need for personal moral transformation, making individuals into modern selves inspired by values of individual initiative, self-reliance, self-improvement, discipline and rationality. In many respects, like the monarchy itself, liberals viewed themselves as acting for the national good rather than the interests of any particular class. This was especially true of the Kadets, who vehemently insisted that they were 'above class' and even 'above party'. The good they sought to promote was, of course, the good of the individual - a liberal touchstone - but also the development of a national community founded on free association and patriotic solidarity.[10]
5
6
Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
7
Ascher,
8
Richard S. Wortman,
9
Ibid., vol. II, chs. 9-14; Andrew Verner,
10
Shmuel Galai,