It is forced labour that lays those streets down, that drains the wetlands and raises columns in the quag. Tens of thousands of conscript serfs and convicts, forced under guard to struggle across the vastness of Peter’s lands. They come and dig foundations in the muck, and die in vast numbers. One hundred thousand corpses lie beneath the city. St Petersburg will be known as ‘the city built on bones’.
In 1712, in a decisive move against a Muscovite past he scorns, Tsar Peter makes St Petersburg Russia’s capital. For the next two centuries and more, it is here that politics will move most quickly. Moscow and Riga and Ekaterinburg and all the countless other towns and cities and all the sprawling regions of the empire are vital, their stories cannot be neglected, but St Petersburg will be the crucible of the revolutions. The story of 1917 – born out of a long prehistory – is above all the story of its streets.
Russia, a confluence of European and easterly Slavic traditions, is long gestated among debris. According to a key protagonist of 1917, Leon Trotsky, it is thrown up by ‘the western barbarians settled in the ruins of Roman culture’. For centuries a succession of kings – tsars – trade and war with nomads of the Eastern steppes, with the Tatars, with Byzantium. In the sixteenth century, Tsar Ivan IV, whom history calls the Terrible, slaughters his way into territories east and north until he becomes ‘Tsar of All Russias’, head of a colossal and multifarious empire. He consolidates the Muscovite state under ferocious autocracy. That ferocity notwithstanding, rebellions erupt, as they always do. Some, like the Pugachev uprising of Cossack peasants in the eighteenth century, are challenges from below, bloody insurgencies bloodily subdued.
After Ivan come motley others, a dynastic jostling, until nobles and clergy of the Orthodox Church elect Michael I tsar in 1613, founding the Romanov dynasty that will continue to 1917. That century the status of the muzhik, the Russian peasant, becomes entrenched in a rigid system of feudal serfdom. Serfs are tied to particular lands, whose owners wield extensive power over ‘their’ peasants. Serfs can be transferred to other estates, their personal property – and their family – retained by the original landowner.
The institution is bleak and tenacious. Serfdom endures in Russia well into the 1800s, lifetimes after Europe dispenses with it. Stories of grotesque abuse of peasants by landlords abound. ‘Modernisers’ see serfdom as a scandalous brake on progress: their ‘Slavophile’ opponents decry it as a Western invention. On the fact that it must go, both groups agree.
At last, in 1861, Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’, emancipates the serfs from their obligations to the landlord, their status as property. For all that reformers have long agonised over the serfs’ atrocious lot, it is not their softening hearts that drives this. It is anxiety at waves of peasant riots and rebellions, and it is the exigencies of development.
The country’s agriculture and its industry are stunted. The Crimean War of 1853–55 against England and France has exposed the old order: Russia stands humiliated. It seems clear that modernisation – liberalisation – is a necessity. And so are born Alexander’s ‘Great Reforms’, an overhaul of the army and schools and justice system, the relaxation of censorship, the granting of powers to local assemblies. Above all, the abolition of serfdom.
The emancipation is carefully limited. The serfs-turned-peasants do not receive all the land they formerly worked, and that which they do is saddled with grotesque ‘redemption’ debts. The average plot is too small for subsistence – famines recur – and it shrinks in size as the population grows. Peasants remain legally constrained, tied now to the village community – the commune, the mir – but poverty drives them to seasonal labour in construction, mining, industry and commerce legal and illegal. Thus they become imbricated with the country’s small but growing working class.
It is not only tsars who dream of kingdoms. Like all exhausted peoples, Russian peasants imagine utopias of rest. Belovode of the White Waters; Oponia at the edge of the world; the underground Land of Chud; the Golden Islands; Darya; Ignat; Nutland; the submerged city of Kitezh, immortal below the waters of Lake Svetloyar. Sometimes bemused explorers strike out physically for one or other of these magic territories, but peasants mostly try to reach them in other ways: in the late nineteenth century comes a wave of countryside revolt.
Informed by dissidents, writers like Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin, the trenchant Nikolai Chernyshevsky, this is the tradition of the narodniki, activists for the narod, the people. The narodniks in groups such as Zemlya i Volya, Land and Liberty, are mostly members of a new layer of self-identified, quasi-messianic purveyors of culture, of the Enlightenment – an intelligentsia that includes a growing proportion of commoners.
‘The man of the future in Russia’, says Alexander Herzen at the start of the 1850s, ‘is the peasant.’ Development being slow, with no meaningful liberal movement in sight, the narodniks look beyond the cities to rural revolution. In the Russian peasant commune, the mir, they see a glimmer, a foundation for an agrarian socialism. Dreaming their own better places, thousands of young radicals ‘go to the people’, to learn from, work with, raise the consciousnesses of a suspicious peasantry.
A chastening and bitter joke: they are arrested en masse, often at the request of those very peasants.
The conclusion that one activist, Andrei Zhelyabov, draws? ‘History is too slow.’ Some among the narodniks turn to more violent methods, so as to hasten it.
In 1878, Vera Zasulich, a radical young student of minor noble background, draws a revolver from her pocket and seriously wounds Fyodor Trepov, chief of the St Petersburg police, a man loathed by intellectuals and activists for ordering the flogging of a discourteous prisoner. In a sensational rebuke to the regime, Zasulich’s jury acquits her. She flees to Switzerland.
The next year, from a split in Zemlya i Volya, a new group, Narodnaya Volya – People’s Will – is born. It is more militant. Its cells believe in the necessity of revolutionary violence, and they are ready to act on their conviction. In 1881, after several failed attempts, they take their most coveted prize.
The first Sunday in March, Tsar Alexander II travels to St Petersburg’s grand riding academy. From the crowd the young Narodnaya Volya activist Nikolai Ryasov hurls a handkerchief-wrapped bomb at the bulletproof carriage. An explosion scorches the air. Amid the screams of wounded onlookers, the vehicle shudders to a halt. Alexander staggers out into the chaos. As he sways, Ryasov’s comrade Ignacy Hryniewiecki comes forward. He throws a second bomb. ‘It’s too early to thank God!’ he shouts.
There is another almighty blast. ‘Through the snow, debris and blood’, one of the tsar’s entourage will recall, ‘you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabres and bloody chunks of human flesh.’ The ‘Tsar Liberator’ is ripped apart.
For the radicals, this is a pyrrhic victory. The new tsar, Alexander III, more conservative and no less authoritarian than his father, unleashes ferocious repression. He decimates People’s Will with a wave of executions. He reorganises the political police, the fierce and notorious Okhrana. In this climate of reaction comes a slew of the murderous organised riots known as pogroms against the Jews, a cruelly oppressed minority in Russia. They face heavy legal restrictions; are allowed residence only in the region known as the Pale of Settlement, in Ukraine, Poland, Russia’s west and elsewhere (though exemptions mean there are Jewish populations beyond that stretch); and they have long been the traditional scapegoats at times of national crisis (and indeed whenever). Now, many who are eager to blame them for something blame them for the death of the tsar.