Despite industrialization, migration out of Siberia was considerable in the late 20th century, and population growth was slow, in part because of the unmitigatedly harsh climate. The population of Siberia remains sparse, is chiefly concentrated in the west and south, is more than half urban, and is overwhelmingly Russian in ethnic character. The largest cities are Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Krasnoyarsk.
Progressive Bloc
▪ Russian political coalition
Russian Progressivnyi Blok,
coalition of moderate conservatives and liberals in the fourth Russian Duma (elected legislative body) that tried to pressure the imperial government into adopting a series of reforms aimed at inspiring public confidence in the government and at improving the management of Russia's effort in World War I. The bloc was formed in August 1915 under the leadership of Pavel N. Milyukov (Milyukov, Pavel Nikolayevich). On September 7 its members issued a program that called upon Emperor Nicholas II to appoint ministers who enjoyed the nation's confidence and who would cooperate with the legislature. It urged that the government curtail its practices that discriminated against national and religious minority groups and that it cooperate with private organizations that had formed to promote the war effort.
The bloc, which included about half of the Duma membership, received support from several political factions in the State Council (the upper house of the legislature) as well as from some ministers and organizations representing local governments. But the emperor responded on Sept. 16, 1915, by suspending the session of the Duma (which had begun on August 1).
Throughout 1916 the bloc became increasingly dissatisfied with the administration; in November 1916 Milyukov delivered a scathing criticism of it to the Duma. When the February Revolution broke out, members of the bloc (with two left-wing Duma members) formed the Provisional Committee of the Duma (March 12, 1917), which appointed the first Provisional Government, which in turn assumed official power in Russia on March 15, 1917.
Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich
▪ Russian writer
Introduction
Herzen also spelled Hertzen, or Gertsen
born April 6 [March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow, Russia
died Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris, France
political thinker, activist, and writer who originated the theory of a unique Russian path to socialism known as peasant populism. Herzen chronicled his career in My Past and Thoughts (1861–67), which is considered to be one of the greatest works of Russian prose.
Early life.
Herzen was the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, Ivan Alekseyevich Yakovlev, and a German woman of humble origins. Reared in his father's house, he received an elite and far-ranging education from French, German, and Russian tutors. Still, the “taint” of his birth, as he regarded it, made him resentful of authority and, ultimately, of the autocratic, serf-based Russian social order. This resentment also bred in him an ardent commitment to the cause of the Decembrists (Decembrist), a revolutionary group that staged an unsuccessful uprising against the emperor Nicholas I in 1825. Herzen and his friend Nikolay Ogaryov, who, like Herzen, was influenced by the heroic libertarianism of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller, took a solemn oath to devote their lives to continuing the Decembrists' struggle for freedom in Russia.
Attending the University of Moscow between 1829 and 1833, Herzen evolved from “romanticism for the heart to idealism for the head” and became an adept of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie.
Eventually Herzen and Ogaryov and their circle fused the pantheistic idealism of Schelling with the utopian socialism of the French social philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simon, Henri de) to produce a philosophy of history in which the “World Spirit” evolved ineluctably toward the realization of freedom and justice.
This metaphysical politics was sufficient, however, to lead to the arrest of the entire circle in 1834. Herzen was sent into exile for six years to work in the provincial bureaucracy in Vyatka (now Kirov) and Vladimir; then, for an indiscreet remark about the police, he spent two more years in Novgorod. The misery of this period was relieved by an extravagantly romantic courtship and an initially happy marriage with his cousin, Natalya Zakharina, in 1838.
Herzen's eight-year experience with injustice and the acquaintance it afforded with the workings of Russian government gave firmer contours to his radicalism. He abandoned the nebulous idealism of Schelling for the thought of two other contemporary German philosophers—first the “realistic logic” of G.W.F. Hegel and then the materialism of L.A. Feuerbach (Feuerbach, Ludwig). Herzen thus became a “Left-Hegelian,” holding that the dialectic (development through the reconciliation of conflicting ideas) was the “algebra of revolution” and that the disembodied truths of “science” (i.e., German idealism) must culminate in the “philosophy of the deed,” or the struggle for justice as proclaimed by French socialism. In later life Herzen explained that this metaphysical approach to politics was inevitable for his generation, since the despotism of Nicholas I made action impossible and thus left pure thought as the only free realm of expression.
Armed with these philosophical weapons, Herzen returned to Moscow in 1842 and immediately joined the camp of the Westernizers (Westernizer), who held that Russia must progress by assimilating European rationalism and civic freedom, in their dispute with the Slavophiles (Slavophile), who argued that Russian development must be founded on the Orthodox religion and a fraternal peasant commune. Herzen contributed to this polemic two able and successful popularizations of Left-Hegelianism, Diletantizm v nauke (“Dilettantism in Science”) and Pisma ob izuchenii prirody (“Letters on the Study of Nature”), and a novel of social criticism, Kto vinovat? (“Who Is to Blame?”), in the new “naturalistic” manner of Russian fiction.
Soon, however, Herzen fell out with the other Westernizers because the majority of the group were reformist liberals, whereas Herzen had by now embraced the anarchist socialism of the French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At this point, in 1846, Herzen's father died, leaving him a considerable fortune; and the following year Herzen left Russia for western Europe—as it turned out, for good.
Life in exile.
Herzen went immediately to the capital of European radicalism, Paris, hoping for the imminent triumph of social revolution. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 that he witnessed in Paris and Italy soon disabused him: he became convinced that the Western “matadors of rhetoric” were too imbued with the values of the past to level the existing social order, that Europe's role as a progressive historical force was finished, and that Western institutions were in fact “dead.” He concluded further that, contrary to the teachings of the Hegelians, there was no “rational” inevitability in history and that society's fate was decided instead by chance and human will. He developed these themes in two brilliant but rather confused works, Pisma iz Frantsii i Italii (“Letters from France and Italy”) and S togo berega (From the Other Shore). His disillusionment was vastly increased by his wife's infidelity with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh and by her death in 1852.
Loss of faith in the West, however, provoked a spiritual return to Russia: though “old” Europe, “fettered by the richness of her past,” had proved incapable of realizing the ideal of socialism, “young” Russia, precisely because its past offered nothing worth conserving, now seemed to Herzen to possess the resources for a radical new departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea from his old foes, the Slavophiles) found these resources above all in a collectivist peasant commune, which he viewed as the basis for a future socialist order. This new faith in Russia's revolutionary potential was expressed in Letters to the French historian Jules Michelet and the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850 and 1851.