extract political concessions from the tsar. Significantly, they persuaded the army generals that nothing short of Tsar Nicholas N's abdication could ensure the successful continuance of the war. On 2 March members of the duma went ahead without a formal mandate and established a provisional, or temporary, government. The next day, since his brother could not be persuaded to take the throne, Nicholas abdicated and the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an ignominious end. In 1905 the autocracy had withstood the revolutionary movement for 12 months; in February 1917, deprived of the support from the army, it survived for less than 12 days.
The collapse of the autocracy was rooted in a crisis of modernization. From the 1860s, and particularly from the 1890s, the government tried hard to keep abreast militarily and economically of the major European powers by modernizing Russia's economy. By 1913 Russia had become £ the fifth largest industrial power in the world. However, economic
g modernization was carried out in an external and internal environment
I
e that was deeply threatening to the autocracy. The empire was
jg challenged by Japan in the Far East, leading to war in 1904; by Germany
1 in central Europe and the Ottoman empire; and in the decade up to 1914
by instability in the Balkans. Internally, the modernization was menaced
by the deep social tensions that scarred this backward, poverty-stricken
country. The government hoped that it could carry out modernization
whilst maintaining tight control over society. Yet the effect of
industrialization, urbanization, internal migration, and the emergence
of new social classes was to set in train forces that served to erode the
foundations of the autocratic state.
The difficulties of modernization were nowhere clearer than in agriculture. On the eve of the revolution, three-quarters of Russia's population was still engaged in farming. Russia had been the last country in Europe to abolish serfdom, but the emancipation of 1861 had left peasants feeling cheated, since the landed gentry kept roughly one-sixth of the land - usually the best-quality land - and since the peasants
6
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1. International Women's Day, 8 March 1917
had to pay for the land they received at a price above its market value. Between 1860 and 1914 the population of the empire grew rapidly from 74 million to 164 million, putting intense pressure on land resources, especially in the central and Volga provinces where the black earth was very fertile. The average peasant allotment shrank by one-third between 1861 and 1900. The fact that by 1917 the landed gentry had lost almost half their land - much of it sold to peasants - and rented most of the remaining land to peasants, made little difference to how peasants felt.
In spite of increasing land hunger, peasant living standards were actually rising very slowly after 1891, although not in the central black-earth provinces. The rapid expansion of the market - stimulated by the construction of railways - allowed peasants to supplement their income from farming with work in industry, trade, handicrafts, or on the farms £ of the well-to-do; it also stimulated commercial production of grain, g making Russia the world's leading grain exporter by 1913. Yet the e average peasant still lived a life of poverty, deprivation, and oppression, jg one index of which was that infant mortality was the highest in Europe. 1 Moreover, notwithstanding the expansion of commercial farming, agriculture continued to be technically primitive, based on the three-field system and strip farming, with little use of fertilizer or machinery. In spite of clear signs that agriculture was beginning to commercialize, then, the agrarian system as a whole remained backward and the peasantry deeply alienated.
By 1914,18% of the empire's population was urban. Towns grew rapidly, mainly as a result of peasant migration, and this put immense strain on the urban infrastructure. Overcrowding, high rents, and appalling squalor were the norm in the big cities. Incompetent municipal authorities, dogged by an inadequate tax base (there was no income tax until 1916), proved unable to cope with rising levels of disease and mortality. St Petersburg -which changed its name to Petrograd during the First World War - enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the most
8
unhealthy capital in Europe. In 1908 more than 14,000 people died in a cholera epidemic. In the burgeoning towns, the traditional system of social estates, which defined the fiscal and military obligations of the tsar's subjects according to whether they belonged to the nobility, clergy, merchantry, or peasantry, was breaking down. New classes, such as the professional and commercial middle classes, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the working class, were emerging, posing demands on the system that it was not designed to accommodate.
As early as the 1830s a social group had emerged that stood outside the system of social estates. This was the characteristically Russian group known as the intelligentsia, defined less by its socio-economic position than by its critical stance towards the autocracy. Liberal and socialist in its politics, it did much in the course of 70 years to erode the legitimacy of the autocracy, not least by providing a steady flow of members to the terrorist and socialist groups that struggled to overthrow the system by violent revolution. By the turn of the 20th century, the intelligentsia was becoming less clearly defined, as professional and commercial middle classes emerged, as the middle and upper ranks of the bureaucracy became professionalized, and as mass commercial culture developed. The professional and commercial middle classes had been slow to develop in Russia, but by the time revolution broke out in 1905 they were making their mark on society. A civil society was emerging, manifest in the professional associations of lawyers, doctors, and teachers, in voluntary associations of a charitable or reformist type, in the expansion of universities, and especially in the explosion of publishing.
In 1905 the intelligentsia and the middle classes together campaigned for the autocracy to give them civil and political rights and establish a constitutional political order. They thus played a role similar to that which in western Europe had been performed by a more economically defined bourgeoisie. In Russia, however, the capitalist class was politically unassertive, deeply segmented by region and branch of
industry, and tied to the traditional merchant estate. Industrialists in key sections of the mining, metallurgy, and engineering industries relied on the state for orders, subsidies, and preferential tariffs, and showed little will to confront it.
The growth of an industrial proletariat posed a challenge of a different kind. In 1917 there were still only 3.6 million workers in Russia's factories and mines, yet their concentration in particular regions and in relatively large enterprises gave them a political clout out of all proportion to their numbers. Mainly recruited from the peasants -'snatched from the plough and hurled into the factory furnace' in L. D. Trotsky's memorable phrase - they varied considerably in the extent to which they were tied to the land, involved in urban culture, educated, and skilled. There were big differences, for example, between the skilled metalworkers of Vyborg district in Petrograd, the textile-£ workers of the Moscow industrial region, and the workers from the g mining settlements of the Urals. Nevertheless the proportion of workers e who had severed their ties with the village and who were becoming jg socialized into the urban-industrial environment was increasing. Towns 1 provided workers with cultural opportunities, such as evening classes, clubs, libraries, theatres, and mass entertainment, and exposed them to the subversive political ideas of Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. The wretched conditions in which workers lived, the drudgery of their work, and their pitiful wages heightened their sense of separateness not only from the government but from privileged society in general.