Censorship laws tightened. Student riots in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Reactionary regime of Alexander III characterized by stagnation in agriculture, retrogression in education, russification of non-Russian section of the population, and narrow bureaucratic paternalism.
First Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Liberation of Labor, founded in Geneva by Georgi Plekhanov. Increased persecution of religious minorities.
New education minister Delyanov increases powers of inspectors; university appointments made directly by the ministry rather than academic councils; fees increased. Fatherland Notes, edited by Saltykov-Shchedrin, suppressed. During 1880s organizations such as the Moscow Law Society and the Committee for the Advancement of Literacy become centers for the discussion of political and social ideas among the intelligentsia.
DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Students hold a demonstration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dobrolyubov. Several of them, disgusted by the brutal way in which the demonstration is suppressed, resolve to assassinate the tsar; the plot is discovered, and among those executed is Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov, whose death he swears to avenge.
During the late 1880s Russia begins her industrial revolution.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade.
Introduction of land captains, powerful administrator magnates who increase control of the gentry over the peasants, undermining previous judicial and local government reforms. Shishkin: Morning in a Pine Forest.
First performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and first (posthumous) performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Peasant representation on Zemstva reduced. Bismarck dismissed. During the 1890s growth rate for industrial output averages about 8 percent per annum. Important development of coal mines in southern European Russia. Industrial expansion sustained by growth of banking and joint stock companies, which begin to attract foreign, later native, investment.
Harvest failure in central Russia causes famine and starvation: up to a million peasants die by the end of the winter. Work commences on Trans-Siberian Railway. Twenty thousand Jews brutally evicted from Moscow. Rigorously enforced residence restrictions, quotas limiting entry of Jews into high schools and universities, and other anti-Jewish measures drive more than a million Russian Jews to emigrate, mainly to North America.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker. Property qualification for franchise raised, reducing number of voters in St. Petersburg from 21,176 to 7,152.
Armenian massacres begin. As part of the russification of the Balkans, the German University of Dorpat is reopened as the University of Yuryev, with a majority of Russian students. Death of Tchaikovsky.
Death of Alexander II; accession of Nicholas II. Growth in popularity of Marxist ideas among university students encouraged by appearance of Struve’s Critical Notes and Beltov’s Monistic View.
A. S. Popov, pioneer of wireless telegraphy, gives demonstration and publishes article on his discoveries, coinciding with Marconi’s independent discoveries in this field. Establishment of Marxist newspaper Samarskii Vestnik . In May, two thousand people crushed to death on Klondynka field when a stand collapses during the coronation ceremony.
Tsar Nicholas II visits President Faure of France: Russo-French alliance. Lenin deported for three years to Siberia. Only systematic census carried out in Imperial Russia reports a population of 128 million, an increase of three and a half times over the century. The industrial labor force of three million (3 percent) is small compared with the West but shows a fifteen-fold increase over the century. Thirteen percent of the population now urban as opposed to only 4 percent a century earlier.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founded. Between 1898 and 1901 Caucasian oil production is higher than that of the rest of the world together. Finns begin to lose their rights as a separate nation within the Empire. Sergey Diaghilev and others found the World of Art society, prominent members of which are Benois and Bakst; its most notable production is Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The magazine, to which ‘‘decadent’’ writers such as Balmont frequently contribute, opposes the ‘‘provincial naturalism’’ of the Itinerant school, and advocates a philosophy of art for art’s sake.
Student riots. All universities in Russia temporarily closed. Moscow Law Society also closed. Reactionary Sipyagin becomes minister of the interior. During 1890s the so-called Third Element, consisting of doctors, teachers, statisticians, engineers, and other professionals employed by the Zemstva, becomes a recognized focus of liberal opposition to the tsarist regime. Russian industry enters a period of depression.
Lenin allowed to leave Russia. Founds paper Iskra in Germany. Russia ends nineteenth century with a total of 17,000 students spread over nine universities: a hundred years before, the Empire had only one university – Moscow. Nevertheless, the proportion of illiterates in the Empire was recorded at this time as 75 percent of persons aged between nine and forty-nine.
Murder of minister of education Bogolepov by a student marks beginning of wave of political assassinations. For the authorities, the principal menace is the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which looks for support from the peasantry, rather than the Social Democrats, who hope to rouse the urban proletariat. First performance of Rachmaninov’s piano concerto No. 2, with the composer as soloist. Death of Queen Victoria.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? provides blueprint for future Bolshevik party. Sipyagin assassinated by Socialist Revolutionaries.
Conflict between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia.
Russo-Japanese war (to 1905), both unpopular and unsuccessful from the Russian point of view. Assassination of V. K. Pleve, minister of the interior, and notorious oppressor of minority peoples within the Empire.
First Russian Revolution.
THE STEPPE
The Story of a Journey
I
ON AN EARLY July morning a battered, springless britzka— one of those antediluvian britzkas now driven in Russia only by merchants’ agents, herdsmen, and poor priests—rolled out of the district town of N., in Z—— province, and went thundering down the post road. It rattled and shrieked at the slightest movement, glumly seconded by the bucket tied to its rear—and from these sounds alone, and the pitiful leather tatters hanging from its shabby body, one could tell how decrepit it was and ready for the scrap heap.
In the britzka sat two residents of N.: the merchant Ivan Ivanych Kuzmichov, clean-shaven, in spectacles and a straw hat, looking more like an official than a merchant; and the other, Father Khristofor Siriysky, rector of the church of St. Nicholas in N., a small, long-haired old man in a gray canvas caftan, a broad-brimmed top hat, and a colorfully embroidered belt. The first was thinking intently about something and kept tossing his head to drive away drowsiness; on his face a habitual, businesslike dryness struggled with the good cheer of a man who has just bid farewell to his family and had a stiff drink; the second gazed at God’s world with moist, astonished little eyes and smiled so broadly that his smile even seemed to reach his hat brim; his face was red and had a chilled look. Both of them, Father Khristofor as well as Kuzmichov, were on their way now to sell wool. Taking leave of their households, they had just had a filling snack of doughnuts with sour cream and, despite the early hour, had drunk a little...They were both in excellent spirits.