This situation limited the Russian Orthodox Church’s ability to act as the unifying promoter of Russian national values. Compelled to act as a spiritual arm of the tsarist state, the Church conducted a campaign of harassment against the Russian sects. The kind of intellectual effervescence characteristic of ‘national’ churches in other countries was discouraged in Russia. The tsar and his ecclesiastical hierarchy wanted an obedient, obscurantist traditionalism from the Russian Orthodox Church, and had the authority to secure just that.
Nor did a clear sense of national purpose emanate from the intelligentsia even though the leading cultural figures in the nineteenth century explored how best the human and natural resources of Russia might be organized. The poems of Alexander Pushkin; the novels of Lev Tolstoy, Fëdor Dostoevski and Ivan Turgenev; the paintings of Ivan Repin; the music of Modest Musorgski and Pëtr Chaikovski: all such works stressed that Russia had a great potential which had yet to be effectively tapped. Among creative artists, the musicians were exceptional in displaying allegiance to the monarchy. Most of the intellectuals in their various ways hated tsarism and this attitude was shared by students, teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professional groups.13 It was a commonplace amidst the intelligentsia that the autocratic monarchy was stifling the development of the Russian national spirit.
And yet the intellectuals were remote from agreeing what they meant by Russianness. Indeed many of them abhorred the discourse of national distinctiveness. While criticizing the imperial nature of the state, they disliked the thought of breaking it up into several nation-states; instead they pondered how to create a multinational state which would deny privileges to any particular nation. Anti-nationalism was especially characteristic of the socialists; but several leading liberals, too, refused to invoke ideas of Russian nationalism.
It was left to far-right public figures, including some bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, to argue for the interests of ethnic Russians at the expense of the other peoples of the Russian Empire. Several monarchist organizations came into existence after 1905 which sought to promote this case. The most influential of them was the Union of the Russian People, which had the undisguised support of Nicholas and his family.14 Such organizations called for the unconditional restoration of autocracy. They lauded the tsar, the Russian Orthodox Church and ‘the simple people’. They hated the Jews, whom they blamed for all the recent disturbances in the empire. They helped to form gangs, usually known as the Black Hundreds, which carried out bloody pogroms against Jewish communities in the western borderlands. By stirring up a xenophobic hysteria, they aimed to reunite the tsar and the Russian people.
After his initial declaration of sympathy for the Union of the Russian people, Nicholas took a more measured public stance. He left it to the Union to do what it could. But he was a tsar. He was far too austere to become a rabble-rouser, and his wish to be respected by fellow monarchs abroad was undiminished. Nothing done by Nicholas had an entirely clear purpose or consistent implementation.
Among Nicholas’s inhibitions was the fact that he could not feel confident about the loyalty of his Russian subjects. The Imperial state oppressed Russian peasants, soldiers and workers as well as their non-Russian counterparts. What is more, the Russians constituted only forty-four per cent of the Imperial population in the two decades before 1917.15 The empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities, and the Russians were inferior to several of the other nations in educational and occupational accomplishment. Nicholas II’s German, Jewish and Polish subjects had a much higher average level of literacy than his Russian ones;16 and Germans from the Baltic region held a disproportionately large number of high posts in the armed forces and the bureaucracy. Moreover, the Poles, Finns, Armenians, Georgians had a clearer sense of nationhood than Russians: their resentment of imperial interference was strong. It would not have made sense to alienate such nationalities from the regime more than was necessary.17
Thus the tsarist state in the nineteenth century was primarily a supranational state; it was not one of those several nation-states that had simply acquired an empire. Loyalty to the tsar and his dynasty was the supreme requirement made by the Russian Empire.
Not that the tsars were averse to brutal repression. The Polish Revolt of 1863 had been savagely quelled; and in the North Caucasus, which had been conquered only in the 1820s, the rebel leader Shamil raised a Muslim banner of revolt against tsarism and was not defeated until 1859. The autonomy granted to Finnish administration and education was trimmed on the instructions of Emperor Nicholas II. The Uniate Church in Ukraine and Belorussia; the Armenian and Georgian Orthodox Churches; the Lutheran Churches among Estonians and Latvians; the Catholic Church in Lithuania and ‘Russian’ Poland: all resented the official interference in their practices of worship and became crucibles of anti-tsarist discontent. Meanwhile most Jews were constrained to live within the Pale of Settlement in the empire’s western borderlands — and Nicholas crudely believed them to be responsible for subverting the entire empire.
In his more reflective moments, however, he recognized that the regime’s security was endangered less by the ‘national question’ than by the ‘labour question’ — and most factory workers were ethnic Russians. The illegal labour movement had come to life intermittently in the 1890s, but strikes were more the exception than the rule. Peasant disturbances also occurred. Until after the turn of the century, however, tsarism was strongly in place. Rumblings against the monarchy were only intermittent. Liberals, being forbidden to form a political party, held grand banquets to celebrate anniversaries of past events that had embarrassed the monarchy. Peasants whose harvests were twice ruined by bad weather after 1900 were intensely discontented. Workers, too, were disgruntled. The government, acting on the advice of Moscow police chief Sergei Zubatov, had allowed the setting up of politically-controlled local trade unions; and this gave rise to a legal labour movement determined to take on the authorities.
On Sunday, 9 January 1905 a revolutionary emergency occurred when a peaceful procession of demonstrators, led by Father Georgi Gapon, was fired upon outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Innocent civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. Immediately across the Russian Empire there were strikes and marches in protest. Poland and Georgia became ungovernable over the following weeks. In Russia there was revulsion against the Emperor among factory workers, and their demonstrations were initially given approval by industrialists.
As the press began to criticize the authorities, Nicholas II set up an enquiry into the reasons for popular discontent. The news from the Far East brought further discredit to the monarchy. In February 1905 Russian land forces were crushed at Mukden; in May the Baltic fleet was annihilated in the battle of Tsushima. The myth of the regime’s invincibility was dissipated and the illegal political parties emerged from clandestinity. The two largest of them were the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. The former were Marxists who wanted the urban working class to lead the struggle against the monarchy; the latter were agrarian socialists who, while also trying to appeal to workers, put greater faith in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Both sought the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty. Liberals, too, organized themselves by establishing the Constitutional-Democratic Party in October 1905. On all sides the autocracy was under siege.