Alexander II also insisted that they should have permission from their communes before taking up work in towns; for he and his ministers were fearful about the rapid creation of an unruly urban ‘proletariat’ such as existed in other countries. But this brake on industrial growth was insubstantial. In order to meet their fiscal obligations, communes found it convenient to allow able-bodied young men to seek jobs in factories and mines and remit some of their wages to the family they left behind them in the village. By 1913 there were about 2.4 million workers in large-scale industry.8 The figure for the urban working class reached nearly eleven million when hired labourers in small-scale industry, building, transport, communications and domestic service were included. There were also about 4.5 million wage-labourers in agriculture. Thus the urban and rural working class quadrupled in the half-century after the Emancipation Edict.9
Change occurred, too, amidst the middle and upper classes. Owners of large estates in the more fertile regions adopted Western agricultural techniques and some of them made fortunes out of wheat, potatoes and sugar-beet. Elsewhere they increasingly sold or rented their land at prices kept high by the peasantry’s land-hunger. The gentry took employment in the expanding state bureaucracy and joined banks and industrial companies. With the increase in the urban population there was a rise in the number of shopkeepers, clerks and providers of other products and services. The cities of the Russian Empire teemed with a new life that was bursting through the surface of the age-old customs.
The monarchy tried to hold on to its prerogatives by ensuring that the middle and upper classes should lack organizations independent from the government. There were a few exceptions. The Imperial Economic Society debated the great issues of industrialization. The Imperial Academy, too, managed to elude excessive official restriction, and several great figures won international acclaim. The chemist Mendeleev and the behavioural biologist Pavlov were outstanding examples. But the various professional associations were subjected to constant surveillance and intimidation, and could never press their case in the Emperor’s presence. The industrialists and bankers, too, were nervous and their organizations were confined to local activities; and tsarism kept them weak by favouring some at the expense of others. Imperial Russia put obstacles in the way of autonomous civic activity.
And so the transformation of society was in its early stages before the Great War and the bulk of economic relationships in the Russian Empire were of a traditional kind: shopkeepers, domestic servants, carriage-drivers and waiters lived as they had done for decades. The khodoki — those peasants who travelled vast distances to do seasonal work in other regions — were a mass phenomenon in central and northern Russia.
Even those factories which used the most up-to-date, imported machinery continued to rely heavily upon manual labour. Living conditions in the industrial districts were atrocious. Moscow textile-factory owners had a paternalist attitude to their work-force; but most of them failed to supply their workers with adequate housing, education and other amenities. Russian workers lived in squalor and were poorly paid by the standards of contemporary industrial capitalism. Like the peasants, they felt excluded from the rest of society. A chasm of sentiment separated them from their employers, their foremen and the police. They were forbidden to form trade unions; they were subordinated to an arbitrarily-applied code of labour discipline at their places of work. The Ministry of Internal Affairs in the late nineteenth century showed sympathy with their plight. But the interests of the owners were usually given official protection against the demands of the workers.
The established working class which had existed in Moscow, St Petersburg and Tula grew rapidly under Nicholas II. But the precariousness of their conditions encouraged workers to maintain their ties with the countryside. Relatives cultivated the communal allotments of land for them; and, in the event of strikes, workers could last out by returning to the villages. This was a system of mutual assistance. Peasant households expected the workers not only to help them financially but also to come back to help with the harvest.
The linkage between countryside and town helped to sustain traditional ideas. Religious belief was prevalent across the empire, and Christmas, Easter and the great festivals were celebrated with gusto by Russians and other Christian nationalities. The priest was a central figure, accompanying the peasants into the fields to bless the sowing and pray for a good crop. But pagan vestiges, too, survived in the peasant world-view and the ill-educated, poorly-paid parish priest rarely counteracted the prejudices of his parishioners. Both the Russian peasant and the Russian worker could be crude in the extreme. Heavy drinking was common. Syphilis was widespread. Fists and knives were used to settle disagreements. And the peasantry ferociously enforced its own forms of order. It was not uncommon for miscreants to undergo vicious beating and mutilation. The sophistication of St Petersburg salons was not matched in the grubby, ill-kempt villages.
Thus the Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom. Most people (and ninety per cent of the Emperor’s subjects had been born and bred in the countryside)10 felt that a chasm divided them from the world inhabited by the ruling élites.
Ostensibly the Russian nation was the pre-eminent beneficiary of the empire; but national consciousness among Russians was only patchily developed and local traditions and loyalties retained much influence. This was evident in a number of ways. One example is the way that migrants, as they moved into the towns for work, tended to stay together with people from the same area. The man from Saratov found the man from Arkhangelsk almost as alien as someone from Poland or even Portugal. Remarkable differences of dialect and accent prevailed. Despite the current economic transformation, furthermore, most Russians did not move to the nearest town: many did not even visit the neighbouring village. The lifestyles of Russian peasant communities were so strongly rooted in particular localities that when peasants migrated to areas of non-Russian population they sometimes abandoned these lifestyles and identified themselves with their new neighbours.
There had nevertheless been times when the peasants had rallied to the government’s side. Patriotic sentiments were roused by the Napoleonic invasion in 1812 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8;11 and a deep dislike of foreign traders, mercenaries and advisers had existed in previous centuries.12 The general processes of industrialization and education, too, had an effect on popular sentiments. Russians were moving to towns; they were becoming literate; they could travel from one part of the country to another; they had chances of changing their type of occupation. As they met and talked and worked together, they started to feel that they had much in common with each other.
Yet national consciousness was not a dominant sentiment among Russians. Except at times of war, most of them at the beginning of the twentieth century were motivated by Christian belief, peasant customs, village loyalties and reverence for the tsar rather than by feelings of Russian nationhood. Christianity itself was a divisive phenomenon. The Russian Orthodox Church had been torn apart by a reform in ritual imposed by Patriarch Nikon from 1653. Those who refused to accept Nikon’s dispensations fled to the south, the south-east and the north and became known as the Old Believers. Other sects also sprang up among Russians. Some of these were strange in the extreme, such as the Khlysty who practised castration of their adherents. Others were pacifists; notable among them were the Dukhobors. There was also a growth of foreign Christian denominations such as the Baptists. What was common to such sects was their disenchantment not only with the Russian Orthodox Church but also with the government in St Petersburg.