*Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, n. See Andrew M. Verner, Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, 370–76. Verner maintains that Witte misdated his first meeting with Nicholas and that it actually took place one day earlier (October 8), but this seems most unlikely, especially in view of the testimony of a third person, D. M. Solskii (Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, 25).
†Witte’s memorandum of October 9, 1905, is in KA, No. 11–12 (1925), 51–61. The above passage appears on p. 55. This is what Struve had written four months earlier: “Russia needs a strong government which will not fear revolution because it will place itself at its head … The Revolution in Russia must become the government”: Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 384. Struve’s program, from which Witte generously borrowed: Ibid., 376–85. The concept is an echo of the French Revolution: when, in February 1791, Louis XVI urged the National Assembly to pursue the work of reform, Brissot, the Girondist leader, declared: “The King is now the Head of the Revolution” (J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution, Oxford, 1947, 192).
*The entire St. Petersburg garrison at this time consisted of 2,000 men: Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 225. Cf. Vitte, Vospominaniia, II, 9–10, 26–27.
*The earliest Soviet had emerged in May 1905 in the textile center of Ivanovo-Voznesensk to manage the workers’ economic conflict with the employers. It had no political program. Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974), 40–42.
*In the revolutionary years 1905–6 as well as 1917, persons wearing glasses, called ochkastye, risked the fury of both monarchist and radical mobs: Albert Parry in the preface to A. Volskii [Machajski], Umstvennyi rabochii (New York-Baltimore, 1968), 15–16.
†L. Geller and N. Rovenskaia, eds., Peterburgskii i Moskovskii Sovety Rabochikh Deputatov 1905 g. (v dokumentakh) (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 17. This position was grounded in the conviction of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, that left to follow their own inclinations, the workers would not make revolution but seek accommodation with capitalism. For this reason the revolution had to be done for them but not by them.
*Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, 26–27. Witte asserted that he opposed issuing the reform program in the form of a manifesto because such a document, written in succinct and solemn language, could not provide the rationale behind the reforms and might unsettle the population: Ibid., 33. Imperial manifestos were read at church services.
*G. G. Savich, ed., Novyi gosudarstevennyi stroi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), 24–25. The only demand of the September 1905 Zemstvo Congress which the October Manifesto ignored concerned the Duma’s control over the budget, but that power was granted to it later in the Fundamental Laws.
*This is what Witte told Nicholas during his audience of October 9: Verner, Nicholas II, 373–74.
*A survey of the rural disorders in 1905–6 carried a report from the Central Agricultural Region which stated that the “agrarian movement was caused by the fact that from all ends of Russia at a certain time the villages heard reports that in the cities people beat Yids [zhidov] and were allowed to steal their property without being punished”: Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1905-1906 gg., I (St. Petersburg, 1908), 48. Similar observations were made about agrarian violence in the Ukraine: Ibid., II, 290.
*Two weeks after he had explained the anti-Jewish pogroms as justifiable punishment, he noted with dismay that these pogroms were followed by the destruction of estates of Russian landlords: KA, No. 3/22 (1927), 174.
*Pankratova et al, eds., Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii, IV, Pt. 1, 650. The authors of this program apparently decided on their own that the Assembly would replace the monarchy with a republic.
2
Official Russia
The events we have described occurred in a country that in many respects was unique. Ruled (until 1905) by an absolute monarchy, administered by an all-powerful bureaucracy, and composed of social castes, Russia resembled an Oriental despotism. Its international ambitions, however, and the economic and cultural policies which these ambitions necessitated, injected into Russia a dynamism that was Western in origin. The contradiction between the static quality of the political and social order and the dynamism of the economy and cultural life produced a condition of endemic tension. It lent the country a quality of impermanence, of expectation: as one contemporary French visitor put it, Russia seemed somehow “unfinished.”1
Until the October Manifesto, Russia was an autocracy (samoderzhavie). The old Fundamental Laws defined her sovereign, formally designated Emperor (Gosudar’ Imperator), as “unlimited” (neogranichennyi) and “autocratic” (samoderzhavnyi). The first adjective meant that he was subject to no constitutional restraints; the second, that he was not limited institutionally.2 The Emperor’s authority received its original definition in 1716 in the Military Regulation of Peter the Great (Chapter 3, Article 20), which was still in force in 1900:
His Majesty is an absolute [samovlastnyi] monarch, who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill [blagomnenie].
The Emperor was the exclusive source of laws and ordinances. According to Article 51 of the old Fundamental Laws, “no post [mesto] or office [pravitel’stvo] of the realm may, on its own initiative, pass a new law, and no law can go into effect without the sanction of the autocratic authority.” In practice it proved impossible to enforce such a rigid absolutism in a country with 125 million inhabitants and the world’s fifth-largest economy, and in time, increasing discretionary authority was vested in the officialdom. Nevertheless, the autocratic principle was strictly insisted upon and any challenge to it, in word or deed, led to savage persecution.
On the face of it, the autocracy did not differ from the monarchies of ancien régime Europe, and it was thus widely regarded, in and out of Russia, as an anachronism. But viewed more closely, in the context of her own past, Russia’s absolutism showed peculiar qualities that distinguished it from that of the Bourbons, Stuarts, or Hohenzollerns. European travelers to Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ancien régime absolutism stood at its zenith, were impressed by the differences between what they were accustomed to at home and what they saw in Russia.3 The peculiar features of Russian absolutism in its early form, which lasted from the fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, were marked by the virtual absence of the institution of private property, which in the West confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority. In Russia, the very concept of property (in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over objects) was unknown until introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century by the German-born Catherine II. Muscovite Russia had been run like a private estate, its inhabitants and territories, with everything they contained, being treated as the property of the Crown.