*The origins and evolution of Russian patrimonialism are the theme of my Russia under the Old Regime (London and New York, 1974).
*The zemstva and Municipal Councils, organs of local self-government introduced in 1864–70, performed important cultural and economic functions (education, sanitation, etc.) but had no administrative authority.
†Russia was a multinational empire in which the dominant nation, the Great Russians, constituted at the turn of the century 44.4 percent of the population. The majority were other Orthodox Slavs (Ukrainians, 17.8 percent, and Belorussians, 4.7 percent); Poles (6.3 percent); Muslims, mostly Turkic speaking and Sunni (11.1 percent); Jews (4.2 percent); and various Baltic, Caucasian, and Siberian nationalities. The total population of the Empire, according to the first census taken in 1897, was 125.7 million (exclusive of Finland, which was a separate Grand Duchy under the Russian Tsar, and the Central Asian Muslim protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara). Of the 55.7 million Great Russians, some 85 percent were peasants.
*Compare this with the strikingly similar remark of Louis XVI. On being informed of his father’s death, he exclaimed: “What a burden! And I have been taught nothing! It seems as though the universe were about to fall upon me”: Pierre Gaxotte, The French Revolution (London-New York, 1932), 71.
*In fact, Nicholas himself had hardly any Russian blood in his veins: since the eighteenth century, through intermarriage with German and Danish families, Russian monarchs were Russians in name only. Their opponents liked to taunt them as the “Gottorp-Holstein” dynasty, which, genealogically speaking, was not far from the truth.
* A. A. Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London, 1935), 127–31. Witte recalls that when he used the expression “public opinion” in the Tsar’s presence, Nicholas responded with passion: “And what is public opinion to me?”: S.lu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, II (Moscow, 1960), 328.
*The rules governing the Russian bureaucracy were formalized in Volume III of the Code of Laws: Ustav o sluzhbe po opredeleniiu ot pravitel’stva: Izdanie 1896 goda, Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1913). All further references are to this edition. In Imperial Russia the term neblagonadëzhnyi had legal standing and could lead to the dismissal from any state institution, including the universities. It was formally defined by Minister of the Interior N. P. Ignatev, in 1881: P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880kh godov (Moscow, 1964), 395.
* Bernard Pares, Russia and Reform (London, 1907), 328. According to one contemporary source, some Russian officials believed that treating their own population brutally enhanced the country’s standing abroad. Western powers, which provided Russia with loans, were said to be impressed by strength: “the more cruelly affairs were conducted inside Russia, the more her respect grew in Europe”: Die Judenpogrome in Russland, I (Köln-Leipzig, 1910), 230. There is, indeed, a relevant Russian proverb: “Beat your own people and others will fear you.”
*H.-J. Torke makes the interesting suggestion that the notorious venality of Russian officials was at least in part due to their self-identification with the state and the resulting difficulty of distinguishing private property from public: Jahrbücher, 227.
*It must be noted, however, that in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy it was not uncommon to find officials who resented the existing regime and sympathized with the opposition: Sergius A. Korff, Autocracy and Revolution in Russia (New York, 1923), 13–14.
*On this, see Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation (New York, 1966). It is testimony, however, of the independence of the Russian judiciary of the time that notwithstanding immense pressure brought on it by the bureaucracy and the Church, the court acquitted Beilis. The role of anti-Semitism in late Imperial politics is dealt with in Heinz-Dietrich Loewe’s Antisemitismus und Reaktionäre Utopie (Hamburg, 1978), which lays stress on the identification of Jews with international capital, and Hans Rogger’s Jewish Policies and Right-wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
*Exempt from his authority were the governors-general placed in charge of selected areas and accountable directly to the Tsar. In 1900, there were seven of them: one in Moscow, three in the troublesome western provinces (Warsaw, Vilno, and Kiev), and three in remote Siberia (Irkutsk, the Steppe, and the Amur River region). Combining civil with military authority, they resembled viceroys.
*S. Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, III (Moscow, 1960), 107. In 1905 Witte refused the post of Minister of the Interior because he did not want to become a policeman.
*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 133. Von Laue cites Witte to the effect that “a modern body politic cannot be great without a well-developed national industry”: Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York-London, 1963), 262.
*Bertrand Gille, Histoire Economique et Sociale de la Russie (Paris, 1949), 163–65. According to Geoffrey Drage [Russian Affairs (New York-London, 1904) 287], in 1900, 60.5 percent of the Russian railroad network was state property.
† In September-November 1891, as the news of the crop failures spread abroad, the price of 4 percent Russian bonds dropped from 97.5 to 87, raising the return from 4.1 percent to 4.6 percent: René Girault, Emprunts Russes et Investissements Français en Russie, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1973), 197.
*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 135. John P. McKay [Pioneers for Profit (Chicago, 1970), 37] believes that in 1914 “foreigners held at least two-fifths of the total of nominal capital of corporations operating in Russia.”
† Vitte, Vospominaniia, II, 501. Although basically correct, this claim is an exaggeration, since the Extraordinary Budget, based on foreign borrowings, also paid a good part of the defense expenditures. It was also used for debt servicing.
*McKay, Pioneers, 383–86. McKay stresses, in addition to capital investments, the great contribution made by foreigners in bringing to Russia advanced industrial technology: Ibid., 38283.
†Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life, 3rd ed. (New York, 1951), 541. Other historians estimate that in 1914 Europeans held between $4.5 and $5.5 billion in U.S. bonds: William J. Shultz and M. R. Caine, Financial Development of the United States (New York, 1937), 502.
‡Leo Pasvolsky and Harold G. Moulton, Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction (New York, 1924), 112. To these figures must be added the value of products turned out by cottage industries (kustarnaiapromyshlennost’), which Pasvolsky estimates at approximately 50 percent of the above: Ibid., 113.
*Based on statistics in Jürgen Nötzold, Wirtschaftspolitische Alternativen der Entwicklung Russlands in der Ära Witte und Stolypian (Berlin, 1966), 110.
*See below, Chapter 6.
†P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii (Moscow, 1973), 34. Zaionchkovskii provides a table showing Russian army involvement in suppressing disorders between 1883 and 1903 (Ibid., 35). The subject is treated at length in William C. Fuller’s Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1985).