REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1894–1917
It would be hard to think of a man less suited to serve as autocrat of a large empire in turmoil than Nicholas II, who ascended the throne in 1894. People acquainted with Nicholas were, in fact, alarmed at the prospect of his assuming ultimate authority. In October 1894, when it was clear that Alexander would not survive a serious illness, the minister of the navy, N. M. Chichaev, warned that the twenty-six-year-old Nicholas was ‘a mere child, without experience, training, or even an inclination to study great problems of state . . . military service is the only subject that interests him . . . What will be the course of the ship of state under these conditions the Lord only knows.’ Even a cursory examination of Nicholas’s letters and diaries confirm the legitimacy of Chichaev’s apprehensions.
A man of personal charm with strong religious convictions and deep affection for his wife and family, the tsar showed no serious interest in politics. In his diaries, he took pains to record how he spent his evenings with his family and his various sporting activities, going so far as to note the number of birds he bagged on his hunts. He could be deeply moved by such events as the loss of his favorite dog, Iman. ‘I must confess,’ he wrote in his diary on 20 October 1902, ‘the whole day after that happened I never stopped crying – I still miss him dreadfully when I go for walks. He was such an intelligent, kind, and loyal dog!’ Yet the great events of his rule – the wars with Japan and the Central Powers, the demands of liberals for a constitution, the industrial strikes, the violence of 1905, the breakdown of public order that year – received scant attention from him. He venerated his father’s memory and believed that it was his ‘sacred mission’ to follow in his footsteps. Like his father, he felt he must be uncompromising in upholding the principle of autocracy, the only political idea for which he could muster any passion. On this issue he was much influenced by one of his father’s favorite teachers, Pobedonostsev, whose retrograde ideas are examined in chapter 6.
Although moderately intelligent, Nicholas lacked the personal drive and vision to take charge of the government, to familiarize himself with the workings of the administration, and to instill a sense of purpose and direction in the ministers and bureaucracy. He was also a narrow-minded, prejudiced man, incapable of tolerating people who did not fit his conception of the true Russian. He especially disliked Jews and attributed his refusal to abolish restrictions on them to an ‘inner voice’ that told him it would be wrong to do so. Nor could he abide the intelligentsia, the one social group that, he believed, was not fully devoted to him.
Some people within the elite, prepared to give the new ruler the benefit of the doubt, thought that Nicholas might adopt policies more liberal than those of Alexander III. But Nicholas did not wait long before disabusing the optimists. Early in 1895 he told a delegation representing the nobility, the zemstvos, and the cities that they were entertaining ‘senseless dreams’ of participating ‘in the affairs of internal administration’. He indicated that he intended to ‘maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as did my unforgettable father’.
But economic and social developments made it increasingly unlikely that he would be able to resist the pressures for political change. In the 1880s Russia had embarked on a new course, industrialization, and under the impetus of the dynamic S. Iu. Witte, the minister of finance from 1894 to 1903, economic development proceeded rapidly. Witte promoted industrialization not because he believed that economic modernization was desirable in itself or because he wished to raise the standard of living of the Russian people; he wanted to transform the economy because that was the only way the country could maintain its status as a great power. As a political conservative, Witte believed that Russia could undergo economic modernization and still retain its ancient political and social institutions, a conviction he reluctantly abandoned during the revolutionary turbulence of 1905.
Always a major factor in the national economy, the state assumed an especially large role in stimulating industrialization. The government not only placed extremely high tariffs on foreign commodities and encouraged foreign investments and loans to Russian industrialists but also became directly involved in the economy. By 1912, when Russia was the fifth industrial power in the world, the state owned sixty-eight percent of all railways; by 1899 almost one-third of all metallurgical products were bought by the state; from 1903 to 1913 the government received over twenty-five percent of its income from its various holdings rather than from taxes. Another important characteristic of Russian industrialization was the prevalence of very large enterprises. In 1866, forty-three percent of the workers in the cotton industry were employed at plants with more than one hundred employees; in 1877, fifty-one percent; in 1894, seventy-two percent. The proportion of workers employed in factories with more than one thousand employees was three times as large in Russia as in Germany, generally considered to be the pacesetter in industrial concentration.
The concentration of industry facilitated both the formation of trade unions and the growth of political activism among workers, who, it must be stressed, constituted no more than 2.4 percent of the total population in the early twentieth century. The government’s policies on the relations between workers and employers also contributed to restlessness among workers. The authorities insisted on transferring the allegedly benign, patriarchal relations between landlord and peasants to the industrial sector of the economy, where employers were to treat their workers with compassion but also with sternness if they did not follow the rules. The government claimed that their approach was entirely successful, and until 1905 it denied that there was any labor problem at all. Many senior officials knew better, but any public acknowledgement that the patriarchal relationship might not be applicable to the modern industrial setting was considered tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the social order under tsarism.
The system of disciplinary paternalism that prevailed in the factories was harsh. The Penal Code of 1845, for example, branded collective resistance to employers as illegal, punishable by fifteen to twenty years of hard labor, which meant that trade unions could not lawfully be formed to seek improvement in the grim conditions in factories. Until 1897, a working day of thirteen hours was the norm; that year, the working day was shortened to eleven and a half hours. Laborers, many of whom still returned for part of the year to their villages for field work, were generally housed in large, unsanitary barracks. Within the plant, the managers and owners treated the workers condescendingly: they addressed them in the familiar ‘thou’, searched them for stolen goods whenever they left the factory, and fined them for infractions of the strict ‘Rules of Internal Order’. Workers deeply resented these humiliations, and during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 their lists of grievances almost invariably included demands for polite treatment by factory officials.
By the late nineteenth century, it became apparent that Russian workers would not indefinitely accept their status of inferiority and that they would not remain docile. The most striking evidence for the change in mood was the growing strike movement. Between 1862 and 1869, only six strikes and twenty-nine disturbances in factories were recorded. By 1885, the annual number of such disorders had risen to twenty; between 1895 and 1904, that number was about 176. In 1902 alone, there were 550 strikes involving 138,877 workers. Dissatisfaction with economic conditions caused most strikes, but every time workers engaged in a work stoppage they contravened the law, which prohibited strikes, and thus they were also making a political statement. By 1905, a large number of the men and women who went on strike included specifically political demands in their list of grievances.
In the meantime, a small group of Russian intellectuals had founded a Marxist movement that claimed to represent the interests of the working class. The Marxists contended that Russia’s development would be similar to that of Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized and would then undergo a bourgeois revolution by which the autocratic system would be replaced by a constitutional order dominated by the middle classes committed to capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization had reached maturity and the proletariat had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian Marxists formed the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which five years later split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.
The split occurred over the seemingly minor question of how to define a party member, but it soon turned out that the differences between the Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir Lenin (Ulyanov) and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Iulii Martov and Pavel Axelrod touched on fundamental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had expressed in 1902 in his What Is to Be Done?, favored a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the necessity and desirability of broad working-class participation in the movement’s affairs and in the coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also became evident that, although both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bolsheviks.
Less doctrinaire, but equally militant, was the party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), who claimed to speak for the peasants. The heirs of the populists of the 1870s, the SRs formally created a political party in 1901 committed to the idea that, since most people in Russia had been exposed to the egalitarian principles of the commune, the country could attain socialism without passing through the stage of full-blown capitalism. The party advocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to everyone who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry would be similarly socialized. Although the SRs insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the ‘Combat Organization’, an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political murders. Political terror, many SRs believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime.
Liberalism had also emerged as an organized force. Initially, as has been noted, people associated with the zemstvos advocated liberalization of the political system. They were joined in the late 1890s by a variety of liberal lawyers, doctors, writers, and professors. Highly articulate, these intellectuals soon exerted an influence on the national scene far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Industrialists and businessmen in general were slower to take up the liberal cause; their economic dependence on the state made them politically cautious.
The liberals favored a fundamental reordering of society. They advocated the rule of law, the granting of civil liberties to all citizens, a sharp curtailment in the powers of the monarch, and the creation of a legislative body elected by the people. The journal they founded in 1902, Osvobozhdenie, and their underground organization, the Union of Liberation, formed in 1904, helped mobilize public opinion against the old order and thus set the stage for the first Russian revolution.
Unwittingly, the government facilitated the growth of the opposition movement by bumbling into a catastrophic war with Japan in 1904. Although the charge that the Russian government deliberately provoked Japan to stave off revolution has never been proved and is probably unfounded, there can be no doubt that elements within the tsarist government mindlessly pursued a foreign policy in the Far East that the Japanese were bound to regard as provocative. In the 1890s, Russia abandoned its generally cautious policy in the Pacific region and committed itself to an assertive forward policy. Alarmed at Japan’s emergence as a strong, aggressive power as well as China’s weakness, and eager to promote Russia’s economic development, the government in St. Petersburg adopted various measures to extend its influence over two regions also coveted by Japan: Manchuria, which was part of China, and Korea, an autonomous kingdom under the suzerainty of the Chinese emperor. Most importantly, the Russian government in 1891 decided to construct the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Witte, who vigorously promoted the railway project during his tenure as minister of finance, was interested primarily in the economic exploitation of an area rich in resources and markets. At the same time, he favored a cautious foreign policy that would avoid needless provocation of other powers. Russian diplomats, however, adopted an aggressive stance towards Japan and on several occasions during the 1890s forced Japan to pull back from positions on the mainland. These humiliations produced a ‘paroxysm of public indignation’ among the Japanese, who now embarked on a program of massive rearmament.
Early in the twentieth century, hostility between the two powers reached a climax. Japan had vastly expanded its economic and political influence over Korea, whereas Russia had extended its influence over neighboring Manchuria. When a Russian speculator, A. M. Bezobrazov, received a concession from the Korean government to cut timber on the Yalu and Tumen rivers, the Japanese government became alarmed. To lower tensions, it proposed an arrangement whereby Russia would be granted predominance in Manchuria in return for Japan’s predominance in Korea, and in January 1904 the Japanese pressed St. Petersburg for a speedy reply. When none was forthcoming, they decided on a course of action they had believed to be unavoidable for some time. On 26 January they launched a surprise attack on Russian ships at Port Arthur and Chemulpo.
Once war began, it quickly emerged that Japan enjoyed enormous advantages. Its troops and naval forces were better trained, its intelligence services were more effective, and, unlike Russia, it did not face the enormously difficult task of having to transport reinforcements almost 4,400 miles over a railway system that was still quite primitive. From the moment of Japan’s attack, Russia suffered one humiliating defeat after another, at sea and on land. As is generally true in the early stages of a military conflict, the public rallied to the government’s support. But within a few months, as it became evident that the tsarist government had totally misjudged both the strength of the Japanese military as well as the prowess and competence of its own military, public opinion began to shift dramatically.
Many thoughtful citizens in Russia now questioned not only the wisdom of waging war but also the legitimacy of the entire political system. In the fall and winter of 1904–5, the liberals, who had held their fire so long as the government seemed to enjoy wide support, unleashed an extensive campaign (the so-called ‘banquet campaign’) for constitutional change. It was remarkably effective and marked the beginning of a nationwide assault on the autocracy that lasted two and a half years. Modeled on the famous banquets in Paris in 1847–8 that inspired a revolution throughout much of Europe, the campaign in Russia also had a clearly political focus and was therefore illegal. Sensing the depth of discontent, the government reluctantly allowed the meetings on the understanding that all the gatherings would be ‘private’.
The rash of political meetings in conjunction with hearty meals – some thirty-eight in twenty-six cities – surprised society and seemed to suggest that the authorities had lost confidence in their ability to continue to rule without taking into account the wishes of the people. Never before had so many citizens, most of them from the educated classes, joined forces to give vent to their profound unhappiness with the state of affairs. The banquets adopted various resolutions, but to one degree or another all contributed to mobilizing support for the demands of liberal activists. They called for civil liberties, amnesty for political prisoners, and a democratically elected constituent assembly.
The banquets were a prelude to the dramatic events on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905), which proved to be decisive in transforming what had been a peaceful campaign for reform by relatively small sectors of society into a national offensive against the old order that eventually enlisted the support of a huge number of workers, peasants, and national minorities. Ironically, even the procession of workers on that fateful Sunday had been intended as a peaceful affair. It was organized by Father Gapon, a mercurial and enigmatic figure. The workers and their families, numbering somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand, marched on the Winter Palace with a petition that amounted to a desperate plea to the tsar, still referred to as ‘the father’, to treat his subjects, as a matter of conscience, not as slaves but as human beings, and to institute reforms to lighten their burdens. In calling for a constituent assembly elected on the basis of democratic suffrage, civil liberties for all citizens, the right to establish trade unions, and an eight-hour working day, Gapon clearly aligned his followers with the political opposition that had turned increasingly vocal and militant in 1904. However, the petition did not demand the abolition of the monarchy or the introduction of socialism. Nor did it contain threats of violence.
Nevertheless, the government, out of fear, meanness, or simple stupidity, decided to disperse the procession, by force if necessary. When the marchers did not heed the officers’ orders to disperse, soldiers began to shoot indiscriminately into the crowds, killing 130 and seriously wounding close to three hundred. The fury of the people in the streets was uncontrollable, as was the anger of citizens throughout the empire. Indeed, the massacre electrified public opinion in virtually every region of the country. It was widely believed that the tsar had lost the affection of vast numbers of people and that his authority and legitimacy had been greatly undermined. In this sense, Bloody Sunday was a pivotal event not only in the revolution but in the history of Russia.
The revolution now proceeded at a rapid pace. The industrial proletariat for the first time became a social and political force to be reckoned with by participating in massive strikes throughout the empire in support of wide-ranging demands. It is noteworthy, however, that none of the political parties of the left had played a significant role in preparing the procession. Bolshevik agitators who appeared at preparatory meetings for the purpose of radicalizing the crowds were shouted down and occasionally even hauled off the platform. Not until the spring and summer of 1905 did large numbers of workers become politicized; they now began to demand an end to the war and an end to autocratic rule. Even then, however, political activists did not exert a decisive influence over the mass protest movements, which were essentially spontaneous expressions of outrage against the authorities.
Within weeks of Bloody Sunday, virtually every sector of society was caught up in the turbulence: students at universities and high schools went on strike; disorders erupted in the borderlands where the minority populations resented the heavy hand of the Russian masters; peasants staged attacks on landlords’ estates; middle-class people ignored the government’s regulations on public meetings and censorship of the press; and on numerous occasions soldiers and sailors mutinied. It seemed as though the fabric of society was coming apart.
The government could not cope with the growing unrest. Instead of settling on a firm course of action, it alternated between strident assertions of the autocratic principle and half-hearted promises of reform, neither of which made much of an impression on most people. Had the government quickly made some far-reaching concessions, such as the establishment of the rule of law and the creation of an elected parliament with real powers, it might well have succeeded in separating the moderates and centrists from the revolutionary left within the opposition movement. But the tsar was unwilling to tamper with the institution of autocracy, and the result was a deepening of the revolution.
The high point came in October 1905, when a general strike brought the government to its knees. Unprecedented in scope, the strike was a spontaneous affair; no one planned it, no one organized it, and it spread rapidly. Although workers took the lead, they received the backing of the middle classes, who viewed the strike primarily as a weapon to wrest political concessions from the tsar. The opposition could act in unison because the political issue, the elimination of the autocratic regime, had assumed center stage. One city after another literally came to a standstill, and the government had no choice but to yield, especially since it was not sure that it could count on the army to obey orders to crush the strikes by force. On 17 October, the tsar reluctantly accepted the advice of Witte, who had just been appointed prime minister, to issue the October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties and the establishment of an elected legislature (Duma) with substantial powers. Most significantly, the tsar committed himself not to enact any law without the approval of the legislature. In conceding that he was no longer the sole repository of political power, Nicholas did what he had vowed never to do: he abandoned the principle of autocracy.
It was a great victory for the opposition. Had it been consolidated, the Russian Empire would have been on the road towards a Western-style constitutional state. For about seven weeks, from 18 October until early December, a period known as the ‘Days of Liberty’, the country enjoyed so much freedom that some observers considered the new conditions dangerous, because extremists would now be able to increase their support among the masses. The press could publish whatever it pleased, workers could form trade unions, political parties could be established, and they could freely publicize their programs. But the pessimists were prescient. It quickly emerged that the new order faced a series of intractable problems that the tsar and his followers, who believed that they had suffered only a temporary defeat, could not adequately deal with. On 18 October, one day after the issuance of the October Manifesto, large numbers of people, enraged at the government’s surrender to the opposition, violently and indiscriminately attacked Jews and anyone else presumed to have been hostile to the old regime. Over a period of about two weeks 690 anti-Jewish pogroms erupted, most of them in the south-western provinces. Eight hundred and seventy-six people were killed and between seventy thousand and eighty thousand injured. In a few cities Jews lost property estimated to have been worth more than a million rubles. Altogether, the damage to property during the pogroms has been calculated to be 6.2 million rubles. To one sober commentator it seemed that ‘complete governmental anarchy’ prevailed in Russia.
There has been much controversy about the origins of the pogroms, the worst in Russian history up to that time, and about the role of the authorities. It is known that on the local level, officials and policemen either encouraged people to attack Jews or looked the other way once the attacks began, but there is no evidence that the unrest was orchestrated by the government in St. Petersburg. In part, the violence can be traced to the rage of those who feared that the demonstrations in favor of the manifesto signified the end of a social order in which they enjoyed a special status that they wished to preserve. To a degree, then, the violence from below was a spontaneous response by various groups determined to crush the opposition and to preserve the old order. In addition, much of the reckless plundering and beating of innocent civilians was the work of riffraff motivated largely by prejudice and a craving for loot. But peasants, shopkeepers, coachmen, janitors, and even some workers (though not any who belonged to trade unions) also lent a hand, for much the same reasons. For these people, however, another factor played a role. They found unbearable the sight of multitudes of ordinary Russians, among them many Jews and rowdy students, celebrating their victory over the revered tsar, often by defiling his portrait. For nine months the ‘upstarts’ had defied authority more or less with impunity; now they had apparently succeeded in bringing down the entire political system, and with it the hierarchical structure on which Russian society had been based. If the autocracy could no longer restrain them, those who yearned to maintain the old order, because they felt secure within it, would have to take the law into their own hands.
The government’s failure to maintain order was not the only sign of its weakness. Throughout the country the soviets (councils of workers’ deputies) that had appeared quite spontaneously as strike committees during the general strike vastly expanded their operations. The Petersburg Soviet, the most prominent in the empire, challenged the government’s authority at one turn after another. It made its presence felt in particular during strikes, when it sent directives to government agencies such as the Post Office and the railroads, and entered into negotiations with the St. Petersburg City Council – and once even with Prime Minister Witte himself. The Soviet also sent numerous inquiries to government offices, and officials were often sufficiently impressed by the Soviet’s authority to go to the trouble of answering. The Soviet also organized collections of money for unemployed workers and distributed thirty kopeks a day to adults and ten to fifteen to children. Moreover, it set up several inexpensive dining halls for the unemployed and their families. The boldest undertaking of the Soviet was the establishment of its own militia, numbering, according to some estimates, six thousand men. The militiamen wore special armbands and frequently interfered in police matters, going so far as to issue orders to policemen, many of whom were so confused by the troubled state of affairs that they gave in to the militiamen. A leading newspaper complained that there were really two governments, one led by Count Witte and one by G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, the chairman of the Petersburg Soviet, and that no one knew who would arrest whom first.
The countryside also became restive during the Days of Liberty. From 23 October 1905 until mid November there were no less than 796 major and minor incidents of peasant unrest in 478 districts in the forty-seven provinces of European Russia and in parts of the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces, and Poland. The basic pattern of the disorders was similar to that of the earlier period: peasants cut down timber, refused to pay taxes, and took grain from estates owned by the nobility. In many regions agricultural workers staged strikes. But this new wave of the peasant movement was more violent than the one in the spring and summer. For example, in Tambov alone, buildings on 130 estates were burned down. It was also more common for peasants to seize land for ‘temporary use’, that is, until the State Duma, expected to meet soon, approved the seizures. Although violence against individuals also increased, it was still not widespread, in part because landlords made their escape before the arrival of marauding peasants. The peasant unrest subsided late in 1905, only to resume with renewed vigor in the period from May to August 1906. By the time the revolution ended in 1907, the empire had endured the most intense wave of agrarian upheaval since the Pugachev peasant rebellion of 1773–5. Total losses in European Russia alone amounted to twenty-nine million rubles.
The government could not always resort to its customary response to peasant unrest – massive force – because many men in the military services had themselves become unruly. These men chose to believe that the tsar’s concession in granting the October Manifesto gave them license to ignore rules and regulations that they found burdensome. The manifesto itself made no reference at all to civil liberties for soldiers and sailors, but that was immaterial. The tsar had given in to the opposition, authority in the civilian sector had collapsed, and to men in the military it seemed as though they, too, were no longer bound by the old constraints. All told, 211 separate mutinies were recorded in the Russian army between late October and mid December 1905, though very few were accompanied by violence. In most of them, the men simply refused to obey orders, left their barracks, held meetings to discuss current affairs, and talked back to their officers. Although the elite corps, the cavalry and Cossacks, were virtually untouched by mutiny, one-third of all infantry units experienced some form of disturbance, and the navy was so riddled with disorder that the government feared that it could no longer be relied upon to carry out its mission. The minister of war, General Rediger, thought that the country was threatened with ‘total ruin’. However, the government was never totally bereft of loyal troops, and in the end it could count on enough of them to restore order in the military and the country at large.
The last gasp of the radical phase of the revolution took place in December 1905, when workers in Moscow, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries, staged an uprising that triggered the bloodiest domestic strife of the revolution. Perturbed by a wide-ranging police crackdown, which included the arrest on 3 December of the Executive Committee of the Petersburg Soviet and two hundred of its deputies, the radicals in Moscow decided on a desperate attempt to overthrow the government by initiating a rebellion in the hope that it would quickly spread throughout the empire. At first, it seemed as though the insurgents might be able to seize the centers of government authority in Moscow. Some eighty thousand workers went on strike in support of the uprising, the economy ground to a virtual standstill, and, surprisingly, the troops were withdrawn from the streets, apparently out of fear that they might not be reliable in hand-to-hand combat. But it soon turned out that Admiral F. V. Dubasov, who had been appointed governor-general of Moscow late in November, would not be reluctant to use all the force under his command – some six thousand soldiers, two thousand policemen, and a division of gendarmes – to crush the rebels. On 10 December, he ordered the use of light artillery to dislodge the revolutionaries from their strongholds. It was the first time that such heavy weapons had been used in a domestic disturbance and, predictably, this aroused profound anger even among people unsympathetic to the insurgents. Within five days the government prevailed, though at a terrible price. One thousand and fifty-nine Muscovites, most of them civilians not involved in the fighting, were killed. Of these, 137 were women and eighty-six were children. Twenty-five policemen and nine soldiers lost their lives.
To consolidate their victory, the authorities unleashed a crackdown not only in Moscow but in other regions of the empire. The government’s most devastating and brutal weapon against the radicals was the punitive expedition, an organized attack on individuals believed to be hostile to the government by small groups of specially selected troops in regions either controlled by radicals or in a state of unrest. The idea behind the punitive expeditions was not only to root out unrest but to intimidate the population by publicly, quickly, and ruthlessly punishing participants in disturbances or people suspected of having participated in them. It was, in short, a form of state terror directed at its own citizens. There is no hard evidence of the total number of victims of this campaign. According to one estimate, between December 1905 and late May 1906, 1,170 people were killed in the Baltic region, admittedly one of the more turbulent parts of the empire. Not surprisingly, the government’s repressive policy proved to be effective. Within about four months, the revolutionary movement was in retreat everywhere, incapable of holding the line against the authorities.
Yet the government did not seek to turn back the clock to 1904. It allowed the election of the State Duma to go forward and, on the whole, it was a fair election in which some twenty to twenty-five million citizens participated. Convinced that the peasants were still loyal to the tsar, the government had devised complicated procedures that assigned to them about forty-two percent of electors who made the final choice of Duma deputies. The landowners were assigned close to thirty-three percent of the electors, the town dwellers more than twenty-two percent, and the workers two and a half percent. This worked out at one elector for every two thousand landowners, thirty thousand peasants, and ninety thousand workers, and four thousand other subjects living in the cities. But the government had completely misjudged the mood of the people. The overwhelming majority of the deputies belonged to parties in opposition to the prevailing order. The newly formed Octobrist Party, which expressed satisfaction with changes in the political system introduced by the October Manifesto, elected only thirteen deputies, the extreme right not one. The Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats, who favored a parliamentary system of government, were the largest single party with 185 deputies and dominated the proceedings of the first and second Duma.
It was predictable that a Duma with this complexion would not be able to cooperate with the tsarist regime, which still held the upper hand. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 stipulated that despite the existence of an elected parliament the tsar retained the power to appoint the cabinet as well as the right to veto measures adopted by the legislature. Moreover, he controlled the administration of the empire, determined foreign policy, commanded the military forces, and had the right to impose martial law or states of emergency on regions beset by unrest. Separately, Nicholas had changed the composition and authority of the State Council, giving it coequal powers with the Duma, whose competence was thus severely circumscribed. Once the Duma met, on 27 April 1906, the relationship between it and the government quickly turned acrimonious. There were many conflicts between them, but two were the most critical in sealing the fate of the legislature. First, the Duma offended the government by unanimously calling for political changes of the most fundamental kind, changes that would have transformed the country into a constitutional monarchy with paramount authority vested in the Duma. Then the Duma further enraged the government by considering several measures to deal with the agrarian issue, all of which, to one degree or another, called for compulsory alienation of privately owned land and its distribution to land-hungry peasants. The prime minister, I. L. Goremykin, a reactionary of limited ability, never took the Duma seriously and instructed his ministries not to attend any of its sessions. When the Duma refused to yield on its demands, the government dissolved it. It had existed for only seventy-two days and had held only forty sessions.
The Kadets protested vigorously. They met in Vyborg (Finland) and issued a call for passive resistance, but the response of the Russian people was muted. Exhausted from a year and a half of turbulence, confronted in many cities with the threat of unemployment, the masses in the summer of 1906 were much more reluctant to defy the authorities than they had been in 1905. Moreover, an effective campaign of passive resistance requires extensive preparation and organization. Surprisingly, the Kadets did not seem to realize this, for they had done virtually nothing to prepare the ground for an organized response to the dissolution. They simply assumed that the masses were still in a militant and activist mood.
But within a few months it turned out that the government, too, had miscalculated badly. It had assumed that a new election for a second Duma, held under the same electoral procedures, would yield a more pliant legislature. In fact, the membership of the second Duma, which began its meetings on 20 February 1907, was much more radical than the first. True, the moderate Octobrists increased their strength from thirteen to forty-four, and the extremists on the right, without any representation in the first Duma, elected ten deputies and could count on the support of some fifty-four from other small groups. But the number of left-wing deputies jumped from 111 to 222. The parties of the center suffered a serious decline: the Kadets and their adherents won ninety-nine seats.
The clashes between the government and the legislature that had plagued the first Duma recurred, but there was one important difference. The government was now led by an able and vigorous man, P. A. Stolypin, a former governor of Saratov who had displayed considerable skill and toughness in dealing with the opposition and who had a vision, conservative to be sure, for the restructuring of the country. He was also an eloquent orator capable of more than holding his own in debates with the opposition. He made what were perhaps his most memorable pronouncements during heated debates with the left. On one occasion he accused them of seeking to ‘paralyze the government . . . [with attacks that all] amount to two words addressed to the authorities: “Hands up.” To these two words, gentlemen, the government must respond, in complete calm and secure in the knowledge that it is in the right, with only two words: “Not afraid.”’ On another occasion he taunted the left with the words ‘They need great upheavals, we need a great Russia!’ When he decided that this Duma, like the first one, took stands on the agrarian issue and on political change that made cooperation with it impossible, he unceremoniously dissolved it again (on 3 June 1907), but this time he fundamentally changed the electoral law by depriving many peasants and minorities of the vote, ensuring the election of a conservative Duma. This marked the end of the revolution of 1905.
On the surface, the failure of the revolution seems puzzling. Never before had any European revolution been spearheaded by four popular movements, the middle class, the industrial proletariat, the peasantry, and national minorities. If the opposition was so pervasive, why was the government able to survive? One important reason was that the various sectors of the opposition did not act as a unified force, did not simultaneously attack the old order. Each one of the defiant groups acted more or less independently, which diluted the pressure on the government. When several movements (workers, professional groups, and some industrialists) did coalesce in October 1905, the government had no choice but to make far-reaching concessions. But the disagreements between liberals and socialists, to mention only one source of conflict, were too deep for prolonged cooperation between them. The liberals by and large did not favor a republic or socialism. Nor did they support violent methods of struggle against tsarism. And when the radicals took up arms late in 1905, the army, though plagued by disorder, in the end proved to be a reliable instrument for repressing unrest in the cities and the countryside. Finally, in 1906, foreign governments strengthened the tsarist regime by advancing substantial loans to it.
Although the revolution had been defeated, the Russia of 1907 was different in several important respects from the Russia of 1904. The very existence of an elected legislature, whose approval was necessary for the enactment of most laws, diminished the powers of the tsar and the bureaucracy. The landed gentry, the business class, and the upper stratum of the peasantry, all of whom continued to participate in the election of the Duma, now exercised some influence in public affairs. Moreover, trade unions and various associations of cooperatives remained active, and censorship of the press and other publications was much less stringent. In short, Russia had taken a modest step away from autocracy and towards the creation of a civil society.
Well before dissolving the second Duma, Stolypin had launched his reform program. Although he did not shy away from repression, he contended that it alone could not restore order and establish a stable and prosperous society. His single most important reform, with which his name has always been identified, sought to transform the agrarian sector of the Russian economy, still the source of income for over eighty percent of the population. For some time, Stolypin had argued that the elimination of the commune was necessary to overcome economic backwardness and to stimulate economic growth. He was certainly not the first to make this point, but he was the first to translate abstract ideas about agrarian reform into reality. Stolypin’s interest in eliminating the commune was not dictated only by a desire to improve the economy. He was convinced that the planned changes in the countryside would affect the peasants’ attitudes on a whole range of issues, fundamentally altering the outlook of most of the people in Russia. The most critical problem, according to Stolypin, was that the peasants were wholly lacking in civic spirit; they did not respect the laws and they had no developed sense of civic obligation. In short, the peasants were not yet ‘citizens’ in the full meaning of the word. His goal, Stolypin stressed, was to transform them into citizens by giving them a stake in society, by making them realize that order and discipline were in their interest. ‘Private peasant ownership’, he wrote in a memorandum he submitted to the tsar in 1905, ‘is a guarantee of order, because each small owner represents the nucleus on which rests the stability of the State.’ Though radical in overturning an established institution, Stolypin’s reform was designed to serve a conservative purpose, that is, to turn the peasantry into a force that would favor political stability.
Stolypin began the process of agrarian reform in August 1906 with the announcement that the government would make available for sale to peasants a modest amount of land from the state, the tsar’s personal holdings, and the properties of the imperial family. Then, a ukase enacted by the government on 5 October provided for an extension of civil and personal rights to the peasants, narrowing the distinction between them and other classes and thereby conferring many of the attributes of citizenship on them. Peasants were now permitted to work in administrative agencies of the state, to attend educational institutions without prior permission from the commune, and to retain ties with their village communities if they entered the civil service or some other profession. But by far the most significant reform was embodied in the ukase of 9 November. It permitted every head of a peasant family who held land in a commune to claim it as private property. The precise conditions for the transfer would have to be worked out, but the communal assembly could no longer as a matter of law prevent such transfer. In addition, the ukase of 9 November made it easier for peasants to bring about consolidated ownership of the strips into which the land was divided. Until the reform, a unanimous vote of the communal assembly was needed before any consolidation could be enacted; now an affirmative vote by two-thirds of the assembly sufficed. The ukase was enacted under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, which permitted the government to rule by decree when the Duma was in recess; such a decree, however, became a dead letter if it were not confirmed by both houses of the legislature within two months after they reconvened. Article 87 was meant to allow the government to enact laws only in an emergency, and many within the opposition rightly contended that Stolypin was abusing his authority in resorting to it to enact measures that should have been considered by the Duma.
The implementation of the reform was bound to be complicated and slow. For one thing, many peasants out of sheer inertia rejected the very idea of seceding from the commune. Many others, committed to the principle of egalitarianism, feared that the new law would inevitably produce greater inequalities in the villages. Personal and social considerations also militated against the success of the reform. Women, especially those whose husbands spent large parts of the year working in distant cities, felt comfortable with the social life in the village and feared the isolation that would invariably accompany secession from the commune. They would have to live on farms far removed from their previous neighbors. But there were other practical impediments that slowed down implementation of the reform. It was extremely difficult for the land organization commissions set up by the authorities to decide which land was to be given to the separator: they had to take into account such matters as access to roads, wells, and the drainage system, and they had to decide how to divide lands of widely different quality into equitable plots.
An unqualified judgment on the effectiveness of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms is difficult to make. His most ardent admirers claim that because of the outbreak of World War I and the revolution of 1917 the reforms could not be fully implemented and that it is therefore unfair to belabor these reforms for failing to change Russia’s political landscape. But an examination of the reform process indicates that it was very slow to begin with and had become markedly slower well before 1914. The number of applications for secession reached its high point in 1909 and declined sharply thereafter. Some 508,000 households left the commune in 1908, 580,000 in 1909, and 342,000 in 1910. In 1913, the number shrank to 135,000. By 1914, only twenty percent of the peasants had obtained ownership of their land, and fourteen percent of the land had been withdrawn from communal tenure. Strip consolidation developed at an even slower pace. By late 1916, only 10.7 percent of the peasant households in European Russia worked land that was enclosed. On the other hand, Stolypin’s contention that his reform was not designed to benefit only or primarily the richer peasants was substantiated. The main beneficiaries were peasants with average-sized holdings, who proved to be most eager to take advantage of the new law. Nonetheless, the process of privatization and consolidation would have taken many years to reach even a majority of the peasants. Whether in the meantime political stability, Stolypin’s goal, could have been achieved remains an open question.
Stolypin himself did not supervise the implementation of his reform for very long. In September 1911, he was assassinated by a troubled man whose motives remain unclear. The assassin had been an informer for the secret police and had also expressed his support for the Socialist Revolutionaries. To this day, historians differ over whether he was serving the revolutionary or tsarist cause or acting purely on his own.1 In any case, Stolypin’s death brought to an end the last major effort under tsarism to reform the social and political order. Stolypin had tried to modernize the country in various ways, but his success was limited. He did expand public education and he managed to introduce measures to provide accident or illness insurance for certain categories of workers (about twenty percent of the country’s workforce). But his efforts to liberalize religious laws to make the state more tolerant of minorities, to improve the efficiency of local governments, and to lift some of the restrictions imposed on the Jews all came to naught. The opposition of the ultra-conservatives among the nobility and the failure of the tsar to back him up proved to be his undoing.
Stolypin’s successor as prime minister, V. N. Kokovtsov, showed little interest in reform, and, in any case, he was not a strong leader capable of implementing measures that disturbed the status quo. In dealing with defiant citizens his government did not take to heart the lessons of 1905. Early in 1912, troops fired on a crowd of about five thousand strikers at the Lena gold mines in eastern Siberia, killing some two hundred and wounding many more. The minister of internal affairs, A. A. Makarov, declared that the soldiers could do nothing but shoot at a crowd that was marching towards them. ‘That’, he said, ‘is how it has been and that is how it will be in the future.’ This callous reaction of the government to the massacre enraged many Duma deputies and society at large. The massacre triggered increased militancy in the labor movement, which manifested itself in victories by the Bolsheviks over the more moderate Mensheviks in several important labor union elections. And in 1914 there was an upsurge in industrial strikes. Thus, Tsar Nicholas faced what turned out to be his severest challenge, war with Germany, without having come to grips with the social, political, and economic problems that kept society dangerously fragmented.
The results of the First World War (1914–18) are indisputable: horrible human and economic devastation, the collapse of monarchical rule in three major countries (Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany), significant changes in national boundaries, abiding hatreds between the victors and the defeated. Moreover, there is little doubt that neither communism nor National Socialism would have triumphed in Russia and Germany, respectively, had it not been for the suffering and despair generated by the war. The causes of the war, however, are not so evident. In the spring of 1914, no responsible leader in Europe wanted to lead his country into military conflict, much less into a conflict that would be worldwide. In a sense, at the crucial moments in July and August of that year, the leaders of the major countries were the captives of policies that their predecessors had followed over the preceding few decades.
After Bismarck unified Germany in 1871 and annexed Alsace-Lorraine, relations between Germany and France were bound to be extremely hostile. To isolate France and to prevent Germany from having to fight a two-front war, Bismarck pursued two policies, which became the backbone of his overall foreign policy: he formed a strong alliance with Austria-Hungary and he maintained good relations with Russia. To remain on good terms with the two powers in the east was not easy, since Russia and Austria-Hungary were rivals for influence in the Balkans. But Bismarck, a genius at diplomacy, managed it with remarkable success. In 1890, however, the new kaiser, Wilhelm II, decided, very rashly, on a new course. An erratic and aggressive man, Wilhelm dismissed Bismarck and changed the country’s foreign policy in drastic ways. He ended the friendly relations with Russia and after a few years in office embarked on a provocative program of naval construction and colonial expansion. Great Britain, deeply troubled by the emergence of a new and aggressive naval power, established close ties with France, which had already formed an alliance with Russia (in 1894). By the early twentieth century, then, Europe was divided into two strong groups: the Triple Alliance (Germany and Austria-Hungary, joined in 1882 by Italy) and the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia). All the countries in the two alliances devoted an increasing portion of their wealth to strengthening their military forces.
Alliances by themselves do not cause wars; they simply shed light on how nations at any particular moment view their national interests. But in times of crisis, when nationalistic passions run high, alliances often influence politicians by encouraging them to think that they have a stronger hand than they really have. The crisis of 1914 began on 28 June, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne in Vienna, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a province populated largely by Slavs that Austria-Hungary had annexed in 1908. Vienna was convinced that Serbia wished to gain control over Bosnia as part of its plan to establish a new state, Yugoslavia, which would incorporate all Southern Slavs. For the Austro-Hungarian Empire, composed of several minorities, such a development was anathema, since it would most likely lead to the unraveling of that multinational state. After receiving a blank check from Germany to deal with the crisis, Vienna took a provocative and aggressive step. It sent an ultimatum to Serbia demanding not only the suppression of all anti-Austrian agitation in Serbia but also the participation of Austrians in the government’s crackdown. No sovereign government could accept such conditions, and Serbia was no exception. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
Ideology as much as anything else dictated the policy of Russian statesmen during the international crisis. Long the protector of ‘her little Slav brother’, Russia, the country’s elite widely believed, could not stand aside and allow fellow Slavs to be subjugated. Still, in response to a final plea from the kaiser to avoid any irrevocable action, Tsar Nicholas rescinded an order he had given for general mobilization and ordered, instead, a partial mobilization directed only at Austria-Hungary. But when his generals and his foreign minister, S. D. Sazonov, advised him that, since there were no plans for a partial mobilization, he should revert to the original order, Nicholas complied, setting off a chain reaction. Germany quickly followed suit in ordering mobilization of its forces, as did France. After some hesitation, Great Britain entered the conflict on 4 August on the side of France and Russia, mainly because it feared German domination of the continent. A serious incident in one relatively remote area of Europe had triggered a world war that no one had expected or wished for.
This brief account of Russia’s slide into war suggests a certain inevitability about it all, as if there were no attempts to avoid a conflagration. In fact, P. N. Durnovo, a former minister of internal affairs and an uncompromising reactionary, sent a memorandum to Tsar Nicholas in February 1914 warning that a European war would be prolonged and would surely provoke a social revolution with shattering consequences for the old order. He urged the tsar to realign the country’s foreign policy by establishing close ties with Germany, a move that would enable Russia to avert war. Events would soon demonstrate that Durnovo was an insightful man.
Initially, the war, greeted by most people with a show of patriotism, went well for Russia. Its armies scored some victories when they attacked eastern Prussia and Galicia in an effort to help the French, who faced the brunt of the German army advancing across Belgium into France. But the Russian successes were short-lived. As soon as the Germans had assembled an army in the east, they routed the Russians in the Battle of Tannenberg (27–9 August 1914), inflicting heavy losses on them: some 300,000 casualties and the destruction or capture of 650 guns. In Galicia, the Russian successes lasted longer, in part because the Austro-Hungarian army was inefficient and beset with severe problems of low morale. Many Ukrainians and Czechs who had been recruited felt little loyalty to Austria-Hungary and voluntarily surrendered to the Russians, who occupied Galicia. But in May 1915 the German army turned its attention to this area and quickly defeated the Russians once again, driving them out of Poland.
It had now become clear that the Russian Empire’s economic and social backwardness as well as its incompetent political and military leadership precluded success in the war. The tsar’s first mistake was to appoint his uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, as commander-in-chief, responsible directly to him. The grand duke was very handsome and popular among the troops, but he himself admitted that he did not know how to run the military. He lasted in his exalted office for only one year, at which point the tsar made an even worse appointment. He himself took over as commander-in-chief. Not only did he know even less than his uncle about warfare, he would now be held directly responsible for the military’s failings. And he did not have an adequate corps of officers on whom he could rely for sound advice. Most of the senior officers had moved up the ladder not because they were able men but because they had served loyally, though without distinction, for many years. They also tended to be excessively concerned with advancing their own reputation and often acted mindlessly without coordinating their plans with other senior officers. To make matters worse, many rank-and-file soldiers were illiterate and clueless about Russia’s goals in the war. The government’s talk about the need to wage war out of brotherly love for the Serbs did not resonate with them. Nor did the promises of the Allies in 1915 and 1916 that at the conclusion of the war Russia would be given Constantinople and the Straits and some regions in Asiatic Turkey.
Naively, the government believed that the key to military success would be the creation of a huge army that would be able to overwhelm the enemy simply by virtue of its size. One year after the beginning of hostilities, Russia had mobilized no less that 9.7 million men. But there were not enough officers and non-commissioned officers to lead so large a force. At the same time, the country lacked facilities for training the new recruits, many of whom had to wait in miserable barracks for months before they began their training. When they were sent to the front, they often did not have the necessary equipment or enough food. It happened more than once that when groups of infantrymen were ordered to advance against enemy positions only the men in the front rows carried guns. Those in the rear lines were expected to pick up the guns of comrades who had fallen in battle. It was thoroughly demoralizing and many surrendered to the enemy without fighting. By late 1915, Russia had endured several defeats and had been forced to give up nearly all the conquered lands. More ominous still, German troops had penetrated deeply into the Russian Empire and could not be dislodged.
In domestic affairs, the government also stumbled badly. Because the army swelled to fifteen million, one-third of the population of working age, industry had to employ people without adequate skills, which lowered productivity at a time when there was a desperate need for military hardware. Large agricultural estates, the main suppliers of food products for the market, also faced a shortage of labor. The railway system, not very efficient to begin with, broke down, in part because many of the lines in the west were under enemy occupation. In addition, the railway companies could not repair all the engines that broke down. Nor could they replace them with new ones. Between 1914 and 1917 the number of functioning railway engines declined from twenty thousand to nine thousand. Increasingly, it was impossible to ship all the available food supplies to the large cities, and the shortages of staples became widespread early in 1917, despite the introduction of rationing in 1916. People widely disregarded the government’s system of rationing, and prices shot up at a dangerous pace, posing serious hardship for most citizens.
The empress urged Nicholas to cope with the mounting crises by being ‘more autocratic’; utterly irrelevant advice, for he had no idea how to deal with the nation’s problems. Increasingly, as the magnitude of the military defeats and casualties became apparent, people blamed the tsar himself for incompetent leadership. The losses were staggering. All in all, 650,000 men lost their lives, over 2,500,000 were wounded, and more than 3,500,000 either became prisoners of war or were missing. The last figure is especially noteworthy because it indicates the extent to which soldiers surrendered to the enemy rather than fight. The tsar tried to deal with the growing decline in confidence in the government by dismissing ministers who had demonstrated their incompetence, but the men he appointed to replace them were as incompetent as their predecessors. The ‘ministerial leapfrog’, as one conservative Duma deputy called the frequent changes in personnel, highlighted the bankruptcy of the old order.
So did the amazing influence at the highest level of government of Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin, an unkempt and semi-literate monk whose rise to prominence in late imperial Russia is one of the more bizarre indications of the degenerate state of Russian politics. Not much is known about Rasputin’s early life beyond the simple fact that he was born in 1872 in the province of Tobolsk, 250 miles east of the Ural mountains. As a young man he gained a reputation for horse stealing and lust, and in the early 1890s he married, and sired three children. Neither marriage nor fatherhood restrained his search for sexual adventures, but his wife apparently did not mind. ‘He has enough for all,’ she explained.
At some point, Rasputin underwent a religious experience of sorts. He then joined an illegal mystical sect and disappeared from Siberia. For a few years he adopted the lifestyle of the stranniki, ascetic wanderers who traveled the country and lived off charity. After two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rasputin showed up at the religious academy in St. Petersburg in December 1903. The monk Illiodor, who met him at the time, remembered him as a ‘stocky peasant of middle height, with ragged and dirty hair falling over his shoulders, tangled beard, and steely-grey eyes, deep set under the bushy eyebrows, which sometimes almost sank into pin points, and a strong body odor’. Illiodor and other clergymen, impressed by Rasputin’s declaration that he wished to repent for his sins by serving God, helped him get settled in St. Petersburg.
Somehow, Rasputin persuaded dignitaries that he could perform miracles. He first demonstrated his skills by curing a dog beloved by the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Late in 1905, Rasputin was introduced to the tsar and tsaritsa, and immediately captivated the royal couple by stopping the bleeding of their only son, Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia. Apparently, Rasputin achieved the feat by means of hypnosis, and there is evidence that such a procedure can work. In any case, the tsarina immediately concluded that Rasputin ‘was a holy man, almost a Christ’. She also interpreted his appearance at the court as a sign of the mystical union between the peasants and autocracy; a man of the people, she reasoned, had come to save the dynasty.
Rasputin conducted innumerable affairs, often with ladies close to the imperial court who were convinced that God revealed himself in his words and that his ‘kisses and embraces sanctified each of his faithful disciples’. Some men actually felt honored to be cuckolded by the lascivious monk. However, many people in St. Petersburg society, including respected political leaders, were scandalized and publicly denounced Rasputin as a ‘fornicator of human souls and bodies’. None of this bothered the empress, who relied on him more than ever when she played a major role in determining domestic policies during the tsar’s long absences at the front. Early in 1916, for example, the empress urged Nicholas to appoint the incompetent Boris Stürmer as chief minister because he greatly valued Rasputin and ‘completely believes in [his] wonderful, God-sent wisdom’. Unfortunately for Russia – and for himself – Nicholas heeded the advice.
Appalled by this embarrassing and harmful state of affairs, several archconservatives took it upon themselves in December 1916 to assassinate Rasputin. Prince Felix Yusupov, who was married to one of the tsar’s nieces, organized a conspiracy and then invited the ‘Holy Devil’ to his home for a party. The host plied Rasputin with poisoned wine and cakes, which the monk devoured with few ill effects. Yusupov then fired several shots into the monk and with the help of the other conspirators dumped him in the Neva river. The conspirators had hoped that the murder of Rasputin would be a signal to conservatives to join a movement to save the monarchy. But it was too late. The people of Russia were now thoroughly disillusioned with the war and refused to tolerate any longer the hardships it had caused.
The Duma, composed largely of moderates and conservatives, had lost patience with the government as early as July 1915, when a sizable number of deputies, including liberals and some conservatives, formed a ‘Progressive Bloc’ to urge the authorities to install a competent government that would enjoy the confidence of the people and respect the rule of law. The bloc specifically did not call for any constitutional changes, and yet the tsar ignored it, a snub that heightened political tensions. In one of the more dramatic moments in the history of the Duma, Pavel Miliukov, leader of the Kadets, delivered a speech in November 1916 in which he listed one after another of the government’s failings and asked, provocatively, whether these were the result of folly or of treason.
At the same time, there were increasing signs that the mood of the people had turned sour. Initially, in 1914, few workers went on strike, but in 1915 there were some one hundred strikes involving about 550,000 workers, and the numbers continued to climb in 1916. In January and February 1917 there was a new upsurge in labor unrest in protest against declining living standards and the persistent food shortages (including bread). The government’s policy of drafting strikers of military age and sending them to the front or keeping them in the factories as soldiers only served to embitter workers even more.
Russia was now teetering on the edge of a convulsion, but no one, not even the most committed radicals, sensed that the country was about to undergo a revolutionary upheaval. In a lecture to young workers in Zurich in January 1917, Lenin predicted that his listeners would have the good fortune of witnessing the ‘coming proletarian revolution’. But he was pessimistic about his own chances of playing a role in such an event: ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’
As it turned out, in 1917 Russia underwent two revolutions, quite different in their evolution, their mass support, and their ultimate goals. The first erupted spontaneously. On 8 March, International Women’s Day, thousands of women in St. Petersburg left the breadlines to join strikers from the Putilov works who were demonstrating against the government with banners that featured a political slogan, ‘Down with the Autocracy’. The police easily dispersed the marchers, but one day later a much larger demonstration, estimated at 200,000 people, appeared in the center of the city. It still seemed to be an unthreatening event, even though, ominously, the Cossacks now refused to charge the crowd. On 10 March, the crowds in the streets were even larger and the tsar, increasingly nervous, ordered the troops to fire at the marchers. As the army began to carry out this order it seemed as though the demonstrations would peter out. But then, on 12 March, one regiment after another not only refused to shoot but went over to the revolution. Moreover, no one stopped the workers who broke into military arsenals and seized forty thousand rifles. V. M. Rodzianko, the president of the Duma, realizing that the regime was on the verge of collapse, urged Nicholas to introduce reforms in a last effort to prevent a national disaster. The tsar, as short-sighted as ever, dismissed the advice: ‘That fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense, to which I shall not even reply.’
A few hours later it was clear that the government had lost control of St. Petersburg, and as unrest spread to other cities the tsar came under intense pressure from political dignitaries to abdicate, which he did on 15 March. A dynasty that had ruled Russia for some three hundred years and had claimed to govern by divine right collapsed after only a few days of unrest and with remarkably little bloodshed. All in all, about thirteen hundred people were killed or wounded. The disintegration of the old order had proceeded so rapidly because the support for it had simply evaporated. As the monarchist Duma deputy V. V. Shulgin, no friend of the demonstrators, noted, ‘The trouble was that in that large city [St. Petersburg] it was impossible to find a few hundred people who felt kindly towards the Government. That’s not all. The Government did not feel kindly towards itself. There was not a single Minister who believed in himself or in what he was doing.’
The critical task now was to establish a new center of authority that would be recognized by the people as legitimate. On 12 March, even before the tsar’s abdication, Duma deputies, who had remained in the parliament building despite Nicholas’s order proroguing the legislature, formed a committee to restore order and act as an unofficial government. Four days later this group declared itself the ‘Provisional Government’ and issued its program, which was thoroughly liberal and democratic. The Provisional Government established freedom of speech and unionization, it promised to grant an amnesty to political prisoners, to abolish all social, religious, and national restrictions, to hold a democratic election of a constituent assembly that would decide on the form of a new government, and to create committees to make recommendations on the agrarian question. Finally, the new government promised to continue the war, by far its most controversial decision.
At the very moment that the Provisional Government came into being, a rival center of authority, the soviets, appeared in St. Petersburg and soon thereafter in many other areas of the country. Chosen haphazardly by workers and soldiers, the soviets were dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and enjoyed the confidence of the politically active masses. The leaders of the Petersburg Soviet acknowledged the Provisional Government as the legitimate authority, but they did so half-heartedly and on some major issues they adopted stands at variance with those of the government. It soon became evident that without the full support of the Soviet the government could not enforce its will. As a result, there emerged what came to be known as ‘dual power’. On the one hand, the government was formally charged with running the country but it could not by itself exercise political power. On the other hand, the soviets, the repository of political power, refused to assume any responsibility of government.
The leaders of the soviets, all socialists, had plausible reasons for refusing to participate in governing the country. Convinced that Russia was ripe only for a bourgeois revolution, they feared that their assumption of power would push moderates into the counterrevolutionary camp, endangering the revolution. In addition, the Petersburg Soviet’s leaders lacked confidence in their ability to administer the machinery of government. Although they did not intend to cripple the government, their stance inevitably produced a situation that can only be described as political paralysis. Effective government is not possible in a country where there are two foci of authority, each with its own concerns and goals.
Conflicts between the Petersburg Soviet and the Provisional Government broke out soon after the collapse of tsarism. The first major clash occurred over Order No. 1 that the Soviet issued to the troops on 14 March. This abolished saluting when off duty, prohibited harsh treatment by officers of men under their command, and called for the election of committees in all army units. Although the committees were ostensibly to obey the orders of the Provisional Government, they were also directed to do so only if the orders of the authorities did not conflict with those of the Soviet. The purpose of Order No. 1 was to prevent the use of the military for counterrevolutionary purposes, but it was bound to undermine discipline in the military services, already very fragile.
But the principal source of conflict between the government and the Soviet was the war, which by now was extremely unpopular and which profoundly affected all major facets of national life. It increasingly became clear that if the war could not be ended quickly, the government would not be able to cope with any of the pressing problems facing the country: redistribution of land, creation of a constitutional order, and revival of the economy. And so long as the government could not make progress in these critical areas, it could not attract the popular support it needed to survive.
Yet the Provisional Government refused to extricate Russia from the war. One may reasonably question the wisdom of the new leaders’ inaction on this score, but it must be recognized that they faced difficult choices. The government feared that abandoning the Allies and concluding a separate peace would lead to Europe being dominated by the Central Powers, which were ruled by monarchs who could be expected to be hostile to the democratic order now established in Russia. The government also believed that it had a moral commitment to France and Great Britain to continue the military struggle until the enemy had been defeated. But it must also be noted that some members of the Provisional Government (in particular the foreign minister, P. N. Miliukov) harbored less lofty motives. They wanted Russia to remain in the war in order to annex Constantinople once the Central Powers had been defeated.
The soviets and their supporters on the left, distressed in particular over Miliukov’s stand, favored determined action by Russia to bring the war to an end. They urged all the belligerent powers to enter into negotiations for peace on the basis of the formula ‘No annexations, no indemnities’. The Provisional Government, however, could not be budged from its position. On the contrary, it assumed that a democratic Russia would be able to appeal to the army and people to make greater efforts to win the war. On the orders of Alexander Kerensky, the exuberant minister of war, the Russian army launched a major offensive in Galicia early in July. Initially, it scored some impressive victories, but after twelve days the Germans and Austrians counter-attacked and quickly mangled the Russian army, which did not put up much of a fight. Discipline simply collapsed. In a desperate attempt to restore morale, the government reinstated the death penalty in the military services, but it was of no avail.
No initiative that the Provisional Government undertook worked to stem the descent into the abyss. It was V. I. Lenin’s genius to sense, before anyone else, the utter helplessness of the authorities and the futility of all their efforts. In Switzerland when the revolution erupted, he immediately tried to return to Russia, but a glance at the map will reveal the difficulties he would encounter. However, officials in Germany concluded that it would be to their advantage to have him and a few dozen other socialists in Russia stirring up trouble. Swiss socialists arranged to have Lenin and thirty other exiles cross Germany in a sealed train. On his arrival in St. Petersburg on 9 April, Lenin discovered, to his dismay, that even the leaders of his own party (including, incidentally, Stalin) favored a policy of conditional support for the new regime, though they were trying to apply pressure on it to extricate Russia from the war. Rejecting this approach as totally misguided, Lenin offered a radically new strategy that amounted to a complete repudiation of the Soviet’s policies. He called for an end to support for the government, urged troops at the front to fraternize with Austrian and German soldiers, and proclaimed the imminence of the proletarian stage of the revolution. Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to commit themselves publicly to the creation in the very near future of a ‘commune state’ based on the soviets.
Even to his closest colleagues in the Bolshevik party Lenin’s scheme seemed to be utterly fantastic, and many wondered whether their leader had in fact lost touch with reality. But he persisted and used all his considerable skills to persuade his colleagues that his strategy and tactics were the right ones. As it became clear that the country was disintegrating, his prognosis appeared not to be unrealistic. The peasants, impatient with the inertia of the government, seized land, and no one could stop them. In the cities, workers took over factories after expelling the owners and managers. Local soviets assumed control over local government. National minorities broke away from the central authorities by proclaiming either autonomy or independence. Finally, the army was breaking up; soldiers, eager to end the war and take part in land seizures, deserted en masse (some two million men in the course of 1917). The Provisional Government promised reform and appealed to the population not to support these mass movements, but not many took seriously the promises or the appeals. It seemed as though the government was merely marking time.
Prodded by Lenin, the Bolsheviks eventually supported all the mass movements that were breaking down society, even though land seizures by peasants, workers’ control over factories, and the collapse of authority ran counter to their long-term goals of a state-controlled economy and a highly centralized political order. Ever the opportunist, Lenin urged his comrades to follow the masses to achieve his immediate goal, the seizure of power.
As early as mid July, when news reached the capital that the offensive in Galicia had stalled, it appeared that in St. Petersburg at least Lenin could count on wide support for his plan. Militant soldiers, sailors, and workers staged an armed uprising to pressure the Soviet into seizing power. The Bolsheviks, believing the time was not yet right for frontal attack on the Provisional Government, initially hesitated to take part in the uprising and even tried to restrain the rebels. But when huge masses (estimated at 500,000 people) appeared in the streets carrying banners on which was inscribed the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’, Lenin decided to support the action. There were some bloody clashes, but the government had too few reliable troops to stop the activists in the street, who almost certainly could have taken over the capital had Lenin been more decisive, even though the Soviet remained unwilling to take power, for reasons already noted. To calm the impatient demonstrators in the streets, the Soviet sent Victor Chernov, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries and known as a radical, out into the street to explain why a seizure of power was inadvisable at that moment. He was met by an angry mob, who, after searching him, accused him of being ‘one of the people who shoots at the people’. One sailor shook his fist and shouted, ‘Take power, you son-of-a-bitch, when it’s given to you.’ It was a dramatic scene not forgotten by the Bolsheviks. The government sought to punish the leaders of the demonstration by arresting them, but many, including Lenin and his close associates, went into hiding. The uprising had failed in its immediate goal, but it had revealed, once again, the weakness of the Provisional Government.
The government was further humiliated two months later, during a bizarre four-day episode known as the Kornilov Affair, which has justifiably been called the ‘prelude to Bolshevism’. The two main protagonists in this affair were Alexander Kerensky, appointed prime minister on 20 July, and General Lavr Kornilov, whom the former had appointed supreme commander-in-chief at a time of grave military crisis. A relatively young and dashing officer (he was forty-seven), Kornilov had demonstrated great valor (some thought in a reckless way) in battles against the enemy and had dramatically escaped from an Austrian prison in 1916. Once the revolution had succeeded in overturning tsarism, his main concern was to revitalize Russia’s fighting force. When he became commander-in-chief, he immediately let it be known that he intended to be his own man. He accepted the post on condition that he would be responsible ‘to his own conscience and to the people at large’, which was a peculiar demand for a general, who would normally be expected to be subordinate to his civilian superiors. Kerensky overlooked Kornilov’s unusual behavior because he needed a commander-in-chief capable of restoring the fighting spirit of the army. But early in September a series of incidents seemed to suggest that Kornilov wished to take power and to crush the revolutionaries. Even now the origins and implications of Kornilov’s actions are still murky and it is still not clear whether Kerensky initially conspired with Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship and then pulled back, or whether Kornilov simply imagined that he had the prime minister’s support.
In any case, when Kerensky dismissed him, Kornilov ignored the order and then appointed General Krymov as commander of the ‘Savage Division’ of Cossacks, which began to advance on the capital. St. Petersburg seemed defenseless and Kornilov appeared to be unstoppable. Strangely, however, Kornilov’s rebellion was suppressed without a single drop of blood being spilled. The general did not reckon with the listlessness of his troops nor with the effective opposition of the workers. The Soviet executive immediately organized workers for a defense against what it denounced as a counterrevolution. The most effective measures were taken by the Railway Bureau, an office set up by the Soviet. It called on workers to cripple the lines of communication and the system of transportation. Tracks at stations were blocked with coaches, and in three places the track was actually torn up, causing endless delays. As a consequence, some army detachments loyal to Kornilov were sent in the wrong direction and when they realized what had happened, it was too late. Also, continuous streams of agitators were sent to the soldiers, and they persuaded the troops not to do Kornilov’s bidding and to remain loyal to the Provisional Government. The rebellion quickly fizzled out. General Krymov committed suicide, and Kornilov and some of his supporters in the army resigned.
But for the Provisional Government it was a pyrrhic victory. For one thing, the military services became even more demoralized, since many rank-and-file soldiers lost what little faith they still had in their officers. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks became militarily much stronger, for in its anxiety to create a fighting force against Kornilov’s advancing troops, the Provisional Government had permitted indiscriminate arming of workers. As a result, the first units of the Bolshevik Red Guard were formed and soon mushroomed into a force of 25,000 people, none of whom gave up their weapons after the affair ended. Moreover, it was widely whispered that Kerensky had been in accord with Kornilov over the necessity of a dictatorship and had betrayed him under pressure from the soviets. And because a number of leading liberals had expressed sympathy for the Kornilov movement, it became impossible for the parties of the center to continue cooperating with each other within or outside the government. A concerted effort to stop the revolutionary left was now quite unfeasible. The Bolsheviks reaped the first concrete advantage from the Kornilov Affair on 13 September, when they achieved, for the first time, a majority in the Petersburg Soviet. Five days later the same thing happened in the Moscow Soviet. Fear of counterrevolution had produced a decisive shift to the left among the working class. Late in September, Lenin declared that the moment had come for the Bolsheviks to seize power. He was certain that ‘we will win absolutely and unquestionably.’
Goaded ceaselessly by Lenin, the Bolsheviks now made extensive preparations for the second revolution, which in some important respects would be quite different from the first, so-called ‘bourgeois’, revolution. It would not be a spontaneous outpouring of masses of people in the streets of St. Petersburg but a carefully planned seizure of power by at most a few thousand men and women. Its goal would be not a democratic and liberal political order but socialism, regardless of whether the prerequisites that Marxists had always claimed were necessary prevailed in Russia. But in one respect the November and March revolutions were similar. Both succeeded without encountering much resistance. Early in 1917 and later that year Russia was politically prostrate. So deep was the public despair and apathy that neither the tsarist regime nor the Provisional Government could muster the necessary support to retain authority. Ousting Kerensky’s government, as Lenin noted early in 1918, was ‘extremely easy’. Within hours, after the Bolsheviks made their move, they controlled the major centers of power in St. Petersburg. It is worth noting that the Bolsheviks throughout the Russian Empire commanded a membership of only about 200,000 people, and the proletariat, in whose name the revolution was staged, numbered perhaps three and a half million out of a total population of 150 million.
On 8 November, one day after taking power, Lenin announced a series of policies that he knew would receive wide acclaim. First, he came out in favor of the Socialist Revolutionary land program; property rights of the nobility would be eliminated and lands in rural regions would be placed at the disposal of Land Committees and district soviets of peasants’ deputies for distribution to the peasants. Lenin explicitly justified the abandonment of the Bolshevik land program of nationalization on the grounds that it was now necessary to demonstrate to the peasants that their land hunger would be satisfied and they were no longer subservient to the landlords. With this one move, Lenin assured himself of at least the temporary support or neutrality of the peasants, still the overwhelming majority of the population.
Lenin also immediately introduced workers’ control in industry and in commercial and agricultural enterprises, abolished distinctions and special privileges based on class, eliminated titles in the army, and issued a decree outlawing inequality in wages. Perhaps most important for the survival of his government, he quickly initiated negotiations with Germany to end the war. That turned out to be a difficult process, but in March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and thus extricated Russia from the war against the wishes of the Allies. But the treaty imposed extraordinarily harsh conditions on Russia, depriving the country of some twenty-six percent of its arable land and twenty-seven percent of its population. Many of Lenin’s comrades raised strong objections to the treaty, but Lenin insisted on accepting Germany’s terms. He was convinced that the treaty would not remain in force for long because the proletariat in other countries would soon follow the example of Russian Marxists and seize power. Once the revolution had triumphed throughout Europe, relations between states would be harmonious, Lenin contended, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be abrogated.
Although the months immediately following Lenin’s seizure of power have often been depicted as the idealistic phase of the Russian Revolution during which the leadership was guided by the principles of equality and popular rule, some Bolshevik actions caused sympathizers to raise their eyebrows even then. For one thing, Lenin made clear that he wanted a monopoly of power for his party, even though it represented only a small minority of the Russian people. He also suppressed newspapers opposed to the new regime, ostensibly as a temporary measure until the new order was firmly consolidated.
Most ominously, on 20 December 1917, the Cheka, the security police, was established to protect the revolution, which it did by arresting and often shooting opponents of Bolshevism without regard to due process. When members of his own party protested the actions of the police, Lenin attacked them as ‘narrow-minded intellectuals’ who ‘sob and fuss’ over the Cheka’s ‘mistakes’. He further declared that ‘When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.’ Nikolai Bukharin, a leading figure in the Bolshevik party, justified the terror during the early years of communist rule with a quotation from St Just, one of the militants of the French Revolution of 1789: ‘One must rule with iron, when one cannot rule with law.’
Many would succumb to government-sponsored terror, but in the early period of the revolution no act of violence was as dramatic as the murder of the tsar and his family in July 1918. A year earlier the family had been moved to Ekaterinburg (later Sverdlovsk), a city on the border of Europe and Asia, and placed under house arrest. Apparently because the Bolshevik hold on power was at the time highly precarious – Ekaterinburg itself was then in danger of falling to forces trying to overthrow the new regime – Lenin ordered local communists to kill the entire family and their staff. It may well be that Lenin viewed the murder both as a means of rallying support for the Bolshevik government and as a warning that the authorities would resort to brute force to remain in power.
Still, the elections to the constituent assembly, planned by the Provisional Government, had been allowed to proceed late in November 1917. The Bolsheviks received 23.5 percent of the votes, 9.8 million out of 41.7 million. The lists of delegates for the constituent assembly had been drawn up before the Bolshevik seizure of power and may therefore not have fully reflected the will of the people. However, it is clear that Lenin was no admirer of democratic procedures. On 26 December 1917, he published an article in Pravda in which he declared that ‘A republic of soviets is a higher form [of government] than the customary bourgeois republic with its constituent assembly.’ He also let it be known that the constituent assembly, which was to meet early in January 1918, would have to accept ‘Soviet power . . . the Soviet constitution’. Otherwise, ‘a crisis in connection with the constituent assembly can be solved only by revolutionary means.’ The assembly was allowed to meet, but when it became clear that the delegates were not well disposed towards the new regime, Bolshevik sailors armed with rifles dissolved it by force. This was, in the words of the historian E. H. Carr, the final ‘tearing asunder of the veil of bourgeois constitutionalism’.2
The true test of Lenin’s leadership came in the years from 1918 through 1921, when he faced civil war, foreign intervention, peasant unrest, and violent protests by revolutionaries who had been among his most dedicated supporters. Lenin’s ability to overcome all these challenges is a true mark of his political and ideological tenacity as well as his tactical flexibility.