The private correspondence of Russia’s ruling elite reveals the sheer panic that gripped the monarchy after the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the right-wing conservative adviser of the new tsar, Alexander III, bombarded his master with agitated letters, arguing passionately that the assassination was the direct result of foolish experiments with liberalism.
The times are terrible1, Your Majesty. It is now or never if you wish to save Russia and yourself. Do not believe the siren voices urging you to yield to so-called public opinion! For God’s sake, Your Majesty, do not believe them – do not continue with the liberal reforms!
Pobedonostsev berated both the dead tsar and the Russian interior minister, Loris-Melikov, who wrote the reforming draft constitution that the monarch signed on the morning of his assassination (see here):
Your Majesty, if you2 put your trust in this man [Loris-Melikov], like your father did, he will lead you and the whole country into ruin. All he is interested in is liberalisation … He wanted to introduce free, European-style institutions in Russia … For God’s sake, Your Majesty, do not let yourself fall under his spell!
The tussle between liberal and reactionary forces didn’t last long. Horrified by his father’s murder (he had been present as he died in agony), Alexander III replied to Pobedonostsev, accepting his arguments and agreeing to fire the remaining liberals in his government:
Yes … Today’s meeting3 saddened me. Loris [and the others] were still arguing for the same policies. Decidedly, they would like to see representative government introduced in Russia. But don’t worry – I shall not allow it! … The very idea of electoral government is something I can never accept!
Within days of ascending the throne, Alexander III had denounced his father’s plans for quasi-liberal reform, scribbling on the front page of the draft: ‘Thank God this over-hasty4, criminal proposal was never realised and the whole crazy project has been rejected.’ A month later, he shared his feelings with the nation:
A proclamation to all Our5 faithful subjects: God, in his inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to end the glorious reign of Our Beloved Parent with a martyr’s death and thus to lay upon us the sacred duty of autocratic rule … Our noble Father, having assumed from God the mantle of autocratic power for the benefit of the people in his stewardship, remained faithful even unto death … The base and wicked murder of a Russian Sovereign by unworthy monsters from the people is a terrible and shameful matter. It has darkened Our entire land with grief and terror. But in the midst of Our grief, the voice of God orders Us to take up the task of ruling, with total faith in the strength and righteousness of Our autocratic power. We are summoned to reaffirm that power and to preserve it for the benefit of the people from any encroachment upon it.
Alexander III’s pronouncement was titled ‘The Tsar’s Manifesto on Unshakable Autocracy’. It signalled the end of yet another of Russia’s brief flirtations with the ideas of representative government and a return to the autocratic rule which had become her default position. Its language is strikingly reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible’s speech at his coronation in 1547 (‘From this day I shall be6 sole and absolute ruler, for a kingdom cannot be ruled without an iron hand … Broad and bounteous are our lands, but there is little order in them. Only absolute power can safeguard Russia …’ (see here) In Russia, the rhetoric that underpins autocracy has remained constant for centuries.
Alexander’s manifesto was written by Pobedonostsev, who became the driving force in a conservative backlash that would last for two decades. He had been Alexander’s tutor from childhood. The huge, bear-like tsar, 6 feet 4 inches tall and almost as wide, and his priestly, cadaverous adviser ruled Russia in tandem. Under Pobedonostsev’s influence, censorship was tightened, the secret police reinforced and thousands of suspected revolutionaries packed off to Siberia. Government agents known as Land Captains were appointed in every rural district and given wide-ranging powers to root out sedition.
Pobedonostsev became the bogey man of the liberals: when Tolstoy pilloried his reactionary views and pinched, sinister appearance in the figure of Anna Karenina’s husband Karenin, Pobedonostsev retaliated by having Tolstoy excommunicated. But conservatives and nationalists regarded him as a hero. Dostoevsky was a personal friend and described him as the only man who might be able to save Russia from revolution.
In his densely argued collection of essays, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (1898), Pobedonostsev makes the case for autocracy in Russia with passionate conviction. As a committed Christian, he maintains that men are innately sinful and that the firm hand of an all-powerful monarch is the only means to restrain their natural rapacity:
It is a gross delusion to regard7 parliamentary government as a guarantee of freedom. The absolute power of the sovereign is replaced by the absolute power of parliament, with this difference only – that the sovereign may embody a rational will, while in parliament all depends on accident … When liberal democracy triumphs, it brings into society disorder and violence with the principles of infidelity and materialism … Such conditions lead inevitably to anarchy, from which society can be saved only by dictatorship – that is, by the return of autocracy.
In an argument as relevant today as it was in 1881, Pobedonostsev contends that the vast size of Russia and its many ethnic minorities mean Western-style democracy can never work there:
These deplorable results8 [disorder and violence] are all the more manifest where the population of a country is of heterogeneous composition, comprising nationalities of different races. The principle of nationality is the touchstone that reveals the falseness and impracticability of parliamentary government … The various races are animated by passionate feelings of intolerance towards the political institution that unites them in a single body, and an equally passionate aspiration to independent government with their own, generally fictitious, culture … Each race would send to parliament representatives not of common political interests, but of racial instincts, of racial hatred, not only to the dominant race but to the sister races and to the political institution that unites them all … Only autocracy succeeds in evading or conciliating such demands and outbreaks. Democracy cannot settle these questions, and the instinct of nationality thus serves as a disintegrating force.fn1
Not surprisingly, his and Alexander’s response to ethnic aspirations within the empire was a brutal campaign of forced Russification, repressing native languages and cultures and crushing nationalist ambitions. It fostered resentment and sowed the seeds of future conflict in regions like the Caucasus, central Asia and the Baltics. Alexander’s policy towards the Jews also bore the stamp of Pobedonostsev’s fierce anti-Semitism. The so-called May Laws9 banned Jews from living in certain areas and entering certain professions. Quotas were imposed on Jewish access to higher education, and anti-Semitic sentiment, never far below the surface in Russia, was deliberately stirred up. Successive waves of pogroms in the years between Alexander’s accession and the 1917 revolution killed thousands of Jews and forced an estimated 2 million to emigrate, mainly to the United States. Pobedonostsev was reported to have sneered that ‘a third of Jews will be converted, a third will leave and the rest will die of hunger’.
Alexander III wanted to unify the country by turning a Russian empire into a Russian nation, with a single nationality, a single language, religion and sovereign authority. His values were a return to the old triptych of Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost’ – Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood – which the last reactionary tsar, Nicholas I, had relied on. Alexander had a pathological fear of political opposition and was quick to declare emergency rule, suspend the law and restrict the civil liberties introduced by his father. For a while, revolutionary activity was driven underground, but it never went away.
In the decade leading up to Alexander’s reign, the intelligentsia had taken its gospel of social revolt to the peasants and workers in a campaign that became known as Khozhdenie v Narod or ‘Going to the People’. In the countryside around Moscow and other big cities, the peasants were amazed to see cohorts of young townsfolk – students, clerks, sons and daughters of merchants and aristocrats – suddenly pitching up in their villages. The new arrivals knocked on the doors of the peasant huts, stripped off their fancy clothes and offered themselves as agricultural labourers. The locals were bemused, then amused to see the posh townsfolk struggling under loads of hay, blistering their tender hands with scythes and shovels. But the incomers were also bearing a message. The intelligentsia had concluded that however much they talked and theorised, however many bombs they planted and government officials they assassinated, a popular revolution was never going to happen unless and until the masses supported it.
So their aim was to awaken the peasants’ revolutionary consciousness and to foment spontaneous uprisings across the country. The idea seemed sensible. The botched Emancipation of 1861 had left most of the peasants still working for their former masters and saddled with state-imposed debts that had generated widespread anger. It should have been fertile ground. But if the revolutionaries were hoping for a warm welcome, they were in for a shock. In the diaries and memoirs of those young idealists a tone of baffled disappointment crops up again and again. Alexander Mikhailov was a 21-year-old student when he went to work outside Saratov:
I left college with my instruction10 manual in my bag and happy hopes in my heart … I met the others who were going to the people and changed into peasant clothes. For the whole summer I worked as a labourer, sleeping under open skies, burned to a cinder by the sun and mercilessly bitten by mosquitoes. The peasant footwear cut my feet till they bled …
Solomon Lion, a Jewish intellectual, was only 19. He quickly became discouraged by the lack of response from the peasants:
Of course the peasants hated11 the burden of taxes and the persecution they suffered from the landowners … of course they would have agreed with me that this all needed to be overthrown, but they were so cautious and mistrustful that I never even got the chance to talk to them about an uprising or the tsar or revolution …
A young Praskovia Ivanovskaya, who would later become a professional terrorist in the ranks of Narodnaya Volya, recalled a less than impressive start to her early revolutionary career:
The peasants reacted to all12 radical talk with distrust and incomprehension. Our talks usually ended with them saying: ‘That’s our fate. We were born that way and we’ll die that way.’ So we didn’t actually conduct any socialist propaganda at all! … we were an alien element in a world we scarcely knew. In fact, we were rarely able to talk at all: after the day’s work, our limbs shrieked with weariness, our exhausted bodies demanded rest and peace.
Solomon Lion’s disillusionment with the peasants was complete. Like all the others, he eventually returned to the city with his hopes for a popular revolution in tatters:
The peasant masses were so apathetic and so mistrustful that they took us revolutionaries, who were ready to lay down our lives for them, for aristocrats trying to bring back serfdom and reverse the tsar’s liberation of the serfs. Basing our hopes for socialist revolution on attempts to galvanise the masses is like trying to build a house on sand …
In many instances, mistrustful, conservative peasant elders turned the incomers over to the police. Hundreds were arrested, and dozens more were murdered by peasant mobs. The experience was enough to convince the revolutionaries that the people were never going to be a reliable basis on which to stage a revolution.
It was a realisation that would have a dramatic impact. From that point onwards, the conviction began to grow that the revolution must be brought about and imposed on society by a clique of dedicated professionals. The man who did most to entrench this view – and who would exert a powerful influence on the thinking of Vladimir Lenin – was the political theorist Pyotr Tkachev:
The people are incapable13 of building a new world that would move towards the communist ideal. That can be done only by the revolutionary minority … The people can never save themselves. Neither in the present nor in the future could the people, left to themselves, carry out the socialist revolution. Only we, the revolutionary movement, can do this – and we must do so, as quickly as possible.
The ‘people’s revolution’ was going to be based not on the will of the people, but on the determination of a small group of activists. The concept of the ‘invisible dictatorship’14 of the revolutionary brotherhood, originally propounded by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, gained widespread acceptance. After 1917, the Bolsheviks would claim to be the ‘vanguard of the people’, exercising dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat. But in none of these models was there any room for the people to express their opinion of what was being done in their name. Democracy, elections, representative government – all were condemned as liberal Westernism, a tool for the interests of the bourgeoisie. In the revolutionaries’ vision, the rule of law was not to be an impartial instrument of justice under which the interests of every citizen would be equally guaranteed; it was to be more like the judicial model favoured by Catherine the Great, a machine to impose the will of the autocracy on the subjugated masses.
Even among the revolutionaries themselves there was unease at such cynical absolutism. Pyotr Lavrov, champion of the Going to the People movement, was appalled:
The belief that a party15, once it has seized power, will voluntarily renounce it can be entertained only before the seizure … State power, whoever wields it, is hostile to a socialist system of society. Any minority power means exploitation, and a dictatorship can mean nothing else. We cannot accept a programme of revolution through a minority dictatorship. This is not the programme of the true socialist revolution.
Lavrov recognised that the revolutionaries were taking on the same character as the regime they were fighting against. The Russian tradition of autocratic rule was simply reasserting itself under another name.
fn1 This, of course, is what the leaders of the Soviet Union, and of present-day Russia, long feared. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gorbachev’s reforms triggered an upsurge of nationalism in Soviet republics like Georgia, the Baltic states and Ukraine, followed by independence demands from ethnic minorities on the territory of Russia itself. As long as the belief in the permanent, unchallengeable nature of Soviet power was maintained, the nationalities had broadly accepted their fate. But when Gorbachev raised the possibility of concessions, the illusion was broken. The nationalities saw that change was, after all, possible, and pushed for change of the most radical sort. Pobedonostsev’s diagnosis echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning that the relaxation of autocracy ultimately leads to disintegration (see here).