The Revolution
A FEW YEARS INTO Alexander’s reign, Russia found itself in the euphoric throes of a reformation-liberation movement. The national problem, the precarious situation of the non-Russian peoples, had never been addressed. Instead of solving the problems that lay upon the body politic like a festering sore, the unhappiness of the minorities had been covered with a plaster of repression.
The resistance to Russification was strong among Poles, Armenians, Finns and Germans for a variety of reasons. Their wishes for reform varied from greater political autonomy and independence, to freedom of religion, to a material stake in the economy.
In the Lower Volga region formerly indentured serfs, finding themselves landless and starving, resorted to anarchistic means. They committed arson, pillage and land seizures in their quest for improvement of their condition. Realizing the true antecedents of their problems, the angry mobs ravaging the countryside left the farms of their German neighbors untouched. They had no animosity toward their neighbors with whom they had traded, exchanged favors, and with whom they had shared the pains of the famines.
The Volga Germans themselves, although, despising anarchy, clamored for greater autonomy. They chafed under the harsh laws especially formulated for minorities. They, who had striven for Russian Language education, now bitterly resented the coercion with which Russian indoctrination was enforced in their school, although Count Tolstoy’s motive behind the enforcement was sound. A people living in a nation should know the history and language of the nation’s people.
Tolstoy’s very reason, to become Russian in character and mind – more even, perhaps to become caught up in Orthodoxy – frightened the German settlers. For the more secularized and Russianized an education young colonists received, the greater the chance that they would leave the colony, because there were no advancements for the educated in the villages. Also, as with their young men returning from military service, dissatisfaction of the educated with the boring, isolated village life was high.
Albina’s family was not unusual among the rich families in the colonies, but unrepresentative as far as the rest of the settlers were concerned. In her family the educational standard was high. To speak Russian was a must, so one could read the newspapers and stay informed.
Therefore they had read with obvious pleasure when new voices called for change in the editorials. For the longest time they’d been appalled by substandard teaching in some village schools, where semi-literate teachers taught little but ancient cultural stories and poems interspersed with homespun wisdom. Such material – couched in ancient, atrophied German, albeit well intentioned – did clearly not help their children understand the demands of the changing times.
Time and again Victoria and Alexander had observed how their young nephews, coming home from their military service, clashed with their rigid, complacent elders. They had been among young Russians burning to free their country from centuries of corruption, neglect, nepotism and disenfranchisement of most of its citizens. In their own way the Volga German settlers had contributed to the stagnation of the situation. They had wished for little but to be left alone in their culture, their worship and their work, thereby ignoring the reality of the country they had chosen to be a part of.
It was the young men who seized upon the Tsar’s decree of February 1905, which granted communes the right to appeal directly to the ruler, petitioning for the right of all men of age to vote, thereby revoking the total control the elders held. For heretofore all other village adults, adult sons, clergy, teachers, artisans, merchants, and even non-colonists, like the Russian traders or merchants residing in the colonies, were excluded from a vote.
Another bitter complaint brought forth concerned the village police. The colonists asked that the local village government be to be charged to deal with law and order incidents, because the police in the colonies were a despicable lot, consisting of drunks, idlers and dishonest louts unable to preserve order.
Amid the reverberating cries for change, the young Grand Duke Alexis had been born in St. Petersburg. He was the heir to the throne, the empire and the inheritor of his mother’s tainted genes. A sickly child, he was cosseted, dominated and fawned over by his mother.
Besides faulty genes, his mother was possessed of a strong, haughty character that easily dominated his father as well. Unfortunately, she not only lacked the grand world-view of a Catherine the Great but also Catherine’s intellect, education, and common sense.
Therefore she strongly insisted that her son’s hemophilic condition be kept a secret from the Russian people. This was the worst decision the royal couple could have made. Revealed to the very empathetic populace, the tragic condition of the royal child would have amassed an outpouring of sympathy and understanding for the troubled parents and the stricken Tsarevich. With truthful accounts offered the public from the first, strange perceptions caused by Rasputin later, could have been allied. But such was not to be. Ruling from a position of insecurity, Nikolay instead suppressed the truth.
Furthermore, he avoided the inclusion of Zemstvo representatives into the internal government, sticking strictly to an unchanged autocracy, while dealing overly harshly with dissent. The absence of a prime minister holding the reins of central control was felt throughout the government.
This allowed certain ministries to establish their own little fiefdoms, some of which were in favor of working with the colonists, while others were working to curtail any progress by thenemyetskiy.
Marxist students became the greatest thorn in the side of the government. Some of their factions were not content to demonstrate and speak out, but were also willing, as were the anarchists, to sacrifice their lives as assassins or in violent assaults on the government. In Switzerland, the Russian intelligencia, pushed, prodded and seduced by Lenin, formed parties, drawing on the differing appeal of the workers and the serfs.
Nikolay’s appalling foreign politics dithered between groups of advisors, eventually leading to the Russo-Japanese war, during which Russia suffered numerous defeats, culminating in the destruction of its entire Baltic Fleet. Taxes that had risen between 1883 and 1892 by twenty-nine percent rose once more to cover the cost of the war. The Russian people who had been supportive and jingoistic at the beginning of the war, suffered unspeakable hardship.
The institution of the Duma, or the elected legislature, a bone tossed by the Tsar to atone for Bloody Sunday, became instantly a cause of contention when the elected body asked for the dismemberment of the nobles’ immense latifundia, to free land to be distributed among the serfs. Of course, the landowners were to be reimbursed – but they remained unwilling to cede even a desyatina of their land.
Such radical proposals angered and frightened the Tsar, thus enfeebling the governing body through his indecisiveness. Upon the pronouncement of these revolutionary changes the Duma was dissolved, causing much anger and distress among the new body politic.
A second Duma followed the first and, since it was even more radical, did not last. However, a new Prime Minister had been installed, and with Stolypin a new period of government ensued. The Tsar finally understood the value of central control. Stolypin assumed the reins of government with good intentions and plans. These included loans available to the lower classes, enabling them to buy land. However, even this farseeing, well-intentioned man could not eradicate centuries of inefficient government, the ingrained graft and corruption. Unintentionally, Stolypin incensed the Tsar with his visions for Russia. But before Nikolay could recall him from his mission, Stolypin was assassinated by a Jewish student on September 18, 1911, in Kiev.
As in his huge country, in Nikolay’s own house all was not well. As the young Grand Duke Alexei grew into active boyhood, his problem, hemophilia, became more pronounced. To tumble and fall, as boys do, was life threatening to the child. He was observed by many eyes, surrounded with many bodies and forever lifted by saving hands.
Foremost among his protectors was a marine, a tough yet gentle middle-aged man, who would have given his life for the child. And then the savior, Rasputin, a wandering mystic from Siberia, was procured through the help of Anna Vyburova, the Tsarina’s friend. This coarse, uncouth mystic was able to stem the bleeding episodes of the Tsarevich with what many thought were hypnotic spells.
As the charismatic gained more control over the anxious Tsarina, ugly rumors circulated among the courtiers and the public, sexually connecting the frantic Tsarina and the bearish Siberian.