The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  On Vasilevskii Island it was the Finnish Life Guard Regiment that stopped the petitioners. Envoys with white handkerchiefs went over to the soldiers, attempting to explain that they had come for, not against the Tsar. When they saw the soldiers’ rifles pointed at them, some of the marchers bared their breasts and dared their brothers in uniform to shoot. Orders were shouted and salvoes of shots rang out; cavalry cut down those too slow to get away. There is a surviving photo of the scene: a line of soldiers in their long winter coats are taking aim at a crowd at the other side of a brilliantly white square. The demonstrators are scrambling to safety; uncertain dots in the distance. A sole, isolated figure is standing in the no man’s land between the lines. At the end of this Bloody Sunday, as soft snow was covering the city, 130 demonstrators had been killed and 299 wounded according to official estimates. Foreign journalists recorded that there were up to 4,600 casualties.

  There Is No God!

  ‘Bloody Sunday’, as it was to become known, was widely seen as the day the Tsar set his army upon his own people. The outrage it caused sparked months of revolutionary unrest and marked a turning point in Russia’s history. ‘There is no God, there is no Tsar!’ the tall priest at the front of the procession at the Narva Gate had cried in despair when the shots were ringing out over the square and he saw his comrades falling around him. His name was Father Gapon, and his cry would echo to the far corners of Siberia.

  In many ways, town and country were connected more intimately in Russia than in any other major country. The fifth largest economy in the world, Russia’s cities were modern and industrialized, but only about 20 per cent of Russians lived there. The overwhelming majority laboured and thought almost exactly as they had done for centuries, far, far away from the great transformation gripping the country’s western neighbours. Any understanding of Russia and of the ‘little revolution’ of 1905 must set out from one of thousands of dusty village squares surrounded by the low huts in which most of the Tsar’s subjects lived out their lives.

  Peasant villages, derevni, derived their name from derevno, the Russian word for wood, the main building material used for the dwellings, which were usually erected and dismantled (if fire did not destroy them first) within a few days. Large families of several generations lived together in a single house, often in a single room with a stove on which they slept, a table by which they ate, and the shrine with the house icon, a world of ‘icons and cockroaches’, as Leon Trotsky put it, bolted behind its inhabitants in more than just a metaphorical sense: ‘The doors are kept vigorously closed, windows are hermetically sealed and the atmosphere cannot be described,’ a desperate English Quaker wrote in a letter home. ‘Its poisonous quality can only be realised by experience.’

  Behind these ‘vigorously closed’ doors, life went on as it had done since time immemorial. Most villagers were illiterate until the end of the nineteenth century; until 1917, there was no compulsory education in Russia, even at primary level. In 1901, only one in five children of school age was in school. While roughly a third of village schools were run by the Orthodox Church, the priests had little influence on their flock. They were themselves hardly more than peasants and were deeply ignorant; studying theology and doctrine was the domain of the robed ‘black clergy’ in the monasteries, who fulfilled no pastoral duties. Knowledge of Christian doctrine was therefore minimal, as Maksim Gorky heard from a Kazan peasant, who said that God ‘cannot be everywhere at once, too many men have been born for that. But he will succeed, you see. But I can’t understand Christ at all! He serves no purpose as far as I’m concerned. There is no God and that’s enough. But now there’s another! The son, they say. So what if he’s God’s son. God isn’t dead, not that I know of.’

  Peasant life was a law unto itself, in the most literal sense. Finance minister Sergei Witte estimated that there were ten thousand policemen for a hundred million peasants in Russia, and justice of a sort was meted out according to caprice and custom - usually in the form of communal humiliations or floggings by peasant courts. The most vicious punishments were reserved for adulterous women and horse thieves. Women accused of betraying their husbands would be stripped naked or have their skirts tied together over their heads and then be beaten or dragged round the village behind a cart. Horse thieves had even worse to fear: they were often castrated, flogged, branded with irons, or hacked to death with sickles. The violence of daily life was extreme, especially for women, who could be beaten by their husbands without any protection of the law. ‘The more you beat the old woman, the tastier the soup will be,’ said a Russian proverb. ‘Beat the fur, and it’s warmer; beat your wife, and she’s sweeter,’ ran another. During the wedding ceremony, the husband’s new authority over his wife was symbolically affirmed when the young woman’s father handed the groom a whip. Village feasts usually turned into drunken brawls, and it was accepted as part of the fun that some of those joining in the fighting would never get up again.

  The real face of

  Russia? Peasant

  men in the

  provinces.

  It is perhaps a measure of the muzhik’s medieval mind that despite these miserable conditions and despite the constant hunger and famine in the countryside there was hardly any emigration from rural Russia. Seventy per cent of the 3 million of the Tsar’s subjects who left their country between 1897 and 1916 in search of a better life were either Poles or Jews. Life outside the village was almost inconceivable.

  Borrowed from the Village

  Almost but not quite. As land holdings for individual families in village communes grew smaller and families larger than before, hundreds of thousands went to the city to work in factories and formed an urban underclass that never became anything like the industrial proletariat that Marxists expected to see. In contrast to other countries, most Russian peasants who took work in the city eventually returned to their villages. The industrial proletariat of Manchester, Milan or Essen was an urban constituency in the proper sense of the word. Russian factory workers were only borrowed from the village.

  Men, especially, were often married and so sent money home, returning to their families when they could afford it. Women had a much harder time. Back from their stint in the ‘godless den of sin’ they were considered compromised, less virtuous, less marriageable. Many therefore had to remain in the cities, eking out a precarious life between factory work, domestic service and prostitution.

  Workers who returned brought with them inexorable change. One would recognise them at once: they wore their shirts inside their trousers and might even have a jacket, they had shaved off their beards and no longer had their hair cut under a bowl. They brought money and consumer goods, ready-made clothes in city fashions, books and political ideas. They had seen the world and wanted more independence than those who had stayed at home. Even the women who had done factory work seemed ‘distinguished by a livelier speech, greater independence, and a more obstinate character’.

  As the city began to infiltrate the village, so the village carried its brutality and hardship into the expanding slums and factory dormitories of Moscow and St Petersburg, where the workers would live almost like animals, many to a room without running water or sanitation, and with hardly any heating - just enough to sleep the sleep of exhaustion after a thirteen-hour working day, six days a week. Even the water from the public wells was not safe to drink and whole districts were all but drowned in a combination of industrial and human waste. As late as 1909, a cholera epidemic claimed 30,000 victims in St Petersburg.

  Once again it was the women who suffered most. Pregnancies, numerous childbirths and mistreatment from drunken husbands or lovers cost them dearly: ‘A woman worker of fifty sees and hears poorly, her head trembles, her shoulders are sharply hunched over. She looks about seventy. It is obvious that only dire need keeps her at the factory, forcing her to work beyond her strength. While in the West, elderly workers have pensions, our women workers can expect nothing better than to live out their last days a
s lavatory attendants,’ a doctor reported in 1914:

  ... they are remarkable for the fact that with very few exceptions and despite the cold and frozen wet snow they appear practically without clothes on ... Unfastened trousers, some rags instead of a shirt, and literally not one of the necessities of ordinary human apparel. Here, also, some questionable women with hand baskets even carry on a lively trade in these horrible rags and worse. People undress under the nearest gate and even right on the street, in full view, without attracting any special surprise or curiosity. Obviously this is a common business.

  Another observer, the journalist Aleksei Svirskii, had written in 1905:

  Three days and two nights I passed among people who had fallen out of life. They are not living, these people, but moldering like charred logs left scattered after a fire. In the gloomy half-light of the dirty dives, in crowded, bug-infested flophouses, in the tearooms and taverns and the dens of cheap debauchery - everywhere where vodka, women and children are sold - I encountered people who no longer resembled human beings.

  The Pugilist at Court

  The steep rise of Sergei Witte from provincial clerk to head of government is exemplary of the frustrations and opportunities Russia presented to its abler inhabitants. Witte’s stupendous advancement was possible only because he was a technical man whose expertise was needed: he was hard-working, he was competent, and he was in railways, a key element of the country’s economic modernization. Unlike his ruler, the pragmatic and farsighted Witte understood from the beginning that such a partial overhaul of the country was not only unjust, it was impossible: ‘it is a general rule that if a government refuses to meet the demands of the people for eco-nomic and social reforms, the people will begin to demand changes in the political structure. And if a government does not meet such demands … revolution will break out.’

  Admitting defeat: Sergei Witte leaving the peace

  negotiations with Japan.

  Witte came as an outsider to the political establishment. Born in Tiflis, in the Caucasus, his family was probably of Baltic German stock, a constituency that had brought forth many of the country’s most able professionals and administrators. His father was a senior civil servant and the boy grew up in a climate of precarious privilege. Later he was sent to Odessa for his studies. At university the tall and awkward young man (he never acquired a metropolitan gloss and was to be famous for his rough manners and provincial accent, as well as for his habit of chewing gum) found a world in which privilege was allowed in the form of debauchery and brothel visits, but any political or civic engagement was severely discouraged: ‘You professors can meet among yourselves, but only to play cards. And you students remember that I will look with an indulgent eye on drunkenness but a soldier’s uniform [i.e. a twenty-five-year conscription into the army] awaits anyone who is noted for free thinking,’ the director of Kiev University had reminded the assembled faculty.

  Witte’s political temperament was like Bismarck’s: instinctively conservative and quietly pragmatic. His time at university had coincided with the high point of an intellectual debate about the future and the nature of Russia that would set the tone for decades to come, and possibly up to the present day. While one party, the modernists, argued vigorously that the country had to shake off its ‘semi-Asian’ backwardness and do its utmost to become a modern, Western state, their Slavophile opponents held that this would spell the nation’s doom. Russia, they argued, was different, was inherently half European and half Asian, a special people put on the earth by God to fulfil a unique task according to a vision of life that was uniquely Russian, tied to the soil, the primitive piety of the peasant, and the grandeur of Church and Tsar. Needless to say, this approach left little room for democracy, industrialization, secular education, or for accommodating the different national cultures of the empire - one third of the Tsar’s subjects were neither Russian nor Orthodox - for Poles and Mongolians, Muslims, Finns and Jews.

  A young engineer with bold ideas and plenty of energy, Witte rose quickly through the ranks of the embryonic railway service (in 1853 the Russian empire, the world’s largest country, had had a total of 650 kilometres of tracks), and he soon attracted the attention of the government hierarchy, especially after he made himself unpopular by going against his superiors on a safety issue concerning a particular line. His warning was ignored, an oversight that almost cost the life of the Tsar, whose train was derailed while he was on board.

  Sped on his way by this event, Witte soon found a post in St Petersburg, first in the ministry of transport and in 1892, aided by energetic ideas about expanding the rail network and attracting foreign investment, as minister of finance. The 43-year-old imperial minister was an exception in many ways. The custom of awarding appointments in the administration strictly according to seniority had the inescapable consequence that the most responsible posts were held by men in their declining years, out of touch and unable to understand the challenges facing them. Promotion was governed by a table of ranks introduced by Peter the Great, a fourteen-rung ladder that not only afforded officials wonderful forms of address like ‘Your High Ancestry’, but also brought an automatic rise into the hereditary nobility. The table also guaranteed an equivalence of rank across the civil service, army and navy. This allowed senior officers going into retirement from army posts to enter the civil service at equivalent rank, which meant that a whole province could suddenly find itself led by a doddering colonel who had never done much more than hang around in the officers’ club and bellow at recruits, and whose only practical experience might stem from his young days in the Crimean War, or from stringing up peasants after local revolts. Any kind of reform was the very last thing on the minds of these men; the quality of many imperial administrators was accordingly dismal.

  Witte was an exceptional figure in the St Petersburg government, a body usually composed of princes, bureaucrats risen through the ranks, and a sprinkling of university professors in the more technical and less prestigious posts. He was robustly disdainful of the camarilla of grand dukes and generals at court, a feeling that was mutual. While the aristocratic faction viewed him as an uncouth upstart, intent on upsetting their comfortable lives with reforms and other demands, the minister had a good deal to say about the officials appointed by the Tsar. A governor sent to pacify the rebellious duchy of Finland, Prince Ivan M. Obolenskii, a member of one of Russia’s most eminent families, seemed ideal for the job in the eyes of the court, as Witte remarked. He had ‘distinguished himself as governor of Kharkov by his successful suppression of peasant riots, in the course of which he had personally supervised the flogging of rioters…That the prince had peasants flogged severely was taken as proof of his youth and decisiveness: “what a solid young man”, “what a fine fellow”, “who else but he should become governor-general of Finland”.’

  Of the governor of Kiev, General Kleigels, Witte wrote that although he was ‘undoubtedly better than those who succeeded him, that [was] no recommendation. He was a very limited man, poorly educated, with a greater knowledge of horses than of men,’ a rather complimentary assessment compared with the verdict on the viceroy for the Far East, Admiral Alexeev, ‘a man with the mentality of a sly Armenian rug dealer’, who had made his career, Witte alleged, because he had once rescued the young Grand Duke Alexis Aleksandrovich from public embarrassment when the latter had misbehaved in a Marseille brothel (after having been sent abroad to forget a mistress he had become rather too infatuated with). Alexeev took responsibility for the sordid incident in front of the French police, and ever after, the Grand Duke promoted his advancement.

  If Witte had little sympathy for the upper echelons of the imperial government, his view of the Tsar and his family was, if anything, more grim. First, of course, there was the Emperor, Nicholas II, whom Witte judged to have a personality like ‘an average guards colonel of good family’, amiable but utterly ineffective and deluded. ‘Emperor Nicholas II is very unlike his father: he is well bred (more so than a
ny man I have ever met), is always dressed to the nines, never uses rough language, never behaves in a rough manner,’ was the kindest thing he had to say about his sovereign.

  The heart of the Russian empire was a void, the ‘character, or lack of character’ of an Emperor who was utterly dominated by his German wife Alexandra Fedorovna, whose ‘dull, egotistical character and narrow world-view’ was evident in the Tsar’s political opinions. ‘She might have been a suitable wife for a German prince or for a Tsar with a backbone,’ Witte reflected maliciously, ‘but sad to say, this Tsar has no will.’ The result was a little world of autocratic hypocrisy and ignorance completely insulated from reality: ‘the Empress…and her spouse [!] immure themselves in fortresses - the palaces at Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof. From their fortresses they send telegrams of condolence to the wives of men who have fallen at the hands of foul revolutionary assassins, praise the fallen for their courage, and declare “my life does not matter to me as long as Russia is happy”.’