The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The court was almost entirely sequestered in a parallel world in which the Tsar still considered himself to be presiding over a mystical union between Old Rus and its eternal God, a vision all the more comically inappropriate because the Russian credentials of Nicholas II himself were weak at best. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue calculated that even according to the most optimistic genealogical analysis, the monarch, who looked so similar to his cousin King George V that even members of their entourage could not tell them apart if they donned each other’s uniforms and who had imitated his forebears by taking a German wife with whom he corresponded in English, could not possibly be more than 1/128th part Russian, and that if rumours were true that Catherine the Great’s son Paul was sired not by her husband but by a count who had been one of her many lovers, Nicholas was not Russian at all. In his mind, though, Nicholas was the father of Russianness itself, the divinely appointed guardian of the Slavic soul, which he was determined to defend against the corrosive effects of modernity and the insolent challenges of liberalism.

  A pragmatic reformer at a deeply reactionary court, Witte had to tread carefully, and he was skilful at tailoring his message to his addressee. When the notoriously antisemitic Tsar Alexander III, the father of Nicholas II, asked his then finance minister whether it was true that he ‘liked Jews’, Witte, who did not like Jews, responded himself with a question. ‘I asked if he could drop all the Jews of Russia into the Black Sea. If he could, the Jewish problem would be solved. But since that was impossible, the only choice as a means of solving the Jewish question was the gradual elimination of all discriminatory laws against the Jews.’ In fact, Witte was at once clear-sighted and intensely prejudiced. He had little time for ‘insolvent yids’ - (zhidy), but he saw that the ‘Jewish question’, as it was then called, was a problem of Russia’s own making. ‘Anti-Jewish legislation, arbitrarily interpreted, reinforced by the negative influence of the Russian schools, helped drive the Jewish masses, particularly the youth, to become extreme revolutionaries,’ he noted, referring to the appallingly inhumane conditions to which the overwhelming majority of Jews in the empire was reduced by legislation limiting the movement and the professions they could follow, and imposing special taxes. As Witte saw, these burdens fell ‘on the poorest Jews, for the richer the Jew, the easier it is for him to buy his way out’. His attitude remained contradictory: given to ranting about ‘yids’ pushing their way up in Petersburg society, Witte chose to endanger his entire career by marrying Matilda Lisanewich, a Jewish divorcée, against the scandalised opinion of all of ‘good’ St Petersburg society, which lost no time in ostracizing the couple. By all accounts he was a devoted husband.

  Dangerous Ideas

  Tsar Nicolas was never able to resolve the question of how to run a medieval state supported and financed by a modern, industrial economy. Such an economy relied on an educated class, and while the Tsar sought the practical, technical expertise of a professional middle class he was fearful of its unruly liberal ideas. Any attempt at innovation or reform, any flirting with liberal ideals, the faintest whiff of revolutionary thought, would invariably be dashed, either by the almighty bureaucracy or by the more ruthless methods of the secret police. Nor were there any other instruments of democratic participation apart from the zemstvos, the local assemblies which quickly became rallying points for reformers. There was no national parliament, no official political party, and the press was as strictly controlled as ever.

  It was dangerous to be seen to be interested in ideas. At best it might ruin one’s career in the civil service; at worst it would cost one’s life. In 1849, Fedor Dostoyevsky had been subjected to a mock execution for reciting a subversive poem. The oppressive atmosphere, however, only made the appeal of liberty all the more irresistible. Revolutionary ideas were discussed behind closed doors and imported between the covers of clandestine journals and books, which were then copied by hand and widely circulated. Occasionally, even the imperial censor took his eye off his desk for a crucial moment. Marx’s Capital had been authorized because the censor could not conceive of anyone actually wanting to read so dull a work of economic theory. In 1862, one of his colleagues had a particularly bad day when he was so overcome with discouragement at the wooden style and clunking plot of Chto delat? (What Is to be Done?), a novel by one Nikolai Chernychevsky, that he authorized its publication. The hero of this novel survives terrible ordeals, steeling himself for the revolution, and ends up eating only meat and sleeping on a bed of nails to strengthen his dedication to the cause. An entire generation of disenchanted young Russians, amongst them Vladimir Ulyanov, who was to become known as Lenin (1870-1924), regarded Chernychevsky’s work as an inspiration for their own subjugation to the revolutionary ideal. Many no longer believed in the possibility of constitutional reform and of a peaceful evolution. Intimidated, bullied and threatened by the state, they turned to other means. In the very year of the publication of Chto delat? another student revolutionary published his vision of things to come:

  Soon, very soon, the day will come when we shall unfurl the great banner of the future, the red flag, and with a mighty cry of ‘Long Live the Russian Social and Democratic Republic!’ we shall move against the Winter Palace to exterminate all its inhabitants ... we shall kill the imperial party with no more mercy than they show for us now. We shall kill them in the squares, if the dirty swine ever dare to appear there; kill them in their houses; kill them in the narrow streets of the towns; kill them in the avenues of the capitals; kill them in the villages. Remember: anyone who is not with us is our enemy, and every method may be used to exterminate our enemies.

  The apparent hopelessness of their cause had radicalized an entire generation of revolutionaries and turned them into jihadists of the revolution. The weapons of choice in what was the modern world’s first wave of terrorist suicide attacks were revolvers and home-made bombs which would be used at close range, often taking with them both the target and his assassin. The campaign had proved cruelly efficient: some 17,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks during the twenty years leading up to 1917, including two prime ministers and several provincial governors. If one adds to this the many local rebellions, particularly in Poland and Finland, where they were viciously suppressed, the many peasant revolts and the mass strikes in the cities, the picture that emerges is that of a constantly simmering civil war whose outbreaks of insurrection and reprisal punctuated a fragile stalemate in the state.

  A Victorious Little War

  Given the situation in the Russian empire, with its brutalized and ignorant peasant majority, its viciously suppressed minorities, a frustrated middle class and the often staggering incompetence of its administrators, it seems a miracle that a large revolution did not occur much earlier. When it finally happened, it arose from a cause as stupid as it was unnecessary: the disastrous war with Japan.

  Eager to extend his empire into south-east Asia and to ensure an ice-free port in the Pacific, the Tsar had been looking for ways of consolidating his influence in Manchuria and Korea. He had managed to strong-arm Japan into ceding its northern possession of Sakhalin Island and to pressure China into leasing to Russia the strategically valuable harbour town of Port Arthur (Lüshun), a natural harbour in the bay formed by northern China and Korea. As soon as the lease was signed, Russia proceeded to fortify the port and to strengthen its army bases in the east, a task made simpler by the Trans-Siberian Railway, one of Witte’s pet projects, which was nearing completion and whose purpose was obviously military, rather than economic.

  All this had infuriated the Empire of the Rising Sun, which had quietly but solidly prepared for war by investing in Prussian military advisers and British warships. In January 1904 Japan began to urge Russia to accept a treaty of mutual territorial guarantees in Manchuria and Korea, and as there was no response from St Petersburg for several weeks, the Japanese Emperor withdrew his ambassador. Admiral Alexeev, the Viceroy of the Far East, who happened to be in Tokyo, telegraphed t
he Tsar to tell him that Japan was bluffing. They would never attack, and even if they did, Prime Minister Vyacheslav Plehve thought that Russia’s domestic situation could be improved no end by a ‘victorious little war’.

  In the late evening of 8 February 1904, Japanese battleships and torpedo boats encircled Port Arthur and opened fire on the Russian fleet helplessly moored in the harbour. With much of the fleet in the Pacific destroyed, damaged or hemmed in, the Tsar’s generals had to watch as Japan landed troops in Korea and marched on Russian positions. In St Petersburg, the general staff flew into a panic. There were not nearly enough forces in the east to counter a Japanese advance; the Trans-Siberian Railway consisted of a single track and was still unfinished around Lake Baikal, a body of water roughly the size of Switzerland. Rails had to be laid on the ice to transport troops to the theatre of war, while construction of the route around the lake was driven forward at maximum speed. Within months it would transport 410,000 soldiers, 93,000 horses and 1,000 heavy guns to Manchuria.

  As the news from the east worsened during the ensuing weeks, panic sowed disorder and gave rise to hare-brained schemes. The Baltic fleet was ordered to relieve the trapped forces in the Japanese sea and began to make its agonizingly slow way past Denmark and towards Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Confusion and paranoia were so intense among the Russian military that the Tsar’s navy almost provoked a war with Britain when it sank a British fishing trawler at Dogger Bank off the Norfolk coast, thinking that it might be a Japanese torpedo boat. Russian ships even fired on each other.

  True to his early choice, Nicholas II had made his viceroy also the supreme military commander of the war, a decision noted caustically by Sergei Witte: ‘The admiral was as qualified for his new post as I. He knew nothing about the army and little about the navy.’ Refusing to listen to his advisers and relieve Alexeev from his post, in order to save the military situation the Tsar resolved to send a second commander, General Kuropatkin, an experienced and competent officer whose task was made impossible by contradictory orders and the constant interference of the vainglorious viceroy. Horrified by these developments, Sergei Witte spoke to Kuropatkin before his departure, imploring him to have Alexeev arrested immediately upon the general’s arrival and sent back to St Petersburg under guard. Kuropatkin ‘burst out laughing and, as he left, said “You are right”.’ The next day he left for Manchuria, ‘with great pomp, as if he were certain of victory’.

  Real carnage: Russian casualties in a press photograph.

  Over the following months, it became abundantly clear that there was to be no such victory. In May Russia suffered heavy casualties at the battle of the Yalu River; a breakout attempt of the Russian fleet at Port Arthur ended in disaster in August; and in February 1905, after a massive and costly battle, the Japanese forced Kuropatkin to retreat from his headquarters at Mukden (Shenyang), 400 kilometres north of Port Arthur. The Russian forces were badly equipped, badly trained, and uncoordinated, and intelligence-gathering was so rudimentary that the army was forced to rely on the London Times for accurate news about troop movements. In an attempt to boost the morale and sense of mission of his troops fighting the ‘Yellow Peril’, the Tsar had a large shipment of icons, including the Holy Mother of God and various Orthodox saints, sent to the front, an initiative that many saw as typical of the priorities and the blindness of central power. ‘The Japanese are beating us with machine guns,’ General Dragomilov remarked, ‘but never mind: we’ll beat them with icons!’

  The guns proved stronger. When the Baltic fleet finally made it to its destination in May 1905 after having circumnavigated the globe, the Japanese admirals had all the time in the world to choose a place of engagement. They gave battle to Russia’s forces off the island of Tsushima, between Korea and Kyushu, sinking eight battleships and effectively ending the ‘victorious little war’ Plehve had wished for. In an attempt to salvage what he could of Russia’s badly shaken prestige as a great power, Sergei Witte was dispatched to the United States to sue for peace.

  If Russia’s government had badly overestimated its military prowess, it had fatally misjudged the internal situation. The little war had turned into a huge disaster; instead of silencing critics, it caused a storm of protest which soon linked the decision to go to war to the general incompetence, ignorance and arrogance of the government. On 15 July 1904, Russia’s ruthless but able minister of the interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, was assassinated with a 16-pound bomb by a young revolutionary socialist. No one mourned the unpopular hardliner. In Warsaw people danced in the streets when the news of his death arrived, and the Austro-Hungarian ambassador Count Aerenthal reported home that several men he had spoken to had voiced the opinion that ‘further catastrophes similar to Plehve’s murder will be necessary in order to bring about a change of mind on the part of the highest authority’.

  The sudden power vacuum at the heart of government was hurriedly patched up by the Emperor, who appointed Pyotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii, one who he hoped would calm the troubled waters, as Mirskii was widely seen as a man of integrity and a moderate. How grave the Tsar’s views of the situation was can be gathered from the fact that he promised his prospective interior minister ‘several months’ leave each year’ if he accepted the job, which Mirskii had tried to turn down, pleading weak nerves. Mirskii set out on what he hoped would be a slow campaign to change the Emperor’s mind and prepare him for the inevitable and long-overdue reforms demanded with increasing confidence by the liberal press, notably a national zemstvo assembly, the precursor of a central parliament. Soon, however, he had to admit that he had set himself an impossible task, as the Tsar, entirely out of touch with political reality, at one point even appeared to agree with his minister about the desirability of a national zemstvo assembly, but added: ‘Then they will be able to look at the veterinary question’ - a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. When Mirskii warned that otherwise there would be a revolution, Nicholas simply maintained a polite silence.

  As the regional zemstvo assemblies - long a focal point of the force for change in the country - mounted their pressure on the interior minister to allow a general reunion of all zemstvo councils in the capital, Mirskii reached a compromise with their representatives. He could not possibly authorize an official meeting openly discussing constitutional reform and the institution of a legislative assembly, he told them, but nothing could prevent them from coming to St Petersburg on private business and meeting socially ‘for a cup of tea’ in the houses of their friends. Nothing said there would be any of his business. This very political tea party was held from 6 to 9 November 1904 in the residences of various St Petersburg grandees, among them Vladimir Nabokov, whose son, the future writer, observed the goings-on.

  In November, the news went from bad to worse. The besieged harbour of Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese, an act widely seen as yet another example of cowardice and incompetence among the Tsar’s military commanders. Inside the country, the activists of the local zemstvos held a series of ‘professional banquets’ for democracy, following the example of the revolutionary banquets held before the French Revolution of 1848. This show of force by the bourgeois camp resulted in a unique situation, as the imperial censors were ordered to allow the debate to play itself out in the newspapers, obviously in the hope that this would prevent it from spilling out onto the street. A torrent of articles on constitutional reform and open attacks on the government now appeared, and it quickly became clear that the battle for public opinion had been lost, and that the new openness had spiralled out of control.

  The cries of defiance even punctuated the high walls of Tsarskoe Selo, where Nicholas liked to spend his time. With his back to the wall not only in moral but also in military terms (should a rebellion break out at home, his general had told him, the government forces were too heavily committed in Manchuria to keep control in the Russian cities), the Emperor passed the poisoned chalice to Count Mirskii, asking him to draft an imper
ial decree concerning necessary reforms. When presented with the draft, the Tsar struck out those parts most wanted by the liberals. ‘I will never agree to the representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to me,’ he stated. Mirskii had understood, and despaired of being able to achieve anything. ‘Everything has failed,’ he said to a colleague, ‘let us build jails.’

  A Useful Priest

  To control this groundswell of discontent, S. V. Zubatov, the chief of the Moscow Okhrana, or secret police, had developed a novel strategy of which he was particularly proud. Rather than suppressing all workers’ clubs and trade unions, he had helped create patriotic workers’ associations which were tolerated (as well as constantly spied upon) by police. These organizations were designed to absorb some of the workers’ demands while inspiring loyalty to state and Emperor through a message carefully drafted upon the precepts of Russian Orthodoxy and which was calculated to appeal to the supposed piety of recent arrivals from the countryside. Meetings began with the Lord’s Prayer and ended with hymns.

  The strategy worked extraordinarily well, as initial reports showed. The Workers’ Society of Russian Factory and Plant Workers in St Petersburg was led by the charismatic young former prison chaplain Father Georgi Apollonovich Gapon (1870-1906). It soon reached a membership of 30,000. Gapon was a gifted organizer, and within a few months he set up a network of lending libraries, reading rooms, insurance plans and social activities. While active socialists saw the priest as a police stooge and were weary of his motives, many of the workers appreciated the atmosphere at the clubs, with their inspirational speeches and readings from conservative, state-approved newspapers. Gapon himself was a fluent speaker and communicator, but politically deeply naive and driven by great personal ambition.