The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Their most illustrious victim, however, was the liberal and reforming Tsar Alexander II, who was killed in 1881. During his long, twenty-six-year rule Alexander had been responsible for the emancipation of the serfs, the promulgation of a new penal code (adapted from the French Code Napoléon), the reorganization of the judiciary, and the setting up of units of self-government in the countryside: the zemstva. True, he had suppressed Polish nationalism, but promoted that of Finland. Just before Alexander II’s assassination, Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, the new Minister of the Interior, had persuaded him to promote further liberalization.

  It was too late. By assassinating Alexander II, the Narodnaya Volya set back the reform process by years, but then their goal was a revolution and the end of the autocracy, not its reform. One of their unwitting allies was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the powerful Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905. Pobedonostsev was a true reactionary and éminence grise at Court. When Alexander III ascended the throne, Pobedonostsev, who had been his tutor (he was later also tutor to Nicholas II, the last Tsar), wrote Alexander a letter warning him to resist change and not to listen to ‘the old siren songs’:

  for God’s sake, do not believe, Your Majesty, do not listen. This spells destruction, the destruction of both Russia and yourself … The mad villains who destroyed your father will not be satisfied with any concession … the evil seed can be extracted only in a struggle with them for life and death, with iron and blood.67

  Not for Pobedonostsev the seduction of democracy: ‘In a democracy,’ he explained, ‘the real rulers are the dexterous manipulators of votes, with their placemen, the mechanics who so skilfully operate the hidden springs which move the puppets in the arena of democratic elections. Men of this kind are ever ready with loud speeches lauding equality; in reality, they rule the people as any despot or military dictator might rule it.’68

  Pobedonostsev was, in his peculiar way, a nihilist of the ultra-pessimistic kind. He believed that Man was hopelessly bad: his salvation could be achieved only by being ruled with an iron rod.69 The Tsar ruled because he was appointed by God to rule. The divine right of kings did not require, by definition, any popular legitimacy, only God’s. Parliaments, liberalism, democracy, separation of Church and State, social progress, and so on would all lead, irrevocably, to the dismemberment of the Tsarist Empire.

  Pobedonostsev, an intelligent and deeply cultured conservative, was, of course, despised by the intelligentsia, though much admired by Dostoyevsky. He was neither easily forgotten nor forgiven: in 1910, three years after his death, the poet Alexander Blok included in his lengthy poem Vozmezdie (‘Retribution’), his spiritual testament, a particularly poignant lament on the dispiriting effect the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod had had on Russian society:

  In these mute and distant years

  A dull gloom filled all hearts.

  Pobedonostsev had unfurled

  His owlish wings over Russia.

  There was neither day nor night,

  Only the shadows of giant wings.70

  Alexander III followed Pobedonostsev’s advice. His reign (1881–94) saw few reforms. One was the decree of 1882 (extended in 1885) regulating the work of children and women in a number of unhealthy occupations (widely ignored).71 This had been sparked by the strike of 1885 at the Morozov textile factory at Orekhovo-Zuyev, which had been crushed by the army. Afterwards, the description of the appalling exploitation of the workers (many former peasants) that surfaced in the courtroom led to the acquittal of the strikers.72

  Such independence of the judiciary was not a novelty. Much of the credit for it must go to Alexander II. Thus when, in 1878, the revolutionary Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded Colonel Fyodor Trepov, the governor of St Petersburg and former police chief, the jury found her not guilty (though the evidence was unassailable). Even a convicted terrorist could become a popular liberal heroine. On 16 January 1906, Maria Spiridonova, a Social Revolutionary, then only twenty-one years old, killed Gavril Luzhenovsky, a provincial counsellor notorious for his brutal suppression of rural unrest. At the trial she claimed that she had been tortured and sexually abused by Luzhenovsky’s bodyguards.73 Described by the liberal press as a ‘flower of spiritual beauty that only the highest culture of Russia could produce’, she was condemned to only eleven years of exile in Siberia. Liberated in 1917 she continued being a revolutionary but was executed in 1941 on the orders of Stalin.74

  Such was the cult of the people in Tsarist Russia that Alexander III’s successor, Nicholas II, blamed the intellectuals and not the people for fostering dissent. Count Witte, in his memoirs, recounts that once, on hearing someone mentioning the ‘intelligentsia’, the Tsar exclaimed: ‘How I detest that word! I wish I could order the Academy to strike it off the Russian dictionary.’75

  Even the reactionaries worshipped an idealized version of the people. Dostoyevsky, in an entry in his diary on his celebrated oration on the unveiling of the monument to Alexander Pushkin (8 June 1880), declared that the greatness of Pushkin’s poetry consisted in being born out of the Russian people, out of its narodnyi (native) spirit and:

  not in so-called ‘European’ education (which, it may be noted in passing, we never did possess); it was not in the deformities of the outwardly adopted European ideas and forms, that Pushkin found this beauty, but exclusively in the people’s spirit and in it alone.76

  Meanwhile the people, the real people, not the ‘people’ imagined by the intelligentsia, could no longer be kept at bay. When the autocratic Interior Minister Plehve was blown to pieces on 28 July 1904, there was such a distinct lack of regret even among conservatives that the Austro-Hungarian ambassador felt he had to report back to Vienna the fact that it had been such a non-event.77 Count Witte was equally unregretful, perhaps even gleeful, at the assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin: ‘This statesman was the embodiment of political immorality and the members of his Cabinet were not far superior to him. He ruled Russia by violating every law and he disdained no means, however reprehensible, to keep himself in power’,78 adding later, ‘No other statesman has ever succeeded in drawing upon himself the enmity of so many men and women.’79

  Seriously worried, Nicholas II appointed Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky as Interior Minister to succeed the murdered Plehve. Mirsky, who had a reputation for liberalism, had reluctantly accepted, hoping that the Tsar would finally see sense. To his dismay the Tsar, still trying to hold on to the past, declared that ‘under no circumstances will I ever agree to a representative form of government, for I consider it harmful to the trust God gave me’.80 The decree he subsequently signed (under pressure from Witte, then Prime Minister) promised greater autonomy to the judiciary, greater tolerance to religious dissenters, and greater powers to the zemstva, which, though under the control of the nobility, did some good. As Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the liberal Kadets (or Constitutional Democrats), said:

  [The zemstva] founded schools, built hospitals, helped the peasantry in every kind of agricultural improvement, and developed domestic industries … they were the first to come to the villages with messages of health, sanitation, enlightenment, and with sound reasons for private economy. Whatever has been done for culture in the Russian villages was done by the Zemstvos – and that in spite of every sort of obstruction … on the part of the central government.81

  Tsar Nicholas II was somewhat less enthusiastic. Some ten years earlier, in January 1895, in a speech to zemstvo representatives, he declared, according to Milyukov, ‘in a strong, clear voice, and with a remarkably resolute manner’:

  I am aware that in certain meetings of the Zemstvos voices have lately been raised by persons carried away by absurd illusions as to the participation of the Zemstvo representatives in matters of internal government. Let all know that … I intend to protect the principle of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as did my late and never-to-be-forgotten father.

  The liberals replied with an open letter war
ning:

  Your speech has provoked a feeling of offense and depression; but the living social forces will soon recover from that feeling … You first began the struggle; and the struggle will come.82

  Russia was on the move. In December 1904 workers had gone on strike at the armaments and shipbuilding Putilov plant in St Petersburg. These workers, who had been peasants until recently, still revered the Tsar, attributing the problems afflicting Russia to wicked advisers who kept him in the dark. It was a common way of being both loyal and subversive (if only the Tsar, may God bless his soul, knew our wretched conditions, etc.). They sent Nicholas II a ‘humble and loyal address’ explaining that ‘we are enslaved, enslaved under the patronage and with the aid of your officials’, and decrying the ‘bureaucratic administration composed of embezzlers of public funds’ who had involved the country ‘in a humiliating war’.83

  Their demands, however, were far from humble. They wanted elected workers’ soviets (councils) in all factories to examine, along with management, workers’ grievances. It was the birth of Soviet power. To back these demands, on 22 January 1905 (9 January according to the Julian calendar), a massive march took place led by Georgy Gapon, a charismatic priest. There were 50,000 participants, some say 100,000. Many of the workers took their families along as if to show that they did not intend any violence. The police fired on the demonstrators, leaving at least a hundred dead, perhaps more. It was Bloody Sunday. That was, to quote a Chinese proverb famously used by Mao in 1930, the single spark that started a prairie fire. The fire would engulf Russia for decades to come.

  In September 1905 the military defeat by Japan jolted the autocracy into reforms (just as the Crimean War had done fifty years previously) and everything changed. To be defeated by what was (wrongly) regarded as a backward Asian state was unbearable. The domestic repercussions were enormous. The crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa. Social Democrats, including the Bolsheviks, a hitherto insignificant force, grew in strength and influence. Nationalist parties emerged or became stronger in Finland, Poland, the Baltic provinces, Georgia, and Ukraine (it was only in 1905 that the Russian Academy of Sciences decreed that Ukrainian was a real language and not a mere dialect of Russian).84 Russia was in disarray as demonstrations, counter-demonstrations, and random pogroms multiplied. The autocracy was scared. Nothing like this had been seen at the time anywhere else in Europe. Concessions flowed accompanied by further turmoil and strikes.

  Until 1905 there had been no significant working-class movement in the country, though there had been strikes and unrest.85 This apparent docility may have contributed to preventing the kind of labour legislation that reformers demanded. If the workers did not complain, why change anything? Let the radical intelligentsia preach to the wind, amid the apathy of the muzhiks in the countryside or the rabochikh (workers) in the cities. Meanwhile, the industrialists continued to pursue their narrow material interests, exhibiting an obtuse absence of a social vision. They believed that it would be counter-productive to improve the conditions of the working class since they had been peasants until recently and therefore were immature and ignorant. Concessions could be made only when the working class had become more educated and capitalism more advanced.86 No wonder no one listened to what the industrialists had to say. Their natural party, the Kadets (or KD, the Constitutional Democrats), the party of the liberal intelligentsia, led by Pavel Milyukov, were dismayed by the ‘narrow’ class interests of Russian landlords and industrialists.87

  Russian liberalism was chronically weak. It was split into three tendencies, the Kadets, the Progressists, and the Octobrists, but even united it would not have amounted to much. The differences were minor and mainly to do with the question of agency, in other words who would lead the change. The Octobrists thought enlightened landlords and the urban upper middle classes would have the leading role. The Progressists rejected the possibility of an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility; progress would only be achieved through the bourgeoisie. The Kadets were the most radical of the three and wanted a democratic system. What united all three of the groups was the idea that capitalism would be the inevitable outcome of Russian development (here even the Marxists, including Lenin and Plekhanov, agreed). Although they rejected the idea of a social revolution, the Kadets wanted a political revolution that would transform the Tsar into a constitutional ruler (as in Germany and Great Britain).88

  Even Nicholas II realized that further concessions had to be made. Prompted, once again by Count Witte, he issued what came to be known as the 17 October 1905 Manifesto, written by Witte, pledging basic freedoms of speech, press, and religion, an elected Duma with considerable powers (‘no law can become effective without approval of the State Duma’) but a limited franchise.89 ‘In those days,’ wrote Witte:

  even the conservatives advocated a constitution. In fact, there were no conservatives in Russia on the eve of October 17, 1905 … Many also suspected – and their suspicions proved eminently true – that the constitution had been granted by the Emperor in a fit of panic and that as soon as his position improved he would so manipulate the constitution as to annul it and turn it into a ghastly farce.90

  The period from mid-October to early December 1905 came to be known as the ‘Days of Freedom’. But as the government relented, the prestige of the opposition grew, especially in the main cities. Workers’ councils (soviets) were formed. In St Petersburg they elected Leon Trotsky as one of their leaders. In the countryside the Socialist Revolutionary Party (which had emerged from Narodnaya Volya) became a mass organization backed by rapidly developing peasant unions. The zemstva demanded an elected national assembly. Then, in December 1905, a particularly threatening uprising in Moscow, acting ‘as a red rag to the bull of the counter-revolution’, was crushed.91 It was the end of the honeymoon. The regime clamped down everywhere: in southern Russia against the peasants, in Russian cities against the workers, in Poland against the nationalists.

  Sergei Witte had urged the Tsar to accelerate constitutional reforms, but his influence was diminishing rapidly. Witte wanted to save the autocracy as much as the Tsar did but he thought that reforming it was the way forward, whereas the Tsar believed that the slightest change would bring the entire edifice down. Of Nicholas II, Witte wrote: ‘A ruler who cannot be trusted, who approves to-day what he will reject to-morrow, is incapable of steering the Ship of State into a quiet harbour. His outstanding failing is his lamentable lack of will power.’92 Witte was convinced that Russia could follow the West but only with a proper legal structure that would stop the peasants being in thrall to the arbitrariness of local powers.93

  Terrorism escalated but, as is always the case, the terrorists were never in control of the consequences of their actions and never able to shape them. Like a sudden flood or a natural disaster, what the terrorists did was left to be exploited by others who were politically more astute, leaving the terrorists under the illusion that they ‘had made a difference’ without ever understanding what that the difference might have been.

  Finally, a new Duma was elected (it took months) with a complicated franchise that depended not only on payment of taxes or property qualification but also on one’s status. The outcome was that electoral power remained distributed unequally: workers were only 2.5 per cent of the electorate, the peasants 42 per cent, but the landowners 32 per cent.94

  The Kadets became the largest party, gaining about one-third of the seats, while the Trudoviks (Labour Party) were second. Witte’s supporters did not fare as well. The far left, namely the Socialist Revolutionaries as well as the much smaller Social Democrats (which then included both Menshevik and Bolsheviks factions), boycotted the election.

  This Duma lasted two months. Contrary to what had been promised, its powers were largely advisory, as the Tsar reminded everyone in his address from the throne.95 In 1907 a second Duma was elected, one far more representative than the first and not boycotted by Socialist Revolutionaries or Social Democrats.

>   This Duma too had very limited powers. Everything it did was subject to the approval of the State Council of Imperial Russia, half of whose members were appointed by the Tsar (who had a further right of veto).96 The Tsar openly manifested his disdain of the Duma by telling the German ambassador that the deputies ‘behave in a manner beneath all contempt, who think about nothing else except how to revile each other and fight against each other’.97 He was not entirely wrong: the delegates were rowdy and disorderly.98 As the Duma tried to assert its power, the suffrage was modified again to give more weight to the supporters of the Tsar – in effect a ‘constitutional’ coup d’état. The Third Duma, elected by a much smaller electorate, ran its full course (1907–12). The landowners (30,000 families) now held 40 per cent of the seats.99