1913
Page 15
In this, he was not entirely successful. Many St Petersburgers loathed the new Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood for example – a virtual copy of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow – inaugurated by Nicholas II in 1907 on the site where his grandfather Alexander II had been assassinated thirty-six years previously. Entirely out of keeping with the rest of the city – but entirely in keeping with Nicholas’ preferred view of Russia – the church’s golden onion domes punctured the flat evenness of the St Petersburg skyline with a reminder that one was still in Russia, not in some idealised European city of the eighteenth century.
More importantly, neither Benois nor anyone else could halt the broader developments of St Petersburg – its expansion, its need for new housing and new office buildings, its gradual transformation from a city of aristocratic palaces to a city of the middle classes, from a city of government to one of commerce, from a city of art to one of industry. For by 1913 St Petersburg was Europe’s fourth-largest city, with a population of two million, including 200,000 industrial workers. When Dmitri Smirnov, the Tobolsk priest, disembarked at the Nikolaevskaya railway station that winter, arriving in a place he had not clapped eyes on for thirty-three years, he found himself caught up in a city that had graduated from being an imperial stage set to being a European metropolis. ‘I was staggered’, he wrote, ‘and deafened by the noise, movement and bustle’.23
As 1913 progressed, the memory of the Romanov celebrations began to fade. As the gold tercentenary leaf began to peel, the full complexity of the Russian empire was revealed, the true extent of the challenges it faced – and its mixed prospects for the future.
In many ways things were not that bad; indeed they were perhaps better than they had been for several years, and getting better. Granted, most Russians were still poorer than a citizen of France or a subject of the Habsburgs. But their sheer numbers meant that the empire as a whole had a national output double that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, already greater than of France, and growing faster than either.24 Russia’s larger cities were covered in advertising hoardings for European products. Was this not a down payment on a still-larger consumer market to come? London’s Times newspaper ran special supplements on Russia throughout 1913, boosting the country’s profile to foreign investors. Its message of Russia’s future economic prospects was plain enough.
By 1913, the Russian colossus was not just stirring economically, it was exploding. Rural incomes were rising, with 1913 promising to be a bumper year for the country’s agriculture. Russia’s share of the world’s industry had increased consistently for thirty years, but now this growth was accelerating still faster. The empire’s exports – timber, metals, grain and oil from the south Caucasus – poured through the country’s ports on the Baltic and on the Black Sea. Foreign capital flowed in, constituting four-tenths of the capital behind Russian banks and an equal share of investment in Russian industry, in Russia’s trams and trains, mines, metalworks and power stations.25 Europe was awash with fashionable theories pronouncing the consolidation of world politics around a few world empires – no one doubted that Russia would be one of those empires. As Halford Mackinder put it ‘the spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great that a vast economic world … will there develop’.26
All this might be disturbed by war, of course. As traders bought and sold on the St Petersburg stock market, they might hear the sounds of marches outside calling for stronger Russian involvement in the Balkans. In March the Bulgarian General Radko Dimitriev was met in the city with adoring crowds, a service in the Resurrection Cathedral and shouts of ‘Shumi Maritsa’, the Bulgarians’ bellicose national anthem.27 But as the economy of the Russian Empire grew it was becoming more enmeshed with that of its most significant political antagonist, the German Empire, source of half of Russia’s imports and destination for a third of its exports.28 This, surely, was a positive sign for Europe’s political stability as a whole. ‘What Russia wants most at present is external peace’, wrote Count Kokovtsov in a much-reported memorandum to the Tsar, ‘in order that, enjoying its blessings, she may develop her productive powers to the necessary extent’.29
And should war come there was less and less reason for Russia to fear it, her army recovered from 1905’s blow of defeat, rearmed and reformed. Although the governments of the various European powers disagreed on the strength of the Russians in 1913 – not untypically the most caustic were the Russians themselves – all considered the country to be growing daily more powerful.30 (Whether that made it a factor of stability in Europe, calming any German thoughts of conflict, or a factor of instability, enticing Russia deeper into adventures in the Balkans or near East, remained to be seen.) ‘The future belongs to Russia’, confided the German Chancellor to his private secretary the following year.31
Above all, it was far from obvious that Russia was heading inevitably to revolution. Industrial strikes in St Petersburg and elsewhere were an evident cause for concern, and in 1913 the number of industrial stoppages was multiplying. But Russia had no monopoly on labour unrest, nor were the demands of workers particularly political – they were the same as those of workers in Glasgow, Düsseldorf or Milan: improved wages and conditions, less intrusion from the bosses, a safer working environment. There were signs that the revolutionists were in fact losing their grip on the proletariat, if they had ever had them fully in their grasp. St Petersburg metalworkers criticised the Bolshevik paper Pravda as the ‘imaginary leaders of the working masses’, accusing them of twisting ‘the meaning of certain decisions and resolutions of the workers out of internal considerations that in no way correspond to the interests and attitudes of the workers’.32 In the meantime, increased factory inspections were improving labour conditions. Health insurance was being introduced which promised to lessen the precariousness of industrial life. The growth of Russian civil society offered an avenue for social cooperation between workers and the middle classes. Newspapers provided a common culture of aspiration. An assessment made by English historian Bernard Pares of Russia a few years earlier still held true in 1913:
Despite the ominous pronouncements of a number of untrained correspondents, who have by their exaggeration almost killed public interest in this great country, the crops go on growing and life goes on developing. What we have to watch is the gradual formation of a middle term between despotism and revolution … With or without convulsions … the great main factors are slowly but surely changing, and Russia will eventually issue on the path of renewed life, with loyalty to the past and with confidence in the future. So far from being weakened, she will be better able to take her natural part in the common affairs of Europe.33
In the Romanov’s tercentenary year, wrote a journalist for the London Times, ‘no hope seems too confident or too bright’.34
And yet – and yet. The challenges to Russian development, both economic and political, remained daunting. The darker forces within Russia remained strong, the structure of Russia’s government remained creaky. While the extent of Russian territory was impressive, not all the gold leaf in the world could hide the fact that much of that land was empty wasteland, frozen in winter and a swamp in summer, without roads, railways or people. Despite improvements in rural incomes the country was saddled with a massive rural population that was uneducated and poor. The diversity of the empire’s population was impressive in itself – but it increased the challenges of governability. More often than not, cack-handed coercion of individual nationalities had achieved the opposite of its objective, and had consolidated opposition to Romanov rule. Russian nationalists, meanwhile, lived in permanent suspicion that the empire served the interests of its subject peoples better than those of the Russians themselves.
In no other country did life seem so precarious or violence so quotidian, barbarism so near the surface. Accidents of all sorts – fires, industrial accidents, mineshaft collapses, breaking ice on rivers, ro
ad accidents, train accidents, tram accidents – casually carried Russians off to early deaths by the dozen every day. In the countryside, although serfdom had been abolished fifty years, feudal attitudes remained alive and well. Justice, such as it was, was rough and immediate: the mother of an eight-year-old child who threw a stick between the legs of a General’s horse was reported to have been struck with a whip, a ten-year-old flogged for having thrown stones into the yard of a neighbouring house.35 In the cities, the Russian papers were full of tales of khouliganstvo, or hooliganism, taken as the sign of a society where established principles of order were breaking down.36
Russian Futurists embraced the spirit of hooliganism in their art and poetry, expressing a desire to shock the public out of their bourgeois values. In 1912 they published a manifesto for their movement entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. In December 1913 they put on a Futurist opera in St Petersburg’s Luna Park theatre in which the sun itself, symbol of enlightenment, was taken captive and then killed. ‘They want to transform the world into chaos, to smash the established values into pieces’, said Matiushin and Kazimir Malevich, two of the opera’s creators, in an interview.37 ‘Who is more crazy?’ asked the Petersburgskaia gazeta, the Futurists or the public who paid nine roubles for a seat in order ‘to see ugly decorations and some freaks dressed in large shirts, and to listen to a senseless selection of words clearly meant for whistling and abuse’.38
St Petersburg in the tercentenary year of the Romanov dynasty, a shop window of Russian modernity with a vast undeveloped hinterland behind it.
Memories of blood on the streets were fresh. During the tercentenary celebrations in February 1913, Tsar Nicholas had walked into the Kazan Cathedral over the same ground where a throng of students had been cut down by Cossack soldiers in 1901 while they celebrated the assassination of a government minister. It was only eight years since the revolution of 1905 and the moment when imperial troops had fired indiscriminately into a crowd of 60,000 workers – a crowd led by a priest bearing a cross and carrying a loyal petition to the Tsar – in front of the Winter Palace. In the previous year striking miners in the Lena goldfields of Siberia had been fired on, with several hundred killed or wounded. In the first years of the twentieth century, pogroms of Russian Jews, carried out by the marauding Black Hundreds while government officials looked on – or even with their connivance – had made rural Russia a byword for anti-Semitic butchery.
Despite legal reforms passed in the wake of the 1905 revolution, the state retained extraordinary and often arbitrary power over individuals and over society. A public meeting could be broken up by a policeman who heard a word – ‘constitution’, for example – to which he took exception. Internal migration was controlled, a system which was applied with particular ferocity to Russia’s Jews, who were excluded from living outside an area known as the Pale of Settlement, with limited exceptions, such as for Jewish women prepared to be labelled as prostitutes. Even for foreign nationals, the Russian state evoked real fear. As Luigi Villari, an Italian traveller to Russia, described it, ‘you arrive with your head full of passports, gendarmes, the secret police, nihilist novels and Siberia’. Nervously, ‘you cannot help looking again and again at your papers … visions of Russian prisons rise up before your eyes, searching examinations into your past history by an all-knowing chief of police’.39
In many respects the Russian state was a scrawnier creature than the double-headed eagle suggested, its grip weak even if its talons were sharp. It was not the case that there was a policeman on every street corner in Russia – in fact there were fewer per capita than in Germany or Britain. In the end, Villari’s fears of Russian border guards turned out to be unfounded – the checks at the border were a fiasco. ‘I might have had a whole boxful of revolutionary literature for all the customs officers knew’, he wrote.40 But this was a consequence of despotic capriciousness rather than thought-out policy, a trait that applied throughout Russian officialdom. The very structures of Russian administration – multiple layers, multiple jurisdictions, different organisations with the same ostensible purpose – seemed calculated to impede effectiveness. Such a state might serve to keep the people sufficiently on edge to ensure sullen submission, but if this was order, it was skin-deep. When it came to more complex tasks of modern government – raising money or prosecuting wars – it was blunderingly incompetent. The story of Russia’s military defeat in 1905 was riddled with shocking examples of disorganisation.
The closer one got to the centre of things, to St Petersburg, to the Duma and to the Tsar himself, the more disheartened one became about the mechanisms by which Russia’s challenges might be addressed. The Duma was housed in Potemkin’s Tauride Palace – and it provided a democratic Potemkin façade to the realities of the Russian political system. Although the existence of the Duma was a welcome advance, and it certainly made popular sentiment ever harder to ignore, the road to true constitutional parliamentary government in Russia was a crooked path strewn with obstacles, not an open highway of political development. As the tercentenary celebrations had made quite clear, the Tsar saw the Duma as subordinate, consultative and, quite possibly, temporary. The Duma itself did not speak with one voice, but was divided between liberals and conservatives, socialists and nationalists, modernisers and those who sought to turn the clock back to simpler times.
The Tsar’s own theory of government, as one former Russian premier described it in 1912, was positively infantile: ‘I do what I wish, and what I wish is good; if people do not see it, it is because they are plain mortals, while I am God’s anointed’.41 Perhaps this was Russia’s way. ‘Let Europe boast of its constitutions’, wrote Vladimir Mescherskii, a favourite of Nicholas II, ‘Russia alone in Europe requires her own path toward development and the future … complete authority and complete freedom for the supreme power, since it alone remains pure and untouched by the poison of corruption’.42 Still, if Tsarist autocracy was to be enlightened absolutism rather than plain old despotism, then the Tsar himself had to be enlightened. But Nicholas was no Peter the Great. His intellectual limitations were well known. Even to those who believed in the system that he represented, the Tsar was a disappointment. His impressionability was legendary; the most powerful man in Russia was said to be the man who had most recently spoken to the Tsar. It was difficult to know what Nicholas really thought, or to predict how he would act. ‘In general one can say about our Tsar in that he is an enigma’, confided one politician to his diary, ‘today he is a rightist, what he will be tomorrow is shrouded in mystery’.43
To the uncertainty of his own mind was allied a willingness to disrupt the work of others. ‘A veritable passion for secret notes and methods’, inexpertly put into effect, invariably landed the Tsar in ‘a mud puddle or in a pool of blood’, wrote a former minister.44 Most recently, the reforming premier Pyotr Stolypin had been undermined by the Tsar behind his back. (Stolypin finally bullied the Tsar into accepting proposals for local government reform in western Russia by threatening to resign.) In 1911, Stolypin was assassinated in the Kiev opera. The Tsar was said to have asked for forgiveness for his meddling. Too late.
And behind the Tsar lay – what? A nine-year-old boy afflicted with haemophilia who invited shocked gasps when seen in public, a brother who had been cut out of the succession for having married a previously married commoner against the Tsar’s will, a German-born wife who refused to show herself in public and when she did seemed on the verge of a nervous collapse, and the starets Rasputin, a so-called holy man who many believed to be an out-and-out fraud with far too much influence, poisoning the life of the imperial court.
Towards the end of the year, the world was reminded of a continuing canker on the Russian body politic, that of anti-Semitism, as its attention turned to a courthouse in Kiev in Ukraine. There, a Jewish clerk, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was on trial on trumped-up charges of ritually murdering a local lad in order to use his blood in a religious service. Under a full-length portrait of Tsar Ni
cholas II, wrote journalist Vladimir Nabokov, a travesty of justice was underway, ‘poisoned with hatred, suspicion and lies’.45 Witnesses were blackmailed and the police lied through their teeth. The only ‘evidence’ was provided by the whispered statement of a local professor of psychiatry, Ivan Sikorskii, who was disowned by his profession for his testimony, of which Nabokov wrote:
No matter how many years will pass, when the future historians of our trial, of our public life, open the pages of the shorthand reports … they will read the delirium, the assurances taken from anti-Semite literature of the lowest rank presented under the flag of scientific authority by a professor of psychiatry [and] he will ask in amazement, how could this happen?
Like the Dreyfus case in France, Beilis became a worldwide cause célèbre, provoking letters to the newspapers and public information campaigns both for and against. Many wondered whether it was not Beilis in the dock, but Russia itself.46 Ultimately, even a specially selected Ukrainian peasant jury could not stomach the injustice and acquitted Beilis. But the Russian Empire was tarnished. So was the Tsar, believed to be supportive of Russian anti-Semitism as a rallying point for the regime against liberalism, and against the future.