That person turned out to be Witte, whom Nicholas II chose as Russia’s first-ever prime minister.
Nicholas II had asked Witte to draft the October Manifesto, but knowing the tsar all too well and probably desirous of maintaining some distance from the document, Witte had passed the drafting task to an associate who happened to be staying at his home.150 Still, Witte edited the drafts and was universally seen as the prime mover.151 And yet, although at the pinnacle of power, Witte found himself suspended in the air, fully supported by no one—not by the stunned establishment, who were mostly proponents of unbridled autocracy and who, additionally, disliked Witte for his pedigree, gruffness, and Jewish wife; not by the narrow stratum of constitutionalists, who were still waiting for the promised constitution to be drafted and enacted; not by the elected representatives to the Petersburg Soviet, who in many cases expected the Duma would be a “bourgeois” sham; not by the striking workers and students, whose general strike had ebbed but who still desired social justice; and not by the rebellious peasantry, who freely interpreted the October Manifesto as a promise of pending land redistribution, which sparked new agrarian disturbances.152 Witte was not even fully supported by Nicholas II, who promoted him yet still found him insolent. Nonetheless, by sheer force of personality, especially his drive to be informed, Witte proved able to impose coordination on much of the government, even in foreign policy and military affairs, whose ministers technically did not even report to the prime minister.153
Whatever Witte’s impressive abilities, however, the introduction of a prime minister, alongside the promise of the still-to-come Duma, did not restore public order. On the contrary, opposition became more violent after the proclamation of the October Manifesto. The tsarist autocracy was saved—literally—by a tough conservative official who had once been fired for abusing his police power in connection with sexual indiscretions. Pyotr Durnovó (b. 1845), the scion of ancient nobility and a naval academy graduate, had been at sea during the 1860s Great Reforms. He then forsook the navy and became a longtime director of police (1884–93). After one of the “black cabinets” that he oversaw intercepted a love letter to the Brazilian charge d’affaires from Durnovó’s own mistress, he had the police break into the diplomat’s apartment to steal the rest of her correspondence. The woman complained about the theft to her diplomat paramour, who at a court ball raised the matter with Tsar Alexander III. The latter is said to have remarked to his interior minister, “Get rid of this swine within twenty-four hours.”154 Durnovó retreated abroad, dismissed from state service, seemingly forever. Yet in 1895, after Alexander III’s surprise death from illness at age forty-nine, Durnovó managed to resume his career, rising to deputy interior minister. On October 23, 1905, Witte named him acting interior minister, against the vociferous objections of liberals, and the hesitancy of Tsar Nicholas II.155 Within three days, the Baltic sailors mutinied. By October 28, Durnovó had crushed their chaotic mutiny, ordering hundreds of executions. He contemplated an empirewide crackdown, but Witte (initially) insisted that Durnovó act within the parameters of the October Manifesto—after all, it had been signed by the tsar. Soon, however, Durnovó began to implement harsher measures, which, of course, greatly pleased the signatory of the October Manifesto, as well as much of state officialdom, once the measures appeared to be successful. “Everyone started to work, the machinery went into high gear” recalled one top okhranka official. “Arrests began.”156 Indeed, between the tsar’s promise of a constitution (October 1905) and the promulgation six months later of the Fundamental Laws—Nicholas II refused to allow it to be called a constitution—Durnovó’s police arrested many tens of thousands (by some estimates, up to 70,000).157 Durnovó also sacked numerous governors and, more important, goaded the rest to seize back all public spaces.
Durnovó showed initiative. In mid-November 1905, when a new strike shut down the postal and telegraph system, he broke it by organizing citizen replacements. On December 3—the day after the Petersburg Soviet called for workers to withdraw their savings from state banks—he arrested around 260 deputies to the Soviet, half the membership, including Chairman Trotsky. Many officials warned this would provoke a repeat of the October 1905 general strike, but Durnovó countered that a show of force would shift the political dynamic. On December 7, 1905, an uprising broke out in Moscow, and Durnovó’s critics looked prescient. But he went to Nicholas II at Tsarskoe Selo to report and seek instructions—without Prime Minister Witte, his (nominal) superior, whom Durnovó no longer bothered to consult even though by now Witte had come around to a hard-line approach. Durnovó did not even appear at the meetings of the government (Council of Ministers), or explain his absences therefrom.158 The tsar, predictably, was keen to encourage the pre-1905 practice whereby ministers like Durnovó reported directly and privately to him. Nicholas II wrote to his mother, the dowager empress, “Durnovó—the interior minister—acts superbly.”159 Now, confronted by an uprising in Russia’s ancient capital, Durnovó ordered it crushed: some 424 people were killed and 2,000 wounded.160 Crackdowns took place all around the empire as well. “I earnestly request, in this and similar cases, that you order the use of armed force without the slightest leniency and that insurgents be annihilated and their homes burned,” Durnovó bluntly instructed officials in Kiev province. “Under the present circumstances, the restoration of the authority of the Government is possible only by these means.”161 In Georgia, imperial troops bloodily recaptured the manganese mining settlement of Chiatura, removing the political base of Jughashvili and his Bolshevik followers. Imperial forces and Black Hundreds also routed the Georgian Menshevik peasant-citadel of the Gurian Republic. Crushed, the world’s first-ever peasant republic led by Marxists, as one scholar wrote, would find echoes “in the fields, hills, and jungles of Asia.”162 For now, however, by the end of 1907, mass peasant uprisings had been snuffed out across the empire.163 It was a stunning achievement.
• • •
RUSSIA’S AUTOCRACY had undergone a near-death experience. Altogether, an army of nearly 300,000, a size close to the land force that had battled the Japanese, was needed to suppress domestic unrest.164 Such a vast mobilization for repression and regime survival would have been impossible had Russia’s foes on its western flank, Germany and Austria-Hungary, decided to take what would have been easy advantage of the situation. Not even an actual attack from the West, merely a mobilization, would have paralyzed and likely doomed the tsarist regime.165 Equally critical, the Russian forces of domestic repression were the same peasants in uniform who had been mutinying when—and because—the tsarist regime had appeared weak, and who now, when the regime showed its teeth again, resumed enforcing state order against rebellious workers, students, and fellow peasants.166 Durnovó rallied them. This is one of those moments in the play of large-scale historical structures when personality proved decisive: a lesser interior minister could not have managed. When “the regime had tottered on the brink of an abyss,” Vladimir Gurko, his deputy rightly concluded, it “was saved by . . . Durnovó, who adopted an almost independent policy and by merciless persecution of the revolutionary elements re-established a certain degree of order in the country.”167
But this was also a moment when a statesman’s talent, rather than shortcomings, proved detrimental to his country. Durnovó’s rescue of Russia’s autocracy—when it should have fallen—would end up having the perverse consequence of preparing the country for a far worse crash during a far worse war, which would serve as a template for a radical new order. Of course, it is impossible to know what would have transpired had Durnovó’s exceptional resoluteness and police skill not saved tsarism in 1905–6. Still, one wonders whether the history of one sixth of the earth, and beyond, would have been as catastrophic, and would have seen the appearance of Stalin’s inordinately violent dictatorship. Be that as it may, the respite Durnovó furnished to Russia would prove short-lived, frenetic, and full of rampant insecurities. “Long before the World War,”
recalled one contemporary, “all politically conscious people lived as on a volcano.”168
CHAPTER 4
CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY
We are tired of everything. We are loyal people and cannot go against the Government, but neither can we support the current Government. We are forced to step to the side and be silent. This is the tragedy of Russian life.
A. I. Savenko, political rightist and anti-Semite, private letter intercepted by the okhranka, 19141
Looking at that low and small head, you had the feeling that if you pricked it, the whole of Karl Marx’s Capital would come hissing out of it like gas from a container. Marxism was his element, there he was invincible. No power on earth could dislodge him from a position once taken, and he could find an appropriate Marx formula for every phenomenon.”
A former fellow tsarist political prisoner speaking about the young Stalin in Baku prison, 19082
RUSSIA’S STATE HAD ARISEN out of military exigencies, in an extraordinarily challenging geopolitical environment, but also out of ideals, above all the autocratic ideal, yet Russia’s long-enduring autocracy was anything but stable. Nearly half the Romanovs, following Peter the Great, left their thrones involuntarily, as a result of coups or assassinations. Peter himself had his eldest son and heir killed for disobedience (thirteen of Peter’s fifteen children by two wives predeceased him). Peter was succeeded by his second wife, a peasant girl from the Baltic coast, who took the name Catherine I, and then by his grandson, Peter II. In 1730, when Peter II died from smallpox on the day of his wedding, the Romanov male line expired. The throne passed to Peter II’s relations, first to his father’s cousin Anna (r. 1730–40), and then, in a palace coup, to his half aunt Elizabeth (r. 1741–61). Neither produced a male heir. The Romanov House avoided perishing altogether only thanks to the marriage of one of Peter the Great’s two surviving daughters to the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. This made the Romanovs a Russian-German family. Karl Peter Ulrich, the first Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov—who became Peter III—was an imbecile. He wore a Prussian military uniform to Russian state functions and lasted six months before being deposed in a putsch by his wife, a minor German princess named Sophie Auguste Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, who assumed the throne as Catherine II (or the Great). She fancied herself an enlightened despot, and made high culture a partner in the autocracy (something Stalin would emulate, ruling as he would from Catherine’s imperial Senate in Moscow). The German Catherine was a Romanov only by marriage, but Russia’s ruling family continued to emphasize its links, via the female line, back to Peter and to employ the Russian surname only. In 1796, Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, who was assassinated in 1801; then came Paul’s son Alexander I (r. 1801–25); Alexander’s brother Nicholas I (r. 1825–55); Alexander II, who died in agony in 1881, his legs shattered by a terrorist’s bomb; Alexander III, who became heir following the sudden death of his elder brother and who, in power, succumbed to kidney disease (nephritis) at age forty-nine in 1894; and finally, Nicholas II.3
Except for Alexander III, who married a Danish princess—his deceased elder brother’s fiancee—all the “Romanov” descendants of the German Catherine took German-born wives. Such intermarriage transformed almost all of Europe’s royalty into relations. Nicholas II’s German spouse—Alix Victoria Helena Louise Beatrice, Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt—was the favorite granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Born in 1872, the year after German unification, Alix first met the tsarevich “Nicky” when she was eleven and he fifteen, during the wedding of her sister, Ella, to Nicholas’s uncle. They met again six years later and fell madly in love. Tsar Alexander III and his wife, Empress Consort Maria Fyodorovna, initially opposed their son Nicholas’s marriage to the shy, melancholic Alix, despite the fact that she was their goddaughter. Russia’s monarchs preferred the daughter of the pretender to the French throne, to solidify Russia’s new alliance with France. Queen Victoria, for her part, had favored Alix for the Prince of Wales of the United Kingdom, but she, too, came around. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supported the Alix-Nicky match from the get-go, hoping to strengthen German-Russian bonds. Alix’s arrival in Russia, however, proved ill starred, coinciding with the early death of Emperor Alexander III. “She has come to us behind a coffin,” the crowd noted in their first glimpse of her, at the state funeral. “She brings misfortune with her.”4 The new empress consort dutifully converted to Orthodoxy (from Lutheranism) and took the name Alexandra. Her honeymoon with Nicholas II consisted of twice-daily Orthodox services and visits by notables to convey condolences about her father-in-law’s untimely passing. She gave birth to four daughters in succession, which also set everyone on edge, because an imperial succession law passed in 1797 under Paul I (r. 1796–1801), the son of Catherine the Great, forbade another female to occupy the throne. Finally, in August 1904, in the tenth year of marriage, Alexandra produced a long-awaited male heir. Nicholas II named the boy for his favorite early Romanov ruler, Alexei, Peter the Great’s father, harkening back to the Moscow days before the building of St. Petersburg.
Possessing an heir, finally, Nicholas II reveled in Interior Minister Pyotr Durnovó’s tenacious crackdown a little more than a year later, but the tsar had not retracted the October Manifesto. And so, on April 27, 1906, the newly created State Duma opened in the Winter Palace with the monarch’s (terse) address from the throne, in emulation of British custom. Nicholas II uncannily resembled his cousin King George V. But facing all the standing dignitaries, domestic and foreign, as well as the commoner-elected representatives, who had gathered in St. George’s Hall, the tsar, raised on a dais, spoke a mere 200 words, which were followed by a tomblike silence.5 Russia had become something that had never before existed: a constitutional autocracy, in which the word “constitution” was forbidden.6 It was a liberal-illiberal muddle. The Duma met in the Tauride Palace, which had been given by the autocrat Catherine the Great to her court favorite, Prince Potëmkin, in 1783, for his conquest of Crimea; it had been repossessed from his family after his death, and used, most recently, to warehouse props of the imperial theater. The Tauride’s interior winter garden was converted into a nearly 500-seat chamber, christened the White Hall. Despite the exclusion from the Duma of the small central Asian “protectorates” of Khiva and Bukhara as well as the Grand Duchy of Finland (which had its own legislature), many of the Russian delegates experienced shock at the stunning diversity of the empire’s representatives, as if elites in the capital had been living somewhere other than imperial Russia. Inside the White Hall, under a gigantic portrait of Nicholas II, the principal advocates for constitutionalism, the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets)—a group led by Moscow University history professor Paul Miliukov—constituted the opposition.7 Who, if anyone, supported the new constitutional autocracy remained unclear.
Prime Minister Sergei Witte, who had done more than anyone to urge the Duma on the tsar, at its successful launch handed in his resignation, exhausted, infirm, and scorned.8 Witte earned no special dispensation from the fact that he had been the lead locomotive behind Russia’s spectacular industrial surge from the 1890s, or had helped bridge the chasm of 1905 between regime and society. Nicholas II found Witte devious and unprincipled (“Never have I seen such a chameleon of a man.”).9 The tsar immediately and everlastingly regretted the political concessions that Witte had helped wring. With Witte’s fall, Durnovó, too, was obliged to step down, his historic service as interior minister having also lasted a mere six months, although Nicholas II allowed Durnovó to continue receiving his salary of 18,000 rubles per annum and awarded him a staggering cash gift of 200,000 rubles. (Witte received the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky, with diamonds.)10 Durnovó yielded his portfolio to the Saratov province governor, Pyotr Stolypin, who in July 1906 managed to add the post of prime minister, thereby replacing both Durnovó and Witte.11
Tall, with blue eyes and a black beard, a figure of immense charm and sensitive to form—so unlike the abrasive Witte—Stolypin was a
discovery. He had been born in 1862 in Dresden (where his mother was visiting relatives abroad) to an ancient Russian noble family. His father, who was related to the renowned writer Mikhail Lermontov, owned a Stradivarius that he himself played, and had served as adjutant to Alexander II and as commandant of Moscow’s Grand Kremlin Palace; Stolypin’s well-educated mother was the daughter of the general who had commanded the Russian infantry during the Crimean War and rose to viceroy of tsarist Poland. The boy grew up on his wealthy family’s estates in tsarist Lithuania, territories of the bygone Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and graduated in natural sciences (not law) from St. Petersburg Imperial University. (Dimitri Mendeleev, of the periodic table, was one of Stolypin’s teachers.) Like Stalin, Stolypin suffered a withered arm, from a mysterious teenage malady; he wrote by using his good left hand to guide his right. The deformity precluded following his father and mother’s relatives into a military career.12 But in 1902, at age forty, Stolypin became governor of Grodno, in the Polish-Lithuanian western borderlands, encompassing his own properties. He was the youngest person in the Russian empire to hold a governorship. In 1903, he had been transferred to governor of Saratov, in central Russia’s Volga valley, whose villages, unlike those in the western borderlands, had communes that periodically redistributed strips of land among peasants (the “repartitional” commune). Saratov also became known for political turbulence. The tsar had had occasion to tour the province, and Stolypin toiled indefatigably to ensure he would be surrounded by admiring subjects. During the brutal 1905–6 crackdown, Stolypin proved to be imperial Russia’s most energetic governor, as well as an executive of courage and vision, willing to explain to assembled crowds his rationale for upholding the law and, if that failed, personally leading troops in repression. Stolypin’s performance impressed the courtiers; Nicholas II telegrammed congratulations for “exemplary efficiency.”
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