The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  To make matters worse, Nicholas was dogged by bad fortune from the day of his birth, which happened to fall on the name day of Job. Everything he tried turned to dust and he soon acquired the reputation of an “unlucky” tsar. He came to share this popular belief. It greatly affected his self-confidence, fostering in him a mood of resignation interrupted by periodic bursts of stubbornness.

  To assert his independence, Nicholas traveled in 1890–91 to the Middle East and Far East, the latter of which some diplomats viewed as Russia’s proper sphere of influence—a view he shared. The journey almost ended in tragedy when he was assaulted by a deranged Japanese terrorist.

  On the day of his coronation in 1895, a terrible accident occurred when a crowd estimated at 500,000, assembled at Khodynka Field outside Moscow to receive souvenirs, panicked, trampling or choking to death nearly 1,400 people.13 Ignoring the tragedy, the Imperial couple attended the Coronation Ball that evening. Both events were considered an evil omen.

  Perhaps because it was known how badly the high-handed Alexander III had treated his son, on coming to the throne in 1894 Nicholas II enjoyed the reputation of a liberal. He quickly disabused these expectations. In an address to a zemstvo delegation in January 1895, he dismissed talk of liberalization as “senseless dreams” and pledged to “safeguard the principle of autocracy as firmly and steadfastly” as his late father had done.14 This ended his brief political honeymoon. Although he rarely pronounced on political matters, he made it no secret that he regarded Russia as the dynasty’s “patrimony.” One example of this attitude was his decision to give three million rubles paid Russia by Turkey as part of a peace settlement as a present to the Prince of Montenegro, at the request of two Russian grand dukes married to the Prince’s daughters. It was with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from disposing of money belonging to the Russian Treasury in such a cavalier manner.15 It was not the only instance of anachronistic patrimonialism in his reign.

  13. The future Nicholas II as tsarevich (in front, wearing white uniform) entertained by his uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (on his right).

  Given his diffident personality and lack of appetite for power, Nicholas might have proven willing to come to terms with the opposition were it not for his spouse, who was destined to play a major and very negative role in the final years of the old regime. A granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of Queen Victoria, Alexandra Fedorovna (Alix) was born in the German principality of Hesse and in Russia was always looked upon, by society and the masses, as “the German woman.”* Haughty and cold, she managed in no time to alienate St. Petersburg society: as her estrangement increased, her entourage became limited to a confidante, Anna Vyrubova, and, later, Rasputin. She was rarely seen to smile and in photographs usually looks away from the camera. Suffering from headaches and what she believed to be a weak heart, she developed an addiction to pills. She had a strong inclination to mysticism. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, left a thumbnail sketch of Alexandra: “Moral disquiet, constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, constant thought given to the invisible and supernatural, credulousness, superstition.”16 Isolated at the Imperial residence in Tsarskoe Selo from everyone except courtiers, she developed a faith in a mythical Russian “people,” who, it was her firm conviction, boundlessly loved the Imperial family. She mistrusted everyone else, including Nicholas’s relatives, whom she suspected of scheming to remove him from the throne.

  None of which would have mattered much were it not that the Empress saw herself obliged to compensate for her husband’s vacillating character by keeping him from making political concessions and eventually taking a direct hand in appointments: she frequently exercised a wife’s prerogative of turning her husband against people to whom, for one reason or another, she had taken a dislike. Treating Nicholas as a good-natured child (she liked to draw him as a baby in arms), she manipulated her husband by playing on his sense of duty and his suspicious nature. Although born and raised in Western Europe, she quickly assimilated the most extreme patrimonial attitudes of her adopted country. Time and again she reminded Nicholas of his heritage: “You and Russia are one and the same,” she would exhort him.17 After giving birth to a male heir, she made it her mission in life to safeguard unalloyed the institution of autocratic monarchy until the time when he would ascend the throne. By her actions she greatly contributed to widening the breach between the monarchy and society until it became unbridgeable: by 1916, even the staunchest monarchists, including many grand dukes, would turn against her and plot to have her removed. Her historic role in this respect was not dissimilar to Marie Antoinette’s.

  To humor her, Nicholas usually followed his wife’s advice, but not slavishly; on rare occasion he could even oppose her wishes. They were a very loving couple, completely devoted to one another and usually of one mind. Both despised “public opinion,” which they identified with St. Petersburg society and the intelligentsia and viewed as an artificial “wall [sredostenie] erected to separate from them the adoring people.”* It has been said that when Nicholas used the word “intelligentsia” he made the same face as when pronouncing the word “syphilis.” He thought it should be erased from the Russian dictionary.18

  Given the misfortune that dogged Nicholas in all his endeavors, it caused no great surprise that it also afflicted his domestic life. His wife bore four daughters in succession but there was no male heir. In desperation, she turned to charlatans, one of whom, a French physician by the name of Dr. Philippe, assured her that she was pregnant with a boy. Alexandra expanded in bulk until a medical examination in the ninth month revealed she had had a sympathetic pregnancy.19 When in 1904 a boy was finally born, he turned out to suffer from hemophilia, an incurable disease of which she had been the transmitter. The blow deepened Alexandra’s mysticism, but also her determination to see the child, christened Alexis, resplendent on the throne as Tsar of All the Russias.

  The courtiers surrounding Nicholas II reinforced these preferences for anachronistic political practices. At the Tsar’s Court immense stress was laid on decorum and the observance of ritualistic forms:

  The circle of intimates [of the Imperial family] consisted of dull-witted, ignorant remnants of

  dvoriane

  clans, lackeys of the aristocracy, who had lost the freedom of opinion and conviction, as well as the traditional notions of estate honor and pride. All these Voeikovs, Nilovs, Mosolovs, Apraksins, Fedoseevs, Volkovs—colorless, untalented slaves—stood at the entrances and exits of the Imperial Palace and protected the integrity of autocratic power. This honorary duty they shared with the Fredericks, Benckendorffs, Korfs, Grotens, Grünwalds—pompous, smug [Baltic] Germans who had sunk firm roots at the Russian Court and wielded a peculiar kind of influence behind the stage. The highly placed lackeys were united by a profound contempt for the Russian people. Many of them did not know Russia’s past, living in a kind of dumb ignorance of the needs of the present and indifference for the future. For the majority of them, conservative thought meant simply mental inertia and immobility. For people of this ilk, autocracy had lost sense as a political system, because their mental level was incapable of rising to general ideas. Their life flowed from one episode to another, from decorations to shifts on the ladder of ranks and honors. From time to time, the flow of events for them was interrupted by some shock—an uprising, a revolutionary upheaval, or a terrorist attempt. These portentous symptoms spread among them fear, even alarm, but never aroused their deep interest or attracted their serious attention. In the final analysis, everything reduced itself to hopes placed on a new energetic administrator or skillful police chief.

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  The monarchy governed Russia with the assistance of five institutions: the civil service, the security police, the gentry, the army, and the Orthodox Church.

  The bureaucracy (chinovnichestvo) descended from the household staff of medieval princes, originally slaves, and it retained into the twentieth century s
trong traces of its origin. It continued to act, first and foremost, as the personal staff of the monarch rather than as the civil service of the nation. Its members had little sense of the state (gosudarstvo) as an entity separate from and superior to the monarch (gosudar’) and his bureaucracy.21

  On being admitted into the service, a Russian official swore loyalty, not to the state or the nation, but to the person of the ruler. He served entirely at the pleasure of the monarch and his own immediate superiors. Bureaucratic executives had the authority to dismiss subordinates without being required to furnish reasons and without giving the officials concerned the opportunity to defend themselves. The Service Regulations denied a discharged official all means of redress:

  Officials who, in the opinion of their superiors, are incapable of carrying out their obligations, or who, for whatever reason, are [deemed] unreliable [

  neblagonadëzhnye

  ], or who have committed a misdemeanor their superior is aware of but which cannot be factually proven, may be discharged from the service by qualified superiors at the latters’ discretion.… Officials who have been simply dismissed from the service at the discretion of their superiors without being informed of the reasons cannot lodge a complaint against such action. Their petitions for reinstatement in their previous posts or for a court trial not only must be left without action but must not even be accepted by the Governing Senate of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancery.…

  *

  As if to emphasize that civil servants were descended from bonded domestics, an official, no matter how prominent, could not resign from the service without permission. As late as 1916, ministers, most of whom by then were at odds with the Tsar’s policies, had to request his permission to quit, which in a number of cases he refused to grant—a situation difficult for a European even to imagine.

  Except for judges and certain categories of specialists, Russian officials were not required to furnish proof of educational qualifications. Unlike contemporary Western Europe, where appointment to the civil service called for either a school diploma or the passing of an examination, or both, in Russia admission requirements were perfunctory. To qualify for the post of Chancery Servitor (Kantseliarskii sluzhitel’), the stepping-stone to the lowest rung on the service career ladder, a candidate had only to demonstrate the ability to read and write grammatically and to have mastered the rudiments of mathematics. For advancement to the next higher rank, he had to pass an examination that tested for knowledge expected of a graduate of a grammar school. Once established in the lowest civil service rank, an official or chinovnik was not obliged to demonstrate any further competence, and moved up the career ladder in accord with the rules of seniority and the recommendations of his superior. Thus, Imperial officials were appointed and advanced on the basis of undefined criteria which in practice centered on complete loyalty to the dynasty, blind obedience in the execution of orders, and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

  As personal servants of the Tsar, officials of the Imperial civil service stood above the law. A chinovnik could be indicted and put on trial only with the permission of his superior.22 Lacking such authorization, the judiciary was powerless to indict officials. Permission to try officials was rarely forthcoming, and this for two reasons. Since all appointments were made, at any rate in theory, by the Tsar, the failure of a bureaucrat properly to perform his duties reflected adversely on the Tsar’s judgment. Second, there was always the risk that if he were allowed to defend himself in court, the accused official could implicate his superiors. In practice, therefore, guilty officials were quietly transferred to another post or, if sufficiently distinguished, promoted to impressive but meaningless positions in the Senate or Council of State.23 In such matters the Tsar himself had to bow to custom. Following a train accident in which he almost lost his life, Alexander III wanted to bring to trial the Minister of Transport. He was ultimately dissuaded on the grounds that a public trial of a minister who had held his post for fourteen years would mean that he had “undeservedly enjoyed the confidence of the monarch”24—that is, that the Tsar had shown poor judgment. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the unaccountability of the Russian officialdom to the law or any body external to itself represented the principal difference between the Russian and Western European civil services. In fact, it was only one of many manifestations of the patrimonial spirit still embedded in the Russian state.

  The Russian bureaucracy, especially in the last years of the monarchy, had in its ranks many well-educated and dedicated officials. These were especially numerous in the ministries and the agencies located in St. Petersburg. Bernard Pares, the English historian of Russia, on his frequent visits there before 1917, observed that when out of uniform a chinovnik often turned out to be an intellectual, troubled by the same thoughts that agitated society at large. In uniform, however, while performing his duties, he was expected to act haughtily and insolently.* The conditions of service, especially the absence of security, did, in fact, encourage servility toward superiors and rudeness toward everyone else. To the outside world, a chinovnik was expected to act with complete self-assurance:

  Always the underlying intent was to present the “Government” as an all-wise, deliberate and ultimately infallible group of servants of the state, selflessly working in unison with the monarch for the best interests of Russia.

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  An essential element of this self-image was secrecy, which helped maintain the illusion of an authority that knew neither discord nor failures. There was nothing that the bureaucracy dreaded more than glasnost’, or the open conduct of public affairs, for which public opinion had been clamoring since the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Beginning in 1722, when Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, Russia’s officialdom was divided into hierarchic grades called chiny, of which nominally there were fourteen but in fact only twelve, Ranks 11 and 13 having fallen into disuse. It had been Peter’s intention that as officials qualified for higher responsibilities they would receive the rank appropriate to the office they occupied. But the system quickly became perverted, with the result that Russia acquired a civil service ranking system that was probably unique in the world. To gain the support of the bureaucracy for her dubious claim to the throne, Catherine II introduced in the 1760s the principle of automatic promotion: henceforth, the holder of a chin was advanced to the next higher grade on the basis of seniority, after he had held a given rank a specified length of time, regardless of whether or not he was assigned greater responsibilities. Unlike the usual practice in bureaucratic establishments where a person moves up in grade as he assumes higher duties, in Imperial Russia he rose in grade more or less automatically, without regard to his functions: promotion was not from post to post, but from rank to rank.26 This made the Russian civil service a closed caste: with minor exceptions, to be eligible for a government position one had to hold chin.27 Ordinary subjects, no matter how well qualified, were excluded from participating in the country’s administration, except in the rare instances of direct appointment by the Tsar. Only those willing and able to make it a lifelong career were able to join the government. Others were barred from public service and therefore deprived of opportunities to acquire administrative experience.

  Appointments to the top four ranks (of which in 1903 there were 3,765 holders)28 could not be attained by regular advancement: since they entitled to hereditary nobility, they were made personally by the Tsar. Ranks 14 through 5 were open to regular career promotions, procedures for which were prescribed in minute detail. In most cases, a prospective functionary of non-noble origin began his career as a Chancery Servitor in some government bureau. This post carried no chin. He remained in it anywhere from one to twelve years, depending on his social status and education, before becoming eligible for promotion to Rank 14: hereditary nobles with completed secondary education served only one year, whereas boys discharged from the Imperial Choir because of a change in voice had to serve twelve. Once installed
, a chinovnik worked his way up the career ladder one rung at a time. The Service Regulations determined how long an official remained in each rank (three years in the lower ones, four in the higher), but advancement could be speeded up for outstanding performance. In theory, it required twenty-four years from one’s first appointment until the attainment of the highest career rank (Chin 5). Ranks 14 through 5 bestowed personal (non-hereditary) ennoblement.

  One could qualify for direct entry into the civil service by virtue of either appropriate social status or education. Sons of nobles (dvoriane) and personal nobles (lichnye dvoriane) were the only ones eligible for admission to Rank 14 or higher regardless of education. Others qualified by virtue of educational attainments. In theory, civil service careers were open to all subjects without distinction of nationality or religion, but an exception was made for Jews, who were ineligible unless they had a higher education, which in practice meant a medical degree. Catholics were subject to quotas. Lutherans were very much in demand and a high proportion of the officials in St. Petersburg chanceries were Baltic Germans. Excluded, unless they met the educational criteria (university degree or completed secondary schooling with honors), were members of the urban estates, peasants, and all persons who had received their secondary education abroad.

  While on duty, holders of rank (which included university professors) were required to wear uniforms, the cut and color of which was prescribed in fifty-two articles of the Service Regulations. They had to be addressed in a specified form appropriate to their rank, the titles being translated from German. Each rank had its perquisites, which included minutely regulated precedence rules.