Between Two Revolutions

Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia

Peter Waldron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000534580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1998, is an original and comprehensive study of a key period of Russian history, between the success of the autocracy in retaining power in the 1905 Revolution and the debacle of the Tsar's crushing defeat in 1917. Focusing on Stolypin, Prime Minister between 1906–11, the study explores tsarism's final attempt to reform Russia. Stolypin seized the opportunity to drive through a programme which would have transformed the social and political structure of Imperial Russia by promoting the development of an independent peasantry and reducing the authority of the traditional elites. The book analyses the weakness of the new parliamentary system and the continuing influence of the traditional elites.

CHAPTER ONE Reform or repression? The dilemma of tsarism

Autocracy and reform: the 1860s

In 1905 imperial Russia experienced a series of crises that brought the very survival of the tsarist regime into question. Russia’s defeat in war with Japan in the Far East was accompanied by large-scale and widespread disturbances in the cities and countryside of the empire. At the same time, sections of the educated elite of the country mounted articulate and repeated attacks on the policies of the autocracy that they believed had brought Russia to the point of collapse. The regime was thus assailed from all sides by demands for change, demands that had been long in maturing. The disturbances and clamour of 1905 had been fuelled over nearly half a century by the failure of the tsarist government to deal with the social and political consequences of economic modernization in Russia. Since the 1860s the regime had pursued policies that were often contradictory and at best had provided only incomplete solutions to the problems of backwardness and undergovernment that bedevilled Russia; by 1905 the pressure from below for change had become too widespread to be resisted.

During the 1860s and early 1870s attempts had been made by Tsar Alexander II to move away from the stultifying atmosphere and static society that his predecessor, Nicholas I, had tried to impose upon Russia. The severe shock that defeat in the Crimean War between 1854 and 1856 administered to Russia’s self-esteem and to her prestige abroad provided the initial impetus for internal reform, while the accession of Alexander II to the throne in early 1855 gave additional encouragement to those Russians who had a firm commitment to reform. Senior bureaucrats and ministers clearly perceived that action needed to be taken if Russia was to be able to shake off the backwardness that so obviously differentiated her from western Europe. Military defeat was only a symptom of Russia’s inferiority, but it provided the most potent stimulus for what was a conscious effort to modernize Russia and her institutions during the 1860s and 1870s.

Russia’s leaders believed that it was vital for their country to regain its status as a great European power after the débâcle in the Crimea, but they recognized that this could not be accomplished by military reform alone. The differences between Russia and her western neighbours and rivals ran much deeper and reached into fundamental questions of social and political structure. To the outside observer, the most obvious difference was that of serfdom. Contemporaries saw the system by which some 40 per cent of Russia’s rural population existed as the personal property of their masters, deprived of all rights and eking out what was very often a poor existence on the land, as a major component of Russia’s backwardness. It was argued that the offence to human dignity that serfdom entailed was not something that a modern state should tolerate. It was also believed that the system of serfdom had an adverse effect on agricultural production. The serf had no incentive to introduce new techniques nor to work harder to improve crop yields, since it would be the landlord, rather than the serf, who would reap the benefit from any such innovation. As well as retarding agricultural progress, serfdom was also perceived as preventing Russia’s industrial development by restricting the mobility of the serf population and thereby creating an inflexible labour market. If Russia was to compete effectively with the more industrialized countries of western Europe, these constraints on the growth of her own industrial sector had to be removed. The motivation for the abolition of serfdom was clear, and the process was accelerated by fears among the Russian government and noble elite that unless action was taken by the regime to deal with the problem, the peasants themselves would prove more and more troublesome and pose an even greater threat to the stability of the state.¹

On 19 February 1861, therefore, serfs belonging to private landowners were emancipated and provided with allotments of land for which they were to have to make redemption payments over a period of nearly half a century. Pressure on the state’s finances meant that the government refused to subsidize the process and the redemption process had to be self-financing. This fundamental reform, which had an immediate effect on over 25 million peasants, and on a further 25 million in 1866 when it was extended to cover those peasants who were the property of the state, was accompanied by high expectations on the part of all sections of the population. The government believed it would remove a brake on economic growth and open the way to the modernization of the Russian economy. The peasantry expected that emancipation would result in their acquisition of land, and were bitterly disillusioned when they learnt that they would have to pay for what they believed belonged to them anyway. Emancipation was viewed as the solution to all of Russia’s ills: by bringing about a profound transformation in the status of the majority of the Russian population, it would provide the means by which the country could advance both economically and socially. However, it proved to be only the starting point for a series of other reforms designed to reflect the position of the emancipated peasantry.

Local government needed reform in order to allow the peasantry some say in their own administration. In 1864 a system of local self-government was introduced in the majority of the provinces of European Russia. This established a two-tier system of elected local councils, the zemstvo, at district and provincial levels. The district council was to be directly elected by the population of the area, but the franchise was arranged so that the landowning gentry gained a disproportionate 40 per cent share of the seats, while other groups - and especially the peasantry - were grossly underrepresented. This situation was exaggerated in the provincial councils since they were elected by and from the members of the lower-tier council. Consequently, the first sets of elections produced a situation where almost 75 per cent of the members of the provincial councils came from the nobility. The duties of the new local councils were very varied and gave them substantial local responsibilities: on the one hand, they acted as agents of central government in such matters as road building and conscription, but they also had great independence in the provision of services such as education, health care and agricultural advice.² The councils were allowed to levy their own taxation and this gave them the opportunity to employ their own professional staff, a group that became collectively known as the “third element”. The introduction of local elected councils did much to improve conditions of life for the provincial population of Russia, and especially for the newly emancipated peasantry, but the councils also proved to be a thorn in the flesh of central government.

The local government reform established a source of authority in the Russian Empire that did not derive all its influence from the institution of the autocrat and his government. The power of the new councils to raise their own revenue and thus to gain some degree of financial independence from the central authorities was of crucial importance, since it allowed the new bodies to operate free of outside interference in many important areas and to establish their own policies that often proved to be at odds with the wishes of central government. Conflict between local and central authorities became increasingly common during the 1860s and 1870s. Many local councils believed that social matters were a vital part of their responsibilities and as a consequence employed more and more of their own staff. These professional people, in frequent and close contact with the rural population, in time became a source of irritation for the government through their pressure for social reform and improvements in living conditions in the countryside. By the mid-1870s the “third element” was perceived as one of the chief sources of opposition to the tsarist state. Some of the local councils also provoked antipathy in St Petersburg bureaucratic circles by calls for an even greater say in the affairs of the country.³ The more liberal of the new councils argued that if the principle of popular participation had been accepted at a local level, there was no reason why the same principle should not play a part in the national administration of the state. Such an idea was unwelcome to successive tsars as it represented a direct assault on their autocratic powers and calls from below for a national representative assembly - a national zemstvo - were invariably rejected and their proponents often punished.

A further source of trouble for the autocratic regime was provided by a major judicial reform. Russian courts had been notorious for their corruption, delay and inefficiency. The change in the status of the peasant population, and the consequent need to recognize the former serfs as individual legal entities and provide them with access to a system of justice, provided an opportunity to overhaul completely the Russian legal structure. A system of civil and criminal courts based on Western models was introduced. These had clear lines of appeal and were staffed by a judiciary whose independence was assured by their being paid good salaries, thus obviating the need for them to take bribes, and by their irremovability from office. Judges whose verdicts displeased the government could no longer be dismissed. Furthermore, jury trials in criminal cases were instituted for the first time, thus introducing another element into the administration of justice that was outside the control of the government.⁴ During the 1860s and 1870s an independent and articulate legal profession came into existence, encouraged by the new freedoms that lawyers had under the legal reform. The courtroom became a scene of substantial challenges to the authority and style of the autocratic government. Lawyers came to be viewed by the regime as being in the same category as the zemstvo professionals - a major source of direct opposition to the government - and the government made attempts to restrict their freedom. This proved more difficult than in the case of the local councils, however, since court proceedings could be openly reported in the press and speeches made by both defendants and their lawyers in the course of a trial could not be the basis for further prosecution.

These legal reforms had most effect on the populations of the large cities and especially on the atmosphere and situation in St Petersburg and Moscow, the scenes of the most significant and controversial trials. For the majority of the population, the peasantry, access to justice was very different: offences concerning solely peasants were dealt with by a village court that was made up of judges elected by and from the peasantry themselves, and which continued to administer customary law. Minor disputes that involved both peasants and other members of society were to be tried by Justices of the Peace (JPs): these magistrates were elected by the district zemstvo and appeals against their decisions could be made to a higher court. The JPs proved to be of significant benefit in making justice more accessible to the population at large, since their courts worked quickly, cost nothing to those appearing in them and came to be perceived as equitable. While the regime’s aims of improving the judicial system and providing the peasantry with access to proper courts were largely satisfied, the 1864 legal reform also laid the basis for a substantial challenge to the autocrat’s power. The regime could no longer expect to go wholly unchecked if it acted in an arbitrary manner and, perhaps most importantly, the empire’s population perceived that this was now the case. What Wortman has called the “development of a Russian legal consciousness” helped to undermine the strength of the tsarist regime: instead of providing a buttress for the state, it gradually came to undermine the foundations of the autocracy.⁵

The tens of millions of newly freed peasants had the potential to cause many problems for the Russian government; one means by which this might be averted was by improving the range and quality of education availablç. Education was also seen as vital by the tsarist regime because of its impact on the elite of the empire’s population. Russian universities, overwhelmingly attended by the sons of the nobility, were viewed as being the seed-bed for discontent with the regime. The state wanted to take action to deal with this situation. The 1860s was, therefore, a period of wide-ranging educational reform. Measures were taken to increase the numbers of primary schools in the empire, but this stopped far short of providing universal primary education. The Orthodox Church continued to play a very large part in basic education but, despite the combined efforts of church and state, primary education during the 1860s and 1870s remained available to only a small minority of Russian children. Secondary education was also reformed and the curriculum revised to place more emphasis on “modern” subjects.⁶ It was in the field of university education, however, that the greatest changes took place and this reflected the importance that was attached to higher education by the government during the 1860s. A new university statute was issued in 1863, removing many of the restrictions that had been placed on Russian universities during the reign of Nicholas I. They were granted a large degree of autonomy from the ministry of education in their own administration and teaching, as well as in the vital area of student discipline. The universities continued, however, to be centres of discontent and demonstration and the government found it necessary to intervene on many occasions, especially at St Petersburg University, in order to restore order. Educational reform, therefore, served not so much to inculcate the virtues prized by the autocracy as to stimulate dissatisfaction and encourage debate among Russia’s social elite. The universities continued to be a constant irritation to the autocracy and acted as an important breeding ground for ideas inimical to tsarism right up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Censorship was also relaxed during the 1860s in order to shift responsibility for the publication of a work from the censor on to the publisher and writers themselves. Legislation in 1865 abolished the system of prepublication censorship for the majority of items, introducing instead examination by the censor after works had been printed. It would thus be the authors themselves who would be responsible for any contraventions of the censorship code and would face proceedings in the courts, should they produce a work that offended the government. Censorship after 1865 worked with less effectiveness since works could reach the public before they were declared to be seditious by the censor. Authors also became increasingly adept at concealing their real meaning behind a façade of Aesopian language or metaphor.⁷ In this area, too, the regime’s attempts to use reform as a means of strengthening its own position failed: the 1865 reform was intended to make authors and publishers more responsible in the way in which they worked, but instead it served to relax the hold of the authorities on what was published inside the empire.

The army was the last major area in which change took place during the 1860s and 1870s. The defeat in the Crimea had made military reform imperative, and the emancipation of the serfs made this even more urgent. The Russian army was made up traditionally of serfs forcibly conscripted to serve for life. The change in peasant status with emancipation meant that such a practice could no longer continue and that new methods had to be found to recruit ordinary soldiers. For the minister of war, D. A. Miliutin, it was clear that the burden of military service had to be spread more equally across the population and that a properly defined term of military service was needed. Prussian success in the Franco-Prussian War helped to accelerate the process of military reform, and in 1874 he instituted a system of conscription that would fall upon the entire population! each year a cohort of conscripts would be selected by lot from among a particular age group. Service in the army was to be limited to six years on active service and nine years in the reserves. Measures were also instituted during Miliutin’s tenure of office to improve military education for officers and to establish a proper general staff in order to give more attention to military strategy.⁸ While the new structures introduced by Miliutin did improve the quality of the army, a generation later, in 1904-5, the Russian army still suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Japanese.

The major series of reforms during the 1860s and 1870s produced results that were far different from those anticipated by their authors. The “Great Reforms” had been intended to modernize Russia and enhance the authority of the regime, but instead served to stimulate discontent and to weaken the structure of the Russian state. Alexander II’s reforms were incomplete and inconsistent, since the regime itself had not fully considered their consequences. In the political sphere, the implications of giving local councils and the judicial institutions a large degree of independence were not clearly perceived. The regime was surprised when calls were heard for the restructuring of national government to allow the population some say in its workings. It was the institution of the autocracy itself that lay at the core of the problem: reform had been conceived by the tsar and his advisers as a means of reinforcing the authority of the autocratic system and preserving intact the status and powers of the autocrat himself. The regime believed that reform would put an end to disquiet and would enable society to coalesce around the government and thus provide added impetus to the drive for modernization. Instead, reform served to stimulate the appetite of the Russian population for further changes and for greater responsibility and authority independent of the autocrat. The problems engendered by political reform ran deeper than this, however, since the reforms themselves acted to lessen the authority of the tsar. Accustomed to governing without any constraints on his authority, the autocrat now found himself impeded by the activities of institutions that he had established to strengthen his regime. While the Russian regime was prepared to implement reform at the lower levels, it was not ready to make changes to government at the highest levels and continued to believe that a modern economy and society could be directed by an autocratic political system that was outdated in comparison to the structures of western Europe. The autocracy was prepared to make many demands of the population of Russia in terms of changes to its economic and social structure, but the regime itself was not ready to respond to calls for it to reform itself.

This contradiction between the economic and social and the political aspects of the policies pursued by the autocracy after 1855 was heightened by the regime’s attitude to the consequences of its efforts to modernize Russia. While the state actively promoted economic change in both countryside and city, it was reluctant to follow this up by making any great improvement to living conditions for its subjects and continued to deal with expressions of discontent through the traditional coercive means employed by the Russian autocracy. The government refused to countenance any positive response to the growing number of demands for further reform from widely disparate groups and individuals during the late 1860s and 1870s. The most widespread and frequent of these were for further action to improve the lot of t...