Russia

Dmitri Trenin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509527700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past century alone, Russia has lived through great achievements and deepest misery; mass heroism and mass crime; over-blown ambition and near-hopeless despair – always emerging with its sovereignty and its fiercely independent spirit intact.

In this book, leading Russia scholar Dmitri Trenin accompanies readers on Russia's rollercoaster journey from revolution to post-war devastation, perestroika to Putin's stabilization of post-Communist Russia. Explaining the causes and the meaning of the numerous twists and turns in contemporary Russian history, he offers a vivid insider's view of a country through one of its most trying and often tragic periods. Today, he cautions, Russia stands at a turning point – politically, economically and socially – its situation strikingly reminiscent of the Russian Empire in its final years. For the Russian Federation to avoid a similar demise, it must learn the lessons of its own history.

1
Revolutionary Upheaval (1900–20)

Russia entered the twentieth century as the largest country in the world after the British Empire, covering about one-sixth of the globe’s surface. The Russian emperor’s full title ran to dozens of lines. His realm included all the territories now belonging to the Russian Federation (except for Kaliningrad, then the northern part of East Prussia); Ukraine (minus Galicia and Volynia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule); Belarus; most of Poland; the whole of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; all of Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and part of eastern Turkey; and the entire territories of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. Alaska, a Russian possession, had been sold to the United States in 1867. However, the Russian sphere of influence extended even further: to Mongolia and Manchuria in China’s north and north-east, where the Russians had just founded a major city, Harbin, and leased a naval base in Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea; to eastern Turkestan, now Chinese Xinjiang; and to northern Persia with Tehran. This enormous contiguous territory covering two-fifths of Eurasia’s landmass formed the geographical basis of Russian power.

Population and Governance

In terms of population, Russia, with its 129 million people, according to the 1897 census,¹ was bigger than any country in the world except for China and (then British) India, and growing rapidly. Ethnically, the population of such a huge empire had to be very diverse. Ethnic Russians (“great Russians”) accounted for only 44.3%, but they were bundled together with the Ukrainians (“little Russians,” 17.8%) and the Belarusians (4.7%) as the Orthodox “Russian people,” who still held a two-thirds majority among the tsar’s subjects. Other major ethnic groups included the Poles (6.3%), Jews (4.1%, the world’s largest community at the time), Germans (1.4%), and various Turkic-speaking peoples: Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and others (10.8%). These groups were held together by religious tradition (70% considered themselves Orthodox Christians, as opposed to 9% Muslims, 9% Catholics, 5% Lutherans, and 4% Jewish),² the scepter of the tsar and his sword. As nationalism was spreading in Europe and beyond, it was only a matter of time before at least some of these groups would claim nationhood and statehood.

Russia was the only absolute monarchy in Europe. When filling out his 1897 census questionnaire, Nicholas II, who had ascended the throne three years earlier, gave his occupation as “the master of the Russian land.” Russia still had no parliament. Its State Council, composed largely of noblemen, was an advisory body to the emperor. The Committee of Ministers was not a real cabinet, with each of its members reporting directly to the tsar, who personally made all major decisions at the state level. The dozens of provinces across the empire were administered on the monarch’s behalf by the governors whom he appointed. The judiciary system operated on a body of laws and a jury system was in practice, but the judges were all appointed. Only local government – zemstvas and city dumas – was partially in the hands of elected members of society, but their prerogatives were narrow. On a daily basis, the country was run by the bureaucracy. The empire, however, allowed for some flexibility. Finland, officially a Grand Duchy, enjoyed a parliament, as well as a monetary system and a police force of its own. At the other extreme, the emirs of Bukhara and the khans of Khiva were allowed to continue with their medieval forms of governance.

After Peter I had abolished the patriarchy in 1700, the Russian Orthodox Church, the dominant religious organization, was administered by a Synod overseen by an officer whom the tsar appointed. In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, the Russian church was not going through the best of times. With the emperor as its de facto head, and the clergy on the government’s payroll, the church, confined to its gilded cage, was increasingly regarded as another department of the state. In these conditions it could not become a moral force. With the church deprived of freedom, the prestige of the bishops and priests sank, with many of them seen as too worldly, and sometimes immoral. This erosion of religious faith among both the ordinary people and the cultured elites would have tragic consequences in the years ahead.

A hereditary autocrat, Nicholas II rejected as “mindless dreams” any suggestion of a representative government, not to mention political rights guaranteed by a constitution. In that, he followed the example of his father, Alexander III, who vowed to strengthen autocratic rule after revolutionary terrorists assassinated his own father Alexander II in 1881. Nicholas II’s highest ambition was, in due course, to hand over full autocratic powers, intact, to his own successor. This stubborn insistence on the integrity of absolute monarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century proved fatal. The tsar turned out to be ill equipped for the enormous task he faced as his empire entered trying times.

The Estates

The Russian tsar was the country’s first nobleman. In 1913, the Romanov family marked its tricentennial anniversary on the Russian throne. The tsars had always relied on the gentry, who were expected to serve them in war and peace, to be compensated for that with land and the peasants who worked on it. From 1649, the peasants lost the right to move and were bound to a particular estate and its owner, thus becoming serfs. In 1762, the nobles were freed from obligatory service to the emperor. This freedom contributed to a spectacular rise of Russian high culture – particularly literature and music – but it also led to the decline of the sense of duty and even the morals of the noblemen, many of whom chose to remain completely idle in their estates or abroad.

In 1861, as part of a major reform effort by Alexander II, the serfs were at last given personal freedom. By 1900, the role of the Russian gentry, who accounted for about 1.5% of the population, had diminished dramatically. Next to free labor, they lost about half of the land they used to own. They had to make room for much more energetic groups: rich peasants-turned-capitalists, merchants-turned-entrepreneurs, and the rising bourgeois intelligentsia. Even though many nobles still held important positions in the civil administration and in the military, quite a few became disoriented, and were satirized in plays by Chekhov, such as Uncle Vanya (1899) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). In many ways, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a day of reckoning for the centuries of oppression of the peasants by the landed gentry.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was still a largely peasant society. Peasants constituted 86% of Russia’s population. They owned 62% of all arable land, against 22% still held by the gentry. However, 83% of that land was owned collectively, so individual peasants could neither sell nor buy land on which they worked.³ Every dozen years or so, land was reassigned within the community, depending on the size of the families. It is hardly a coincidence that years of land reapportionment – 1905, 1917 – also happened to be the years of revolution in Russia. The Land Question was compounded by the fact that while Russia possessed some of the best soils in the world, its agriculture was primitive, and the ownership structure did not stimulate entrepreneurship. Though the country exported much grain, bad harvests frequently led to food shortages domestically.

Many peasants migrated to the cities, where industry was experiencing rapid growth. Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial workers were still a small social group. Of the 13–14 million hired workers, fewer than 3 million were employed at industrial enterprises. Workers’ power, however, lay not so much in their numbers as in their concentration in the major cities. In a highly centralized country, this was a serious advantage. The workers were also much easier to mobilize by a political force who would win their hearts and minds. The Bolsheviks understood this better than anyone. The Workers’ Question was fast coming to the fore.

The Russian bourgeoisie, its roots in the merchant class, did not really emerge until the nineteenth century, but grew rapidly in its second half. By the turn of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs numbered about 1.5 million,⁴ but few of them were making much money. Russian traditional culture did not look kindly on people making money. Often, they were regarded as “predators.” Even though a number of successful industrialists, bankers, and merchants managed to get very rich, they developed few political ambitions and their influence on decision-making was very limited. Many preferred philanthropy – paying society back for their success.

The intelligentsia – a special group of educated people who worked for hire – was very much a Russian feature, as was the word itself. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many members of that group, from university students to literary types, fancied themselves representatives of the common people – still mostly illiterate – in the face of the tsarist regime, which they saw as oppressive and unjust. Initially they “went to the people,” as the phrase went, and became country teachers, doctors, vets, and the like. Over time, they became radicalized and sought to revolutionize the peasants. Some formed terrorist organizations. Fyodor Dostoevsky vividly – and unsympathetically – described them in The Demons. By the turn of the twentieth century, the more radical part of the intelligentsia defined itself through civic and moral responsibility. Its members saw their mission as being society’s consciousness. That meant principled opposition to the state and its institutions.

Culture

Russian philosophy is not particularly well known outside the country, but the turn of the twentieth century saw it in full blossom. An influential collection of articles called Vekhi (Milestones) criticized liberal radicalism and proposed a conservative alternative. Religious thinkers like Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and others sought to synthesize Orthodoxy, Greek and modern German philosophy. Their views strengthened the universalist, essentially global dimension of Russian thought. Orthodox philosophy is also linked to Russian “cosmism,” or cosmic philosophy, best represented by the scientists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky, but it also had an occultist branch led by Mme. Blavatsky. A distinct feature of Russian philosophy is that it is rooted in Orthodoxy rather than in the Renaissance.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian culture was entering what became known as its “Silver Age,” after the golden one of the century before. However, the dissimilarities between the two ages were also striking. The nineteenth-century giants – Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy – were above all realists. They looked at life as a whole, and sought to “sow the reasonable, good, and eternal,” in the words of the poet Nikolai Nekrasov. This leitmotif was taken up by the writer Anton Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, and then by Maxim Gorky and Ivan Bunin.

The new generation’s view was anything but realist. It was fragmented, partial, and symbolic. The poets Alexander Blok and Valery Bryusov and the writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky best represented the new trend. This reflected not only a desire to find some heretofore hidden unconventional truth, but a lot of confusion in many leading minds. Arts flourished, experimentation was rife. The Russian Silver Age gave birth to avant-garde art – pioneered by such figures as Konstantin Malevich, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky. This most powerful world trend of the twentieth century was given a boost by the Russian revolution, but its roots were actually planted in the decade preceding it.

In the arts, impresario Sergei Diaghilev brought his Ballets russes to Paris; singer Feodor Shaliapin began his rise to world fame; painters Vasily Surikov, Ilya Repin, Isaak Levitan, and others came up with dozens of masterpieces that can be seen today in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. In the sciences, moreover, Dmitry Mendeleev (chemistry), Ivan Pavlov (physiology), and Alexander Popov (physics) were among the learned world’s leading lights.

Foreign Policy

The Russian Empire was one of the established great powers. Its foreign policy sought to keep a balance among the major countries of Europe; to expand its influence in Asia; and to establish its primacy in the Near East, from the Balkans to the Turkish Straits. In a major strategic reversal, Russia in the early 1890s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Map
• Preface
• Introduction: Russia’s Many Russias
• 1 Revolutionary Upheaval (1900–20)
• 2 The Rise of the Soviet State (1921–38)
• 3 World War II and Its Aftermath (1939–52)
• 4 Mature Socialism and Its Stagnation (1953–84)
• 5 Democratic Upheaval (1985–99)
• 6 From Stability to Uncertainty (2000–19)
• Conclusion: Forever Russia
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement