Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881 - 1917

H. Rogger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317872719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Hans Rogger's study of Russia under the last two Tsars takes as its starting point what the Russians themselves saw as the central issue confronting their nation: the relationship between state and society, and its effects on politics, economics and class in these critical years.

Chapter One
Prologue

The terrorist bomb which on 1 March 1881 killed Alexander II was the most extreme statement of a question agitating all thinking Russians. That question was not simply whether the reforms begun with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 should now be carried forward, but whether the autocracy which had initiated the work of renovation could remain untouched by the changes it had so cautiously introduced into selected areas of Russian life: local government, the courts, the armed services, education. By removing autocracy's head and embodiment, the revolutionists hoped to sow fear and confusion among its defenders and to provoke a popular rising. They wished also to make Russians ask whether the institution which had since the days of Peter the Great been the chief engine of their country's progress was not now the most important barrier to its welfare and happiness.

In that intention they succeeded. For most of its remaining years the monarchy's character, powers, personnel, and policies dominated political debate. The last two tsars judged nearly all their acts and measures by the effect these would have on the maintenance of the existing political order, which most often meant the preservation of political authority and control in their own hands. Even those opponents of the tsarist regime – the Marxists foremost among them – who saw Russia's burning problems as being of a more fundamental economic and social nature than its political superstructure, had to confront the reality of autocracy. The opposition, especially its liberal wing, had also to dispute autocracy's claim that it alone was sufficiently above party and selfish interest to give evenhanded justice to all and to keep a vast, diverse, multinational empire from breaking up and becoming the prey of more advanced competitors.

Because autocracy and its instruments had for so long loomed so large on the Russian scene, there was a tendency to overrate either its positive or negative role. From this tendency historians have not been free, especially those who wrote of the monarchy's failures a short time after its fall. More recent studies of the Russian crisis have stressed what are thought to be its deeper sources. They have probed cultural and economic backwardness, the agrarian problem, social conflict, and the Utopian impatience of revolutionaries more often than the institutions and personnel of government.

Yet, to examine the materials of Russian history for the years 1881 to 1917 for purposes of a general study is to come away with a sense of the extraordinary influence the character and conduct of government had on the way Russia's problems were treated or perceived. This is not to suggest that autocracy was the source of all problems or that a more liberal polity and more enlightened rulers would have assured their solution. It is difficult, however, not to share the feeling of most articulate Russians - including those who were not committed revolutionaries - that their country's multiple crisis was exacerbated and its resolution complicated by the absoluteness of power claimed by their rulers. This, they felt, made for the inflexibility, the unresponsiveness, and the incompetence of the regime, and most particularly of its top layers.

Students and professors in the universities; teachers, agronomists, and economists; doctors, lawyers, and businessmen agreed in private and, when they were permitted, in public that the professional or technical problems they faced were difficult of solution as long as the political system was not reformed. Even the landed nobles, the regime's most favoured and generally conservative supporters, complained that it crudely violated their rights or did not attend to their needs. The critics overstated their case and disagreed on the desired remedies. But knowledge of the past, personal experience, and comparisons with Western Europe made educated Russians uncomfortably aware of the state's intrusions into their lives and of its jealous defensiveness in the face of real or presumed attacks on its vast powers and prerogatives. The result was growing estrangement and friction between an authoritarian state and a restive society.

It is an underlying theme of the pages which follow, that the nature, course, and outcome of this confrontation were decisively affected by the government's policies, personalities, and institutions. The attempt here will be to give these their proper weight in the story, not to slight other aspects of history. Such an approach seems justified not merely because we are dealing with a political system in which the impulses for action or reaction came from a few men who felt too often threatened by the swift historical currents that swirled around them. It is forcefully suggested also by Western experience which serves as a reminder that the way men are governed and how they feel about their governments and leaders, the extent of their trust and confidence in them, help to determine whether there shall be social peace or conflict, consensus or disaffection, hope or despair. If that is so in countries with representative institutions, some of them neither backward nor poor, how much truer must it have been where autocracy had always claimed to be the best and only agency for achieving national security and public welfare and failed to make good that claim.

Consciousness of that failure had towards the end of his life and a lost war reached even the "knight-errant' of absolutism, Nicholas I (1825-55), and led his son, Alexander II (1855-81), to enact reforms that would allow the system to survive by partial liberalization but leave its essence, autocracy, intact. Indeed, Alexander felt that the reassertion of autocracy's monopoly of power and initiative became all the more important as the serfs were freed (1861), the universities given a large measure of autonomy (1863), the judiciary made independent (1864), rural and urban communities granted limited selfgovernment (1864, 1870) and press censorship relaxed (1865). It seemed to him a necessity of national survival and a precondition of orderly progress that there be no growth of faction or party, no splintering of authority or purpose along lines of class, region, or nationality.

The achievement of serf-emancipation by the sovereign will, especially when compared with the agony that slave liberation had cost America, confirmed the emperor in this view. There would be no sharing of the tsar's power by representative bodies of estates, citizens, or even by permanently constituted agencies of government, such as a cabinet with collective responsibility for the formulation and execution of policy. Alexander II, as did his successors, preferred to deal with individuals, autocrat to bureaucrat, rather than institutions. This placed on him a burden which was bound to undermine the practice of autocracy as well as its theory. It was the weight of that burden, combined with the educated public's demand for some role in the running of the country and repeated attempts on his life, that at last made the tsar heed those who urged conciliation of the public in order to isolate the revolutionaries.

In January 1881 his Minister of Interior, Count M, T. Loris-Melikov, addressed himself to this task. He disavowed any intention of introducing representative, constitutional government or of reviving the assembly of estates (zemskit sobor) that the Muscovite tsars had on occasion summoned before the days of Peter the Great. What he envisaged was much more modest and could be justified on the grounds that no group of men as self-contained and remote as were the autocrat and his servants in the central administration could have adequate knowledge to deal with the range of problems before them. To make up for these deficiencies, Loris-Melikov proposed the inclusion, in two preparatory governmental commissions, of a few invited public figures of relevant competence, as well as members of appropriate state agencies. These commissions - one administrative and economic, the other financial — would examine only questions that the government put before them. Any legislative proposals would go to a purely advisory General Commission (meeting for no longer than two months) in which elected representatives of local governments would join the preparatory commissions.

Before being accepted or rejected by the emperor, the commission's projects, as did all laws, would have to pass the Council of State, an appointive assembly of elder statesmen and senior bureaucrats whose number might, if the tsar wished, be enlarged by ten to fifteen voting representatives of public institutions with special knowledge, experience, and outstanding abilities. Loris-Melikov reassured his master that his power would not be diminished, that he alone would continue to decide whether the commissions met, what they discussed, and whether their draft bills became law. On 17 February 1881 Alexander approved what came to be known as the 'Loris-Melikov Constitution'. On the day of his death he had agreed that his ministers should meet with him on 4 March to discuss how it was to be implemented and announced.

Satisfied as to the integrity of his authority, the emperor wondered whether 'the loyal elements of society' would be content with what they had been offered. He was right to wonder, for the Loris-Melikov project, precisely because it was not a constitution, would soon have raised more urgently the issues it left unresolved: the reach and sources of supreme power and its relationship to the increasingly vocal groups asking for some protection from government or a share in it. In short, the adoption of the non-constitution was likely to whet appetites and prepare minds for a real one. Alexander III, who rejoiced that this‘criminal and hasty step' was not taken, certainly thought so.¹

As events were to show, the desire remained strong for subjecting the legislative and administrative activities of the state to public control and accounting. At the very least, the constitution of Loris-Melikov could, as he hoped, gain time for a government faced by pressing problems and conflicting demands. And if it had led to fruitful cooperation between the monarchy and spokesmen for the public, future concessions might have been made more easily by the former and received with greater trust by the latter. Twenty-five years later Nicholas II had to pay a heavy price for the inflexibility of his father.

When he ascended the throne, Alexander III was not yet certain what his wisest and safest course would be. The son of a self-indulgent and often vacillating father, the new tsar took pains to give the impression of decisiveness and a strong will. But initially he hesitated, as did some of his advisers. Their hesitation was part of the crisis of confidence that had afflicted the government since the late 1870s and had caused Alexander II to countenance the Loris Melikov project and his son to consider it briefly. The assassination was bound to deepen the crisis for no one could yet be sure of the extent of the revolutionary conspiracy. In this area at least, firm and comforting measures of defence could be taken and soon showed that the danger had been exaggerated.

In the political sphere, however, continuing irresolution testified to an awareness that terror was only one aspect of the trouble; equally important were those who used words rather than bombs, the very people whom Loris-Melikov had tried to appease. Far from being stunned into silence by the killing of the tsar-liberator or by attempts to saddle them with moral responsibility for the crime, the non-revolutionary opposition refused to view it as an indictment of the liberalizing steps that Alexander II had taken or as a refutation of its own ideas for the improvement of the system. Even among some highly-placed courtiers and guards officers, the conviction was growing that a constitution might be the only way of winning over the moderates and undercutting the 'nihilists'.

In the higher spheres in which it circulated, such a conclusion may have been the result of a failure of nerve. Elsewhere it continued to be the expression of liberal convictions or practical considerations for broadening the basis of government, improving its effectiveness, and bringing it closer to the people. The conservative assumption that the deed of 1 March would so immediately and totally discredit the advocates of liberalization that they could henceforth be ignored, proved false. Far from thinking that the Great Reforms had gone too far, most moderates (and, naturally, the radicals) blamed the inadequacies of what had been granted in the previous reign for the breach between government and society. One of the prime movers of the reforms, Minister of War D. A. Miliutin, looked upon the fourteen years before 1880 as years of reaction, implying that it could hardly have been the one year of new beginnings following 1880 and the appointment of Loris-Melikov that had prepared the ground for the revolutionaries.²

On 10 March 1881 the Executive Committee of the People's Will, which had planned the murder of Alexander II, demanded in an open letter that his son call a national assembly of freely elected representatives to reorder the nation's social and political life from top to bottom. This could be dismissed in view of its source and scope. Not so the more moderate demands which addressed themselves to the issues of a constitution or some form of representation. ln the days after the catastrophe, six of the country's major newspapers and an equal number of its more important provincial assemblies (zemstva) called upon the government and the tsar not to yield to the easy temptation of a policy of repression. That, it was pointed out, had been given an adequate trial. A more generous course was indicated that would turn subjects into loyal citizens by meeting them with trust and establishing institutions which could tell the ruler of their needs and desires. Only an expression of the will of the people, a St Petersburg newspaper wrote, could show the road the new monarch had to take, while another recommended that a public body serve alongside the government to work for the public welfare. A third, disingenuously yet boldly, concluded that the best way of assuring the monarch's safety was to lessen his responsibilities, make him a symbol of national unity, and charge the people' s representatives with the conduct of domestic policy. 'Why must the Leader of the Russian Nation be held personally accountable for all that is done in Russia – from economic mistakes. . . to Siberian exile?'³

Arguments that did not raise the sensitive point of the imperial prerogative were also made, discreetly, by a few prominent men who eschewed the idea of a constitution as either premature or harmful. One of these was Boris Chicherin, a jurist and philosopher, professor of Moscow University and former tutor to the tsar's late brother. Chicherin's liberalism was concerned in the first instance with the protection of property and persons from arbitrary authority. It was further tempered by his belief that there could be no limiting of the supreme power at a time of turbulence and by his distrust of popular assemblies and popular sovereignty. A constitution, although it was probably inevitable, should be introduced only when the monarch thought it necessary.

Chicherin none the less proposed that delegates of provincial gentry assemblies and of elected local governments sit, as of right, in the Council of State, That was the only way of introducing healthy elements into the state organism, of creating a non-parliamentary forum in which men and ideas could be developed and safely tested. For the time was past, even in Russia, when the autocratic state could govern only through its own instruments.⁴

There was, apparently, no avoiding the central question whether Russia, in the late nineteenth century, could be ruled by principles and methods (ideally, those of enlightened despotism) that had served her well a century earlier. A growing number of educated Russians thought not, including many who were deeply attached to the monarchy, anti-liberal, opposed to the copying of Western models, and fearful of letting the untutored and resentful masses play a political role. In order to continue the exclusion of the masses and the repression of the revolutionaries, to prevent radical changes or to control its speed and direction, government, the well-to-do, and the welleducated had to make common cause and to trust each other.

The issue of trust was a crucial one for Konstantin Pobedonostsev, to whom Chicherin had sent his reflections on 11 March, hoping that Pobedonostsev would gain a hearing for them in the Committee of Ministers. Like Chicherin a jurist and former professor of law, Pobedonostsev had entered the state service after playing an important part in the judicial reforms of 1864, In 1880 he had been appointed Ober-Prokuror, or lay director of the Most Holy Synod, the government office in charge of the country's ecclesiastical establishment. To that post he brought an increasingly bureaucratic outlook on the governing of both Church and State, the regrets he had developed over his role in the Great Reforms, and the belief, striking in its simple consistency, that Russia's salvation in the midst of the giddy inconstancy of modern life lay in strict hierarchy, obedience, and authority. Men were not to be trusted and had, therefore, to be restrained - the lower orders because of their ignorance and brutishness, the upper classes because of selfishness and moral weakness.

Chicherin was mistaken to look for help in that quarter. Personal closeness to Alexander III, whom he had tutored in earlier years, made Pobedonostsev an influential figure in the new reign. But he used his position and the tsar's initial confusion to oppose Loris-Melikov and his chief allies, Miliutin and Finance Minister A. A. Abaza, because they personified the weak-willed and weak-minded liberalism he had come to abhor.

Alexander III had given no sign of sympathy for the governmental ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Preface
• Chapter one Prologue
• Chapter two Tsar, autocrat, and emperor
• Chapter three Corridors of power: the tsar's ministers
• Chapter four Bureaucrats, policemen, and public servants
• Chapter five Peasants and nobles: the problems of rural Russia
• Chapter six Progress and poverty
• Chapter seven Politics and revolution
• Chapter eight Empire abroad: foreign policy till 1905
• Chapter nine Empire at home: the non-Russians
• Chapter ten The ambiguous revolution
• Chapter eleven Hopes and fears: 1907-1914
• Chapter twelve The last act: July 1914 to February 1917
• Chapter thirteen Epilogue: February to October 1917
• Selected bibliography
• Maps
• Index