The big factories of Russia’s late industrial revolution facilitated unionization, while the crowded tenements became hothouses for strong and simple political ideas. In this environment Marxism soon gained appeal. Its ideas — purveyed by educated, idealistic, sometimes resentful young people — came to be interpreted at pie stalls and factory gates, and were debated enthusiastically in bookshops. In the process of transfer to a poorly educated following, Marx’s ideas were sometimes oversimplified and often misunderstood, but the vocabulary of Marxism conjured up believable icons of oppressed workers and an exploitative, unproductive bourgeoisie, together with the promise of an inevitable ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the ultimate triumph of communism. Marxist iconography presented a congruent parallel to Christian iconography, and, since the Church failed to keep effectively in touch with them, many of the young immigrants to the cities took to the new ideology as to a religious belief. Organization, whether in unions or movements, also offered a sense of purpose and comradeship, while the conspiratorial nature of the enterprise lent a sense of adventure. The only problem was the intellectuals’ tendency to differ in their analyses of conditions and their interpretations of the awesome literature. Divergencies and splits became common, and the drift to violence quickened.
However, the bomb-throwings and assassinations which became almost commonplace in the Empire around the turn of the century were not born of the peasant problem, nor of industrialization. They stemmed from a fundamentally middle-class intellectual tradition and from a pervasive, though far from universal, sense of guilt about the peasantry. The terrorism also reflected a romantic compulsion to act, and frustration with an exclusionary and seemingly unresponsive autocratic governmental system. In this context, to shoot a functionary or throw a bomb at the Emperor seemed to some a constructive thing to do. In 1881 Sofia Perovskaia arranged to blow up the Tsar Alexander as he passed by one of the lovelier St Petersburg canals.
The attempt succeeded — and did nothing to change the system in the direction that Perovskaia desired. On the contrary, it killed the ‘Tsar-Liberator’ at the point when he was considering the introduction of democracy and prompted increased security precautions and police activity It may have given the perpetrators a sense of achievement, but it did nothing to destabilize the regime. Terrorism was irrelevant. Marxism, however, helped the regime by offering malcontents an alternative to nationalism, giving the government another means by which to divide and rule.
Vitte had been concerned about Russians’ peasantish understanding of property and economics in an age when banking and commerce were becoming a vital adjunct to empire-building. Some attempt was made to address this problem by the founding of commercial schools which increased from eight in 1896 to sixty-eight in 1904.
29 Russia’s particular strength in this period was the calibre, though not the number, of its emerging professionals, whether soldiers, engineers, bankers, doctors or soldiers. Able, and often innovative, many of them gained responsible posts while still young and their work reflected mental vigour as well as youth. Some had received their training in the technical schools that Kankrin had founded earlier in the century, and Vitte saw to it that some, at least, of the financial skills required were furnished in commercial schools, though many professionals, especially the engineers, were army-trained. Indeed, the army was to be regularly called upon to repair the technological deficiencies
Many of the railway engineers were army men. So were the creators of another, commonly overlooked, achievement of the period: the drainage of wetlands. A special project had been set up in 1873 to reclaim swamps in European Russia and Belarus. Serving as a model for other such projects, it was headed by an army engineer and funded chiefly by the state. By 1900 it had cut nearly 3,000 miles of drainage canals, built 550 bridges, and sharply reduced the incidence of anthrax and other vile diseases damaging to animals as well as humankind. 30 Meanwhile canal-building for communications had gained a significance almost comparable to that of railways. A canal-cutting project to join tributaries of the rivers Ob and Yenisei in Siberia, begun in 1882 and completed ten years later, created over 3,000 miles of navigable waterway connecting Tiumen with Irkutsk. 31
