Russia. A History полностью

But the dominant element, especially in contemporary perception, was ‘reaction’—blind attempts to repress and refasten the shackles of the old order. This reversion was all the more intolerable because it seemed to reverse the gains of the 1860s and 1870s. It was, indeed, in many instances outright counterproductive. While seeking to reconstruct the multinational empire into a homogeneous state, with uniform Russian culture and administration from border to border, the government was merely succeeding in accelerating the development of national consciousness and revolutionary sentiments, even among the most loyal minorities in the empire. To a very considerable degree, the geographic periphery was becoming the political centre: the rebellious sentiments, combined with weakness of state control, was turning the borderlands into the staging-ground and bastion of revolution. The revolutionary movement would recruit heavily from these borderlands as the ancien régime gradually slid towards the abyss of 1917.

8. Revolutionary Russia 1890–1914

REGINALD E. ZELNIK

Rapid industrialization, though vital for military power abroad, ignited deep-rooted unrest in both town and country. By 1905 this ‘modernizing autocracy’ suffered humiliating defeat in the East and revolutionary upheaval at home. In the aftermath, despite grudging if important concessions, the regime failed to establish the social solidarity—or submission—needed to survive the onslaught of modern warfare.

Introduction and Background

ANY analysis of imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth must include the obvious but essential reminder that Russia was still an autocracy (samoderzhavie). This was not simply a garden-variety old regime, with a divinely anointed absolute monarch at the top and a system of legally defined social estates (sosloviia= Stände), headed by the nobility defining its social hierarchy. It was also an old regime whose sovereigns, even the most ‘liberal’ (Alexander II), self-consciously resisted the dilution of their sovereign power, the delegation of that power to intermediary institutions, and its limitation by any constitutional mechanism. Although laws abounded, and had even been codified, until 1906 Russia’s rulers refused to recognize as definitive any body of law that could not be subordinated to or reversed by the autocratic will, as it often was. There was, again until 1906, no equivalent of a Reichstag, no universal manhood suffrage (indeed no suffrage of any sort at the national level), no legal parties to outlaw (as German Social Democracy had been outlawed in 1878), no labour unions or other free associations of workers to persecute and harass.

It was also a regime that deeply distrusted and only grudgingly tolerated any kind of independent civic association organized from below, not only by the lower classes, but even by society’s élites. It was still more distrustful of organizational activity that brought those élites into contact with ‘the people’ in social contexts free from state supervision or that seemed likely to escape the reach of government oversight and control. It was, in short, a polity in which invisible mechanisms of cultural hegemony, civic normalization, embourgeoisement, positive or negative integration—or whatever other metaphor one chooses to suggest the idea of social control without flagrant resort to force majeure—were neither readily available nor easily deployed.

The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s did, however, represent a significant change in the mode of government, marking Russia’s entry into a new era. During this period the serfs were freed, the zemstvo was introduced as an element of civil society at the local level, trial by jury and a relatively independent judiciary and bar were authorized, and the free professions were permitted to begin an open if vexed existence, with their own professional associations. It was also a period when some branches of government attracted a new breed of enlightened bureaucrat, less reluctant to open his mind to new ways and ideas, even while forced to submit to the domination of officials of an earlier stamp.