Russia. A History полностью

All these developments seemed to contradict the principle of unbridled autocracy, while a (more or less) capitalist industrialization, first in the 1870s and 1880s, then more intensively in the 1890s, moved powerfully, if never decisively, against the grain of old status-based hierarchies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these dramatic (and to important elements of the government) disturbing changes, indeed in part because of them, there was enormous reluctance to allowing the winds of change to blow in the direction of a liberalized political system, where society might seek to fulfil its aspirations independently of the state.

This is not to say that the state could snuff out all the ventures of society, of unofficial Russia acting in an organized capacity and a ‘civilizing spirit’. For with the slow but continuing development of Russia’s public sphere (in a word, of glasnost’), each decade from the 1870s—even the ‘reactionary’ 1880s and 1890s—witnessed the appearance, sometimes even with official approval, of new initiatives from below. They came mainly from members of the educated élite (less often from peasants or workers), many of them openly dedicated to high-minded public causes, to social progress, and to forging positive links between the ‘people’ (narod) and ‘society’. As long as such activity respected certain limits, even if never fully trusted by the government, it was tolerated to some extent, even during the so-called era of ‘counter-reforms’ of the late 1880s and 1890s.

The traditional version of the story of late imperial Russia, one that highlights the promise of the Great Reforms, but then goes on to recount the erosion of that promise in the age of ‘reaction’, is not without its virtues: the Great Reforms did promise constructive and enlightened (if not necessarily liberal) change, and the decades of the 1880s–1890s did witness a reversal of certain reforms of the previous reign, especially in the areas of local self-government and higher education.

Yet some important qualifications must be added to this seductively clear picture. From the very outset the Great Reforms were beset by serious contradictions: the coexistence of peasant courts and special administrative punishment with a new, Western-model jury system; abolition of serfdom but preservation of special disabilities for peasants—an internal passport system, compulsory redemption payments, and obligatory membership in communes; acceptance of a new property-based franchise as the foundation of local government, but reaffirmation of institutions based on the traditional juridical estates (not to mention the de facto dominance of the hereditary gentry, barely 1 per cent of the population). At the same time, even during counter-reforms and reaction, radical changes overtook society, economy, and government policy and continued to move the country in a more Westerly, ‘progressive’, modern (if not truly liberal) direction. In sum, at almost every point between the emperors’ most dramatic manifestos—the Emancipation manifesto of 1861 and the October manifesto of 1905—Russian society was in a state of tension, with multiple protagonists and antagonists, some of them seeking a radical reconfiguration of power and policy.

Industrial Progress and Rural Hunger