Russia. A History полностью

Around the time of the ‘counter-reform’ of 1890, the revised zemstvo statute, the tensions in Russian society became increasingly apparent. The ‘Witte era’ (1892–1903) was about to begin. These were the years marked by the influence, if not full political dominance, of the controversial but eminent Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte (Vitte), the former railway executive whose provocative developmental economic policies raised the ire of so many gentry and caused so much friction within the government itself. The policies of his predecessor, Ivan Vyshnegradskii (1887–92), anticipated those of Witte and also exposed their problematic consequences. Among the most important policy initiatives launched by Vyshnegradskii and continued by Witte was the pressure, applied through taxation, to force peasants to market grain at low prices. These ministers of finance also imposed a high protective tariff, which grew with time and made it increasingly difficult for market-oriented grain producers to purchase much-needed machinery and chemical fertilizers abroad. The ‘modernizing’ purpose here was to further economic progress by improving Russia’s balance of trade and by promoting domestic industries. But the consequence was to alienate both gentry and peasantry, the tsar’s élite servitors and his poorest subjects, respectively. Though often in conflict with each other over such issues as land use, both groups felt squeezed by the ministry’s developmental policies (a situation, grosso modo, that could be traced back to Peter the Great). And as always, the image of poor peasants victimized by government policy provided grist to the mill of the liberal and radical intelligentsia, with their keenly felt obligation to the people and reluctance to equate ‘progress’ with capitalist development (the populist writer Nikolai Mikhailovskii being a good case in point). In this instance, however, the criticism of modernizing ‘bureaucracy’, from both the right and the left, conservatives and liberal alike, did not mean that the state was walking sensibly down the middle of the road. It was not.

The accumulating resentments multiplied in 1891–2, when large parts of the Russian countryside, some twenty provinces in all, experienced this period’s greatest famine (followed by devastating cholera and typhus epidemics), a human catastrophe with casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Historians still argue about responsibility—whether famine was the product of government policies or the deeper cyclical malfunction of a backward agrarian structure. Apart from the famine as such, they argue about whether the peasants’ lot was actually worsening by ‘objective’ measurements (for example, caloric intake), about the meaning of rural overpopulation (was demographic growth a sign of ‘progress’—a reflection of declining mortality?), and even about the best methods for measuring such assessments. This debate will continue, a scholarly controversy that echoes England’s classic ‘standard-of-living’ debate. But whatever the truth about ‘objective’ conditions, there can be no doubt that contemporaries were deeply alarmed about the famine and its aftermath, or that their ‘subjective’ perception fuelled resentment against state programmes that seemed inherently harmful to society in general and to ‘the people’, especially the peasants (over 80 per cent of the population), in particular. The Ministry of Finance won few friends with its programme for economic progress.

This negative assessment of state policy in the 1890s readily reinforced existing attitudes of the educated public. Russia’s radical intellectuals (best typified by the sometime liberal, sometime radical, N. K. Mikhailovskii), but even many moderates (not to mention the eccentric, politically enigmatic figure of Leo Tolstoy), generally placed a low premium on economic development, widely viewed as attainable only at the common people’s expense. Less surprising but no less important was the low value placed on economic progress by conservative intellectuals, whose fear of what today is called the evils of modernization or Westernization—Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes readily to mind—sometimes made them odd allies with people who otherwise stood far to their left.

From a political perspective, the most important result of the famine was revitalization of the zemstvo, earlier a locus of nongovernmental public activity and liberal aspirations, but in the 1880s restricting itself to ‘small deeds’. Ineffective in efforts to combat famine when utilizing only its own resources, by late 1891 the government was once again driven to encourage the very kind of grass-roots, voluntary social action that it normally distrusted—from the relief work of district zemstvos and university students to the charitable efforts of national cultural figures such as Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Society was summoned back to life to take part in a national war on poverty.