Throughout the most hard-hit areas of Russia, the hungry blackearth and Volga provinces, the zemstvos took the lead (although, as Richard Robbins has argued, the degree of successful co-operation between zemstvo and central government is often underestimated). The point, however, is not that the zemstvos’ efforts were universally successful (far from it), but that their self-confidence, self-assertion, and self-importance were given an enormous boost, so much so that in the immediate post-famine years, some zemstvos again challenged the central government.
The advent of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894 encouraged zemstvos and other civic bodies to convert their newly acquired prestige into a political force. In keeping with their as yet modest goals, perhaps encouraged by the recent flashes of co-operation with the government, their approach—except for the aggressive Tver zemstvo—was the traditional supplication: a hopeful request to the new, little-known young monarch to include them in his policy deliberations. His notorious response in January 1895 rejected such aspirations as ‘senseless dreams’ and reaffirmed the autocratic principles of his beloved father, Alexander III. This insensitive response was only the first of several dramatic moments (the 1896 Khodynka Field tragedy, when hundreds of spectators were trampled to death at the Moscow coronation ceremonies, was the next) that disrupted constructive dialogue between state and society in the first ten years of Nicholas’s rule.
Revival of the Left
The events of 1891–2, with the continued rigidity of autocratic governance in the years that followed, helped to revive the radical left, which, like the more moderate zemstvo movement, had been licking its wounds in the 1880s. True, the People’s Will and other like-minded, terror-oriented grouplets (including a short-lived conspiratorial student band in 1887 dominated by Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s elder brother) had never entirely ceased their plotting. But until the new mood of the 1890s, they had entertained precious little hope, certainly less than in the 1870s, of effective contact with the ‘people’ (whether peasants or workers) on the one hand, or with zemstvos and other moderates or liberals on the other. From the mid-1890s, however, radicals saw new opportunities: alliances, however uneasy, with increasingly disaffected liberals to their right; contact, however awkward, with the ‘people’, especially the growing numbers of factory workers in and near the rapidly industrializing larger cities. Except for the earlier stages of the 1905 Revolution, co-operation between liberals and socialist radicals never seemed brighter than in the early 1890s. The so-called ‘People’s Rights Party’ (1893–4), a populist-oriented organization that jettisoned terrorism, stressed the importance of political freedom and welcomed both radicals and moderates to join its ranks. Although that party was short-lived, the entire period from 1892 to early 1905 saw on-again-off-again efforts of the more flexible radicals, both populist and Marxist, and the more daring liberals to find common ground. At the same time, more cautious liberals courted the more enlightened members of the bureaucracy, who in turn were willing to co-operate with ‘trustworthy’ leaders of the zemstvo movement, especially the so-called neo-Slavophiles. It was as if every point on the Russian political spectrum, save the most extreme ones, was occupied by someone desperately seeking to hold hands with allies to the right and to the left.
Labour Unrest
Thanks to Witte’s initial success, in the 1890s Russia experienced a rate of industrial growth never to recur until the 1930s. Indeed, industrial production: increased at an average of 8 per cent per annum, higher even than that of the USA. Did this rapid growth augur progress or conflict? As in other countries, the answer was
The renewed labour unrest that erupted in some of the factories of centra Russia, including Moscow, in the mid-1890s, was dwarfed by a succession of city-wide strikes in St Petersburg’s textile industry in 1896–7. Never before had labour unrest been so widespread and so well co-ordinated in a single Russian city, indeed, not in just any city but in the imperial capital, seat of royal authority and centre of imperial administration.
