Russia. A History полностью

To be sure, Russia’s rulers always had the theoretical option of abdicating their great-power aspirations. But to do so would have threatened to undermine the entire regime, dynasty and all. It is hard to imagine a Romanov ruler openly agreeing to renunciation of great-power status, which would have entailed the closing of the Black Sea to Russian shipping, the resurrection of an independent Poland, perhaps even the abandonment of Peter the Great’s Baltic conquests and withdrawal from Central Asia. It took little imagination to itemize the potential losses from such an abdication—not to mention the symbolic significance of the forswearing of Russia’s traditional role, ever since the eighteenth century, as protector of Christian minorities from their Ottoman oppressors. A Russian ruler who openly repudiated these ambitions effectively abandoned his claim to be emperor, and to rule—and, quite conceivably, the moral and political support of the gentry élite.

Such considerations belie the historical possibility of a very different course. There were indeed real choices to be made, but they were between a bold, adventuristic, risk-taking policy that courted the twin dangers of humiliation and bankruptcy, and a more cautious, conservative policy that postponed immediate gratification and gambled on economic development as the key to future claims to power. The latter policy underlay Witte’s domestic programme, though a cautious posture was increasingly difficult to maintain as Russia became entangled in Asian adventures.

The successful pursuit of a cautious foreign policy also required stable relations with Germany. Yet those relations were strained by the Russo-German tariff war, already under way when Vyshnegradskii took office in 1887, at a time when there was little reason to be sanguine about Russia’s international position. A war scare with England two years earlier had added yet another chapter to the story of Russian humiliations in Paris in 1856 and Berlin in 1878. By the time Witte succeeded Vyshnegradskii, the Russian military—despite the misgivings of political conservatives and enemies of republicanism—had begun its turn to France, a move long favoured by Pan-Slavs and liberals alike. In 1892, even a cautious Foreign Ministry (still ever mindful of the need to get on well with Germany) concluded its first, quite limited entente with Paris. By the end of the decade Russian economic as well as foreign policy were more oriented towards France than ever, with French bankers, businessmen, and government officials filling gaps created by the withdrawal of Germans. This of course meant more potential conflict with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and—though there were temporary respites in the tariff wars from 1894 to 1901—ultimately with Germany itself, thereby creating a vicious circle that made loans from France all the more imperative. But until the turn of the century, it was still too early to foresee the potential conflict brewing with Japan over the two countries’ competing ambitions in the Far East.

Revolutionary ‘Parties’

In the 1890s these foreign-policy issues were of little concern to the Russian left. As was their wont, radicals were more attentive to the fate of peasants and workers, with workers attracting an ever-greater share of their attention. If labour policy and attitudes towards workers exposed and intensified divisions in the government, they also produced divisions on the left, which had never been without its internal conflicts over how best to relate to the people that it aspired to lead or represent. Even in the 1870s, when revolutionaries envisioned the peasantry as the repository of their ‘Utopian’ dreams, they had already become heavily involved in the lives of urban workers, especially those in St Petersburg. This involvement entailed closer and closer contacts in that city between a marginalized group of young factory workers and a self-marginalized group of student intelligentsia, with the two groups interacting within the confines of the clandestine ‘circle’ (kruzhok), meeting in the overcrowded apartment of some of the members. These gatherings were the spiritual descendants of the intelligentsia circles of the age of Nicholas I, yet differed to the extent that they now drew many genuine plebeians into their orbit. Though the strategies and tactics varied over time (for example, armed rebellion vied with peaceful propaganda, tight conspiracy with openness), the circles had a powerful, persistent institutional presence right up to the revolutionary events of 1905, and to some extent beyond. Often heterogeneous in its class composition, the ‘all-class’ circle or ‘mixed-class’ circle soon gave birth to an illegitimate offspring—the circle composed exclusively of workers, who often struggled to define themselves in opposition to the intelligentsia-dominated, socially mixed groups that had spawned them.