Russia. A History полностью

The affinity between the modernists and their civic-minded cultural rivals may have been greater than either side cared to admit. They not only had similar backgrounds, they shared the typically Russian notion that art and literature must perform a specially high moral mission for the nation. Though their solutions differed, they assumed that the writer was duty-bound and able to resolve the apparent antagonism between life and art. And, notwithstanding their programmatic differences, they all tended to view the existing order, and especially the governing bureaucracy, with some contempt. By no means did Russia’s Bloks and Maiakovskiis serve as props of the old regime. In sum, neither the splits in the ranks of the cultural intelligentsia nor the defensive postures adopted by liberal and radical people of letters in the face of the modernist challenge were necessarily good news for the government.

In the last analysis, the optimist–pessimist debate, though perhaps unavoidable, is a thought-experiment, a kind of metaphysical sparring match inseparable from counter-factual speculation about Russia’s likely fate in the absence of world war. It must be pointed out, however, that a serious ambiguity, even confusion, is often found in how the optimists pose the question. Is proof for their position to be found in the trajectory of economic, social, and political progress that was followed from 1907 to 1914? If so, the evidence, on balance, is rather thin. Their case is strongest in the economic realm (especially if one concentrates on heavy industry and ignores the explosive issue of dependency on foreign investment) and in the visible signs of a vibrant, modern urban culture—advertisement, commercial press, cinemas. But the optimists have greater difficulty when they try to build their case on the government’s capacity to ensure social peace and on the political stability brought about by the coup d’état of 3 June 1907. Here the point is not simply that urban social stability lasted only until 1912 or that the rift between privileged society and court (thanks to the influence of Rasputin and the empress) was growing wider. For even if we granted the government’s capacity, prior to the war, for maintaining a precarious social peace (for upholding order, if not law), this would not serve as evidence that problems were being solved or progress was being made. Indeed, it was precisely the government’s ability to maintain order through coercion, while restricting progress and upholding autocratic rule, that allowed so many social and political sores to fester, thereby promoting maximalist visions of social and political change.

It was a sign of weakness, then, not strength, that the Russian regime that went to war in the summer of 1914 had successfully resisted becoming a functioning constitutional monarchy. Nicholas II may have succeeded in achieving his goal of January 1895, not only to retain but even to invigorate the symbols and rituals of monarchy that adorned his English cousin; he also retained, while wielding it ineptly, much of the power of personal rule. Despite a promising beginning in 1906, the symbolic and the substantive spheres of authority were never fully separated in Russia, neither in real life nor in the fantasy-life of a monarch who in June 1914, contemplating yet another coup, came close to abrogating the legislative powers of the Duma, just as the nation was poised to join in a momentous struggle for its very survival.

9. Russia in War and Revolution 1914–1921

DANIEL T. ORLOVSKY

The thunder of artillery shells signalled the onset of uninterrupted war, revolution, and civil war. These years brought massive destruction; not only a dynasty, but vast numbers of people, resources, and territories vanished in the conflagration. Amidst these ruins, the Bolsheviks—inspired as much by old social hatreds as new revolutionary visions—attempted to build a new proletarian order.

THE years separating the outbreak of war in 1914 and the announcement of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921 form a critical watershed in modern Russian history. The revolutions of 1917, while not an unbridgeable caesura, fundamentally transformed the polity and social order. This era also had a profound impact on the ‘bourgeois’ West, which in the coming decades had to contend with the spectre of a socialist Prometheus in the East.

The First World War