The Russian Revolution полностью

In many Western industrial countries, the period immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I also saw a rise in labor unrest. In the United States, for example, twice as many workers struck in 1910–14 as in the preceding five years: in 1912 and 1913 there were more workers out on strike than at any time in the preceding thirty years.¹²² In Great Britain, too, strike activity showed a dramatic spurt in 1912, in terms of both workers involved and working days lost.¹²³ Yet neither country was destabilized and neither experienced a revolution.

In the final analysis, Russia’s social stability depended on the peasant: radical intellectuals acknowledged that no revolution in Russia was possible as long as the village remained quiet. And it is a demonstrable fact that the Russian village did not stir either immediately before the war or in the first two years after its outbreak. The half a million workers who were on strike in 1912 represented an insignificant minority compared with 100 million peasants who went peacefully about their business.

Nor can much be inferred from instances of political restlessness in the liberal movement, as symbolized by the eccentric offer of A. I. Konovalov, the millionaire textile manufacturer, to provide financial subsidies to Lenin.¹²⁴ This not untypical tactic of Russian liberals to pressure the authorities for political concessions by invoking the specter of revolution cannot be interpreted as signifying a radicalization of liberal opinion. Indeed, the very opposite trend was noticeable in Russia on the eve of the war—namely, a shift to conservatism. There is much evidence to indicate a growth of patriotic sentiment among educated Russians, including university youths.

A similar shift to the right was noticeable in Russian thought and culture. The preoccupation with civic issues and the politicization of Russian life which had set in in the middle of the nineteenth century showed signs of waning even before it drew to a close. With the rise of the Symbolist school in poetry and the triumph of aesthetic standards in criticism, literature and art turned to different means and subjects: poetry replaced the novel as the principal vehicle of creative literature, while painting turned away from realism toward fantasy and abstraction. The challenge issued to artists and composers by Serge Diaghilev, Russia’s foremost impresario—“Astonish me!”—flew in the face of the didactic precepts upheld by the arbiters of Russian taste in the preceding generation. Other manifestations of this change were the preoccupation of novelists with sex and violence and the popularity among socialites of spiritualism and theosophy. Idealism, metaphysics, religion replaced positivism and materialism. Nietzsche was in high fashion.¹²⁵

The intelligentsia was reeling from the assault on it by the symposium Landmarks (Vekhi), brought out in 1909 by a group of liberals and ex-Marxists. A unique succès de scandale in Russian intellectual history, the book was a broadside attack on the Russian intelligentsia, whom it charged with narrow-mindedness, bigotry, lack of true culture, and a multitude of other sins. The book called on it to begin the arduous task of self-cultivation. The traditional intelligentsia, grouped around the socialist and liberal parties, rejected this appeal, as it did the dominant trends in modernist culture. It persisted in its old ways, the custodian of the stultified culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Maxim Gorky was one of the few prominent creative writers to associate himself with this outmoded trend. Other talented writers adopted “Modernism” and in their politics turned increasingly patriotic.

And yet, notwithstanding social peace, economic progress, and the exuberance of her culture, on the eve of World War I Russia was a troubled and anxious country. Neither the violence of 1905 nor the reforms of Stolypin had solved anything: for the socialists the Revolution of 1905 might as well not have occurred, so meager were its results; for the liberals it was unfinished business; for the conservatives its only legacy was confusion. Since there seemed to be no way of peacefully reconciling the divergent interests of Russia’s 150 million inhabitants, another revolution was a distinct possibility. And the fresh memory of the “masses” on the march, sweeping everything before them in their destructive fury, was enough to sow terror in the hearts of all but a small minority.