To the historian of this period, the most striking—and most ominous—impression is the prevalence and intensity of hatred: ideological, ethnic, social. The monarchists despised the liberals and socialists. The radicals hated the “bourgeoisie.” The peasants loathed those who had left the commune to set up private farms. Ukrainians hated Jews, Muslims hated Armenians, the Kazakh nomads hated and wanted to expel the Russians who had settled in their midst under Stolypin. Latvians were ready to pounce on their German landlords. All these passions were held in check only by the forces of order—the army, the gendarmerie, the police—who themselves were under constant assault from the left. Since political institutions and processes capable of peacefully resolving these conflicts had failed to emerge, the chances were that sooner or later resort would again be had to violence, to the physical extermination of those who happened to stand in the way of each of the contending groups.
It was common in those days to speak of Russia living on a “volcano.” In 1908, the poet Alexander Blok used another metaphor when he spoke of a “bomb” ticking in the heart of Russia. Some tried to ignore it, some to run away from it, others yet to disarm it. To no avail:
whether we remember or forget, in all of us sit sensations of malaise, fear, catastrophe, explosion.… We do not know yet precisely what events await us,
*V. S. Diakin,
*There is a striking difference between the deputies to the first two Russian Dumas and those who in 1789–91 ran the French National Assembly. The Russians were overwhelmingly intellectuals without practical experience. The Third Estate, which dominated the Estates-General and the National Assembly, by contrast, consisted of practical lawyers and businessmen, “men of action and men of affairs.” J. M. Thompson,
*According to M. Szeftel, the tsarist government authorized no oppositional political parties prior to its collapse in 1917 (
*According to Witte (
*“I am in no sense in favor of absolutist government,” Bismarck told the Reichstag in 1884. “I consider parliamentary cooperation, if properly practiced, necessary and useful, as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible”: Max Klemm, ed.,
*In March 1907, a worker incited by a right-wing politician named Kazantsev killed Grigorii Iollos, another Kadet Duma deputy, also Jewish. When he realized that Kazantsev had misled him into believing that Iollos was a police agent, the worker lured Kazantsev into a forest and murdered him.
*Gosudarstvennaia Duma,
*One of the misleading commonplaces in Russian historiography, promoted by Communist historians, is that Stolypin’s agrarian measures were meant to promote a class of kulaks, defined as rural usurers and exploiters. In fact, they had the very opposite purpose: to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury and exploitation.
*The program, which disappeared after his death and was presumed lost, was made public forty-five years later by Stolypin’s secretary, A. V. Zenkovskii, in his
