The Russian Revolution полностью

The bureaucratic conservatives and their supporters on the extreme right wing of public opinion relied heavily on anti-Semitism as an instrument of politics. Although modern anti-Semitism originated in France and Germany, it is in Russia that it first entered official ideology. To the conservatives, Jews presented the single most dangerous threat to that political and social stability which they regarded as the main concern of state policy. Jews destabilized Russia in two capacities: as revolutionaries and as capitalists. The police authorities were convinced that they formed the principal element in the revolutionary parties: Nicholas II only echoed them when he claimed that nine-tenths of the revolutionaries and socialists in Russia were Jews.⁴⁷ But Jews also upset the socioeconomic equilibrium of Russia by introducing free market operations. The obvious contradiction in the claim that the members of the same religious group were both beneficiaries and mortal foes of capitalism was resolved in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a scurrilous forgery concocted at the end of the nineteenth century by the tsarist police, which claimed that in the pursuit of their alleged historic mission—the destruction of Christianity and world domination—Jews resorted to every conceivable means, even to the extent of organizing pogroms against themselves. The monarchists, “lacking a monarch who could have embodied the autocratic principle with vigor and infectious conviction, … had only anti-Semitism and the notion of universal evil, with the Jews as its carriers, to make sense of a world which was escaping their control and intellectual grasp.”⁴⁸ The infamous Beilis case, prosecuted in the courts in 1913, in which an obscure Kievan Jew was charged with the “ritual murder” of a Ukrainian youth, was the culmination of this desperate search for a scapegoat.* Although (with some minor exceptions) the Imperial Government did not encourage, let alone instigate, anti-Jewish pogroms, its unconcealed policy of discrimination against Jews and tolerance of anti-Semitic propaganda conveyed to the population the impression that it approved of them.

Liberal-conservative bureaucrats rejected such a system as hopelessly out of date. In their judgment, a country as complex and dynamic as modern Russia could not be governed by bureaucratic whim, in disregard of the law and without popular involvement. The liberal-conservative trend in the bureaucracy first emerged, in the 1860s, at the time of the Great Reforms. It was reinforced by the emancipation of serfs in 1861, which deprived the monarchy of the services of 100,000 serf-owning landlords who had previously performed on its behalf, free of charge, a variety of administrative functions in the countryside. At that time P. A. Valuev was of the opinion that

already now, in the conduct of administration, the Sovereign is Autocrat in name only; that is, autocracy manifests itself only in bursts, in flashes. But given the growing complexity of the administrative mechanism, the more important questions of government elude, and must of necessity elude, the Sovereign’s immediate attention.⁴⁹

Which was to say that the sheer mass of administrative business required authority to be more widely distributed.

The liberal-conservatives conceded that the Tsar had to remain the exclusive source of laws, but they insisted that laws, once promulgated, were binding on all the officials included. This was the distinguishing quality of the Rechtsstaat. They also had a higher opinion of Russia’s capacity for self-government and wanted the educated part of the population to be brought into participation in a consultative capacity. They disliked the estate system as an anachronism, preferring that the country move toward common and egalitarian citizenship. They attached particular importance to the gradual elimination of the special status and isolation of the peasantry. The liberal-conservatives had their bastions in the Council of State (which framed laws), the Senate (the highest court of appeals), and the ministries of Justice and Finance.⁵⁰