Late Imperial Russia, 1890-1917

John F. Hutchinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317881681
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This new interpretation of the final years of Imperial Russia provides a clear and concise introduction to a critical period in the history of modern Russia. Professor Hutchinson outlines the key problems facing the Tsarist regime, and the attitudes of its Liberal critics and revolutionary enemies. In particular, he considers how the monarchy was able to withstand the uprisings of 1904-06, but failed in 1917. This important new study provides an analysis of social, as well as political developments, and concludes with a brief historiographical essay which draws together alternative interpretations of the final years of the Tsars.

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

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1 RUSSIA IN THE LATE 19th CENTURY

THE EMPIRE AND ITS INHABITANTS

Late Imperial Russia was ruled by Tsar Alexander III from 1881 to 1894, and then by his son, Tsar Nicholas II, from 1894 to 1917. Both were members of the Romanov family which in 1913 celebrated 300 years as Russia’s ruling dynasty. Among their illustrious forbears were Peter the Great, whose victory over the Swedes in the early eighteenth century had transformed Muscovy into one of the great powers of Europe; Catherine the Great, who sought to bring the fruits of the Enlightenment to a distant and culturally backward Russia; Alexander I, whose epic confrontation with Napoleon Bonaparte is immortalized in Tolstoi’s War and Peace; and Alexander II, the ‘tsar-liberator’ who ended serfdom and revamped Russia’s governing structure after defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856) underlined the need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

The Russian Empire was, however, even older than the Romanov dynasty. Its real founder was the notorious sixteenth-century Tsar Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, who defeated Russia’s former overlords, the Mongols, thereby bringing the Volga river basin under Muscovite control and opening Siberia, a land rich in both furs and minerals, to Russian exploration and exploitation. His successors continued to add territories and subject peoples, many of the latter not only non-Russians but also non-Slavs. By the time Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894, Russia’s vast empire stretched from Finland and the frozen Eurasian Arctic in the north to the subtropical shores of the Black Sea and the desert oases of Turkestan in the south; its western borders adjoined those of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, while its already substantial territory in eastern Asia had recently been increased at the expense of the faltering Chinese Empire. Four centuries of Russian expansion – neither constant nor unopposed, it should be noted – had, by the late nineteenth century, created the largest land empire since Genghis Khan, if not since Alexander the Great. Its aspirations were symbolized by the two cities at its extremities: St Petersburg, Peter the Great’s ‘window onto Europe’, and Vladivostok, the ‘Lord of the East’.

Like their royal predecessors, Alexander III and Nicholas II were not only tsars (‘Caesars’), but also autocrats, rulers whose sovereignty was absolute; their powers were subject to neither constitutional nor institutional limitations. Among the great powers of Europe, Russia was unique both because it adhered to the eastern (Orthodox) form of Christianity, and because on the eve of the twentieth century its form of government remained an hereditary autocracy. According to the mythology that was given official expression in the Fundamental Laws and sanctified by the state Church, Russian tsars derived from God the power they wielded, and it was to God alone that they were answerable for their actions. In the past, such vast power had often been exercised in ways that smacked of tyranny and caprice, but the rituals and ceremonies of the Church earnestly sought to foster the image of a pious, dutiful and fatherly ruler whose heart was at one with his people. In this propagandistic endeavour, attention turned not to the military exploits of the many ‘conqueror’ tsars, but rather to the ‘most-gentle’ Tsar Alexis, whose mid-seventeenth century life and reign came to exert a peculiar hold upon the religious imagination and devotions of Nicholas II. At a court ball celebrating the Romanov tercentenary in 1913, for example, he and Empress Alexandra dressed in costumes appropriate to the reign of Alexis, and onlookers agreed that this exercise in anachronism appeared to bring deep feelings of joy and peace to the face of the emperor.

Nicholas may well have longed for what seemed a simpler Muscovite past precisely because the challenges that he now faced in ruling Russia seemed so much more difficult and troublesome than those faced by Tsar Alexis. For, despite Nicholas’ theoretically vast powers as head of state, and his exalted position as defender of both the integrity of the Russian land and the purity of its Orthodox faith, a huge gulf separated the official mythology of autocracy from the complexities that he faced in dealing with Russian reality on a day-to-day basis. Of these, none was more striking than the empire’s extraordinary ethnic diversity.

When the first reasonably reliable census was taken in 1897, many Russians learned with surprise that they had already become a minority in their own empire. Out of a total population that exceeded 122 million, less than 45 per cent were now ethnic Great Russians. True, Slavic peoples constituted a majority of the entire population; Great Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Poles together formed more than 73 per cent of the total, but that statistic counted for little because these groups rarely perceived an overarching common interest. Indeed, among the Slavs, disunity was far more typical than unity. Most troublesome of all were the proudly nationalist Poles, who could not forget that a century earlier, Catherine the Great had joined Prussia and Austria in destroying the venerable Polish state and partitioning its extensive territory. Merged against their will into the Russian Empire, the Poles remained separated from the Russians not only by language and history but also by religion: the overwhelming majority were Roman Catholics. Polish Catholicism and Polish nationalism were difficult to separate; indeed, some Polish nationalists drew parallels between Christ’s suffering on the cross and the pfitiable fate of their own partitioned nation. By contrast, from the Russian point of view, the Poles were nothing but disloyal and untrustworthy subjects who had twice rebelled against Russian rule, first in 1830 and again in 1863. Fearing that the ‘virus’ of nationalism might spread from Poland to neighbouring Ukraine, the Russians attempted to stamp out the tentative efforts of Ukrainian intellectuals to assert the distinctiveness of that region’s history, language, or cultural identity. The partitions of Poland also brought under Russian rule about 5 million Jews, almost all of whom lived, no longer by choice, in a specially demarcated area of the western provinces known as the Pale of Settlement. Yiddish-speaking and studiously traditional in dress and appearance, the Jews understandably sought to preserve their religion and culture against attempts to convert or assimilate them, thereby earning the hatred of antisemites, who were especially active in the western and southern Ukraine.

By the end of the nineteenth century more than a quarter of the tsar’s subjects were neither Russians nor Slavs. Some 13 million were Muslims, most of whom spoke various Turkic languages, and who lived mainly in the southern regions of the empire. Another 3 million inhabitants of Russia proper, living mostly in the north, belonged to various Finnic peoples, while the administratively separate Grand Duchy of Finland had a population of 2.5 million, almost all Finns, but also including a small minority of Swedes. In addition, there were Germans (found mostly in the Baltic), Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, and Armenians; each of these groups constituted between 1 and 2 per cent of the entire population of the empire, and in addition there were dozens of other smaller ethnic groups, especially in the mountainous regions of the Caucasus [94]. In the late Imperial period, many important conflicts would turn on relations between Russians on the one hand, and Poles, Finns and Jews on the other; the Ukrainians found themselves in conflict with Russians, Poles, and Jews, although usually for different reasons.

If the empire’s ethnic and linguistic diversity was bewilderingly complex, so was the variety of religions practiced within its boundaries. To be sure, the Orthodox Church occupied a privileged position in law, but this special status partially concealed the fact that Orthodox believers were divided into three distinct groups. Besides the majority, who followed the rites of the established religion, there were two substantial minorities: the Old Believers, descendants of those whose defiant refusal to accept seventeenth-century reforms in dogma and ritual brought upon them continuing discrimination and sporadic persecution by the state; and the Uniates, mostly peasants in the western provinces, Roman Catholics who were permitted to follow the rites of the Orthodox Church in return for acknowledging the authority of the Papacy, an arrangement devised in the seventeenth century by Catholic missionaries imbued with the religious zeal of the Counter-Reformation. In the Caucasus, the Georgians and the Armenians each had their own distinctive and ancient versions of eastern Orthodoxy. Other substantial Christian populations included the Roman Catholics of Poland and Lithuania; and the Lutherans of Finland and the Baltic provinces; in addition, there were several sects, both radical and conservative, some of them offshoots of native Orthodoxy while others derived from imported Protestantism. The smaller Christian groups were far outnumbered by the mostly Sunni Muslims, whose religious ties to the Ottoman Empire periodically gave Russians cause for concern. Finally, the empire also contained Buddhists, such as the Buriat Mongols of eastern Siberia, and small groups of pagan nature-worshippers found mostly in northern and northeastern Asia. Religion, in other words, was more likely to divide than to unite the tsar’s subjects.

Some idea of what this ethnic and religious complexity could mean in practice may be obtained from two examples. In the three Baltic provinces acquired by Russia after Peter the Great’s lengthy war with Sweden, the landowners – the so-called ‘Baltic barons’ – were German-speaking Lutherans, descendants of the northern crusading orders that had come to this area both to settle and to convert the pagan Baits and Lithuanians; the peasants who worked for them were either Lutherans or Catholics who spoke Baltic (Latvian) or Finno-Ugrian (Estonian) languages. In order to ensure that the Baltic Germans would remain loyal to Russia, the tsarist regime had welcomed them into its ruling elite without requiring that they convert to Orthodoxy, while using the tool of emancipation to force their peasants into abject economic dependence upon the landowners. In Turkestan, by contrast, where the Muslim population consisted of nomads, peasants, and townspeople, the very primitivism of the nomads was seen as ‘a bulwark against Islam’ by Russian officials who feared the religious fanaticism of the townspeople [25 p. 122]. In such varied circumstances it was next to impossible to formulate policies that could be applied consistently throughout the empire.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REALITIES

One of the greatest challenges facing the tsarist regime was the fact that Russian social and economic development lagged well behind that of England, or Germany, or the United States. In this regard, the 1897 census confirmed what foreign visitors had already observed: Russia was an overwhelmingly rural country. The majority of the population, 86.6 per cent, lived in the countryside, most of them in small villages. Although Moscow had a million inhabitants and St Petersburg slightly more, there were only about a dozen other substantial cities, and few of these were located in central Russia [94]. The vast majority of rural inhabitants were peasants; between three-quarters and four-fifths of the population of the empire were either engaged in agriculture or in some way dependent upon it. Although migrating to cities, becoming industrial workers, or emigrating to southern frontier areas or to Siberia were options taken by many peasants despite the difficulties involved, the fact is that the rural population continued to grow so rapidly that those who remained constantly complained of the shortage of arable land. Despite such misery and want, and in stubborn defiance of Malthus’ ‘providential checks’ to population growth, the peasants went on creating more mouths than the countryside could feed. Ironically, but understandably, the pressure of rising population was strongest in the most fertile, black-soil regions of central and western Russia.

Many of the peasants counted in the 1897 census had been born serfs, serfdom having survived from the Muscovite era until Tsar Alexander II embarked on a programme of ‘Great Reforms’ in the 1860s. Whatever its legal implications, emancipation scarcely improved – indeed some would say it worsened – the economic situation of the Russian peasant. In its wake, many peasants found themselves tilling an allotment of land that was barely able to produce a subsistence for themselves and their families, let alone to offset the redemption payments that the government had imposed in return for having compensated the landlords for parting with some of ‘their’ land. Especially in the forest provinces, peasants supplemented meagre incomes by resorting to handicraft production during the long winter months.

Judged by the standards of peasant agriculture elsewhere – France, for example – the land allotments of Russian peasants might well have been sufficient, perhaps more than sufficient, if only they had been worked in a more efficient manner. Striking early photographs of peasants holding wooden rakes and shovels attest to the relatively primitive agricultural methods that still prevailed throughout much of rural Russia. Understanding little or nothing about fertilizers or crop rotation, most peasants employed traditional scratch ploughing methods that virtually guaranteed low yields per sown acre. Moreover, because so much of the land was periodically redistributed among members of the village commune,* peasants had little reason to think of the long-term productivity of any particular allotment. For centuries, their peasant forbears had coped with the hardships of the Russian climate and the deficiencies of soil quality by continually seeking more land to bring under the plough; hence the persistent calls in the late Imperial period that still more land be made available for peasant cultivation.

Russia’s rural population grew steadily enough to maintain its proportion of the whole, no mean feat in a period when some urban areas were achieving spectacular growth rates. Urban population doubled in the thirty years before the 1897 census, and continued to increase steadily until the outbreak of war in 1914. Multi-ethnic Odessa, the principal grain export port on the Black Sea; Kharkov and Rostov-on-Don, the main southern centres of heavy industry; Baku, the oil production and distribution centre on the Caspian Sea; these and several other cities experienced phenomenal growth in the late nineteenth century. Such rapid growth put pressure on rudimentary municipal institutions that were everywhere struggling, not often successfully, with the attendant problems of urban modernization. Contemporaries found the streets of Russian cities teeming with ‘vagrants, paupers, idlers, parasites, and hooligans’ [23 p. 1], a situation which in Moscow produced systematic efforts to discipline the common people through stricter poor relief measures [59]. However, despite this recent and dramatic urban growth, Russia was still, on the eve of the twentieth century, a largely agricultural and peasant country [40].

In matters of health Russia also lagged behind the West. Mortality rates in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire were appreciably higher than those in Western Europe or the United States. Regional differences were apparent in the statistics: rates were lower in the Baltic, the western and southwestern provinces than in central Russia, and the lower Volga provinces had the highest rates of all. Until the 1880s, urban death rates generally exceeded rural, but in St Petersburg, reputedly the unhealthiest capital in Europe, mortality rates remained startlingly high as late as 1913 [20]. Epidemiological reconstruction reveals that children accounted for a high proportion of all deaths and, more surprisingly, that there were significant differences in death rates according to religion: ‘Orthodox babies perished at roughly twice the rate of Jewish infants’, and were much more vulnerable than babies born into Lutheran, Catholic or Muslim families, a disparity attributable largely to differences in breast-feeding and weaning practices [76]. That Russia lagged behind Europe is clear from the fact that most deaths were still from infectious diseases. Children died mainly from measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and pertussis; adults from smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, malaria and tuberculosis. The lower Volga provinces, especially Astrakhan, and the Black Sea coast were particularly vulnerable to epidemics of malaria. Because of overcrowding and poor ventilation, respiratory and eye diseases flourished during the winter months, while summer water shortages especially in the south often produced gastrointestinal disorders. Migrating peasants and pilgrims helped to spread tuberculosis, typhus and venereal diseases. A modest downward trend in mortality rates is apparent by 1900, but whether it is attributable to better nourishment, as some have argued, or to rising standards of education and literacy reinforced by the efforts of physicians and sanitarians, remains an unsettled question [52].

REFORMERS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

By the late nineteenth century, the Russian tsar usually exercised his ostensibly unlimited powers through certain established officials and institutions. The chief executive officers of the Russian autocracy were the commanders of the army and the fleet; the ministers, appointed and dismissed by the will of the tsar; and the provincial governors, who were both the tsar’s personal representatives and the executive heads of the provincial administrations [92]. Separate arrangements prevailed in the Grand Duchy of Finland and in the Cossack territories. Except in Finland, there were no legislative or representative bodies comparable with the English House of Commons or the American Congress. The Committee of Ministers, by no stretch of the imagination a unified cabinet, might at the tsar’s behest consider and advise on particular measures or general matters, but neither it, nor the State Council, a largely honorific deliberative body composed of senior officials appointed by the tsar, had the power to initiate legislation or indeed to block any specific measure or course of action that found favour with the ruler. The Governing Senate, founded by Peter the Great to run the country while he made war, had long since become the senior judicial body of the empire; it registered decrees, tried to ensure consistency in the application of law, and sent out officials commissioned to enquire into local abuses, a practice that was hilariously satirized in Gogol’s The Government Inspector.

Although the provincial towns portrayed in Russian literature appeared full of obsequious, corrupt, idle and incompetent bureaucrats, the empire was probably overgoverned at the centre and undergoverned at the local level. Too many matters required reference to St Petersburg, where the decision-making apparatus was plagued by delay, incomprehension, and a lack of co-ordinated policy. Because ministers reported separately to the tsar, there was no certain means by which overlapping or contradictory policies could be identified and reconsidered. Not until the 1860s did the empire have a co-ordinated annual budget, and even at the turn of the present century the Ministries of Finance and Interior clashed repeatedly over various aspects of domestic, especially labour, policy [114, 118]. From 1864, after considerable discussion about whether the empire needed more or fewer bureaucrats, new institutions of local government known as zemstvos* were created in the provinces and districts of European Russia, supplementing rather than replacing the local administrative apparatus overseen by the governors. Zemstvo institutions were promoted by reformers who sought to encourage responsible elements of the population to take part in local government, but the reformers’ influence on Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881) was undermined by a major uprising in Poland in 1863; consequently, the zemstvos were established with fewer powers, smaller fields of jurisdiction, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Referencing System
• List of Maps
• Names, Dates and Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• An Introduction to the Series
• Part One The Background
• Part Two Descriptive Analysis
• Part Three Assessment
• Part Four Documents
• Glossary
• Chronology of Events
• Guide to Characters
• Maps
• Bibliography
• Index