Russia in the Twentieth Century

The quest for stability

David R. Marples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317862277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The history of Russia, as the natural successor to the Soviet Union, is of crucial importance to understanding why communism ultimately lost out to Western democracy and the free market system. David Marples presents a balanced overview of 20th century Russian history and shows that although contemporary Russia has retained many of the practices and memories of the Soviet period, it is not about to revert back to the Soviet example.

1
From tsarism to revolution, 1894–1917

Social and political conditions in tsaritst Russia

Russia at the turn of the century was a peasant nation with a population of about 129 million, a feudal empire of vast territory that was reliant almost exclusively on agriculture for its national income. It was the world’s main agricultural producer in 1897, though the situation in the villages, home to 97 million people, was strained. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had alleviated the worst vestiges of the economic system of serfdom, which had tied the peasants to the land, but it had hardly ameliorated their plight, burdening them with redemption payments that ultimately exceeded the value of the land now in their possession. Often the plots of land these peasants worked were smaller than the amount required for subsistence, forcing them to lease land, often from their former landlords. Methods were primitive, and manual labor was the norm. The late 19th century also saw a rapid expansion of the population, causing the further division of the land plots and the departure of many peasants from the villages to the growing towns, or else to Siberia or even abroad. Droughts and famines occurred frequently, partly as a result of the adverse climatic conditions, and partly as a consequence of the way in which Russian agriculture was organized. The basic issues of village life were dealt with by the village community – the mir – an organization that many political agitators had envisaged as the instrument of a social revolution.

The period was also one during which the vast Russian Empire slowly began to experience the beginnings of major industrialization. Russian industry at the turn of the century was characterized by the workshop and by seasonal workers, who would return to the villages to assist with the harvest in the fall. In the larger cities, such as St Petersburg, however, the factories springing up were often huge affairs, employing thousands of people. Under Prime Minister Sergey Witte, Russia embarked on a campaign to build railways, and in the last decade of the 19th century some 16,800 miles of railways were constructed. By the turn of the century, the empire had several established industrial centers – regions of Poland, such as Warsaw and Lodz, the major cities of St Petersburg and Moscow, and the Donbass region of Ukraine. For the most part, the major investors in the development were foreign – French, German, Belgian, and British. By 1913, the urban population had risen to 18 percent of the total, and was mostly occupied in industry, construction, trade, and technical industries. Nevertheless over 70 percent of the population remained in the agricultural sphere.

The tsarist autocracy represented a forbidding but weakening leadership. Russian expansion since the 16th century had been chaotic, often unplanned, frequently conducted by individualistic freebooters, and partly as a result of conquests arising from warfare. In the 19th century, a small group of the intelligentsia devised different revolutionary ideas and methods to bring about change. None came to fruition, other than the assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II in 1881. Terrorism as a means to bring about change was discredited by this time. Populism, the attainment of a socialist revolution through the village community, also appeared to have failed. Increasingly those who wished to bring about political change in Russia considered that it was no longer possible for Russia to avoid the capitalist stage of its development. More traditional political parties began to emerge. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, using a peasant base, was formed in 1900 and was generally the largest of all Russian political parties, though lacking in organization and leadership. The Russian liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets, was founded in 1905 after a Congress of Rural and Urban Activists. Russian Marxism was not new, but for some years it had been confined to emigration. In 1898, however, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party held its first “congress” in a wooden hut in the city of Minsk. It was attended by nine delegates from Social Democratic organizations, with others from the Jewish Bund, and Rabochaya gazeta (Workers’ Newspaper). Most of the participants were well known to the secret police, the Okhrana, and were arrested immediately afterward. Little that occurred in the 1898 meeting seemed to herald anything of import.

The 2nd Congress held in 1903 had to be convened abroad, though it was still facing pressure from the police, this time of Germany, eventually moving from Stuttgart to London. The immediate goals of the party were radical enough – to overthrow at once the tsarist autocracy and establish a democratic republic, while introducing rights for workers such as an eight-hour day, eliminating the remains of the feudal system in the village, and allowing full rights to non-Russians, including self-determination. The maximal goal was even more utopian – the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat through a socialist revolution. The goals were more deep-rooted than those of the European trends of the day, particularly in Germany where Economism had taken root: the belief that the workers’ demands could be satisfied gradually through the trade union movement without having to resort to outright revolution. Such views were anathema to the Social Democratic leaders. The Russians were also divided on tactics, however. One group, initially the largest, and led by Yuly Martov (the pseudonym of Yuly Tserderbaum), considered that the party could incorporate not only committed and hardened revolutionaries but also sympathizers. The other, led by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin), following guidelines laid out in his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, preferred a small, disciplined party that could guide rather than be guided by the mass of the workers. As the Congress progressed, and disputes led to the departure of several delegates, this faction was found to be in the majority, and designated by Lenin with the title of Bolsheviks. Martov and his now-minority group were termed the Mensheviks. Though the divide seemed frivolous and temporary, it proved to be permanent, mainly thanks to the intransigence of Lenin.

Though the revolutionary Marxist party was very small, there appeared to be some hope that it could have an impact on Russian political life. By the turn of the century, Russia was suffering from unemployment in the towns. On the initiative of Count Witte, the working day had been reduced to a maximum of 11.5 hours by 1897, but many workers considered this excessive. There was also widespread peasant unrest after the difficult years of famine. In the period 1900–1904, 1,205 peasant “disturbances” were recorded. Many of the intelligentsia also demanded reforms. Partly at the behest of the authorities, and specifically of V. K. Plehve, appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in 1902, the Jews became a scapegoat for the difficulties, and 1903 was notorious for its anti-Jewish pogroms in cities in Moldavia, Belarus, and Ukraine. At the turn of the century, the Jews, confined to the Pale of Settlement, formed a majority or plurality in the major towns of the western borderlands. In the summer of 1903, oil workers in Baku initiated a general strike, and were quickly joined by workers in other parts of the Caucasus, comprising more than 100,000 people, again reiterating the demand for better working conditions, including an eight-hour day. The industrial centers of Ukraine and south Russia then joined in. The Social Democrats did not organize these strikes but they did join in and were able to spread effectively their propaganda. The first legal trade union – the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers – was formed in this same year. Its leader was a priest, Georgy Gapon, who was a double agent working for the tsarist Okhrana. As often happens in such cases, however, it was difficult to know where Gapon’s real sympathies lay. The police would try to control such movements through infiltration, but often the movement seemed to be beyond their reach. By April 1905, when the 3rd Congress of the RSDWP was held in London, and Lenin had been elected as the Chairman of the Congress, the possibility of a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution in Russia appeared to be much greater than hitherto. The party issued a new newspaper, the Proletarii, and divided activities between a Russian section and one abroad, with Lenin appointed as the chairman of the latter.

The war with Japan

The main possibility for further expansion lay in the Far East, and at the expense of China. Nikolay II, who had ascended to the throne upon the death of his father Aleksandr III in 1894, had no clear ambitions. Rather his approach was traditional – to continue the legacy inherited from his robust father and to maintain and strengthen the existing realm. Thus he was far from averse to colonialism, but had run into a new problem – the emergence of Imperial Japan as a new colonial power in the Far East. To date, the Japanese had not posed a serious threat to the Russians, but they were equally anxious to benefit from the weakness of China, and in Japan’s case the goal was to use Korea as a springboard for further encroachment. In 1894–1895, Japan had defeated China, using the victory to gain control over part of the Liaotung Peninsula – including, at its tip, Port Arthur. Almost at once the Great Powers had intervened to prevent this “outrage” by an Asian power; and Japan, resentfully, had been forced to relinquish its conquests. The immediate beneficiary was Russia, which in 1897 obtained a lease over both the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur, which was linked to the new Trans-Siberian Railway through the Chinese territory of Manchuria. Japan was concerned that the next target for the Russians would be Korea, and decided that the most preferable alternative was a war with Russia.

There were several disadvantages for Russia at the outset of the war. The main one was logistics. To fight a war so far from the center of the empire required the transportation of the Russian army and supplies and equipment over a lone route, that of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was single-tracked. The Japanese by contrast could easily replenish their resources from the Japanese islands. Both the Russian Pacific Fleet and the Russian Far Eastern Army were based on the Liaotung Peninsula, but both were put under immediate pressure by Japan. On January 27, 1904 the war began when Japanese units attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Though the attack was repelled, the fleet was effectively hemmed in, and it became the focus of further Japanese assaults. In May the attack was renewed, when Japanese forces based in Manchuria began a long siege of Port Arthur. Though Japanese losses were extraordinarily high, the port finally fell on December 20, 1904, after the Japanese had begun to use 11-inch howitzers that weighed almost 500 pounds. Russian losses in the battle were considerably less than those of their Japanese counterparts; but the Russian commander at Port Arthur, General Anatoly Stessel, had to scuttle the Pacific Fleet’s ships. Thereafter, the fate of the Russians at sea would depend on the Baltic Fleet, which was dispatched on a remarkable journey of 20,500 miles in October 1904, with the aim of reaching Vladivostok.

In the meantime, the Russians suffered a series of defeats in land battles. Military operations had begun in April 1904, with the Japanese deploying four armies. Two great battles were fought, neither of which was conclusive, but the outcome of each was that the Japanese army held the battlefield at the conclusion. At the Battle of Liaoyang between August 11 and 21, 1904, a slightly larger Japanese force defeated a Russian force led by General Aleksey Kuropatkin, and both sides suffered more than 17,000 casualties. A Russian counter-offensive at Sha Ho was a disaster, resulting in around 40,000 casualties. Generally, however, the trench warfare was equally catastrophic for both sides and a prelude to what was to occur during the First World War. In February 1905 the two sides met at Mukden with enormous armies. One estimate maintains that over 600,000 troops from both sides took part in this battle, and casualties were huge (more than 150,000). The Japanese victory, though a narrow one, was achieved largely because of the army’s numerical superiority in machine-guns. Mukden proved to be the most decisive land engagement of the war, and the Russian defeat was a major embarrassment for the government of Nikolay II. An expected easy victory over an Asian opponent had failed to materialize.

At sea, matters were to take an even worse turn for the Russians. The Baltic Fleet, under the command of admirals Z. P. Rozhestvensky and N. I. Nebogatov, managed the considerable feat of circumnavigating most of the globe, only to run into an ambush by the large Japanese fleet under the leadership of Admiral Togo Heihachiro. The Russian losses were unprecedented at sea, and included nineteen major warships out of the thirty dispatched. Only four ships out of the Baltic Fleet ever reached the port of Vladivostok, and almost half the Russian sailors lost their lives. However, mainly through the diplomatic skills and wiles of Witte, the Russian side did not fare particularly badly as the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by the Americans in September 1905, moderated considerably Japanese demands for the transfer of the entire Liaotung Peninsula to Japanese control, the seizure of the entire Sakhalin Island, control over Korea, and the removal of the Russian army from Manchuria. Japan did receive the southern part of Sakhalin, and was permitted to control Korea, and Russia agreed to transfer its lease over the peninsula. Though the results of the treaty were less harsh than might have been anticipated, the military and naval defeats reduced the prestige of the tsarist government at a time when outright revolution had broken out in the capital, St Petersburg. The first real dent in the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty had been rendered. In later years, Soviet leaders, and particularly Stalin, were to avenge the disastrous defeat by Japan – a sign of how deeply such an event rankled, even among avowed socialist activists.

By 1905, Russian standing as a world power had fallen sharply. Less than a century earlier, the Russian tsar, Aleksandr I, had been in Paris helping to supervise the abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte. By contrast, Nikolay II, a pleasant and courteous family man, had suffered the most ignominious defeat in living memory. Britain, one of Russia’s main rivals in the Near East, no longer regarded Russia as a serious threat to its empire, and to India in particular – the two countries would sign an alliance agreement in 1907. Henceforth, Russia would seek to re-establish itself on the international stage, often as a means of diverting attention from growing domestic (and especially economic) problems. The tsarist autocracy was in theory the most powerful ruling family on the continent and landmass of Eurasia. In practice, the tsars had become vulnerable. A weak tsar, like Nikolay, was dependent on his ministers and on Russia’s international standing. His ministers gave him contradictory advice: Witte seeking cordial links with China and Korea, and Plehve preferring a more aggressive and warlike attitude toward these states, which were under Japanese influence. Partly as a result of circumstances beyond his control, but partly through his own inadequacies, such a goal proved beyond his power.

The 1905 Revolution

The revolution of 1905 began with a strike movement – something quite common in the Russian Empire during this period. Working conditions were extremely difficult. Employers generally ignored a flurry of laws issued in the later part of the 19th century to reduce working hours and improve labor conditions. However, the demands of the strikers at the outset suggest that there was already a political dimension to the protests. The strike began on January 3 at the giant Putilov munitions factory in St Petersburg, and spread to several other factories throughout the week. The strikers demanded an eight-hour working day, a rise in wages, and the cessation of indirect taxes, but also the transfer of lands to the peasants and the convocation of an assembly based on equal and general voting rights. Less than a week later, a large group of demonstrators took their protests directly to the Tsar, with a peaceful procession to the Winter Palace. The priest Gapon led the marchers. The Tsar was absent, but the Cossacks under the command of the Grand Duke Vladimir fired on the protestors, killing an estimated 1,000 of them, and injuring about five times as many. The event became known as Bloody Sunday and catalyzed the protests of 1905. By the end of the month over 400,000 Russian workers had joined the strike.

The strike movement continued over the next several months, despite an abortive government commission to ascertain the causes of the workers’ discontent. Another famous event was the mutiny in the battleship Potemkin, immortalized by the Soviet film director Sergey Eisenstein, which took place in Odesa in mid-June. The sailors had refused to eat poor-quality meat, taken command of the ship, and hoisted the red flag. The battleship made a raid on Odesa before returning to the Black Sea. Lacking fuel, the mutineers eventually landed in Romania and gave themselves up to the local authorities. By October the strike had spread to the Russian railway workers, on the main lines between Moscow and several cities further east and south, such as Kursk and Kazan. Altogether some 120 cities and towns saw mass strikes, with thousands of protestors in the streets demanding the convocation of an Extraordinary Assembly. By October 13, various factories in St Petersburg had begun to elect representatives to a new council (soviet) of workers’ deputies. In the meantime, the tsarist regime had agreed reluctantly to establish a state parliament (Duma) provided with legislative authority. The Duma was to comprise representatives from the landowners and factory managers, and the peasants were to receive one out of every eight seats. The workers, however, were not enfranchised because they did not own property. Thus the initial law antagonized the very forces that had initiated the strike. On October 17, as the worker discontent reached a climax, Nikolay II agreed to freedom of speech and of assembly, along with a parliament that wielded real authority – the concession was termed the October Manifesto. Two days later the monarchy also agreed to the creation of a Council of Ministers under the chairmanship of Witte.

The period of the 1905 Revolution also saw the formation of two new political parties. The Kadets were fortunate that Witte was seeking liberal support for the government in a move to drive a wedge between those groups prepared to compromise and the more hardened revolutionary elements. By late October a number of Kadet leaders, including the historian P. N. Milyukov, took part in discussions with the government. The Kadet goal was for the party’s leaders to be invited into the government – a prospect that began to fade with time. In mid-October the Kadets held an Extraordinary Congress in Moscow which combined the goals of two organizations – the Union of Liberation and the Union of Land Constitutionalists. Though a relatively small party, the Kadets remained influential for many years, and included members of the landed aristocracy and the liberal intelligentsia, along with academicians. The party’s guiding light was Milyukov. The Kadets sought a constitutional monarchy (close to the British model), freedom of assembly and of the press, universal suffrage, and the establishment of a Duma that would exert significant control over the government. Their goals were radical in 1905, and the prominence of their members in public life ensured that the party would not be ignored. However, the eventual polarization of political life in Russia ensured that the Kadets gradually began to move further away from the more radical tendencies that followed the military defeats during the First World War.

Another party was formed as a result of the tsarist Manifesto, namely the Union of October 17 or Octobrists. They represented a more affluent...