Late Tsarist Russia, 1881–1913

Beryl Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000178906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together the large volume of work on late Tsarist Russia published over the last 30 years, to show an overall picture of Russia under the last two tsars - before the war brought down not only the Russian empire but also those of Germany, Austria–Hungary and Turkey. It turns the attention from the old emphases on workers, revolutionaries, and a reactionary government, to a more diverse and nuanced picture of a country which was both a major European great power, facing the challenges of modernization and industrialization, and also a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire stretching across both Europe and Asia.

1 Imperial Russia

A second son, Alexander III had not expected to inherit the throne. Pushed into the position of monarch by the early death of his elder brother and the assassination of his father, he was unprepared. Not well educated or exceptionally bright he nevertheless had common sense, was disciplined, hard-working, and had a strong sense of duty. He was shy and obstinate and very much a family man. He saw his role as that of a patriarch. Conservative rather than reactionary, he was also in favour of economic modernization and was concerned to develop Russia as a European great power. Political modernization, however, he identified with instability, revolution, and the ideas that had caused his father’s death, and as fundamentally unsuited to the Russian empire. His natural conservatism and his rejection of his father’s reforms, was encouraged by his advisors, nearly all of whom had lectured to him as part of his education. Foremost among them was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, and thus in charge of the Orthodox Church, and Mikhail Katkov, the influential publisher of the Russkii Vestnik (Russian Messenger). He was also influenced by panslavic thinkers, including Dostoevsky, whose Diary of a Writer, was published by 1881.

In theory, Alexander’s desire to return to an age of untrammelled autocracy and Russian values should not have been difficult. The Russian government was still an autocracy and the tsar’s word was law. Decrees and reforms could be repealed. In practice, it was more difficult than might have been expected. Changing the law could no longer be done just on the whim of the ruler. The Russian government had become immensely more complicated since the days of Nicholas I, and the bureaucracy that ran it was, by the 1880s, more professional and expert and more difficult to do without. It had become a self-perpetuating elite. Although almost all of the top bureaucrats came from old established aristocratic families, and some still owned large, and sometimes profitable, estates, many had cut off direct ties with the land after the abolition of serfdom. The resident landowning gentry and the state bureaucracy had by now often become very different and led very different lifestyles, well-illustrated by Karenin and Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. By the end of the nineteenth century the nobility owned 40 per cent less land than they had in 1861 and many owned none at all.

Linked by prestige schools, regiments, clubs, and universities, high-level civil servants were now full time administrators. Governors of provinces were no longer just the ‘Tsar’s Viceroys’, but after 1880 also agents of the Ministry of the Interior. Personal loyalty and patronage were no longer enough. Professionalism and expertise were increasingly essential, although the old ways would suffice many until the turn of the century. In 1884, Chernigov’s governor quelled a peasant riot by going himself to the scene of the trouble, admittedly accompanied by soldiers with birch rods, and threatening the peasants with the tsar’s and God’s displeasure.¹ By the 1890s the typical governor was a trained and well-educated bureaucrat, dedicated to modernizing his province and needing to collaborate with zemstvos and town dumas as well as the local gentry, although there were always exceptions. Alexander might see bureaucrats as resisting his own power, but at all levels of government he could not do without them. The State Council was the advisory body appointed by the tsar to assist in forming legislation and was in practice the supreme organ of the executive. It was purely advisory, but its members were appointed for life. It was not easy for the tsar to dismiss them, and as a body it had real power. Ninety per cent of its members were hereditary nobility, highly educated, and full time civil servants, and they could in practice block change.²

Ministers were members of the State Council but were individually appointed, and dismissed, by the tsar and were responsible only to him. There was no coordinating body to ensure cooperation between ministries and no Prime Minister. Ad hoc committees could be called for specific issues but the system encouraged confusion, and rivalries between ministers, who then fought out their disagreements in the State Council, were common. Conflicts between ministries, for example between the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, or between the War Office and the Foreign Office, could paralyse government policy. Heated debates within the State Council could go on for years. Policy was formulated in the ministries but nothing could be passed into law without the tsar’s approval. The Assembly of the State Council was presided over by the tsar’s appointee. Under Alexander this was Grand Duke Michael. Alexander inherited the State Council from his father and its members had a strong reformist bent. The decree of 1864 had established an independent judiciary, trial by jury and Justices of the Peace. The State Council had been used by Alexander II to carry out reforms in the 1860s and many who sat on it had been trained as lawyers and were dedicated to preserving the legal reforms of the Tsar Liberator. Alexander III, despite the urging of Pobedonostsev, had no intention of abolishing the State Council or of allowing it, like the Council of Ministers, to lapse, but he did wish to end what he saw as its liberal, ‘quasi-constitutional’, reformist inclinations. He was only partially successful.³

The debate as to which path Russia should follow towards modernization had started during the last decade of Alexander II’s reign. His assassination came at a critical moment. The reforms had stalled during the second half of the 1860s, after the Polish revolt in 1863 and the 1866 attack on the tsar, and there had never been any intention of political reform at the centre. Nevertheless the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of the zemstvo and the military, legal, and educational reforms of the 1860s had profoundly changed Russian society by 1881. There were mounting calls from an increasingly educated society for further change. The zemstvo movement, and its growing ‘third element’ of professional employees, was at the forefront of demands to ‘crown the edifice’ of reform by allowing some degree of popular participation in central government decisions. In 1879, the Tver zemstvo called for genuine local self-government and for civil rights. That same year, an illegal assembly of three provincial zemstvos under the leadership of I.I. Petrunkevich of Chernigov, called for the right of regular meetings of zemstvos to discuss political issues at a national level.⁴

Faced with the growing revolutionary movement after the 1874 ‘going to the people’ by populist groups, and the subsequent turn to terror by their more radical wing, the government faced a crisis. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 had been successful but it nearly bankrupted the Russian state. There was a harvest failure and near famine conditions in 1880–1, followed by, to the government, an inexplicable wave of pogroms against Jews across the south and west of the country. Abroad the re-negotiation by the great powers of Russia’s peace treaty with Turkey, signed at San Stefano, at the Congress of Berlin, had underlined Russia’s fragile claim to great power status. It was clear by 1881 that changes had to be made. Government circles saw intense debates as to how to respond. Should they revive the reforms of the 1860s to follow a more Westernized path to win over educated society? This would mean allowing some, even if limited, participation in government debates. Would that lead inevitably to a constitutional monarchy and Western liberalism? Should Russia take a newly unified Germany as a model? Would this be fundamentally at odds with Russian traditions and the preservation of autocracy? Alternatively could a return to a pre-Petrine model be made to work in the late nineteenth century?

At first it seemed as if the reformers would win out. In the mid-1870s Count Peter Shuvalov had proposed a scheme to include representatives of all estates in a commission to draft further reforms. By 1881, by which time he was out of office, he was even to champion a constitutional parliamentary structure with two houses. After all Russia had granted a constitution to Bulgaria when it had been granted independence by the Treaty of San Stefano, and it was inevitable that demands for something similar for Russia itself would be heard. Similar arguments had indeed been put forward after concessions to Poland earlier in the century. Loris-Melikov, the new Minister of the Interior, appointed by Alexander II in 1880, was instructed by the tsar to prosecute the terrorists but also to meet ‘as far as possible the lawful demands and needs of the people’. He did not go as far as to propose a constitution, although some historians do label his plans as one, but he drew on Shuvalov’s draft. His aim was to coordinate the experience of local governments and zemstvos and to involve educated society with the central government and so isolate the revolutionaries. A self-made man from the Caucasus, like Witte after him, he had been a war hero in 1878. He was careful to deny that his plans were in any way a constitution. Any such moves, he said, had to be left to ‘our sons and grandsons’. His model was the preparatory commissions set up to plan the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and he proposed to establish, initially, two commissions to which ‘informed and loyal persons’ would be invited to discuss issues of the day with central government institutions. These were to include reform of local provincial administration and regulations concerning the peasantry. Resulting proposals would be sent to a general commission to include elected representatives of the zemstvos and the major cities. This commission was be strictly temporary, to meet for not more than two months, and to be purely consultative in nature.⁵ This was less radical than an earlier proposal by Peter Valuev in 1863 to allow representatives of the nobility, zemstvos, and towns to participate in discussions in the State Council. Alexander III’s reaction to Loris-Melikov’s proposal, however, was to say ‘thank God that this criminal and hasty step towards a constitution was not taken’. Alexander II had signed Loris Melikov’s manifesto the morning of the day he died. A week later it was discussed by the Council of Ministers and received majority support. The small minority was led by Pobedonostev, and D.A. Miliutin, the Minister of War who had led the army reforms, reported that Pobedonostsev repudiated all Western influences and the 1860 reforms in their entirety. The new tsar, however, as was his right, accepted the minority report.⁶

Alexander III had opposed many of his father’s reforms well before he came to succeed to the throne. Traumatized by his father’s death he was deeply opposed to any political change that could be interpreted as leading to a more Western and thus constitutional system, and thus potentially to a revolutionary threat. He initially promised to uphold his father’s will, but the manifesto, although signed, was not published or submitted to the State Council. While the document was still being discussed by the Council of Ministers, the tsar accepted Pobedonostsev’s alternative manifesto of 29 April. This emphasized the sacredness of unlimited autocracy and the need to uphold the unity of tsar and people by use of firm authority against the revolutionaries. The spiritual bond of tsar and people, he claimed, was more important than the inclusion in governmental discussions of representatives of society. Three ministers, including both Miliutin and Loris-Melikov himself, resigned. Even calls for a zemskii sobor, an assembly relatively common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which had elected the first Romanov tsar in 1613, were rejected. Vorontsov-Dashkov had proposed this as a solution to a ‘new time of troubles’ in his Letters on the Contemporary Condition of Russia, written in 1879–80. So did Loris-Melikov’s successor, General Nicholas Ignatiev, a convinced slavophile, a hero of the Asiatic expansion in the 1860s and then ambassador to Constantinople in the 1870s. His stay in office, however, was short.⁷

By 1882 the new Minister of the Interior, Dmitrii Tolstoi, signalled the end of discussions and a clamp down on all opposition. Trial by jury had effectively been bypassed in the late 1870s when juries had acquitted terrorists, notably Vera Zasulich, who tried to assassinate the Governor of St Petersburg in January 1878. After this, political crimes were removed from juries and a high property or income qualification was introduced. Juries also tended, even with regard to non-political crimes, to acquit suspects they judged to be acting from necessity or misfortune, to the annoyance of the authorities, especially as trials were avidly followed in the press. Crime fiction and sensational reporting of murders and other crimes were very popular.⁸ After 1881 extra-legal measures were brought in to combat the revolutionary movement and arrest anyone seen as a potential sympathizer. In the aftermath of Alexander II’s assassination, five members of the People’s Will, including one woman, Sofia Petrovskaia, the daughter of a former military governor of St Petersburg, were hung, scandalizing educated public opinion. Capital punishment had been almost non-existent in Russia since the days of Catherine the Great, but, as with the Decembrists, treason and regicide had always been exceptions. Temporary emergency police measures were brought in, ‘to preserve political order and social tranquillity’, and were to remain in place until the end of the monarchy. The Ministry of the Interior’s control was extended to include the political or security police in 1880, abolishing Nicholas I’s Third Section. Security sections, collectively if not strictly accurately, known as the Okhrana, were established in St Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, and extended to other cities after 1902. The Okhrana became an effective weapon against suspected revolutionaries and could bring them before the courts. But the Ministry of the Interior was also given power to declare martial law in the provinces, and this enabled Governors to arrest or exile suspects under administrative order and without trial. This was a right frequently used, and abused, in the following years. Students especially were liable to be picked up on suspicion and exiled to remote parts of Siberia without conviction or right to appeal.⁹

By 1886 the only ‘liberal’ left in the government was N. Kh. Bunge, the Finance Minister, and he was to resign that December. Moreover, his position was ambivalent, and he concentrated on economic reform, introducing factory legislation and inspection, joint stock commercial banks, ending the poll tax, and introducing both peasant and noble land bank...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Imperial Russia
• 2 Art, industry, and civil society
• 3 Peasants, workers, and revolutionaries
• 4 From war to revolution
• 5 From revolution to repression
• 6 Constitutional Russia
• 7 The silver age
• Selected bibliography
• Index