Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reform, war and revolution

to this effect were approved on 9 March 1874, but the matter was put on

hold.

The weakest link in the chain of reforms was ﬁnances, and it was only

after the war of 1877–8, against a background of ﬁnancial crisis, social and

political discontent, and terrorist acts, that Alexander II and the government

acknowledged the need to continue the Great Reforms. This attempt would be

undertaken by M. T.Loris-Melikov with the agreementand approval of Alexan-

der II. The most recent research has convincingly shown that Loris-Melikov’s

programme was not a set of separate measures, but a deﬁnite ‘scheme’, organ-

ically linked to those reforms which had been carried out in the ﬁrst decade

of Alexander II’s reign. The tsar himself expressed his understanding of this

continuity, in particular in his confession to Loris-Melikov that ‘there was one

person in whom I had full conﬁdence. That was Ia. I. Rostovtsev . . . I have

that same conﬁdence in you and perhaps even more.’

As N. A. Miliutin had done in the late 1850s to early 1860s, Loris-Melikov

at the end of the 1870s considered it crucial to unite Russian society around a

reforming government which rested on the support of public opinion. With-

out neglecting to strengthen the police, he argued that it was impossible to

defeat nihilism by police measures alone. ‘Not only did the reforms of the

1860s need to be cleansed from subsequent deviations but their principles had

to be developed further.’ Loris-Melikov’s programme envisaged a whole sys-

tem of interrelated reforms. Above all it had in mind provincial reform: the

reorganisation of the local administrative and social institutions, by removing

the antagonism between the zemstva and the state administration, and the

transformation of the police in the localities. The improvement of the peas-

ant situation occupied a signiﬁcant place in the programme: the salt tax was

abolished and the tsar’s agreement was given to a reduction in redemption

payments and a number of other measures. The transformation of the taxation

and passport systems was also planned, as was a more ﬂexible policy in the

borderlands.

The creation of preparatory commissions along the lines of the Editing

Commissions of 1859–60 was proposed in order to facilitate the implementa-

tion of this programme. Subsequently, a General Commission attached to the

State Council would be created with the participation of representatives of

51 V. G. Chernukha, Krest’ianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60-e–70-e gg. XIX v.)

(Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1973), pp. 162–3, 170.

52 A. V. Mamonov, ‘Graf M. T. Loris-Melikov: k kharakteristike vzgliadov i gosudarstvennoi

deiatel’nosti’, Otechestvennaia istoria 4 (2001): 32–50. This article gives a detailed descrip-

tion of Loris-Melikov’s programme.

612

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?

the zemstva and town self-governments. This was what in the literature has

been called the Loris-Melikov ‘constitution’ and what A.V. Mamonov consid-

ers a return to (and development of, I would add) Miliutin’s concept of the

‘enterprising monarchy’. On 1 March 1881, Alexander II approved the draft

government report on the upcoming reforms but died a few hours later. The

programme for the further development of the Great Reforms died with him

for ever, although certain individual elements of it were realised by N. Kh.

Bunge during his time as minister of ﬁnance between 1881 and 1886. Bunge’s

attempts to develop the 1861 peasant reform (he was a believer in indepen-

dent peasant farming) and modernise the taxation and banking systems only

affected limited aspects of state policy, however, and were in any case compro-

mised by the overall programme of counter-reforms carried out in the reign

of Alexander III.

By the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, it was understood by

the few reformers still alive at the time that the possibility of continuing

the reforms that had been decisively and radically begun by the abolition of

serfdom had been lost. Russia entered the twentieth century, the century of

revolutions and shocks, which they had tried so hard to avoid. In the ﬁrst

months of the 1905 Revolution four elder statesmen gave an independent and

realistic appraisal of the Great Reforms and of subsequent government policy.

These statesmen – Count K. I. Pahlen, A. A. and P. A. Saburov and A. N.

Kulomzin – had experienced the Great Reforms in their early years of ser-

vice and subsequently participated in their implementation. They produced a

memorandum for Nicholas II which stated that the empire’s current crisis was

rooted in the ‘fateful misunderstanding’ that the reason for 1 March 1881 (i.e.,

the assassination of Alexander II) was ‘the liberating policy of the tsar-

reformer’. They criticised ‘the government’s endeavour over the last twenty-

ﬁve years to limit the privileges and advantages which were bestowed on Russia

in the epoch of the reforms of Alexander II’.

The revolution wrested from the autocracy the Manifesto of 17 October

1905 and led to the creation of the ﬁrst Russian parliament (the Duma) and of

a true ministerial cabinet and prime minister. The last great reformist states-

man of the old regime, P. A. Stolypin, rose on the wave of the revolution-

ary events and in the struggle with them. While adopting harsh police mea-

sures in the struggle with terror, he worked out and began the realisation of

53 See V. L. Stepanov, N. Kh. Bunge, Sud’ba reformatora (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998).

54 P. Sh. Ganelin, ‘Politicheskie uroki osvoboditel’nogo dvizheniia v otsenke stareishikh

tsarskikh biurokratov’, in Osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Rossii (Saratov: 1991), Izd. Sara-

tovskogo universiteta, 14th edn, pp. 122–36.

613

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reform, war and revolution

fundamental changes. In the ﬁrst place, as in the 1860s, there was agrarian

reform, which allowed peasants to leave the obshchina, strengthened peasant

property-ownership and aided migration to Russian Asia. It was proposed to

combine these paramount reforms with the expansionof local self-government

and the extension of the reforms to the empire’s borderlands. However,

Stolypin’s plans were not realised. He was killed in Kiev in 1911,wherehe

had gone for the ceremonial opening of a monument to the Tsar-liberator in

connection with the half-century jubilee of the abolition of serfdom. The ﬁnal

possibility for transformations had once again been lost. Russia would soon

take part in the First World War and live through a revolution which would

sweep away the monarchy and shake the world.

∗∗∗

The Great Reforms, which were organically linked to socioeconomic and

political processes in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, were at the same

time a turning point in the history of Russia. While they neither intended

nor ensured a simultaneous transformation in all the spheres of public life,

they laid the foundations for this turnaround and ruled out the possibility of a

restoration of the pre-reform order. As a result of the transformations, ‘a basic

principle of Russian life was destroyed – the link of progress with serfdom’.

The modernisation of Russia continued on a new basis – labour freed from

serfdom, the development of private initiative, the origins of civil society. In

this context the year 1861 was a watershed, ‘the beginning of a new history, a

new epoch in Russia’ – as many contemporaries understood the abolition of

serfdom at the time and as many historians evaluated it later. However, the

degree and the depth of the turning point remain to be clariﬁed. In this regard

there still remains much for scholars to do.

Among the questions which demand attention are study of the statesmen

of the Great Reforms themselves and of the actual circumstances in which

they put together their plans. It is probably worth listening more closely to

the terms and concepts used by them, their understanding, their perception

of reality. For example, it is important to understand how they conceived of

‘the new system of agrarian relations’, which was supposed to be the result of

the implementation of the peasant reform, how they envisaged the coexistence

of the landlord and peasant economies. The idea of the reformers about the

reforms as a process which would necessitate constant modiﬁcations by the

government also merits attention. Undoubtedly, when studying the Great

55 N. A. Ivnitskii (ed.), Sud’by rossiiskogokrest’ianstva (Moscow: Rossiiskii gos. gumanitarnyi

universitet, 1996).

614

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?

Reforms, as well as the counter-reforms, there is the challenge of adopting a

differentiated approach to the different stages and ‘levels’ of the process: to the

ideology which lay at the basis of the intended transformations, to the initial

draft laws, to the laws as actually adopted (a signiﬁcant distinction) and ﬁnally

to how these laws were realised and faced the test of reality.

Such an approach enables one to avoid one-sidedness in the evaluation of

the Great Reforms, sometimes observed in the historiography, when either the

unbridgeable gulf between epochs or the complete continuity in the gradual

advance of the autocracy on the path of reform is emphasised. The undoubted

links between the abolition of serfdom and attempts at earlier legislation, the

traditions and structures of the pre-reform order, do not contradict the con-

cept of the transformation of various aspects of the country’s life begun by the

reforms. On the other hand, to acknowledge the inevitability of modiﬁcations

to the reforms and the presence of pragmatic elements in the legislation of

the 1880–90s does not remove the fundamental difference between the Great

Reforms and the counter-reforms. For example, it is true that legislative mea-

sures were needed to strengthen the system of peasant self-government, and

that the volost’ court needed to be co-ordinated with the socially inclusive

structures of the new court system. In the end, too, and despite the govern-

ment’s original intentions, the Statute of 1890 did not signify a radical change

to the zemstvo as created by the reform of 1864. Realities neutralised the con-

servative amendments which were adopted. But it is impossible to derive from

these truths the argument that there were no basic differences between the

policies of the 1860s reformers and Loris-Melikov on the one hand, and the

instigators of the counter-reforms on the other.

The ideological aims of Count D. A. Tolstoy underlying the revision of

the Great Reforms were, for example, far from fully realised in the zemstvo

legislation but had a much fuller impact in the spheres of education and

censorship, where they created a gulf between the regime and the progressive

intelligentsia.Thedangerous consequences of this phenomenon weremanifest

in 1900–6. The co-operation of the liberal bureaucracy and liberal social forces

in the eras of Nikolai Miliutin and Loris-Melikov was abandoned, as was

their systematic approach to reform. In the 1880s Bunge continued the work

of the Great Reforms, and Tolstoi and Pobedonostsev revised it. Thus, if it

makes sense to speak of ‘the epoch of Great Reforms’, there is less reason to

speak of ‘the epoch of counter-reforms’, which would imply co-ordination of

the various aspects of internal policy under Alexander III. The course set on

preserving the autocracy inviolate, which was proclaimed in the Manifesto

of 29 April 1881 and reinforced by the decree of 14 August 1881 on states of

615

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reform, war and revolution

emergency, signiﬁed the state’s loss of initiative in the realisation of large-scale

reforms. That initiative would pass to social forces. When Stolypin tried to

regain the initiative for the monarchy he did not have the twenty years he

asked for. Those twenty years had been lost between 1881 and 1905.

I would like to stress one more problem. Russian and Western historiogra-

phy has accumulated a rich store of factual material, many valuable conclu-

sions and observations. But these achievements remain disparate and isolated.

A comparison of the results of the study of ‘institutional’ and ‘social’ history,

a comparison of the work on different reforms and a more attentive attitude

to the knowledge already established in the historiography, together with a

broadening of the range of sources could all yield new approaches and new

answers to the question posed in the title of this chapter.

616

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Russian workers and revolution

reginald e. zelnik

‘Workers’, people who live off their daily labour and the sweat of their brows,

have of course been present since the very dawn of Russian history. Depending

on the exact time and place, they have included slave labourers (largely extinct

by the beginning of the eighteenth century), a wide variety of highly restricted

serfs (numerically dominant from the sixteenth century to 1861 if we include

peasants whose lord was the state), and free or ‘freely-hired’ (vol’nonaemnye)

labourers, but ‘free’ only in the sense that their obligation to their employer, at

least theoretically, was purely contractual, while they remained the bondsmen

of their noble lords. Viewed more narrowly, however, deﬁned not simply as

people who worked for a living, but only as those employed in manufacturing

and paid a wage, workers started to become important to the Russian economy

and society mainly in the eighteenth century, beginning with the reign of Peter

the Great (1689–1725), who placed a high priority on the country’s industrial

development. But even under Peter and for many years to come, most workers

employed in manufacturing and mining, even if paid in cash or in kind, were

unfree labourers, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises

or in factories owned by the government. Among those who experienced the

worst conditions in this period of labour-intensive industrialisation were the

‘possessional’ (posessionnye) and ‘ascribed’ (pripisannye) workers – state peas-

ants who, since Peter’s time, had been bound to the factory or its owner, and

who were compelled to pass this unfortunate status on down to their children.

Even those who were ‘free’ at least in the sense that they were free to negotiate

their terms of employment with employers who had no extra-economic, that

is, purely coercive controls over them, were almost all otkhodniki, the serfs of a

1 See my ‘The Peasant and the Factory’, in Wayne S.Vucinich (ed.), The Peasant in Nineteenth

Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), from which I draw much of

my discussion of the pre-Emancipation period. See also R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in

Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St Petersburg, 1855–1870(Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1971), chapters 1–2.

617

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reform, war and revolution

landowner who controlled their freedom of movement, was given part of their

wages as all or part of a quit-rent (obrok), and sometimes even negotiated the

otkhodniki’s terms of employment directly with the owner of the enterprise

where they worked, leaving the workers with little or no power to negotiate

with their employers. Although the practice of serf owners contracting out

their serfs to non-noble manufacturers was outlawed in the early 1820s, the

continued coexistence of institutions of (contractually) free and forced labour,

often combined in the same individuals, at a time when forced labour (except

for convicts) had virtually vanished from the European scene, was a notewor-

thy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as 1861, when

serfdom was abolished and almost all labour except in some military factories

was placed on a contractual footing.

The number of freely hired factory workers in Russia expanded consider-

ably in the 1830s and the decades that followed, though mainly in the grow-

ing textile sector (especially the spinning and weaving of cotton cloth). One

important stimulus was the decision of the British government to lift its ban

on the export of cotton-spinning machinery in 1842. Since the manufacture

of machinery was perhaps the least developed branch of Russian industry at

that time, most Russian factories were still devoid of mechanisation before this

shift, and, if we accept the favoured terminology of Soviet Marxist historians,

should perhaps be thought of as manufactories rather than factories, since they

depended on hand labour and outwork, were deﬁcient in steam engines, and

were often only minimally centralised.

Before the 1840s, those few factories

(fabriki) that did employ steam-driven machinery, and were therefore likely

to bring their workers together under a single roof, had depended to a large

extent on the precarious practice of obtaining smuggled British machinery

or importing lesser quality machines from Belgium or France. Hence the

legalisation of machinery-export by Britain did mark an important stage in

the evolution of an industrial landscape in Russia where large numbers of

workers, still maintaining the subordinate legal status of serfs, to be sure,

were gathered together in large numbers at a central location, most notably

2 This notion, rooted in the writings of Karl Marx and sometimes exaggerated in Soviet

historiography, is best exempliﬁed in the title ‘Ot manufaktury k fabrike’, a widely cited

article by the Soviet historian M. F. Zlotnikov published in Voprosy istorii, nos. 11–12, 1946.

In the discussion that follows, I will ignore the distinctions in Russian between the terms

manufaktura, fabrika,andzavod and use the English ‘factory’ to refer to any physically

compact industrial plant. The distinction between fabrika and zavod and its early origins

are complex. Sufﬁce it to say here that in the case of the two most politically sensitive

branches of industry, that is, the ones most extensively referenced below, textiles and the

machine- and metal-working industries, the former used the term fabrika, the latter zavod.

The term fabrika is the one normally used generically when only one term is invoked.

618

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Russian workers and revolution

in St Petersburg and in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), especially the

provinces of Moscow and Vladimir. The large majority of these were for many

years to come the workers of Russia’s growing number of cotton-spinning

mills, with the mechanisation of weaving following only after some delay

and probably not nearing completion until the 1880s. Little wonder, then,

that despite ideological imperatives to push Russia’s industrial revolution back

in time in order to combat the concept of Russia’s ‘backwardness’, serious

Soviet economic and social historians have acknowledged the absence of a

true proletariat in pre-reform Russia, substituting such compromise concepts

as ‘pre-proletariat’ (predproletariat) and in some cases even arguing that pre-

reform Russia was yet to experience a full-ﬂedged industrial revolution, since

the presence of a proletariat and a truly free labour market was a necessary

sign of that historical phase.

∗∗∗∗∗

With the abolition of serfdom, the way was open in Russia to new spurts

of industrial growth, a modest one in the 1870s and early 1880s, and a major

one in the 1890s, during the incumbency of the pro-industrial ﬁnance minister

Sergei Witte (1892–1903). One can question the extent to which the emanci-

pation as such, meaning its contribution to labour mobility, was a primary

stimulus of industrial growth, as contrasted to the state-supported railway

construction that followed in its wake and was vigorously pursued in the

1890s, especially the Trans-Siberian line. Surely, despite their emancipation

from personal bondage, the peasants’ continued attachment to the rural com-

mune (mir, obshchina) limited the degree to which conditions after 1861 would

remove past restraints on the complete mobility of labour. The omnipresence

of the commune prolonged the ties between the urban worker and his or her

village, delaying the transformation of the majority of peasant-workers into a

permanent, well-trained, urbanised labour force, fully assimilated into modern

industrial life, all its bridges to village life having been burned.

Sheer numbers

of available workers, however, were never an issue. By the 1890s, despite the

persistence of communal restraints, and with Russia’s industry – including

mining, metallurgy and, in the Petersburg region especially, the manufacture

3 The Soviet historian most closely identiﬁed with the concept of a predproletariat is Anna

M. Pankratova, especially in her posthumously published Formirovanie proletariata v Rossii

(XVII–XVIII vv.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1963). A useful, extensive discussion of the timing of

Russia’s ‘industrial revolution’ and related matters is P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie

kapitalizma v Rossii, 1850–1880 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978).

4 The best analysis of industrial workers’ continued connection with their villages in the

post-reform period is Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of

Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979).

619

Reform, war and revolution

of machinery, rails, rolling stock, ships and military hardware – expanding at

a record pace of 8 per cent per annum, the rapid growth of the land-hungry

rural population easily provided factories with a numerically adequate labour

pool (while at the same time reducing the proportion of workers who were

urbanised, literate and self-identiﬁed as permanent denizens of the industrial

world).

Of course, viewed as a percentage of the overall population, the number of

industrial workers was still small at the end of turn of the century. According

to the 1897 national census (Russia’s ﬁrst), the empire’s population was over

128 million, while the number of industrial workers (an elusive category, to be

sure) was only somewhat over 2 million at the turn of the century. However,

the social and political importance of these workers became increasingly evi-

dent, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such

as St Petersburg (the ofﬁcial capital), Moscow (the old capital and to many

contemporaries still Russia’s principal city), the ethnically mixed port cities of

Baku and Riga, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland. And to

this list should be added the miners of the Urals and the Don basin as well as

two groups, the railway workers and the printers, who would become very

inﬂuential politically – the former because of their rapidly expanding num-

bers and strategic locations as the empire’s railway network expanded from its

Moscow hub, the latter because of their special role as an educated middling

group located between the industrial working class and the intelligentsia.

The most dramatic manifestation of the workers’ social and political impor-

tance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If a strike is loosely

understood as any collective work stoppage carried out in deﬁance of one’s

employer, then strikes, like other worker actions (most notably ﬂight before

the expiration of a contract), certainly took place in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries. Dissatisﬁed workers put down their tools and in some

cases ﬂed both the factories and mines of their private employers and those

owned by the state. Yet before the 1870s, to the extent that government ofﬁ-

cials were disturbed by such developments at all – ﬁrst in the mid-1840sand

then again in the early 1860s – they were inﬂuenced more by the demonstra-

tion effect of developments in Western Europe and the possible destabilising

inﬂuence of the 1861 Emancipation than by actual labour unrest in Russia.

To a great degree, such unrest as there was both before and in the wake of

5 On railway workers, see Henry Reichman, Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); on workers in printing, see Mark D.

Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry,

1867–1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

620

Russian workers and revolution

the Emancipation, much of it conﬁned to railway construction workers and

Ural miners, was viewed by the authorities, and not without reason, as an

extension of peasant unrest rather than a discrete phenomenon in its own

right. Nor was it viewed very differently in the 1860s by Russia’s revolutionary

youth, whose perception of the workers was limited to the still quite accurate

notion that they were peasants who happened to be temporarily employed

away from their villages and who, like the young revolutionary populist Petr

Kropotkin, sometimes looked askance at the strike as an illusory weapon, one

that was bound to end in failure, yet if promoted by intelligenty, would implant

in workers the false hope that their lot could be improved under the existing

system.

Labour unrest among industrial workers began to be taken more seriously

by Russian ofﬁcials, publicists, and political activists of all stripes only in the

1870s, which is when the story of workers in Russia begins to become not only

a social but a political narrative. Although it would be foolish to place an exact

date on the transition, two events, both involving textile workers – one in 1870,

one in 1872 – are particularly relevant.

In 1870 there was a major strike action at what was then St Petersburg’s

largest textile mill, the Nevsky cotton-spinning factory. Although most of the

Petersburg region’s larger factories were located at the outskirts of the city,

in its industrial suburbs (with some important medium-sized factories located

in the city’s north-eastern Vyborg District), the Nevsky was exceptional in its

location near downtown St Petersburg, at a site that gave it special visibility.

In addition, the work stoppage was prolonged and sustained, was followed by

a contested, adversarially structured trial of its leaders (made possible by the

1864 judicial reforms), and was widely covered in the press (made possible by

the 1865 censorship reforms). In other words, though there had been countless

work stoppages in Russian factories before, because it took place in the middle

of the Great Reforms this was the ﬁrst such event in Russia proper to enter

the public arena and be incorporated into the new civic discourse that ﬂow-

ered during the reign of Alexander II. Strikes would henceforth be a political

issue.

We must, of course, be careful about our use of language. At the time,

the workers themselves did not use the term ‘strike’ – usually stachka or

zabastovka in the Russian of those years, but occasionally shtreik – and there

6 Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. James Allen Rogers (Garden City: Anchor

Books, 1962), pp. 110–13.

7 For a detailed analysis of the Nevsky strike and subsequent trial, see Zelnik, Labor and

Society, chapter 9.

621