Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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Russia’s ﬁn de si

ecle, 1900–1914

mark d. steinberg

The critical years from the turn of the century to the eve of the First World War

were a time of uncertainty and crisis for Russia’s old political, social and cultural

order, but also a time of possibility, imagination and daring. A chronological

narrative of events is one way to retell this contradictory story. Still useful

too is rehearsing the old debate about whether Russia was heading towards

revolution in these pre-war years (the ‘pessimistic’ interpretation as it has been

named in the historiography and in much classroom pedagogy) or was on a

path, had it not been for the burdens and stresses of war, towards resolving

tensions and creating a viable civil society and an adequately reformed political

order (the ‘optimistic’ narrative). The conventional narrative of successive

events and likely outcomes, however, suggests more coherence, pattern and

telos than the times warrant. To understand these years as both an end time

and a beginning, and especially to understand the perceptions, values and

expectations with which Russians lived these years and entered the war, the

revolution and the new Soviet era, we must focus on the more complexly

textured ﬂux of everyday life and how people perceived these experiences and

imagined change.

History as event

The years 1900–14 are full of events marking these times as extraordinary years

of change and consequence. In 1903, as part of the government’s ongoing efforts

to strengthen the state by stimulating the expansion of a modern industrial

economy, the great Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, symbolising both

the growth of the railroad as an engine of industrial development (the driving

idea of the minister of ﬁnance, Sergei Witte) and the imperial reach of the

state.

In the same year, in direct opposition to this growing power of the state,

1 T. H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York: Atheneum,

1969).

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mark d. steinberg

members of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, meeting

at its second congress in Brussels and then London (the stillborn founding

congress was in 1898), created an organisation designed to incite and lead

democratic and social revolution in Russia, though it also split into twofactions,

the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, over questions of how disciplined and

closed such a party should be.

The year 1904 saw the start of the Russo-Japanese war, a disastrous conﬂict

sparked by Russia’s expansion into China and Korea in the face of Japan’s own

regional desires,further fuelled byRussianoverconﬁdence and racist contempt

for the Japanese. The assassination by revolutionaries in the summer of 1904

of the notoriously conservative minister of internal affairs, Viacheslav Plehve,

and his replacement by Prince Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who openly spoke

as few tsarist ofﬁcials had before of ﬁnding ways for the voice of ‘society’ to be

heard, initiated what many expectantly called a political ‘spring’ in relations

between state and society. A ‘banquet campaign’, inspired by the French exam-

ple of 1847–8, was staged by increasingly well-organised liberals, who gathered

over dinner and drinks to make fervent speeches and pass resolutions calling

for democratising political change.

And then came the ‘Revolution’ of 1905,an

unprecedented empire-wide upheaval, set in motion by the violent suppres-

sion on 9 January (‘Bloody Sunday’) in St Petersburg of a mass procession of

workers with a petition for the tsar. The revolution had many faces: workers’

and students’ strikes, demonstrations (both digniﬁed and rowdy) stretching

through city streets, spates of vandalism and other periodic violence, assassi-

nations of government ofﬁcials, naval mutinies, nationalist movements in the

imperial borderlands, anti-Jewish pogroms and other reactionary protest and

violence, and, by the end of the year, a series of armed uprisings, violently sup-

pressed.

These revolutionary upheavals extracted a remarkable concession

from the government: Nicholas II’s ‘October manifesto’, which for the ﬁrst

time in Russian history guaranteed a measure of civil liberties and a parliament

(the State Duma) with legislative powers.

The years following the 1905 Revolution were marked by a succession of

contradictory events. New fundamental laws in 1906 established the legislative

Duma but also restricted its authority in many ways – not least of which was the

complete lack of parliamentary control over the appointment or dismissal of

2 Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1955).

3 Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1988), pp. 53–6, 66–70.

4 Ibid.

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Russia’s ﬁn de si

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cabinet ministers. Trade unions and strikes were legalised, but police retained

extensive authority to monitor union activities and to close unions for engag-

ing in illegal political activities or even allowing political speeches at meetings.

Greater press freedom was guaranteed, but in practice was subject to constant

harassment, punitive ﬁnes and closure for overstepping the bounds of toler-

ated free speech. In the early summer of 1907, the new prime minister, Petr

Stolypin, seeking to defuse persistent criticism of the government by liberals

and the Left in the ﬁrst and second State Dumas (the ﬁrst Duma closed after

seventy-three days, the second lasted three months), revised the electoral law,

reducing representation by peasants, workers and non-Russian nationalities,

and increasing that of the gentry, hoping to ensure that the new Duma would

be more compliant. Stolypin’s ‘coup’, as it was dubbed, proved effective, in the

short term, in quietening the Duma. Stolypin was similarly effective, again at

least in the short term, in ‘pacifying’, as it was then called, continuing politi-

cal and social unrest in the country. During 1906–7, disagreeable publications

were shut down by the hundreds and summary courts martial tried and sen-

tenced hundreds of individuals accused of sedition. In the ﬁrst few months,

more than a thousand people were executed, inspiring grim ironic talk of

‘Stolypin’s necktie’ – the noose. These repressions were not without reason:

assassinations or attempts on the lives of tsarist ofﬁcials were frequent during

1906. Characteristically, Stolypin paired his political authoritarianism with a

commitment to modernising social reform in Russia, visible above all in laws

he was able to pass designed to break up the traditional peasant commune in

the hope of leading rural society away from dangerous communalism and out

of what many saw as its destabilising backwardness.

The relative stability of the years between 1907 and the start of war in 1914 –

a time when many who dreamed of change spoke of Russia as mired in polit-

ical darkness, stiﬂing repression, of bleak hopelessness – were marred (or

brightened, depending on one’s point of view) by unsettling events. Terrorist

assassinations continued, in deﬁance of Stolypin’s harsh repressions; indeed

in 1911, Stolypin himself was fatally shot, in the presence of the tsar, while

at a theatre in Kiev. The year before, the writer Lev Tolstoy’s death inspired

widespread public acts of mourning for a man who had been excommunicated

by the Orthodox Church in 1901 for his inﬂuential denial of much of Church

5 Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 1992); Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia

(Stanford,Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press,2001); Victoria Bonnell,Roots ofRebellion:Work-

ers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1983).

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mark d. steinberg

dogma and ritual in favour of an ethical religion of inward purity and virtuous

practice; adding to his sins and popularity, Tolstoy had made use of his sta-

tus as a moral prophet to openly criticise the brutality of the government of

Stolypin and Nicholas II. A new wave of strikes broke out beginning in 1910,

though especially in the wake of news of the violent death of over a hundred

striking workers attacked by government troops in 1912 in the Lena goldﬁelds

in Siberia. But perhaps the most ominous events of these years, which ﬁlled

the daily press, took place abroad. Russians closely followed the Balkan wars

of 1912 and 1913. For many, these were struggles for independence by Slavic

Orthodox nations, necessarily and justly backed by Russia. But many also saw

in these distant conﬂicts threatening signs of a much greater European war.

The political ideology of autocracy

As we look beneath the surfaces of these events, it is useful to begin with ideas

about the nature of state power in Russia, which were more complex than is

allowed by the simple deﬁnition of Russia’s political order as an ‘autocracy’.

The Fundamental Laws continued to insist that the Russian emperor (as the

tsar was also called since Peter the Great) was a monarch with ‘autocratic

and unlimited’ power, a redundancy meant to suggest both the lack of formal

bounds to his authority and the personal nature of his sacred authority and will.

In the wake of the manifesto of 17 October 1905, the stipulation that the tsar’s

authority was ‘unlimited’ was reluctantly dropped: the new Fundamental

Laws of 1906 deﬁned the monarch as holding ‘Supreme Autocratic Power’,

impressive but not ‘unlimited’, for the law also recognised the new authority

of the legislative State Duma.

In practice, even before the 1905 Revolution, the tsar’s power was not bound-

less in its reach nor could it all emanate directly from his own person. Although

all servants of the state were in theory accountable to the tsar, Russia’s legions

of ofﬁcials and bureaucrats necessarily exercised considerable practical power.

It is impossible to speak, for example, of the policies of the imperial regime in its

ﬁnal decades without recognising the inﬂuence of ministers such as Konstantin

Pobedonostsev, Sergei Witte or Petr Stolypin. Their inﬂuence, however, was

contradictory. On the one hand, Pobedonostsev, a tutor to Nicholas II as well

as to his father and the lay ofﬁcial (Chief Procurator) in charge of the Orthodox

Church from 1880 to 1905, fought vigorously and, for many years, effectively

6 Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1897), vol. i,p.2;

Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St Petersburg: Zakonovedenie, 1913), vol. i,p.2; Ascher,

The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored,pp.63–71.

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against any concessions to civil liberties and constitutionalist reform, which

he viewed as a dangerous course inspired by the fundamental philosophical

error, derived from the Enlightenment, of belief in the perfectibility of man

and society.

By contrast, Witte and Stolypin, leading government ministers,

each eventually holding the post of prime minister (Witte 1903–6 and Stolypin

1906–11) and both loyal to the principle that Russia required and that God had

willed a strong state, recognised the need for political and social reform to

restore stability to Russia after 1905. Witte’s advice, to which Nicholas turned

in desperation amidst the upheavals of 1905, was crucial to the decision to

issue the October manifesto. And without Stolypin’s ‘drive and persistence’

and ‘commanding presence’, a recent historian has written, the state’s policy

of intertwined reform and repression in the years 1906–11 is ‘inconceivable’.

Still, the tsar retained, even after 1905, substantial power. He alone appointed

and dismissed ministers and he, not the Duma, controlled the bureaucracy,

foreign policy, the military and the Church. He retained, by law, veto power

over all legislation, the right to dissolve the Duma and hold new elections,

and the right to declare martial law. He felt growing regret in his ﬁnal years

for the concessions he made in 1905–6 under duress and did much to undo

them. Indeed, it has been argued persuasively that Nicholas II (supported

and encouraged by prominent conservative ﬁgures) was ultimately a force

for instability in the emerging political order of late Imperial Russia. While

ministers like Witte and Stolypin and the legislators of the Duma worked to

construct a stable polity around the ideal of a modernised autocracy ruling

according to law and over a society of citizens, Nicholas II was at the forefront

of those embracing a political vision that sought to resituate legitimate state

power in the person of the emperor. To put this in more political-philosophical

terms, ‘rather than accommodating the monarchy to the demands for a civic

nation’, Nicholas II and his allies ‘redeﬁned the concept of nation to make it a

mythical attribute of the monarch’.

As a symbolic and performative accompaniment to these ideas, and to

quite tangible policies of authoritarian control, the last tsar engaged in an

elaborate effort to demonstrate publicly that the legitimacy and even efﬁcacy

of his immense authority was grounded not in constitutional relationships

with various constituencies of the nation or the empire but in his own personal

7 Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow, 1896), trans. as Reﬂections of

a Russian Statesman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965); Robert Byrnes,

Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968).

8 Ascher, P. A. Stolypin,p.392; Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored,p.263.

9 Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. ii

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 12.

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virtue (devotion to duty, orderliness in private and public life, familial devotion

and love, religious piety) and in the mystical bond of mutual devotion and love

uniting tsar and ‘people’ (by which was meant mainly those whom Nicholas

called the ‘true Russian people’). Public rituals of national ‘communion’ and

‘love’, often gesturing to an idealised pre-modern past, proliferated, such as

Easter celebrations in the pre-Petrine capital of Moscow signalling the tsar’s

communion with the nation and tradition, or journeys of remembrance and

dynastic nationalism into the Russian heartland during the 1913 tercentenary of

Romanov rule, or the ceremony on Palace Square at the outbreak of war in 1914

when Nicholas, with tears in his eyes, exchanged ritual bows with his people.

Nicholas II was not alone, of course, in imagining Russia’s salvation to lie in

an ideal of the paternal state standing above society – free and independent of

government bureaucracy, fractious political parties, selﬁsh social groups and

individuals and even law itself – to defend the common good, care for the poor

and downtrodden and advance principle over vested interest. Ultimately, the

ofﬁcial embrace of this vision of the Russian political nation would contribute

to the rejection of monarchy in 1917. But its echoes would also play a part in

how state and party were envisioned later in the twentieth century.

Intellectuals and ideologies of dissent

Russia’s growing class of educated men and women offered a wealth of alter-

native visions of power and society to those of the monarch, the state and

their conservative supporters. In spirit, many educated liberals and radicals

in the early twentieth century felt themselves to be heirs to the traditions of

the nineteenth-century ‘intelligentsia’, a group distinguished not by education

alone, nor even by a shared interest in ideas, but by a cultural and political

identity constituted in opposition to a repressive order and in the pursuit of

the common good and universal values. Like these forebears, they often suf-

fered as individuals for daring to criticise and act against the established order.

Still, they managed to meet together, to form clandestine ‘circles’ (kruzhki),

and to organise a series of oppositional parties, ranging from liberals to Social

Democrats and neo-populists to militant communists and anarchists.

10 Ibid., vol. ii, chs. 9–14; Andrew Verner, The Crisis of the Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II

and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Dominic Lieven,

Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); Mark Steinberg,

‘Introduction’, in Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustal

ev, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political

Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1995).

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On the moderate Left, liberals were divided over strategy and tactics –

reﬂected especially in the post-1905 split between the Left-liberal Constitu-

tional Democratic Party (Kadets) and the relatively pro-government Union

of 17 October (Octobrists). But they shared a common set of goals for trans-

forming Russia into a strong and modern polity: the rule of law replacing

the arbitrary will of autocrat, bureaucrats and police; basic civil rights (free-

dom of conscience, religion, speech, assembly) for all citizens of the empire;

a democratic parliament (Kadets viewed the system established after 1905 as

incomplete); strong local self-government (many liberals were involved in

the zemstvo councils of rural self-government or in city councils); and social

reforms to ensure social stability and justice, such as extension of public edu-

cation, moderate land reform to make more land available to peasants and

protective labour legislation. They also believed strongly in the need for per-

sonal moral transformation, making individuals into modern selves inspired

by values of individual initiative, self-reliance, self-improvement, discipline and

rationality. In many respects, like the monarchy itself, liberals viewed them-

selves as acting for the national good rather than the interests of any particular

class. This was especially true of the Kadets, who vehemently insisted that they

were ‘above class’ and even ‘above party’. The good they sought to promote

was, of course, the good of the individual – a liberal touchstone – but also

the development of a national community founded on free association and

patriotic solidarity.

Socialists shared the democratic goals of the liberals as well as the philo-

sophical logic underpinning liberal democracy: that political and social change

ought to promote the freedom and dignity of the human person by removing

the social, cultural and political constraints that hindered the full develop-

ment of the individual. But socialists approached this ideal with the radical

insistence that only a transformation root and branch of all social and political

relationships, and of the values informing these, could set Russia on the path

to true emancipation. Indeed, dissatisﬁed with the anomic logic of liberal indi-

vidualism (though many Russian liberals also worried about the dangers of

excessive individualism), socialists favoured linking self-realisation with com-

munal notions of solidarity and interdependent interests.

11 Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1973); William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Con-

stitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),

pt. 1; Richard Pipes, Struve, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970

and 1980).

mark d. steinberg

Various underground socialist organisations emerged in the early years of

the century. Populist socialists were organised after 1901 around the Socialist

Revolutionary Party (the SRs) and partlyrepresentedafter1906 by the Trudovik

(Labourist) faction in the State Duma. Ideologically, they viewed the whole

labouring narod, the common people, as their constituency, and socialism

as a future society embodying, above all, the ethical values of community

and liberty. Marxists, who were increasingly numerous and inﬂuential and

organised around the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, believed

they possessed a more ‘scientiﬁc’ and rationalistic understanding of society

and history. Socialism, for Marxists, was the historically certain, and more

rational and progressive, successor to capitalism, and the industrial proletariat

alone, not some idealised ‘people’, was the social class whose interests and

efforts would bring this new order into being. This simple divide between

populists and Marxists inadequately suggests the intricate divisions among

socialists, though. Populists differed among themselves over issues such as

the use of terror, the actual vitality and theoretical importance of peasant

communalism and whether and on what terms to ally with liberals. Marxists

differed among themselves – often with considerable rancour – over questions

of organisation (how centralised and authoritarian the party should be), tactics

(such as whether workers should ally with other classes), strategy (whether

Russia was ready for socialism) and philosophy (e.g. the relative importance

of ethics and revolutionary faith versus scientiﬁc reason).

The intellectual differences between two leading Marxists, Vladimir

Ul’ianov (known by his party pseudonym Lenin) and Iulii Tsederbaum

(Martov), illustrate some of the diversity and complexity that lay behind party

programmes. In many ways, Martov ﬁtted well into the long history of the

Russian intelligentsia, especially in his passionate preoccupation with the idea

of justice. When he discovered Marxism, he found compelling not only Marxist

arguments about the natural progress of history and the centrality of the work-

ing class but the moral idealism embedded in this rationalist ideology: an end to

inequality and suffering, injustice and coercion and Russia’s humiliating back-

wardness as a nation.

Lenin also approached politics with passion, but his was

12 Haimson, The Russian Marxists;OliverRadkey,The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1958); Abraham Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of

Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Manfred Hildermeier,

The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War (New York: St Martin’s

Press, 2000).

13 Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1967); Haimson, The Russian Marxists.

Russia’s ﬁn de si

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a passion more of reason than of moral sensibility, focused more on the goal of

liberation than on the uplifting process of struggle. Indeed, Lenin repeatedly

made it clear that he despised the political moralising so common to Russian

socialism. For Lenin, the revolution was a matter of rationality and discipline

not the romantic heroism of the struggle for justice, goodness and right.

These different sensibilities were reﬂected in different approaches to key

political notions. Everyone, it seemed, from liberals to radical socialists,

embraced democracy. Martov – and perhaps most Russian Marxists in the

pre-war years – was attracted to Marxism precisely for its democratic promise.

They believed that political representation and civil freedoms were goods in

themselves, though necessarily needing to be supplemented by the democ-

racy of social rights. Lenin, by contrast, was among those who embraced

social and political democracy as a goal, but not for its own sake. Rather,

Lenin argued, Bolsheviks viewed political democracy as having mainly instru-

mental value, as enabling workers more effectively to ﬁght for socialism. Along

similar lines, while Martov was among those who believed strongly in what

might be called the consciousness-raising beneﬁts of the experience of struggle

(hence his opposition in 1903 to Lenin’s advocacy of a vanguard party limited

to disciplined professional revolutionaries), Lenin emphasised the centrality

in raising consciousness of imposed rationality and leadership. As he famously

argued in What Is To Be Done (1902), left to themselves workers were unable

to see beyond the economic struggle and understand that their interests lay

in overthrowing the existing social system.

If socialists were to do more than

‘gaze with awe . . . upon the “posterior” of the Russian proletariat’,

Lenin

wrote in his characteristically biting style, it was necessary to create a party

(and later critics would suggest that this was the kernel of Lenin’s approach

to the Soviet state) of full-time revolutionaries to direct the mass movement,

who embodied the full consciousness that the masses lacked and were obe-

dient to party discipline. In practice, these differences were not absolute. By

the eve of the war, both parties were to be found playing large and similar

roles among workers: helping to establish and lead workers’ organisations

and spreading socialist ideas among workers, students and others through

underground publications and everyday agitational talk. And the results were

14 V. I. Lenin, ‘Who Are the “Friends of the People” ’ (1894), PSS, vol. i,pp.325–31, 460;

Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. i (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);

Haimson, The Russian Marxists.

15 V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902), in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Lenin Anthology (New

York: Norton, 1975), pp. 12–114.

16 Lenin, What Is To Be Done?,p.65.