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

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contrary, it seemed a mark of disillusionment and ‘impenetrable scepticism’,

of escapism and ephemeral pleasure at best.

In the countryside

The vast majority of Russians were peasants – at 85 per cent, Russia had

the highest proportion of rural dwellers in Europe on the eve of the First

World War.

A great deal of everyday peasant life had changed little since the

abolition of serfdom in 1861 and even from earlier times. Work, community,

family and religion remained the hallmarks of everyday life in the village.

Subsistence family farming and handicraft manufacture were still central to

the texture of everyday life, little changed by technological innovation. Village

life was largely controlled by the commune (obshchina or mir), acting most

often through its assembly of male heads of household. The commune held

collective title to local peasant lands and made the major decisions about land

use (what work should be done in each ﬁeld, when to do it and by which meth-

ods) and periodically, according to tradition, redistributed the holdings, which

were divided into scattered strips, among peasant families on the basis of a

calculus of hands to work and mouths to feed. The commune also carried out

a range of ﬁscal, administrative and community functions: tax collection, mili-

tary recruitment, granting or refusing permission to individuals to work away

from the village, investigating and punishing petty crimes and misdemeanours,

maintaining roads and bridges and the local church or chapel, dealing with

outsiders and caring for needy members of the community. The village com-

munity was not simply a structural fact of life, but also a cultural value, as can

be seen vividly in the collective enforcement of community values and order –

through rituals of charivari (vozhdenie), which publicly humiliated offenders

against community interests and norms, and occasional collective violence,

some of it startlingly brutal, against deviants and criminals. Community sol-

idarity was a moral value as well as a way to survive in a harsh world. The

family household remained the foundational unit of everyday peasant social

and economic life. Within the family, the male head of household exercised

enormous power: controlling, sometimes brutally, behaviour in his household,

representing the family at assemblies of the village commune, and holding vil-

lage administrative, police and judicial posts. In this patriarchal world, women

were relegated to domestic and some farming work and to ceremonial life.

35 Rossiia 1913 god: Statistiko-dokumental’nyi spravochnik (St Petersburg: Blits, 1995), pp. 23,

219.

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Russia’s ﬁn de si

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Religious life, in which women had the largest role to play, was an Orthodoxy

(though Old Belief was strong in many areas of the country and sectarian-

ism common) that complexly blended folk, magical and Church traditions.

The timing and form of rituals and celebrations, belief in the pervasiveness of

powerful unseen spirits and forces (God, saints, Satan, devils, sprites), reliance

on holy men and women (from priests to folk healers), belief in the porous

boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead and belief in the

power of material objects to embody the sacred (relics, holy water, ritual

gestures, icons, incantations, potions and herbs), all partook of both Ortho-

dox traditions and what the Church and educated Russians sometimes called

‘pagan’ residues to create a lived folk Christianity (a vital, syncretic mix poorly

captured by the notion of a ‘dual-faith’, or dvoeverie, in which an essential

paganism was only superﬁcially masked by a ‘veneer’ of Christian faith) that

helped make the worldmeaningful to peasants and give them some measure of

control.

Evidence of profound changes in the experiences and expectations of peas-

ants in these years is no less impressive. Most visibly, peasants were becoming

increasingly engaged politically, especially in the wake of the 1905 Revolution.

The abolition of serfdom had left peasants with only part of the land they

believed by right belonged to them (it was a sacred verity that land must

belong to those who work it), requiring peasants to pay rent or work for

wages on the land of others. Noble landownership declined precipitously in

these years, with peasant communes purchasing or leasing much of this land,

and there is evidence that overall peasant poverty gradually diminished. Still,

‘land hunger’, as it was widely called, and the old dream of ‘black repartition’,

the redistribution of all the land into the hands of the peasantry, remained stub-

bornly compelling, nurtured by both the relative poverty peasants felt and their

notions of moral right. ‘Disturbances’ and everyday forms of resistance con-

tinued. In the midst of the national crisis of 1905–7, when the possibilities for

change seemed high, peasants voiced their discontent and desires openly in

petitions to the government and through new political organisations such as

the All-Russian Peasant Union. They also took direct action, seizing land,

36 Ben Eklof and Stephen Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation

Culture and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia:

Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1991); Barbara Engel, Between Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia,

1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1; Stephen Frank, Crime,

Cultural Conﬂict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999).

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mark d. steinberg

taking and redistributing grain, pillaging landlords’ property and burning

manor houses.

No less important, peasants were less and less a ‘world apart’, as they

have sometimes been characterised, and more and more entwined in Russia’s

modern transformation. External changes facilitated this, though what most

decisively altered peasants’ everyday lives were their own actions and choices.

After the turn of the century, the government moved towards removing some

of the disabilities that marked peasants as a distinct and legally inferior social

estate: collective responsibility for tax payment was ended in 1903, corporal

punishment was abolished in 1904 and, in 1906, Prime Minister Petr Stolypin

promulgated a reform that allowed individual peasants to withdraw from the

commune and establish independent farmsteads, though relatively few did.

Outsiders (educated reformers, teachers, clergy and others) were increasing

in evidence in the villages, organising co-operatives, mutual assistance organ-

isations, lectures and readings, theatres and temperance organisations. The

rapid expansion of schooling and literacy and the massive rise in newspapers

and literature directed at common people (the illiterate could hear these read

and discussed in village taverns and tearooms) exposed peasants in unprece-

dented ways to knowledge of the larger world. Changing economic oppor-

tunities were especially important. Migration to industrial and urban work

touched the lives of millions of peasants – the migrants themselves but also

their kin and fellow villagers when these individuals returned to the country-

side after seasonal or temporary industrial or commercial work, or at least on

holidays, or after becoming sick or aged.

As peasants responded to these new experiences and to their own desires,

everyday peasant life visibly changed. Many peasants, especially younger men

and women who had been to the city, demonstrated new social mores (for

example, in personal and sexual relations); began wearing urban-style dress,

either bought in urban shops or hand-sewn on the model of pictures in

magazines; and purchased, or at least desired, commodities such as clocks,

urban furniture, stylish boots and hats, porcelain dishes and cosmetics. Espe-

cially for peasants able to experience life beyond the village (through work

but also reading), this new knowledge stimulated new desires and expecta-

tions. What was said of peasant women who had worked in the city can be

37 Maureen Perrie, ‘The Russian Peasant Movement in 1905–7’, in Eklof and Frank, The

World of the Russian Peasant,pp.193–218; Barbara Engel, ‘Women, Men, and Languages

of Peasant Resistance, 1870–1907’, in Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg (eds.), Cultures

in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 34–53.

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said of many individual peasants in these years whose lives were no longer

conﬁned by traditional spaces and knowledges: they were ‘distinguished by

livelier speech, greater independence, and a more obstinate character’. These

changes brought pleasure, but also potential frustration and danger.

Nation and empire

The fundamental question of Russian nationhood was also in ﬂux, and under

siege, in these years. As a political entity, of course, Russia was not a single

ethnic nation but an empire that included large numbers of Ukrainians, Poles,

Belorussians, Turkic peoples, Jews, Roma (gypsies), Germans, Finns, Lithua-

nians, Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Armenians and many others, some of

whom could claim histories of once having their own states and others who

were discovering and inventing themselves as nations. Non-Russian ‘minori-

ties’, based on native language, were already a slight majority in the empire

at the time of the 1897 census.

The empire’s national complexity was no

less visible in the strong presence, despite many restrictive laws, of ethnic and

religious minorities in urban centres, especially in business and the profes-

sions. But how was this imperial society understood? Historians have debated

the utility of categories such as empire, imperialism, colonialism, orientalism,

frontier and borderlands. At the level of state policy, certainly, it would be

foolhardy to apply any single model: the treatment of Jews, Catholic Poles,

Orthodox Ukrainians, Muslim Tatars or Uzbeks and ‘pagan’ Evenks, for exam-

ple, was not uniform. Also, local policies, driven by imperial administrators

and educators who often better understood local needs and possibilities, could

differ from the policy directives coming from St Petersburg. And individuals

were treated differently depending on their professions and their degree of

assimilation. Most of all, as recent scholars have shown, state policy towards

38 Engel, Between Fields and the City, quotation p. 82; Frank, Crime, Cultural Conﬂict, and

Justice in Rural Russia; Frank and Steinberg, Cultures in Flux, ch. 5; Brooks, When Russia

Learned to Read; Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Ofﬁcialdom, Village Culture, and Popular

Pedagogy, 1861–1914(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Jeffrey Burds, Peasant

Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); Boris Mironov (with Ben Eklof ), The Social History

of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000).

39 Of the entire population of the empire, excluding Finland, only 44.9 per cent spoke

Russian (not including Belorussian and Ukrainian, though the census viewed these

as sub-categories of Russian) as their native language. N. A. Troinitskii (ed.), Pervaia

vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897 g.,vyp.7 (St Petersburg, n.p., 1905),

pp. 1–9.

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mark d. steinberg

the empire’s peoples, even in any single case, was ‘enormously ambiguous,

variable, uncertain, and contested’.

On the one hand, the government of Nicholas II, and the tsar personally,

actively promoted a renewed Russian nationalism that often had dire conse-

quences for those deﬁned as outside the national fold. Ofﬁcial images of the

tsar’s loving communion with his ‘people’ pointedly excluded non-Russian

nationalities. Conversely, he blamed non-Russians (especially Jews) for the dis-

turbances of 1905. For Nicholas II and his nationalist allies, it was time again to

establish state and society on ‘unique Russian principles’, which meant ‘that

unity between Tsar and all Rus’ ...asthere was of old’. To speak of Russia as

Rus’, of course, was to offer up an idealised national past, a pure national Russia

before imperial expansion or Westernisation, in place of the complex realities

of Rossiia the empire.

In practice, the state had since the late 1800s been

promoting an aggressive ‘Russiﬁcation’ of non-Russian nationalities: insisting

on Russian as the language of education and administration, promoting the

settlement of ethnic Russians in the borderlands, supporting active Orthodox

missionary work and building Orthodox churches throughout the empire,

increasing quotas on Jews and some other groups in higher education, tolerat-

ing and perhaps even instigating anti-Jewish violence (‘pogroms’), reducing the

representation of non-Russian national parties in the Duma and suppressing

radical nationalist parties and demonstrations.

The government’s approach to empire and nation was not a simple matter

of Russian nationalist revivalism and the repression of the ‘Other’, however.

Indeed, ‘Russiﬁcation’ could also be a policy of trying to assimilate various

ethnic groups (or at least individuals) into a common imperial polity, and

could mean in practice limited respect for local customs, education in native

languages and an active if circumscribed role in administration or education

for non-Russians themselves, all in the pursuit of a deeper integration. Imperial

diversity was sometimes visibly celebrated in rituals such as the tsar’s corona-

tion or the arrival in the borderlands of imperial dignitaries.

But apparent

celebration of the empire’s many peoples was often entwined with a compli-

cating ideology of national hierarchy and mission. Russian national identity,

40 Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 344.

41 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. ii,p.397 (quote), 495, 497. Major-General A. Elchaninov,

The Tsar and his People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913); Steinberg and Khrustal

ev,

Fall of the Romanovs, ‘Introduction’.

42 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. ii,p.351; Dov Yaroshevskii, ‘Empire and Citizenship’,

in Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini (eds.), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and

Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 58–9.

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Russia’s ﬁn de si

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for many leaders of state and society, was constructed upon notions of Russia

as a ‘civilised’ nation bringing ‘order’ and ‘culture’ to ‘backward’ peoples. Even

the reforms of 1905–6, which stipulated religious tolerance and greater pos-

sibilities for native leaders to play active roles in civic life, were conceived as

part of the effort to integrate the various peoples of the empire into a coher-

ent whole, marked by ideals of citizenship, of a non-parochial common good,

and even of the universalism of empire.

Such talk clashed with other ofﬁcial

discourses that relegated Russia’s diversity to the shadows and focused on the

mythic recovery of the puriﬁed national spirit of old Rus’. Still, the dominant

ofﬁcial vision remained that of integration and uniformity. This was some-

times elaborated in generous and inclusive ways; but most often, especially in

the ﬁnal years of the empire, the model (however contradictory and unstable)

was a polity that was simultaneously national-Russian and imperial.

The perspectives and actions of non-Russians themselves greatly compli-

cated efforts to strengthen the empire. The late 1800s and early 1900swerea

time of widespread cultural awakening and nationalist activism. Many groups –

Poles, Ukrainians, Finns, Balts, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Muslims and

others – deﬁned themselves as ‘nations’ and organised movements seeking

cultural autonomy and perhaps an independent nation-state, though many

activists (especially socialists) saw national revival and emancipation best

served in common cause with Russians to ﬁght for civil rights and democ-

racy for all within the empire. Changes in the lives and expectations of non-

Russians, however, were not limited to the history of political and nationalist

movements. For many non-Russian communities, these were also years of

social and cultural change and exploring of new possibilities and new identi-

ties – probably more than we know, as historians are still only beginning to

recover and retell these ‘other’ Russian histories.

Among Jews, for example, we see the rise around the turn of the century

and after of schools promoting Hebrew or Yiddish (each with quite different

national agendas) along with growing numbers of Russian-educated Jews; the

emergence of a new Jewish literature, written in both Hebrew and Yiddish,

and of a Jewish periodical press; increasing secular studies in the yeshivas; the

rise of both mysticism and secularising trends within religious life; organised

political movements of both Jewish socialism, which sought a transformed

Russian Empire, and Zionism, which sought salvation in a new land; and large

numbers of Jews living and working outside the Pale of Settlement, often

43 Brower and Lazzerini (eds.), Russia’s Orient, chs. 3 and 7.

44 Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois

University Press, 1996).

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mark d. steinberg

negotiating complex new identities as ‘Russian Jews’. Boundaries (not just

of settlement but of culture) were far from stable or absolute in Jewish life in

these years: we know, for example, that religious Jews were attracted to secular

ideologies and that secular radicals might be attracted to prayer and even

mysticism. What is certain is that it was no longer possible to speak of Jewish

life in Russia, even in the Pale and least of all among the Jewish populations of

cities like Kiev, Odessa and St Petersburg, as ghettoised and tradition-bound.

Indeed, widespread anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred seemed less a timeless

response to Jewish ‘otherness’ than a reaction to Russia’s intensifying crisis

and the increasing visibility of Jews in public life.

We see a similar movement of cultural revival and reform, and of civic visi-

bility and engagement, especially after 1905, among Russia’s Muslims. Organ-

isations proliferated – including libraries, charities, credit unions, national

congresses and political unions and parties – expressing ideologies ranging

from liberalism and socialism to Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism. The drive

for cultural reform was especially strong. The Jadid (new-method) movement

in Islamic education – which grew into a widespread movement of cultural

and social reform, echoing trends throughout the Muslim world – sought

to create a new modern Muslim steeped both in a revitalised and ‘puriﬁed’

Islam and in modern cosmopolitan knowledge. A major sign and catalyst of

change was the growth of native-language publishing, including inﬂuential

magazines such as the satirical Mulla Nasreddin from Tiﬂis, which elaborated

a new hybrid discourse that blended the world-view of Western modernity

(thus, for example, satirising Muslim ‘backwardness’ and advocating women’s

rights) with Muslim identities and values (though these too were to be debated

and renewed).

Many non-Russian communities and individuals sought to articulate the

meaning of their own ‘national’ selves and their relationships to others. As an

ideal, many sought to be hybrids at once reconnected to their national and

religious traditions, free to practise this culture and faith how they wished

and imbued with a modern knowledge and identity. Others, just as fervently,

resisted challenges to tradition and viewed reformers and those with hybrid

ethnic and religious identities with hostility.The sense of crisis and opportunity

45 Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to

the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the

Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2002).

46 Geraci, Window on the East; Brower and Lazzerini, Russia’s Orient; Adeeb Khalid, The Pol-

itics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1998).

Russia’s ﬁn de si

ecle, 1900–1914

that marked so much of the Russian ﬁn de si

ecle was evident in the experience

of being a non-Russian subject of the empire, as well as in state policy towards

the nationalities ‘problem’.

Fin de si

ecle

The contemporary sense that Russian life in the early years of the twentieth

century had become deeply unstable and contradictory highlights the char-

acteristic modernity of Russia’s historical moment. Modern displacement –

of people, traditions, the order of public spaces, identities and values – was

everywhere. So was the modern ambiguity of pervading progress and col-

lapse, possibility and crisis. Historians have long debated whether pre-war

Russia was heading towards inevitable crisis and revolution or towards cre-

ating a viable civil society and a reformed political order. This chapter has

pointed to evidence for the visibility and plausibility of both narratives. But

the focus has been beneath these surfaces to a still deeper contradictoriness.

A working-class author, looking back on these years through the wake of the

war, revolution and civil war that followed, described the experience of this

age as ambiguously marked by ‘unexpected pains and joys’ and by ‘tragedies

of immense weight appearing at every step’, as a time when ‘people sicken,

go mad from exhaustion, but really live’.

As this writer understood, as late

as 1914, the greatest tragedies and joys were still to come.

47 N. Liashko, ‘O byte i literature perekhodnogo vremeni’, Kuznitsa 8 (Apr.–Sept. 1921):

29–30, 34.

The First World War, 1914–1918

mark von hagen

The Russian Empire entered what became known as the First World War in

the summer of 1914 as a Great Power on the Eurasian continent; four years

later, the Russian Empire was no more. In its place was a Bolshevik rump

state surrounded by a ring of hostile powers who shared some loyalty to the

values of the Old Regime, or a conservative version of the Provisional Gov-

ernment. The notable exception to this was Menshevik-dominated Georgia in

Transcaucasia, which pursued a moderate but socialist transformation of its

society. Although all the Central European dynastic empires (Austria-Hungary,

the Ottomans, Germany and Russia) failed to survive the suicidal war, what

succeeded the Russian Empire, namely, the Soviet socialist state, was unlike

any other successor regime. Many of the origins of that Soviet state, and the

civil war that did so much to shape it, can be traced to the preceding world

war: new political techniques and practices, the polarisation of mass politics,

the militarisation of society and a social revolution that brought to power a

new set of elites determined to transform society even further while in the

midst of mobilising for its own war of self-defence against domestic and for-

eign enemies. The war demanded unprecedented mobilisation of society and

economy against formidable enemies to the west and south. The industrial

mobilisation alone triggered ‘a crisis in growth – a modernisation crisis in thin

disguise’.

But the economic crisis, with its attendant dislocations and disrup-

tions, unfolded against the backdrop of an impressive societal recruitment;

the involvement of millions of subjects in the war effort raised demands for

political reform and exacerbated the crisis of the Old Regime.

The outbreak of war

The outbreak of war followed from the absence of any effective international

mechanisms for resolving interstate conﬂicts on the European continent

1 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 14.

The First World War, 1914–1918

after the decline of the system of ‘balance of power’. The previous diplo-

matic arrangements were predicated on no single power gaining overwhelm-

ing inﬂuence over the affairs of Europe. That balance was disrupted by the

rise of a powerful German Reich in Central Europe that was committed to

a position of world power under its aggressive emperor, Wilhelm II. Faced

with new threats on its western borders, Russia abandoned its traditional

nineteenth-century royalist alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary for

a new set of relationships, the Triple Entente, with the constitutional monar-

chy of Great Britain and republican France, in the 1890s. The immediate

casus belli was an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia after the assassination of

the Habsburg heir, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo on

28 June 1914; Russia and Austria-Hungary were divided over other issues of

growing contention as well, particularly the fate of Austrian eastern Galicia

(today’s western Ukraine), where pre-war tensions involved several sensa-

tional espionage trials and fears of annexation. Inﬂuential German elites, for

their part, developed plans to detach the western borderlands of the Russian

Empire and reduce their eastern rival to a medium-sized and non-threatening

power.

It was these western borderlands (today’s Poland, Ukraine, Belarus,

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) which witnessed the war’s most devastating

violence and whose social structures were unintentionally and dramatically

transformed even before the revolutions of 1917 proper. This set of battle-

grounds became known as the eastern front of the First WorldWarand remains

much less well known in English-language literature than the western front

that pitted Germany against France and Britain. Transcaucasia (today’s Geor-

gia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) also became another important front in the war

after the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in late October 1914.

Here, too, the war strained local resources, destroyed moderate, nascent civil

societies and pitted ethnic and social groups against one another in violent

struggles for survival.

Although most elites in Russia (as was true for the other belligerent powers)

dreaded the outcome of a major continental war, the proclamation of war in

July 1914 was greeted in educated society with a wave of patriotism and some

willingness to suspend the opposition to the obstreperous regime of Emperor

Nicholas II. Russian elites naively shared the certainty of their counterparts

across the continent that the war would be over by Christmas. The call-up

of soldiers to military service was less of a patriotic manifestation, with draft

riots and other violence providing the ﬁrst foretaste of the war’s challenge to