20.1 Russia on the Eve of the Revolution

         On May 26, 1896, following two years of official mourning, Nicholas Romanov, the son of the late Alexander III, was officially crowned Autocrat of all the Russias (the czar's official title) according to the rite of the Russian Orthodox Church. Nicholas II's reign began on a troubled note. It was a Russian tradition that on the occasion of the coronation gifts be distributed among the people on behalf of the new czar.  As the crowds pressed forward to receive the gifts, the police lost control and a thousand were killed or injured in a panicked crush of humanity.  Rather than interrupt the ceremonies of the occasion and look to the needs of his subjects, Nicholas continued the schedule of events.  It was important, his advisors cautioned, to show the people that he would be firm. Despite the tragedy, he attended a coronation ball at the French embassy that same evening. Nicholas was a ruler who, to use today's colloquialism, "just didn't get it." 

            History finds Nicholas II to be weak, indecisive, and stubborn; well-meaning but lacking good sense; a loving family man.  He was either insensitive to or afraid of royal responsibility.  He once confided that he hated being monarch and would have much preferred to be a sailor. In both his private and public life he was dominated by his wife, Czarina Alexandra.  The daughter of a German prince, Alexandra was strong willed and resolute.  She loved the luxury and majesty of Russian royalty and adapted well to the political traditions of Russia, demanding that Nicholas do his duty as czar and exercise his absolutism fully and with resolve. Nicholas loved her deeply, and the couple doted on their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and their young son, Alexis (born, 1904).  As czarevich (crown prince), Alexis represented the future of the Romanov monarchy.  As the little boy was hemophilic, his well-being became an overwhelming obsession for both his parents. The story of Nicholas and Alexandra is one of great personal tragedy set on the background of a Russia undergoing a serious crisis of identity and direction.

            The Russia that Nicholas inherited was the largest country in the world.  Stretching from the Polish borders of Germany in the west to China and the Pacific in the east, it crossed twelve time zones.  In it lived some 125 million people, mostly peasants farming lands that historically had belonged to the crown, Church, and nobility.  Beyond Russia itself, the czar's empire included a wide range of differing cultures and nationalities: Poles, Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, and millions of Muslim Central Asians. Russia's spiritual heart was the city of Moscow, but its capital was St. Petersburg, a city on the Baltic coast near Finland that Czar Peter the Great had ordered built in 1703 as Russia's "Window to the West."  There, a huge bureaucracy of officials and clerks laboriously operated the government that responded to and implemented the czar's will. 

            The title czar (derived from the Latin title, Caesar) was adopted by Russia's absolute rulers in the 1400s.  Since 1613 the Russian crown was the hereditary possession of the Romanov family whose rulers included such monumental figures as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I (who defeated Napoleon), and Alexander II (who freed the serfs).  The czars ruled with an absolutism unparalleled in other countries. The czar's word was law; his will was that of God.  His power was based upon both the support of the Russian Orthodox Church and a tradition of intimidation and terror exercised by a dedicated and experienced secret police force. There was no allowing for political dissent.  Any and all opposition to the czar's government was illegal.  Those who opposed the government did so through conspiracy and violence and at very great risk.  The czar's police very effectively infiltrated every aspect of society.  Arrest meant instant conviction.  There was no system of constitutional justice, no presumption of innocence.  Conviction meant death or exile to the wilds of Siberia, the vast desolate stretches of pine barrens east of the Urals.

             The Church had long functioned as an arm of the state.  The traditions of Russian Orthodoxy were rooted in the ancient Byzantine origins from which they came.  The Church saw the Russian soul as best served by a primitive spiritual innocence that denied all things modern.  Salvation was through simple faith in the revealed word of God as interpreted by the Church.  For centuries, the Church’s liturgical language had been Old Slavonic, a language akin to Macedonian and far removed from the Greek intellectual heritage.  Even at the start of the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church resisted reform and remained committed to the belief that knowledge was sinful.  Scientific knowledge or educated critical thinking had no place in the Russian soul.  For millions of Russians the greatest virtues were love of and obedience to God and love of and obedience to the czar. 

            The reign of Nicholas' father, Alexander III (1881-1894), had been one of reactionary repression stemming from the assassination of his father, Alexander II.  Alexander II (1855-1881) had freed the great mass of Russian peasants from serfdom and authorized other reforms including the creation of elected regional and city governments. His brutal assassination by radicals who felt his reforms had not gone far enough caused his successor to revoke many of the reforms and tighten czarist controls.  The main figure behind both Alexander III and Nicholas' policies of repression was Konstantin Pobesdonostsev, Procurator of the Church's ruling body, the Holy Synod. 

            Pobesdonostsev saw religion as the means to restore the spiritual communion between the Russian people and the czar.  Essential to Pobesdonostsev's program was a policy of active "Russification."  The non-Russian peoples of the empire were both viewed and treated as cultural inferiors.  The Polish, Turkic, Central Asian, Mongol, and Jewish populations were subjected to intensive programs of "Russification."  Under threat of persecution, loss of property, and other repressive measures they were forced to adopt the Russian language and join the Orthodox Church.  The Jewish populations in the Ukraine and Moscow were severely persecuted through government pogroms in 1887 and 1891.  Pobesdonostsev's policies were continued by Nicholas II until the procurator's death in 1907.

            Another legacy of Alexander III continued by Nicholas was industrialization. Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856), had caused Alexander II to see the need for Russia to modernize its economy.  To do this would require a population free to leave the land and work in industry.  To this end, Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861.  Both his son and grandson took an active interest in economic development and encouraged the growth of Russian industry.  Alexander III entered into negotiations with France, and the resulting agreements secured French credit and opened Russia to French investment opportunities.  Such opportunities were offered to other nations as well, and Russian industry, stimulated by this influx of foreign capital, began rapidly to expand.  By 1914 there would be some two million Russians working the new factories, mines, and railroads.  When the First World War broke out later that year, Russia had become the world's fifth largest industrial power.

            Unlike other industrial countries where industrialization was the natural outcome of already existing economic and social conditions, industrialization in Russia was initiated as state policy.  Russia had no commercial middle class, no tradition of private enterprise, no ready availability of capital for business investment.

             As recently as 1861 Russia had been an agricultural feudal society wherein vast estates owned by the crown, Church, and nobility were worked by millions of peasants under conditions of serfdom that literally made them slaves.  Serfs could not leave the lands on which they were born and lived. They could not marry without the consent of their landlords.  They owed their landlords their labor and shares of the crops they produced.  They could be bought and sold or given away at will by their owners.  They could be conscripted into the czar's armies and sent off to fight in foreign wars. They could be drafted and sent hundreds of miles from their home villages to quarry stone, clear forests, build cities, palaces, roads, or canals. To protest was futile. It was, the Church affirmed, the will of God. In 1861 Alexander II ended serfdom and the estates were broken up, but little changed.  Instead of the feudal landlord, the mir, the local farming village, became the arbiter of an individual's fate.  Because the mirs had to provide the payments that compensated the former feudal landlords for the loss of their lands, one was not free to leave. The village councils decided who could leave the land and go to the cities to work in the factories. Those permitted to leave had to give up all claims to the lands they held.  Often peasants who were allowed by their mirs to go to the cities had to return home to help with the harvest.  Industrialization, therefore, could not begin on its own.  It was dependent upon government policy.

            For Russian industrial workers, government encouragement of economic expansion did not mean improvement in the quality of life.  Working and living conditions for the new factory class were similar to those of Britain and France over a century earlier.  Russian laborers worked long hours for low wages under poor and unsafe working conditions.  They lived in crowded unsanitary slums in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and the mining cities of the Ukraine.  Because the state was a major player in business, workers in state-owned industries were housed in military-like barracks and marched to and from their job sites. The formation of unions and strikes were forbidden by law.  Worker resentment and dissatisfaction were widespread, but because of strict state censorship and police controls, there were no legal means for labor to vent its frustration.  Strikes were brutally suppressed.  Many workers, consequently, were attracted by the propaganda appeal of such secretive groups as the Social Democrats, a Marxist party that advocated working class revolution.

            Expatriate Russian Marxists, led by Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, founded the Russian Social Democratic Party in Switzerland in 1883.  The Social Democrats drew their adherents from populists who were philosophically attracted to the plight and cause of industrial labor.  The Social Democrats, however, rejected Slavophilic romanticism and looked for philosophical inspiration to the West, particularly the German Social Democratic Party.  In 1898 the Social Democrats began formal efforts to build a party structure in Russia.  Because of the czarist secret police, they continued, however, to hold their party congresses (meetings) in the West.  It was at the London congress in 1903 that Lenin’s followers proclaimed themselves the Bolshevik (bolshevik means “majority”) faction of the Party.  Despite their self-proclaimed label, the Bolsheviks were a minority. The majority of Social Democrats were labeled as Menshevik (“menshevik” actually means “minority”).

            A new but small business and managerial class began to emerge that profited greatly from the changing economy, but it too resented government controls. This new middle class wanted a voice in the making of economic policy and hoped for such reforms as constitutional government and a Russian parliament in which they would be represented. Their appeal fell on deaf ears as the czar had no intention of sharing power. In frustration, a small group of intellectuals from the middle class illegally founded their own political party, the Union of Liberation which later took the name Constitutional Democratic Party (popularly called the “Kadets”).  In addition, the peasants, long resenting the conditions of serfdom and the fact that liberation from serfdom did not mean direct ownership of land, were represented by a secretive radical group calling itself the Social Revolutionary Party. 

          In the late19th century opposition came largely from Russia’s Slavophilic “populist” movement that had a mystical faith in the virtue and strength of Russia’s peasant culture.  The populists concentrated their attention on peasant problems and peasant welfare.  From the populists emerged the Social Revolutionary Party in 1901.  The Social Revolutionaries admired the communal socialism of the mir and were attracted to Marx and Engels but believed the peasants were also a revolutionary class.  The Social Revolutionaries did not believe that capitalism should precede socialism.  It was a Social Revolutionary who assassinated the reformist Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911.

            Unable to operate in the open, the political opposition parties functioned as underground conspiracies struggling to build their support through propaganda attacking the abuses of the czarist regime. The Social Revolutionaries, Marxists, and Constitutional Democrats would have little impact on influencing change.  The czar's police easily infiltrated these groups with agents and informers. In fact, the police were so efficient that their spies sometimes sat as trusted members of the parties' governing councils!   Often police agents urged the parties to call for strikes or to organize anti-government demonstrations in order to bring them into the open and reveal their followers.  Arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Siberia were among the fates waiting the unsuspecting. In 1905 the opposition parties had the opportunity to act.  War had broken out between Russia and Japan. 

            Russian imperial interests in the Far East had caused increased friction with Japan.  Both nations coveted the northern Chinese region of Manchuria and neighboring Korea.  Russia wanted Manchuria as it would provide easy railroad access to Port Arthur, the Russian warm-water treaty port secured from China in 1898. Japan wanted control of Manchuria in order to protect its newly-established (1895) protectorate over Korea.  Nicholas II had been encouraged to press Russian interests in Manchuria and Korea by his cousin, William II, the German Kaiser.  The German interest in Russian eastward expansion was motivated by the Kaiser's intent to refocus Russian attentions away from Europe and its alliance with France.  Through the famous "Nicky - Willy" correspondence, William inspired in Nicholas the vision of a Russian "holy mission," a crusade to protect the West from and bring civilization to the eastern "yellow" barbarians.  The popular Western perceptions of Japan held that the Japanese were simple, quaint Orientals who wore colorful kimonos and high platform shoes. In reality, Japan was fast becoming a highly industrialized society with a modern military force.  Having soundly defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the Japanese pursued their imperialist goals in the region: to dominate China, secure Manchuria, and annex Korea.  Seeing Russia as a threat to its security, Japan launched war in February 1904 by attacking without warning and destroying the Russian Pacific Fleet stationed at Port Arthur. 

            Russia's experience in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was one of defeat and humiliation.  Fought in distant Manchuria, the war was a logistical nightmare that required that troops and supplies be sent across the total expanse of Siberia.  The new Trans-Siberian railroad was not yet fully completed and what did exist was only a single set of tracks. Trains moving in opposite directions could not pass except on special sidings which often had to be built when the trains met!  Locomotives that broke down in isolated regions had to be abandoned for lack of repair facilities or spare parts.   Lacking adequate equipment and reinforcements, the Russian armies in China were easily beaten by the well-equipped Japanese. To add further insult to injury, the Russian Baltic Fleet made an 18,000-mile voyage around Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and along the coasts of China only to be destroyed in a single battle by the Japanese navy in the Tsu-Shima Strait off Korea.  The war was ended through American mediation in the late summer of 1905.  (For the resulting Treaty of Portsmouth, US President Theodore Roosevelt would receive the Nobel Peace Prize.)   On the background of the war with Japan came the Revolution of 1905.

            In January 1905, workers in St. Petersburg led by Father Georgi Gapon, a reformist priest who may have been a secret police agent, organized a march to the Winter Palace to protest working conditions and continuation of the war.  The palace guard opened fire on the marchers and some 500 were killed or injured.  This "Bloody Sunday" massacre galvanized the opposition. When the czar offered to broaden the government by forming a Duma (assembly) with only advisory power, the workers took to the streets with strikes and further demonstrations. Led by the Menshevik wing of the Marxist Social Democrats, they joined forces and formed the Soviet of Workers' Deputies to organize and direct the opposition.  Under the leadership of Lev Bronstein (who later took the name Leon Trotsky), the Soviet called for a general strike that paralyzed the city.  Units of demoralized soldiers and sailors returning from the war also joined the opposition. 

            In October, Nicholas offered concessions. His "October Manifesto" called for the creation of an elected Duma with legislative powers and granted the Russian people civil liberties and the freedoms of assembly, speech, and press.  Not trusting the czar, the Marxists regarded the October Manifesto with suspicion.  The Constitutional Democrats, however, accepted it as a significant constitutional achievement and ended their opposition.  The Soviet was dissolved and the Revolution of 1905 came to an end. Satisfied that the crisis had passed, the czar entrusted his new, reformed government to ministers who themselves remained committed to autocracy.  The middle class would have its voice in government and come to regard further working class pressure for reform as counterproductive.  For Russian workers, the middle class now became part of the repressive regime that sought to keep them in slavery.

            The Russian peasantry was also a source of potential revolutionary unrest. There existed a “land-hunger,” an antagonism between those peasants who worked the land and the “gentry” landlords whose estates comprised some 400 million acres.  The reforms Nicholas’ Prime Minister Peter Stolypin (1906-1911) permitted peasants to buy land from the mirs and to leave the mirs to seek work elsewhere.  These reforms gave rise to a new class of wealthy peasants called kulaks (“big farmers”) and contributed to the growth of the urban working class as less-enterprising peasants sought jobs in the industrial cities.  Despite Stolypin’s reforms, conditions remained relatively unchanged for most peasants. Although there was no peasant unrest in the two decades before World War I, the potential for unrest seemed to hang in the background.  There remained as legend in peasant memory the massive peasant rebellions led by Stefan Razin and Pugachev in the 17th and 18th centuries.

            The story of Nicholas II's reign now became part of the events that would sweep it away, the Russian Revolution. Forces unknown and unrecognized by the czar had already begun to take shape.  An obscure Marxist revolutionary calling himself Lenin would by 1903 have become leader of the Social Democratic Party's Bolshevik faction.  Lenin had already developed the ideas that the historical process could be accelerated and that proletarian revolution could take place in an economy that had not fully made the transition to bourgeois capitalism. A simple look at Russia's working class revealed a proletariat as exploited as any in recent history. It was already a revolutionary class.  Lenin's Bolsheviks, disciplined, tightly organized, and committed to their revolutionary purpose, waited their opportunity to strike.  Unknowingly, Nicholas would serve their interests well. In late July 1914 his government began a general mobilization of its armed forces in response to the Austrian declaration of war against Russia's Balkan ally, Serbia.  The First World War was about to begin.

Illustration of Nicholas and family is from Wikipedia.

Sources for Russia on the Eve of the Revolution are found among those listed at the end of Section 20.2.