A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

First, the reforms made relatively little headway in moving Russia towards a constitutional parliamentary order. Indeed some of Stolypin's own methods — such as the coup d'etat of June 1907 and his tactics over the Western Zemstvo Bill — were a flagrant abuse of that system's ideals. True, there were some gains in civil liberties, in the freedom of the press, and in the fact that the Duma itself continued to exist, if only as a symbol and a school for the new culture of constitutionalism, between 1906 and 1914.* But this hardly meant that tsarist Russia was necessarily moving towards some sort of Western liberal normality. The nature of the tsarist regime was the single biggest guarantee of its own political irreformability. The Muscovite ideology of patrimonial autocracy which Nicholas and the Rightists increasingly favoured was deeply hostile to the Western constitutional vision entailed in Stolypin's programme of reforms; and the entrenched powers of the court, together with the vested interests of the Church and the provincial nobility, were quite strong enough to prevent that programme from ever being realized. Once the revolutionary crisis of 1905—7 had passed, the monarchy no longer needed the protection of Stolypin, and increasingly detached itself from his government, paralysed its programme,

* This last cultural aspect was a crucial one — and itself a sign of the mountain to be climbed — for the introduction of a constitutional order in a country such as Russia which then (as today) had no real traditions of constitutionalism. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a pre-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society — and the state itself — into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.

and began to pursue its own separate agenda, based increasingly after 1912 on the use of Russian nationalism to rally 'the loyal people' behind the throne.

Second, by 1912, if not before, it had already become clear that no package of political reforms could ever resolve the profound social crisis that had caused the first crack in the system during 1905. True, for a while, largely as a result of government repressions, the labour movement subsided and showed signs of greater moderation, enough to give grounds for the Menshevik hope that it might evolve on European lines. But in the two years after 1912 there was a dramatic increase in both the number of industrial strikes and in their level of militancy, culminating in July 1914 with a general strike in St Petersburg, where in the midst of a state visit by the French President there was street fighting and barricades. The workers of the capital cities, according to Leo Haimson's seminal work of thirty years ago, were rapidly turning away from all the democratic parties — including even the Mensheviks — which advocated the adoption of constitutional or gradualist methods, and were moving over to the Bolsheviks, who encouraged direct workers' action and a violent struggle against the regime.²² Despite all the efforts at political reform, urban Russia on the eve of the First World War found itself on the brink of a new and potentially more violent revolution than the 'dress rehearsal' of 1905.

in The Wager on the Strong

The exiled peasant returned to his village on a cold April morning in 1908. It had taken him nearly three days by train, horse and cart to travel the one hundred miles from Moscow, and as he neared his birthplace his hopes of finding some improvement made during his two years of absence increased. But the village of Andreevskoe had never been a dynamic sort of place. The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sights of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay. The black strips of ploughed land seemed narrower and more ragged than ever, the tussocks in the meadow had grown to the size of small bushes, the woods had been cut down, the cattle allowed to roam freely over the gardens, and weeds sprouted in the main village street. Semenov's neighbour, once a hard-working peasant, had taken to the bottle, while his eight children went without shoes. But what depressed Semenov most was to learn that the elders of the village were the same old patriarchs who had been there when he left. For they would now have even more reason to regard his plans for reform with hostility and mistrust.²³

Chief among the elders was Grigorii Maliutin, a heavy-built and heavy-drinking septuagenarian, with a big red-blistered face and a long white beard,