A people's tragedy

The outcome could have been different. During the last decades of the old regime a public sphere was emerging which, given enough time and freedom to develop, might have transformed Russia into a modern constitutional society. The institutions of this civil society — public bodies, newspapers, political parties — were all growing at enormous speed. Western concepts of citizenship, of law and private property, were starting to take root. Not even the peasants were left untouched, as the story of Semenov’s reform efforts in the village of Andreevskoe shows. To be sure, the new political culture was fragile and confined largely to the tiny urban liberal classes; and, as the events of 1905 showed, it was always likely to be swept away by the bloody violence of the ‘serfs’ revenge’. But there were enough signs of modern social evolution to suggest that Russia’s power question might have been resolved in a peaceful way. Everything depended on the tsarist regime’s willingness to introduce reforms. But there was the rub. Russia’s last two Tsars were deeply hostile to the idea of a modern constitutional order. As Russia moved towards the twentieth century, they sought to return it to the seventeenth, ruling Russia from the court and trying to roll back the modernizing influence of the bureaucracy. The archaic privileges of the noble estate were increasingly defended by the court and its supporters against the logic of a modern social order based on the ownership of property, which Stolypin had tried to introduce. As a result a violent peasant revolution became almost inevitable. The civil liberties and parliamentary rights extracted from the Tsar in October 1905 were successively withdrawn by the autocracy once the revolutionary danger passed, with the result that a constitutional resolution of the power question became virtually impossible. Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis: decent-minded liberals like Prince Lvov were forced into the revolutionary camp by the regime’s idiotic policy of blocking the initiatives of patriotic public bodies such as the zemstvos; self-improving workers like Kanatchikov, deprived of the right to defend their class interests through legal parties and trade unions, were forced into the revolutionary underground; and those non-Russians who had wanted more rights for their national culture were driven by the tsarist policies of Russification to demand their nation’s independence from Russia. The tsarist regime’s downfall was not inevitable; but its own stupidity made it so.

The First World War was a gigantic test of the modern state, and as the only major European state which had failed to modernize before the war it was a test which tsarist Russia was almost bound to fail. The military establishment was too dominated by the court’s own loyal aristocrats for more competent generals like Brusilov to assume command of the country’s war effort; the military-industrial complex, to adopt a Cold War phrase, was too closely (and corruptly) linked with the bureaucracy to create a competitive war economy; while the tsarist regime was far too jealous of its powers to allow the sort of public war initiatives from which other powers derived so much strength. But the regime’s overwhelming shortcoming was its utter failure to muster the patriotism of its peasant soldiers, who for the most part felt little obligation to fight for the Russia beyond their own native region, and even less to fight for the Tsar. This was the ultimate proof of the regime’s failure to build a modern state: the ordinary peasant did not feel that he was subject to its laws. The tsarist regime paid the price for this with its own downfall — as, in their own way, did the democratic leaders of 1917. They also tied their fortunes to the war campaign in the naive belief that the ‘patriotic masses’ might at last be called upon to carry out their duty to the nation now that it was free. But their belief in the ‘democratic nation’ turned out to be equally illusory; and the summer offensive, just like all the previous fighting, underlined the fact that there were two Russias, the privileged Russia of the officers and the peasant Russia of the conscripts, which were set to fight each other in the civil war.