A people's tragedy

The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good. After a century dominated by the twin totalitarianisms of Communism and Fascism, one can only hope that this lesson has been learned. As we enter the twenty-first century we must try to strengthen our democracy, both as a source of freedom and of social justice, lest the disadvantaged and the disillusioned reject it again. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that the emerging civil societies of the former Soviet bloc will seek to emulate the democratic model. This is no time for the sort of liberal-democratic triumphalism with which the collapse of the Soviet Union was met in many quarters in the West. Reformed (and not-so-reformed) Communists may be expected to do well electorally — and may even be voted back into power — as long as the mass of the ordinary people remain alienated from the political system and feel themselves excluded from the benefits of the emergent capitalism. Perhaps even more worrying, authoritarian nationalism has begun to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Communism, and in a way has reinvented it, not just in the sense that today’s nationalists are, for the most part, reformed Communists, but also in the sense that their violent rhetoric, with its calls for discipline and order, its angry condemnation of the inequalities produced by the growth of capitalism, and its xenophobic rejection of the West, is itself adapted from the Bolshevik tradition.

The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.

IMAGES OF AUTOCRACY

1 St Petersburg illuminated for the Romanov tercentenary in 1913. This electric display of state power was the biggest light show in tsarist history.

2 The imperial family rides from the Winter Palace to the Kazan Cathedral for the opening ceremony of the tercentenary.

3 Nicholas II rides in public view for the first time since the 1905 Revolution.

4 The famous Yeliseev store on Nevsky Prospekt is decorated for the tercentenary.

5 Guards officers greeting the imperial family at the Kazan Cathedral. Note the icons, the religious banners, and the crosses of the onlookers.

6 Townspeople and peasants come to see the Tsar in Kostroma during the tercentenary provincial tour.

7 The court ball of 1903 was a landmark in the cult of ancient Muscovy. Each guest dressed in the seventeenth-century costume of his twentieth-century rank. The Tsar and Tsarina are standing in the centre of the front row.

8 The Temple of Christ’s Resurrection on the Catherine Canal – a hideous example of the last tsars’ efforts to ‘Muscovitize’ St Petersburg.

9 Trubetskoi’s bronze statue of Alexander III on Znamenskaia Square in St Petersburg. The workers called it ‘the hippopotamus’.

10 The Moscow statue of Alexander III – with its back to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – at its opening ceremony in 1913.

11 The imperial family (right to left): Olga, Tatyana, Nicholas, Alexandra, Maria, Alexis and Anastasia.

12 Rasputin with his admirers. Anna Vyrubova, the closest friend of both Rasputin and the Empress, is standing fifth from left.

13 The Tsarevich Alexis with his playmate and protector, the sailor Derevenko. After the February Revolution Derevenko joined the Bolsheviks.

EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER THE TSARS

14 The city mayors of Russia in St Petersburg for the tercentenary in 1913.

15 The upholders of the patriarchal order in the countryside: a group of volost elders in 1912.

16 A newspaper kiosk in St Petersburg, 1910. There was a boom in newspapers and pamphlets as literacy expanded and censorship was relaxed following the 1905 Revolution.

17 A grocery store in St Petersburg, circa 1900. Note the icon in the top-left corner, a sign of the omnipresence of the Church.

18 A society of extreme rich and poor.

Dinner at a ball given by Countess Shuvalov in her splendid palace on the Fontanka Canal in St Petersburg at the beginning of 1914.

19 A soup kitchen for the unemployed in pre-war St Petersburg.

20 Peasants of a northern Russian village, mid-1890s. Note the lack of shoes and the uniformity of their clothing and their houses.

21 Peasant women were expected to do heavy labour in addition to their domestic duties.

A peasant’s two daughters help him thresh the wheat.

22 Peasant women haul a barge on the Sura River under the eye of a labour contractor.

23 Serfdom was still within living memory. Twin brothers, former serfs, from Chernigov province, 1914.

24 A typical Russian peasant household – two brothers, one widowed, each with four children – from the Volokolamsk district, circa 1910.

25 A meeting of village elders, 1910. Most village meetings were less orderly than this.

26 A religious procession in Smolensk province. Not all the peasants were equally devoted to the Orthodox Church.

27 The living space of four Moscow workers in the Sukon-Butikovy factory dormitory before 1917.

28 Inside a Moscow engineering works, circa 1910.