Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Poles were much more difficult to assimilate. A proud people, with their own historical kingdom, high culture, and a more advanced economy, their elites bitterly resented Russian rule. They had their own distinctive experience of nationhood, and it included Ukrainians and Belorussians. Many Poles fought alongside Napoleon in 1812. Afterwards, Alexander I, seeking the best way to keep Poland loyal, experimented with a constitutional regime there, which many hoped might be extended to Russia as a whole. In 1830–1, however, the Poles rebelled and tried to throw off Russian rule altogether, and they repeated the attempt in 1863–4. The Polish nobles never had the convinced support of their own peasants, however, and both risings were suppressed, with considerable bloodshed. After the second, Poland’s separate institutions were finally abolished. Poland was placed under martial law, many of its nobles and clergy were exiled to Siberia, and it became ‘the Vistula region’ of Russia. Meanwhile, Polish exiles in Paris, London, and elsewhere agitated in favour of a restored Polish kingdom, and gave Russia a bad name throughout Europe.

The 18th-century Polish partitions also brought some half a million Jews into the empire. They had an ancient religion and culture, a level of literacy and communal cohesion far higher than Russians; many of them also excelled in trade or one of the professions. Most of them were poor but, because they lived in compact ghettos or shtetls, they were regarded with suspicion and resentment by many in the local population, who feared their competition or exploitation. The government also worried that Jews would ruin Russian peasants if they were allowed to move freely, and so it mostly confined them to a Pale of Settlement in the western regions. By the May Laws of 1882, Jews were forbidden to own agricultural land even there. They were denied votes in the zemstvos (see below, p. 73) and municipalities, and numerical limits were placed on their admission to educational institutions. Deprived of the benefits of empire-wide trade and barred from agriculture, most of them remained poor, leading a marginal existence as shopkeepers, publicans, artisans, and stewards.

At times of crisis and unrest, as in 1881 and 1905–6, the Jews who lived in the cities of the Pale became targets for popular resentment. Russian or Ukrainian mobs would storm Jewish stores and workshops and assault their owners or anyone who looked Jewish. Many of the police had more sympathy with the rioters than with their victims, and were in any case swamped by the sudden violence. In the city worst affected, Odessa, some 800 Jews were murdered in 1905–6. Disgracefully, Nicholas II allowed his portrait to be carried by the Union of Russian People, a political organization which instigated anti-Jewish pogroms. He also blocked attempts to emancipate the Jews and repeatedly pardoned those found guilty of anti-Jewish violence.

The Baltic

When Peter I conquered the Baltic regions in the early 18th century, he confirmed the privileges, laws, and self-governing corporations of the local landed elites, who were German. He had good reason for doing this: they were excellent administrators. Many of them had been educated in German universities in ‘cameralism’ (public administration) and had experience of running corporate institutions on Western models. The huge and backward Russian Empire offered them far greater scope for exercising their skills than the petty principalities of Germany. At the same time, there was in the Baltic region no mass German population whose ascendancy to nationhood they could lead; hence they were dependent on empire for their dominance. Over the next two centuries, they not only ruled the Baltic, but provided numerous high officials for the administration of the entire empire, and for command in its army. For them, loyalty to the Emperor paid off: they were allowed to preserve their own culture and religion, and they retained tight control over the indigenous Estonian, Latvian, and Jewish populations.

Only in the 1880s did the Russian government endeavour to assimilate the Baltic barons to Russian nationhood, by introducing Russian administrative language, Russian-style municipalities, law courts, and schools, and building Orthodox cathedrals. In 1893, the German Dorpat University was closed and re-opened as a Russian establishment, Iuriev University.

Estonians and Latvians were already among the most literate peoples in the empire, thanks to their Lutheran religion. In 1905–6, their growing national consciousness produced a massive and violent movement of social and ethnic protest against Russians and Germans, in which both workers and peasants were involved. Russian punitive detachments restored order with even greater bloodshed. Thus, on the eve of 1917, the Baltic region simmered with discontent.