Empires Apart (43 page)

In 1960s America and Europe there was much talk of a new political force: ‘student power'. Long haired, dirty, dissolute, free-loving, radical, anarchic, irreligious student rebels were for the first time cleaving society not along lines determined by class or religion or tribe but by age. A whole new generation seemed intent on sweeping away traditional values. Their protests were not as novel as many thought them to be. A century earlier there had also been sixties rebels. Russians were observing exactly the same phenomenon in the 1860s and describing it in exactly the same way – even down to complaints about boys wearing their hair as long as girls. Alexander II had introduced liberal reforms in tertiary education: student uniforms were abolished and students were allowed to travel abroad. The result was that students nibbling the first crumbs of freedom wanted more. Student demonstrators paralysed the University of St Petersburg. ‘Nihilists', consisting primarily of students and intellectuals, propounded such dangerous dogmas as social equality. In the west they would have been labelled democrats; in Russia they became communists. Then in 1866 a mentally unstable student tried to assassinate the tsar. Alexander abandoned his liberalism and clamped down on all manifestations of dissent, even circumscribing the teaching of history in case it gave rise to treasonous theories. In 1874 the student protests culminated in a grand demonstration known as the ‘Going to the People'. Thousands of students and intellectuals streamed out of the cities into the countryside, determined to help the peasant masses in their struggle for liberation. Not surprisingly the average peasant did not welcome being patronised and their response to this unexpected visitation tended to be curt. At best students and serfs were left mutually bemused. In Going to the People the intelligentsia had gone nowhere, other than the eighty leaders of the demonstration whom Alexander exiled to Siberia.

The various groups of earnest nihilists and populists achieved virtually nothing, just as many would argue their American counterparts a century later achieved little, and again like their successors their very impotence
spawned fringe groups calling for more direct action. To some of those demanding dramatic change the message of the failed attempt at Going to the People was that if the peasants would not rise up and save themselves the intelligentsia should do it for them. A revolutionary vanguard would topple the imperial autocracy by destroying the imperial autocrat. There then began a macabre game of ‘Hunt the Tsar' or ‘Pin the Bomb on the Emperor'. A group calling itself the People's Will set out to assassinate Tsar Alexander. They tried to blow up the imperial train, but derailed another train by mistake. They smuggled a bomb into the kitchens of the Winter Palace, directly below the imperial dining room, but the tsar was late for dinner and missed the massive explosion.

The assassins were not crazed anarchists recklessly hurling bombs around in an attempt to turn order into chaos. Part of the reason for the eventual success of the extreme left in Russia and the failure of even the moderate left in America lay in the nature of democracy and autocracy. Russian tsars were far more powerful than individual political leaders in America, so shooting a tsar would potentially achieve far more than shooting a president. In America power was diffuse. Not only were there powerful local leaders in the individual states but many of the centres of power were outside the political process altogether. Oligarchs like J. D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan controlled vast sections of the economy and often exercised effective police power, calling on their private security forces and the forces of the state to suppress opposition. More importantly the people – or at least at that time white males – could make themselves heard: having the ballot Americans had no need of the bullet.

The People's Will may have had a coherent strategy based on a realistic analysis of the tsarist power structure, into which most of the revolutionaries had been born, but they had a totally unrealistic assessment of the power structure of the peasantry. In particular the People's Will failed to understand that the peasants were incapable of spontaneously organising themselves to seize power. Not only had the numerous peasant rebellions shown that their protests were inevitably fragmented and
localised, but the Going to the People demonstrations had shown that the Russian peasantry were deeply conservative.

The spirit of the swinging 1860s had virtually no impact on the downtrodden masses. Only within the elite were there any real changes in social attitudes, and then only within a small radical splinter. One example of such a change concerned the status of women. The previous century had witnessed symbolic change: before 1725 no woman had sat on the imperial throne; in the ‘Empress Era' from 1725 to 1796 there were no fewer than four tsaritsas – Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. This female phalanx, however, did not mean there were any fundamental changes in the sexism of Russian society; the tsar was regarded as above gender rather than a gender role model. And after Catherine II no woman ever mounted the throne again.

It was to be half a century after the death of Catherine that real change came, and that among those most bitterly opposed to the Romanovs. A few women joined the revolution: just as rebellious boys let their hair grow long, rebellious girls cut theirs short. Typical among them was Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a governor-general of St Petersburg. Born in 1854, she celebrated her twentieth birthday by being thrown into jail in the clamp-down that followed the Going to the People campaign. From then on she spent much of her life in jail or on the run, until on 1 March 1881 she stood on a street corner near the Catherine canal in St Petersburg and gave the signal to two People's Will comrades to throw their bombs at the tsar's carriage. They missed the carriage but the tsar got out to inspect the damage, whereupon another revolutionary threw his bomb and Alexander II was killed instantly. Sophia Perovskaya was arrested and, along with the other conspirators, hanged a few weeks later. At the age of twenty-seven she became the first woman in modern Russia to be executed for crimes against the state.

The period from the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to the Russian Revolution in 1917 was one of the most critical in Russian history. Conservatives and liberals, socialists and anarchists, reactionaries and progressives were jumbled together in a volatile brew of hopes and fears. The
Romanov autocracy stumbled to its end assailed on all sides by the forces of dissent. And yet for most of the period political activity was mere froth on the stagnant waters of Russian economic life. It is easy to imagine that as the twentieth century approached Russia was a seething mass of discontent, but just as cowboys and Wild West gunfights were totally unrepresentative of contemporary America so revolutionaries and anarchist bombs were no reflection of what was happening in Russian society as a whole. Political activists formed a tiny minority of the population. The left fractured into a multiplicity of nihilists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, social revolutionaries, Mensheviks and so on, and the very act of fracturing made their numbers seem greater than they really were. The proponents of gentle change – those advocating constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy and often some form of capitalism – were an equally small minority.

The history of Russia is largely the history of the tsars. Their core beliefs were the nation's beliefs. The nature of the nation depended on them. Quite literally they determined what Russia was; the nation's very frontiers moved in line with their aspirations and fears, their successes and failures. Ivan the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great all redrew the shape of the Russian empire. In America too individual leaders made their impact on history, but inevitably on a smaller scale. American history is as much the history of parties and movements as it is of great men (unlike Russia, in America there have, as yet, been no great women at the helm). As the nineteenth century progressed parties became more important in Russia, but as long as autocracy survived they remained peripheral. Russian political movements and parties in any case were very different from American parties.

American party political dynamics were transformed by the civil war. The Democrats stood for the defeated, segregationist south and Republicans for the pious, rural mid-west and the aggressive, successful, industrial north-east. In particular the Republicans stood for the aggressive, successful industrialists of the north-east, and so the Democrats became the champions of the urban underclass and of the immigrants pouring into cities like New York, Boston and Chicago.

Although the divisions between the parties were frequently bitter, in the main they lacked the profoundly ideological character of Russian political parties. American parties have, almost from the first, been groupings of interests rather than ideas. Political power became something used not to change society but to protect or promote particular sectional interests. Political affiliations were badges that distinguished one group from another but had no particular intrinsic meaning. Thus it is possible to describe as ‘political' the long running Lincoln County War in New Mexico (which included the killing of the pro-Democrat Billy the Kid by Republican sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881), but the events were not party political as would be conventionally understood. Similarly, in the same year Republican mine-owners in Arizona appointed a marshal to take on the supporters of the Democrat county sheriff, but there was virtually no difference ideologically between the two groups: the fact that in the Gunfight at the OK Corral Wyatt Earp and his brothers represented Republican interests and their gunfighter opponents Democrat is incidental.

This is not to say that there were no ideological divisions between American parties, but in general these divisions reflected sectional interests or were secondary to them. In 1888, for example, the presidential election was fought on straightforward issues of economic policy. The Democratic candidate President Grover Cleveland wanted to reduce the tariffs levied on imports and the Republican Benjamin Harrison did not. Those policies reflected the interests of their backers: Republican industrialists did not want to face competition; Democratic voters wanted cheaper goods. In the event the two candidates effectively tied (Cleveland had the most votes but Harrison had a majority in the electoral college). The election was then decided not on the basis of ideology or party platforms; instead New York City Democrats were simply bribed to change sides.

The development of political movements in Russia did not imply a move toward American-style political parties. Russian history is sometimes imagined as a gradual transition from the eastern barbarism of the Mongols and Ivan the Terrible, through the flirtations with the west of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to arrive at a nascent
parliamentary democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century, a democracy snuffed out by Lenin and, especially, Stalin. It is an attractive picture implying a natural progression towards western values, interrupted during the Soviet era but now free to continue towards its final fulfilment. Unfortunately the picture is just not true. The nineteenth century in Russia saw a flowering of culture – most people asked to name a Russian composer, novelist or playwright would choose a figure from that period – but politically there was no similar blossoming. To flourish democracy's seed must fall on fertile ground and put down roots over decades or even centuries. The seeds of democracy were present in Russia, but they fell on stony ground and never truly rooted. Going into the twentieth century Russia was no more prepared for popular government than it had been a century earlier. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 his son, Alexander III, imposed a repression openly dedicated to destroying any signs of progress towards parliamentary democracy. Censorship was rigorously enforced. Education at all levels felt the full weight of the state's authority

Autocracy was not an ideology slowly disintegrating in the face of the advance of western civilisation. After all, the emancipation of American slaves had just been accompanied by the horrific slaughter of the civil war, whereas Russian serfs were emancipated by nothing more violent than the stroke of a pen. To the proponents of autocracy the difference showed the wisdom of entrusting government to a man chosen by God to guide his nation along the paths of righteousness.

The most articulate advocate of autocracy wrote not in the seventeenth or eighteenth century but towards the end of the nineteenth. Konstantin Pobedonostsev was a law professor who became director general of the Russian Orthodox Church and tutor to the tsar's children. He exercised a massive influence over the thinking of the last two tsars, Alexander III and Nicholas II, and that influence was by modern western standards monstrously reactionary. Society, he argued, had been ordered by God from the highest to the lowest because that is the most effective way to organise human existence. Everyone should know his or her place.
Education was largely a waste of time. Educating children beyond the level they needed to fulfil their role in society not only wasted resources but created aspirations that could not be satisfied. The children of miners, he wrote, should spend time down the mines getting accustomed to their future workplace rather than learning physics, which they would never use. To western minds such ideas seem bizarre or even barbaric, but Pobedonostsev was not an ignorant reactionary ranting in the darkness. He quoted Socrates and Antoninus. His writings were peppered with references to John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. He published a detailed critique of the religious views of the British historian John Robert Seeley (although Seeley's famous advocacy of imperialism must have been closer to Pobedonostsev's heart). Pobedonostsev's views on politics are alarming but coherent: the best form of government is the government of a wise and supreme autocrat; democracy is a sham. Individual votes in a democracy are valueless; they only acquire value in the aggregate; and thus the essence of democracy is the manipulation of groups of voters by those who wish to obtain or retain power. This constant manipulation of public opinion, Pobedonostsev argued, led to demagoguery and the debasement of political ideals. This demagoguery was fostered by the press. Journalists and newspaper proprietors had the power to defame, with no right of appeal allowed to those they defamed. Freedom of the press thus became another sham.