Russia (37 page)

Meanwhile on the western side of the Caspian a railway was constructed to connect Baku with the new possession of Batum and with Tiflis. The network locked newly acquired territories into the Empire, and enabled forces to be quickly switched between the Caucasus, Central Asia and the imperial heartlands. Only communications across Siberia remained as slow as ever. It was obvious that if Russia was to have a successful future as a Pacific power this needed to be rectified. The American Civil War had demonstrated that success in war was now a product of barbed wire, steam power and mass production as much as of the dash of cavalrymen and the endurance of foot soldiers. Efficient transport for mass armies, vastly expanded output of iron, coal and steel, and the production of the tools of war were now prerequisites for any great power. In 1891 the Russian government took a decisive step towards meeting these demands by starting construction on a railway to the Pacific.

For a vast developing country with little native capital, the decision to build by far the longest railway in the world over its most difficult terrain was certainly ambitious. But, though the trans-Siberian project was risky, its completion promised alluring rewards. Linking Moscow with the Pacific would enable the Empire to build up its power on the Pacific and on the frontiers with China and Korea. The massive orders it would generate for rails and engines would stimulate industry. And, together with the construction of new lines linking the industrial regions with each other and with the ports, it would provide an even bigger stimulus to the economy as a whole than the first railway boom had done. On the other hand the cost of borrowing the necessary capital would impose an immense burden of debt which would take many years to pay off; the projected maintenance costs were also alarming, and the technical difficulties in, for example, cutting over thirty tunnels to find a way round Lake Baikal and establishing a stable bed for rails over deserts and morasses would pose formidable problems for the engineers. Moreover, 1891 was a famine year in Russia, so the project had to be justified in social terms.

The project’s mastermind, Sergei Vitte, had headed the railway department of the Ministry of Finance since 1889. His background was in state railway administration in southern Russia, but he had also worked in the private sector. He knew that, since the Empire could not generate sufficient capital, this had to come from the West - chiefly from France, Germany, Belgium and Britain. He also knew that the costs of servicing the loans and borrowings would constitute a serious burden on the budget, but that the price had to be paid. He was soon presented with the responsibility for finding the means of paying it: in 1892 he was promoted, in quick succession, to be minister of communications and then minister of finance.

Aside from its military and economic potential, the great project would help to answer looming social problems, permitting the rapid transportation of food to famine areas, argued Vitte. Once bureaucratic reluctance to encourage large-scale settlement in Siberia had been overcome, it would also help to relieve the rising rural-population pressure in European Russia. Vitte’s promotion of Russian industry was also to absorb some of this excess rural population. Even so, the capitalist-minded Vitte himself remained conscious of the Empire’s fundamental problem. In a secret memorandum to the Tsar dated March 1899, he was to compare

Russia’s economic relationship to western Europe … [with] that of colonies to their mother countries. The latter see their colonies as convenient markets from which they can sell their … industrial products advantageously and from which they can extract the raw materials they need … To a large extent Russia … is such a … colony for the industrially-developed states. It provides them with the products … at low prices, and buys … their products at high ones.

There was one saving grace: Russia was a powerful independent state able to break out from dependency and create ‘a fully independent national industry’.
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The Trans-Siberian Railway project was the first major step towards this goal, and, overall, the achievements were brilliant.

Within ten years the extent of the Empire’s rail network grew by over 73 per cent, from little over 19,000 in 1890 to over 33,000 miles in 1900. By 1904 the lines extended over 38,000 miles. Thanks to the demand the project generated, pig-iron output rose three times over in the 1890s; steel production expanded tenfold.
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There were huge expansions in coalmining, especially in southern Russia and Ukraine, and of iron in western Siberia, though textiles remained the Empire’s biggest industry of all. And, thanks to Vitte, the Empire’s finances remained stable throughout this period of disruptive change. Only, as he realized, a spirit of enterprise as
well as capital and technical expertise were needed. Until they were found, Russia would still be in a position of dependence on more developed powers. Meanwhile, Vitte aimed to exploit the railway to promote further imperial expansion.

Three new provinces — Transbaikalia, the Amur and the Maritime Province — were created to organize these distant possessions. Further expansion in North America and the acquisition of California had been mooted in the 1820s and again in the 1830s, but Nicholas I had rejected the idea. The matter had been raised yet again in the 1850s. However, Count Muravev, governor of the furthest territories, who had himself annexed the lower Amur, understood that geography imposed limits to the growth of empires. Railway development reinforced him in the view. The wise men of St Petersburg concurred, and decided to limit the Empire to Europe and Asia. The strategic island of Sakhalin was occupied, but in 1867 Alaska, which had been acquired almost by default as a natural continuation of the exploration policy launched in the eighteenth century, was sold to the United States.
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It was, after all, half a world away from St Petersburg, and boasted few obvious assets, yet funds had to be found for its administration and defence. It was a burden better disposed of.

Nevertheless, Vitte was minded to expand further into Asia, not only through territorial acquisition and direct rule, but, as great powers like Britain and America were now doing, through economic concessions and dominating influence. As he recalled in his memoirs, by May 1896, when royalty and statesmen gathered in St Petersburg for the coronation of Nicholas II,

Our great Trans-Siberian railway had almost reached Trans-Baikalia, and it became imperative to decide what route it should follow beyond that. It was quite natural that I should think of continuing it straight to Vladivostock, cutting through Mongolia and northern Manchuria [for] this would speed up its construction considerably In this way the Trans-Siberian would become … an artery of world-wide importance, connecting Japan and the … Far East with Russia and Europe.
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Vitte immediately sought out China’s chief minister, and struck a deal. Vladivostok duly became the terminus of the Trans-Siberian, and Manchuria opened up to Russian development. The price involved a commitment to defend China against attack from Japan.

Thanks to Vitte, Russia was also able to penetrate China economically, masterminding the foundation of the Russo-China Bank and negotiating controlling rights over the construction and running of the East China Railway. Military planning went hand in hand with economic penetration
and diplomacy, and the military build-up in Transbaikalia and the Maritime Province on the Pacific played a part in China’s agreement two years later to cede the warm-water port of Lüshun (Port Arthur) on the peninsula dividing the Bay
of
Korea from the Gulf of Liautong to Russia for twenty-five years, and grant a concession to build a railway through southern Manchuria, which the Japanese had wanted to do. The achievement was the culmination of adroit Russian diplomacy over many months.

The encounters between Russians and Chinese which became much more frequent as a result were unusual in the history of imperialism. The Russian soldiers may have been under instruction not to antagonize the Chinese they encountered, and punishment for mistreating them was dra-conian (a soldier convicted twice for stealing was hanged). Even so, a visiting Englishman was astounded to find that ‘the Russians have no racial antipathy for the yellow race … The Russian soldiers and the Chinese fraternise as people belonging to the same race and the same class, and not only the soldiers but the officers treat the Chinese lower classes, and let themselves be treated, with great and good-natured familiarity.’
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These soldiers presented a face of Russian imperialism that contrasted with the Cossack Khabarov’s bloody excursions through Dauria centuries earlier, and with the behaviour of Russian merchants in the region. China, of course, was a friendly power, but similarly humane and easygoing manners were to characterize Russians’ treatment of the Japanese, who were soon to be enemies.

Russia had prevailed on the Japanese to share some of their influence in Korea, but the two Powers were already on a collision course. Britain’s nose, too, was put out of joint. The prospect of Russia gaining a predominant influence in Manchuria as well as in Korea was not widely popular.
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Only Germany encouraged Russia to satisfy its expansionist ambitions in the Orient rather than looking to the West, which would impede Germany’s own imperialist ambitions. As for the United States, Russia’s sale of Alaska to it in 1867 had sweetened their relations, although they were to cool somewhat after the Mexican War of 1898, the American acquisition of the Philippines, and the extension of US economic influence in the Pacific.
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But while the Great Powers manoeuvred on the world stage, their domestic problems began to loom larger — and nowhere more so than in Russia.

By emancipating the peasants in the 1860s the government unwittingly contributed to an even greater problem: a population explosion. Between
1850 and 1900 the population of the Russian Empire is calculated to have almost doubled, rising from 70 to 133 million. For an underpopulated country this would not have constituted a problem, but, although much of the Empire was underpopulated, European Russia was not, and there the population grew from 60 to 100 million in the same period.

The problem had not been foreseen, and the reasons for it are still the subject of discussion among scholars. A better diet, leading to improved female fecundity, was one factor; a lower death rate from diseases of malnutrition was another. Earlier marriages and fewer wars and epidemics in the later nineteenth century also counted. So did less onerous terms of compulsory military service after 1874, and improving public health provision. But the emancipation of the serfs also contributed - not simply by engendering excessive optimism among the peasantry, but by abolishing their labour-service obligations to landowners. This reduced both the incentive for peasants to treat their sons as labourers and their resistance to their marrying and setting up on their own earlier in life.
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Earlier marriages, the earlier division of household property, and entitlement to shares in the communal land led to a problem of which Malthus had warned: that the population could outgrow its land resources and hence its capacity to feed itself. The government could implement plans for famine relief, as it did in 1891. It also began to encourage peasants to migrate to Siberia, and booming industry created a healthy demand for labour which led to a rising tide of migration from countryside to city. But the structures of village life were such as to precipitate a crisis beyond the power of such measures to prevent.

By the turn of the century, with village lands having to be shared between an ever increasing number of households, the average size of family farms was shrinking and increasing numbers of them became marginal. Even the Cossack communities, a privileged part of the population, were affected. Between 1861 and 1914 the Don Cossack population increased by 80 per cent, while changes in conditions of service introduced in 1875 had quadrupled the costs of service. As a result, by the turn of the century one Don Cossack out of every four called to the colours had to be excused on account of family poverty.
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In many parts of European Russia the countryside began to grow restive again. At the same time, rural conditions were driving more and more young people to the cities, creating social problems there.

The government was careful to monitor conditions in the spawning mills and factories, and recognized that it had a duty of social care to the employees. Legislation to protect workers was no worse than in most other
industrializing countries and better than in many. Nevertheless, as everywhere else at this stage of an industrial revolution, conditions in the slums of Moscow and in the working-class suburbs of St Petersburg and many other cities deteriorated. Most of the inward migrants, women as well as men, were young people uprooted from quiet rural Russia, Poland and Ukraine, where the pace of life was sloth-like, and plunged into a disturbingly noisy, crowded, stressful scene. The consequence was a sharp rise in the political temperature of urban Russia.

The big factories of Russia’s late industrial revolution facilitated unionization, while the crowded tenements became hothouses for strong and simple political ideas. In this environment Marxism soon gained appeal. Its ideas — purveyed by educated, idealistic, sometimes resentful young people — came to be interpreted at pie stalls and factory gates, and were debated enthusiastically in bookshops. In the process of transfer to a poorly educated following, Marx’s ideas were sometimes oversimplified and often misunderstood, but the vocabulary of Marxism conjured up believable icons of oppressed workers and an exploitative, unproductive bourgeoisie, together with the promise of an inevitable ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the ultimate triumph of communism. Marxist iconography presented a congruent parallel to Christian iconography, and, since the Church failed to keep effectively in touch with them, many of the young immigrants to the cities took to the new ideology as to a religious belief. Organization, whether in unions or movements, also offered a sense of purpose and comradeship, while the conspiratorial nature of the enterprise lent a sense of adventure. The only problem was the intellectuals’ tendency to differ in their analyses of conditions and their interpretations of the awesome literature. Divergencies and splits became common, and the drift to violence quickened.