Russia (38 page)

However, the bomb-throwings and assassinations which became almost commonplace in the Empire around the turn of the century were not born of the peasant problem, nor of industrialization. They stemmed from a fundamentally middle-class intellectual tradition and from a pervasive, though far from universal, sense of guilt about the peasantry. The terrorism also reflected a romantic compulsion to act, and frustration with an exclusionary and seemingly unresponsive autocratic governmental system. In this context, to shoot a functionary or throw a bomb at the Emperor seemed to some a constructive thing to do. In 1881 Sofia Perovskaia arranged to blow up the Tsar Alexander as he passed by one of the lovelier St Petersburg canals.

The attempt succeeded — and did nothing to change the system in the direction that Perovskaia desired. On the contrary, it killed the ‘
Tsar-Liberator’ at the point when he was considering the introduction of democracy and prompted increased security precautions and police activity It may have given the perpetrators a sense of achievement, but it did nothing to destabilize the regime. Terrorism was irrelevant. Marxism, however, helped the regime by offering malcontents an alternative to nationalism, giving the government another means by which to divide and rule.

Vitte had been concerned about Russians’ peasantish understanding of property and economics in an age when banking and commerce were becoming a vital adjunct to empire-building. Some attempt was made to address this problem by the founding of commercial schools which increased from eight in 1896 to sixty-eight in 1904.
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Russia’s particular strength in this period was the calibre, though not the number, of its emerging professionals, whether soldiers, engineers, bankers, doctors or soldiers. Able, and often innovative, many of them gained responsible posts while still young and their work reflected mental vigour as well as youth. Some had received their training in the technical schools that Kankrin had founded earlier in the century, and Vitte saw to it that some, at least, of the financial skills required were furnished in commercial schools, though many professionals, especially the engineers, were army-trained. Indeed, the army was to be regularly called upon to repair the technological deficiencies
of
civil society.

Many of the railway engineers were army men. So were the creators of another, commonly overlooked, achievement of the period: the drainage of wetlands. A special project had been set up in 1873 to reclaim swamps in European Russia and Belarus. Serving as a model for other such projects, it was headed by an army engineer and funded chiefly by the state. By 1900 it had cut nearly 3,000 miles of drainage canals, built 550 bridges, and sharply reduced the incidence of anthrax and other vile diseases damaging to animals as well as humankind.
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Meanwhile canal-building for communications had gained a significance almost comparable to that of railways. A canal-cutting project to join tributaries of the rivers Ob and Yenisei in Siberia, begun in 1882 and completed ten years later, created over 3,000 miles of navigable waterway connecting Tiumen with Irkutsk.
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Technological changes also inspired innovations in the army, particularly in the structure and operations of its general staff. Whatever his qualities as a commander in the field, Nikolai Obruchev was a hero as an administrator and, in effect, the formulator of imperial strategy from 1865 until 1898. He and the able group of young colonels who worked under him drew up
mobilization plans for wars on the many fronts that had to be defended. They collected intelligence, topographical and statistical data of many kinds, and engaged in some thorough social research to underpin decisions; they also maintained an up-to-date base of technological knowledge relevant to warfare, and promoted military education. It was not by chance that many of the most energetic and innovative of these ‘action officers’ were from the guards regiments. This was a reflection not so much of snobbery as of the fact that the guards had a system of accelerated promotion. This allowed Obruchev to recruit a number of able senior officers who were young, mentally energetic and open to ideas. Together they applied scientific methods and ways of thinking to military planning and training. They aimed at professionalizing the army staff, and to a large extent they succeeded. Such developments promoted the Empire’s efficiency, but not all the efforts were sustained.

Obruchev’s ability was to be measured by the consequences of his departure. This, according to a military historian, coincided with ‘deepening strategic anarchy at the highest levels of the government’. War planning was disrupted by the repeated reorganization of the department; the operation lost direction, and became less dynamic, more complacent. Soon even the army’s ability to convince the government of its financial needs faltered.
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The consequences were to be seen in the impending war with Japan. And misdirection of the army staff was only one ground for concern. The vigour of the young commanders (civil as well as military) and all the inventiveness of the technical intelligentsia were outweighed by the underproductive, restive rural population. The proportion of peasants to total population actually increased in the late nineteenth century.
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This fundamental problem, and the regime’s inability to cope with it, effectively helped to drive Russia towards the disaster of 1905.

There is a monument on the banks of the Neva in St Petersburg on which sailors’ brides throw their bouquets on the evening of their wedding day. It commemorates those lost at the disastrous battle of Tsushima. Beset by a rising tide of domestic unrest, some government ministers had sought war as a diversion; and the Tsar, with his ill-advised sponsorship of dubious speculators active in the Far East, had helped provide the occasion for it. The Japanese had sounder reasons for engagement: to recover from the effects of Vitte’s démarche in having outwitted them to gain influence over China and Manchuria and a voice in Korea. Soon after Russia went to war with Japan in 1904, its hopes vanished. Port Arthur surrendered after a long
siege in January 1905; the army was forced to abandon Mukden, and when the great Baltic fleet which had sailed majestically round Europe, Africa and Asia finally gave battle in May 1905 it lost a dozen battleships along with most of its smaller warships. But an even worse disaster had occurred in St Petersburg in January.

Troops had fired on a large but peaceful demonstration of workers passing the Winter Palace, killing over a hundred of them. Members of all classes throughout the Empire raised a chorus of protest. They also made a variety of demands. The working class called vociferously for better pay and conditions, the educated classes cried out for representative government, while Poles, Finns and others demanded national independence. Crowds clogged the streets of major cities; strikes became frequent and widespread; there was a mutiny in the Black Sea fleet; high-ranking officials were assassinated. Then the peasants rose. The disorders, especially in the countryside, were to take many months to suppress, but suppressed they were.

The departure for the front of so many military units that were normally available near the biggest population centres had encouraged the insurgents, and when the Tsar recalled Vitte and, with American help, peace was arranged with Japan, the tide soon turned. Soldiers dislike crowd-control and suppression duties, but these operations were on the whole well-managed, and casualties were comparatively few. A total of 2,691 people died as a result of terrorism; 2,390 people were executed for terrorist acts.
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Meanwhile the Tsar’s promise of democratic elections to a parliament or Duma served further to quieten the middle-class opposition.

In terms of the territorial extent of the Empire, the peace with Japan cost Russia relatively little: the Lüshun Peninsula, half of Sakhalin, and recognition that Japanese interests should predominate in Korea. However, Russia retained the East China Railway and its dominant position in northern Manchuria. Vitte had deftly extricated the Empire from what had promised to be a much greater disaster. Furthermore, as sometimes happens in the complex affairs of great empires, inertia decreed that there would be some successes even in the wake of cataclysmic defeat. The Orenburg—Tashkent line started after the turn of the century was finished in 1906; the Tiflis—Julfa railway opened for traffic the following year.
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And in 1907 Britain was persuaded to concede the division of Persia into Russian and British spheres of influence.

To the west, the threat of Germany and Austria was countered by Russia’s alliance with France and Britain, while at home attempts were made not only to accommodate the regime to democracy, but to solve the peasant problem. This task fell to an experienced provincial governor, Petr
Stolypin, and the solution which he applied was radical. His strategy was to turn the more substantial peasants into private farmers, break up the peasant commune, and force those who could not survive to sell their plots and move either on to the labour market (which was short of manpower) or to underpopulated Siberia. Between 1906 and 1914 2 million people did so.
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The destruction of a traditional way of life invariably involves cruelty, but there seemed to be no workable alternative. Stolypin claimed that, given twenty years of peace, his reforms would transform Russia, creating a solid, prosperous farmer class which would benefit the economy and stabilize politics. But while attending a performance in Kiev’s handsome cream, red and gilded opera house in 1911 he was killed by an assassin’s bullet. His reforms might have succeeded but they were to be overtaken by the First World War only three years later.

Nor was the experiment with parliamentary democracy successful, though the fault did not lie entirely with the regime. Stolypin’s offer to the majority liberal opposition of seats in a coalition government was rejected. As one liberal was himself to recall, the politicians saw in ‘compromises and gradualism “a lowering of the flag”. They wanted
everything,
and wanted it
immediately
… A “constitutional democracy” was certainly attainable, but it could not be realized at once … The intolerance of the doctrinaires … was sharpest in questions involving “theoretical … principles”. A concession in
this
area was regarded as treason.’
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The result was an unrealistic attitude to the monarchy. The democrats wanted to form the government, even though they had no experience in office, and in effect they forced the government to change the electoral process in the hope of getting a Duma with which it could work. But it proved impossible to reach an accommodation even with a slightly more tractable Duma. The problem was partly constitutional, partly the intransigence of the democratic leaders, but partly, too, the Tsar’s.

Experienced statesmen had noticed a problem in Nicholas II some time before. In July 1901 A. Polovtsev, Chief Secretary of the State Council and a senator — a loyal official in a central position — noted in his diary that

Things are done piecemeal… on momentary impulse, through the intrigues of one person or another, or through the importunities of various fortune seekers … The young Tsar is becoming increasingly contemptuous of the organs of his own authority and is beginning to believe in the beneficial effect of his own autocratic power. [Yet] he exercises it sporadically, without prior deliberation and without reference to the general course of affairs.
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The Tsar’s ill-judged patronage
of
the adventurer Captain Bezobrazov and his Korean Timber Company had helped to lead Russia into confrontation with Japan;
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his support for the dissolute hypnotist Grigorii Rasputin was to help discredit the monarchy itself. This is not to suggest that all members
of
the imperial family shared Nicholas’s faults. Grand Duke Mikhail proved to be more open-minded and in touch, and it was thanks to Grand Duke Aleksei that an air ministry was formed and 77 aircraft were in service by 1913.
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It is true that the problems of governing the Empire in Nicholas’s reign were more complex than before, and the pressures greater. But it is also true that, partly because of deficiencies in his private chancery, Nicholas was out of touch with all but a very small stratum of his subjects and yet under the illusion that he understood them. Moreover, he was temperamentally unsuited to running the Empire, unwilling to delegate authority to those who were, and often unwilling to take their advice. Although fundamentally decent and well-meaning, he was a poor judge of men, and intellectually limited. Uxorious to a fault, he was much influenced by a wife whose judgement was even worse than his. He obstinately played the part of autocrat, but erratically, and he evidently failed to understand many of the issues on which he took decisions. ‘A fish’, it is said, ‘begins to rot from the head,’ and the proverb applies to Imperial Russia.

Some of the consequences had already been noted. They had been seen in the war with Japan, when, although the armed services performed with their usual steadiness and courage, command had been poorly co-ordinated and the logistics inadequate. They had been seen in 1905, when, due to confusion or misjudgement, troops fired on peaceful demonstrators passing near the Winter Palace, precipitating a revolution. They were seen in a series of questionable appointments and decisions; and when Russia went to war in 1914 they were seen in ever sharper form. The decision to go to war may have been virtually impossible to avoid, but clear warning of the consequences had been given.

Six months before the war began, Petr Durnovo, a member of the State Council and a former police chief and minister of the interior, wrote a long memorandum to the Tsar. It reflected a thorough grasp of the relevant facts, and the analysis was acute. There were two power blocs in Europe, he argued, and Russia was allied to the wrong one. Russia’s vital interests did not conflict with Germany’s. Furthermore, if Russia fought Germany and won it could gain nothing useful as a result, whereas ‘those territorial and economic acquisitions which might prove really useful to us are only located in places where our ambitions may meet opposition from
England.’ War with Germany, he warned, would bring disaster. ‘The main burden of the war will … fall on us,’ and Russia was unprepared for this. Its war industries were ‘embryonic’, so that its arms and munitions supplies were insufficient. Its strategic railway system was still inadequate, and there was insufficient rolling stock to cope with ‘the colossal demands that will be made upon it in the event of a European war’. Then there was the question of cost: