A People's Tragedy (10 page)

It did not have to be this way. There was a time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the imperial bureaucracy could have fulfilled its potential as a creative and modernizing force. After all, the ideals of the 'enlightened bureaucrats', so aptly named by W Bruce Lincoln, shaped the Great Reforms of the 1860s.

Here was a new class of career Civil Servants, mostly sons of landless nobles and mixed marriages
(raznochintsy)
who had entered the profession through the widening channels of higher education in the 1830s and 1840s. They were upright and serious-minded men, like Karenin in Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina,
who talked earnestly, if slightly pedantically, about 'progress' and statistics; scoffed at the amateur aristocrats in high office, such as Count Vronsky, Anna's lover, who encroached on their field of expertise; and believed in the bureaucracy's mission to civilize and reform Russia along Western lines. Most of them stopped short of the liberal demand for a state based upon the rule of law with civil liberties and a parliament: their understanding of the
Rechtsstaat
was really no more than a bureaucratic state functioning on the basis of rational procedures and general laws. But they called for greater openness in the work of government, what they termed
glasnost,
as a public check against the abuse of power and a means of involving experts from society in debates about reform. Progressive officials moved in the circles of the liberal intelligentsia in the capital and were dubbed the 'Party of St Petersburg Progress'. They were seen regularly at the salon of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, and enjoyed the patronage of the Grand Duke Konstantin, who, as President of the State Council, did much to promote reformist officials in the government circles of Alexander II. They also had close ties with public bodies, such as the Imperial Geographic Society, from which they commissioned statistical surveys in preparation for the great reforming legislation of the 1860s.6

The Great Reforms were the high-water mark of this bureaucratic enlightenment. They were conceived as a modernizing process — which in Russia meant a Westernizing one

— with the aim of strengthening the state after its defeat in the Crimean War. Limited freedoms and reforms were granted in the hope of activating society and creating a dynamic economy without altering the basic political framework of the autocracy. In this sense they were similar in conception to the
perestroika
of Mikhail Gorbachev a century later. In 1861 the serfs were
de jure
(if not
de facto)
emancipated from their landlord's tyranny and given some of the rights of a citizen. They were still tied to the village commune, which enforced the old patriarchal order, deprived of the right to own the land individually, and remained legally inferior to the nobles and other estates. But the groundwork had at least been laid for the development of peasant agriculture. A second major reform of 1864 saw the establishment of local assemblies of self-government, called the zemstvos, in most Russian provinces. To preserve the domination of the landed nobles, they were set up only at the provincial and district level; below that, at the volost and the village level, the peasant communes were left to rule themselves with only minimal supervision by the gentry. The judicial reforms of the same year set up an

independent legal system with public jury trials for all estates except the peasants (who remained under the jurisdiction of local customary law). There were also new laws relaxing censorship (1865), giving more autonomy to universities (1863), reforming primary schools (1864) and modernizing the military (1863—75). Boris Chicherin (with the benefit of hindsight) summed up their progressive ideals: to remodel completely the enormous state, which had been entrusted to [Alexander's]

care, to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace it with civic decency and freedom, to establish justice in a country which had never known the meaning of legality, to redesign the entire administration, to introduce freedom of the press in the context of untrammelled authority, to call new forces to life at every turn and set them on firm legal foundations, to put a repressed and humiliated society on its feet and to give it the chance to flex its muscles.7

Had the liberal spirit of the 1860s continued to pervade the work of government, Russia might have become a Western-style society based upon individual property and liberty upheld by the rule of law. The revolution need not have occurred. To be sure, it would still have been a slow and painful progress. The peasantry, in particular, would have remained a revolutionary threat so long as they were excluded from property and civil rights. The old patriarchal system in the countryside, which even after Emancipation preserved the hegemony of the nobles, called out for replacement with a modern system in which the peasants had a greater stake. But there was at least, within the ruling elite, a growing awareness of what was needed — and indeed of what it would cost — for this social transformation to succeed. The problem was, however, that the elite was increasingly divided over the desirability of this transformation. And as a result of these divisions it failed to develop a coherent strategy to deal with the challenges of modernization.

On the one hand were the reformists, the 'Men of 1864' like Polovtsov, who broadly accepted the need for a bourgeois social order (even at the expense of the nobility), the need for the concession of political freedoms (especially in local government), and the need for a
Rechtsstaat
(which increasingly they understood to mean not just a state based on universal laws but one based on the rule of law itself). By the end of the 1870s this reformist vision had developed into demands for a constitution. Enlightened statesmen openly argued that the tasks of government in the modern age had become too complex for the Tsar and his bureaucrats to tackle alone, and that the loyal and educated public had to be brought into the work of government. In January 1881

Alexander II instructed his Minister of the Interior, Count Loris-Melikov, to draw up plans

for a limited constitution which would give invited figures from the public an advisory role in legislation. 'The throne', argued the Minister of Finance, A. A. Abaza, during the debates on these proposals, 'cannot rest exclusively on a million bayonets and an army of officials.' Such reformist sentiments were commonplace among the officials in the Ministry of Finance. Being responsible for industrialization, they were the first to see the need to sweep away obstacles to bourgeois enterprise and initiative. Many of them, moreover, like Polovtsov, who had married into a banking family, were themselves drawn from the 'new Russia' of commerce and industry. Witte, the great reforming Finance Minister of the 1890s, who had worked for twenty years in railroad management (to begin with as a lowly ticket clerk) before entering government service, argued that the tsarist system could avoid a revolution only by transforming Russia into a modern industrial society where 'personal and public initiatives' were encouraged by a rule-of-law state with guarantees of civil liberties.8

On the other hand were the supporters of the traditional tsarist order. It was no accident that their strongest base was the Ministry of the Interior, since its officials were drawn almost exclusively from 'old Russia', noble officers and landowners, who believed most rigidly in the
Polizeistaat.
The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle (both in central and local government), the unchecked powers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility and the moral domination of the Church, against the liberal and secular challenges of the urban-industrial order. Conceding constitutions and political rights would only serve to weaken the state, argued P. N. Durnovo and Viacheslav von Plehve, the two great Ministers of the Interior during Witte's time at the Ministry of Finance, because the liberal middle classes who would come to power as a result had no authority among the masses and were even despised by them. Only when economic progress had removed the threat of a social revolution would the time be ripe for political reforms. Russia's backwardness necessitated such a strategy (economic liberalism plus autocracy). For as Durnovo argued (not without reason): 'One cannot in the course of a few weeks introduce North American or English systems into Russia.'9

That was to be one of the lessons of 1917.

The arguments of the reactionaries were greatly strengthened by the tragic assassination of Alexander II in March 1881. The new Tsar was persuaded by his tutor and adviser, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, that continuing with the liberal reforms would only help to produce more revolutionaries like the ones who had murdered his father. Alexander III soon abandoned the project for a constitution, claiming he did not want a government of 'troublesome brawlers and lawyers'; forced the resignation of his reformist ministers (Abaza from Finance, Loris-Melikov from the Interior, and Dmitry Miliutin from War); and proclaimed a Manifesto reasserting the principles of autocracy.10 This was the signal for a series of counter-reforms during Alexander Ill's reign. Their purpose was to centralize control and roll back the rights of local government, to reassert the personal rule of the Tsar through the police and his direct agents, and to reinforce the patriarchal order — headed by the nobility — in the countryside. Nothing was more likely to bring about a revolution. For at the same time the liberal classes of provincial society were coming to the view that their common interests and identity entailed defending the rights of local government against the very centralizing bureaucracy upon which the new Tsar staked so much.

ii The Thin Veneer of Civilization

When Prince Sergei Urusov was appointed Governor of Bessarabia in May 1903 the first thing he did was to purchase a guidebook of the area. This southwestern province of the Empire, wedged between the Black Sea and Romania, was totally unknown to the former graduate of Moscow University, thrice-elected Marshal of the Kaluga Nobility. 'I knew as little of Bessarabia', he would later admit, 'as I did of New Zealand, or even less.'

Three weeks later, after stopping in the capital for a briefing with the Tsar, he set off by train from Moscow to Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, some 900 miles away. The journey took two nights and three long days, the train chugging ever slower as it moved deeper and deeper into the Ukrainian countryside. Alone in his special compartment, Urusov used the time to study his guidebook in preparation for his first exchanges with the civic dignitaries he expected to meet on his arrival. He had written to the Vice-Governor, asking him to keep the reception party small. But as his train pulled into the station at Bendery, the first major town of the province, he saw through his carriage window a platform crowded with people and what looked like a full orchestral band. At the centre, cordoned off by a ring of policemen, stood the Vice-Governor in full dress uniform and the city's mayor with the chain of office bearing a platter of bread and salt.

This was how the new Governor had always been welcomed in Bessarabia and no exception would be made for Urusov. In Kishinev, an hour and a half later, His Excellency the Governor was driven through the city in an open carriage drawn by six white horses. 'Men, women and children stood in crowded ranks on the sidewalks,'

Urusov recalled. 'They bowed, waved their handkerchiefs, and some of them even went down on their knees. I was quite struck by the latter, not having been used to such scenes.' After a brief stop at the cathedral, where God's blessing was invoked for the work that lay ahead of him, Urusov was driven to the Governor's house, an imposing neo-classical palace in the centre of the city, from which he would rule as the Tsar's viceroy over this distant corner of the Russian Empire.11

With a population of 120,000 people, Kishinev was a typical provincial city. The administrative centre, situated in the 'upper city' on a hill, was a formal grid of broad and straight paved streets bordered by poplars and white acacias. The main boulevard, the Alexandrov, was particularly elegant, its pavements wide enough for horse-drawn trams to run along their edges. In addition to the Governor's House, it boasted a number of large stone buildings, offices and churches, which in Urusov's judgement 'would have made no unfavourable impression even in the streets of St Petersburg'. Yet not a stone's throw from these elegant neo-classical facades, in the 'lower city' straggling down the hillside, was a totally different world — a world of narrow and unpaved winding streets, muddy in the spring and dusty in the summer; of wooden shanties and overcrowded hovels which served as the homes and shops for the Russian, Jewish and Moldavian workers; a world of pigs and cows grazing in the alleys, of open sewers and piles of rubbish on the public squares; a world where cholera epidemics struck on average one year in every three. These were the two faces of every Russian city: the one of imperial power and European civilization, the other of poverty and squalor of Asiatic proportions.12

One could hardly blame Urusov for seeing his appointment as a kind of exile. Many governors felt the same. Accustomed to the cosmopolitan world of the capital cities, they were bound to find provincial society dull and narrow by comparison. The civic culture of provincial Russia was, even at the end of the nineteenth century, still in the early stages of development compared with the societies of the West. Most of Russia's cities had evolved historically as administrative or military outposts of the tsarist state rather than as commercial or cultural centres in their own right. Typically they comprised a small nobility, mostly employed in the local Civil Service, and a large mass of petty traders, artisans and labourers. But there was no real 'bourgeoisie' or 'middle class' in the Western sense. The burghers, who in Western Europe had advanced civilization since the Renaissance, were largely missing in peasant Russia. The professions were too weak and dependent on the state to assert their autonomy until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The artisans and merchants were too divided among themselves (they were historically and legally two separate estates) and too divorced from the educated classes to provide the Russian cities with their missing
Burgertum.
In short, Russia seemed to bear out Petr Struve's dictum: 'the further to the East one goes in Europe, the weaker in politics, the more cowardly, and the baser becomes the bourgeoisie'.13