A People's Tragedy (11 page)

As anyone familiar with Chekhov's plays will know, the cultural life of the average provincial town was extremely dull and parochial. At least that is how the intelligentsia

— steeped in the culture of Western Europe — saw (with

some disgust) the backward life of the Russian provinces. Listen to the brother of the
Three Sisters
describing the place in which they lived: This town's been in existence for two hundred years; a hundred thousand people live in it, but there's not one who's any different from all the others! There's never been a scholar or an artist or a saint in this place, never a single man sufficiently outstanding to make you feel passionately that you wanted to emulate him. People here do nothing but eat, drink and sleep. Then they die and some more take their places, and they eat, drink and sleep, too — and just to introduce a bit of variety into their lives, so as to avoid getting completely stupid with boredom, they indulge in their disgusting gossip and vodka and gambling and law-suits.

Kishinev was in this respect a very average town. It had twelve schools, two theatres and an open-air music hall, but no library or gallery. The social centre of the town was the Nobleman's Club. It was here, according to Urusov, that 'the general character of Kishinev society found its most conspicuous reflection. The club rooms were always full. The habitues of the club would gather around the card-tables from as early as 2

p.m., not leaving until 3 or 4 a.m. in winter; and in summer not until 6 or 7 a.m.' In Kishinev, as in most provincial towns, the social habits of the nobility had much more in common with those of the local merchants than with the aristocrats of St Petersburg.

Stolypin's daughter, for example, recalled that in Saratov, where her father was once Governor, the wives of noblemen 'dressed so informally that on invitations it was necessary to specify "evening dress requested'. Even then, they would sometimes appear at balls in dressing-gowns.'14

In a society such as this the provincial Governor inevitably played the role of a major celebrity. The high point of any social event was the moment when His Excellency arrived to grace the company with his presence. To receive an invitation to the annual ball at the Governors house was to have made it to the top of provincial society. Prince Urusov, being a modest sort of man, was taken aback by the god-like esteem in which he was held by the local residents: 'According to Kishinev convention, I was to go out exclusively in a carriage, escorted by a mounted guard, with the Chief of Police in the van. To walk or to go out shopping was on my part a grave breach of etiquette.' But other governors, less modest than himself, took advantage of their lofty status to behave like petty autocrats. One provincial Governor, for example, ordered the police to stop all the traffic whenever he passed through the town. Another would not allow the play to begin before he arrived at the local theatre. To lovers of liberty the provincial Governor was the very personification of tsarist

oppression and despotism. Gorky could find no better way to condemn Tolstoy's authoritarianism than to compare him to a governor.15

The office Urusov assumed went back to the medieval era, although its exact form was altered many times. In a country as vast and difficult to govern as Russia the tasks of tax collection and maintaining law and order were obviously beyond the capabilities of the tiny medieval state. So they were farmed out to governors, plenipotentiaries of the Tsar, who in exchange for their service to the state were allowed to 'feed' themselves at the expense of the districts they ruled (usually with a great deal of violence and venality).

The inability of the state to build up an effective system of provincial administration secured the power of these governors. Even in the nineteenth century, when the bureaucracy did extend its agencies to the provinces, the governors were never entirely integrated into the centralized state apparatus.

The provincial governors were in charge of the local police, for whom they were technically answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. They also served as chairmen on the provincial boards whose work fell within the domain of the other ministries, such as Justice, Finance and Transportation. This fragmentation of executive power increasingly obliged the governors to negotiate, persuade and compromise — to play the part of a modern politician — during the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless, because of their close connections with the court, they could still ignore the demands of the ministries in St Petersburg — and indeed often did so when they deemed that these clashed with the interests of the noble estate, from which all the provincial governors were drawn.

Stolypin's local government reforms, for example, which he tried to introduce after 1906, were effectively resisted by the governors who saw them as a challenge to the domination of the nobility. A. A. Khvostov, one of Stolypin's successors at the Ministry of the Interior, complained that it was 'virtually impossible' to prevent the governors from sabotaging the work of his ministry because of their lofty protectors' at the court:

'one has an aunt who is friendly with the Empress, another a gentleman-in-waiting for a relative, and a third a cousin who is an Imperial Master of the Horse.' The governors'

extraordinary power stemmed from the fact that they were the Tsar's personal viceroys: they embodied the autocratic principle in the provinces. Russia's last two tsars were particularly adamant against the idea of subordinating the governors to the bureaucracy because they saw them as their most loyal supporters and because, in the words of Richard Robbins, 'as the personal representatives of the Sovereign, the governors helped keep the emperors from becoming dependent on their ministers and gave [them] a direct connection to the provinces and the people'. Two of Alexander Ill's counter-reforms, in 1890 and 1892, greatly increased the governors' powers over the zemstvos and municipal bodies. Like his son, Alexander saw this as a way of moving closer to the fantasy of ruling Russia directly from

the throne. But the result was confusion in the provincial administration: the governors, the agencies of the central ministries and the elected local bodies were all set against each other.16

The power of the imperial government effectively stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors had their offices. Below that there was no real state administration to speak of. Neither the uezd or district towns nor the volost or rural townships had any standing government officials. There was only a series of magistrates who would appear from time to time on some specific mission, usually to collect taxes or sort out a local conflict, and then disappear once again. The affairs of peasant Russia, where 85 per cent of the population lived, were entirely unknown to the city bureaucrats. 'We knew as much about the Tula countryside', confessed Prince Lvov, leader of the Tula zemstvo in the 1890s, 'as we knew about Central Africa.'17

The crucial weakness of the tsarist system was the
under-government
of the localities.

This vital fact is all too often clouded by the revolutionaries' mythic image of an all-powerful old regime. Nothing could be further from the truth. For every 1,000

inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only 4 state officials at the turn of the century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France.

The regular police, as opposed to the political branch, was extremely small by European standards. Russia's expenditure on the police
per capita
of the population was less than half of that in Italy or France and less than one quarter of that in Prussia. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements stretched across nearly 2,000 square miles. Many of them did not even have a horse and cart. True, from 1903 the constables were aided by the peasant constables, some 40,000 of whom were appointed. But these were notoriously unreliable and, in any case, did very little to reduce the mounting burdens on the police. Without its own effective organs in the countryside, the central bureaucracy was assigning more and more tasks to the local police: not just the maintenance of law and order but also the collection of taxes, the implementation of government laws and military decrees, the enforcement of health and safety regulations, the inspection of public roads and buildings, the collection of statistics, and the general supervision of 'public morals' (e.g. making sure that the peasants washed their beards).

The police, in short, were being used as a sort of catch-all executive organ. They were often the only agents of the state with whom the peasants ever came into contact.18

Russia's general backwardness — its small tax-base and poor communications —

largely accounts for this under-government. The legacy of serfdom also played a part.

Until 1861 the serfs had been under the jurisdiction of their noble owners and, provided they paid their taxes, the state did not intervene in

the relations between them. Only after the Emancipation — and then very slowly — did the tsarist government come round to the problem of how to extend its influence to its new 'citizens' in the villages and of how to shape a policy to help the development of peasant agriculture.

Initially, in the 1860s, the regime left the affairs of the country districts in the hands of the local nobles. They dominated the zemstvo assemblies and accounted for nearly three-quarters of the provincial zemstvo boards. The noble assemblies and their elected marshals were left with broad administrative powers, especially at the district level (uezd) where they were virtually the only agents upon whom the tsarist regime could rely. Moreover, the new magistrates
(mirovye posredniki)
were given broad judicial powers, not unlike those of their predecessors under serfdom, including the right to flog the peasants for minor crimes and misdemeanours.

It was logical for the tsarist regime to seek to base its power in the provinces on the landed nobility, its closest ally. But this was a dangerous strategy, and the danger grew as time went on. The landed nobility was in severe economic decline during the years of agricultural depression in the late nineteenth century, and was turning to the zemstvos to defend its local agrarian interests against the centralizing and industrializing bureaucracy of St Petersburg. In the years leading up to 1905 this resistance was expressed in mainly liberal terms: it was seen as the defence of 'provincial society', a term which was now used for the first time and consciously broadened to include the interests of the peasantry. This liberal zemstvo movement culminated in the political demand for more autonomy for local government, for a national parliament and a constitution. Here was the start of the revolution: not in the socialist or labour movements but — as in France in the 1780s — in the aspirations of the regime's oldest ally, the provincial nobility.

The Emancipation came as a rude shock not just to the economy but also to the whole of the provincial civilization of the gentry. Deprived of their serfs, most of the landed nobles went into terminal decline. Very few were able to respond to the new challenges of the commercial world in which as farmers — and less often industrialists and merchants — they were henceforth obliged to survive. The whole of the period between 1861 and 1917 could be presented as the slow death of the old agrarian elite upon which the tsarist system had always relied.

From Gogol to Chekhov, the figure of the impoverished noble landowner was a perennial of nineteenth-century Russian literature. He was a cultural obsession.

Chekhov's play
The Cherry Orchard
(1903) was particularly, and subtly, resonant with the familiar themes of a decaying gentry: the elegant but loss-making estate is sold off to a self-made businessman, the son of a serf on the very same estate, who chops down the orchard to build houses. Most of the

squires, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov's play, proved incapable of transforming their landed estates into viable commercial farms once the Emancipation had deprived them of the prop of free serf labour and forced them into the capitalist world. They could not follow in the footsteps of the Prussian Junkers. The old Russian serf economy had never been run, in the main, with the intention of making profits. Nobles gained prestige (and sometimes high office) from the number of serfs they owned — whence the story of Chichikov in Gogol's
Dead Souk
(1842), who travels around the estates of Russia buying up the lists of deceased serfs (or 'souls' as they were then called) whose death had not yet been registered — and from the ostentation of their manor houses rather than the success of their farms. Most seigneurial demesnes were farmed by the serfs with the same tools and primitive methods as they used on their own household plots.

Many of the squires squandered the small income from their estates on expensive luxuries imported from Europe rather than investing it in their farms. Few appeared to understand that income was not profit.

By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the squires had fallen hopelessly into debt. By 1859, one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and aristocratic banks. This, more than anything, helped the government to force Emancipation through against considerable opposition from the gentry. Not that the conditions of the liberation were unfavourable to the landowners: they received good money for the (often inferior) land which they chose to transfer to the peasants.* But now the squires were on their own, deprived of the free labour of the serfs and their tools and animals. They could no longer live a life of ease: their survival depended on the market place. They had to pay for tools and labour and learn the difference between profit and loss. Yet there was almost nothing in their backgrounds to prepare them for the challenge of capitalism. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting and went on spending in the same old lavish way, furnishing their manor houses in the French Empire style and sending their sons to the most expensive schools. Once again their debts increased, forcing them to lease or sell off first one or two and then more and more chunks of land. Between 1861 and 1900 more than 40 per cent of the gentry's land was sold to the peasants, whose growing land hunger, due to a population boom, led to a seven-fold increase in land values.