A People's Tragedy (16 page)

ideas of self-government being bandied about by their liberal brethren, but Witte s insistence on making religious toleration the price of such autonomy (a policy motivated by the prospect of wooing important commercial groups in the Old Believer and Jewish communities) was guaranteed to drive them back into the arms of reaction.

After 1905 they allied themselves with the court and extreme Rightist organizations, such as the Union of the Russian People, in opposing all further attempts by the liberals to reform the Church and extend religious toleration. The old alliance of Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality' was thus revived against the threat of a liberal moral order.

This clash of ideologies was one of the most decisive in shaping Russian history between 1905 and 1917.

With the liberal clergy defeated, the Church was left in a state of terminal division and weakness. The central ideological pillar of the tsarist regime was at last beginning to crumble. Rasputin's rise to power within the Church signalled its own final fall from grace. 'The Most Holy Synod has never sunk so low!' one former minister told the French Ambassador in February 1916. 'If they wanted to destroy all respect for religion, all religious faith, they would not go about it in any other way. What will be left of the Orthodox Church before long? When Tsarism, in danger, seeks its support, it will find there is nothing left.'44

v Prison of Peoples

The collapse of the tsarist system, like that of its successor, was intimately connected with the growth of nationalist movements in the non-Russian parts of the Empire. In neither the tsarist case nor in the Soviet were these movements the direct cause of the collapse. Rather they developed in reaction to it, at first putting forward moderate proposals for autonomy and then, only when Russia's impotence became clear, pushing on to the demand for complete independence. But, in both cases, the old regime was weakened by the growth of nationalist aspirations during the decades of gradual decline which led to its final downfall. From the post-Soviet perspective, all this may seem obvious. Nationalism today is such a potent force that we are inclined to believe that it is, and always has been, part of human nature. But, as the late Ernest Gellner warned us,

'having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity'. The development of a mass national consciousness did not occur in most of Eastern Europe until the final decades of the nineteenth century. It was contingent on many other factors associated with the rise of a modern civil society: the transition from an agrarian society and polity to an urban and industrial one; the shift from a folk to a national culture through the development of schooling, mass literacy and

communication; and an increase in the mobility of the population which not only made it more aware of its own ethnic differences and disadvantages, compared with other groups in the broader world, but also resulted in its literate sons and grandsons joining the leadership of the embryonic nation. In short, the failure of the tsarist system to cope with the growth of nationalism was yet another reflection of its failure to cope with the challenges of the modern world.45

So new were these national movements that, even after the Polish uprisings of the nineteenth century, they took the tsarist regime largely by surprise when they appeared as a political force during the 1905 Revolution. Neither of the two mainstream Russian schools of thought could handle the conceptual problems thrown up by the rise of nationalism. Both the conservatives and the liberals were entrapped by the fact that Russia had become an Empire before it had become a nation: for it obliged them as patriots to identify with Russia's imperial claims. For right-wing supporters of autocracy the non-Russian lands were simply the possessions of the Tsar. The Russian Empire was indivisible, just as the Tsar's power was divine. Even Brusilov, who in 1917 would throw in his lot with the Republic, could not give up the idea of the Russian Empire, and it was this that made him join the Reds, whose regime was destined to preserve it.

Since, moreover, in the Rightists' view Orthodoxy was the basis of the Russian nation, the Ukrainians and the Belorussians were not separate peoples but 'Little' and 'White'

Russians; yet by the same token, the Poles, the Muslims and the Jews could never be assimilated into the Russian nation, or given equal rights to the Russian people, but had to be kept within the Empire in a sort of permanent apartheid. Hence the supporters of autocracy had no conceptual means of dealing with the problems of nationalism: for even to recognize the validity of the claims of the non-Russians would be to undermine the racial basis of their own ruling ideology. And yet the liberals were equally unable to meet the challenges of nationalism. They subordinated the question of national rights to the struggle for civil and religious freedoms, in the belief that once these had been achieved the problem of nationalism would somehow disappear. Some liberals were prepared to talk of a Russian federation in which the non-Russians would be granted some rights of self-rule and cultural freedoms, but none of them was ready to concede that the aspirations of the non-Russian peoples might legitimately be extended to the demand for an independent state. Even Prince Lvov could not understand the Ukrainian claims to nationhood: in his view the Ukrainians were Little Russian peasants who had different customs and a different dialect from the Great Russians of the north.

Only the socialist parties in Russia embraced the ideas of national autonomy and independence, although even they tended to subordinate the national question to the broader democratic struggle within Russia. It is hardly

surprising, then, that the national movements for liberation should have formed such a central part of the revolutionary movement as a whole. Indeed this was the pretext for their persecution by the Right: simply to be a Pole or, even worse, a Jew was to be a revolutionary in their eyes. This socialistic aspect of the nationalist movements is worth underlining. For the late twentieth-century reader might be tempted to assume, on the basis of the collapse of Communism and the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe, that they must have been opposed to socialist goals. What is striking about the nationalist movements within the Russian Empire is that their most successful political variants were nearly always socialist in form: Joseph Pilsudski's Polish Socialist Party led the national movement in Poland; the Socialist Party became the national party of the Finns; the Baltic movements were led by socialists; the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries were the leading Ukrainian national party; the Mensheviks led the Georgian national movement; and the Dashnak socialists the Armenian one. This was in part because the main ethnic conflict also tended to run along social lines: Estonian and Latvian peasants against German landlords and merchants; Ukrainian peasants against Polish or Russian landlords and officials; Azeri workers, or Georgian peasants, against the Armenian bourgeoisie; Kazakh and Kirghiz pastoralists against Russian farmers; and so on. Parties which appealed exclusively to nationalism effectively deprived themselves of mass support; whereas those which successfully combined the national with the social struggle had an almost unstoppable democratic force. In this sense it is worth repeating, given the understandably bad press which nationalism has received in the twentieth century, that for the subject peoples of the Tsarist Empire, as indeed of the Soviet Empire, nationalism was a means of human liberation from oppression and foreign domination. Lenin himself acknowledged this when, paraphrasing the Marquis de Custine, he called Imperial Russia a 'prison of peoples'.46

* * * Most of the national movements in the Tsarist Empire began with the growth of a literary cultural nationalism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Romantic writers, students and artists, alienated by the life of the cities, travelled to the countryside for refreshment and inspiration. They idealized the simple rustic lifestyle of their peasant countrymen and added folk themes to their works in an effort to create a

'national style'. This appropriation of the native culture — of
folksongs and folklore, local customs and dialects, peasant crafts and costumes — was more than a passing fashion for the pastoral. It was part of a broader project by a newly conscious urban middle class: the creation of a set of
ethnic symbols as the basis of their own national ethos and identity. This was their 'imagined community'. The urban intelligentsia did not so much observe peasant life as reinvent and mythologize it in their own image. The folk culture of the countryside, which they believed was the ancient origin of their nation, was in fact often little more than the product of their own fertile imagination. It was increasingly the urban middle classes, rather than the peasants, who dressed up in folk costumes when they went to church, and who filled their homes with furniture and tableware in the 'peasant style'. It was they who flocked to the ethnographic and folk museums which were opened in cities throughout Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.* But if instead of these museums they had gone into the villages themselves, to observe this folk culture, so to speak, in its native habitat, they would have found it was disappearing fast. The old handicrafts were dying out under competition from cheaper industry. The peasants were increasingly wearing the same manufactured clothes as the urban workers, buying the same food in tins and jars, the same factory furniture, household utensils and linen. It was only the urban middle classes who could afford to buy the old handicrafts.47

The essentially bourgeois character of this kind of nationalism was clearly visible in Finland. The Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed more self-rule and autonomy than any other part of the Tsarist Empire because on its capture from Sweden in 1808—9 the Russians confirmed the same rights and privileges that had been granted to the Finns by the more liberal Swedes. These cultural freedoms enabled the growth of a small but nationally conscious native intelligentsia, which took its inspiration from the publication of such Finnish folk-epics as the
Kalevala,
and which, from the 1860s, became increasingly unified through the national campaign for the Finnish language to be put on an equal footing with the historically dominant Swedish.48

In the Baltic provinces there was a similar cultural movement based around the campaign for native language rights in schools and universities, literary publications and official life. It was directed less against the Russians than the Germans (in Estonia and Latvia) or the Poles (in Lithuania), who had dominated these regions before their conquest by the Russians in the eighteenth century. Here the native languages had survived only in the remote rural areas (the native elites had been assimilated into the dominant linguistic culture). They were really no more than peasant dialects, closely related but locally varied, not unlike the Gaelic of the Irish and the Scots. During the nineteenth century linguists and ethnographers collected together and standardized these dialects in the form of a written language with a settled grammar and orthography.

Ironically, even if the peasants could have read this 'national language', most of them would have found it hard to understand, since it was usually either based on just one of the dominant dialects or was an artificial construction, a sort of

* Warsaw established the first Ethnographic Museum in 1888. It was followed by Sarajevo in 1888, Helsinki in 1893, Prague and Lvov in 1895, Belgrade in 1901, St Petersburg in 1902, and Krakov in 1905.

peasant Esperanto, made up from all the different dialects. Nevertheless, this creation of a literary native language, and the publication of a national literature and history written in its prose, helped to start the process of nation-building and made it possible, in future decades, to educate the peasantry in this emergent national culture. In Estonia the cultural landmarks of this national renaissance were the publication of the epic poem
Kalevipoeg
by Kreutzwald in 1857, and the foundation, in the same year, of an Estonian-language newspaper,
Postimees,
aimed at peasant readers. In Latvia there was also a native-language newspaper,
Balss (The Voice),
from 1878, which, like the Latvian Association, was committed to the idea of uniting the peoples of the two provinces of Livonia and Kurland — which then comprised the territory of Latvia — to form a single Latvian nation. Finally, in Lithuania, which for so long had been dominated by the Poles, a national written language was also developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century (just to spite the Poles it was based on the Czech alphabet) and a native literature began to appear.49

As on the Baltic, so in post-partition Poland, the nation was an idea and not yet a place.

Poland existed only in the imagination and in the memory of the historic Polish kingdom which had existed before its defeat and subjugation to the great powers of Eastern Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. Its spirit was expressed in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, in the patriotic hymns of the Catholic Church, and — or so at least the patriots claimed (for he was half-French) — in the music of Chopin. This cultural nationalism was a comfort for the Poles, and a substitute for politics. Very few people were engaged in public life, even fewer in open dissent against Russia.

Censorship and the constant danger of arrest forced the literate population to withdraw into the world of poetry (as in Russia, literature in Poland served as a metaphor for politics). The 1830 Polish uprising, even the great 1863 uprising, were the work of a relatively small nationalist minority, mostly students, officers, priests and the more liberal noble landowners. Neither won much support from the peasantry, who had little concept of themselves as Poles and who, in any case, were much more interested in gaining their own land and freedom from the nobles than in fighting for a cause led by noblemen and intellectuals.50

This first and primarily cultural expression of aspiring nationhood was nowhere more in evidence than in the Ukraine, no doubt in part due to the fact that of all the Empire's subject nationalities the Ukrainians were the closest culturally to the Russians. The Russians called the Ukraine 'Little Russia', and made it illegal to print the word