The Transformation of the World (123 page)

Reforms as Triggers of Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 was preceded not by a wave of repression and exclusion but by a cautious attempt, especially on the part of Minister Turgot, to open up and modernize the political system. This gave rise to the hypothesis—seemingly confirmed in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev—that signs of liberalization smooth the path for revolutions by creating a spiral of rising expectations. On this point the Eastern revolutions we are considering differed from one another. Abdülhamid II was not altogether the tyrant depicted by hostile propaganda; he persevered with many of the reforms introduced before his time, such as the building of an education system and the modernization of the armed forces. But the sultan showed no willingness to compromise on the issue of political participation. In Iran there was little sign of reforms on the eve of
the revolution; the shah, when faced with protests, had often revoked particular measures during the previous decades, but he had never countenanced actual changes to the system. In Russia, it was less out of perspicacity than because of external pressures that Nicholas II announced some minor reforms in summer 1904. But, instead of mitigating the climate of unrest, this long-awaited token of minimal concessions became the signal for the opposition to step up its activity against the autocracy.
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Similarly, the decision of Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General had given a major impetus to public debate.

China was the big surprise, furthest of all from the cliché of Oriental despotism. The Empress Dowager had a reputation abroad of being perhaps the extreme hardliner among Asiatic monarchs, and it is true that nowhere else was life so dangerous for oppositionists. In 1898 Cixi had ruthlessly suppressed a moderate reform movement. But the catastrophic defeat of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 convinced her of the need to reappraise the institutions of the Chinese state, to pursue modernization more actively, and to involve sections of the upper classes in policymaking. In the Tsarist Empire such participation had existed since 1864 in the form of the zemstvo: a rural administrative body at the governorate and district level intended to meet the needs of the local population in matters such as education, health care, and road construction. The zemstva were to some degree independent of the state bureaucracy, being constituted (after 1865) through elections in which only the nobility could vote. The peasantry was allowed to send representatives of its own, but from 1890 these were no longer directly elected. The creation of the zemstva served to politicize various sections of the population but also to divide them into mutually antagonistic tendencies. Where radical forces gained the upper hand, the zemstvo became an opposition forum in the early years of the twentieth century. Parliamentary-style local government was hard to reconcile, however, with an autocratic system subject to no constitutional safeguards and a bloated, increasingly self-assertive, bureaucratic apparatus. In the years before 1914, Russia was by no means on its way to ever broader self-government, let alone liberal democracy.
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In China it had traditionally been unthinkable to engage in politics outside the bureaucracy; the principle of representation was unknown. It therefore meant a radical break when the Dowager Empress, without facing significant resistance from the intrabureaucratic opposition, promised in November 1906 that work would begin on a constitution, and when the Court announced at the end of 1908 a transition to constitutional government within nine years. In October 1909 male members of the elite convened in provincial assemblies, much like similar bodies earlier in European history. China had not seen anything like it; officially sanctioned forums could for the first time freely discuss the affairs of their province and even of the country as a whole. At least as important was a whole series of reforms that high officials of the Qing Dynasty initiated in the first decade of the new century: creation of specialized ministries, suppression of opium growing, an accelerated construction of the railroad network, increased
funding for universities and other educational establishments, and above all elimination of the examination system that had been used for more than eight hundred years to select top civil servants. This last measure changed overnight the character of the Chinese state and of the upper stratum in society. In none other of the four countries under comparison were such radical and farsighted reforms not only announced but implemented on the eve of the revolution. The oldest monarchy in the world seemed to prove itself particularly capable of learning, not least under the impact of events in Russia since 1905.
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All the greater is the irony that none of the anciens régimes dropped out of the picture with such rapidity.

Intelligentsia

Behind each revolution stand special coalitions of social forces. The four countries under consideration traditionally had very different forms of society, yet they also displayed a number of common features. Everywhere the intelligentsia was a driving force. In Russia, where the term itself was coined, the
intelligentsiya
had come into being in the first third of the nineteenth century through Alexander I's modest, Enlightenment-inspired educational reforms. From then on, large sections of the nobility regarded a higher education as “an indispensable part of their life plan.”
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The original model was the European Enlightenment, and later heroic-romantic idealism, in the forms in which these reached the truly cosmopolitan culture of the Russian elite. Protected by the upper-class background of many of its members, the intelligentsia was able to develop even amid the censorship that gripped Russia from the 1860s on. The new liberal professions and growing elite education (limited though this was in comparison with Western Europe) expanded their recruitment base beyond the circles of the nobility. It began to define itself increasingly in opposition to the state:
intelligentsiya
versus officialdom. The lifestyles and values of the “nihilist” counterculture that arose in the sixties were also shaped by a protest symbolism that is harder to find in the other three countries where revolution was slowly ripening. After Tsar Alexander II was assassinated on March 1, 1881, by a terrorist group within one intellectual movement (the Narodniki or “Friends of the People”), the intelligentsia appeared more sharply as a force of radical
political
opposition.
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In the Ottoman Empire—comparable in a way to Prussia or the southern German states earlier on—reformist attitudes inspired by the Enlightenment spread in midcentury particularly among the upper reaches of the state bureaucracy. Here the critical intelligentsia was at first a special group close to the levers of power, until the authoritarian turn under Sultan Abdülhamid II made criticism of the status quo a dangerous business. Many independent minds then took the road of exile, to Western Europe and elsewhere, forming a diaspora that was by far the main source of revolutionary preparations.

This was paralleled in the Iranian case, though on a lesser scale. One peculiarity of Iran was that secularism, understood as a separation between religion and politics, made slower progress than in the Ottoman Empire. Shiite scholars
of divinity and law, especially the high-ranking
mujtahids
, were able to preserve their general position in the culture more successfully than Sunni clerics. Indeed, their influence had grown in the eighteenth century, and under the Qajar Dynasty (from 1796) it became even stronger than it had been under the Safavids.
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Equivalents of the European intelligentsia were therefore to be found not on the liberal wing of the state bureaucracy (as in the Ottoman Empire) but among more closed groups within the religious establishment.

In China, since time immemorial, there had been no room for a critical intelligentsia outside the elite of scholar-officials defined by success in competitive examinations. Any criticism had always been expressed from within the bureaucracy itself, often with considerable effect on imperial governance. After 1842, a modern press and the first scope for critical argument began to appear in the special areas to which the Chinese authorities had no direct access (above all the British colony of Hong Kong).
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But so long as the examination system survived, mapping out life plans for young Chinese, a “free-floating” intelligentsia could develop on only a very limited scale. Its history therefore really dates from 1905, when thousands quickly took up the greater opportunities allowed for study abroad. A revolutionary intelligentsia did not develop in China out of a reform-minded state bureaucracy (the failed reformers of 1898 were outsiders) or, as in Russia, out of an elite culture oriented to the West; there was no clergy as in Iran. The concept of an intelligentsia (
zhishi fenzi
) can be applied at all only to circles of nationalist students educated mainly in Japan after 1905. Their chief organization was the Tongmenghui, a revolutionary association “bound by oath,” which made an essential contribution to the program of the Chinese Revolution and eventually spawned the Guomindang, the National Party of Sun Yat-sen.

In scarcely any other country in the twentieth century did the intelligentsia shape history to the extent that it did in China, especially after 1915. Living mostly in exile, sometimes in Shanghai or Hong Kong, such intellectuals did not participate directly in the Revolution of 1911; they were a backstage influence rather, with only a weak presence in the spotlight of events. Their hour was to arrive
after
1911. The role of the intelligentsia in the revolutions was most important in Russia and Iran. In the Ottoman Empire the initiative passed in spring 1908 from revolutionary exiles (including Armenians) to a group of officers in Ottoman Macedonia. It was from their ranks that the leadership of the Young Turk movement would be recruited after the success of the revolution.
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The Military and the International Setting

None of the four revolutions was a military coup d'état. In Russia and Iran the military was on the side of the old order. If the Russian armed forces had gone over to the striking workers, the rebellious peasantry, and the turbulent nationalities, the authoritarian regime would not have been able to survive. However, unrest in the Black Sea fleet did not escalate into a general mutiny; only on the battleship
Potemkin
did revolutionary sailors seize command and
fraternize with radical groups in the port of Odessa. On June 16, 1905, the army put down the revolt with a brutality that went far beyond Bloody Sunday in Saint Petersburg; more than two thousand people were killed in the space of a few hours.
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In Iran there was no army that could have been subordinated to the civil power. Following the early death of the resourceful Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in 1833 the regime had given up attempts to modernize the military. Then in 1879, after he had encountered Cossack troops on a visit to Russia, Nasir al-Din Shah established a Cossack brigade of his own under the command of Russian officers. It was a kind of Praetorian Guard, which, in addition to serving its own interests and those of the shah, represented the concerns of Russia. In June 1908 Muhammad Ali Shah deployed the Cossacks (now down to two thousand men, but a redoubtable force) in a coup d'état that disbanded the parliament, suspended the constitution and brought the first phase of the revolution to a sudden end.

The difference with the Ottoman Empire and China could hardly have been greater.
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In those two countries, it was army officers who struck the decisive blows for the revolution. Both Sultan Abdülhamid and, beginning two or three decades later, the Qing rulers had founded military academies, recruited foreign advisers, and sought to raise some units to a European standard of training, equipment, and battle-readiness. Although this was quite successful, the central governments neglected to ensure the loyalty of their officers, who tended to be highly patriotic. The Young Turk movement, in whose emigré circles military men had initially played a very minor role, became the great danger for the sultanate once civilian organizations managed to win over numbers of officers.
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Military pressure resulted in Abdülhamid's reactivation of the constitution on July 23, 1908, moving him away, at least in theory, from absolutist rule. In a similar way, ideas of a revolutionary conspiracy, first voiced among the exiled Tongmenghui radicals in Japan, found an echo among officers of modernized sections of the army in the Qing empire. Here regional militias had been formed in the wake of the anti-Taiping war. The new armies that had arisen in the 1890s were likewise concentrated not in the imperial capital (where the, by now, rather ineffectual Manchu troops were based) but in the various provincial capitals, where they were often in close contact with officials and other notables. This alliance boded ill for the fate of the dynasty.
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A chance uncovering of subversive activity among soldiers in Hankou (there was something similar in Ottoman Salonica in 1908) led to an improvised mutiny in several provinces. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 took the form of a defection of most provinces from the imperial house.
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This set the power configuration for the next twenty years and more, in which the quest for autonomy on the part of military and civilian elites was the dominant tendency of Chinese politics. Things were much more centralized in the Ottoman system, where military leaders gradually ensconced themselves in positions of power after 1908. Turkey's major involvement in the First World War—in contrast to China's
rather nominal participation—and the fact that not long afterward it had to fight another war against Greece, further strengthened the position of top officers. But one of the leading generals, Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk), managed to rein in and “civilize” the army in the 1920s by channeling its energies into the construction of a civilian republican nation-state, whereas the militarization of China—under warlords, Guomindang, and Communists—continued to proceed until the middle of the century.