for the tsarist empire was dramatic: three revolutions – January 1905, February 1917 and October 1917 – within the first two decades of the twentieth century. Just as defeat in the Crimean War had pushed the tsar towards reforms, so the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 helped pave the way for what Lenin described as the dress rehearsal of 1905. The ‘Great’ War of 1914–18 made February 1917 inevitable. Lenin ensured the success of October.
An idealized depiction of serfs after the
Emancipation. In fact conditions remained grim.
The apex of the system was the court. The tsar, whether in Moscow or St Petersburg, exercised control of virtually every aspect of life. He was assisted by a despised bureaucracy, membership in which often altered class locations by opening the gates to the lowest levels of the nobility. This upward mobility, designed to ensure stability, occasionally had the opposite effect. Everything was relative. The peasants and, later, the intelligentsia wondered whether the next ruler would be a good or a bad tsar.
In 1796, understandably panicked by the tumbrils in Paris, Catherine’s grandson and tsarevitch Grand Duke Alexander confessed to his French tutor ‘that he hated despotism everywhere … that he loved liberty … that he had taken the greatest interest in the French revolution; that while condemning its terrible mistakes, he hoped the Republic would succeed and would be glad if it did.’ The French Revolution was never too far from the thoughts of rulers and ruled in Russia.
A few years later Alexander conspired in a palace coup that did away with his father Paul I and dismantled some of the more odious structures of his reign. Alexander ordered the removal of gallows from public squares, authorised the import of foreign books and ended the state monopoly on the establishment of printing presses. He lived to regret the latter. Nothing fundamental changed. Despotism was inbred. The autocracy needed it to survive. For a while, however, Alexander was the best example of the ‘good tsar’ as far as many of his subjects were concerned.
Ever since the legal code of 1649 – a time when England was already engulfed in a bourgeois revolution – forbade peasants from leaving the land without authorisation, serfdom had gradually become entrenched in the absolutist system. Overnight, millions of people became tied to the land. This Russian form of servitude adversely affected the country on many levels, cutting it off from developments in Western Europe and delaying capitalism and modernisation till the twentieth century. When an 1861 imperial proclamation ended legal bondage, it was almost time to mark the centenary of the French Revolution.
Unlike the African slaves in North and South America or the West Indies, the Russian serfs lived in their own villages and were responsible for reproduction and the sharing of communal lands. In many other ways, however, their suffering was not dissimilar to that of slaves elsewhere. Contemporary historians argue that the serfs, unlike slaves, had 153 holidays a year, but leaving aside Easter, Christmas and numerous saint days, this probably had much more to do with the inclement Russian winters than a more benign dispensation on the part of their landlords. In 1800, for instance, the price of a serf fluctuated depending on the market and natural calamities but never rose higher than that of a pedigree dog, especially one imported from France or Germany. Young women were sold in the marketplace alongside horses, cows and used carriages. Advertisements such as the following in Moscow were common elsewhere in the country: ‘For sale at Pantaleimon’s, opposite the meat market: a girl of thirty and a young horse.’ Liveried serfs worked in the households of rich families in huge numbers: the Sheremetievs had 300 house-serfs; the Stroganoffs, 600; the Razumovskys, 900. A similar pattern was repeated on different scales throughout the country. While some of the domestic serfs (the ‘house niggers’, in Malcolm X’s memorable description of their Afro-American counterparts) shared the prejudices of their masters, many others imbibed a deep sense of bitterness and hatred. Serf memoirs published in the literary press after the abolition of legal bondage contain numerous details concerning the treatments to which they were regularly subjected. Sexual oppression against women and children was common. When the time came to rebel, serfs’ congealed anger did not remain hidden. Class fought against class. And the serfs’ numbers were huge. The 1825 census revealed that out of a total population of 49 million, a large majority – 36 million – were serfs. Anti-Semitism and pogroms were rife, reaching fever pitch when the autocracy felt threatened by serf unrest.
The roll-call of significant events in Russian history includes two giant jacqueries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by a semi-insurrection launched by radical army officers in St Petersburg in December 1825. These three events became deeply embedded in the historical memory of the entire country, their imprint reaching far beyond the more radical segments of the population. Each side of the social divide learnt its own lesson: the revolts were warnings of the destructive nature of the working class, or examples of their liberatory potential. Russian backwardness, as symbolised by the serf economy, had produced its own variant of upheavals. These did not, as in England and France, lead to full-blown revolution, but they established a pattern and strongly influenced Populist and anarcho-terrorist groups, especially the secret societies, that organised and carried out acts of terror against tsars, dukes, generals and senior bureaucrats in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. These were the early expressions of Russian Marxism that slowly developed into the Emancipation of Labour group and later the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, with its Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) factions.
The peasant revolts grew out of a long tradition of rural discontent starting after the final victory over the Tatars in the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo and the birth of a Russia-wide tsarist autocracy. As the new absolutism grew in size and scale, it was accompanied by small peasant outbreaks, usually confined to clusters of small villages and bands of déclassé Tatars and their dependents that included ethnic Russians. All people of Mongol origin – Tatars, Kirghiz, Kalmuks – were treated as an inferior race and deprived of rights, and could be legally forced into serfdom by members of the Russian nobility, some of whom exercised this privilege. More popular with merchants was the legalised slave trade, formally prohibited only in 1828, that sanctioned the sale of children of Mongol origin throughout the empire and, no doubt, abroad. These conditions were instrumental in inciting the two large-scale rebellions that would make such a strong impression on peasants’ political consciousness.
1918: Lenin dedicates a statue honouring
Stenka Razin.
The insurrections were led by the Don Cossacks: Stepan (Stenka) Razin (1667–71) and, a century later, Emilian Pugachev (1773–75), who took on Catherine II. The Cossack core of both insurrectionary groups rapidly expanded and embraced discontents of every sort. Both were ultimately defeated. Interestingly, both Razin and Pugachev had been born in the same South Russian village of Zimoyevskaya. Of the two, Razin was showier and more adventurous, a Cossack Robin Hood much given to tormenting and mocking his captives and extending his adventures to neighbouring Persia. Pugachev was more politically astute, pretending to be a popular deposed prince to whom he bore a resemblance. Mass movements in those days, not only in Russia, flourished on such myths. Pugachev took Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, today Volgograd), laid unsuccessful siege to Simbirsk (where Lenin was born), claimed to be defending a good tsar against the bad boyars and won the support of the Cossack krug, a representative though unelected assembly, for a march to the North. This triggered a wave of peasant uprisings en route, greatly enlarging the size of the army. After four years on the road and a betrayal by Cossack elders loyal to the tsar, Pugachev was captured and publicly decapitated in Moscow’s Red Square. Some months later, his brother and elderly parents were eliminated in similar fashion. Punishing families to prevent revenge killings in the future is an old tradition.
The Volga rebellions typified the revolutionary traditions of the Russian peasantry,
