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A People’s Tragedy

Also by Orlando Figes

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917

Also by Orlando Figes

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–21

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–21

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Private

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991: A Pelican Introduction

The Blackest Streets

A People’s Tragedy

The Russian Revolution 1891–1924

The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum

100th Anniversary Edition

Orlando Figes

TH E BODLEY HEAD

LONDON

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First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Jonathan Cape Published in 1997 by Pimlico

First published by The Bodley Head in 2014 This anniversary edition published by The Bodley Head in 2017 www.penguin.co.uk/vintage

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For Stephanie

Introduction to the 100th Anniversary Edition

It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly than the Russian Revolution of 1917. A generation after the establishment of the Soviet system, one-third of the human race was living under regimes modelled, more or less, upon it. The fear of Bolshevism was a major factor in the rise of fascist movements, leading to the outbreak of the Second World War. From 1945, the export of the Leninist model to Eastern Europe, China, South-East Asia, Africa and Central America engulfed the world in a long Cold War, which came to an uncertain end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its shadow,’ I wrote in the Preface to the first edition of A People’s Tragedy in 1996. Today, in 2017, that shadow still hangs darkly over Russia and the fragile new democracies that emerged from the Soviet Union. Its presence can be felt in the revolutionary and terrorist movements of our age. As I warned in the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, ‘The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’

That was not how it appeared to many in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a widespread feeling, in the West at least, that the Russian Revolution was over, its false gods toppled by democracy. In that moment of democratic triumph and triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote his influential book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he announced the ultimate victory of liberal capitalism in its great ideological battle against communism. ‘What we are witnessing,’ Fukuyama wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

When I was working on A People’s Tragedy, between 1989 and 1996, there was, for sure, a liberating sense for me, as a historian, that my subject need no longer be defined by Cold War ideological battles. The Russian Revolution was becoming ‘history’ in a new way: with the collapse of the Soviet system, it could at last be seen to have a complete historical trajectory – a beginning and a middle and, now, an end – which could be studied more permissively, without the pressures of contemporary politics or the limiting agendas of Sovietology, the political-science

framework in which most Western studies of the Revolution had been written when the Soviet Union was alive.

Meanwhile the opening of the Soviet archives enabled new approaches to the Revolution’s history. Mine was to use the personal stories of ordinary individuals whose voices had been lost in the Cold War-era histories (both Soviet and Western), which had focused on the abstract ‘masses’, social classes, political parties and ideologies. Having worked in the Soviet archives since 1984, I was sceptical that startling revelations about Lenin, Trotsky or even Stalin were yet to be found, which is what the new arrivals in the reading rooms were mostly looking for. But I was excited by the opportunity to work with the personal archives of the Revolution’s minor figures –secondary leaders, workers, soldiers, officers, intellectuals and even peasants – in much larger quantities than had previously been allowed. The biographical approach I ended up adopting in A People’s Tragedy was intended to do more than add ‘human interest’ to my narrative. By weaving the stories of these individuals through my history, I wanted to present the Revolution as a dramatic series of events, uncontrolled by the people taking part in them. The figures I chose had one feature in common: setting out to influence the course of history, they all fell victim to the law of unintended consequences. By focusing on them, my aim was to convey the Revolution’s tragic chaos, which engulfed so many lives and destroyed so many dreams.

My conception of the Revolution as a ‘people’s tragedy’ was also meant to work as an argument about Russia’s destiny: its failure to overcome its autocratic past and stabilize itself as a democracy in 1917; its descent into violence and dictatorship. The causes of that democratic failure, it seemed to me, were rooted in the country’s history, in the weakness of its middle class and civil institutions and, above all, in the poverty and isolation of the peasantry, the vast majority of Russia’s population, whose agrarian revolution I had studied in detail in my first book, Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989).

When A People’s Tragedy came out, some reviewers thought the book too bleak in its assessment of the Revolution’s democratic potential. Part of this reaction had its origins in the Marxist view of October 1917 as a popular uprising based on a social revolution that lost its democratic character only after Lenin’s death, in 1924, and the rise of Stalin to power. But part of it was rooted in the democratic hopes invested in post-Soviet Russia by a wide variety of interested parties, ranging from those veteran idealists, the Russian intelligentsia, who wanted to believe that Russia could yet become a flourishing democracy once it had been freed from its Stalinist inheritance, to Western business leaders, more pragmatic but ignorant of Russia, who needed to believe the same in order to put their money into it.

Those hopes proved short-lived, as Russia under Vladimir Putin, elected President in 2000, reverted to a more authoritarian and familiar form of rule. The causes of this democratic failure were similar to those in 1917, as I had identified them in A People’s Tragedy, but with one important difference. Unlike the downfall of the Tsarist system in February 1917, the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991 was

not brought about by a popular or social revolution, leading to the democratic reform of the state. It was essentially an abdication of power by the Communist élites, who, at least in Russia, where there were no lustration laws like those in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states to keep them out of public office, were soon able to recover dominant positions in politics and business with new political identities. Spared any public scrutiny of its activities in the Soviet period, the KGB, in which Putin had made his career, was allowed to reconstruct itself, eventually becoming the Federal Security Service (FSB), without substantial changes in its personnel.

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected to the pressures of the market, the intelligentsia proved far smaller and less influential than it thought it was, and lost its credibility as the people’s moral voice, a role it had assumed since the nineteenth century: it lived in a world of books at a time when power and authority were increasingly defined by the state-controlled mass media. In the quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet regime, the development of public bodies in Russia has been pitifully weak. Where are the professional societies, the trade unions, the consumer organizations, the real political parties? The problem for democracy in Russia lies as much in the weakness of civil society as in the state’s oppressive strength.

But the biggest problem for the democratic project in 1991, as it had been in 1917, was the simple historical fact that the Russians had no real experience of it. Neither the Tsarist nor Soviet governments had given them a taste or even an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty, government accountability or legally protected liberties. The popular conception of ‘democracy’ in 1917 was not as a form of government at all, but rather as a social label, equivalent to ‘the common people’, whose opposite was not ‘dictatorship’ but instead ‘the bourgeoisie’. On this basis, for the next six or perhaps seven decades, people could believe that the Soviet system was ‘the most democratic in the world’ insofar as it provided, more or less, universal employment, housing, health care and social equality. In such a view, the economic crisis that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system undermined the credibility of the capitalist versions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that were offered in its place.

For the majority of ordinary Russians, especially for those of a certain age who identified themselves as ‘Soviet’, the 1990s were little short of a catastrophe. They lost everything: a familiar way of life; an economic system that guaranteed security; an ideology that gave them moral certainties, perhaps even hope; a huge empire with superpower status and an identity that covered over ethnic divisions; and national pride in Soviet achievements in culture, science and technology. Struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of the new capitalist way of life, where there was no great idea, no collective purpose defined by the state, they looked back with nostalgia to the Soviet period. Many yearned for the mythic past they remembered or imagined under Stalin, who, they believed, had presided over times of material

plenty, order and security, the ‘best times in the country’s history’. According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’.

From the start of his regime, Putin aimed to restore pride in Soviet history. This was an important part of his agenda to rebuild Russia as a great power. The rehabilitation of the Soviet past, including Stalin, sanctioned Putin’s own authoritarian government, legitimizing it as the continuation of a long Russian tradition of strong state power, going back before 1917 to the Tsars. The order and security provided by the state, according to this myth, are more highly valued by Russians than the Western liberal concepts of human rights or political democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.

Putin’s historical initiative was popular in Russia, particularly when it gave encouragement to nationalist feelings, patriotic pride about the Soviet victory of 1945 and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. When he declared to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2005 that ‘the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century’, Putin was articulating the opinion of three-quarters of the population, who, according to a poll in 2000, regretted the collapse of the USSR and wanted Russia to expand in size, incorporating ‘Russian’ territories, such as the Crimea and the Donbass, which had been ‘lost’ to Ukraine. In 2014, volunteers with neo-Soviet flags would cross the border from Russia to fight for the return of these two Ukrainian territories.

The positive rewriting of Soviet history also came as a relief to those Russians who had resented the ‘blackening’ of their country’s history in the glasnost period, when the media was full of revelations about ‘Stalin’s crimes’, which undermined the Soviet textbook version they had learned at school. Many had been made uncomfortable by the questions they had been forced to ask about their families’ actions in the period of Stalin’s rule. They did not want to listen to moralising lectures about how ‘bad’ their country’s history was. By restoring pride in the Soviet past, Putin helped the Russians to feel good as Russians once again.

His initiative began in schools, where textbooks deemed too negative about the Soviet period were denied approval by the Ministry of Education, effectively removing them from the classroom. In 2007, Putin told a conference of history teachers:

As to some problematic pages in our history, yes, we have had them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II,

as the Americans did in Vietnam. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt . . .

Putin did not deny Stalin’s crimes. But he argued for the need not to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past’. In a manual for history teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an ‘effective manager’ who ‘acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the country’s modernization’.

Polls suggested that the Russians shared this troubling attitude to the Revolution’s violence. According to a survey conducted in 2007 in three cities (St Petersburg, Kazan and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk), 71 per cent of the population thought that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in 1917, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent believed he was a ‘criminal and executioner’. More disturbing was the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had suffered – two-thirds of these respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the country. Many thought that, under Stalin, people had been ‘kinder and more compassionate’. Even with knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appeared, continued to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified to meet the Revolution’s goals.

Preface

In the autumn of 2011, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which various figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with advocates, witnesses and a jury of the viewers, who reached their verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgements arrived at in this trial by state TV do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian attitudes. Presented with the evidence of Stalin’s war against the peasants and the catastrophic effects of forcible collectivisation, in which millions died of starvation and many more were sent to the Gulag camps or remote penal settlements, 78 per cent of the viewers nonetheless believed that these policies were justified, a ‘terrible necessity’ for Soviet industrialisation. Only 22 per cent considered them a ‘crime’.

Politically the Revolution may be dead, but it has an afterlife in these mentalities, which will continue to dominate the Russian polity for many years.

Finally, the narrativeof APeople’ s Tragedy weaves between the private and the public spheres. W herever possible,I have tried toemphasize the human aspect of its g reat events by listening to the voices of individualpeople whose lives became caughtupin the stor m. T heir diaries, letters and other private writings featureprominently in this book. More substantially, the personal histories of several figures have been interwoven through the narrative. Some of these figures are well known(Maxim Gorky,General Brusilov and Prince Lvov), while others are unknowneven tohistorians (the peasantrefor mer Sergei Semenov and the soldier-commissar Dmitr y Os’ kin). But all of them hadhopes and aspirations, fears and disappointments, thatwere typicalof the revolutionary experience as a whole. Infollowing the fortunes of these figures, my aim has been to conveythe chaos of these years,as it must have been felt by ordinary men and women. I have tried topresentthe revolution not as a marchof abstract socialforces and ideologies but as a humanevent of complicated individual tragedies. Itwas a story,by and large, of people, like the figures in this book, setting out withhigh idealsto achieveone thing , onlyto find out laterthatthe outcome was quitedifferent. T his,again, iswhy Ichose to call the book A People’ s Tragedy. For it is not just about the tragic tur ning-point in the history of a people. It i s also about the ways in which the tragedy of the revolution engulfed the destinies of those who lived through it.

So how should we commemorate the Revolution during its centenary? In 1889, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated at the entrance to the Paris World Fair of that year. The tower symbolized the values of the Third Republic derived from 1789. No such landmark could be built in Russia, where the commemoration of the October Revolution has divided

T his book hastakenoversixyears to write and it owes a g reat debttomany people.

Above all,I must thank Stephanie Palmer, who has had toendurefar morein the way of selﬁshofﬁcehours, weekends and holidays spoilt by homework and generally impossible behaviour by her husband than she had any righttoexpect. In retur n I received from her love and support in muchg reater measure than I deserved. Stephanie looked after me through the dark years of debilitating illness in the earlystages of this book,and, in addition toher own

Russia since the downfall of the Soviet regime. In 1996, Boris Yeltsin replaced the 7 November Revolution Day with a Day of Accord and Reconciliation, ‘in order to diminish confrontations and effect conciliation between different segments of society’. But Communists continued to commemorate the Revolution’s anniversary in the traditional Soviet manner with a demonstration in massed ranks with red banners. Putin tried to resolve the conflict by establishing a Day of National Unity on 4 November (the date of the end of the Polish occupation of Russia in 1612). It took the place of the 7 November holiday in the official calendar from 2005. But the Day of National Unity did not catch on. According to a 2007 poll, only 4 per cent of the population could say what it was for. Six out of ten people were opposed to the dropping of Revolution Day. Despite Putin’s efforts to reclaim the positive achievements of the country’s Soviet past, there is no historical narrative of the October Revolution around which the nation can unite: some see it as a national catastrophe, others as the start of a great civilization, but the country as a whole remains unable to come to terms with its violent and contradictory legacies.

Likewise, no consensus could be achieved on what to do with the founder of the Soviet state. Yeltsin and the Russian Orthodox Church supported calls to close the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, where Lenin’s preserved body has been on display since 1924, and bury him next to his mother at the Volkov Cemetery in St Petersburg, as he had wanted for himself. But the Communists were organized and vocal in resisting this, so the issue remained unresolved. Putin was opposed to removing Lenin from the Mausoleum, reasoning that it would offend the older generation of Russians, who had sacrificed so much for the Soviet system, by implying they had cherished false ideals.

With such division and confusion, the commemoration of the Revolution will probably be muted in Russia in 2017. That too seems most likely in the West, where the Russian Revolution has retreated in our historical consciousness, partly as a result of declining media interest since the end of the Cold War, as our focus has been redirected to the Middle East and the problem of Islamic extremism; and perhaps in part because our growing concern about human rights, which dominates our moral discourse about political change, has led us to be less understanding of the emotive force of other values, such as social justice and wealth redistribution, which fuel revolutionary violence.

But as events in recent years have shown, the age of revolutions has not passed. The ‘colour revolutions’ in the Balkans, Ukraine, Georgia and the Lebanon, the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan remind us of the power of mass protest to bring down governments, usually with violence. In all these movements there are lessons to be learned from comparisons with 1917. Their use of social media to organize the crowds, for example, would have been appreciated by Lenin. As the Jacobins were for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, so the Bolsheviks became a model for all the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, from

China to Iran, as well as for the terrorists of our own age. All the methods used by ISIS – the use of war and terror to build a revolutionary state, the fanatical devotion and military discipline of its followers, and its brilliant use of propaganda – were first mastered by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. We should not complacently suppose that revolution could not pose a threat to Western liberal democracies. The recent rise in populist mass movements across Europe should remind us that revolutions can erupt unexpectedly: they are never far away. Europe’s history in the twentieth century demonstrates how fragile democracy has been. If it won its great ideological battles against fascism and communism, it did so only narrowly, and its victory was by no means preordained: it could have turned out otherwise. As I wrote in the final paragraphs of A People’s Tragedy in 1996, ‘we must try to strengthen our democracy, both as a source of freedom and of social justice, lest the disadvantages and the disillusioned reject it again’.

London, January 2017

Preface

Preface to the 1996 Edition

T hesedays we call somanythings a ‘revolution’— achangein the gover nment ’ s policies on sport,a technologicalinnovation, or even a newtrend in marketing that it may behardforthe reader of this book to take on board the vast scale of its subject atthe start. T he Russian Revolution was,at least in ter ms of its effects, one of the big gest events in the history of the world. Within a generation of the establishment of Soviet power, one-thirdofhumanity was living under regimes modelled upon it. T he revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world,and we areonly now emerging from its shadow. Itwas not somuch a single revolution the compact eruption of 1917sooften de picted in the history books as a whole complex of diffe rent revolutions which exploded in the middle of the First World War and set off achain reaction of more revolutions,civil, ethnicand national wars. Bythe time that itwas over, it had blown apart and then put back together anempire covering onesixthof the surfaceof the globe. Atthe riskof appearing callous, the easiest wayto conveythe revolution’ sscope istolist the ways in whichitwasted human life: tens of thousandswerekilled bythe bombs and bullets of the revolutionaries, and at least anequalnumber bythe repressions of the tsarist regime,before 1917; thousands died in the street fighting of thatyear; hundreds of thousands from the Terror of the Reds and anequalnumber from the Terror of the W hites , if one counts the victims of their pog roms against Jews during the years that followed; more than a million perished in the fighting of the civil war, including civilians in the rear; and yet morepeople died from hunger,cold and disease thanfrom all theseput together.

All of which,I suppose, is byway of an apolog y forthe vast sizeof this book the first attempt at acomprehensivehistory of the entire revolutionary period in a single volume. Its narrative begins in the 1890s, when the revolutionary crisisreallystarted,and more specifically in 1891, when the public’ s reaction to the famine crisisset it forthe first time on acollision course with the tsarist autocrac y. And our story ends in 1924, with the deathof Lenin,by which time the revolution had come full circle and the basic institutions, if not all the practices, of the Stalinist regime wereinplace. T his istogive to the revolution a muchlonger lifespan thanis customary. But itseemstome that,

withone ortwoexceptions, previous histories of the revolution have been too narrowly focused on the events of 1917,and thatthis has made the rangeof its possible outcomes appear muchmorelimited than they actuallywere. Itwas by no means inevitable thatthe revolution should haveended in the Bolshevik dictatorship,although looking only atthat fateful yearwould leadone towards this conclusion. T here were a number of decisivemoments,both before and during 1917, when Russia might havefollowed a moredemocraticcourse. It is the aim of APeople’ s Tragedy,by looking atthe revolution in the longuedure´ e, to explain why it did not at eachof thesein tur n. As its title is intended to suggest, the book rests on the proposition that Russia’ s democratic failure was dee ply rooted in its political culture and socialhistory. Many of the themes of the four introductory chapters in Part One the absenceof a state-based counterbalance to the despotismof the Tsar; the isolation and fragility of liberal civil society; the backwardness and violenceof the Russian village that drove somany peasants togo and seek abetter lifein the industrial towns; and the strange fanaticismof the Russian radicalintelligentsia will reappear as constant themes in the narrativeof Parts Two,T hree and Four.

Although politics arenever far away, this is,I suppose,a socialhistory in the sense that its main focus isthe common people. I have tried topresent the majorsocialforces the peasantr y, the working class, the soldiers and the nationalminorities asthe participants in their own revolutionary drama ratherthan as ‘victims’ of the revolution. T his is nottodenythatthere were manyvictims. Nor is itto adoptthe ‘bottom-up’ approach sofashionable these days among the ‘revisionist’ historians of Soviet Russia. Itwould be absurd and in Russia’ s caseobscene toimplythat a people gets the rulers it deserves. But it isto argue thatthe sort of politicized ‘top-down’ histories of the Russian Revolution which used to be written in the Cold War era, in which the common people appeared asthe passiveobjects of the evil machinations of the Bolsheviks, arenolonger adequate. Wenow have a rich and g rowing literature,based upon researchin the newly opened archives, on the sociallifeof the Russianpeasantr y, the workers, the soldiers and the sailors, the provincial towns, the Cossacks and the non-Russian regions of the Empireduring the revolutionary period. T hesemonog raphs havegiven us a muchmore complex and convincing picture of the relationship between the party and the people than the one presented in the older ‘top-down’ version. T hey have shown that insteadof a single abstract revolution imposed bythe Bolsheviks on the whole of Russia, itwas as often shaped by localpassions and interests. APeople’ s Trage dy is an attemptto synthesize thisreappraisal and topush the argument one stage fur ther. It attempts to show, as its title indicates, thatwhat began as a people’srevolution contained the seeds of its owndegeneration into violence and dictatorship. T he same socialforces which brought about the triumph of the Bolshevik regime became its main victims.

Finally, the narrativeof APeople’ s Tragedy weaves between the private and the public spheres. W herever possible,I have tried toemphasize the human aspect of its g reat events by listening to the voices of individualpeople whose lives became caughtupin the stor m. T heir diaries, letters and other private writings featureprominently in this book. More substantially, the personal histories of several figures have been interwoven through the narrative. Some of these figures are well known(Maxim Gorky,General Brusilov and Prince Lvov), while others are unknowneven tohistorians (the peasantrefor mer Sergei Semenov and the soldier-commissar Dmitr y Os’kin). But all of them hadhopes and aspirations, fears and disappointments, thatwere typicalof the revolutionary experience as a whole. Infollowing the fortunes of these figures, my aim has been to conveythe chaos of these years,as it must have been felt by ordinary men and women. I have tried topresentthe revolution not as a marchof abstract socialforces and ideologies but as a humanevent of complicated individual tragedies. Itwas a story,by and large, of people, like the figures in this book, setting out withhigh idealsto achieveone thing , onlyto find out laterthatthe outcome was quitedifferent. T his,again, iswhy Ichose to call the book A People’ s Tragedy. For it is not just about the tragic tur ning-point in the history of a people. It is also about the ways in which the tragedy of the revolution engulfed the destinies of those who lived through it.

T his book hastakenoversixyears to write and it owes a g reat debttomany people.

Neil Belton at Jonathan Cape has played a huge part in the writing of this book. Neil is anywriter’ s dreamof aneditor. He readevery chapter in every draft,and commented on them in long and detailed letters of the ﬁnest prose. His criticismswere always on the mark, his knowledgeof the subject constantly sur prising ,and his enthusiasm was inspiring. If thereis any one readerto whom this book is addressed, it istohim.

T he second draftwas also read by Boris Kolonitskii during the course of our various meetings in Cambridge and St Petersburg. Iam very g rateful to him for his many comments,all of which resulted in improvements to the text,

and hope that,although it hassofar been one-sided, this may be the start of a lasting intellectualpartnership.

I owe a g reat debtto two amazing women. One is my mother,Eva Figes,a past master of the art of narrative who always gavemegood adviceon howtopractiseit. T he other is my agent,Deborah Rogers, who did me a g reat servicein brokering the marriage with Cape.

At Cape twoother people meritspecial thanks. Dan Franklin navigated the book through its ﬁnal stageswith sensitivity and intelligence. And Liz Cowen wentthrough the whole text line by line suggesting improvements withmeticulous care. Iamdee ply g rateful to them both.

Fortheir assistancein the preparation of the ﬁnal text I should also like to thank Claire Farrimond, who helped to check the notes,and Laura Pieters Cordy, who workedovertime toenterthe correctionsto the text. T hanks are alsodue to Ian Agnew, who drewthe splendid maps.

T he past sixyears have been anexciting time for historical researchin Russia. I should like to thank the staff of the many Russian archives and libraries in which the researchforthis book was completed. I owe a g reat debtto the knowledge and adviceoffartoo many archivists toname individually,but the one exception is Vladimir Barakhov,Director of the Gorky Archive, who was more thangenerous withhistime.

Many institutions havehelped me in the researchforthis book. Iam g rateful to the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust,and although the Fellowship could not be taken up to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington fortheir generous support. My own Cambridge colle ge,Trinity, whichis as generous as it isrich, has also been of enor mous assistance, giving me bothg rants and study leave. Among the Holy and Undivided Fellows of the colle ge special thanks aredue tomyteaching colleagues,Boyd Hilton and John Lonsdale, for covering for me in my frequent absences; to the inimitable Anil Sealfor being a supporter; and,above all, to Raj Chandavarkar, for being such aclever criticand loyalfriend. Finally, in the History Faculty,Iam,as always, g ratef ul to Quentin Skinner for his efforts on my behalf.

T he best thing about Cambridge University isthe quality of its students, and in the courseof the past sixyears I havehad the privile ge of teaching some of the brightest in myspecial subject on the Russian Revolution. T his book is in no small measure the result of that experience. Manywere the occasionswhen I rushed backfrom the lecturehall to writedown the ideas I hadpicked up from discussionswithmystudents. If they cannot be acknowledged in the notes, then I only hope thatthose who read this book will take it as a tributeofmy g ratitude to them.

Cambridge November 1995

Glossary

ataman Cossack chieftain

Black Hundreds extremist right-wing paramilitary g roups and protoparties (forthe origin of the ter m see page 196)

Bund Jewish socialdemocratic organization

burzhooi popularter mfor abourgeois or othersocialenemy (see page 523)

ChekaSovietsecret police1917–22 (latertransfor med into the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB);the Cheka’ s full title wasthe All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Str uggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage

Defensists socialist supporters of the war campaign (1914 –18) for nationaldefence;the Menshevik and SR partieswere split between Defensists and Inter nationalists desyatina measurement of land area, equivalentto1.09hec tares or 2.7 acres

Duma the state Duma wasthe elected lower houseof the Russianparliament 1906–17; the municipaldumaswere elected town councils

guber niia province(subdivided into ue zdy and volosti)

Inter nationalists socialists opposed to the war campaign (1914 –18) who campaigned for immediatepeace through inter national socialist collaboration;the Menshevik and SR parties were split between Defensists and Inter nationalists

Kadets Constitutional DemocraticParty

kolkhoz collectivefar m

Komuch anti-Bolshevik gover nment established in Samara during the summer of 1918; its full title wasthe Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly

Krug Cossack assembly

kulak capitalist peasant (see page 91)

mir village commune

NEP New EconomicPolic y (1921–9)

obshchina peasant land commune

Octobrists liberal-conservativepoliticalparty

pud measurement of weight, equivalentto16.38kg

SDs Social Democrats:Marxist party (knowninfull asthe Russian Social DemocraticLabour Party);split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions after 1903

skhod communalorvillage assembly

sovkhoz Soviet far m

SRs Socialist Revolutionaries: non-Marxist revolutionary party (PSR);split into Right and Left SRs during 1917

Stavkaar my headquarters

ue zddistrict (sub-division of guber niia)

versta measurement of distance, equivalentto 0.66 miles

voisko Cossack self-gover ning community volia freedom; autonomy

volost rural township and basicadministrative unitusually comprising several villages

zemstvoelected assembly of localgover nment dominated bythe gentr y atthe provincial and district level (1864 –1917); a volost-level zemstvo was ﬁnally established in 1917 but wassoon supplanted bythe Soviets.

Illustrations

Images of Autocracy:between pages 96 and 97

1 St Petersburgilluminated forthe Romanovtercentenary in 1913

2 T he procession of the imperialfamily during the tercentenary

3 Nicholas II rides in public view during the tercentenary

4 Nevsky Prospekt decorated forthe tercentenary

5 Guards ofﬁcers g reetthe imperialfamily during the tercentenary

6 Townspeople and peasants in Kostroma during the tercentenary

7 T he cour t ball of 1903

8 T he Temple of Christ’ s Resur rection

9 Trubetskoi’ s equestrian statueof Alexander III

10 Statueof Alexander III outside the Cathedralof Christ the Saviour

11 T he imperialfamily

12 Rasputin withhis admirers

13 T he Tsarevich Alexiswith Derevenko

Everyday Life Underthe Tsars:between pages 192 and 193

14 T he city mayors of Russia

15 A g roupof volost elders

16 A newspaper kioskin St Petersburg

17 A g rocery storein St Petersburg

18 Dinner at aball given by Countess Shuvalov

19 A soupkitchen forthe unemployed in St Petersburg

20 Peasants of a norther n Russian village

21 Peasantwomen threshing wheat

22 Peasantwomen hauling abarge

23 Twin brothers, for merserfs, from Cher nigov province

24 A typical Russianpeasant household

25 A meeting of village elders

26 A religious procession in Smolenskprovince

27 T he living spaceoffour Moscow factory workers

28 Inside aMoscow engineering works

Dramatis Personae:between pages288 and 289

29 General Brusilov

30 Maxim Gorky

31 Prince G . E. Lvov

32 Sergei Semenov

33 Dmitr y Os’kin

34 Alexander Kerensky

35 Lenin

36 Trotsky

37 AlexandraKollontai

Between Revolutions:between pages384 and 385

38 Soldiers ﬁre atthe demonstrating workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ , 1905

39 Demonstrators confront mounted Cossacks during 1905

40 T he opening of the State Duma in April 1906

41 T he Tauride Palace

42 Petr Stolypin

43 Wartime volunteers packparcels forthe Front

44 A smart dinner partysees in the New Year of 1917

45 Troops pump out a trenchon the Norther n Front

46 Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrog radin February 1917

47 T he arrest of a policemanduring the February Days

48 Moscowworkers playing with the stone headof Alexander II

49 Acrowd bur nstsarist emblems during the February Days

50 T he crowdoutside the Tauride Palaceduring the February Days

51 Soldiers receivenews of the Tsar’ s abdication

Images of 1917:between pages 480 and 481

52 T he First Provisional Gover nment in the Marinsky Palace

53 T he burialof victims of the February Revolution

54 A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies

55 Waiters and waitresses of Petrog radon strike

56 T he All-Russian Cong ress of Peasant Deputies

57 Fedor Linde leads an anti-war demonstration bythe Finland Regiment during the April Crisis

58 Kerensky makes a speech to soldiers atthe Front

59 Patriarch Nikon blessesthe Women’ s Battalion of Death

60 General Kor nilov’striumphant arrivalin Moscow during the State Conference

61 Members of the Women’ s Battalion of Deathin the Winter Palaceon 25 October

62 Some of Kerensky’ s last defenders in the Winter Palaceon 25 October

63 T he Smolny Institute

64 T he Red Guardof the Vulkan Factory

T he Civil War:between pages 576 and 577

65 General Alexeev

66 General Denikin

67 Admiral Kolchak

68 Baron Wrangel

69 Members of the Czech Legion in Vladivostok

70 A g roupof W hiteofﬁcers during a military parade in Omsk

71 A strategic meeting of Red partisans

72 An ar moured train

73 T he Latvian Division passing through a village

74 Two Red Ar mysoldiers take abreak

75 Red Ar mysoldiers reading propaganda leaﬂets

76 ARed Ar my mobile library in the village

77 Nestor Makhno

78 T he execution of a peasant bythe W hites

79 Jewish victims of a pog rom

80 Red Ar mysoldiers torture aPolishofﬁcer

Everyday Life Underthe Bolsheviks:between pages672 and 673

81 Muscovites dismantle a housefor ﬁrewood

82 A priest helpstransport timber

83 Women of the ‘for mer classes’ sell their last possessions

84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a g roupof burzhoois

85 Haggling over a fur scarf atthe Smolenskmarket in Moscow

86 Traders atthe Smolenskmarket

87 Twoex-tsarist ofﬁcers aremade to clearthe streets

88 Cheka soldiers closedown traders’ stalls in Moscow

89 Requisitioning the peasants ’ g rain

90 ‘Bagmen’ on the railways

91 T he 1 May subbotnik on Red Squarein Moscow, 1920

92 Anopen-air cafeteriaatthe Kiev Station in Moscow

93 Dele gates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Cong ress

94 T he Agitation and PropagandaDepartment of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Norther n Region

95 T he Smolny Instituteon the anniversary of the October coup

T he Revolutionary Inheritance:between pages768 and 769

96 Red Ar mytroops assaultthe mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base

97 Peasantrebels attack a train of requisitioned g rain

98 Bolshevik commissars inspectthe harvest failurein the Volga region

99 Unburied cor pses from the famine crisis

100 Cannibalswith theirvictims

101 Street or phans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip

102 T he Secretary of the TulaKomsomol

103 A juvenile unit of the Red Ar my in Turkestan

104 Red Ar mysoldiers conﬁscate valuables from the Semenov Monastery

105 A propaganda meeting in Bukhara

106 Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East

107 T he dying Lenin in 1923

Photog raphicCredits

Bakhmeteff Archive,ColumbiaUniversity: 58; Califor niaMuseumof Photography,University of Califor nia, Riverside: 20. Hoover Institution of War,Revolution and Peace,Stanford,Califor nia: 82–4; Lifeon the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Culturalhistory,by PriscillaRoosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museumof the Revolution,Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; PhotokhronikaTass,Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russianin Original Photographs 1860–1920,by Marvin Lyons (Routledge &Kegan Paul,London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924:LaRe´volution est la ` , (Baschet,Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century,T he,by Brian Moynahan(Chatto &Windus,London, 1994): 13, 28(cour tesy of SlavaKatamidze Collection/Endeavour Group,London), 46 (Cour tesy of the Endeavour Group,London); Russian State Archiveof Film and Photog raphicDocuments,Krasnogorsk: 18–19, 21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93, 98–106; Russian State Military History Archive,Moscow: 29; Saltykov-Shchedrin Library,St Petersburg: 12; State Archiveof Film and Photog raphicDocuments,St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; TulaDistrict Museum: 33.

EUROPEAN RUSSIA

Murmansk

SWEDEN

Arkhangelsk

Helsingfors (Helsinki)

Baltic Sea ESTONIA ST PETERSBURG ONIA

Kovno

Warsaw

POLAND LITHUANIA

Kostroma BELORUSSIA

Brest-Litovsk Chernigov

Lvov GALICIA ROMANIA

BULGARIA

Minsk Mogilev Smolensk Vitebsk MOSCOW Tula Orel

Kiev Wilno

Novgorod Pskov Riga Vologda Yaroslavl' Nizhnyi Novgorod Saratov Tambov Voronezh

UKRAINE

Kishinev Odessa

Sevastopol Stavropol Tiflis Baku FINLAND

Kharkov Poltava

D on

Simbirsk

Kazan Viatka

Samara

Tiumen'

Cheliabinsk Perm Ufa Orenburg

Tobolsk

Omsk

Ekaterinburg Rostov Khiva Bukhara

GEORGIA

Tsaritsyn Sea Black Sea

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Caspian

AZERBAIJAN

PERSIA

EASTERN FRONT in the FIRST WORLD WAR

Furthest German advance February 1918

BRUSILOV'S OFFENSIVE

Russianfront line November 1915

Furthest Russian advance1914-15

Campaigns of 1914

Battles of 1914

Russian retreat of 1915

Russi

nfront

Cossackinsurgency

Ice March(February – April)

Furthest extent of Komuch territory

Front line in mid-October

Moscow

Kaluga

Tula Orel

Riazan'

Trans - S i b e r i a n R a i lway

Penza Kozlov ✡ HQ Southern Front

mbov Saratov

Simbirsk

Ukrainian partisans

Austrian forces

Voronezh Tsaritsyn

Kharkov Astrakhan

Novocherkassk

Rostov Taganrog

Volunteer Army Don Army

Ekaterinodar

Novorossiisk

Stavropol

Piatigorsk

Kazan

Izhevsk

mara Ural'sk

0200 miles

FINLAND

Helsingfors Lake Lagoda

Petrograd

vinsk

ver Pskov

molensk

insk

Furthest advanceof POLISH armies

Zhitomir

Gomel

Fastov KIEV

Odessa

Bucharest

oronezh

rosl

lexandrovsk

Kherson Rostov Kharkov Ekaterinoslav Lugansk

Hulyai Pole

Sevastopol Simferopol Krasnodar Novorossiisk

area of Makhno's partisans

area of Petliura's partisans

tumi Stavropol Vladikavkaz MOSCOW

Aleksandrovsk Baku Astrakhan

major peasant uprising

Yudenichoffensive against Petrograd

Noteon Dates

Until February 1918 Russiaadhered to the Julian(Old Style) calendar, which

ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian(New Style) calendar in usein Western

Europe. The Soviet governmentswitched to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next daywas declared 14 February. Datesrelating to

domestic events aregiven in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New Style afterthat. Datesrelating tointernationalevents (e.g.diplomatic

negotiations and military battles in the First World War) aregiven in the New Style throughout the book.

NB The term ‘ the Ukraine’ has been used throughout this book, ratherthan the currently correct but ahistorical ‘Ukraine’ .

Part One

RUSSIA UNDER THE OLD REGIME

1 The Dynasty

i The Tsar and His People

On a wet and windy morning in February 1913 St Petersburg celebrated three

hundred years of Romanovrule over Russia. People had been talking about the

great event forweeks,and everyone agreed that nothing quite so splendid would

ever be seen again in their lifetimes. The majestic power of the dynasty would be

displayed,as never before, in anextravaganza of pageantry. Asthe jubilee approached, dignitaries from far-ﬂung parts of the Russian Empire ﬁlled the

capital’ s grand hotels: princes from Poland and the Baltic lands; high priests

from Georgiaand Armenia; mullahs and tribal chiefs from Central Asia;the

Emir of Bukharaand the Khanof Khiva. The city bustled with sightseers from

the provinces,and the usual well-dressed promenaders around the Winter Palace

now found themselves outnumbered bythe unwashed masses peasants and workers in theirtunics and caps, rag-bundled women withkerchiefs on their

heads. Nevsky Prospekt experienced the worst trafﬁc jams in its history astrams and horse-drawn carriages,cars and sleighs,convergedonit. The main streets

weredeckedout in the imperial colours of white,blue and red;statueswere

dressed in garlands and ribbons; and portraits of the tsars, stretching back to

Mikhail, the founder of the dynasty, hung on the fac ¸ ades of banks and stores.

Above the tram-lineswere strung chains of coloured lights, whichlitup at night

with the words ‘God Save the Tsar ’ or aRomanov double-headed eagle and the

dates 1613–1913. Out-of-towners, many of whom hadneverseen electric light, stared up and scratched their heads in wonderment. There were columns,arcs

and obelisks of light. Infront of the Kazan Cathedral stood a whitepavilion ﬁlled withincense,bromeliads and palms, shivering in the Russian winter air.

The rituals began with a solemn thanksgiving in the Kazan Cathedral led bythe Patriarchof Antioch, who had come from Greeceespecially forthe occasion, the three Russian Metropolitans and ﬁfty priests from St Petersburg. The imperialfamily droveout from the Winter Palaceinopen carriages accompanied bytwo squadrons of His Majesty ’ s Own Horseguards and Cossack

riders in black caftans and red Caucasian caps. Itwasthe ﬁrst time the Tsar had

ridden in public viewsince the 1905 Revolution,and the police were taking no chances. The route was lined bythe Imperial Guards gorgeouslyturned out in

4 Russia underthe Old Regime

their feathered shakos and scarletuniforms. Military bandsthumped out the

national anthem and the soldiers boomed ‘Oorah!’ asthe cavalcade passed by.

Outside the cathedral religious processions from various parts of the city had

been converging from early in the morning. The vast crowd,a forest of crosses, icons and banners, knelt down as one asthe carriages approached. Inside the

cathedral stood Russia ’ sruling class: grand dukes and princes, members of

the court, senators, ministers, state councillors,Duma parliamentarians, senior

Civil Servants, generals and admirals, provincialgovernors,city mayors, zemstvo

leaders,and marshals of the nobility. Hardly abreast without a row of shining medals or a diamond star; hardly a pair of legswithout a sword. Everything

sparkled in the candlelight the silver iconostasis, the priests ’ bejewelled mitres, and the crystal cross. In the middle of the ceremonytwodoves ﬂew downfrom

the darkness of the dome and hovered forseveralmoments overthe heads of the

Tsar and hisson. Carried away byreligious exaltation,Nicholas interpreted it

as a symbol of God’ s blessing on the Houseof Romanov.

Meanwhile, in the workers ’ districts factorieswere closed for a public

holiday. The poor queued outside municipal canteens, wherefree mealswere

served tomark the anniversary. Pawnshopswere beset by crowds afterrumours

spreadof a specialdispensation allowing people to redeem theirvaluableswithout interest payments; when these rumours turned out to befalse, the crowds became

angry and severalpawnshops had theirwindows smashed. Women gathered outside the city ’ s jails in the hope thattheir loved oneswould be among the

2,000 prisoners released underthe amnesty to celebrate the tercentenary.

During the afternoon huge crowdswalked into the city centreforthe

long-awaited son et lumie`re. Stalls along the waysold mugs of beer and pies, Romanov flags and souvenirs. There werefairs and concerts in the parks. As darkness fell, the Nevsky Prospekt became one solid mass of people. Every face turned upwards asthe skywas litupin ablazeof colour by fireworks and lights that criss-crossed the city, sweeping overroofstoland for a moment on significant monuments. The golden spireof the Admiralty burned like a torch against the black sky,and the Winter Palace was brilliantly illuminated with three huge portraits of Nicholas II, Peterthe Great and Mikhail Romanov. The imperialfamilyremained in the capitalfor anotherweek of ritual self-congratulation. There werepompous receptions atthe Winter Palace where long lines of genuflecting dignitaries filed through the state roomstopresent themselvesto Nicholas and Alexandra in the concert hall. There was a sumptuous ball in the Noblemen’ s Assembly attended bythe imperial couple and their eldest daughter,Olga, in one of her first socialengagements. She danced the polonaise with Prince Saltykov, who caused a stir by forgetting to take off his hat. Atthe Marinsky Theatre there was a gala performanceof Glinka ’ s patriotic opera, A

Lifeforthe Tsar, which retold the legend of the peasant Susanin, who had saved

the lifeof the ﬁrst Romanov Tsar. The tiers of boxes ‘blazed withjewels and

tiaras ’ ,according to Meriel Buchanan, the British Ambassador ’ s daughter,and the

stallswere ﬁlled with the scarletuniforms of the court ofﬁcials, who swayed in

unison ‘like a ﬁeld of poppies ’ astheyrose togreetthe arrivalof the Tsar.

Mathilde Kshesinskaya, Nicholas ’ s former mistress,came out of retirementto

dance the mazurkas in the second act. But the sensation of the evening wasthe

silent appearanceof the tenor,Leonid Sobinov, standing in for Shaliapin, who

walked across the stage atthe headof a religious procession dressed as Mikhail

Romanov. Itwasthe ﬁrst (and the last)occasion in the history of the imperial

theatre when the ﬁgureof aRomanov Tsarwasrepresented on the stage.1 Three months later, during an usually hot May, the imperialfamily

went on aRomanov pilgrimage around the towns of ancient Muscovy associated

with the foundation of the dynasty. They followed the route taken by Mikhail

Romanov, the ﬁrst Romanov Tsar, from his home at Kostroma on the Volga to

Moscow after his election to the Russian throne in 1613. The imperial touring

party arrived at Kostroma in a ﬂotilla of steamboats. The river bank was packed

with townspeople and peasants, the men all dressed in tunics and caps, the

women in the traditionallight blue and whiteheadscarfs of Kostroma. Hundreds of sightseers had waded waist deepinto the rivertoget closerto the royal

visitors. Nicholasvisited the Ipatiev monastery, where Mikhail had taken refuge

from the Polishinvaders and from the civil wars that had raged through Muscovy

on the eveofhis assumption of the throne. He received a peasant delegation

from the landsthat had belonged to the monastery and posed for a photograph with the descendants of the boyars who had travelled from Moscow in 1613to offerthe crown to the Romanovs.

From Kostroma the touring partywent on to Vladimir,Nizhnyi Novgorod and Yaroslavl’ . Theytravelled in the beautifully furnished imperial train, complete withmahogany-panelled rooms, softvelvet armchairs, writing desk and grand piano. The bathroom even had a specialdevice toprevent His Imperial

Majesty ’ s bathwater from spilling when the train was moving. There was no

railway between Vladimir and the small monastery townof Suzdal, so the entourage had tomake the journey along dusty countryroads in a ﬂeet of thirty open-top Renaults. In the villages old peasant men and women bent downon their knees asthe cars sped past. Infront of their modest wooden huts,barely noticed bythe travellers, they had setuplittle tables laid with ﬂowers,bread

and salt, the traditional Russianofferingsto strangers. The royalpilgrimage climaxed with a triumphant entry into Moscow, the old Russian capital, where the ﬁrst Romanov Tsar had been crowned, followed by anotherround of pageantry and gastronomy. The ball in the Assembly of the Moscow Nobility was particularly lavish, far beyond the wildest dreams of Hollywood. A liftwas installed speciallyso the royal waltzers need nottire

Russia underthe Old Regime

themselves by climbing to the ballroom on the second ﬂoor. The imperial

touring party arrived in Moscow bytrain and was greeted by a vast delegation of dignitaries atthe Alexandrovsky Station. The Tsarrode alone on a white

horse, sixty feet aheadofhis Cossackescort and the rest of the imperial

cavalcade, through huge cheering crowdsto the Kremlin. The decorations along

TverskayaStreet,bathed in brilliantsunshine, wereeven moremagniﬁcentthan

in St Petersburg. Maroon velvet banners with Romanov emblemsspanned the boulevard. Buildingsweredraped in colourful ﬂags and pennants,and covered

in lights whichlitup at nightto revealeven moreinventiveemblemsthan those

on the Nevsky Prospekt. Garlanded statues of the Tsarstood in shop windows and on the balconies of private apartments. People showered the procession with

confetti. The Tsar dismounted in Red Square, where religious processions from

all parts of the city had converged tomeet him,and walked through lines of

chanting priests into the Uspensky Cathedralfor prayers. The Empress and the

Tsarevich Alexiswere also to walk the last few hundred yards. But Alexiswas

struckdownonce again by his haemophiliaand had to be carried by aCossack

bodyguard. Asthe procession paused,Count Kokovtsov, the Prime Minister,

heardfrom the crowd ‘ exclamations of sorrow atthe sight of this poor helpless child, the heirto the throne of the Romanovs ’ . 2

The Romanov dynasty presented to the world abrilliant image of monarchical power and opulenceduring its tercentenary. Thiswas no simple propaganda exercise. The rituals of homage to the dynasty and the glorification of its history were, to be sure, meanttoinspire reverence and popularsupport forthe principle of autocracy. But their aim was also to reinvent the past, to recountthe epic of the ‘ popular Tsar ’ , so astoinvest the monarchywith a mythicalhistorical legitimacy and animage of enduring permanence atthis anxious time when its rightto rule was being challenged by Russia ’ s emerging democracy. The Romanovs were retreating to the past, hoping itwould save them from the future. The cult of seventeenth-century Muscovy wasthe keyto thisselfreinvention,and the leitmotiv of the jubilee. Three perceived principles of Muscovite tsardom appealed to the Romanovs in their final years. The first wasthe notion of patrimonialism wherebythe Tsarwas deemed literallytoown the whole of Russiaas his private fiefdom (votchina)in the manner of a medievallord. In the first national census of 1897 Nicholas described himself as a ‘landowner ’ . Until the second half of the eighteenth centurythis idea had set Russiaapart from the West, where anindependent landowning class emerged as acounterbalance to the monarchy. The second principle from Muscovy wasthe idea of personal rule:asthe embodiment of God on earth, the Tsar ’ swill should be unrestrained by laws or bureaucracy and he should beleftto rule the country according tohis own consciousness of duty and right. Thistoo haddistinguished

the Byzantine tradition of despotismfrom the Western absolutist state. Conserva-

tives, such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor and leading ideologist to both

Nicholas and Alexander, the last two Tsars,argued thatthisreligious autocracy

wasuniquelysuited to the Russiannational spirit, that a god-like autocratwas

needed to restrain the anarchic instincts of the Russianpeople.*Lastly, there

wasthe idea of a mystical union between the Tsar and the Orthodox people,

who loved and obeyed him as a father and a god. Itwas a fantasy of paternal

rule, of a golden age of popular autocracy, free from the complications of a

modern state.

The last two tsars hadobvious motives for holding on so ﬁrmlyto this

archaic vision. Indeed, in sofar asthey believed thattheir power and prestige

were being undermined by ‘modernity ’ in all its forms secular beliefs,Western

constitutionalideologies and the newurban classes itwas only logicalfor

them to seek toput the clock back to some distant golden age. Itwas in the eighteenth century and the reign of Peterthe Great —‘Your Peter ’ as Nicholas

called him speaking withofﬁcials thatthe rot, in theirview, had begun to

set in. There were twoopposing models of autocracy in Russia: the Petrine and

the Muscovite. Emulating Western absolutism, the Petrine model soughtto systematize the power of the crown through legalnorms and bureaucratic institutions. Thiswas deemed a limitation on the Tsar ’ s powers in that even he would henceforth beobliged toobey his ownlaws. The Tsarwho did notwas

a despot. The Petrine tradition alsoimplied a shift in the focus of power from the divine person of the Tsarto the abstract concept of the autocratic state.

Nicholas disliked this,above all. Likehis father,Alexander III, he had been

taughtto uphold the principles of personal rule, keeping power atthe court,

and todistrust the bureaucracy as a sort of ‘ wall’ that broke the natural bond

between the Tsar and his people. This distrust may beexplained bythe fact

that during the nineteenth centurythe imperial bureaucracy had begun toemerge

as a forcefor modernization and reform. It became increasingly independent of

the court and closertopublic opinion, which, in the view of conservatives, was

bound tolead to revolutionary demands for aconstitution. Alexander II’ s

assassination in 1881 (aftertwodecades of cautious reform) seemed to conﬁrm

theirviewthatthe time had come to stop the rot. Alexander III (who once

claimed that he ‘despised the bureaucracy and drank champagne toits

obliteration’)3 instituted a return topersonalforms of autocratic rule,bothin

*Bertrand Russell used a similar idea when, in an attempttoexplain the Russian Revolution

to Lady Ottoline Morrell, he remarked that, terrible though Bolshevik despotism was, itseemed

the rightsort of government for Russia: ‘If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky ’ s characters should

begoverned, youwill understand.’

Russia underthe Old Regime

central and localgovernment. And where the father led the son was bound to

follow. Nicholas ’ s model of the autocracywas almost entirely Muscovite. His

favourite Tsarwas Alexei Mikhailovich(1645–76),afterwhom he named his

son the Tsarevich. Heemulated histranquil piety, whichitwassaid hadgiven him the conviction to rule Russia through his own religious conscience. Nicholas often liked tojustify his policies on the groundsthatthe idea had ‘ come to him’ from God. According to Count Witte, one of his most enlightened

ministers,Nicholas believed that ‘people do not influenceevents, that God directs everything,and thatthe Tsar,as God’ s anointed, should nottake advice from anyone but follow only his divine inspiration’ . Such was Nicholas ’ s admiration forthe semi-Asiaticcustoms of the Middle Agesthat he tried tointroduce them at his court. Heordered the retention of the old Slavonic forms of spelling in officialdocuments and publications long afterthey had been phased out in literary Russian. He talked of Rus ’ , the old Muscovite termforthe corelands of Russia, insteadof Rossiia,a termforthe Empire whichhad been adopted since Peterthe Great. Hedisliked the title Gosudar Imperator (Sovereign Emperor), alsointroduced by Peter, sinceit implied thatthe autocratwas no more than the first servant of the abstractstate(the gosudarstvo),and muchpreferred the oldertitle Tsar (derived from the Greek term kaisar), which went back to

the Byzantine eraand carried religious connotations of paternal rule. Heeven toyed with the idea of making all his courtiers wear long caftans, like thoseof the ancient Muscovite boyars (itwas onlythe cost that discouragedhim). The Minister of the Interior,D. S. Sipiagin, who hadgiven him the idea, hadhis ownofﬁces decorated in the Muscovite style. Onone occasion he received the

Tsar, who came dressed as Alexei, with all the rituals of the seventeenth-century court,complete with a traditional Russianfeast and a gypsy orchestra. Nicholas encouraged the Russian courtly fashion whichhad beguninhis father ’ s reign forseventeenth-century costume balls. In1903 he himself gaveone of the most lavish. The guests appeared in replicas of court dress from Alexei’ s

reign and danced medieval Russiandances. Photographs of all the guests, each

identiﬁed bytheirrespective courtranks from the seventeenth and the twentieth

centuries, werepublished in two richly produced albums. Nicholas appeared in

a replica of the processional robe worn by Alexei,and Alexandra in the gown and headdress worn by his TsarinaNatalia. 4

Nicholas made no secret of the factthat he muchpreferred Moscow

to St Petersburg. The old ‘holy city ’ , withits thousand onion domes, stood for

the Eastern and Byzantine traditionswhichlay atthe heart of his Muscovite

world-view. Untouched bythe West,Moscowretained the ‘ national style’ so

favoured bythe last two Tsars. Both considered Petersburg, withits classical

architectural style, its Western shops and bourgeoisie,alien to Russia. Theytried

to Muscovitizeit by building churches in the Byzantine style a fashion started

under Nicholas I and adding archaicarchitecturalfeaturestoits cityscape.

Alexander III, for example,commissioned aTemple of Christ ’ s Resurrection,

which was built in the old Moscowstyle, to consecrate the siteon the Catherine

Canal wherehis father had been assassinated in 1881. Withits onion domes,

colourfulmosaics and ornatedecorations, it presented abizarre contrast with

the other great cathedrals of the city, the Kazan Cathedral and St Isaac ’ s, which

were both built in the classical style. Nicholasrefashioned buildings in the neo-

Byzantine manner. The School Council of the Holy Synod wasremodelled as

the Alexander Nevsky Temple-Monument by embellishing its classicalfac ¸ ade

with Muscovitemotifs and adding toits ﬂatroof ﬁveonion domes and a

triangularsteeple. More buildingswere built in the old Russian style tomark

the Romanov jubilee. The Tercentenary Cathedral, nearthe Moscow Station, for example, was built in explicit imitation of the seventeenth-century Rostov

church style. The Fedorov Village,built by Nicholas at Tsarskoe Selo, just outside the capital, elaboratelyrecreated a seventeenth-century Kremlin and Cathedral.5 Itwas a sort of Muscovite theme park.

Nicholas and his father Alexandervisited Moscow often and used it

increasingly forritualistic displays of homage to the dynasty. The coronation of the Tsar, which traditionallytook placein Moscow,became animportant

symbolic event muchmore so thanit had been in the past. Nicholas made a habit of visiting Moscow at Easter something no Tsar haddone for more

than ﬁfty years. He convinced himself that only in Moscow and the provinces would he ﬁnd hisspiritual communion with the ordinary Russianpeople. ‘United

in prayerwithmy people’ , he wrote to Moscow ’ s Governor-Generalin1900, shortly after his ﬁrst Eastervisitto the old capital, ‘I draw newstrengthfor

serving Russia, for herwell-being and glory ’ . 6 After 1906, when St Petersburg

became the seat of the Duma, Nicholas looked even more towards Moscow and

the provinces as abaseon which to build his ‘ popular autocracy ’ as a rival

to the parliament. With the support of the simple Russianpeople represented

increasingly by Grigorii Rasputin he would reassert the power of the throne, whichfortoo long had been forced to retreat before the bureaucracy and society.

The tercentenary jubilee marked the culmination of this Muscovite

heritage industry. Itwas a dynasticcelebration,centred on the symbols of the

Tsar, with thoseof the statepushed ﬁrmly into the background. The squabble between Rasputin, the scandalous peasant ‘holy man ’ whoseinﬂuencehad come

todominate the court,and Mikhail Rodzianko,President of the Duma, during the servicein the Kazan Cathedral wassymbolic in thisrespect. Rodziankohad

takenoffence because the members of the Duma were to be seated atthe back, far behind the placesreserved forthe state councillors and senators. This, he complained to the master of ceremonies, was ‘ not in accordance with the dignity ’

10 Russia underthe Old Regime

of the parliament. ‘If the jubilee was intended to be a truly national rejoicing, itshould not beoverlooked that in 1613 itwas an assembly of the people and

not a groupofofﬁcialsthat elected Mikhail Romanov Tsar of Russia. ’ Rodzi-

anko’ s pointwastaken and the Duma placeswereduly exchanged forthoseof

the senators. But when he arrived to take his ownplacehefound it occupied

by a dark bearded maninpeasant dress, whom he immediatelyrecognized as

Rasputin. The twomen confronted eachother in a heated exchange, the one insisting on the sanctity of his position as President of the country ’ s elected

parliament, the other claiming the support of the Tsar himself, until a sergeant-

at-armswas called to restore the peace. With a heavy groan,Rasputin slunk

awaytowardsthe exit, wherehe was helped on withhissable coat and shown

to a waiting carriage.7

The Prime Ministerwas equally outraged bythe court ’ s contemptuous

attitude towardsthe government during the jubilee rituals. Ministers were

expected toprovide their own transport and accommodation whilst they

accompanied the royalparty on its tour of the provinces. ‘The current attitude’ , recalled Count Kokovtsov:

seemed to suggest thatthe governmentwas abarrier between the people

and their Tsar, whom theyregarded with blind devotion becausehe was

anointed by God ... The Tsar ’ s closest friends at court became persuaded

thatthe Sovereign could do anything byrelying upon the unbounded love

and utter loyalty of the people. The ministers of the government, on the

other hand, did not hold to thissort of autocracy; nor did the Duma, which steadilysought control of the executivepower. Both wereof the opinion thatthe Sovereign should recognize that conditions had changed since the daythe Romanovs became Tsars of Moscow and lords of the Russiandomain.

The Prime Ministertried in vain to tell the Tsarthat he could notsavehis throne bytrying to adopt ‘ the halo of the ‘‘Muscovite Tsar ’’ ruling Russiaas his ownpatrimony ’ . 8

The communion between the Tsar and his people wasthe central theme of the jubilee. The cult of the peasant Ivan Susanin wassupposed to reinforce the message thatthe simple people loved the Tsar. Susanin hadlived on the Romanov estatein Kostroma. Legend haditthat,atthe cost of his ownlife, he saved Mikhail Romanov ’ s by misleading the Poleswho had come tokill him on the eveofhis assumption of the throne. From the nineteenth century he was ofﬁcially promoted as a nationalhero and celebrated in patriotic poems and operassuch as Glinka ’ s ALifeforthe Tsar. During the tercentenary celebrations ALife was performed throughout the country by amateur companies, schools

and regiments. The penny press and popular pamphlets retold the Susanin myth

adnauseam. Itwassaid to symbolize the people’ s devotion and their duty to the

Tsar. One army newspapertold its readers that Susanin had shownevery soldier howtofulﬁlhis oath to the Tsar. The image of the seventeenth-century peasant hero wasreproduced everywhereduring the jubilee, most notably atthe baseof the Romanov Monument in Kostroma, where a female ﬁgure representing Russia

blessed a kneeling Susanin. During histour of KostromaNicholaswas even presented with a delegation of Potemkin-peasants purporting to bedescendants of Susanin.9

According to the jubilee propaganda, the election of the Romanovs in

1613was acrucialmoment of national awakening, the ﬁrst real act of the Russiannation state. The ‘ entireland’ wassaid tohaveparticipated in the election, thus providing a popular mandateforthe dynasty,although it had been widely accepted by historians in the nineteenth centurythatthe election owed more to the machinations of a few powerful boyars than to the ordinary people. Through their election, itwas claimed, the Romanovs had come to personifythe will of the nation. ‘The spirit of Russia is incarnateinher Tsar, ’

wroteone propagandist. ‘The Tsarstandsto the people astheir highest conception of the destiny and ideals of the nation.’ Russia, in short, wasthe Romanovs. ‘Inevery soul thereissomething Romanov, ’ declared the newspaper Novoe vremia. ‘Something from the soul and spirit of the House that hasreigned for300 years. ’10

Nicholas Romanov,Russia incarnate: thatwasthe cult promoted by the jubilee. Itsoughtto build on the Tsar ’ sreligious status in the popular consciousness. Russia had a long tradition of saintly princes rulers who were canonized for laying down their lives propatria et fides stretching back to the tenth century. In the mind of the ordinary peasantthe Tsarwas not just a kingly ruler but a godonearth. He thought of him as a father-figure(the Tsar Batiushka, or Father-Tsar, of folk tales) who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minutedetails,and, if itwerenot forthe evil boyars, the noble officials, who surrounded him, would satisfytheir demands in aGolden Manifestogiving them the land. Hence the peasanttradition of sending direct appealsto the Tsar a tradition that (like the monarchic psyche itreflected in the common people) continued well into the Soviet era when similar petitionswere sentto Lenin and Stalin. This ‘ naive ’ peasant mythof the

Good Tsar could sometimes be used tolegitimizepeasantrebellions, especially when a long-awaited governmentreformfailed to satisfythe people’ s expectations. Pugachev, the Cossack rebel leader of the 1770s, proclaimed himself Tsar Peter

III;while the peasantrebels after 1861 also rose upin the name of the True Tsarwhen the serfemancipation of thatyear failed to satisfythe grievances of the peasantry. But in general the mythof the Good Tsarworked to the beneﬁt

12 Russia underthe Old Regime

of the crown,and asthe revolutionary crisis deepened Nicholas ’ s propagandists

relied increasinglyupon it. The propaganda of the tercentenary wasthe ﬁnal ﬂourishof this legend.

It depicted Nicholas as a godfathertohissubjects, intimately acquainted with

eachof them and caring fortheir every need. He was praised for his modest

lifestyle and hissimple tastes, his accessibility to the common people, his

kindness and hiswisdom. A popular biography of Nicholaswas commissioned

especially forthe jubilee, the ﬁrst ever published of a living Tsar. It portrayed him asthe ‘father of his people, overwhoseneeds he keeps anearnest and

compassionate watch’ . He wassaid todevote ‘ special care and attention to the welfare and moraldevelopment ’ of the peasants, whosehuts he frequently entered

‘ to see howthey live and topartake of their milk and black bread’ . At ofﬁcial

functions he ‘ talked genially ’ with the peasants, who then ‘ crossed themselves

and felt happier forthe rest of their lives ’ . He shared the people’ ssimple habits and pursuits, wore a peasant blouse and atehumble peasant dishessuch

as borscht and blinies. During the jubilee the Tsarwas photographed in symbolic

acts of homage to the people, such as inspecting a newtype of plough ortasting

the rations of hissoldiers. Suchimageswere calculated to reinforce the popular

myth that nothing, howevertrivial, in the people’ s daily lives escaped the attention

of the Tsar and that his inﬂuence was everywhere. ‘Thousands of invisible threads

centrein the Tsar ’ s heart, ’ wrote the royal biographer; ‘ and these threadsstretch

to the huts of the poor and the palaces of the rich. And that isthe reason why

the Russianpeople always acclaims its Tsarwith suchfervent enthusiasm, whether

in St Petersburgin the Marinsky Theatre... or on hiswaythrough the towns

and villages. ’11

‘Nowyou can see foryourself what cowardsthose stateministers are, ’ the

Empress Alexandra told a lady-in-waiting shortly afterthe jubilee. ‘They are

constantly frightening the Emperorwith threats of revolution and here you see it foryourself weneed merelyto show ourselves and at once their hearts areours. ’ If the rituals of the jubilee wereintended to create the illusion of a mighty and stable dynasty, then they had convinced few people exceptthe court

itself. The Romanovs became victims of their ownpropaganda. Nicholas, in

particular, returned from histour of the provinces conﬁrmed in the self-delusion that ‘My people loveme. ’ It aroused a freshdesire to travel in the Russian interior. He talked of aboattrip down the Volga, a visitto the Caucasus and

Siberia. Emboldened bythe belief in his ownpopularity, he began tolook for ways of moving one step closertowardsthe system of personal rule whichhe so admired in ancient Muscovy. Encouraged by his more reactionary ministers, he even considered dissolving the Dumaaltogether orturning it into a purely

he Dynasty

consultative bodysuch asthe Land Assembly (Zemskii Sobor)of the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries. Foreign observers friendlyto the monarchywerejust as easilyswept

along bythe rosy rhetoric. ‘Nohope seemstoo conﬁdent ortoo bright, ’ the

London Times pronounced on the Romanovs ’ futurein a specialedition on

the jubilee. Convinced of the people’ s devotion to the Tsar, itreported that a

series of postage stampswithportraits of the Romanovrulers had been issued tomark the tercentenary but had been withdrawn when some royalist post-ofﬁce clerksrefused toimpress the obliterating postmarkon thesehallowed visages. ‘Theseloyal and eminentlyrespectable scruples ’ ,concluded The Times, ‘ are typical of the mind of the vast masses of the Russianpeople.’ Such sentiments were echoed bythe British Foreign Ofﬁce. ‘Nothing could exceed the affection and devotion to the person of the Emperor displayed bythe population wherever

His Majesty appeared. Thereis no doubtthat in thisstrong attachment of the masses ... to the person of the Emperor liesthe greatstrengthof the Russian

autocracy. ’12

Infact, the jubilee took placein the midst of a profound social and

political crisis some would even say a revolutionary one. Its celebrationswere

set against abackdrop of severaldecades of growing violence, human suffering

and repression, whichhad setthe Tsar ’ s people against hisregime. None of the

wounds of the 1905 Revolution had yet healed; and some of them hadfestered

and become worse. The great peasant problem remained unresolved, despite

belated efforts at land reform; and in fact, if anything, the landed gentry had

become even moreopposed to the idea of concessionsto the peasants since the

1905 Revolution, when crowds had attacked their estates. Therehad also been

a resurgenceofindustrial strikes, muchmoremilitantthan their predecessors in

the early 1900s, with the Bolshevikssteadily gaining ground atthe expenseof

their moremoderate rivals, the Mensheviks,among the labour organizations.

And as forthe aspirations of the liberals, whichhad seemed sonear in 1905, theywerenow becoming a moredistant prospect asthe court and its supporters blocked all the Duma ’ s liberal reforms and (with the Beiliss trialof1913, which

even afterthe Dreyfus Affairshocked the whole of Europe withits medieval persecution of aninnocent Jew on trumped-up charges of the ritualmurder of aChristian boy) trampled on their fragile idealof civil rights. There was, in short,a widening gulf of mistrust not just between the court and society a gulf epitomized bythe Rasputin scandal but also between the court and

many of its own traditional supporters in the Civil Service, the Church and the army,asthe Tsarresisted their owndemands forreform. Just asthe Romanovs werehonouring themselves and ﬂattering themselveswith the fantasticbelief thatthey mightrule for anotherthree centuries, outside their ownnarrow court

circlesthere was a growing senseofimpending crisis and catastrophe. Thissense

Russia underthe Old Regime

of despairwas best voiced bythe poets of thisso-called ‘Silver Age ’ of Russian

literature Blok and Belyi above all who depicted Russiaas living on a volcano. In the words of Blok:

And over RussiaI see a quiet Far-spreading ﬁre consume all.

How are we toexplain the dynasty ’ s collapse? Collapseis certainlythe

rightword to use. Forthe Romanovregime fell underthe weight of its own

internal contradictions. Itwas not overthrown. As in all modern revolutions, the

ﬁrst cracks appeared atthe top. The revolution did notstart with the labour movement solong the preoccupation of left-wing historians in the West. Nor did itstart with the breakaway of the nationalist movements on the periphery:aswith the collapseof the Soviet Empire thatwas built on the ruins of the Romanovs ’ , nationalist revoltwas aconsequenceof the crisis in the centre

ratherthanits cause. A more convincing case could bemade forsaying that it

was all started bythe peasantrevolution on the land, whichin some places

began as early as 1902, three years before the 1905 Revolution,and indeed that itwas bound to bein sofar as Russia was overwhelmingly a peasantsociety.

But while the peasant problem, like that of the workers and nationalities,

introduced fundamental structural weaknesses into the social system of the old regime, it did not determine its politics; and itwaswithpoliticsthatthe problem

lay. Thereis no reason to suppose thatthe tsarist regime was doomed to collapse in the waythat Marxist determinists once claimed from their narrow focus on its ‘ social contradictions ’ . It could have been saved byreform. But thereisthe rub. For Russia ’ s last two tsars lacked the will forreal reform. True, in 1905, when the Tsarwas nearlytoppled from histhrone, he was forced reluctantlyto concede reforms; but once thatthreat hadpassed he realigned himself with the supporters of reaction. This isthe fatal weakness in the argument of those historians on the Rightwho paint a rosy image of the Tsarist Empireon the eveof the First World War. They claim thatthe tsarist system was being reformed, or ‘modernized’ ,along Westernliberallines. But the last two tsars and their more reactionary supporters in the gentry, the Church and Rightist political circles were at best ambiguous towardsthe idea of ‘modernization’ . They knew, for example, thatthey needed a modernindustrialeconomy in order to compete with the Westernpowers; yet atthe same time theyweredeeply hostile to the politicaldemands and social transformations of the urbanindustrial order. Insteadofembracing reform they adhered obstinatelyto their own archaic

vision of autocracy. Itwastheirtragedythat just as Russia was entering the twentieth centurytheywere trying to returnitto the seventeenth.

Here, then, were the roots of the revolution, in the growing conﬂict

Dynasty

between a society rapidly becoming moreeducated, more urban and more complex,and a fossilized autocracythatwould not concede its politicaldemands.

That conflict first became acute(indeed revolutionary)following the famine of 1891,asthe government floundered in the crisis and liberal society became politicized as it launched its own relief campaign; and it isthere thatthe narrative of Part Two commences. But before thatwemust look more closely atthe main

protagonists of the conﬂict, starting with the Tsar.

ii The Miniaturist

Four years before the tercentenary the brilliantsculptor,Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, had completed anequestrian statueof the former Tsar Alexander III which

stood in ZnamenskayaSquareopposite the Nikolaevsky Station in St Petersburg. Itwassuch aningenious and formidable representation of autocracy in human

form that afterthe revolution the Bolsheviks decided toleaveit in place as a fearful reminder of the old regime; and thereitremained until the 1930s.*The huge bronze ﬁgureof Alexandersatrigidly astride a ponderous horseofmassive architecturalproportions, its four thicklegs ﬁxed likepillars to the ground. The rider and horsehad been made to appearsoheavy and solid that itseemed impossible forthem tomove. Many people took thisto be a symbol of the autocracy ’ s owninertia, and there was a perhaps not-altogetherunintentional element of irony in this. Workers werequick to recognize the statue ’ s funny side. They christened itthe ‘Hippopotamus ’ and recited the witty lines:

Here stands achest of drawers,

On the chest a hippopotamus

And on the hippopotamus sits anidiot.

Even the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich,President of the Academy of Arts and the late Tsar ’ s brother, denounced the statue as acaricature. Itwas certainly acruel twist of fate that Trubetskoihad chosen to build the statuein equestrianform, since Alexander III had always been afraid of horses. His difficultieswith them hadgrowninhis final years as he put on weight. It became almost impossible to find a horse that he could bepersuaded tomount. 13

Nicholaswas oblivious to suchironies. For him, the Trubetskoi statue symbolized the power and solidity of the autocracy during his father ’ sreign. He

*After more than ﬁfty years in storage the statue wasreturned to the city ’ sstreets in 1994. Ironically, the horsenowstands in front of the former Lenin Museum, whereit hastaken the placeof the armoured carwhich, in April 1917,brought Lenin from the Finland Station.

Russia underthe Old Regime

ordered aneven largerstatueof Alexanderto be built for Moscow, his favoured

capital, in time forthe tercentenary. Ittook two years to constructthe awesome

monument, which Nicholas himself unveiled amidst great ceremony during the

jubilee celebrations. Unlikeits Petersburg brother, whichhad combined a good

representationallikeness of the Tsarwith a strong symbolic point, the newstatue hadnopretensionsto artistic merit. The Tsar ’ s giant ﬁgure was a mannequin

without humanexpression,a monolithic incarnation of autocratic power. Itsat

straight-backedonits throne, hands on knees, encumbered with all the symbols

of tsarist authority the crown, the sceptre and orb, the imperial robe and full military dress staring out towardsthe Kremlin, its back to the cathedral,

in the manner of a pharaoh withnothing to think about exceptthe sourceof

his ownillimitable power. 14

Since Alexander ’ s death, in 1894,Nicholas haddeveloped an almost

mystical reverence towardsthe memory of his father. He thought of him asthe true autocrat. Alexander had ruled over Russia like a medievallordover his

privatepatrimony. Hehad centralized power in his hands and commanded

his ministers like a general atwar. Heeven looked like an autocratshould

look a giant of a man, six feetthree inchestall, hissternfaceframed by an

imposing black beard. Thiswas a man who liked to amusehis drinking com-

panions by crashing through lockeddoors and bending silverroubles in his ‘ vice-

likeimperial thumb’ . Out of earshot in a private corner of his palaceheplayed

the trumpetwith similar boisterousness. Legend has itthat in 1888 he hadeven

saved his family from certain death bysupporting on his Herculean shoulders

the collapsed steel roof of the dining carriage in the imperial train, whichhad

been derailed byrevolutionaries on its wayto the Crimea. His onlyweakness, it

seems, was his fatal addiction toliquor. When he fell ill withkidney disease

the Empress forbade him todrink. But he gotround this by having a special

pair of boots made withhidden compartments large enough to carry a ﬂaskof cognac. General P. A. Cherevin, one of his favourite companions, recalled, ‘When

the Tsaritsa was beside us, we sat quietly and played likegood children. But whenevershe went off a little, we would exchangeglances. And then one, two, three! We ’dpull out our ﬂasks, take a swig and then itwould be as if nothing hadhappened. He [Alexander] was greatly pleased with this amusement. Itwas like a game. Wenamed it ‘‘Necessity isthe mother of invention.’’ ‘‘One, two, three. Necessity,Cherevin?’’ —‘‘Invention,Your Majesty. ’’ ‘‘One, two and

three ’’ and we ’d swig.’15

Nicholas grewupin the shadow of this boozy colossus,acutely aware of his owninferiority. Being naturallyshy and juvenile in appearance, his parents

continued to treat him like a little child (‘Nicky ’ was his family name) long

after he hadoutgrownhisteenage years. Nicholasretained many of his childish

tastes and pursuits. The diaries he wroteinhis earlytwenties arefull of silly

The Dynasty

little notes about games and pranks. In1894,atthe age of twenty-six, for example, less than a month beforehis accession to the throne, he recorded an epicchestnut battle with Prince George of Greecein the royalpark: ‘We started in front of the house and ended upon the roof.’ A few days later he wrote of another battle, thistime withpine cones. Alexander, who knew nothing of physicalor emotional complexes,considered hisson a weakling and something of animbecile. He called him ‘girlie’ and thoughtthere was little point in preparing him forthe tasks of government. When Count Witte, his Minister of Finance, suggested thatthe time had come toinstructthe heirto the throne in the affairs of state,Alexanderseemed surprised. ‘Tell me, ’ he asked the

Minister, ‘have you everspoken tohis Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke

Tsarevich?’ Witte admitted that he had. ‘Then don’ ttell me you never noticed

thatthe Grand Duke is a dunce!’16

Through his education Nicholas had all the talents and charms of an

Englishpublic schoolboy. Hedanced gracefully, rode beautifully, was a very

good shot and excelled in severalothersports. He spoke Englishlike an Oxford

professor,and French and German well. His manners were,almost needless to

say, impeccable. His cousin and boyhood friend, the Grand Duke Alexander,

supposed him to be ‘ the most politemanin Europe ’ . But of the practical

knowledge required togovern acountrythe sizeof Russia and acountry,

moreover, in a pre-revolutionary situation Nicholas possessed almost nothing.

His principal tutor,an Englishgentleman bythe name of Mr Heath, painted well in water-colours,and was extremely fond of the outdoor life. But he lacked

the advantage of a university education and knew nothing about Russia except for a few basic words of its language. From V . O. Kliuchevsky, the distinguished

historian,Nicholas learned something of the history of his country,but nothing of its contemporary problems. When Pobedonostsevtried toinstruct him in the workings of the state, he became ‘ actively absorbed in picking his nose ’ .

Politics bored Nicholas. He was always more at home in the company of ofﬁcers and society women thanministers and politicians. 17

Less than sanguine about hisson ’ s ability tolearn the art of kingship from books,Alexander enrolled him in the officer corps of the Guards in the hope thatthe armywould build uphis character and teachhim something of the world. Nicholas loved the military life. The comradelyspirit of the officers ’ mess, morelike a gentleman ’ s club than a military barracks, would remain with him forthe rest of his life as a fond memory of the days beforehehad been weighed down bythe burdens of office. Itwasthen that he hadfallen in love with the ballerinaMathilde Kshesinskaia. Hisrank of Colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards,awarded tohim by his father, remained a sourceof immensepride. He refused to take a higherrank, even during the First World

Russia underthe Old Regime

Warwhen he assumed the position of Supreme Commander. This damagedhis prestigein the army, wherehe became known as ‘Colonel Romanov ’ . In1890 Alexandersent hisson on a grand tour of Siberia, Japan,Indo-

China, Egypt and Greece. The journeywas intended to broaden the heir ’ s politicaleducation. But the natureofhistravelling suite(the usual complement of dim and hedonisticGuards ofﬁcers)largely precluded this. During the tour

Nicholas ﬁlled his diary with the same banal and trivialentrieswith whichhe usually ﬁlled his diary at home: tersenotes on the weather, the distances covered

eachday, the times of landfall and departure, the company at meals,and soon.

Itseemsthat nothing in histravels hadencouragedhim to broaden his outlook

and observations on life. The one lasting effect of the tour wasunfortunate. At

Otsu in Japanhenarrowly escaped an attempt on his life by a deranged terrorist.

The experienceleft him with aningrained hatred of the Japanese(he called them ‘monkeys ’ , makaki),and it is often argued thatthis made him vulnerable to the inﬂuenceof those at his courtwho promoted the disastrous warwith Japan in 1904–5.

Had Alexander lived three score years and ten then the fateof the

Russian Empiremight have been very different. But as fortune would haveit, he died from kidney diseasein1894 atthe age of only forty-nine. Asthe crowd of relatives, physicians and courtiers gathered around the death-bed of the great

autocrat,Nicholas burst into tears and exclaimed patheticallytohis cousin,

Alexander, ‘What is going tohappen tome and to all of Russia? Iamnot prepared to be aTsar. I neverwanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I havenoidea of even howto talk to the ministers. ’18 Louis

XVI, with whom Nicholas hadmuchin common, made a strikinglysimilar

remark when he ﬁrst learned in 1775 that he wasto be the King of France.

The reign of Russia ’ s last Tsar begandisastrously. A few days afterthe

coronation, in May 1896,acelebratory fairwas organized on the Khodynka Field,a military training ground just outside Moscow. Bythe early morning

some half a million people had already assembled, expecting to receivefrom

their new Tsar gifts of souvenirtankards and biscuits embossed with the date and the occasion. Vast quantities of free beer and sausage were to bedistributed. As morepeople arrived,a rumour wentround thatthere would not beenough gifts for everyone. The crowd surgedforward. People tripped and stumbled into the military ditches, where theywere suffocated and crushed todeath. Within minutes, 1,400 people had been killed and 600 wounded. Yetthe Tsarwas persuaded to continue with the celebrations. In the evening, while the corpses were carted away, he even attended aball given bythe French Ambassador, the

Marquis de Montebello. During the next few days the rest of the scheduled festivities banquets,balls and concerts went ahead as if nothing had happened. Public opinion was outraged. Nicholastried to atone by appointing

a former Minister of Justice tolook into the causes of the catastrophe. But

when the Minister found thatthe Grand Duke Sergius,Governor-Generalof

Moscow and the husband of the Empress ’ ssister, wasto blame, the other Grand

Dukes protested furiously. Theysaid itwould undermine the principles of

autocracyto admit in public the fault of a member of the imperialfamily. The

affairwas closed. But itwasseen as abadomen forthe newreign and deepened

the growing divide between the court and society. Nicholas, who increasingly

believed himself to beill-fated, would later look back atthis incident asthe

start of all histroubles. 19

Throughout hisreign Nicholas gave the impression of being unable to

cope with the taskof ruling a vast Empirein the grips of a deepening revolution-

ary crisis. True, only a genius could have coped withit. And Nicholaswas

certainly no genius.*Had circumstances and his owninclinations been different, he might have saved his dynasty by moving away from autocratic rule towards a

constitutional regime during the ﬁrst decade of hisreign, while there wasstill hope of appeasing the liberals and isolating the revolutionary movement. Nicholas hadmany of the personalqualitiesrequired to be a good constitutionalmonarch.

In England, whereone needed onlyto be a ‘good man ’ in orderto be a good king, he would havemade an admirable sovereign. He was certainly no dimmer thanhis look-alike cousin,George V, who was a model of the constitutional king. Nicholaswas mild-mannered, had anexcellent memory and a perfectsense of decorum,all of whichmade him potentially idealforthe largely ceremonial

tasks of aconstitutionalmonarch. But Nicholas hadnot been born to thatrole: he wasthe Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias.† Familytradition and pressurefrom the crown ’ straditional allies compelled him not onlyto reign,but to rule. Itwould not do for aRomanovtoplaythe role of aceremonialmonarch, leaving the actual business of governmentto the bureaucracy. Norwould it do

to retreat before the demands of the liberals. The Romanovway, in the faceof politicalopposition, wasto assert the ‘divine authority ’ of the absolutemonarch, to trust in the ‘historicbond between the Tsar and the people’ ,and to rule with

*There used to be a nice Soviet joke thatthe Supreme Soviet haddecided to award the Order of the Red Bannerto Nicholas II posthumously ‘for hisservicesto the revolution’ . The last Tsar ’ s achievement, itwassaid, wastohave brought about a revolutionary situation.

† The full titles of Nicholas II were:Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias; Tsar of

Moscow,Kiev,Vladimir,Novgorod,Kazan,Astrakhan,Poland,Siberia, the TauricChersonese and

Georgia; Lordof Pskov; Grand Princeof Smolensk,Lithuania, Volhynia, Podoliaand Finland;

Princeof Estonia, Livonia, Courland and Semigalia, Samogatia, Belostok,Karelia, Tver,Yugria,

Perm,Viatka, Bulgariaand other lands; Lord and Grand Princeof Nizhnyi Novgorod and

Chernigov; Ruler of Riazan,Polotsk,Rostov,Yaroslavl’,Belo-Ozero,Udoria, Obdoria, Kondia,

Vitebsk,Mstislavl and all the Northern Lands; Lord and Sovereign of the Iverian,Kartalinian and Kabardinianlands and of the Armenianprovinces; Hereditary Lord and Suzerain of the

Circassian Princes and Highland Princes and others; Lordof Turkestan; Heirto the Throne of Norway; Duke of Schleswig-Holstein,Stormarn, the Dithmarschen and Oldenburg.

20 Russia underthe Old Regime

force and resolution. In spiteofher Anglo-German background, the Empress

adopted with a vengeance all the medieval traditions of Byzantine despotism,

and constantlyurgedher mild-mannered husband to bemorelike Ivan the

Terrible and Peterthe Great. The veneration which Nicholas felt for his father,

and his owngrowing ambition to rule in the manner of his Muscovite ancestors,

made it inevitable that he would endeavour toplaythe part of a true autocrat.

As he warned the liberalnobles of Tvershortly after his coronation, he saw it

as his duty before God to ‘ maintain the principle of autocracy just as ﬁrmly

and unﬂinchingly as itwas preserved by myunforgettable deadfather ’ . 20

But Nicholas had been blessed withneither his father ’ sstrengthof

character nor his intelligence. Thatwas Nicholas ’ stragedy. Withhis limitations, he could only play atthe part of an autocrat, meddling in (and, in the process, disrupting) the workofgovernmentwithout bringing toit any leadership. He was fartoo mild-mannered and shyto command anyreal authority among his subordinates. Being only ﬁvefeetseven inchestall and feminine in stature, he didn’ t even look the part of an autocrat. Domineering ﬁgures, likehis mother, the Empress MariaFedorovna, hisuncles, the four Grand Dukes,and his extutor,Konstantin Pobedonostsev, towered over him during the earlyyears of his reign. Later hiswife would ‘ wearthe trousers ’ ,asshe onceput it in a letterto him.

Yet itwould bemistaken to assume,assomany historians havedone, that Nicholas ’ s failure stemmed from a fundamental ‘ weakness of will’ . The

generally accepted wisdom has been that Nicholaswas a passive victim of history who became increasingly mystical and indifferenttowards his ownfate as he

realized his growing powerlessness against the revolution. This interpretation

owes much to the observations of hisrevolutionary enemies, who dominated the

early literatureonhim. Viktor Chernov, the Social Revolutionary leader, for

example,argued that Nicholas hadmet adversity with ‘ a kind of stubborn passivity,as if he wished toescape from life... He seemed not a man,but a poor copy of one. ’ Trotskysimilarly portrayed the last Tsar as opposing ‘only a dumb indifference ’ to the ‘historic flood’ that flowed ever closerto the gates of his palace. Thereis of course anelement of truthin all this. Frustrated in his ambitionsto rule as he thought a true autocratshould,Nicholas increasingly retreated into the private and equally damaged realm of his family. Yetthis covert admission of politicalfailure was not made forwant of trying. Beneath his docile exterior Nicholas had a strong senseofhis duty to uphold the principles of autocracy. As he grew in confidenceduring hisreign he developed anintensedesire to rule, likehis Muscovite ancestors, on the basis of his own religious conscience. He stubbornly defended his autocratic prerogatives against the encroachments of his ambitious ministers and even his own wife, whose persistent demands (often in Rasputin’ s name) he did his best toignore and

he Dynasty

resist. Itwas not a ‘ weakness of will’ thatwasthe undoing of the last Tsar but,

on the contrary,a wilfuldetermination to rule from the throne, despite the fact

that he clearly lacked the necessary qualitiestodo so.21

Acompleteinability tohandle and command hissubordinateswas one

obvious deﬁciency. Throughout his life Nicholaswas burdened by a quite

unnatural senseofdecorum. Hehid his emotions and feelings behind a mask

of passive reserve whichgave the impression of indifference to those, like Chernov and Trotsky, who observed him from a distance. He tactfully agreed with

everyone who spoke tohim ratherthan sufferthe embarrassment of having to

contradictthem. This gave rise to the witticism, which wentround the salons

of St Petersburg, thatthe most powerfulmanin Russia wasthe last man to have spoken to the Tsar. Nicholaswastoo polite to confront his ministers with

complaints about theirwork, soheleft ittoothers toinform them of their

discharge. Count Witte recalled his owndismissal as President of the Council of Ministers: ‘We [Nicholas and Witte] talked fortwo solid hours. He shook my hand. Heembraced me. He wished me all the luckin the world. I returned home beside myself withhappiness and found a written order for my dismissal

lying on my desk.’ Witte believed thatthe Tsar derived some curious satisfaction from tormenting his ministers in thisway. ‘Our Tsar ’ , he wroteinhis memoirs, ‘is an Oriental,a hundred per cent Byzantine.’ Such unpredictable behaviour gave

rise tofeelings of insecurity within the ruling circles. Damaging rumours began

to circulate thatthe Tsarwas involved in various court conspiracies, or, even

worse, that he did not know his ownmind and had become the unwitting tool of dark and hidden forces behind the scenes. The factthat Nicholasrelied on a kitchen cabinet of reactionary advisers (including Pobedonostsev,Procurator-

Generalof the Holy Synod,and the notorious newspaper editor,Prince Meshchersky, whosehomosexuallovers werepromoted toprominent positions at court)merely added fuel to this conspiracytheory as of courseinlateryears

Rasputin did.

What Nicholas lackedinleadership he made upfor by hard work. He was anindustrious and conscientious monarch, especially during the first half of hisreign, diligentlysitting at his desk until he had finished his daily administrative duties. All this he did in the manner of aclerk the ‘Chief Clerkof the Empire’— devoting all his energiesto the routine minutiaeofhis office without everstopping to considerthe broader policy issues. Whereas his father had been briefed on onlythe major questions of policy and haddelegated most of his minor executivefunctionstohissubordinates,Nicholas proved quiteincapable of dealing with anything but the most trivialmatters. Hepersonally attended to such things asthe budget forrepairs at an agricultural training school,and the appointment of provincialmidwives. Itwas evidentthat he found real comfort in theseminor bureaucratic routines: they created the illusion of a smoothly

Russia underthe Old Regime

functioning government and gavehim a senseofpurpose. Every day he carefully

recorded in his diary the time and duration of his meetingswithhis ministers and his other ofﬁcial activities,along with tersenotes on the weather, the time of his morning coffee, the company attea, and soon. These routines became a sort of ritual:atthe same time every day he performed the same functions, so much so that his ofﬁcials often joked that one could set one ’ swatch by him.

To the petty-minded Nicholas, itseemed thatthe role of the true autocrat, ruling in person from the throne, was preciselyto concernhimself withevery minor detail in the administration of hisvast lands. He spent hours, for example, dealing with the petitionsto the Chancellery: hundreds of these came in every

month, many of them from peasants with rude names (e.g. serfnicknamessuch

as ‘Smelly ’ or ‘Ugly ’ that had been formalized astheirsurnames) which they

could not change without the Tsar ’ s consent. Nicholas proved unable to rise

above suchpetty tasks. Hegrew increasingly jealous of his ministers ’ bureaucratic

functions, whichhe confused with the exerciseofpower,and resented having to

delegate authority to them sincehe saw it as a usurpation of his own autocratic

powers. Soprotective was he of his petty executiveprerogativesthat he even

refused to appoint a private secretary, preferring instead todeal withhis own

correspondence. Even such simple instructions asthe summoning of anofﬁcial

orthe readying of a motor carwere written out in a note and sealed in an envelope bythe Tsar ’ s owngentle hand. It never occurred tohim that an autocrat might bemore usefully employed in resolving the larger questions of state. His

mind wasthat of a miniaturist, well attuned to the smallest details of adminis-

tration yet entirely incapable of synthesizing them intogeneralprinciples of government. As Pobedonostsev once said of him, ‘Heonlyunderstandsthe significanceof some isolated fact, without connection with the rest, without appreciating the interrelation of all other pertinent facts, events, trends, occurrences. He stickstohis insignificant, petty point of view. ’22 Todefend his autocratic prerogatives Nicholas believed that he needed tokeephis officialsweak and divided. The morepowerful a minister became, the more Nicholas grew jealous of his powers. Able prime ministers, such as

Count Witte and Petr Stolypin, who alone could have saved the tsarist regime, wereforced out in this fogofmistrust. Only grey mediocrities, such asthe ‘old

man ’ Ivan Goremykin, survived long in the highest ofﬁce. Goremykin’ ssuccess

was put down bythe British commentator Bernard Paresto the factthat he was ‘ acceptable’ to both the Tsar and the Tsarina ‘for his attitude of abutler, taking instructionsto the otherservants ’ . Indeed,as beﬁts aTsarwho ruled over Russia like a medievallord,Nicholasregarded his ministers asthe servants of his own

privatehousehold ratherthanofﬁcials of the state. True, he no longer addressed them with the familiar tyi (the ‘ you ’ reserved for animals, serfs and children).

But he did expectunthinking devotion from them and placed loyalty far above

competenceinhis estimation of his ministers. Even Count Witte, who was

anything but humble in his normaldemeanour, found himself standing to

attention in the presenceof the Tsar, histhumbs in line with the seams of his

trousers,as if he were some private steward.

Nicholas exploited the rivalries and divisions between his different

ministries. He would balance the views of the one against the other in orderto

retain the upper hand. This made for little coherenceingovernment,but in so

far as it bolstered his position it did not appearto bother him. Apart from a

short time in 1901,Nicholas consistentlyrefused to co-ordinate the workof the different ministries by chairing meetings of the Council of Ministers: it

seems he was afraid that powerfulfactions might beformed there which would forcehim to adopt policies of whichhedisapproved. Hepreferred to see his

ministers on a one-to-one basis, whichhad the effect of keeping them divided

but was a recipe for chaos and confusion. These audiences could beextremely frustrating for ministers, forwhile Nicholas invariably gave the impression that

he agreed with a minister ’ s proposals, he could never be trusted to support them

against thoseof another minister. Sustained and generaldebates on policywere

thus extremelyrare. If a ministertalked too long on politics, the Tsarwould

make clearthat he was bored and change the conversation to the weather or

some other more agreeable topic. Aware thatthe Tsar found theirreports dull, ministers consciouslyshortened them. Some even scrapped them altogether and

amused him instead with anecdotes and gossip.23

The result of all thiswastodeprive the government of effective leadership or co-ordination during the ﬁnal years of the tsarist regime. Nicholas wasthe sourceof all the problems. If there was a vacuumofpower atthe centre of the ruling system, then he wasthe empty space. In a sense,Russia gained in him the worst of both worlds:a Tsar determined to rule from the throne yet quiteincapable of exercising power. Thiswas ‘ autocracywithout an autocrat ’ .

Perhaps nobody could havefulﬁlled the role which Nicholas had set himself: the workofgovernment had become much too vast and complex for a single man; autocracy itself was out of date. But Nicholaswas mistaken to try in the

ﬁrst place. Insteadofdelegating power he indulged in a fantasy of absolute

power. Sojealous was he of his ownprerogativesthat he tried to bypass the

stateinstitutions altogether and centrepower on the court. Yet none of his amiable but dim-witted courtiers wasremotely capable of providing him with

sound adviceonhowto rule the country,coming asthey did from a narrow

circle of aristocraticGuards ofﬁcers who knew nothing of the Russiabeyond St

Petersburg ’ s fashionable streets. Most of them were contemptuous of Russia, speaking Frenchnot Russian and spending more time in Niceor Biarritz than on their landed estates in the provinces. Underthe court ’ s growing domination, Nicholas ’ s governmentwasunable to create coherent policiestodeal with the

4 Russia underthe Old Regime

mounting problems of society which wereleading inexorablytowardsrevolution.

During its ﬁnal years, especially after Stolypin’ s downfall in 1911, the government

drifted dangerously as one sycophantic mediocrity after anotherwas appointed

Prime Minister bythe Tsar. Nicholas himself spent more and more time away

from his ofﬁce. Government business had to bedelayed forweeks at a time, while he went off on hunting trips, yachting parties and family holidays to the

Crimea. But in the apparentlysecure refuge of his family anothertragedywas unfolding.

iii The Heir

The Empress Alexandra found the jubilee celebrations a strain. She dragged herself withdifﬁculty to all the public functions,but often left earlywithobvious signs of distress. Atthe magniﬁcent ball given bythe Moscow nobility she felt soill thatshe could scarcely keep her feet. When the Emperor came toher rescue, itwas just in time toleadher away and prevent her from fainting in

public. During the gala performance atthe Marinsky Theatre she appeared pale

and sombre. Sitting in the adjacent box,Meriel Buchanan, the British Ambassador ’ s daughter, observed howthe fan she was holding trembled in her hands, and how her laboured breathing:

made the diamondswhich covered the bodiceofher gown rise and fall, ﬂashing and trembling with a thousand uneasy sparks of light. Presently, itseemed thatthis emotion or distress mastered her completely,and with a fewwhispered wordsto the Emperorshe rose and withdrewto the back

of the box, to benomore seen that evening. A little waveof resentment rippled overthe theatre.24

The factwasthatthe Empress hadnot appeared in public on more

than a dozen occasions during the previous decade. Since the birthofher haemophiliac son, the Tsarevich Alexis, in 1904, she had secluded herself atthe

Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo and other imperial residences away from the capital. It had been hoped thatshe would use the opportunity of the tercentenary toimproveher public image. Having turned her backon society, she had come to be seen as cold and arrogant, while her dependenceon the

‘holy man ’ Rasputin hadlong been a matter of political concern becauseofhis growing domination of the court. Yetshortly before the jubilee the illness of herson had taken a turnforthe worse,and thiswas constantly on her mind during the celebrations. Tomake matters worse,Tatyana, hersecond daughter, hadfallen ill with typhoid after drinking the infected water of the capital.

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Alexandra did her best to concealher inner anguishfrom the public. But she

lacked the heart togoout and win theirsympathy.

Alexandra was a strangerto Russia when she became its Empress. Since

the eighteenth century, it had become the custom for Romanovrulers tomarry foreign princesses. Bythe end of the nineteenth, inter-marriage hadmade the

Romanovs anintegralpart of the family of European crowned heads. Their

opponents liked to call them the ‘Gottorp-Holstein’ dynasty, whichingenealogi-

cal termswas not far from the truth. Most statesmen shared the viewthatthe balanceofpower in Europe would be secured bythesedynastic ties. So there

wasreason to welcome the engagement in April 1894 of the Tsarevich Nicholas

to Princess Alexandra, or Alix forshort, daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-

Darmstadt and Princess Aliceof England. Itwas expected thatthe Princess

would haveplenty of time toprepareherself forthe role of Empress. But

Alexander III died onlysix months later,and the 22-year-old woman suddenly found herself on the Russian throne.

Although in lateryears she wasto be cursed by hersubjects as ‘ the

German woman ’,Alexandra was in fact in manyways the quintessential English

woman. Afterthe deathofher mother, in 1878, she had been broughtupin England by her grandmother,Queen Victoria, whose strict morals,attitudes and

tastes, notto speakofhertenacity of purpose, she had assimilated. Alexandra

spoke and wrote with Nicholas in English. Russian she spokepoorly, with a

heavy English accent, onlyto servants, ofﬁcials and the clergy. Her housekeeping

atthe Alexander Palace was austerely Victorian. Factory-produced furniture was ordered from Maples, the Englishmiddle-class departmentstore, in preference

to the ﬁne imperialfurniture whichmuch bettersuited the classicEmpire style

of the Alexander Palace. Her four daughters shared abedroom, sleeping on

narrow camp-beds; the Empress herself was known to change the sheets. Cold

bathswere takenevery day. Itwas in manyways the modest ambition of Nicholas

and Alexandra tolead the lifestyle of the Englishmiddle class. Theyspoke the cosy domestic language of the Victorian bourgeoisie: ‘Hubby ’ and ‘Wifey ’ were

their nicknames for eachother. 25 But the Empress waswrong to assume,asshe

did from her knowledgeof the English court, thatsuch a lifestyle, whichin

England was a result of the monarch’ ssteadyretreat from the domain of executive power, might beenjoyed by aRussian autocrat.

From the beginning,Alexandra gave the impression of resenting the

public role whichher position obliged hertoplay. She appeared onlyrarely at court and socialfunctions and,being naturallyshy,adopted a poseof reservein her ﬁrst appearances, whichmade herseem awkward and unsympathetic. She

gained a reputation for coldness and hauteur, two very un-Russian vices. ‘No one liked the Tsarina, ’ wrote the literary hostess ZinaidaGippius. ‘Hersharp face,beautiful,but ill-tempered and depressed, with thin, tightly pressed lips,

Russia underthe Old Regime

did not please; her German,angular height did not please. ’ Learning of her

granddaughter ’ sunpopularity,Queen Victoria wrote toherwith some advice:

Thereis no harder craftthanour craft of ruling. I have ruled for more

than ﬁfty years in my own country, which I haveknown since childhood, and, nevertheless, every day I think about what I need todo to retain and

strengthen the loveofmysubjects. How muchharder isyour situation.

You ﬁnd yourself in a foreign country,acountrywhich you do not know

at all, where the customs, the way of thinking and the people themselves

are completely alien to you,and nevertheless it isyour ﬁrst duty to win

their love and respect.

Alexandra replied with an arrogance suggesting herreputation was deserved:

You aremistaken, my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need toearn the loveof the people. The Russianpeople revere

their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As

far as St Petersburg society is concerned, that issomething whichone may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up thissociety and their mocking haveno signiﬁcance whatsoever.

The contents of this correspondence soon became knownin St Petersburg

circles, resulting in the complete breakdownof relations between the leaders of high society and the Empress. She steadilyreduced her publicappearances and limited her circle of friendsto thosefrom whom she could expect a slavish devotion. Herelaythe roots of her paranoic insistenceondividing court and

society into ‘friends ’ and ‘enemies ’ , which wasto bring the monarchyto the brink of catastrophe.26

The unpopularity of the Empress would not havemattered somuch had she nottakenitupon herself toplay an activepolitical role. From her letter

to Queen Victoria itwas clearthatthe mystical attractions of Byzantine despot-

ismhad takenearly possession of her. Even more thanher mild-mannered husband,Alexandrabelieved that Russiacould still be ruled and indeed had

to be as it had been ruled bythe medieval tsars. She sawthe country asthe private ﬁefdom of the crown:Russia existed forthe beneﬁt of the dynasty rather

than the otherwayround. Government ministers were the private servants of the Tsar, not public servants of the state. Inher bossy wayshe set out to organize the state as if itwas part of her personalhousehold. She constantly urgedher husband to bemoreforceful and to assert his autocratic will. ‘Be more autocratic than Peterthe Great ’ , she would tell her husband, ‘ and sterner

than Ivan the Terrible.’ She wanted him to rule, like the medieval tsars, on the

basis of his own religious convictions and without regardforthe constraints of

the law. ‘You and Russiaareone and the same, ’ she would tell him asshe pushed him thisway and that according toher own ambitions, vanities, fears and

jealousies. Itwasthe Tsarinaand Rasputin who at least so the public

thought became the real rulers of tsarist Russia during the ﬁnal catastrophic

years. Alexandra liked to compareherself with Catherine the Great. But in fact

herrole was muchmore reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, the last queen of ancien-re ´gime France, whoseportrait hung over herwriting deskin the Alexander

Palace.27

Alexandra made it her mission togive the Romanov dynasty a healthy

son and heir. But she gave birth tofour daughters in succession. Indesperation

she turned to Dr Philippe,a practitioner of ‘ astralmedicine’ , who had been

introduced to the imperialfamily in 1901during theirvisitto France. He

convinced hershe was pregnantwith a son,and she duly expanded until a

medicalexamination revealed that itwas no more than a sympathetic pregnancy.

Philippe was acharlatan(he had been ﬁned three times in Francefor posing as

a regular practitioner) and left Russia in disgrace. But the episode had revealed

the Empress ’ ssusceptibility to bogus forms of mysticism. One could have

predicted this from the emotionalnatureofher conversion to Orthodoxy. After

the cold and spartan spiritual world of north German Protestantism, she was

ravished bythe solemn rituals, the chanted prayers and the soulful singing of

the Russian Church. With all the fervour of the newly converted, she came to

believein the power of prayer and of divine miracles. And when, in 1904, she ﬁnally gave birth to a son, she was convinced it had been due to the intercession

of St Seraphim,a pious old manof the Russian countryside, who in 1903 had been somewhat irregularly canonized on the Tsar ’ s insistence.

The Tsarevich Alexis grewupinto a playfullittle boy. But itwassoon discovered that he suffered from haemophilia, atthattime incurable and in most cases fatal. The disease was hereditary in the Houseof Hesse(one of Alexandra ’ s

uncles, one of her brothers and three of her nephews died from it) and there was no doubtthatthe Empress had transmitted it. Had the Romanovs been moreprudentthey might have stopped Nicholas from marrying her; but then haemophilia wasso common in the royalhouses of Europe that it had become

something of anoccupationalhazard. Alexandra looked upon the illness as a

punishment from God and, to atone for hersin, devoted herself to religion and

the duties of motherhood. Had the natureofherson ’ s illness not been kept a

secret, she might have won as a motherthat measureof sympathy from the public which she so utterly failed to attract from it as an Empress. Alexandra

constantlywatched overthe boy lest he should fall and bring on the deadly internal bleeding from which the victims of haemophiliacan suffer. There was

no way he could lead the lifeof a normal child, since the slightest accident

Russia underthe Old Regime

could start the bleeding. A sailor bythe name of Derevenko was appointed to

go withhim wherever he went and to carry him when,aswas often the case, he

could notwalk. Alexandraconsulted numerous doctors,but acure was beyond

theirscience. She became convinced that only a miracle could saveherson,and

strove tomake herself worthy of God’ s favour by donating moneyto churches,

performing good works and spending endless hours in prayer. ‘Every time the

Tsarina saw him with red cheeks, or heardhis merry laugh, orwatched his frolics, ’ recalled Pierre Gilliard, the Tsarevich’ stutor, ‘her heart would ﬁll with

animmensehope,and she would say: ‘‘God has heardme. Hehas pitied my

sorrow at last. ’’ Then the disease would suddenlyswoop downon the boy, stretch him oncemoreonhis bed of pain and take him to the gates of death.’28

Itwas her desperateneed to ﬁnd a miracle cure that brought Rasputin intoher life and into the lifeof Russia. Grigorii Rasputin was borninto a

relativelywealthy peasant family in the village of Pokrovskoein western Siberia.

Until recently itwasthoughtthat he had been bornin the early 1860s; but it

is now known that he wasyoungerthanpeople assumed he was in fact born in 1869. Little moreis known about Rasputin’ s earlyyears. Acommission set up bythe Provisional Government in 1917 interviewed a number of his fellow villagers, who remembered him as a dirty and unruly boy. Later he became

known as a drunkard,a lecher and a horse thief, which was almost certainly how he acquired hissurname, from the word rasputnyi, meaning ‘dissolute ’ .*At some point he repented and joined a groupofpilgrims on theirwayto the

nearby monastery of Verkhoturye, wherehe stayed forthree months before returning to Pokrovskoe,a much changed man. Hehad renounced alcohol and

meat, learned to read and write a little,and become religious and reclusive. The main causeofhis conversion seemstohave been the ‘holy man ’ or starets Makarii, a monk atthe Verkhoturye Monastery, whose spiritualpowers, like thoseof the

starets Zosima in Dostoevsky ’ s Brothers Karamazov, had attracted disciples from all overthe region. Makarii had been received bythe Tsar and the Tsarina, who were always on the lookout for Men of God among the simple folk,and itwas Makarii’ s example that Rasputin later claimed hadinspired him. Thereis no question of Rasputin ever having been Makarii’ s disciple: he hadneverreceived the formaleducation needed to become a monk,and indeed seemed quite incapable of it. When the post of the Tsar ’ s confessor fell vacant in 1910, Alexandra insisted on Rasputin being trained for ordination so that he could take up the job. But itsoon became clearthat he wasunable to read anything but the most basic parts of the Scriptures. The capacity for learning by heart, which was essentialforthe priesthood, proved quite beyond him (Rasputin’ s

*Itwas common for fellowvillagers to address one another by nicknames describing their characteristics: ‘Clever ’ , ‘Calf ’ , ‘Wolf ’ , ‘Heart ’ ,and soon.

Dynasty

memory was in factsopoorthat often he even forgotthe names of his friends; sohegave them nicknames, such as ‘Beauty ’ or ‘Governor ’ , which wereeasierto

recall). In any case, itwas not exactlythe Orthodox faith that Rasputin brought withhim from the wilds of Siberia to St Petersburg. Hisstrangehybrid of mysticism and eroticismhadmore similaritieswith the practices of the Khlysty, anoutlawed sect he would certainly haveencountered at Verkhoturye, even if the frequent accusationsthat he was himself a member of the sectwerenever proved conclusively. The Khlysty believed thatsin wasthe ﬁrst step towards

redemption. Attheir nocturnalmeetingsthey danced naked to achieve a state of frenzy and engagedin ﬂagellation and group sex. Indeed there was a lot in common between the views of the Khlysty and the semi-pagan beliefs of the Russianpeasantry, which Rasputin’ s mysticism reﬂected. The Russianpeasant believed thatthe sinner could be as intimate with God asthe pious man; and

perhaps even moreintimate.29

Atthe age of twenty-eight, orso Rasputin later claimed, he saw an

apparition of the Holy Mother and went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There is no recordof this pilgrimage,and it is morelikelythat he merely joined the

trail of peasantwanderers, wisemen and prophets, who for centuries had walked

the length and breadthof Russia living off the alms of the villagers. Hedeveloped

an aura of spiritual authority and a gift for preaching which soon attracted the

attention of some of Russia ’ s leading clergymen. In1903 he appeared forthe ﬁrst

time in St Petersburg sponsored bythe Archimandrite Theophan,Alexandra ’ s

confessor,Bishop Hermogen of Saratov,and the celebrated Father John of

Kronstadt, who was also aclosefriend of the royalfamily. The Orthodox

Church was looking for holy men, like Rasputin, who came from the common

people, to reviveits waning inﬂuence among the urbanmasses and increaseits prestige at Nicholas ’ s court.

Itwas also a time when the court and social circles of St Petersburg were steeped in alternativeforms of religion. In the salons of the aristocracy and the drawing-rooms of the middle classesthere was a ferment of curiosity about all forms of spiritualism and theosophy, the occult and the supernatural.

Se ´ ances and ouijaboardswere all the rage. Inpart, thisreﬂected a hedonistic quest for new forms of belief and experience. But itwas alsopart of a more general and profound senseofmoraldisequilibrium, which was echoed in the

works of writers such as Blok and Belyi and wassymptomatic of European cultureduring the decade before1914. Various holy men and spiritualists had

established themselves in the palaces of Russia ’ s great and good long before

Rasputin came on to the scene. Theirsuccess cleared the way for him. He was

presented at parties and soire ´ es as a manof God,a sinner and repentant, who had been graced withextraordinary powers of clairvoyance and healing. His

disgusting physical appearancemerely added piquancytohis moral charms.

Russia underthe Old Regime

Dressed in a peasant blouse and baggytrousers, his greasy blackhair hung down

tohisshoulders, his beard was encrusted withold bits of food,and his hands

and bodywereneverwashed. He carried a strong body odour, whichmany

people compared to that of a goat. But itwas his eyesthat caught his audience ’ s

attention. Their penetrating brilliance and hypnotic power made a lasting

impression. Some people even claimed that Rasputin was able tomake his pupils

expand and contract atwill.30

Itwas as a healer fortheirson that Rasputin was ﬁrst introduced to

the Tsar and the Tsarina in November 1905. From the beginning, he seemed topossess some mysterious power bywhichhe could check the internal bleeding. Heprophesied that Alexiswould not die,and thatthe disease would disappear

when he reached the age of thirteen. Alexandra persuaded herself that God had

sent Rasputin in answertoher prayers,and hisvisits to the palacegrew more

frequent asshe came increasinglyto relyupon him. It conﬁrmed the prejudices of both Alexandraand Nicholasthat a simple Russianpeasantwho was close

to God should be able todo whatwas beyond all the doctors. In the many books on thissubjectthereis no ﬁnal wordon the secret of Rasputin’ s gift of healing. It iswidelytestiﬁed that his presencehad a

remarkablysoothing effect on both children and animals,and this mightwell

havehelped to stop Alexis ’ s bleeding. It is alsoknown that he had been trained

in the art of hypnotism, whichmay have the powertoeffect a physical change

such asthe contraction of the blood vessels. Rasputin himself once confessed

tohissecretary,Aron Simanovich, that he sometimesused Tibetandrugs or

whatever else came tohand,and thatsometimes he merely pretended to use

remedies or mumbled nonsensical wordswhile he prayed. This isreminiscent of faithhealing and it may be that Rasputin’ s most remarkable feat can be credited

to suchmethods. In October 1912the Tsarevich suffered a particularly bad bout of bleeding after accompanying his mother on acarriage ride near Spala, the imperialhunting estateineastern Poland. The doctors were unable todo

anything toprevent a large and painful tumour from forming in his groin,and

theytold the imperialfamilytopreparefor his imminent death. Itwas generally

thoughtthat only a miracle, such asthe spontaneous reabsorption of the tumour, could save the boy. The situation was considered sograve that medical bulletins on the condition of the patientwerepublished forthe ﬁrst time in the national press, though no mention was made of the natureofhis illness. Prayerservices wereheld in churches across the land and Alexiswas given the last sacraments, as he layracked withpain. Indesperation,Alexandra sent a telegram to Rasputin, who was at his home in Pokrovskoe. According to the testimony of his daughter, he said some prayers and then wentto the local telegramofﬁce, wherehe wired the Empress: ‘God hasseen your tears and heard your prayers. Donot grieve. The little one will not die.’ Within hours, the patient had undergone a sudden

he Dynasty

recovery: the bleeding had stopped, histemperaturehadfallen and the ﬂabber-

gasted doctors conﬁrmed thatthe danger hadpassed. Those who are sceptical

of the power of prayertoheal through ` the mediumof a telegraph cable may

wanttoput this down to remarkable coincidence. But Alexandra was convinced

otherwise,and afterthe ‘Spala miracle’ Rasputin’ s position at her court became

unassailable.31

Rasputin’ sstatus at court brought him immensepower and prestige.

He became a maı ˆtrede reque ˆtes,accepting bribes, gifts and sexualfavours from

those who came tohim in the hope that he would usehis inﬂuenceon their

behalf. During the First World War, when his politicalinﬂuence was at its

zenith, he developed a lucrative system of placements in the government, the

Church and the Civil Service,all of whichhe boasted were under his control.

Forthe hundreds of lesser mortalswho queued outside his apartment every

day women begging for military exemption fortheirsons and husbands,

people looking forsomewhere tolive he would simplytake a scrapofpaper,

put across on the letter head,and in hissemi-literate scrawl write to some

ofﬁcial: ‘My dear and valued friend. Do this for me,Grigorii.’ One suchnote

was broughtto the headof the courtsecretariat by a pretty young girl whom

Rasputin clearly liked. ‘Fix itupfor her. She is all right. Grigorii.’ When the

ofﬁcial askedherwhatshe wanted, the girl replied thatshe wanted to become

a prima donna in the Imperial Opera. 32

It has often been assumed that becausehe accepted bribes Rasputin

was motivated by ﬁnancialgain. This is not quite true. He took no pleasurein the accumulation of money, whichhe spent or gave away as quickly as he earned

it. What excited him was power. Rasputin wasthe supreme egotist. He always

had to be the centreof attention. Heloved to boast of his connections atthe

court. ‘Icando anything, ’ he often said,and from thisthe exaggerated rumours

spreadofhis politicalomnipotence. The gifts he received from hiswealthy

patronswereimportanttohim not because theywere valuable but because they

conﬁrmed his personalinﬂuence. ‘Look, this carpet isworth400 roubles, ’ he once boasted to a friend, ‘aGrand Duchess sent ittomefor blessing her

marriage. And do yousee,I’ vegot a golden cross? The Tsar gaveittome. ’

Above all,Rasputin liked the status whichhis position gavehim and also the power it gavehim, no more than a peasant, over men and women of a higher

social class. Hedelighted in being rude to the well-bornladieswho sat at his

feet. He would dip his dirty ﬁnger into a dishofjam and turn toone and say, ‘Humble yourself, lickit clean!’ The ﬁrst time he wasreceived by Varvara

Uexku ¨ll, the wealthysocialite, he attackedher for her expensive tastein art:

‘What ’ sthis, little mother, pictures on the wall like a realmuseum? I’ll bet you could feed ﬁve villages of starving people with what ’ s hanging on a single wall.’ When Uexkull introduced him toher guests, he stared intently at each

Russia underthe Old Regime

woman, took her hands,and askedquestionssuch as: ‘Are you married?’ , ‘Where

isyour husband?’ , ‘Why did you come alone?’ , ‘Had you been here together,I

could havelooked you over, seen howyou eat and live. ’ He calculated thatsuch

insolencemade him even more attractive to the guilt-ridden aristocrats who

patronized him. Rich but dissatisﬁed society ladieswereparticularly attracted to

this charismatic peasant. Many of them got acurious sexualexcitement from

being humiliated by him. Indeed the pleasurehegained from such sexual

conquests probably had as much todo with the psychologicaldomination of

hisvictims as it did with the gratiﬁcation of his physicaldesires. He told women

thatthey could gain salvation through the annihilation of their pride, which

entailed giving themselvesup tohim. One woman confessed thatthe ﬁrst time

she made love tohim her orgasm wasso violentthatshe fainted. Perhaps his potency as a lover alsohad a physicalexplanation. Rasputin’ s assassin and alleged

homosexuallover,Felix Yusupov,claimed that his prowess was explained by a

large wart strategicallysituated on his penis, which was of exceptional size. On

the other hand, thereis evidence to suggest that Rasputin was in fact impotent and thatwhile he lay naked withmanywomen, he had sexwith very few of them. In short, he was a great lecher but not a great lover. When Rasputin was medically examined after being stabbed in a failed murder attempt in 1914, his genitalswerefound to be so small and shrivelled thatthe doctorwondered whether he was capable of the sexual act at all. Rasputin himself hadonce boasted to the monk Iliodorthat he could lie with women without feeling passion becausehis ‘penis did not function’ . 33

As Rasputin’ s power grewsodid the legends of his crimes and misdemeanours. There weredamaging stories of hissexual advances, some of them unwanted, including rape. Even the Tsar ’ ssister,OlgaAlexandrovna, was rumoured tohavefound herself the victim of hiswandering hands. There were the drunken orgies, the days spent in bath-houseswithprostitutes,and the nights spent carousing in restaurants and brothels. The most famous scandal

took place atthe Yar,a well-knowngipsy restaurant, in March1915. Rasputin hadgone there with twojournalists and three prostitutes. He became drunk, tried tograb the gypsy girls,and began to boast loudly of hissexualexploits with the Empress. ‘See this belt?’ he bellowed. ‘It ’ s her majesty ’ s own work,I canmake her do anything. Yes,IGrishkaRasputin. Icould make the old girl dancelike this if I wished’— and he made a gestureof the sexual act. By now, everyone was looking at Rasputin and severalpeople askedifhe reallywasthe famous holy man. Rasputin dropped his pants and waved his penis at the spectators. The British agent,Bruce Lockhart, who was in the restaurant

downstairs, heard ‘ wild shrieks of women,broken glass and banging doors ’ . The waiters rushed about, the police were called,but no one dared evictthe holy man. Telephone callstoincreasingly high ofﬁcials ﬁnallyreached the Chief of

the Corps of Gendarmes, who ordered Rasputin’ s arrest. He was led away and

imprisoned forthe night. But the next morning orders came downfrom the

Tsar for hisrelease.34

What made these rumours sodamaging politicallywasthe widespread

belief, which Rasputin himself encouraged, that he wasthe Tsarina ’ s lover. There

wereeven rumours of the Empress and Rasputin engaging in wild orgieswith

the Tsar and AnnaVyrubova, her lady-in-waiting, who wassaid to be a lesbian.

Similar pornographic tales about Marie Antoinette and the ‘impotent Louis ’

circulated on the eveof the French Revolution. There was no evidencefor any of these rumours. True, there wasthe infamous letter from the Empress to

Rasputin, leaked to the press in 1912, in which she had written: ‘I kiss your

hands and lay my head upon your blessed shoulders. I feel sojoyful then. Then

all I want isto sleep, sleepfor ever on your shoulder, in your embrace. ’35 But,

given virtually everything else weknow of the Empress, itwould be a travesty

to read this as a loveletter. She was a loyal and devoted wife and motherwho

had turned to Rasputin in spiritualdistress. In any case, she was probablytoo narrow-minded to take a lover.

Nevertheless, itwasthe factthatthe rumours existed, ratherthan their truth, which caused such alarm to the Tsar ’ ssupporters. Theytried to convince him of Rasputin’ s evil inﬂuence and toget him expelled from the court. But, although Nicholas knew of his misdemeanours, he would notremove Rasputin solong asthe Empress continued to believe that he,and only he,could help their dying son. Rasputin’ s calming effect on the Empress wastoo much appreciated by her henpeckedhusband, who onceletslip in an unguarded moment: ‘Better one

Rasputin than ten ﬁts of hysterics every day. ’ The Archimandrite Theophan, who hadhelped to bring Rasputin to St Petersburg, found himself expelled from the capitalin1910 after he tried to acquaintthe Empress with the scandalous natureofher Holy Man ’ s behaviour. The monk Iliodor and Bishop Hermogen wereimprisoned in remotemonasteries in 1911,after confronting

Rasputin with a long chronicle of his misdeeds and calling on him to repent. It was Iliodor, in revenge, who then leaked to the press the Empress ’ s letters to

Rasputin. The Tsarstopped the press printing any more stories about Rasputin, in spiteof the pledgehehadgiven in the wake of the 1905 Revolution to abolishpreliminary censorship. This effectivelysilenced the Church,coming as it did with the appointment of Vladimir Sabler,aclose ally of Rasputin’ s, as Procurator-Generalof the Holy Synod.36

Politicianswerenomore successfulin their effortsto bring Rasputin down. They presented evidenceofhissinsto the Tsar,but Nicholas again refused to act. Whywas he so tolerant of Rasputin? The answersurely lies in his belief that Rasputin was a simple man,a peasant, from ‘ the people’ ,and that

God had sent him to save the Romanov dynasty. Rasputin conﬁrmed his

34 Russia underthe Old Regime

prejudices and ﬂattered his fantasies of a popular autocracy. He was a symbol of the Tsar ’ s belief in the Byzantine trinity God,Tsar,and People which he thoughtwould help him to recast the regime in the mould of seventeenth-

century Muscovy. ‘Heis just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian, ’ Nicholas

once said toone of his courtiers. ‘When Iamin trouble or plagued by doubts, I like tohave a talk withhim and invariably feel at peace withmyself afterwards. ’

Rasputin consciously played on this fantasy by addressing hisroyalpatrons in the folksy terms batiushka-Tsar and matiushka-Tsarina (‘Father-Tsar ’ and ‘MotherTsarina ’)insteadof ‘Your Imperial Majesty ’ . Nicholas believed that onlysimple

people people who were untainted bytheir connectionswith the political factions of St Petersburg were capable of telling him the truth and of giving him disinterested advice. For nearlytwenty years he received directreports from

Anatoly Klopov,aclerkin the Ministry of Finance. Rasputin ﬁtted into the same category. Asthe embodiment of Nicholas ’ s idealof the loyal Russian people, he could do no wrong. Nicholas discounted the rumours about him on the groundsthat anyone shown suchfavour at court, especially a simple peasant like Rasputin, was bound to attract jealous criticisms. Moreover, he clearly

considered Rasputin a family matter and looked upon such criticisms as an infringement of his privatepatrimony. When the Prime Minister,Stolypin, for example, gavehim a dossier of secret police reports on Rasputin’ s indiscretions,

the Tsar made it clearthat he regarded thisunsolicited warning as a grave breach of etiquette: ‘I know,Petr Arkadevich, thatyou are sincerely devoted tome.

Perhaps everything yousay istrue. But Iask you never again to speak to me about Rasputin. Thereis in any casenothing Icando.’ The President of the Duma got no furtherwhen he presented aneven moredamaging dossier based on the materials of Iliodor and the Holy Synod. Nicholas, though clearly disturbed bythe evidence, told Rodzianko: ‘Rasputin is a simple peasantwho can relieve the sufferings of myson by a strangepower. The Tsarina ’ sreliance upon him is a matter forthe family,and I will allow no one tomeddle in my

affairs. ’37 Itseemsthatthe Tsar, in his obstinate adherence to the principles of

autocracy,considered any questioning of his judgement an act of disloyalty.

And so the Rasputin affairwentunresolved. More and moreit poisoned the monarchy ’ srelationswith society and its traditionalpillars of support in the

court, the bureaucracy, the Church and the army. The episode has often been

compared to the Diamond Necklace Affair,a similarscandal that irreparably

damaged the reputation of Marie Antoinetteon the eveof the French Revolution, and that is about the sumofit. Bythe time of Rasputin’ s eventualmurder, in

December 1916, the Romanov dynasty was on the verge of collapse.

2 Unstable Pillars

i Bureaucrats and Dressing-Gowns

On the ﬁrst morning of 1883the readers of Government News (Pravitel’stvennyi

vestnik) opened their newspapertolearn that A. A. Polovtsov had been appointed

Imperial Secretary. Itwas hardlythe sort of announcementtomake anyone

chokeon their breakfast. Atthe age of ﬁfty-one,Polovtsov had all the right

credentials forthistop Civil Servicejob. The son of a noble landowner, he had

married the heiress to abanking fortune, graduated from the e ´lite School of

Law,and steadilyrisen through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. He was,

by all accounts, reﬁned,cultured and well mannered; Witteeven thought him a little vain. Polovtsovwas conﬁdent and perfectly at easein the aristocraticcircles of St Petersburg,counting severalgrand dukes among his closest friends. He even belonged to the Imperial Yacht Club, the after-hours headquarters of Russia ’ sruling e ´lite, whereon New Year ’ s Evehehad been told of his promotion.1

In short,Alexander Alexandrovich was a model representativeof thatsmall and privileged tribe who administered the affairs of the imperial state.

The Russianimperial bureaucracywas ane ´lite caste set above the rest of society. In thissenseitwas notunlike the Communist bureaucracythatwas to succeed it. The tsarist system was based upon a strictsocialhierarchy. At its

apexwasthe court; belowthat, its pillars of support in the civil and military

service,and the Church, made up bythe members of the ﬁrst twoestates; and

atthe bottom of the socialorder, the peasantry. There was acloselink between

the autocracy and thisrigid pyramid of socialestates (nobles,clergy, merchantry

and peasants), which were ranked in accordance with theirservice to the state.

Itwas a ﬁxed socialhierarchywitheachestatedemarcated byspeciﬁc legal rights

and duties. Nicholas compared itwith the patrimonial system. ‘Iconceiveof

Russiaas a landed estate, ’ he declared in 1902, ‘of which the proprietor isthe

Tsar, the administrator isthe nobility,and the workers are the peasantry. ’ He

could not have chosen a more archaic metaphor forsociety atthe turnof the twentieth century.

Despite the rapid progress of commerce and industry during the last decades of the nineteenth century,Russia ’ sruling e ´lite still came predominantly from the old landed aristocracy. Noblemen accounted for71per cent of the

Russia underthe Old Regime

top four Civil Service ranks (i.e. above the rank of civil councillor)in the census of 1897. True, the doors of the Civil Service were being opened to the sons of commoners, solong asthey had a university degree or a high-school diploma withhonours. True, too, the gap was growing,bothin terms of social background and in terms of ethos,between the servicenobles and the farming gentry. Many of the servicenobles had sold their estates, moving permanently into the city, or indeed hadnever owned land, having been ennobled fortheirservice to the

state. Inotherwords, the Civil Service was becoming just as much a path to

nobility as nobility wasto the Civil Service. It alsohadits owne ´lite values, whichonlythe crudest Marxist would seek toportray assynonymous with the

‘ class interests ’ of the landed nobles. Nevertheless, the aphorismof the writer

Iurii Samarin, that ‘ the bureaucrat is just a noblemanin uniform,and the noblemanjust abureaucrat in a dressing-gown ’ , remained generallytruein1900.

Russia wasstill anold agrariankingdom and its ruling e ´lite wasstill dominated

bythe richest landowning families. These were the Stroganovs, the Dolgorukovs, the Sheremetevs, the Obolenskys, the Volkonskys,and soon, powerfuldynasties whichhad stood nearthe summit of the Muscovite stateduring its great

territorialexpansion between the ﬁfteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had been rewarded withlavishendowments of fertile land, mainly in the southof

Russiaand the Ukraine.2 Dependenceon the statefortheirwealth,and indeed for most of their employment, hadprevented the Russian aristocracy from developing into anindependent landowning class counter-balancing the monarchy

in the waythatthey haddone in most of Europe since the sixteenth century.

Asreaders of Gogol will know, the imperial Civil Service was obsessed byrank and hierarchy. Anelaborate set of rules, spelled out in 869paragraphs of Volume I of the Code of Laws, distinguished between fourteen different Civil

Service ranks, each withits own appropriate uniform and title (all of them

translations from the German). Polovtsov, for example, on his appointment as

Imperial Secretary, received the dark-blue ribbon and the silverstar of the Order of the White Eagle. Like all Civil Servants in the top two ranks, he wasto be addressed as ‘Your High Excellency ’ ;thosein ranks3 and 4 were to be addressed as ‘Your Excellency ’ ; and soondown the scale, with thosein the bottom ranks (9 to14) addressed simply as ‘Your Honour ’ . The chinovnik, or Civil Servant, was acutely awareof these status symbols. The progression from white to black trousers, the switchfrom a red to ablue ribbon, orthe simple addition of a stripe, were ritualevents of immense signiﬁcanceinhiswell-ordered life. Promotion was determined bythe Table of Ranks established in 1722 by Peterthe Great. An ofﬁcial could hold onlythoseposts at or below his ownpersonal rank. In1856 standardintervalswere set for promotion: one rank every three years from ranks 14 to8; and one every four years from ranks 8 to5. The top four ranks, which broughtwith them a hereditary title, were appointed directly bythe Tsar. This

meantthat,barring some heinous sin, even the most average bureaucrat could

expectto rise automaticallywith age,becoming, say,acivil councillor bythe age

sixty-ﬁve. The system encouraged the sort of time-serving mediocrity which

writers like Gogol portrayed asthe essenceofofﬁcialdom in nineteenth-century

Russia. Bythe end of the century, however, thissystem of automaticadvancement

was falling intodisuse as merit became moreimportantthan age.3

Still, the top ranks in St Petersburg weredominated by a very small

e ´liteofnoble families. Thiswas a tiny political world in whicheveryone knew

eachother. All the people who mattered lived in the fashionable residential

streets around the Nevsky and the Liteiny Prospekts. Theywere closely connected

through marriage and friendship. Most of them patronized the same e ´lite schools

(the Corps des Pages, the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns and Cavalry Junkers,

the Alexander Lyce ´ e and the School of Law) and theirsons joined the same

e ´lite regiments (the Chevaliers Gardes, the Horse Guards, the Emperor ’ s Own

Life Guard Hussar Regiment and the Preobrazhensky), from which they could

be certain of a fast lane to the top of the civil or military service. Social

connectionswereessentialin thisworld,as Polovtsov ’ s diary reveals, for much

of the real business of politicswas done at balls and banquets, in private salons and drawing-rooms, in the restaurant of the EvropeiskayaHotel and the bar of the Imperial Yacht Club. Thiswas anexclusive world but not a stuffy one. The

St Petersburg aristocracywas fartoo cosmopolitan to be reallysnobbish. ‘Petersburg was not Vienna, ’ as DominicLieven remindsus in his magisterial study of the Russian ruling e ´lite,and there was always a placeinits aristocraticcircles for charmers and eccentrics. Take, for example,Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, one of Nicholas II’ s better foreign ministers,anoctogenarian grand seigneur, collector of Hebrew books and Frenchmistresses, who ‘ sparkled in salons ’ and ‘ attended churchinhis dressing-gown ’ ; or Prince M. I. Khilkov,a ‘ scion of one of Russia ’ s oldest aristocratic families ’ , who workedfor a number of years as an engine driver in South America and as a shipwright in Liverpool before becoming

Russia ’ s Minister of Communications. 4

Despiteits talents, the bureaucracy neverreally became aneffective tool in the hands of the autocracy. There were three main reasons forthis. First, its dependenceon the nobility became a sourceof weakness asthe noble estatefell intodecline during the later nineteenth century. There was anincreasing shortfall in expertise(especially in the industrial field) tomeetthe demands of the modern state. The gapmight have been bridged byrecruiting Civil Servants from the new industrialmiddle classes. But the ruling e ´lite was fartoo committed toits own archaic vision of the tsarist order, in which the gentry hadpride of place,and feared the democratic threat posed bythesenew classes. Second, the apparatus wastoo poorly financed (itwasvery difficultto collect enough taxes in such a vast and poor peasant country) so thatthe ministries,and still more

Russia underthe Old Regime

localgovernment, neverreally had the resourcesthey needed eitherto control

orreform society. Finally, there were too many overlapping jurisdictions and

divisions between the different ministries. Thiswas a result of the waythe state haddeveloped, witheachministry growing as a separate,almost adhoc, extension of the autocrat ’ s ownpowers. The agencies of governmentwerenever properly

systematized, northeirwork co-ordinated,arguably becauseitwas in the Tsar ’ s

best interests tokeep them weak and dependentupon him. Each Tsarwould

patronize a differentset of agencies in a given policy ﬁeld, often simply bypassing

those setup by his predecessors. The resultwas bureaucraticchaos and confusion.

Eachministrywas lefttodevelop on its own without acabinet-like bodyto coordinate the work between them. The twomajor ministries (Finance and Interior)

recruited people through their own cliente `les in the e ´litefamilies and schools.

They competed witheachother forresources, for control of policy and for inﬂuenceover lesser ministries and localgovernment. There was no clear distinction between the functions of the different agencies, nor between the status of different laws nakaz, ukaz, ustav, zakon, polozhenie, ulozhenie, gramota and manifest, to name just a few so thatthe Tsar ’ s personalintervention was constantly required to unhook theseknots of competing jurisdiction and legislation. From the perspectiveof the individual, the effect of this confusion wastomake the regime appear arbitrary: itwas never clearwhere the realpower lay, whether one

lawwould beoverridden byspecial regulations from the Tsar, orwhetherthe police would respectthe law at all. Some complacent philosophers argued on this basisthatthere was in fact no real autocracy. ‘Thereis an autocracy of policeman and land captains, of governors, department heads,and ministers, ’

wrote Prince Sergei Trubetskoiin1900. ‘But a unitary tsarist autocracy, in the propersenseof the word, does not and cannot exist. ’ To the less privilegedit wasthis arbitrariness (whatthe Russians cursed as proizvol) that made the regime’ s power feel sooppressive. There wereno clear principles orregulationswhich enabled the individual to challenge authority orthe state.5

Thiswas, in effect,a bureaucracythat failed todevelop into acoherent politicalforce which, like the Prussian bureaucracy analysed by Max Weber, was capable of serving as a tool of reform and modernization. Ratherthan a ‘ rational’ bureaucratic system as distilled in Weber ’ s ideal type one based on ﬁxed institutional relations,clear functionaldivisions, regular procedures, legalprinciples Russia had a hybrid state which combined elements of the Prussian system with anolder patrimonialism that leftthe Civil Service subjectto the patronage and intervention of the court and thus prevented the completeemergenceof a professional bureaucratic ethos.

It did not have to be thisway. There was a time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the imperial bureaucracy could havefulﬁlled its potential as a creative and modernizing force. After all, the ideals of the ‘enlightened bureau-

crats ’ , so aptly named by W. Bruce Lincoln, shaped the Great Reforms of the

1860s. Here was a new class of career Civil Servants, mostlysons of landless

nobles and mixed marriages (raznochintsy) who hadentered the profession through

the widening channels of higher education in the 1830s and 1840s. Theywere

upright and serious-minded men, like Karenin in Tolstoy ’ s AnnaKarenina, 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 Russiaalong Westernlines. Most of them stopped short of the liberaldemand for a state based upon the rule of lawwith civil liberties and a parliament: theirunderstanding of the Rechtsstaat wasreally no more than

abureaucratic statefunctioning on the basis of rationalprocedures and general

laws. But they called for greater openness in the workofgovernment, whatthey

termed glasnost,as a publiccheck against the abuseofpower and a means of involving experts from society in debates about reform. Progressiveofﬁcials moved in the circles of the liberalintelligentsia in the capital and weredubbed

the ‘Party of St Petersburg Progress ’ . Theywere seen regularly atthe salon

of the Grand Duchess ElenaPavlovna, and enjoyed the patronage of the Grand

Duke Konstantin, who,as President of the State Council, did much topromote reformist ofﬁcials in the government circles of Alexander II. They alsohad close

tieswithpublicbodies, such asthe Imperial GeographicSociety, from which

they commissioned statistical surveys in preparation forthe greatreforming

legislation of the 1860s. 6

The Great Reformswere the high-water markof this bureaucratic

enlightenment. Theywere conceived as a modernizing process whichin

Russia meant aWesternizing one with the aim of strengthening the state

after its defeat in the Crimean War. Limited freedoms and reformsweregranted in the hope of activating society and creating a dynamic economywithout altering the basic politicalframeworkof the autocracy. In thissense theywere

similar in conception to the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev acentury later. In 1861 the serfswere de jure (if not de facto)emancipated from their landlord’ s tyranny and given some of the rights of acitizen. Theywere still tied to the village commune, whichenforced the old patriarchalorder, deprived of the right toown the land individually,and remained legally inferiorto the nobles and other estates. But the groundworkhad at least been laid forthe development of peasant agriculture. A second majorreformof1864 sawthe establishment of local assemblies of self-government,called the zemstvos, in most Russian provinces. Topreserve the domination of the landed nobles, theywere setup only atthe provincial and district level; belowthat,atthe volost and the village level, the peasant communeswereleftto rule themselveswithonly minimal supervision bythe gentry. The judicial reforms of the same yearsetup an

Russia underthe Old Regime

independent legal system withpublic jurytrials for all estates exceptthe peasants

(who remained underthe jurisdiction of local customary law). There were also

new laws relaxing censorship (1865), giving more autonomyto universities

(1863), reforming primary schools (1864) and modernizing the military (1863–75). Boris Chicherin (with the beneﬁt of hindsight) summed up their

progressiveideals:

to remodel completelythe enormous state, whichhad been entrusted to

[Alexander ’ s]care, to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace

itwith civic decency and freedom, toestablishjusticein acountrywhich hadnever known the meaning of legality, to redesign the entire adminis-

tration, tointroducefreedom of the press in the context of untrammelled

authority, to call new forcestolife at every turn and setthem on ﬁrm

legalfoundations, toput a repressed and humiliated society on its feet

and togiveitthe chance to ﬂex its muscles. 7

Had the liberal spirit of the 1860s continued topervade the workof

government,Russia might have become aWestern-style society based upon individualproperty and libertyupheld bythe rule of law. The revolution need

not haveoccurred. To be sure, itwould still have been a slow and painful

progress. The peasantry, in particular, would have remained a revolutionary threatsolong astheywereexcluded from property and civil rights. The old patriarchal system in the countryside, whicheven after Emancipation preserved the hegemony of the nobles,called out forreplacementwith a modern system

in which the peasants had a greaterstake. But there was at least, within the

ruling e ´lite,a growing awareness of whatwas needed and indeed of what it

would cost forthissocial transformation to succeed. The problem was, however, thatthe e ´lite was increasingly divided overthe desirability of this transformation. And as a result of thesedivisions it failed todevelop acoherent

strategytodeal with the challenges of modernization.

On the one hand were the reformists, the ‘Men of 1864’ like Polovtsov, who broadly accepted the need for abourgeoissocialorder (even atthe expense of the nobility), the need forthe concession of politicalfreedoms (especially in localgovernment),and the need for a Rechtsstaat (whichincreasinglytheyunderstood tomeannot just a state based on universallaws but one based on the rule of law itself). Bythe end of the 1870s thisreformist vision haddeveloped intodemands for aconstitution. Enlightened statesmen openly argued thatthe tasks of government in the modern age had become too complex forthe Tsar and his bureaucrats to tackle alone,and thatthe loyal and educated public had to be brought into the workofgovernment. In January 1881 Alexander II instructed his Minister of the Interior,Count Loris-Melikov, todrawupplans

for a limited constitution which would giveinvited ﬁgures from the publican

advisory role in legislation. ‘The throne ’ ,argued the Minister of Finance,A. A.

Abaza, during the debates on theseproposals, ‘ cannotrest 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, theywere the ﬁrst to see the need to sweep away obstacles

to bourgeois enterprise and initiative. Many of them, moreover, like Polovtsov, who hadmarried into abanking family, were themselves drawnfrom the ‘ new

Russia ’ of commerce and industry. Witte, the greatreforming Finance Minister of the 1890s, who had workedfortwenty years in railroadmanagement (to

begin with as a lowlyticket clerk) beforeentering governmentservice,argued

thatthe tsarist system could avoid a revolution only bytransforming Russia into

a modernindustrial society where ‘ personal and public initiatives ’ wereencour-

aged by a rule-of-lawstate withguarantees of civil liberties. 8

On the other hand were the supporters of the traditional tsarist order.

Itwas no accidentthattheirstrongest base wasthe Ministry of the Interior, sinceits ofﬁcialsweredrawn almost exclusively from ‘old Russia ’ , noble ofﬁcers

and landowners, who believed most rigidly in the Polizeistaat. The onlyway, they argued, toprevent a revolution wasto rule Russia with aniron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle (bothin central and localgovernment), the uncheckedpowers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility and the moral

domination of the Church,against the liberal and secular challenges of the

urban-industrialorder. Conceding constitutions and political rights would only serve to weaken the state,argued P. N. Durnovo and Viacheslavvon Plehve, the twogreat Ministers of the Interior during Witte ’ stime atthe Ministry of Finance,because the liberalmiddle classeswho would come topower as a result

hadno authority among the masses and wereeven despised bythem. Onlywhen

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 liberalismplus autocracy). For as Durnovo argued (notwithout reason): ‘One cannot in the courseof a fewweeks introduce North American or English systems into Russia. ’9 Thatwasto beone of the lessons of 1917. The arguments of the reactionariesweregreatlystrengthened bythe tragicassassination of Alexander II in March1881. The new Tsarwas persuaded by histutor and adviser, the Procurator of the Holy Synod,Konstantin Pobedonostsev, that continuing with the liberal reformswould only help to producemore revolutionaries like the oneswho hadmurdered his father. Alexander III soon abandoned the project for aconstitution,claiming he did notwant a government of ‘ troublesome brawlers and lawyers ’ ; forced the resignation of hisreformist ministers (Abaza from Finance,Loris-Melikov from the Interior, and Dmitry Miliutin from War); and proclaimed aManifesto reasserting the

42 Russia underthe Old Regime

principles of autocracy. 10 Thiswasthe signalfor a series of counter-reforms

during Alexander III’ sreign. Their purpose wasto centralize control and roll

back the rights of localgovernment, to reassert the personal rule of the Tsar

through the police and his direct agents,and to reinforce the patriarchalorder

headed bythe nobility in the countryside. Nothing was morelikelyto bring

about a revolution. For atthe same time the liberal classes of provincial society

were coming to the viewthattheir common interests and identity entailed

defending the rights of localgovernment against the very centralizing bureaucracy

upon which the new Tsarstaked somuch.

ii The Thin Veneer of Civilization

When Prince Sergei Urusovwas appointed Governor of Bessarabia in May 1903

the ﬁrst thing he did wastopurchase a guidebook of the area. Thissouth-

westernprovinceof the Empire, wedged between the Black Seaand Romania, wastotallyunknown to the former graduateof Moscow University, thriceelected Marshalof the KalugaNobility. ‘I knew as little of Bessarabia ’ , he would

later admit, ‘ as I did of New Zealand, or even less. ’

Three weeks later,afterstopping in the capitalfor abrieﬁng with the

Tsar, he set off bytrain from Moscowto Kishinev, the capitalof Bessarabia, some 900 miles away. The journeytook twonights and three long days, the

train chugging everslower as it moved deeper and deeper into the Ukrainian

countryside. Alone in hisspecial compartment,Urusovused the time to study his guidebook in preparation for his ﬁrst exchangeswith the civic dignitaries he

expected tomeet on his arrival. Hehad written to the Vice-Governor,asking him tokeep the reception partysmall. But as histrain pulled into the station

at Bendery, the ﬁrst majortownof the province, he sawthrough his carriage

window a platform crowded withpeople and what looked like a full orchestral

band. Atthe centre,cordoned off by a ring of policemen, stood the Vice-

Governor in full dress uniform and the city ’ s mayorwith the chain of ofﬁce

bearing a platter of bread and salt. Thiswas howthe new Governor had always

been welcomed in Bessarabiaand no exception would bemade for Urusov. In

Kishinev,anhour and a half later,His Excellencythe Governorwas driven

through the city in anopen carriage drawn bysixwhitehorses. ‘Men, women

and children stood in crowded ranks on the sidewalks, ’ Urusovrecalled. ‘They

bowed, waved their handkerchiefs,and some of them even went downon their

knees. I was quite struck bythe latter, not having been used to such scenes. ’

After abrief stop atthe cathedral, where God’ s blessing was invoked forthe

work that lay aheadofhim,Urusovwas driven to the Governor ’ s house,an

imposing neo-classicalpalacein the centreof the city, from whichhe would

rule asthe Tsar ’ sviceroy overthis distant corner of the Russian Empire.11

With a population of 120,000 people,Kishinevwas a typicalprovincial

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 tramsto run along their edges. In addition to the

Governor ’ s House, it boasted a number of large stone buildings, ofﬁces and

churches, whichin Urusov ’ s judgement ‘ would havemade no unfavourable

impression even in the streets of St Petersburg ’ . Yet not a stone ’ sthrow from

theseelegant neo-classicalfac ¸ ades, in the ‘lower city ’ straggling down the hillside, was a totally differentworld a world of narrow and unpaved winding

streets, muddy in the spring and dusty in the summer; of wooden shanties and

overcrowded hovelswhich served asthe homes and shops forthe Russian,Jewish and Moldavian workers; a world of pigs and cows grazing in the alleys, of open sewers and piles of rubbishon the public squares; a world where cholera epidemicsstruckon average one year in every three. These were the twofaces of every Russian city: the one of imperialpower and European civilization, the other of poverty and squalor of Asiatic proportions. 12 One could hardly blame Urusov forseeing his appointment as a kind of exile. Many governors feltthe same. Accustomed to the cosmopolitan world of the capital cities, theywere bound to ﬁnd provincial society dull and narrow by

comparison. The civiccultureofprovincial Russia was, even atthe end of the nineteenth century, still in the earlystages of development compared with the societies of the West. Most of Russia ’ s cities hadevolved historically as administrativeor military outposts of the tsarist state ratherthan as commercial

or cultural centres in their own right. Typicallythey 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, werelargely missing in peasant Russia. The pro-

fessionswere 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 (theywerehistorically and legallytwo

separateestates) and too divorced from the educated classestoprovide the

Russian citieswith their missing Burgertum. In short,Russia seemed to bear out

Petr Struve ’ s dictum: ‘ the furtherto the East one goes in Europe, the weaker in politics, the more cowardly,and the baser becomesthe bourgeoisie’ . 13

As anyone familiarwith Chekhov ’ s plays will know, the culturallifeof the average provincial town was extremely dull and parochial. At least that is howthe intelligentsia steeped in the cultureof Western Europe saw (with

Russia underthe Old Regime

some disgust) the backwardlifeof the Russianprovinces. Listen to the brother

of the Three Sisters describing the placein which they lived:

Thistown ’ s been in existencefortwohundred years; a hundred thousand people liveinit,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 tomake you feel passionatelythatyou

wanted toemulatehim. People heredonothing but eat, drink and sleep.

Then they die and some more take their places,and they eat, drink and

sleep, too and just tointroduce abit of variety into their lives, so as

to avoid getting completelystupid with boredom, they indulgein their

disgusting gossip and vodkaand gambling and law-suits.

Kishinevwas in thisrespect a very average town. It had twelve schools, two

theatres and anopen-air music hall,but no library or gallery. The social centre

of the town wasthe Nobleman ’ s Club. Itwas here,according to Urusov, that

‘ the general character of Kishinevsociety found its most conspicuous reﬂection.

The club roomswere always full. The habitue ´ s of the club would gather around

the card-tables from as early as2 p.m., not leaving until 3 or 4 a.m. in winter; and in summer notuntil 6 or7 a.m. ’ In Kishinev,as in most provincial towns,

the socialhabits of the nobility hadmuchmorein common with thoseof the

localmerchants than with the aristocrats of St Petersburg. Stolypin’ s daughter, for example, recalled that in Saratov, whereher fatherwas once Governor, the wives of noblemen ‘dressed soinformallythat on invitations itwas necessary to specify ‘‘ evening dress requested’’ . Even then, theywould sometimes appear at balls in dressing-gowns. ’14

In a society such asthisthe provincial Governor inevitably played the role of a major celebrity. The high point of anysocialeventwasthe moment when His Excellency arrived tograce the companywithhis presence. To receive aninvitation to the annual ball atthe Governor ’ s house wastohavemade itto the top of provincial society. Prince Urusov,being a modest sort of man, was taken aback bythe god-likeesteem in whichhe was held bythe local residents: ‘According to Kishinev convention,I wastogoout exclusively in acarriage, escorted by a mounted guard, with the Chief of Policein the van. To walk or togoout shopping was on my part a grave breachofetiquette. ’ But other

governors, less modest thanhimself, took advantage of their lofty status to behavelikepetty autocrats. One provincial Governor, for example, ordered the police to stop all the trafﬁc whenever he passed through the town. Another would not allowthe playto begin beforehe arrived atthe local theatre. To lovers of libertythe provincial Governorwasthe very personiﬁcation of tsarist

oppression and despotism. Gorky could ﬁnd no betterwayto condemn Tolstoy ’ s

authoritarianism than to comparehim to a governor. 15

The ofﬁce Urusov assumed went back to the medievalera, although its

exact form was altered manytimes. In acountry asvast and difﬁculttogovern

as Russia the tasks of tax collection and maintaining law and orderwereobviously

beyond the capabilities of the tiny medieval state. So theywerefarmed out to

governors, plenipotentiaries of the Tsar, who in exchangefortheirservice to the

state were allowed to ‘feed’ themselves atthe expenseof the districts theyruled

(usuallywith a great dealof violence and venality). The inability of the state to

build up aneffective system of provincial administration secured the power of

thesegovernors. Even in the nineteenth century, when the bureaucracy did extend its agenciesto the provinces, the governors werenever entirely integrated into

the centralized state apparatus.

The provincialgovernors werein charge of the localpolice, forwhom

theywere technically answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. They also served

as chairmen on the provincial boardswhose workfell within the domain of the

other ministries, such as Justice,Finance and Transportation. This fragmentation

of executivepower increasingly obliged the governors tonegotiate, persuade and compromise toplaythe part of a modernpolitician during the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless,becauseof their close connectionswith the court, they could still ignore the demands of the ministries in St Petersburg and indeed often did so when they deemed thatthese clashed with the interests of the noble estate, from which all the provincialgovernors weredrawn. Stolypin’ s localgovernmentreforms, for example, whichhe tried tointroduce after 1906, wereeffectivelyresisted bythe governors who sawthem as achallenge to the domination of the nobility. A. A. Khvostov, one of Stolypin’ ssuccessors at the Ministry of the Interior,complained that itwas ‘ virtually impossible’ to

preventthe governors from sabotaging the workofhis ministry becauseof their ‘lofty protectors ’ atthe court: ‘ one has an auntwho is friendlywith the Empress, another a gentleman-in-waiting for a relative,and a third acousin who is an

Imperial Master of the Horse. ’ The governors ’ extraordinary powerstemmed

from the factthattheywere the Tsar ’ s personal viceroys: they embodied the

autocratic principle in the provinces. Russia ’ s last two tsars wereparticularly

adamant against the idea of subordinating the governors to the bureaucracy

because theysawthem astheir most loyal supporters and because, in the words of Richard Robbins, ‘ asthe 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’ . Twoof

Alexander III’ s counter-reforms, in 1890 and 1892, greatly increased the governors ’ powers overthe zemstvos and municipal bodies. Likehisson,Alexander

sawthis as a way of moving closerto the fantasy of ruling Russia directly from

Russia underthe Old Regime

the throne. But the resultwas confusion in the provincial administration: the

governors, the agencies of the centralministries and the elected local bodies

were all set against eachother. 16

The power of the imperialgovernment effectivelystopped atthe eighty-

nine provincial capitalswhere the governors had their ofﬁces. Belowthatthere

was no real state administration to speakof. Neitherthe uezdor districttowns

northe volost orrural townships had anystanding government ofﬁcials. There

was only a series of magistrateswho would appear from time to time on some

speciﬁc mission, usuallyto collecttaxes orsort out a local conﬂict,and then

disappear once again. The affairs of peasant Russia, where85per cent of the

population lived, wereentirelyunknown to the city bureaucrats. ‘Weknew as

much about the Tulacountryside’ ,confessed Prince Lvov, leader of the Tula

zemstvoin the 1890s, ‘ asweknew about Central Africa. ’17

The crucial weakness of the tsarist system wasthe under-government of the localities. Thisvitalfact is all too often clouded bythe revolutionaries ’ mythic image of an all-powerfulold regime. Nothing could befurther from the truth. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there wereonly 4 state

ofﬁcials atthe turnof 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 extremelysmall by European standards. Russia ’ s expenditure on the police per capita of the population was less thanhalf of that in Italy or

France and less thanone quarter of that in Prussia. For a ruralpopulation of 100 million people,Russia in 1900 hadnomore than1,852 police sergeants and 6,874police constables. The average constable wasresponsible for policing

50,000 people in dozens of settlements stretched across nearly2,000 square

miles. Many of them did not even have a horse and cart. True, from 1903 the

constableswere aided bythe peasant constables, some 40,000 of whom were

appointed. But these werenotoriouslyunreliable and, in any case, did very little

to reduce the mounting burdens on the police. Without its owneffectiveorgans

in the countryside, the central bureaucracywas assigning more and more tasks

to the localpolice: not just the maintenanceoflaw 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 thatthe peasants washed their beards). The police, in short, were being used as a sort of catch-all executiveorgan. Theywereoften 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 communi-

cations largely accounts forthisunder-government. The legacy of serfdom

alsoplayed a part. Until 1861 the serfs had been underthe jurisdiction of their

noble owners and, provided they paid theirtaxes, the statedid not intervene in

the relations between them. Only afterthe Emancipation and then very

slowly did the tsarist government come round to the problem of howto extend its inﬂuence toits new ‘ citizens ’ in the villages and of howto shape a

policytohelp the development of peasant agriculture.

Initially, in the 1860s, the regime leftthe affairs of the country districts

in the hands of the localnobles. They dominated the zemstvo assemblies and

accounted for nearlythree-quarters of the provincial zemstvo boards. The noble assemblies and their elected marshalswereleftwith broad administrativepowers, especially atthe district level (uezd) where theywere virtuallythe only agents upon whom the tsarist regime could rely. Moreover, the new magistrates (mirovye posredniki) weregiven broadjudicialpowers, notunlike thoseof their predecessors underserfdom, including the rightto ﬂog the peasants for minor crimes and misdemeanours.

Itwas logicalforthe tsarist regime to seek to baseits power in the provinces on the landed nobility, its closest ally. But thiswas a dangerous strategy, and the danger grew astime went on. The landed nobility was in severeeconomic decline during the years of agriculturaldepression in the latenineteenth century, and wasturning to the zemstvostodefend its local agrarianinterests against the centralizing and industrializing bureaucracy of St Petersburg. In the years

leading up to1905 thisresistance was expressed in mainly liberal terms: itwas

seen asthe defenceof ‘ provincial society ’ ,a term which was nowused forthe

ﬁrst time and consciously broadened toinclude the interests of the peasantry.

This liberal zemstvomovement culminated in the politicaldemand for more

autonomy for localgovernment, for a nationalparliament and aconstitution.

Here wasthe start of the revolution: not in the socialist or labour movements

but as in Francein the 1780s in the aspirations of the regime’ s oldest

ally, the provincialnobility.

The Emancipation came as a rude shocknot just to the economy but

also to the whole of the provincial civilization of the gentry. Deprived of their

serfs, most of the landed nobleswent into terminaldecline. Very fewwere able

to respond to the new challenges of the commercial world in which as farmers

and less often industrialists and merchants theywerehenceforthobliged to

survive. The whole of the period between 1861 and 1917 could bepresented

asthe slow deathof the old agrariane ´lite upon which the tsarist system had

always relied.

From Gogol to Chekhov, the ﬁgureof the impoverished noble landowner

was a perennialofnineteenth-century Russianliterature. He was acultural

obsession. Chekhov ’ s play The Cherry Orchard (1903) was particularly,and subtly,

resonantwith the familiarthemes of a decaying gentry: the elegant but lossmaking estateissold off to a self-made businessman, the son of a serfon

the very same estate, who chops down the orchard to build houses. Most of the

Russia underthe Old Regime

squires, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov ’ s play, proved incapable of transforming

their landed estates into viable commercialfarms once the Emancipation had

deprived them of the prop of free serflabour and forced them into the capitalist

world. They could not follow in the footsteps of the Prussian Junkers. The old

Russian serfeconomy hadnever been run, in the main, with the intention of making proﬁts. Nobles gained prestige(and sometimes high ofﬁce) from the

number of serfsthey owned whence the story of Chichikov in Gogol’ s Dead

Souls (1842), who travels around the estates of Russiabuying up the lists of deceased serfs (or ‘ souls ’ astheywere then called) whosedeathhadnotyet been

registered and from the ostentation of their manor housesratherthan the

success of their farms. Most seigneurialdemesneswerefarmed bythe serfswith

the same tools and primitivemethods astheyused on their ownhousehold

plots. Many of the squiressquandered the small income from their estates on

expensiveluxuries imported from Europe ratherthaninvesting it in their farms.

Few appeared to understand that income was not proﬁt.

Bythe middle of the nineteenth century many of the squires hadfallen

hopelessly intodebt. By 1859, one-thirdof the estates and two-thirds of the

serfs owned bythe landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and aristocratic

banks. This, more than anything, helped the governmenttoforce Emancipation

through against considerable opposition from the gentry. Notthatthe conditions

of the liberation were unfavourable to the landowners: theyreceived good money forthe (often inferior)land which they chose to transferto the peasants.*But

nowthe squireswereon their own, deprived of the free labour of the serfs and theirtools and animals. They could no longer live a lifeofease: theirsurvival depended on the market place. They had topay fortools and labour and learn the difference between proﬁt and loss. Yetthere was almost nothing in their backgroundstoprepare them forthe challengeof capitalism. Most of them knew next tonothing about agricultureor accounting and went on spending in the same old lavish way, furnishing their manor houses in the French Empire style and sending theirsonsto the most expensive schools. Once again their debts increased, forcing them toleaseorsell off ﬁrst one ortwo and then more

and more chunks of land. Between 1861 and 1900 more than40 per cent of the gentry ’ s land wassold to the peasants, whosegrowing land hunger, due to a population boom, led to a seven-fold increaseinland values. There was a similarrisein rental values and,by 1900, two-thirds of the gentry ’ s arable land had been rented out to the peasants. Itwas ironic thatthe depression of agriculturalprices during the 1880s and the 1890s, whichforced the peasants

*Underthe terms of the Emancipation the serfswereforced topay fortheir newly acquired land through a mortgage arrangementwith the state, whichpaid the gentry for it in full and directly. Thus, in effect, the serfs boughttheir freedom by paying off their masters ’ debts.

toincrease the land they ploughed,alsomade it moreproﬁtable forthe

squiresto rent out orsell their land ratherthan cultivateit. Yet despite these

speculativeproﬁts,bythe turnof the century most of the squires found they

could no longer afford tolivein the mannerto which they hadgrown accustomed.

Their neo-classicalmanor houses, with their Italianpaintings and their libraries,

their ballrooms and their formalgardens, slowly fell intodecay. 19

Not all the squireswentwillinglyto the wall. Many of them made a go of running their estates as commercialenterprises,and itwas from these

circlesthatthe liberal zemstvomen emerged to challenge the autocracy during

the last decades of the century.

Prince G. E. Lvov (1861–1925) who wasto become the ﬁrst Prime

Minister of democraticRussia in 1917 typiﬁed thesemen. The Lvovs were one of the oldest noble Russianfamilies. Theytraced theirroots back thirty-one generationsto Rurik himself, the ninth-century founder of the Russian ‘ state ’ .

Popovka, the ancestralhome of the Lvovs, was in Tula province, less than120 miles but on Russia ’ s primitive roads at least twodays ’ travel by coach

from Moscow. The Tolstoy estate at YasnayaPolyana was only a few miles

away,and the Lvovs counted the greatwriter as one of their closest friends.

The manor house at Popovka wasrather grand forwhat,at only 1,000 acres,

was a small estate by Russian standards. Itwas a two-storeyresidence,built

in the Empire style of the 1820s, withovertwenty rooms, each with a high

ceiling, double-doors and windows, overlooking a formalgarden planted with

roses and classical statues atthe front. There was a park behind the house

with a large white-stone chapel,an artiﬁciallake,anorangery,abirch avenue

and anorchard. The domestic regime was fairlystandardforthe nineteenth-

century provincialgentry. There was an Englishgoverness called ‘Miss Jenny ’

(English wasthe ﬁrst language Lvov learned to read). Lvov ’ s fatherwas a reform-

liberal,a manof1864,and spent all his money on his children ’ s education. The

ﬁve sons though notthe only daughter were all sent off to the best

Moscowschools. Luxurieswereminimal bythe spendthriftstandards of the

Russiannoble class: the standard First Empiremahogany furniture; one ortwo

Flemisheighteenth-century landscapes; a few dogs forthe autumn hunt; and an

English carriage withpedigree horses; but very little toimpress the muchgrander

Tolstoys.

Yet, even so,bythe end of the 1870s, the Lvovs hadmanaged to clock upmassivedebts well in excess of 150,000 roubles. ‘With the abolition of serfdom, ’ recalled Lvov, ‘ we soon fell into the category of landowners who did not have the meanstolivein the mannerto which their circle had become accustomed.’ The family had to sell off its twoother landed estates, one in Chernigov for30,000 roubles, the other in Kostroma forslightly less,aswell as abeer factory in Briansk and the Lvovs ’ apartment in Moscow. But thisstill left

0 Russia underthe Old Regime

them heavily in debt. They now had to choose between selling Popovka or

making it proﬁtable as a farm. Despite their inexperience,and the onset of the

worst depression in agriculturefor acentury, the Lvovs hadnodoubts about

opting forthe latter. ‘The idea of giving up the home of our ancestors was

unthinkable, ’ Lvovwrotelater. The farm at Popovka had become so rundown

from decades of neglectthatwhen the Lvovs ﬁrst returned there to runit even

the peasants from the neighbouring villagesshook their heads and pitied them.

They offered tohelp them restore the farm buildings and clearthe forest of weeds from the ﬁelds. The four eldest brothers took charge of the farm their

fatherwastoo old and ill to work while Georgii studied law at Moscow

University and returned to Popovka during the holidays. The family laid off the servants, leaving all the housework to Georgii’ ssister,and lived likepeasants on rye bread and cabbage soup. Later Lvovwould look back atthistime as a source

of his ownemancipation his ownpersonal revolution from the landowners ’

cultureof the tsarist order. ‘Itseparated us from the upper crust and made us democratic. Ibegan tofeel uncomfortable in the company of aristocrats and always felt much closerto the peasants. ’ Gradually,bytheir ownhardlabour in the ﬁelds, the Lvovs restored the farm.

They learned about farming methods from their peasant neighbours and from agricultural textbooks purchased in

Moscow by Georgii. The soil turned out to begood for growing clover and,by

switching toit from rye, they even began tomake impressiveproﬁts. Bythe late

1880s Popovka wassaved,all its debts had been repaid,and the newly graduated

Georgii returned to transformit into acommercialfarm. Heeven planted an orchard and built acanning factory nearthe estate tomake apple pure ´eforthe

Moscow market. 20 What could be a more ﬁtting counterto Chekhov ’ svision of the gentry in decline?

Prince Lvov became a leading member of the Tula zemstvoduring the early 1890s. The ideals and limitationswhichhe shared with the liberal ‘ zemstvo men ’ were toleave their imprint on the government he led between March and

July 1917. Prince Lvovwas notthe sort of man whom one would expectto ﬁnd atthe headof a revolutionary government. As aboy he haddreamed of ‘becoming a forester and of living on my ownin the woods ’ . This mystical

aspect of his character a sort of Tolstoyannaturalism was never extinguished. EkaterinaKuskova said that ‘in one conversation he could speak with feeling about mysticism and then turn at once to the priceofpotatoes ’ . By temperament he was much bettersuited to the intimate circles (kruzhki)of the zemstvo activists than to the cut-throatworld of modernparty politics. The Prince wasshy and modest, gentle and withdrawn,and quiteincapable of commanding people by anything otherthan a purely moral authority. None of these were virtues in the eyes of more ambitious politicians, who found him ‘ passive ’ , ‘ grey ’ and ‘ cold’ . Lvov ’ ssad and noble face, which rarelyshowed signs

of emotion or excitement, made him appear even more remote. The metropolitan

and arrogant e ´lite considered Lvov parochial and dim the liberalleader Pavel

Miliukov, for example,called him ‘ simple-minded’ (shliapa) and this largely

accounts for Lvov ’ s poorreputation, even neglect, in the history books. But this

is both tomisunderstand and to underestimate Lvov. Hehad a practicalpolitical

mind one formed byyears of zemstvo workdedicated toimproving rural

conditions and not a theoreticalone like Miliukov ’ s. The liberal V . A.

Obolensky, who knew Lvovwell,claimed that he ‘ never onceheardhim make a

remarkof a theoreticalnature. The ‘‘ideologies ’’ of the intelligentsia were com-

pletely alien tohim.’ Yetthis practicality what Obolensky called his ‘ native

wit’— did not necessarily make Lvov aninferior politician. Hehad a sound graspof technicalmatters,bags of common sense and a rare ability tojudge people all good politicalqualities. 21

Lvovwas not just an unlikelyrevolutionary: he was also a reluctant one. His idealswerederived from the Great Reforms he was born symbolically in 1861 and, in his heart, he was always to remain a liberalmonarchist. He believed itwasthe calling of the noble class todedicateitself to the serviceof the people. Thissort of paternalpopulism was commonplace among the zemstvo men. Theywere well-meaning and dedicated public servants, of the sort who fill the pages of Tolstoy and Chekhov, who dreamt of bringing civilization to the dark and backward countryside. Asthe liberal(and thus guilt-ridden) sons of ex-serf-owners, many of them no doubt feltthat, in thisway, theywere helping to repaytheir debts to the peasants. Some were readytomake considerable personal sacrifices. Lvov, for example, spentthree months a yeartravelling around the villages inspecting schools and courts. He used some of the profits from the estate at Popovka to build a school and install animproved water system forthe nearbyvillages. Under his leadership in the 1890s, the Tula zemstvo became one of the most progressivein the whole country. It established schools and libraries; setuphospitals and lunaticasylums; built newroads and bridges; provided veterinary and agronomic services forthe peasantry; invested in local trades and industries; financed insurance schemes and rural credit; and, in

the best liberal tradition,completed ambitious statistical surveys in preparation for furtherreforms. Itwas a model of the liberal zemstvomission: toovercome the backwardness and apathy of provinciallife and integrate the peasantry,as ‘ citizens ’ , into the lifeof ‘ the nation’ . The optimistic expectations of the zemstvoliberalswere, it is almost needless to say, neverrealized. Theirs was a vast undertaking, quite beyond the limited capabilities of the zemstvos. There were some achievements, especially in primary education, which were reﬂected in the generalincreaseof zemstvo expenditurefrom 15 million roubles per annumin1868 to96 million per annum bythe turnof the century. However, the overall level of spending was

Russia underthe Old Regime

notvery high,considering the zemstvos ’ wide rangeof responsibilities; and the

proportion of local to state taxation (about 15 per cent) remained very low

compared withmost of Europe (whereitwas over 50 per cent).22 There was,

moreover,a fundamentalproblem one which undermined the whole liberal

project of howtoinvolve the peasants in the zemstvo ’ swork. The peasants

afterthe Emancipation werekept isolated in theirvillage communeswithout

legal rights equal to the nobility ’ s or even the righttoelect delegates directlyto

the districtzemstvo. Theysawthe zemstvo as aninstitution of the gentry and

paid its taxesreluctantly.

But aneven moreintractable problem forthe zemstvoswasthe growing

opposition of the centralgovernmentto theirwork underthe last two tsars.

Alexander III looked upon the zemstvos as a dangerous breeding placeof

liberalism. Most of his bureaucrats agreed withhim. Polovtsov, for example,

thoughtthatthe zemstvos had ‘brought a whole new breed of urban types

writers, money-lenders,clerks,and the like into the countryside who were

quite alien to the peasantry ’ . The governmentwasvery concerned about the

70,000 professionalemployees of the zemstvos teachers, doctors, statisticians

and agronomists who wereknown collectively asthe Third Element. In contrast to the ﬁrst two zemstvo Elements (the administrators and elected deputies), who weredrawnmainly from the landed nobility, theseprofessionals

often came from peasant or lower-class backgrounds and this gave their politics

a democraticand radicaledge. Astheir numbers increased in the 1880s and

1890s, so theysoughtto broaden the zemstvos ’ socialmission. Ineffectthey transformed them from organs forthe gentry intoorgans mainly forthe peasan-

try. Ambitious projects for agricultural reform and improvements in health and

sanitation were advanced in the wake of the great famine which struck rural

Russia in the early 1890s. Liberallandowners like Lvovwent along with them.

But the large and more conservativelandowners were very hostile to the increased

taxeswhich suchprojects would demand after more than a decade of

agriculturaldepression many of them wereindire ﬁnancial straits and

campaigned against the Third Element. They found a natural and powerful ally

in the Ministry of the Interior, which since the start of Alexander ’ sreign had

campaigned to curtail the democratic tendencies of localgovernment. Successive

Ministers of the Interior and their police chiefs portrayed the Third Element as

revolutionaries —‘cohorts of the sans-culottes ’ in the words of Plehve,Director

of the Police Department and later Minister of the Interior who were using

their positions in the zemstvosto stirup the peasantry.

In response to their pressure,a statute was passed in 1890whichincreased

the landed nobles ’ domination of the zemstvos by disenfranchising Jews and

peasant landowners from electionsto these assemblies. It also broughtthe

zemstvos ’ work underthe tight control of a new provincial bureau, headed by

the provincialgovernor and subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, which

was given a wide vetooverthe appointment of zemstvopersonnel, the zemstvos ’

budgets and publications,aswell as most of their dailyresolutions. Armed with

these sweeping powers, the Ministry and its provincial agents constantly

obstructed the zemstvos ’ work. They imposed stringent limits on their budgets

on the groundsthatsome of their expenditureswere unnecessary. Some of this

was extremely petty. The Perm zemstvo, for example, hadits budget capped for

commissioning a portrait of Dr Litvinov, the long-serving director of the provin-

ciallunaticasylum. The Suzdal zemstvo wassimilarly punished forusing ﬁfty

roubles from a reservefund tohelp pay forthe building of a library. The police

also blocked the zemstvos ’ work. They arrested statisticians and agronomists as

‘ revolutionaries ’ and prevented them from travelling into the countryside. They

raided the zemstvoinstitutions including hospitals and lunaticasylums

in searchof ‘political suspects ’ . They even arrested localnoblewomen forteaching

peasant children howto read and writein theirspare time.23

The counter-reforms of Alexander ’ sreign, of which the 1890 Statute was acornerstone, wereessentially an attemptto restore the autocratic principle tolocalgovernment. The provincialgovernor, whosepowers overthe zemstvos and the municipal bodies had been greatly increased bythe counter-reforms, was toplaythe role of a tsar in miniature. The same idea lay behind the institution of the land captains (zemskie nachal’niki) as a result of another counter-reformin 1889. Theyremained the central agents of the tsarist regime in the countryside until 1917,although afterthe 1905 Revolution their powers were considerably diluted. Appointed bythe provincialgovernors and subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, the 2,000 land captains, mainly from the gentry, weregiven a wide rangeofexecutive and judicialpowers overthe peasants, to whom they wereknown asthe ‘little tsars ’ . Their powers included the righttooverturn the decisions of the village assemblies, todischarge elected peasant officials,and to decide judicialdisputes. Until 1904 they could even orderthe public flogging of the peasants for minor misdemeanours, such as (and most commonly)for trespassing on the gentry ’ s land or for failing topaytheirtaxes. It is hard to overstress the psychologicalimpact of this public flogging decades afterthe Emancipation on the peasant mind. The peasantwriter Sergei Semenov* (1868–1922), whom we shall encounterthroughout this book, wrote that his fellow peasants sawthe land captains as ‘ a return to the days of serfdom, when the mastersquirehadlorded it overthe village ’ . Semen*Kanatchikov,another peasant-son we shall encounter,also voiced the resentment caused bythe captains ’ feudal treatment of the peasantry. One peasant, who had been arrested for failing to removehis hat and bow before the land captain while he delivered a lecture to

*Semenov is pronounced Semyo ´ nov and Semen is Semyo ´ n.

Russia underthe Old Regime

the village,asked Kanatchikov: ‘What ’ s a poor peasantto a gentleman? Why he’ s

worse than a dog. At least a dog can bite,but the peasant is meek and humble and tolerates everything.’

Worried bythe damage the land captainswere causing to the image of the regime in the countryside, many of the moreliberal bureaucrats and even

some of the conservatives pressed fortheir abolition during the ﬁrst decade

of Nicholas ’ sreign. They pointed to the low calibreof the land captains

who wereoften retired army ofﬁcers orthe lessersons of the local squirestoo

dim to advance within the regular bureaucracy and warned thattheirreadiness

to resort to the whip might provoke the peasants to rebel. But Nicholaswould

not hear a word against them. He sawthe land captains asthe ‘knightservitors ’ of his personalpower in the countryside. Theywould givehim a direct link

with the peasantry a link which the ‘ wall’ of the bureaucracy had blocked

and help to realizehis dreamof a popular autocracy in the Muscovite style.

Through their power he soughtto restore the traditionalorder of society, with the landed gentry at its head, thereby counteracting the democratic trends of the modern world.24 The counter-reforms of Alexander ’ sreign were a vital turning point in the pre-history of the revolution. Theysetthe tsarist regime and Russian society on the pathofgrowing conﬂict and, to acertain extent, determined the outcome of events between 1905 and 1917. The autocratic reaction against the zemstvos like the gentry ’ sreaction against democracywith whichit became associated had both the intention and the effect of excluding the mass of the people from the realm of politics. The liberaldreamof the ‘Men of 1864’— of turning the peasants into citizens and broadening the baseoflocalgovern-

ment wasundermined asthe court and its alliessoughtto reassert the old paternal system, headed bythe Tsar, his clergy and his knights, in which the peasants, like children orsavages, weredeemed too primitive toplay an active part. The demiseof the liberal agenda did not become fully clearuntil the defeat of Prime Minister Stolypin’ sreforms above all his projecttoestablish a volost zemstvodominated bythe peasantry between 1906 and 1911. But its likely consequenceswere clear long before that. Astheir pioneers hadoften pointed out, the zemstvoswere the one institution capable of providing a political baseforthe regime in the countryside. Had they been allowed to integrate the peasants into the system of localpolitics, then perhapsthe old divide between the ‘ two Russias ’ (in Herzen ’ s famous phrase),between ofﬁcial Russiaand peasant Russia, might at least have been narrowed if not bridged. That divide deﬁned the whole courseof the revolution. Without a stake in the old ruling system, the peasants in 1917 hadnohesitation in sweeping away the entire state, thereby creating the political vacuumforthe Bolshevik seizure

of power. Tsarismin thissense undermined itself; but it also created the basic

conditions forthe triumph of Bolshevism.

iii Remnants of aFeudal Army

‘I promise and do herebyswear before the Almighty God,before His Holy

Gospels, to serve His Imperial Majesty, the Supreme Autocrat, truly and faith-

fully, toobey him in all things,and todefend his dynasty, without sparing my

body, until the last drop of my blood.’ Every soldiertook this oathof allegiance upon entering the imperial army. Signiﬁcantly, itwasto the Tsar and the

preservation of his dynasty ratherthan to the stateor even to the nation that the soldiersworehis loyalty. Every soldier had to renewthis oathon the

coronation of eachnew Tsar. The Russian army belonged to the Tsar in person; its ofﬁcers and soldiers wereineffect in vassalage tohim.25 The patrimonialprinciple survived longer in the armythanin any other institution of the Russian state. Nothing was closerto the Romanov court or moreimportanttoitthan the military. The power of the Empire was founded on it,and the needs of the army and the navy always took precedencein the formulation of tsarist policies. All the most importantreforms in Russianhistory had been motivated bythe need to catch up and competein warwith the Empire ’ srivals in the west and south:Peterthe Great ’ sreforms had been brought about bythe wars with Sweden and the Ottomans; thoseof Alexander II by military defeat in the Crimea.

The courtwassteeped in the ethos of the military. Since the late

eighteenth century it had become the custom of the tsars toplaysoldiers with

their families. The royalhousehold wasrunlike a huge armystaff, with the Tsar asthe Supreme Commander,all his courtiers divided byrank,and hissons, who wereenrolled in the Guards, subjected from anearly age to the sort of cruel

humiliationswhich theywould encounter in the ofﬁcers ’ mess, so astoinculcate

the principles of discipline and subordination whichitwasthoughttheywould

need in orderto rule. Nicholas himself had a passion forthe Guards. His fondest memorieswereofhisyouthful and carefree days as Colonel in the

Preobrazhensky Regiment. Hehad a weakness for military parades and spared no expenseongold braid for hissoldiers. Heeven restored some of the more

archaicand operatic embellishments to the uniforms of the e ´lite Guardsregiments which Alexander III had thought betterto abolishin the interests of economy. Nicholaswas constantly making fussy alterationsto the uniforms of his favourite units anextrabutton here,anothertassel there as if he wasstill playing with the toysoldiers of his boyhood. All his daughters,aswell as hisson, were enrolled in Guardsregiments. Onnamedays and birthdays theywore their

Russia underthe Old Regime

uniforms and received delegations of their ofﬁcers. They appeared at military

parades and reviews, troop departures, ﬂagpresentations, regimentaldinners,

battle anniversaries and other ceremonies. The Guards ofﬁcers of the Imperial

Suite, who accompanied them everywhere theywent, were treated almost as

extended members of the Romanov family. Noother group was as closeor

as loyal to the person of the Tsar. 26

Many historians havedepicted the army as a stalwart buttress of the

tsarist regime. Thatwas also the view of most observers until the revolution.

Major Von Tettau from the German General Staff wrotein1903, for example, thatthe Russian soldier ‘is full of selﬂessnesss and loyalty tohis duty ’ in a

way ‘ that isscarcelyto befound in any other army of the world’ . Hedid

‘ everything with a will’ and was always ‘ unassuming, satisﬁed and jolly even

after labour and deprivation’ . 27 But in factthere weregrowing tensions between the military in every rank and the Romanovregime.

Forthe country ’ s military leaders the root of the problem lay in the

army ’ s dismal recordin the nineteenth century, whichmany of them came to

blame on the policies of the government. Defeat in the Crimean War (1853–6), followed by acostly campaign against Turkey (1877–8),and then the humiliation of defeat bythe Japanese the ﬁrst time a major Europeanpower hadlost to

an Asian country in 1904–5, leftthe army and the navy demoralized. The causes of Russia ’ s military weakness werepartly economic: her industrial resources failed tomatch up toher military commitments in an age of increasing competition between empires. But this incompetence alsohad a political source: during the later nineteenth centurythe army hadgradually lost its place atthe top of governmentspending priorities. The Crimeandefeat haddiscredited the armed services and highlighted the need todivert resources from the military to the modernization of the economy. The Ministry of War lost the favoured position it hadheld in the governmentsystem of Nicholas I (1825–55) and became overshadowed bythe Ministries of Finance and the Interior, whichfrom this point on received between them the lion’ sshareof stateexpenditure. Between 1881 and 1902 the military ’ sshareof the budget dropped from 30 per centto 18 per cent. Ten years before the First World Warthe Russian armywas spending only 57 per cent of the amountspent on each soldier in the German

army,and only63 per cent of thatspent in the Austrian. In short, the Russian

soldierwentto warworse trained, worseequipped and morepoorlyserviced thanhis enemy. The armywasso short of cash that itrelied largely on its own

internaleconomyto clothe and feed itself. Soldiers grewtheir ownfood and tobacco,and repaired their own uniforms and boots. They even earned money forthe regiment by going off to work asseasonallabourers on landed estates, in factories and mines neartheir garrisons. Manysoldiers spent more time

growing vegetables orrepairing boots than they did learning howtohandle their

guns. Byreducing the military budget, the tsarist regime created an army of

farmers and cobblers. The demoralization of the armywas also connected toits increasing role in the suppression of civilianprotests. The Russian Empire was covered with a networkofgarrisons. Their job wastoprovide moreor less instant military assistanceforthe provincialgovernors orthe police todeal with unrest.

Between 1883 and 1903 the troopswere called out nearly 1,500 times. Ofﬁcers complained bitterlythatthis policeduty was beneath the dignity of a professional soldier,and that it distracted the army from its proper military purpose. They also warned of the damaging effect itwas likelytohaveon the army ’ s discipline. History proved them right. The vast majority of the private soldiers were peasants,and their morale was heavily inﬂuenced bythe news theyreceived from theirvillages. When the armywas called out toput down the peasantuprisings of 1905–6 many of the units, especially in the peasant-dominated infantry, refused toobey and mutinied in support of the revolution. There wereover 400 mutinies between the autumn of 1905 and the summer of 1906. The armywas broughtto the brink of collapse,and ittook years to restore a semblanceof

order. 28

Many of thesemutinieswerepart of a generalprotest against the feudal

conditions prevailing in the army. Tolstoy, who had served as an army ofﬁcer in

the Crimean War, described them in his last novel Hadji-Murad. The peasant soldiers, in particular, objected to the waytheir ofﬁcers addressed them with

the familiar ‘ you ’ (tyi) normallyused for animals and children rather than the polite ‘ you ’ (vyi). Itwas howthe masters hadonce addressed theirserfs; and sincemost of the officers werenobles,and most of the soldiers were sons of formerserfs, this mode of address symbolized the continuation of the old feudal world inside the army. The first thing a recruit did on joining the army wastolearn the differenttitles of his officers: ‘Your Honour ’ up to the rank of colonel; ‘Your Excellency ’ for generals; and ‘Your Radiance ’ or ‘Most High

Radiance ’ fortitled officers. Colonels and generalswere to begreeted not just with the simple hand salute but by halting and standing sideways to attention while the officer passed by for a strictly prescribed number of paces. The soldier wastrained to answer hissuperiors in regulation phrases of deference: ‘Not at all,Your Honour ’ ; ‘Happyto serve you,Your Excellency. ’ Any deviationswere likelyto bepunished. Soldiers could expectto bepunched in the face, hit in the mouth with the butt of a rifle and sometimes even floggedforrelatively minor misdemeanours. Officers were allowed to use a wide rangeof abusive terms such as ‘ scum ’ and ‘ scoundrel’— tohumiliate theirsoldiers and keep them in their place. Even whilst off-duty the common soldierwas deprived of the rights of a normal citizen. He could notsmokeinpublic places, go to restaurants ortheatres, ride in trams, or occupy a seat in a first-orsecond-class

Russia underthe Old Regime

railway carriage. Civic parks displayed the sign: DOGS AND SOLDIERS FORBIDDEN

TO ENTER. The determination of the soldiery to throw off this ‘ armyserfdom’

and gain the dignity of citizenship wasto become a majorstory of the

revolution.29

Itwas not just the peasant infantrywho joined the mutinies after 1905.

Even some of the Cossack cavalry who since the start of the nineteenth

century had been a model of loyalty to the Tsar joined the rebellions. The

Cossacks had speciﬁc grievances. Since the sixteenth centurythey haddeveloped

as ane ´litemilitary caste, whichin the nineteenth century came underthe control

of the Ministry of War. Inexchangefortheir military service, the Cossackswere

granted generous tracts of fertile land mainly on the southern borders they

were todefend (the Don and Kuban) and the eastern steppes aswell as

considerable politicalfreedom fortheirself-governing communities (voiskos, from

the wordfor ‘ war ’). However, during the last decades of the nineteenth centurythe costs of equipping themselves forthe cavalry, of buying saddles, harnesses and

military-grade horses,astheywereobliged toin the charters of their estate,

became increasingly burdensome. Many Cossackfarmers,alreadystruggling in the depression, had to sell part of their livestock tomeettheir obligations and

equip theirsonstojoin. The voiskos demanded more and more concessions

botheconomicand political asthe priceof their military service. They began

to raise the ﬂagof ‘Cossacknationalism’— a parochial and nasty formoflocal

patriotism based on the idea of the Cossacks ’ ethnic superiority to the Russian

peasantry,and the memory of a distant and largely mythic past when the

Cossacks had been leftto rule themselvesthrough their ‘ ancient ’ assemblies of elders and their elected atamans. 30

The government ’ streatment of the army provoked growing resentment among Russia ’ s military e ´lite. The ﬁercest opposition came from the new generation of so-called military professionals emerging within the ofﬁcer corps and the Ministry of War itself during the last decades of the old regime. Many of them weregraduates from the Junker military schools, whichhad been opened

up and revitalized in the wake of the Crimeandefeattoprovide a means forthe sons of non-noblesto rise to the seniorranks. Career ofﬁcers dedicated to

the modernization of the armed services, theywere bitterly criticalof the archaic

military doctrines of the e ´lite academies and the General Staff. To them the

main priorities of the courtseemed to be the appointment of aristocrats loyal

to the Tsarto the top command posts and the pouring of resources into what had become in the modern age a largely ornamental cavalry. They argued,by

contrast, that more attention needed to bepaid to the newtechnologies heavy artillery, machine-guns, motortransportation, trenchdesign and aviation which were bound to bedecisivein coming wars. The strains of

modernization on the politics of the autocracywerejust as apparent in the

military astheywerein all the other institutions of the old regime.

Alexei Brusilov (1853–1926) typiﬁed the new professionaloutlook. He

was perhapsthe most talented commander produced bythe old regime in its

ﬁnaldecades; and yet,after 1917, he did more than any otherto secure the

victory of the Bolsheviks. Forthis he would later come to be viliﬁed as a ‘ traitor

to Russia ’ bythe White Russiane ´migre ´ s. But the whole of his extraordinary

career from his long service as a generalin the imperial armytohistime as

the commander of Kerensky ’ s army in 1917 and ﬁnallytohisyears as a senior

adviser in the Red Army was dedicated to the military defenceofhis country.

Inmanyways the bitter lifeof Brusilov, which we shall be tracing throughout

this book, symbolized the tragedy of his class.

There was nothing in Brusilov ’ s background or earlyyears to suggest

the revolutionary pathhe would latertake. Even physically, withhis handsome fox-likefeatures and his ﬁne moustache, he cut the ﬁgureof a typicalnineteenthcenturytsarist general. One friend described him as a ‘ manof average height withgentle features and a naturaleasy-going manner but with such an air of commanding dignity that, when one looks at him, one feels duty-bound tolove him and atthe same time tofear him’ . Brusilov came from anold Russiannoble familywith a long tradition of military service. One of his ancestors in the eighteenth century haddistinguished himself in the battle forthe Ukraine against

the Poles a feat he would emulatein1920 and forthisthe family had

been given a large amount of fertile land in the Ukraine. Atthe age of nineteen

Brusilov graduated from the Corps des Pages, the most e ´liteof all the military

academies, whereofﬁcers were trained forthe Imperial Guards. Hejoined the

Dragoons of the Tver Regiment in the Caucasus and foughtthere withdistinc-

tion, winning severalmedals, in the war against Turkey in 1877–8,before

returning to St Petersburg and enrolling in the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns

and Cavalry Junkers, wherehe rose to become one of Russia ’ stop cavalry experts.

Notsurprisingly, given such abackground, he instinctivelyshared the basic

attitudes and prejudices of his peers. He was a monarchist,aGreat Russian

nationalist,a sterndisciplinarian withhissoldiers and a patriarch withhis family.

Above all, he was a devout, even mystical,believer in the Orthodox faith. Itwas

this,according tohiswife, that gavehim his legendary calmness and self-belief even at moments of impending disaster for histroops. 31

But Brusilov ’ sviews were broader and moreintelligentthan thoseof

the average Guards ofﬁcer. Although bytraining acavalryman, he was among the

ﬁrst to recognize the declining military signiﬁcanceof the horsein an age of modern warfaredominated bythe artillery, railways, telephones and motor

transportation. ‘We were too well supplied with cavalry, ’ he would laterrecall in his memoirs, ‘ especiallywhen trench ﬁghting took the placeofopen warfare. ’32