In part 10 of the Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander details the development of Russian history towards the 20th century,

Russian history had a very different trajectory than that experienced in Western Europe by the nineteenth century. Almost everywhere in Western Europe, the medieval period had seen the gradual growth of self-sustaining towns and trade, creating a bourgeoisie (originally meaning simply inhabitants of a city rather than the owners of capital enterprises), and in many regions, at least partly market-orientated agricultural production. The economically developed feudalism of Western Europe, in fits and starts, transitioned into capitalism across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Russia, in contrast, was far behind these developments.

Sometimes this is put down to geography, such are the vast distances involved in Russian territory, and the resultant sparse population. However, in the long view, this doesn’t wholly stand up, since major rivers such as the Volga, the Don and the Dnieper had the potential to be, and to an extent were, major thoroughfares like the Rhine or the Danube. They also potentially made Russia a connective territory between important economic regions: the Baltic and the Middle East. Indeed, the Viking trade routes to Constantinople were the ultimate origin of the Kievan Rus kingdom in the ninth century, and the reason why English princes and nobles could be found in the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire before and after the Norman Conquest.

Russia’s historical development was however blown into an entirely new course by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which either obliterated existing states, or reduced them tributary princedoms, drained by the demands of their overlords. The Golden Horde was the successor of the original Mongol Empire in regions from Ukraine, past the Caspian Sea and the Urals, into Central Asia. It eventually broke down into smaller khanates like Astrakhan. The reason why these successor states eventually fell prey to the Russian Tsars is that it is difficult on the Steppe, with very mobile populations, to create a stable system of accumulation: the people you want to exploit have a tendency to ride away to freer regions if they are pressed too hard. Hence it was one of the northern Russian principalities, Muscovy, which became the core of a post-Mongol Russian state.

The eventual result was a powerfully centralised state, with considerable military power that was able to expand territorially at a steady pace. The Tsarist state had far more control over its territories and peoples, from serfs to the nobles, than had contemporary monarchs in Western Europe. The latter, even at the height of absolutist monarchies in France or Austria, faced nobilities entrenched in their lands, and provinces with autonomous customs and institutions. Russian Tsars never had to contend with the independent jurisdictions and parlements of France, or, in England, or with a gentry in control of county society. The noble boyars of Russia were dependent upon the Tsars in a way not comparable to the West; they could plot and scheme, but were always at the mercy of being crushed by Tsarist power. Hence the fearsome reputation of Tsars like Ivan the Terrible (1533-84).

The state and development

All this rested, however, on a remarkably underdeveloped rural base. Trotsky went so far as to claim that in 1905 both ‘technology and crops over the vast expanse of central Russia today are the same as a thousand years ago.’ What Trotsky was referring to by the thousand years was the fact that at the start of the twentieth century, very substantial portions of Russia’s agricultural land was still farmed using a strip system. Such a system did indeed reach its maturity in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Western Europe. In 1900, Russian agriculture was thus far behind contemporary industrialised agriculture in the advanced capitalist nations, lacking much in machinery and technology. Wooden ploughs were still in common use, while modern fertilisers were hardly present.

Something else that marked the Tsarist state out from its equivalents to the West was the existence of a whole class of peasantry called state serfs. This substantial portion of the population who were directly exploited by the state had no equivalent in the West, and was another factor in the state’s overwhelming superiority over its nobility. Where medieval kings in France, Germany and England could be conceived as being ‘first amongst equals’ in relation to other great aristocrats, there was no such parity in Russia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One reason that Russian agriculture was so far behind was that little surplus was left to peasant farmers to invest in their land, even to the degree that late-medieval peasants around London or Paris, for example, were able to develop into market-orientated farmers. Instead, the Tsarist state expanded territorially without growing economically, except where the state itself directed the creation of new industries, or even new cities. It was under the first ‘Emperor’, Peter the Great (1682–1725) that Saint Petersburg was founded and made the new capital, purposely to introduce selected Western influences into Russia, with a particular emphasis on developing Russian industry and science on Western lines. Not for the last time, military pressure from outside had sparked efforts to further Russia’s internal development.

The preponderance of the state in Russia, and the poverty of its peasantry, also meant that towns were not independent entities serving the manufacturing and exchange needs of rural communities, but administrative centres, almost entirely populated by those employed by the state. Apart from places which were well-placed for longer-distance merchant activity, they were just consumption centres for the nobility and bureaucracy. Trotsky observed of the eighteenth-century towns that they were ‘mere accumulations of the nobility, the bureaucrats, and their retainers’ and ‘contained no progressive forces of any kind.’

Tsarist Russia lacked the plebian masses who powered the bourgeois revolutions in seventeenth-century England and 1790s France. Equally, the enserfed peasantry could not retain sufficient surplus to develop much in the way of agrarian capitalism, while poverty and rural isolation also limited their cultural and ideological reach. This did not mean that the Tsarist state did not face internal social challenges, including four major peasant revolts across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were significantly motivated by resistance to serfdom, and were all led by Cossacks, in the south-east and middle Volga regions. This is an equivalent to peasant revolts in the medieval and early-modern West being often led by disgruntled minor noblemen. The Cossacks were originally semi-nomadic peoples of various origins, Slavicised by the nineteenth century, who were allowed considerable autonomy and self-government in return for military service to the Tsars. Their hierarchical and quasi-feudal social structure made them usually reliable troops for the Tsarist state in the face of the growing dissent of the nineteenth century.

What is notable about the peasant revolts before 1800 is that they never made common cause with struggles in the towns of the central Muscovy region or elsewhere, in contrast to the French Jacquerie of 1358 or the English Rising of 1381. There was no shortage of urban risings, but town revolts didn’t even make links with other towns. Another major fracture was between Russians and the colonised peoples of the Volga and Urals, whose revolts, such as during the Pugachev rising of 1773-4, could target Russians as such, even where the leadership of the revolt attempted to prevent it. The powerful Tsarist state was a brittle carapace upon a fissiparous society.

Russia and the French Revolution

Russia was not unaffected by the French Revolution, and its involvement in the Napoleonic Wars exposed officers and some of the more elite units to the liberal and radical ideas of the era. There had always been discontent among landowners over the authoritarian power of the Tsar, and as much as they depended upon the state, they could resent it as well. The demands of creating a modern bureaucracy and equipping a modern military also created, as well as some industry, an educated layer, particularly among the gentry. This ‘intelligentsia’ tended to be open to liberal ideas, and among its younger members, even revolutionary ones. This became a permanent feature of politics in nineteenth-century Russia. In the aftermath of Napoleon, the contrast between life in the West and Russia encouraged some to think in terms of a total restructuring of society, from the emancipation of the serfs to the abolition of autocracy.

Secret societies were formed organising the dissidents among army officers in particular. This culminated in the attempted coup of December 1825 in Petersburg during a moment of confusion after the death of Alexander II and the succession of Nicholas I. Some among the ‘Decembrists’ planned a limited monarchy and the abolition of serfdom, and others a republican democratic state, or even a revolutionary dictatorship. The different aims of those involved did not have time to break out into inter-revolutionary conflict, as, although the rising was supported by some regiments in the south, largely the military remained loyal to the state, and the mutineers were crushed. Reforming ideas among the social elite did not go away, however, and the Decembrists were remembered.

Western radicals widely feared Russia as a major counterrevolutionary bulwark in the first half of the nineteenth century, intervening in 1849 to suppress the Hungarian revolution in Transylvania, to aid Austria’s recovery of Hungary proper, and in the same year threatened Prussia over the latter’s conflict with Denmark concerning Schleswig-Holstein. It was, however, Russia’s steady encroachments on the Ottoman Empire on both sides of the Black Sea that began to threaten a change to the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean. When in 1853, Russia occupied present-day Romania, then under Ottoman overlordship, the issue became a crisis.

Both Britain and France were alarmed. These Western powers, together with upwardly mobile Piedmont, seeking great power approval for its project of Italian unification, launched a war against Russia in support of the Ottomans. The Crimean War has a reputation as a disaster in Britain, but it was an even worse debacle for the Russians, who were unable to mobilise and supply their troops properly. The military was revealed as backward both technologically and administratively compared to the militaries of the Western powers, while state finances also failed in the face of the war’s expense. A humiliating peace in 1856 further underlined the need for major reforms, if the Tsarist state was to restore its standing at home and abroad.

Alexander II’s reforms

As the throne passed from Nicholas I to Alexander II in 1855, the way was smoothed for advocates of reform to set the agenda. Most important was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, against very considerable opposition from the landowning nobility and gentry. Some were, however, actually in favour of abolition, seeing that it could open up economic possibilities, and enable them to rationalise the exploitation of their lands. Moreover, the emancipation, like the freeing of slaves in the West, was organised in such a way as to protect the class position of the exploiters. Serfs now had rights as citizens, and legal freedoms, but in return for a share of the lands they had worked, they would owe redemption payments, which were effectively impossible to repay. Still, in receiving some land, it might be noted that Russian serfs were treated more generously than the slaves of the British Caribbean or the United States.

What emancipation did achieve was to create a poor but free peasantry, who could, in time, be recruited as industrial workers. This was the necessary basis for kickstarting the growth of modern capitalism in Russia. Major financial, judicial, educational reforms brought a degree of the rule of law to the autocracy, and created a basis for industrial and commercial investment. A system of local government was also organised to replace the personal rule of serf-owners, which had included the state itself, over the bulk of Russia. These new local elected bodies, the zemstvos, tended to be dominated by landowners and the professional middle class, and soon became bastions of liberal sentiment.

To the peasantry, Alexander II became lauded as the ‘Tsar Liberator’, but particularly for the younger generation of the middle and upper classes, emancipation seemed an inadequate halfway house. There was not to be any kind of national legislature, and the poverty of most Russians looked set to continue. Out of the resulting disappointment, there emerged Russia’s first revolutionary movement, the Narodniks, or Populists.

This movement had been prepared by an earlier generation of Russian intellectuals attracted by radical German philosophical currents and particularly French utopian socialism. There was an already established enthusiasm for the institution of the mir in Russia, the village commune, which many hoped could provide a basis for a distinctive Russian socialism that could seamlessly move into modernity while bypassing the horrors of Western-style capitalism. The political thinker, Alexander Herzen (1812-70) is usually credited as beginning this tradition in Russian radical thought. Famously, Marx would have a brief correspondence with a leading Populist, and then Marxist, Vera Zasulich in 1881 on the mir as a basis for socialism.

However, in the early 1860s, neither Marxism nor a substantial working class was present in Russia, and the populists’ focus was on the peasants as the source of a revolutionary challenge to the Tsar. There were, in fact, some rural rebellions in the wake of emancipation, as many peasants were shocked that substantial swathes of the land they had worked were being reserved for the landowners’ private possession. Rumours spread that the Tsar had intended all the land for the peasants, but that landowners were hiding this fact, and cheating the peasants.

Unrest in the countryside existed quite separately from the agitations of the mostly youthful Populists, who formed numerous small groups, including Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) and Young Russia. These engaged in writing revolutionary manifestos, which terrified the authorities, but made no progress towards gaining a mass audience. The conspiratorial tradition inherited from the period of the Decembrists, but also necessitated by the authoritarian state, helped to produce a turn towards terrorism as a revolutionary strategy. The first fruit of this was Dmitry Karakozov’s attempted assassination of Alexander II in 1866.

Reactionary turn

The anti-communist line taken by many a Cold War orientated historian is that this showed the inherent destructive and counter-productive violence of the revolutionary left. In any number of accounts of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia from this school, there is always a search for moments when Russia could or should have taken a liberal bourgeois path. This is one of those: after the assassination attempt, Alexander II’s reign took a more reactionary direction. Then, of course, another assassination attempt in 1881 succeeded, when the Tsar was poised to introduce a legislative ‘commission’. The cold warriors triumphantly claim that, but for populist violence, Tsar Alexander would have gone on to reform Russia’s political system. This is an unjustified leap of wishful thinking.

Alexander II was always likely to end his series of reforms with those which dealt to some degree with the economic and administrative failings of the state. There had been considerable opposition to emancipation from landowners, and for all the state’s relative power, it needed the support of that class. It is also a recurring pattern in hereditary authoritarian systems for periods of reform to be followed by reaction. In this, Alexander II followed the same trajectory as his great-uncle Tsar Alexander I.

The end of Alexander II’s reign was dominated by the fallout from the war of 1877-8 with the Ottomans. This ended with Russia being outmanoeuvred diplomatically by the other European powers, and failing to make hoped-for gains. The ruling class was put into some disarray, so this was the context for the hesitant plans for an elected convention. It is dubious whether it would have gone ahead, never mind whether it would have led to genuine constitutional change. Later, when an elected Duma, or parliament, was instituted after the 1905 revolution, the autocracy clawed back its concessions as soon as it had regained some stability.

The 1870s were nonetheless marked by the further growth of the populist movement, which tried to make good its social isolation from the mass of the people by advocating that students go directly to the peasants by living among them. The idea had been around since the 1860s but took off in spectacular fashion in the summer of 1874. Some thousands of students left the cities for the countryside, but largely found the peasantry unresponsive to their revolutionary exhortations.

Some of the students were even turned over to Tsarist officials, and others suspected by the peasants of actually being police spies. There was a huge cultural and political chasm between these young revolutionaries, often sons and daughters of the nobility, and the masses they had idealised. Before dismissing this endeavour entirely, however, it should be noted that many activists did stay in the countryside long term, as teachers and in other useful roles attempting to carry on the project in a more considered and organic way. Others started to try to propagandise urban workers instead.

After 1874, the populist movement started reconsolidating, and a new Zemlya i Volya group was formed, but then soon split over strategy and the role of terrorism. Those who wished to take the terrorist path became the Narodnya Volya, the People’s Will, which did begin a campaign of attempted assassination, mainly directed at the Tsar. This succeeded in 1881. Meanwhile, those who rejected terrorism called themselves ‘Black Partition’, referring to a repartition of the land in favour of the peasantry. This group, which included Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, gradually moved towards Marxism.

Government arrests of populists during the 1874 movement tended to harden opposition to the state among the young activists themselves, and, when they were finally put on trial, they gained considerable public sympathy. Most ominously for the Tsarist regime was the case of Vera Zasulich. Zasulich shot and wounded the much hated Governor Trepov in 1878, following his illegal order for the flogging of a political prisoner who had refused to doff his hat to him. The course of Zasulich’s trial for attempted murder in effect cast Trepov and the state as the guilty party; she was acquitted by the jury, and public sympathy lay very much on her side. This was a grave sign that the Tsarist state was losing legitimacy in the eyes of its more prosperous subjects. The trial itself was only allowed in front of the jury because the government had decided it wanted to avoid another damaging ‘political’ trial. Thus the state’s capacity to use repression in response to opposition was breaking down.

Tsar Alexander III

However, the assassination of Alexander II led to a recovery of balance in the Tsarist regime, and Tsar Alexander III was to preside over a highly repressive government until he died in 1894 and Nicholas II became Tsar. Repression destroyed the main Populist organisations. At the same time, the results of emancipation began to flow through the Russian economy, with massive and rapid industrial growth. An index of industrial output shows Russia’s production surging from 13.9 in 1860 to 109.5 in 1904. Between 1888 and 1913, Russia averaged about 5% growth a year, higher than either the United States or Germany at the time. Industrial output doubled during the 1890s alone, with heavy industry the marked leader, and railways grew by 73.5%. Russia’s need for foreign capital investment was served by the Russia’s first ‘prime minister’ Sergei Witte in the 1890s, who introduced protective tariffs, helping to ensure industrial profitability, particularly for French capital. Together with loans from the French government, this created a pressing need for a surplus in trade in order to provide the foreign currency for the state to repay its debts.

All the industrial growth was, however, undermined by the much weaker performance of agricultural production, whose sluggish expansion pulled Russia down to below US and German growth levels overall, and deep below once rapid population growth is taken into account. By some measures, Russia still lagged behind poorer European powers like Italy, despite its huge size and vast resources. Moreover, there was a huge tax burden placed upon the peasantry, as the government was determined to use agricultural exports to finance the industrial expansion. Rural unrest was steadily increasing by the start of the twentieth century, while collective responsibility for redemption payments prevented many in the growing peasant population from leaving to seek new lands opening up east of the Urals. One result was that peasants looked enviously at the land still controlled by the gentry and nobility, believing it should belong to those who actually worked it.

Industrialisation had led Russia into a highly combustible state, which Trotsky would soon describe as ‘combined and uneven development’. The unevenness of development was clear to every observer: industrial development happened in concentrated geographical pockets, and leapt ahead more in some industries than others. Heavy industry in particular was of the most advanced kind, so Russian cities suddenly had vast factories with high concentrations of workers, ripe for industrial organising. In some areas, small craft industry also expanded enormously, in a pattern actually consistent with how industrial development happened elsewhere. However, the Russian petty bourgeoisie remained small while a new industrial working class took up the space, and its inclinations and politics would become hegemonic in urban areas.

Yet, the advanced development of some industrial areas happened in a sea of underdevelopment and poverty, with all the backwardness for which the Russian countryside was notorious. The ultra-modern and the archaic lay side by side. The most advanced forms of class struggle rose in industrial areas, while the most basic conflicts of landlord and peasant existed often only a few miles away. This ‘combination’ of social contradictions gave the Russian revolution an unexpected character for those who imagined the country would follow in the historical lines laid down by England and France before it. The bourgeois regimes in those countries had a sufficiently capitalist countryside, with an abundant small property-owning class in both town and country to provide stability during the most disruptive phases of their industrial revolutions. Russia’s ‘combined’ development meant that the mass movements of the new proletariat coincided in the same period with the insurrectionary impulses of a desperate peasantry.