The Xenophile Historian

1682 to 1917

	Peter the Great
	Interregnum
	Catherine the Great
	Russian America
	Napoleon and Alexander
	"Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism"
	The Liberation of the Serfs
	Alexander III
	Nicholas II and the Birth of Marxism-Leninism
	The 1905 Revolution
	World War I
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Peter shunned the Kremlin as much as possible because to him it symbolized everything that was old and wrong about Russia (after he grew up, he would feel the same way about Moscow). He spent most of his time with the western Europeans who lived in the German Quarter of Moscow; not only could they satisfy his immense curiosity about things, but also their tastes for drinking and carousing equaled his own. With their help, he gave his playmates military training with modern equipment.⁽²⁾ This came in handy when Peter grew up, because by then Sophia did not want to step down from her powerful position. She attempted to have Peter arrested, but Peter and his well-trained friends got to her first, and in 1689 they hauled her off to a convent.

The story of Peter I's reign is one of constant motion and commotion; only a single year of it passed without war, and during his entire adult life he never spent more than three months in one place. Peter wanted to break the bonds of tradition and make Russia a modern, westernized country. This could only be done if he had reliable contact with the West, which meant merchant ships, a seaport, and a navy to protect both. Archangel would not do for a seaport in this case; it was too remote, and frozen in for most of the year. Peter first tried to get a warm-water port in 1695 by taking the Crimean fortress of Azov; he failed because Azov was supplied by sea. Taking this defeat as a lesson, Peter spent the winter at Voronezh (325 miles upstream on the Don), building the first Russian navy since the time of the Vikings. The next spring he attacked Azov by both land and sea, succeeding this time.

In the spring of 1697 Peter became the first tsar to travel abroad. He traveled with a group of boyars, Cossacks, drummers, trumpeters, and dancing dwarves, disguised as an ordinary carpenter named Peter Mikhailov. His disguise was not convincing--not only was he six foot nine inches tall (that gets attention no matter who you are!)--but he tended to order around the boyars a little too much. They passed through Sweden (the Swedes knew who Peter Mikhailov was, but discretely looked the other way), Prussia, Holland (where Peter learned about shipbuilding by laboring in the shipyards), and England. Everywhere they went, Peter wanted to learn as much as possible about how things worked. Ultimately he became an expert in 14 crafts: he could shoe a horse, cast a cannon, pull a tooth or cut the type for a printing press. He never showed much interest in theoretical knowledge, though; the products of European civilization mattered to him more than the theories that produced them. Those he met in the West took notice of his intelligence, determination--and boorish behavior. In Prussia, not knowing about whalebone corsets, he remarked that German ladies have devilishly hard bones. He called on England's King William III in his shirtsleeves, and after his embassy left the mansion where they had stayed in England, it looked as if "Tartars had camped there." Doors had been ripped off their hinges, windows were shattered, portraits were riddled with musket balls and a wheelbarrow was driven into a hedge. Peter paid for the damage by handing his host a dirty piece of paper in which a huge uncut diamond was wrapped.

When Peter returned to Russia the Streltsy revolted, so Peter exterminated them wholesale and built a new modern army in their place. He then westernized his subjects by shaving the beards off the boyars and forcing them to wear Western dress. He did the same with the common people, but later made a concession to them in the form of a beard tax; those who did not shave had to pay a small tax to keep their whiskers. The government was overhauled to make it more efficient, and Western-style schools were built. All of these reforms were unpopular, especially the laws concerning beards; both the established Church and the Old Believers agreed that since man is created in God's image, shaving is an indirect mutilation of God himself. Probably 95% of the people opposed Peter's reforms, even after they got results. In response to this Peter made his authority more absolute than ever; his reforms were not so much introduced as inflicted upon his subjects ("Russians must be coerced!"). Since the Church was his greatest critic, Peter removed its tax-exempt status to help pay for his reforms; then when the patriarch died, Peter refused to appoint a successor. The patriarch's office was replaced with a "Holy Synod," a committee of ten priests led by a tsar-appointed layman; this neat little move made the Church just another branch of the tsar's government. In order to extract the last possible kopeck to pay for his wars, Peter placed additional taxes on coffins, beehives, bathhouses and anything else that seemed remotely likely to yield revenue. Most of the new burdens were borne by the already oppressed peasant masses; Peter went one step further and put all of the peasant's land, as well as his body, at his master's disposal. The service gentry was given the right to reduce the amount of land a peasant could work on, increase his obligations at will, and even dispense justice on his personal property as he saw fit. In addition, those serfs conscripted into the armed forces were required to serve a minimum of 25 years. As time went on, the government came to regard the serfs as chattel rather than human beings.

Azov was nice, but Peter thought that a seaport on the Baltic, conveniently close to England and Holland, would be a much better thing to have. Since the Baltic was a Swedish lake at this time, he formed an alliance with Denmark, Saxony and Poland, three other countries with anti-Swedish grudges. All four of them declared war on Sweden in 1700.

The Swedish king, eighteen-year-old Charles XII, was expected to be a pushover, but he turned out to be a military genius in the tradition of his ancestor, Gustavus Adolphus. Instead of waiting for the expected onslaught, he made a beeline for Copenhagen, knocking Denmark out of the war in a single battle. Then he led 10,000 men to the other side of the Baltic, defeating a Russian army of 50,000 at the battle of Narva. From there Charles could have continued to Moscow and ended Peter's career, but instead he set up winter camp, pondering whether to attack Russia or Poland next spring.

The tough-looking German mercenaries in Poland's army decided matters, and Charles marched south to deal with them. For the next six years Charles and Poland's King Augustus chased each other in circles around Poland. During this time Peter recovered from his defeat, sent an army into Poland each spring to keep Charles from winning too soon, and occupied the eastern shore of the Baltic (Ingria, Estonia and Latvia). He showed his total commitment to winning the war by building Russia's new capital, St. Petersburg, on former Swedish territory, at the mouth of the Neva River. The site was abominable--cold and swampy--and to build the city he drafted thousands of peasants, paid them nothing, shrugged at their misery and death, and drove them onward. When it was finished he ordered the nobility to move there. In this we can see the real genius of Peter's actions, for he knew that his reforms would very likely die with him unless he placed the seat of government so far west that it could not help but see what the West was doing at any time.

In 1706 Charles XII chased Augustus to his home, the German state of Saxony, and finally captured him. Now he could tackle his real enemy, Peter. But this time Peter's modernized army fought better than expected; it took until the fall of 1708 for the Swedes to reach the Russo-Polish border. It was too late in the year for Charles to go forward, but he would not go back, either; he camped in Ukraine, where he could hope for food, milder weather, and support from friendly Cossacks. An unusually cold winter killed off half his force, and the local Cossacks stayed loyal to the tsar.⁽³⁾ In July 1709 Peter surrounded and annihilated the remaining Swedes in the battle of Poltava. Today Poltava is regarded as one of the most important battles in world history, because Sweden was the most powerful country in northern Europe for most of the previous century, but has never been even a second-rate power since that time.

Charles XII escaped to the Ottoman Empire and persuaded the Turks to join his side. The Turkish response was disappointing, though; they only stayed in the war long enough to take back Azov. Now Denmark, Hanover, and Prussia declared war on Sweden, and all of Sweden's enemies closed in. By the time Charles got home everything but Sweden itself had been lost, but he kept the "Great Northern War" going until he was killed while invading Norway in 1718. At the Treaty of Nystad (1721) Peter gave back Finland (occupied since 1714), but got to keep all of his other conquests.

It was after the Great Northern War that Europeans called Peter "the Great" and started referring to his country as the Russian Empire instead of Muscovy. Even Peter's enemies admitted that "he works harder than any peasant", and Peter's violent labors and entertainments eventually wore him out; he was only 53 when he died.

Interregnum

Catherine I (1725-27), Peter's second wife.

Peter II (1727-30), a teenage son of the late Prince Alexis. He tried to move the capital back to Moscow, but died of a severe cold first.

Anna of Kurland (1730-40), daughter of Ivan V. She returned the southern and western shores of the Caspian Sea to Persia, territory annexed by Peter I in 1723.

Ivan VI (1740-41), the infant great-grandson of Ivan V, deposed by his babysitter,

Elizabeth (1741-62), a daughter of Peter I. A competent empress, but also a nymphomaniac, who was addicted to cherry brandy until it killed her one day.

After these characters the last living male member of the Romanov family was Peter III, the son of another daughter of Peter I. This Peter was not even Russian; his father was a Prussian prince. Peter hated orthodoxy and Russian traditions, but loved everything that had to do with Prussia. His wife was also from the German nobility, a princess named Sophia Augusta Frederica, who changed her name to Catherine II after the wedding. Peter's six months as tsar were good ones: he reduced the salt tax, abolished the secret police, forbid the sale of serfs to factory owners, and stopped the persecution of Old Believers. He also freed the serfs that worked on Church property, eliminated the term of military service required from the gentry, and gave the gentry permission to travel abroad. However, if you want to know what kind of person Peter really was, read on!

Peter the Great had turned Russia into a major participant in European politics, a fact of life that has continued to this day, even when Russia was under mediocre leadership. In 1733 Stanislas Leszczynski was elected king of Poland; he had briefly ruled the country as a puppet of Sweden during the Great Northern War. The Russians didn't like this turn of events, so they sent an army to Warsaw to demand new elections; this time the candidate the Russians liked won by a landslide. Six years later the Black Sea port of Azov was taken for good. And the exploration/colonization of Siberia (and Alaska) continued, which we will discuss at the end of this chapter.

The place where Russian involvement really made a difference was in the Seven Years War (1756-63), which was caused by the constant quarrel between two implacable foes, Prussia's King Frederick the Great and Austria's Empress Maria Theresa. These two began their reigns with a silly war called the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and Maria Theresa was spoiling for a rematch, so she persuaded France, Sweden and Russia to join her in an anti-Prussian alliance, while England sided with Frederick. The next time Prussia and Austria had a fight, all six countries got involved. Frederick, "the Soldier King," won most of the battles, but his forces were outnumbered, and he ran out of men before his enemies did. By 1762 two thirds of Prussia had been lost, and a Russian army had captured Berlin. Then Peter III became tsar; he thought Frederick was simply great, and promptly switched sides. That was just what Frederick needed, and the war quickly ended with a Prussian-English victory.

Catherine the Great

Catherine was the foremost promoter of Western culture since Peter the Great. She considered herself an example of "enlightened despotism" and corresponded with many of the philosophers of her day; she also wrote about philosophy, making her the only intellectual to ever sit on the Russian throne. The sons of nobility were sent abroad to Western colleges, creating a class of educated Russians called the intelligentsia; they would play an active role in the shaping of future generations. Catherine's reign is also noteworthy for producing Mikhail Lomonosov, the first scientist in Russian history.

Enlightened as Catherine's reforms may have been, they did nothing for the country's peasant majority, whose fortunes hit rock bottom at this time. By now the government no longer interfered with the landowner's treatment of his serfs in any way. In addition to all the burdens placed on the serfs previously, the noble could now make them work in his factories, interfere with their marriages, convert them into domestic servants, or even sell them, often breaking up families in the process. Many nobles now demanded that their serfs pay their rent in barshchina (labor), rather than in the customary obrok (payment in goods or money); this meant to the peasant more supervision by his owner and less freedom to manage his own affairs. Catherine added to the plight of thousands of serfs by giving her lovers gifts of land (along with the peasants working on them), for the state was a less demanding taskmaster than most of the landlords. One could say that at this time "the landlord ruled a little monarchy within the great one."

In 1772 a Cossack named Emelian Pugachev deserted from military service, wandered to the Ural River, and claimed to be Tsar Peter III; he said that he never really died, but had spent the last ten years hiding from his enemies, including Catherine, by traveling abroad. Pugachev did not resemble the late tsar in any way, but the Cossacks, desparate for any sort of liberator, supported him enthusiastically. Soon the entire Urals (both the river valley and the mountains) were in revolt, as Pugachev's band was joined by workers from Russia's first factories, and by Moslem tribesmen who resented the government's heavy-handed attempts to convert them at gunpoint. Government troops sent to the scene defeated Pugachev at Orenburg, but he escaped to the Volga city of Kazan. There he was joined by oppressed peasants who warmly remembered Stenka Razin's revolt a century earlier, and they went on a rampage, looting the houses of the rich and killing anybody they caught who was financially better off than they were. This last and most terrible of the Cossack rebellions engulfed the entire Volga as far upstream as Nizhni Novgorod (modern Gorkiy), and threatened to spread even farther west to the Don, making Pugachev's retreat look more like an invasion. Late in 1774 he was finally captured and executed, and the rebellion petered out after it lost its "False Peter," but to many the message was clear. Among these was Alexander Radishchev, a member of the gentry whose family barely escaped the Pugachev rebellion with their lives. His book, A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow, had a fictitious traveler advocate liberation of the peasants, warning that a more dangerous rebellion would come if their misfortunes continued. Radishchev got ten years in Siberia for writing this, so today he is remembered as the first modern Russian revolutionary.

If acquiring real estate is a proper way to measure "greatness," then Catherine was a more successful ruler than Peter the Great. To the south and east, Russian expansion into Central Asia and the Caucasus region began, to be continued one step at a time for a century. Two wars with the Ottoman Empire (1768-74 & 1787-92) captured the northern shore of the Black Sea, while a third campaign between the other two finished off the Crimean Khanate (1783). The most unusual gains, however, came from the partitioning of Poland. It happened like this: Austria's Maria Theresa, alarmed at Russia's continuing success against the Turks, threatened war if Russian expansion in her direction did not stop. Prussia's Frederick the Great intervened, offering this solution: why not peacefully take over something else rather than fight over slices of Turkey? Catherine agreed, and in 1772 Russia, Austria and Prussia each annexed approx. an eighth of Poland's territory.⁽⁵⁾ Naturally the Poles were livid at the carving up of their country, and they revolted constantly, until Prussia and Russia came back in 1793, forcing the Poles to give up half of the land they had left. Once the occupying forces left there was yet another Polish revolt, so in 1795 Prussia, Austria and Russia quietly returned and divided the rest of Poland between themselves.

Russian America

Because the fur trade was so lucrative, the whole enterprise was transformed into a government-sponsored monopoly, the Russian-American Company, in 1799. But from there fortunes took a downswing; there were enough wild animals in Alaska to make a few independent trappers rich, but not enough to keep a big business in the black. Even the wholesale slaughter of entire species (e.g., the sea otter and the Stellar's sea cow) could not bring profits for long. Alaska became more of a liability than an asset to its owners, and the tsars looked for a way to cut their losses. Fort Ross was sold to the American entrepreneur John Sutter in 1841; the rest of Russian America was bought by Secretary of State William Seward in 1867, for the fire sale price of $7,200,000 (two cents an acre!).

Napoleon & Alexander

Alexander I (1801-25) had a few quirks of his own, especially a fondness for mystical things, but fortunately he did not let them get in the way of running the country. He wanted to improve the lot of the peasants, but the foreign affairs of the day kept him from ever getting around to it. Those foreign affairs were mostly French; in the days of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, revolutionaries established popular governments in America and France. Catherine shrugged off these experimenters with democracy as "so many Pugachevs," but her successors could not take them so lightly. The monarchs of Europe trembled when the French executed King Louis XVI, and they grew even more concerned when the French republic degenerated into the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte's ambitions for a French-dominated Europe threatened to put every monarch out of a job, and they formed alliances to stop him. Russia was included in these alliances, and in the reign of Paul an army, led by an excellent general named Alexander Suvorov, marched into Italy to drive the French out. Unfortunately Paul and the Austrians could not agree on what to do with French-occupied Switzerland, and Suvorov was called home before his work was completed. By the time Alexander I decided to take part in the anti-Napoleonic coalition, Suvorov was dead, and the generals Alexander had were not quite as good. Alexander found this out the hard way when he tried to help Austria (1805) and Prussia (1806); Napoleon beat him badly both times.

Despite these victories, Napoleon did not really want to fight the Russians. In 1807 he met Alexander on a raft at Tilsit, in the middle of the river dividing Russia from Napoleon's empire. There they discussed plans for the future of Europe.⁽⁶⁾ Napoleon offered Finland to Alexander; they talked about dividing the Ottoman Empire between them, and how to drive the British out of India. All of these ideas, except the one concerning Finland, were fantasies as long as the British navy ruled the seas undefeated.

The Franco-Russian alliance did not last long, because Alexander insisted on continuing to trade with Britain, Napoleon's archenemy. Napoleon took offense at anyone who thought he could remain independent of his economic system, so he made plans for the invasion of Russia. On June 22, 1812, he began his march toward Moscow with 600,000 men, the largest army Europe had ever seen.

The Russians used the same tactics of attrition that worked so well against Charles XII a hundred years earlier: burn anything useful to the French that cannot be removed, avoid a straight-on battle with Le Grand Armee', pick off stragglers that get separated from the main body of French troops, etc. It wasn't until he reached Borodino, 70 miles from Moscow, that Napoleon got the kind of battle he wanted; after that he occupied Moscow easily. But once he was there, he did not have anything useful to do next, for Alexander I had never even left St. Petersburg. Alexander refused to surrender or negotiate while Napoleon was on French soil, so the Little Corporal found himself sitting in the Kremlin, feeling very silly. When the Russians set the outskirts of Moscow on fire, burning three fourths of the city, Napoleon got the message; he gave the command to withdraw, 33 days after arriving in the heart of Russia.

Napoleon had plans to come back the following spring for an attack on St. Petersburg, but it was not to be. As soon as he left Moscow (October 1812), the first snows of winter fell. The weather grew bitterly cold; campfires were inadequate, shoes soon wore out, and thousands died in the snow. Disease and guerrilla attacks by Cossacks took a terrible toll; discipline broke down, and the army became a shambling mob of marauders. At the end of the year it recrossed the border in various small groups. Less than one man out of thirty in Napoleon's original force ever saw home again.

Somehow Napoleon managed to raise a new army to replace his losses, but nothing went right for him now. The Russians were part of the coalition that drove him back to Paris in 1813-14. Russia was too far away to take part in the final battle at Waterloo, but Alexander had done enough; everywhere he was hailed as "The Liberator of Europe." At the Congress of Vienna, which drew the map of post-Napoleonic Europe, Alexander was a major participant, and he got to keep two of the territories had acquired during the wars, Finland and Bessarabia.⁽⁷⁾ He also received most of the Polish land Prussia and Austria had taken in 1795, which he named the "Kingdom of Poland" and gave to his brother Constantine.

"Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism"

Because Alexander I was childless, it was expected that Constantine would become the next tsar. But Constantine did not want the job--he was happy enough with Poland--so the crown went by default to the youngest brother, Nicholas I (1825-55). Unfortunately Constantine never announced in public that he was refusing the crown while Alexander was alive, so many (including the Decembrists) thought Nicholas was a usurper. Alexander's death caught the Decembrists without a plan for achieving their goals, but they acted anyway, feeling that it must be now or never. On December 14, 1825, they staged a coup d'etat in St. Petersburg, but most of the tsar's troops stayed loyal, and the revolt was promptly crushed. Five Decembrist leaders were hanged, and the rest were sent to Siberia.

The Decembrist revolt was doomed to failure from the start: it was attempted without planning, did not have determined and experienced leadership, and made no attempt to gain civilian support. Most of all, it ignored the three elements essential for any revolution to succeed: widespread discontent among the masses, an incompetent government, and support from most of the armed forces. However, it gave the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia its first martyrs, and an important lesson in how not to seize control of a country.

Because his reign got off to such a bad start, Nicholas I devoted his career to upholding the three ideals he cherished the most, "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism." Foreign visitors were carefully screened, and those with "dangerous ideas" were halted at the border. Foreign books were not permitted if they contained any liberal political ideas from the West. Even sheet music was checked to see if the notes were a secret code. Schools and universities were under constant surveillance, and only officially approved textbooks could be used. A new secret police was created, and a new criminal law code made any attempt to limit the authority of the tsar, to alter the existing system of government, or even to fail to denounce anyone guilty of these offenses, crimes punishable by death and the confiscation of all property. Spreading ideas which in any way spread doubt about the authority of the tsar could result in a Siberian exile, four to twelve years of hard labor, flogging and/or branding. A measure of how effective these policies were on Russian intellectual life can be gained by noting that in 1843 all Russian periodicals had a combined circulation of only 12,000 and the colleges contained less than 5,000 students; this in a country of almost 70 million people!

Nicholas did not limit his preoccupation with security to Russian affairs. In 1848 Hungary declared independence from the Austrian Empire. Faced with losing half his kingdom, the new Austrian emperor, eighteen-year-old Franz Josef, called on Russia for help, and Nicholas gave him the troops he needed to crush the rebellion. For this action and those at home Nicholas I was given the epithet "Europe's Policeman."

Despite this oppression (or maybe because of it?), the nineteenth century became the golden age of Russian culture. Russia's greatest musicians (Tchaikovsky and Glinka, to name a few) and authors (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Lermontov) lived during this time. Great achievements were also made in art and science. Often these forms of expression had political motives; one painting, for example, shows two rich men sitting on lawn chairs, discussing a trade--a family of serfs for a family of hunting dogs!

Some Russian authors, influenced by Western ideas like Utopian socialism and Hegel's philosophies, chose to write purely political literature. At this point most of the Russian intelligentsia thought they could reform the country peacefully along Western lines; we call them Zapadniks, or Westernizers. The most important Westernizer was Alexander Herzen (1812-70), a moderate socialist who wanted to free the serfs and make Russia a democracy. Nicholas forced him to flee to London in 1847 on account of his beliefs, where he published a newspaper named Kolokol (The Bell). It was smuggled into Russia, where it was widely read, even appearing mysteriously on the table of the tsar.

Another important Westernizer, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76), wanted the same goals as Herzen, but had a very different way to achieve them. Bakunin was an anarchist, who advocated terrorism as an agent of social change, calling it "the propaganda of the deed." Bakunin was shipped to Siberia, but he escaped, journeyed across the Pacific, North America, and the Atlantic, and finally made his way to London, where he teamed up with Herzen and Karl Marx. His followers called themselves Nihilists (from the Latin word for "nothing"), and they would become trailblazers for Russia's frustrated thinkers, who turned into violent revolutionaries in the next generation.

Finally mention should be made of Russia's conservative philosophers. They called themselves Slavophiles and viewed the world differently from the Westernizers. They felt that Peter the Great had done the wrong thing by embracing Western culture; there were still a lot of good things in the Slavic way of life, such as Orthodox Christianity and collectivism (as opposed to the dog-eat-dog capitalism of the West). Heaping scorn on the "decadent" West, one Slavophile wrote:

"In Europe the principle of personality is supreme; with us it is the communal principle. Europe is pagan, Russia--holy Christian. In the West reigns apparent liberty, a liberty like that of a wild animal in the desert. The true liberty is found among us, in the East."

The Communists of Soviet Russia were never Slavophiles, but what we call Marxism-Leninism owes as much to this philosophy as it does to the teachings of Marx.

In foreign affairs, the system of international cooperation worked out so carefully at Vienna came undone as a result of events in the only European power that did not attend the 1814-15 congress: Turkey. The Turks never got over the defeats they suffered at the hands of Christian nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the next crack in the Ottoman Empire's once-impressive facade was not long in coming; it was Greece, which declared independence in 1821. Europe's five principal nations could not agree on what to do about the Greek War of Independence (1821-29); Prussia and Austria refused to have any part of it, while Britain, France and Russia jumped in on the side of the Greeks. Together the three allies easily defeated the Turks, and Greece was freed, but the friendliness that existed between the kings of Europe was gone. Now there could only be peace as long as no king became greedy for more land or power than he already had.

Throughout this period the Ottoman Empire, which Nicholas I scornfully called "The Sick Man of Europe," grew visibly weaker, and as it did so, the temptation to exploit this weakness grew stronger every year. In 1853 Nicholas succumbed. He sent an ultimatum to the sultan demanding the right to protect his Christian subjects (about 40% of the Ottoman Empire's population); when the sultan said no, he declared war. The Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed the Turkish fleet at Sinope, and the army occupied the nearest Turkish provinces, Moldavia & Wallachia.

The Western response was quick; nobody liked the Turks, but a strong Russia controlling Constantinople was a bigger threat to world peace than a weak Turkey. Britain and France joined the war on the side of the Turks, and Franz Josef of Austria threatened to do the same if Nicholas did not pull his troops out of Moldavia & Wallachia immediately. Nicholas was furious--it was, after all, only a few years since he had saved Franz Josef's bacon in Hungary--but he could not take on all of these countries at once, so he recalled his forces. That eliminated the reason for the fighting, but the British and French felt they could only teach a proper lesson to the Russians by defeating them in a battle, and since the Russians would not come to them they must now go to Russia. The joint Anglo-French force invaded the Crimea, their objective being the naval base at Sevastopol. It took thirteen months and 118,000 casualties (mostly from cholera and a Russian winter the allies were ill-equipped for), but the Russians were beaten in every battle, and Sevastopol finally fell. Nicholas died heartbroken in the middle of the conflict, leaving his son Alexander II (1855-81) to pick up the pieces.

The treaty that ended the Crimean War dismantled all of Russia's naval bases on the Black Sea, and declared that nobody had the right to interfere with Turkish affairs on behalf of the sultan's Christian subjects. To keep the Russians out of Moldavia & Wallachia, they were united to create a new country, Romania, and the tsar agreed to leave it alone.

The Liberation of the Serfs

Like the slaves freed in America just a few years later, Russia's 23 million peasants found that life did not get much better with the arrival of freedom. Instead of receiving their pieces of farmland for free, the peasants were charged a stiff price for what the government gave them, and they had 49 years to pay off this debt. What happened in effect was that the debt of the peasants was transferred from the nobility to the state. For purposes of administration, a group of farms would be organized into a mir (commune); the mir collected land payments, and to insure that everybody worked to meet these payments, no one was allowed to move without permission of the mir. The peasant was free from the abuses of the landlord, but he was still hungry, in debt (more so than before), and bound to the soil.

In the eyes of the intelligentsia, Alexander just would not go far enough in his reforms. The followers of Herzen, who now called themselves Narodniks (Populists), decide to "go to the people," spreading among the peasants the revolutionary ideas of "land and freedom." Intent on rousing the peasants from their political apathy, the Populists worked in the fields alongside them, or became their doctors and teachers, telling their creed to anyone who listened. The movement failed miserably; the peasants, who still viewed the tsar as their protector from evil and greedy men, could not understand what the Populists were talking about, and usually turned them in to the authorities.

Alexander found native political philosophies more interesting than foreign-inspired ones. Since the Crimean War had discredited the Slavophiles, conservative thinkers now entertained an idea called Pan-Slavism, which stated that all of the world's Slavic peoples should live together in one country. Pan-Slavism never caught on among the Slavs living just across the Austrian border (the Galician Poles and Ukrainians)--they knew which ethnic group would dominate a super-Slav state!--but to Czechs, Serbs, and other Slavs living under Austrian or Ottoman despotism, Pan-Slavism offered an ideal to fight for. It was from this that the idea for a southern Slav state, called Yugoslavia, would come into being.

Pan-Slavism also provided Russia with an excuse to intervene in Turkish affairs again. Remembering the Crimean War, Alexander II restrained himself for most of his reign, merely asking the British for permission to build a new Black Sea fleet. The British refused, so in 1871 the tsar proposed having the issue discussed at an international conference in London. Since nobody could stop the tsar from building ships if he really wanted to, the conference accepted Alexander's proposal. Four years later, Turkey's Serbian and Bulgarian subjects revolted, and they were suppressed by bloody massacres. Alexander thought he saw his opportunity when horrified Europeans cried out for the rescue of the Christians from the Terrible Turk.

In the Russo-Turkish War (1877-8), the Turks threw everything they had against the Russians, but after nine months a Russian army reached the gates of Constantinople. The sultan sued for peace and was forced to sign a treaty that gave most of Turkey-in-Europe to an independent Bulgarian state. But the treaty never went into effect because there were British ships nearby. The David & Goliath struggle had turned Western opinion in favor of the Turkish underdog. Britain threatened a second Crimean War if a new treaty was not written. This put Alexander in an embarrassing situation because, despite all the fuss he made about his right to keep warships in the Black Sea, he never actually got around to building any. Germany offered a neutral meeting place in Berlin, and there the Turks got to keep most of their empire, losing just bits and pieces to Britain (Cyprus), France (Tunisia), Austria (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Romania (the Danube delta), Greece (Thessaly), and Russia (part of Armenia). The Balkan states of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria became fully independent, but it was not the kind of freedom they originally expected.

While all this was going on, Alexander abandoned his desire for reform and turned to the repressive measures used by his father. The Nihilists responded with acts of terrorism, shooting or blowing up the tsar's men one by one. Between 1866 and 1881, five attempts on the life of the tsar were made. On the sixth try a group called Narodnya Volya (The People's Will) succeeded, throwing a bomb into Alexander's carriage just hours after he had approved a proposal for a constitutional convention.

Alexander III

In addition to what it could already do, Alexander made it legal for the Okhrana (secret police) to do the following:

1. Imprison dissidents for up to three months without trial.
2. Forbid gatherings of people.
3. Close down the businesses of troublemakers.
4. Relocate people (as opposed to waiting for a court to do it).
5. Detain the suspicious for up to two weeks.

Alexander's most influential advisor was Konstantin Pobyedonostzev, the personal tutor of Alexander III and his son Nicholas II, and the procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. Pobyedonostzev taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech & press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. With his approval, terrorists were hunted down, and a new policy called Russification was formed. Russification sought to eliminate revolts from the numerous minorities in the empire's heterogeneous population by forcing all of them to learn Russian and convert to Orthodox Christianity. One nation, one language, one church, and one government: this was the goal Alexander tried to achieve. When it came to languages, for instance, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Finnish were banned in schools and public places; in Moslem areas, the Arabic alphabet was suppressed and replaced with the Cyrillic one. All this backfired; instead of converting rebellious ethnic groups like the Poles into good Russians, previously loyal groups like the Baltic Germans now became enemies of the state.

Those hardest hit by Russification were the Jews. The original Jews of Russia, the Khazars, were long gone, most of them having been converted to Christianity of driven out of the country. In 1502 a rabbi converted two Novgorod priests to Judaism, causing a nationwide panic, and ever since that time anti-Semitism was considered a natural part of Russian life. Yet from the thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth century there were hardly enough Jews in Russia to bother persecuting them. That changed when Catherine the Great grabbed eastern Poland, gaining more than a million Jewish subjects for the empire in the process. Persecution gradually increased afterwards, reaching its peak under the last two tsars, when the Jews were bullied or massacred in terrible pogroms, and thousands emigrated to more tolerant places like the United States. For this reason, an astonishing percentage of communists and other revolutionaries in the early twentieth century, like Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev and Julius Sverdlov, came from Jewish backgrounds.

Nicholas II and the Birth of Marxism-Leninism

1. Russia failed to industrialize fast enough to end the wretched state of poverty most of the people lived in.
2. Russia started two wars it could not win, both against modern nations (Japan in 1904, Germany in 1914).

Though Nicholas failed in economic matters, it was not because he didn't try to solve them. Early in his reign he had a superb Minister of Finance, Count Sergius Witte. Witte felt that industrialization was the country's first priority, but if factories were going to function at full capacity, they would need an efficient transportation system to bring in raw materials and take out the finished products. At the turn of the century the answer to this problem was railroads, so Witte borrowed money from France and used it to build an unprecedented amount of railroad tracks (more than 10,000 miles). Half of that mileage went into the famous Trans-Siberian Railroad, which reduced travel time across Siberia from several months to a single week. Witte also indirectly controlled the ministries of agriculture, education, and foreign affairs, making him a powerful statesman indeed. Unfortunately, he did not keep his posts long enough to finish his projects; Nicholas kicked him upstairs to a powerless cabinet post in 1903 because Witte thought that peaceful cooperation with the modern nations, particularly Japan, would be better for Russia than wars of conquest.

The economic progress achieved by Witte would have been impressive had it taken place in a smaller country. Iron and steel production, for example, had reached three million tons a year by 1910. This was ten times the amount produced in 1850, but it was still just half of Britain's 1910 production, less than one fourth of Germany's, and a mere ninth of what the United States (a country with two thirds the population of Russia) was producing at the same time. Russia's urban population also grew respectably, from 6% to 15%, but per capita income remained depressingly small when the GNP was divided between 170 million people. Part of the problem was that the country was too large to be changed quickly; almost every tsar had been successful at enlarging the portion of the world under Russian rule, without any concern for the problems of communication and transportation this would give future generations. A head of state who was determined to succeed, no matter what the cost, like Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin, could have modernized this country despite this handicap, but Nicholas II was not that kind of ruler.

Karl Marx never thought of Russia as a likely place where his ideas would first be put into practice; he always expected the communist revolution to begin in the most advanced countries of the West, where capitalism had flourished for a long time. This may have been a proper assessment of the situation during his lifetime (1818-83), but it wasn't after the turn of the century. By now the proletariat (workers) of the advanced countries, through labor unions and progressive governments, was receiving better pay, improved working conditions, and other material benefits of capitalism, causing the desire for revolution to diminish. In Russia, on the other hand, factory workers were the lowest paid in Europe (about $90 a year), and everyday life was still nearly as nasty, brutish and short as it had been during the Middle Ages. Here were workers who had nothing to lose but their chains!

The first Russian Marxist group was founded by a repentant nobleman, George Plekhanov (1857-1918). A former Populist, Plekhanov was disillusioned with both the failure of the Populists (he had participated in the "going to the people" movement of the 1870s) and the futility of mindless terrorism. He emigrated to Switzerland, discovered Marxism, and in 1883 he teamed up with three other ex-Populists to found a party called Liberation of Labor. In the following years other Marxist groups were formed, made up mostly of Polish, German and Jewish members. Because of the lack of freedom, all of them either held meetings abroad or resorted to conspiratorial activity.

In 1898 nine of these Marxist cells each sent one delegate to Minsk, where they united to form the Russian Social-Democratic Worker's Party (RSDWP). That event marks the birth of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), though it would not be called by that name until 1918. In 1902 a second party congress was held, and it split over the critical issue of how to conduct the upcoming revolution. Most of the older members of the party, including Plekhanov, felt that Russia had not been a capitalist country long enough for a Marxist-style revolution to take place any time soon. They proposed a two-stage revolution: first, overthrow the tsar and establish a Western-style democracy; second, wait an indefinite amount of time for the country to finish industrializing; and finally, when most of the government's members are Marxists, stage a second revolution, to place a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in power. One party member, Vladimir I. Ulyanov, better known to us as Nikolai Lenin, felt much differently. He argued that the Russian people, accustomed to all-or-nothing politics, would not accept or even understand a party that acted that way. Instead, he proposed a violent short cut, saying that communism must be established as soon as possible, with no regard for what Marx said about social conditions. Later on Lenin would propose two other major changes to make Marxism compatible with Russian reality: he would require that the proletariat be led by a totally committed, conspiratorial elite, and he would look for support among the peasants as well as among the workers.⁽⁸⁾

The RSDWP was permanently divided by the 1902 congress. Most of the attending members were won over to Lenin's point of view, and they came to call themselves Bolsheviks ("majority"). The others, led by a Jew named Yulii Martov, became known as the Mensheviks ("minority"). Both were still Communists from an outsider's point of view, but they never got along after that. The names "Bolshevik" and "Menshevik" stuck, though in the years leading up to 1917 the Mensheviks were more successful at recruiting new members, making them more numerous than the Bolsheviks.

The two factions of the RSDWP were not the only Russian political parties around. The largest was the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), which absorbed into its membership most of the former Populists and Nihilists; consequently it championed the rights of the peasants, and advocated terrorism as a means to achieve their ends. Also significant were the Labor Party, a socialist group, and the Liberal Party, which split in two during the 1905 Revolution to form the Octobrists and the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats). On the far right was an anti-Semitic group called the Black Hundreds, which assassinated members of the other groups when it was not busy with pogroms.

The 1905 Revolution

The Russo-Japanese War made the tsar's arrogance and incompetence visible for the whole world to see. The war, never popular to begin with, caused widespread protests every time news of another defeat came back from the Far East. On January 22, 1905, thousands of singing demonstrators, carrying icons and pictures of the royal family, gathered in front of the Winter Palace with a petition for the tsar, pleading that he come out in public and rescue his subjects from poverty and injustice. The demonstrators were attacked by a cavalry charge of the tsar's Cossacks, which killed more than a hundred and wounded many more. After this incident, known to us as "Bloody Sunday", it was discovered that the leader of the demonstrators, a priest named Father Gapon, was actually a police agent, though it is not known whose side he was on that day.

"Bloody Sunday" brought an end to the old belief that the tsar was basically good, but surrounded by men with evil intentions. As news of the event spread across the country, army and navy units mutinied, and peasants began looting and burning the homes of the rich. In St. Petersburg, a group of workers, Mensheviks, and others (including Trotsky, the #2 Bolshevik) formed a government of their own, called the "St. Petersburg Soviet" (Soviet is the Russian word for council); soon other Soviets were set up in every major city. When the railroads went on strike in October, the entire economy was paralyzed. Even the wooden-headed tsar now realized that concessions had to be made, so he reluctantly agreed to allow an elected legislature (called the Duma) to meet, and to grant a constitution. That did the trick. The people drifted back to work, the troops returned to their loyalty and the government regained the initiative. At the end of the year the authorities arrested the members of the Soviets. The St. Petersburg Soviet went quietly; the Bolshevik-dominated Moscow Soviet tried to fight it out, but the few squads of armed workers it could call on were soon shot down. When the constitution was written, it contained an article allowing the tsar to rule by decree in times of emergency; Nicholas continued the state of "emergency" indefinitely and thus was able to rule as autocratically as ever. The first Duma was unable to get anything done and dissolved in frustration after only three months; three more Dumas were elected between 1906 and 1917, but they did little better.

Overall, the 1905 revolution was a failure, but Lenin learned some important lessons from it. The most important was his dealings with non-Marxist revolutionaries, most of whom quit when Lenin felt the revolution was just beginning. After that he would never look for support from anyone who was less committed to the cause than he was. To the Bolsheviks, 1905 was a dress rehearsal; the next time a revolution came they would know exactly what to do.

Because the tsar did not keep his promises, 1906 and 1907 were years of unrest; revolutionaries and common criminals went on a spree of violence, killing 4,383 people (more than half of them state officials) and wounding 3,453. The new prime minister, a conservative named Pyotr A. Stolypin, struck back with military tribunals that arrested, convicted, and executed 1,144 people; soon the hangman's noose was called "Stolypin's necktie". But Stolypin was no blind reactionary; he felt that the best way to insure future peace and prosperity was to help the country's largest economic group: the peasants. To do this he launched an agrarian revolution of his own. All debts that the peasants still owed the state were canceled, and new land was offered to them at moderate prices. He also made it legal for peasants to leave the village commune (mir) and work for private profit, or even to run for elective office in local governments. For the first time the peasants were given a fair chance to prosper. But while Stolypin was befriending the farmers, everybody else disliked him and his reforms. The conservatives, still Slavophiles at heart, saw the mir as the ideal village society, and the revolutionaries hated him not only for his security measures, but also because no revolutionary likes a reformer who claims he can do peacefully what a revolutionary plans to accomplish with violence. In 1911, while attending an opera with the tsar in Kiev, Stolypin was assassinated by a Social Revolutionary who was also, in the strange Russian tradition, a police agent.

Meanwhile, the royal family came under the influence of one of the strangest figures in Russian history, Grigori Y. Rasputin. An unkempt Siberian "holy man" who smelled like a goat, Rasputin first gained the attention of the Empress Alexandra because her only son, Alexis, had hemophilia, and his bleeding spells would stop whenever Rasputin was around. This gave him a reputation as a miracle worker, and he gained a powerful influence over her, and through her the tsar and the government. With his hypnotic eyes he seduced the women of St. Petersburg, calling his bedroom "the holy of holies" and declaring that "great sins made possible great repentances".⁽¹⁰⁾ The competent members of the government, including Stolypin, warned the tsar that this "mad monk" was a dangerous charlatan, but to no avail.

World War I

The spark that started the war came from the Balkans, a region so politically unstable that people were calling it "the powder keg of Europe." In the three dozen years following the Russo-Turkish war there had been four more Balkan conflicts, in 1885 (Bulgaria vs. Serbia), 1897 (Greece vs. Turkey), 1912 (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria vs. Turkey), and in 1913 (Serbia, Greece, Romania and Turkey vs. Bulgaria). None of the new borders created by these conflicts satisfied everybody, and every nationality in the region came to hate its neighbors. On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the aged Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Austria sent Serbia a list of demands involving the investigation of the murder, to which Serbia agreed except for one: permitting the Austrian police to conduct their investigations in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. No sovereign state could allow that and keep its independence, so Serbia rejected it and Austria declared war.

The Russian Empire had always been a friend of Serbia, but the last two times there had been an Austro-Serbian quarrel (1908 & 1913), Russia could not help; this time the Russians felt they could not let the Serbs down again, so the call was made to mobilize. That brought in other countries, bound by the treaties signed over the past generation; Germany mobilized to support Austria, France and Britain came to the rescue of Russia, and World War I was on.

Expecting an easy victory, the huge Russian army went into the war with high spirits. With six million men available for active duty, and another nine million in the reserves, Russia had by far the largest army on either side. But transportation was still substandard, and equipment for the troops was out of date, and often unavailable. One third of the soldiers did not even have guns, and they were told to stay in the rear until they could grab the rifles of fallen comrades. Indeed, the Russian army was lucky to have firearms at all. The Minister of War, a corpulent general by the name of Vladimir Sukhomlinov, could not understand why anyone would discard the glorious saber for firearms. In 1913 he had discharged five instructors from the War College for teaching the virtues of firepower; "All these things," he declared, "are merely vicious innovations."

These shortcomings were not obvious in the first three weeks of the war, as Russia took Galicia from Austria (whose army was in equally bad shape), and part of East Prussia from Germany. But the Russian units moved at a snail's pace and used uncoded radio signals, allowing the Germans to know exactly what they were doing. On August 26 one of the armies in East Prussia blundered into a trap at Tannenberg and was destroyed; by the middle of September the Germans had driven the other one out as well.

In the summer of 1915 the Germans followed up this victory with a combined Austro-German offensive that cleared the Russians out of Poland completely. The Russians were now too far away to save Serbia, which was crushed by Austria and Bulgaria in October. In response to all this bad news, the tsar went to the front and assumed personal responsibility for the conduct of the war, but things did not get any better. In fact they got worse, because the empress and Rasputin were now running the government in Petrograd (the capital's name since 1914; St. Petersburg sounded too German). During the last eighteen months of Romanov rule the empire had four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three foreign ministers and three ministers of war, all hired & fired on the personal whims of the empress. She bombarded Nicholas daily with letters and telegrams and even interfered with the conduct of military operations. And rumors about Rasputin's role at the court filtered down to the front and undermined the soldiers' morale. As for the Germans, they halted their advance eastward because they considered fighting the British, French and Belgians to be their first priority; for the rest of the war they would keep the Russians from winning in the east and send every man they could spare to the western front, an insulting assessment of Russia's fighting ability.

The only time things looked better for Russia was in June of 1916, when the tsar's only good general, Alexei A. Brusilov, punched a hole in the Austrian front and was rewarded with a general collapse of that sector, allowing him to retake eastern Galicia. Austria's Czech and Slovene units had always performed a bit reluctantly when fighting their Slavic brothers; now they simply threw away their weapons and ran. The Russians took more than a quarter million of them prisoner. In the Caucasus, a similar offensive conquered the northeastern part of Turkey. But the Brusilov offensive was the last gasp of imperial Russia; it ended in September when German reinforcements arrived on the scene. In December a conspiracy of five nobles, including a cousin of the tsar, murdered Rasputin⁽¹¹⁾, but it was too late to save the empire. The events that followed, starting with the downfall of the Romanovs and finishing with the establishment of communism, would make 1917 the most momentous year in Russian history.

2. The one who drilled the "troops," Scottish general Sir Patrick Gordon, noted with dismay that in one war game 24 young men were killed, and a five-pound rocket took off the head of a boyar.

3. But not those on the Don; they revolted under Konrad Bulavin, and Peter had to suppress them in a separate campaign.

4. "God knows where she gets them!" exclaimed Peter at a state banquet.

5. Maria Theresa didn't want to do it and cried over the fate of the Poles. Consequently she only took 62,500 square miles.

6. "What is Europe? WE are Europe!" was one of the exclamations Alexander made at the meeting.

7. Bessarabia is modern Moldova, the land between the Prut & Dniester rivers; he grabbed it from the Turks in 1812.

8. To avoid confusion later on, I should explain that many Russian revolutionaries adopted aliases to keep ahead of the tsar's secret police. Plekhanov, for example, called himself Volgin, after the Volga River. Vladimir Ulyanov wanted everyone to know he was greater than Volgin, so he picked a longer river, the Lena in Siberia, hence Lenin. Lev Davidovitch Bronstein took the name of a former jailer, Leon Trotsky, and the party's token Georgian, Yosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, became "the Man of Steel"--Stalin.

9. For more details on the Russo-Japanese War, read my Japanese history.

10. And guess who provided the great sins?

11. Rasputin had a demon's constitution. He was first fed poisoned cakes, then shot; when neither did more than slow him up, he was hogtied and thrown into the icy Neva River by his assailants. This time he stayed dead, but the official autopsy reported that he even managed to free himself from the ropes that held him, only to run out of air before reaching the surface.
Three weeks before his death, Rasputin wrote a chilling letter to the tsar that read as follows:

"I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1st. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother and to the children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear, remain on your throne and govern, and you, Russian Tsar, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigory has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people . . . I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family."

Four prophecies in that letter were fulfilled: that Rasputin would die in the same year, that a civil war would follow his death, that Russia would be without nobles for twenty-five years, and that the royal family would be killed by ordinary Russians within two years. Did Rasputin have the last laugh from beyond the grave?

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball