16.6: Russia

In the context of 19th Century European politics, the histories of Great Britain and Russia were always exceptional. Neither underwent revolutionary upheavals, and neither had much difficulty suppressing nationalist movements from within their respective empires. And yet, the two countries were in many ways polar opposites.: Britain was an advanced industrial economy with a liberal constitution and a monarchy whose real political power declined over time. Meanwhile, Russia was an overwhelmingly agricultural - even feudal - economy with a powerful, autocratic head of state: the Tsar. The modernizing trends that changed much of the rest of Europe over the course of the century had the least impact on Russia of any of the major states.

Tsar Alexander I (r.1801 – 1825) was intensely conservative and had a powerful attraction to Orthodox Christian mysticism. In turn, he sincerely believed that he had a mission from God to maintain the sacred order of monarchy, nobility, and clergy. Becoming Tsar shortly after Napoleon seized power in France, Alexander believed the event was an unholy abomination, a perversion of the proper order of society as it had been ordained from on high. Ultimately, largely due to the winter and the brilliant tactical decision to camp out and wait for the French to run out of supplies, Russia defeated Napoleon's armies in 1812. Alexander sat in a position of great power at the Congress of Vienna because of the strength of his armies and aiding in the French's defeats of 1814 and 1815.

In 1815, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and, technically, the restored French monarchy formed the Holy Alliance that vowed to crush attempts to overthrow the social and political order with force. For Austria, this was a pragmatic gesture because the Habsburgs had to the most to lose in the face of nationalism. For Prussia, it was a way to cement their great power status and to be treated as an equal by the other members of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. For Russia and for Alexander, however, it was nothing less than a true holy mission that had to happen regardless of any practical benefits. Russia did indeed intervene to crush rebellions over the course of the next few decades, most importantly in 1848, when it decimated the Hungarian Revolution and returned Hungary to the Austrians.

Alexander I died in 1825, and his death promptly set off the Decembrist Uprising., which was crushed by his younger brother and heir Nicholas (r. 1825 - 1855). Much less of a mystic than his brother had been, Nicholas was equally trenchant in his opposition to any loosening of the Russian social order. During his rule, he championed the conservative cause, was a staunch supporter of the Holy Alliance, and formed the world's first modern secret police force, The Third Section. Nicholas declared his three principles of government: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality, the last of the three in service to the idea of Russian supremacy over its enormous empire and the other ethnic groups present in it.

19th Century Tsars were mostly arch-conservatives, and the vast majority of the Russian population had no interest in political change. The Russian serfs were among Europe's poorest, least educated, and most oppressed. The Russian Orthodox Church was closely tied to the government and preached total obedience to the authority of the Tsar. For that tiny sliver of educated society that could read and had access to foreign books, to discuss politics at all and advocate reform of any kind, was a punishable crime. Thousands were exiled to Siberia for making an off-hand remark about politics or owning a book describing a political concept originating in the west.

Figure 16.6.1: Tsar Nicholas I, architect of nineteenth-century Russian autocracy.

The Russian intelligentsia mostly belonged to the noble class: a small class of educated and very self-consciously cultured people who were at the forefront of Russian literature and artistic creation. They began modern Russian literature, containing great novelists like Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Their art dealt with both the thorny political issues of their time and a kind of ongoing spiritual quest to understand the Russian “soul,” something that was usually identified with both nature and the mystical qualities of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Reading or discussing anything to do with politics was sufficient cause for arrest and exile to Siberia. As a result, many of the great novelists spent at least part of their lives in Siberia. Even Dostoevsky, a deeply conservative thinker hostile to radical or even disruptive politics, spent part of his life in exile. To be an intellectual was almost the equivalent of being a criminal in the eyes of the state. The police apparatus that matured under Nicholas I’s rule perpetuated this phenomenon.

A momentous event occurred late in Nicholas’s reign unrelated to Tsarist autocracy: the destruction of the Congress System created at the Congress of Vienna via the Crimean War. From 1854 – 1856, Russia tried to take advantage of the political decline of the Ottoman Empire to assert total control in the region of the Black Sea, and both France and Britain recognized those machinations as a threat to the balance of power. The Austrian government unwisely stayed neutral, which ruptured the alliance between it and Russia (after all, Russia had just put down the Hungarian uprising on Austria’s behalf during the Revolutions of 1848).

While not long by the standards of the Napoleonic period, the Crimean War was nevertheless a major conflict. 600,000 men died, the majority from disease due to the abysmal conditions at the front. Russia ultimately lost, and the Congress System was finally undone. From that point on, the great powers of Europe feared and resented each other more so than they feared revolutionary forces from within. One manifestation of this newfound rivalry was the wars that saw the birth of Italy and Germany.

When Nicholas finally died in 1855, and his son Alexander II took the throne. In 1861, following Russia’s defeat, Alexander made the momentous decision to emancipate the serfs, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States freed the African-American slaves. Russian elites thought that Russia had lost the war because of its backwardness. This backwardness could not be mitigated with serfdom weighing down the possibility of progress. However, emancipation had surprisingly little immediate impact on Russian society, because the serfs legally owed the government the money that had been distributed to buy their freedom from the nobility. Thus, for generations, serfs were still tied to the same land, laboring to survive and to pay off the debt incurred with their “freedom.”

Ironically, Alexander II was assassinated by a radical terrorist group. The People's Will believed that the assassination of a Tsar would result in an enormous uprising of the newly-”liberated” peasants (i.e. the former serfs). In this, they were inspired by the anarchist socialism of the exiled Mikhail Bakunin, whose vision of an apocalyptic revolutionary transformation spoke directly to the social and political conditions of his native Russia.

Before the assassination, young members of the intelligentsia formed a social movement known as the Narodniks. The members advocated going “back to the people,” living among and trying to educate the former serfs beginning in the spring of 1874. The serfs would form the nucleus of a revolutionary class that would rise up and dismantle Tsarist autocracy. Instead, the serfs were deeply suspicious of the urban, educated Narodniks. In many cases, the serfs actually turned the Narodniks into the local authorities. The disappointed Narodniks formed the People’s Will, which killed Alexander II in March 1881.

While The People’s Will had hoped that their assassination of Alexander II would result in a spontaneous uprising of the peasants against Tsarist despotism, nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, another reactionary Tsar, Alexander III, came to the throne and ruthlessly hunted down the terrorist groups. Now, there were terrorist groups, not just intellectuals guilty of discussing politics. One thing that practically every intellectual in Russian society (terrorist or not) believed was that meaningful change would require a significant, even radical, restructuring of Russian society. There was no room for weak-kneed reformism; it was a revolution or nothing. In this environment, Vladimir Lenin, future Bolsheviks, and the leaders of the Russian Communist Party were born. A brilliant intellectual, Lenin would synthesize the writings of Marx with the tradition of Russian radical terrorism, producing a potent combination of theoretical and practical political concepts that were realized in 1917.

By the late 19th Century, Russia had changed the least among the great powers of Europe. Whereas the other states, from Austria to the new Germany to France, had all adopted at least some form of representative government, Russia remained staunchly autocratic and monarchical. The Russian economy was overwhelmingly agricultural and rural, with industrialization only arriving at the very end of the century in and around some of the large cities of western Russia. In a sense, Russia was stuck in a historical impasse that would only end with outright revolution, first in 1905 and again in 1917.

Russia in 1871

Source: TimeMaps