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Authors: David Priestland
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in a common enterprise, not as cannon-fodder or milch-cows.
A series of military defeats – by the British and Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War (1853–6), by the Japanese (1904–5) and by the Germans in the Great War – forced some of the Tsar’s officials to recognize that the
ancien régime
was not working; reformers realized that the empire had to become something like a unified nation state, with modern industry and agriculture. The divisions within society had to be overcome and an emotional bond forged between people and the state. Against them, however, were ranged conservatives who feared reform would undermine the monarchy and the hierarchies which were its foundation. The result was a series of unstable compromises, which only partially integrated the population into the political system, and increased popular resentment. Alexander II introduced a series of reforms in the 1850s and 1860s, the most important of which, the emancipation of the serfs, legally freed the peasants. But they still had an inferior legal status, and they did not receive the land they believed was their due. They also continued to be tied to the ancient village ‘commune’ (
obshchina
) – an ancient institution of local self-regulation – the better to control and tax them. The peasants’ anger at the inequitable settlement, expressed as a populist, almost anarchistic resentment against the state, continued to simmer until the Bolsheviks gave them land in 1917. 8
If the peasantry, a separate estate, remained isolated and discriminated against, the working class was completely excluded from the estate structure, despite its growing size during Russia’s belated industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s. Pudovkin’s ‘Lad’ was typical of the millions who left the increasingly overpopulated countryside for industry in the towns. In the fifty years before 1917 the urban population of Russia quadrupled from 7 to 28 million; and whilst the industrial working class was still a relatively small 3.6 million, it was highly concentrated in the politically important cities. On arriving in the city, workers sometimes joined informal communities, or ‘artels’. The worker Kanatchikov remembered his group of fifteen men, who rented an apartment and ate cabbage soup every day together from a common bowl with wooden spoons, celebrating their twice-monthly pay-cheque with ‘wild carousing’. 9 But workers were not allowed to organize themselves into trade unions or any larger bodies, at least before 1905, and so the rich culture of the German unions and SPD was completely lacking. However, resentment at poor conditions and treatment remained; indeed theworkers’ impotence fuelled it. The worker A. I. Shapovalov recalled in his memoirs his attitude towards his boss:
At the sight of his fat belly and healthy red face I not only did not take off my hat, but in my eyes, against my will, there flared up a terrible fire of hatred when I saw him. I had the mindless idea of grabbing him by the throat, throwing him to the ground, and stamping on his fat belly with my feet. 10
Eventually, Kanatchikov and Shapovalov, and many other so-called ‘conscious’ workers, decided to act on their anger by joining a larger organization. But it was to the radical intelligentsia that they looked for leadership – another group excluded from the estate system, and determined to overcome Russia’s divisions and accelerate its modernization.
III
From the middle of the 1860s, the Russian authorities became worried about a new fashion amongst young educated people: women were escaping their highly restrictive families by contracting fictitious marriages; the newly-weds would then separate after the wedding, or live together without consummating the relationship. The police were also concerned with what they saw as a related phenomenon: the popularity of the
ménage à trois
. They located the roots of this subversive behaviour in an extraordinarily
A series of military defeats – by the British and Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War (1853–6), by the Japanese (1904–5) and by the Germans in the Great War – forced some of the Tsar’s officials to recognize that the
ancien régime
was not working; reformers realized that the empire had to become something like a unified nation state, with modern industry and agriculture. The divisions within society had to be overcome and an emotional bond forged between people and the state. Against them, however, were ranged conservatives who feared reform would undermine the monarchy and the hierarchies which were its foundation. The result was a series of unstable compromises, which only partially integrated the population into the political system, and increased popular resentment. Alexander II introduced a series of reforms in the 1850s and 1860s, the most important of which, the emancipation of the serfs, legally freed the peasants. But they still had an inferior legal status, and they did not receive the land they believed was their due. They also continued to be tied to the ancient village ‘commune’ (
obshchina
) – an ancient institution of local self-regulation – the better to control and tax them. The peasants’ anger at the inequitable settlement, expressed as a populist, almost anarchistic resentment against the state, continued to simmer until the Bolsheviks gave them land in 1917. 8
If the peasantry, a separate estate, remained isolated and discriminated against, the working class was completely excluded from the estate structure, despite its growing size during Russia’s belated industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s. Pudovkin’s ‘Lad’ was typical of the millions who left the increasingly overpopulated countryside for industry in the towns. In the fifty years before 1917 the urban population of Russia quadrupled from 7 to 28 million; and whilst the industrial working class was still a relatively small 3.6 million, it was highly concentrated in the politically important cities. On arriving in the city, workers sometimes joined informal communities, or ‘artels’. The worker Kanatchikov remembered his group of fifteen men, who rented an apartment and ate cabbage soup every day together from a common bowl with wooden spoons, celebrating their twice-monthly pay-cheque with ‘wild carousing’. 9 But workers were not allowed to organize themselves into trade unions or any larger bodies, at least before 1905, and so the rich culture of the German unions and SPD was completely lacking. However, resentment at poor conditions and treatment remained; indeed theworkers’ impotence fuelled it. The worker A. I. Shapovalov recalled in his memoirs his attitude towards his boss:
At the sight of his fat belly and healthy red face I not only did not take off my hat, but in my eyes, against my will, there flared up a terrible fire of hatred when I saw him. I had the mindless idea of grabbing him by the throat, throwing him to the ground, and stamping on his fat belly with my feet. 10
Eventually, Kanatchikov and Shapovalov, and many other so-called ‘conscious’ workers, decided to act on their anger by joining a larger organization. But it was to the radical intelligentsia that they looked for leadership – another group excluded from the estate system, and determined to overcome Russia’s divisions and accelerate its modernization.
III
From the middle of the 1860s, the Russian authorities became worried about a new fashion amongst young educated people: women were escaping their highly restrictive families by contracting fictitious marriages; the newly-weds would then separate after the wedding, or live together without consummating the relationship. The police were also concerned with what they saw as a related phenomenon: the popularity of the
ménage à trois
. They located the roots of this subversive behaviour in an extraordinarily
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