A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Alexander Alexandrovich was a model representative of that small and privileged tribe who administered the affairs of the imperial state.

The Russian imperial bureaucracy was an elite caste set above the rest of society. In this sense it was not unlike the Communist bureaucracy that was to succeed it. The tsarist system was based upon a strict social hierarchy. At its apex was the court; below that, its pillars of support in the civil and military service, and the Church, made up by the members of the first two estates; and at the bottom of the social order, the peasantry. There was a close link between the autocracy and this rigid pyramid of social estates (nobles, clergy, merchantry and peasants), which were ranked in accordance with their service to the state. It was a fixed social hierarchy with each estate demarcated by specific legal rights and duties. Nicholas compared it with the patrimonial system. 'I conceive of Russia as a landed estate,' he declared in 1902, 'of which the proprietor is the Tsar, the administrator is the nobility, and the workers are the peasantry.' He could not have chosen a more archaic metaphor for society at the turn of the twentieth century.

Despite the rapid progress of commerce and industry during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Russia's ruling elite still came predominantly from the old landed aristocracy. Noblemen accounted for 71 per cent of the

top four Civil Service ranks (i.e. above the rank of civil councillor) in the census of 1897. True, the doors of the Civil Service were being opened to the sons of commoners, so long as they had a university degree or a high-school diploma with honours. True, too, the gap was growing, both in terms of social background and in terms of ethos, between the service nobles and the farming gentry. Many of the service nobles had sold their estates, moving permanently into the city, or indeed had never owned land, having been ennobled for their service to the state. In other words, the Civil Service was becoming just as much a path to nobility as nobility was to the Civil Service. It also had its own elite values, which only the crudest Marxist would seek to portray as synonymous with the 'class interests' of the landed nobles. Nevertheless, the aphorism of the writer Iurii Samarin, that 'the bureaucrat is just a nobleman in uniform, and the nobleman just a bureaucrat in a dressing-gown', remained generally true in 1900. Russia was still an old agrarian kingdom and its ruling elite was still dominated by the richest landowning families. These were the Stroganovs, the Dolgorukovs, the Sheremetevs, the Obolenskys, the Volkonskys, and so on, powerful dynasties which had stood near the summit of the Muscovite state during its great territorial expansion between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land, mainly in the south of Russia and the Ukraine.² Dependence on the state for their wealth, and indeed for most of their employment, had prevented the Russian aristocracy from developing into an independent landowning class counter-balancing the monarchy in the way that thev had done in most of Europe since the sixteenth century.

As readers of Gogol will know, the imperial Civil Service was obsessed by rank and hierarchy. An elaborate set of rules, spelled out in 869 paragraphs of Volume I of the Code of Laws, distinguished between fourteen different Civil Service ranks, each with its own appropriate uniform and title (all of them translations from the German). Polovtsov, for example, on his appointment as Imperial Secretary, received the dark-blue ribbon and the silver star of the Order of the White Eagle. Like all Civil Servants in the top two ranks, he was to be addressed as 'Your High Excellency'; those in ranks 3 and 4 were to be addressed as 'Your Excellency'; and so on down the scale, with those in the bottom ranks (9 to 14) addressed simply as 'Your Honour'. The cbinovnik, or Civil Servant, was acutely aware of these status symbols. The progression from white to black trousers, the switch from a red to a blue ribbon, or the simple addition of a stripe, were ritual events of immense significance in his well- ordered life. Promotion was determined by the Table of Ranks established in 1722 by Peter the Great. An official could hold only those posts at or below his own personal rank. In 1856 standard intervals were set for promotion: one rank every three years from ranks 14 to 8; and one every four years from ranks 8 to 5. The top four ranks, which brought with them a hereditary title, were appointed directly by the Tsar. This

meant that, barring some heinous sin, even the most average bureaucrat could expect to rise automatically with age, becoming, say, a civil councillor by the age of sixty-five. The system encouraged the sort of time-serving mediocrity which writers like Gogol portrayed as the essence of officialdom in nineteenth-century Russia. By the end of the century, however, this system of automatic advancement was falling into disuse as merit became more important than age.³

Still, the top ranks in St Petersburg were dominated by a very small elite of noble families. This was a tiny political world in which everyone knew each other. All the people who mattered lived in the fashionable residential streets around the Nevsky and the Liteiny Prospekts. They were closely connected through marriage and friendship. Most of them patronized the same elite schools (the Corps des Pages, the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns and Cavalry Junkers, the Alexander Lycee and the School of Law) and their sons joined the same elite regiments (the Chevaliers Gardes, the Horse Guards, the Emperors Own Life Guard Hussar Regiment and the Preobrazhensky), from which they could be certain of a fast lane to the top of the civil or military service. Social connections were essential in this world, as Polovtsov's diary reveals, for much of the real business of politics was done at balls and banquets, in private salons and drawing-rooms, in the restaurant of the Evropeiskaya Hotel and the bar of the Imperial Yacht Club. This was an exclusive world but not a stuffy one. The St Petersburg aristocracy was far too cosmopolitan to be really snobbish. 'Petersburg was not Vienna,' as Dominic Lieven reminds us in his magisterial study of the Russian ruling elite, and there was always a place in its aristocratic circles for charmers and eccentrics. Take, for example, Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, one of Nicholas II's better foreign ministers, an octogenarian grand seigneur, collector of Hebrew books and French mistresses, who 'sparkled in salons' and 'attended church in his dressing-gown'; or Prince M. I. Khilkov, a 'scion of one of Russia's oldest aristocratic families', who worked for a number of years as an engine driver in South America and as a shipwright in Liverpool before becoming Russia's Minister of Communications.⁴

Despite its talents, the bureaucracy never really became an effective tool in the hands of the autocracy. There were three main reasons for this. First, its dependence on the nobility became a source of weakness as the noble estate fell into decline during the later nineteenth century. There was an increasing shortfall in expertise (especially in the industrial field) to meet the demands of the modern state. The gap might have been bridged by recruiting Civil Servants from the new industrial middle classes. But the ruling elite was far too committed to its own archaic vision of the tsarist order, in which the gentry had pride of place, and feared the democratic threat posed by these new classes. Second, the apparatus was too poorly financed (it was very difficult to collect enough taxes in such a vast and poor peasant country) so that the ministries, and still more

local government, never really had the resources they needed either to control or reform society. Finally, there were too many overlapping jurisdictions and divisions between the different ministries. This was a result of the way the state had developed, with each ministry growing as a separate, almost ad hoc, extension of the autocrat's own powers. The agencies of government were never properly systematized, nor their work co-ordinated, arguably because it was in the Tsar's best interests to keep them weak and dependent upon him. Each Tsar would patronize a different set of agencies in a given policy field, often simply bypassing those set up by his predecessors. The result was bureaucratic chaos and confusion. Each ministry was left to develop on its own without a cabinet- like body to coordinate the work between them. The two major ministries (Finance and Interior) recruited people through their own clienteles in the elite families and schools. They competed with each other for resources, for control of policy and for influence over lesser ministries and local government. There was no clear distinction between the functions of the different agencies, nor between the status of different laws — nakaz, ukaz, ustav, zakon, polozhenie, ulozhenie, gramota and manifest, to name just a few — so that the Tsar's personal intervention was constantly required to unhook these knots of competing jurisdiction and legislation. From the perspective of the individual, the effect of this confusion was to make the regime appear arbitrary: it was never clear where the real power lay, whether one law would be overridden by special regulations from the Tsar, or whether the police would respect the law at all. Some complacent philosophers argued on this basis that there was in fact no real autocracy. 'There is an autocracy of policeman and land captains, of governors, department heads, and ministers,' wrote Prince Sergei Trubetskoi in 1900. 'But a unitary tsarist autocracy, in the proper sense of the word, does not and cannot exist.' To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness (what the Russians cursed as proizvol) that made the regime's power feel