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

its work if another catastrophe was to be avoided. The zemstvos, which had spent the past decade battling to expand their activities in the face of growing bureaucratic opposition, were now strengthened by widespread support from the liberal public for their work in agronomy, public health and education. The liberal Moscow merchants and industrialists, who had rallied behind the relief campaign, now began to question the government's policies of industrialization, which seemed so ruinous for the peasantry, the main buyers of their manufactures. From the middle of the 1890s they too supported the various projects of the zemstvos and municipal bodies to revive the rural economy. Physicians, teachers and engineers, who had all been forced to organize themselves as a result of their involvement in the relief campaign, now began to demand more professional autonomy and influence over public policy; and when they failed to make any advances they began to campaign for political reforms. In the press, in the 'thick journals', in the universities, and in learned and philanthropic societies, the debates on the causes of the famine — and on the reforms needed to prevent its recurrence — continued to rage throughout the 1890s, long after the immediate crisis had passed.⁶

The socialist opposition, which had been largely dormant in the 1880s, sprang back into life with a renewed vigour as a result of these debates. There was a revival of the Populist movement (later rechristened Neo- Populism), culminating in 1901 with the establishment of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Under the leadership of Viktor Chernov (1873—1952), a law graduate from Moscow University who had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for his role in the student movement, it embraced the new Marxist sociology whilst still adhering to the Populist belief that all the workers and peasants alike — what it called the 'labouring people' — were united by their poverty and their opposition to the regime. Briefly, then, in the wake of the famine, there was growing unity between the Marxists and the Neo-Populists as they put aside their differences about the development of capitalism (which the SRs now accepted as a fact) and concentrated on the democratic struggle. Lydia Dan, from the Marxist side, recalled this as a 'new era . . . when it was not so much

the struggle for socialism that was important for us as the political struggle ... [which] could and should become nationwide'.⁷

Marxism as a social science was fast becoming the national creed: it alone seemed to explain the causes of the famine. Universities and learned societies were swept along by the new intellectual fashion. Even such well- established institutions as the Free Economic Society fell under the influence of the Marxists, who produced libraries of social statistics, dressed up as studies of the causes of the great starvation, to prove the truth of Marx's economic laws. Socialists who had previously wavered in their Marxism were now completely converted in the wake of the famine crisis, when, it seemed to them, there was no more hope in the Populist faith in the peasantry. Petr Struve (1870—1944), who had previously thought of himself as a political liberal, found his Marxist passions stirred by the crisis: it 'made much more of a Marxist out of me than the reading of Marx's Capital'. Martov also recalled how the crisis had turned him into a Marxist: 'It suddenly became clear to me how superficial and groundless the whole of my revolutionism had been until then, and how my subjective political romanticism was dwarfed before the philosophical and sociological heights of Marxism.'⁸ Even the young Lenin only became converted to the Marxist mainstream in the wake of the famine crisis.

In short, the whole of society had been politicized and radicalized as a result of the famine crisis. The conflict between the population and the regime had been set in motion — and there was now no turning back. In the words of Lydia Dan, the famine had been a vital landmark in the history of the revolution because it had shown to the youth of her generation 'that the Russian system was completely bankrupt. It felt as though Russia was on the brink of something.'⁹

* * * This political awakening of the public was part of the broader social changes that lie at the root of the revolution. From the 1890s can be dated the emergence of a civil society, a public sphere and an ethic, all in opposition to the tsarist state. The time was passing when, in the words of Miliukov, the autocracy had been 'the only organized force' in Russia and had been able to dominate a weak and divided society. Now that relationship was being reversed. The institutions of society were becoming more independent and organized, while the tsarist state was steadily becoming weaker and less able to control them. The famine crisis was the crucial turning-point in this process, the moment when Russian society first became politically aware of itself and its powers, of its duties to 'the people', and of the potential it had to govern itself. It was the moment, in a sense, when Russia first became a 'nation'.

Profound social changes were pulling this public culture on to the political scene. The old hierarchy of social estates (soshviia), which the autocracy

had created to organize society around its own needs, was breaking down as a new and much more mobile social system began to take shape. Men born as peasants, even as serfs, rose to establish themselves as merchants and landowners, teachers, doctors, engineers, writers, publishers and patrons of the arts. The sons and daughters of noblemen entered the liberal professions. Merchants became noblemen. Marriages between the estates became commonplace. Overall, people neither could nor wanted any longer to define themselves in the old and rigid terms.¹⁰

This new civil society was too complicated to be described in crude terms of 'class'. For one thing, it was defined much less by social position than by politics and culture. The world-view of the intelligentsia — based on the notion of public service and the liberal values of the West — defined its identity. The intelligentsia had always been made up of people from diverse social backgrounds, and had claimed to stand for 'the nation' as a whole. And this universalist tradition shaped the ethics and the language of this nascent public sphere. Educated liberals talked of serving the 'public good' (obsbchestvennost'), expressed as 'society' or 'the nation', as opposed to the old noble ethic of service to the tsarist state. They called their politicians 'public men' (obsbchestvennye deiateli). And indeed it was an important part of the whole rhetorical process of defining this 'political nation' — which meant setting it apart from the 'alien' tsarist state — that its leaders should be honoured with a generic name that made them patriots of the people's cause. A national political culture based on the ideals and institutions of the intelligentsia was coalescing in Russia. An active public was emerging in opposition to the old regime and demanding the rights of an independent citizenry. The spread of higher education, of public opinion and activity, shaped this emerging public culture. Between I860 and 1914 the number of university students in Russia grew from 5,000 to 69,000 (45 per cent of them women); the number of daily newspapers rose from 13 to 856; and the number of public bodies from 250 to over 16,000.ⁿ

These were the signs of a new middle stratum between the aristocracy and the peasants and the working class. But it was much too fragile in social terms to deserve the robust title of a 'middle class'. The industrial 'bourgeoisie', which in the West had led the way in the forging of a middle-class identity, was too weak and dependent on the state, too fragmented by regional and ethnic divisions, and too isolated from the educated elite, to play the same role in tsarist Russia, although this was the belated aim of the liberal Moscow businessmen of the Riabushinsky circle in the 1900s.¹² Indeed an awareness of its own fragility and isolation was a crucial aspect of the self-identity of this fledgling 'census society' (tsenzovoe obshchestvo). As the liberal and educated public became more conscious of itself and of its leading role in politics, so it also grew more conscious of the huge and frightening gulf — a gulf revealed by the

famine — separating it from the hungry masses. As in South Africa under apartheid, there was always a time-bomb of violent revolution ticking in the cupboard of liberal politics.

Two main groups stood in the forefront of this public campaign during the decade leading up to the Revolution of 1905: the liberal 'zemstvo men' and the students.

The 'zemstvo men' were unlikely pioneers of the revolution. Most of them were noble landowners, progressive and practical men like Prince Lvov, who simply wanted the monarchy to play a positive role in improving the life of its subjects. They sought to increase the influence of the zemstvos in the framing of government legislation, but the notion of leading a broad opposition movement was repugnant to them. Prince Lvov's mentor, D. N. Shipov, who