to underline their rudeness.' Another landowner remarked on returning to his Tula estate in 1908:
Externally everything appeared to have returned to normal. But something essential, something irreparable had occurred within the people themselves. A general feeling of fear had undermined all trust. After a lifetime of security — no one ever locked their doors and windows in the evening — the nobles concerned themselves with weapons and personally made the rounds to test their security measures.
Many nobles complained of a rise in peasant crime, vandalism and 'hooliganism'. They would find farm buildings and machines smashed, or would have to deal with distraught daughters who had been harassed by the villagers. This new militant assertiveness and impatience with the nobles was reflected in village songs, such as this one from 1912:
At night I strut around, And rich men don't get in my way. Just let some rich guy try, And I'll screw his head on upside-down.76
The revolution luridly exposed the peasants' deep hatred of the gentry. They resented having to give back the land they had briefly taken in the 'days of freedom'. Through hostile looks and petty acts of vandalism they were letting it be known that the land was 'theirs' and that as soon as the old regime was weakened once more they would again reclaim it.
The provincial squires, many of whom supported the liberal reform movement in 1904—5, now became, for the most part, inactive or stalwart supporters of reaction. Many of them took fright from the peasant violence and sold their estates to move back to the city: between 1906 and 1914 the gentry sold one-fifth of its land to the peasants; and in the most rebellious regions in 1905—6 the proportion was nearer one-third. But among the majority who chose to remain on the land there was a hardening resolution to defend their property rights. They called loudly for the restoration of law and order. Some local squires hired their own private armies to protect their estates from vandalism and arson. Many of the largest, in particular, joined the United Nobility and the other landowners' organizations established after 1905. This 'gentry reaction'
was reflected in the changing nature of the zemstvos, which were transformed from liberal institutions into pillars of conservatism. In their liberal days the zemstvos had sought to improve conditions for the peasantry, but after 1905 they became increasingly focused on the gentry's narrowest concerns. Even the liberal-minded Prince Lvov was voted off the provincial board of the Tula zemstvo during the winter of 1905—6, and had to stand again as an urban delegate. Count Bobrinsky, the leader of the United Nobility, and ironically Lvov's brother-in-law, condemned him as a 'dangerous liberal'.77
The squires were not the only gentlemen who feared the lower classes more and more. Propertied society in general had been forced to confront the frightening reality of a violent revolution, and the prospect of it erupting again — no doubt with still more violence — filled its members with horror. The next revolution, it now seemed clear, would not be a bloodless celebration of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. It would come as a terrible storm, a violent explosion of suppressed anger and hatred from the dispossessed, which would sweep away the old civilization. Here was the awesome vision of poets such as Blok and Belyi, who portrayed Russia after 1905 as an active and unstable volcano.
Such fears were reflected in the darkening mood of bourgeois language towards the 'mob' in the wake of 1905. In place of the earlier benign view of the urban poor as a 'colourful lot, worthy of compassion', there was now a growing fear of what Belyi called the 'many-thousand human swarm'. The boulevard press and periodicals fed on this growing bourgeois moral panic — reminiscent of our own concerns today about the rise of an 'underclass' — and editorialized on the breakdown of the social order, juvenile crime and delinquency, violent attacks on the well- to-do, disrespect towards authority, and even working-class promiscuity. All 'rough' behaviour by the lower classes was increasingly seen as aggressive and condemned as 'hooliganism' — as indeed were organized labour protests which liberal society in previous years had viewed with some sympathy. In other words, there was no longer any clear distinction in the minds of the respectable classes between criminal hooliganism and violent but justifiable protest. The Revolution of 1905 was now roundly condemned as a form of 'madness', a 'psychic epidemic', in the words of one psychologist, which had merely stirred up the 'base instincts' of the mob. There was less compassion for the poor on the part of this frightened bourgeoisie, and this was reflected in the falling rate of their contributions to charity.78
As the liberal conscience of their class, the {Cadets agonized over the dilemmas which this growing threat of violence raised for their support of the revolution. On the one hand, they had been drawn into an alliance with the street, if only because there were no political alternatives. And as they themselves proclaimed, there were 'No enemies on the Left'. But, on the other hand, most
of the Kadets were bourgeois, both in terms of their social status and in terms of their general world-view, and as such they were terrified of any further violence from the streets. As E. N. Trubetskoi warned in November:
The wave of anarchy that is advancing from all sides, and that at the present time threatens the legal government, would quickly sweep away any revolutionary government: the embittered masses would then turn against the real or presumed culprits; they would seek the destruction of the entire intelligentsia; they would begin indiscriminately to slaughter anyone who wears German clothes [i.e. is well-dressed].79
Most of the Kadets now came to the conclusion that they did not want a revolution after all. They were intelligent enough to realize that they themselves would be its next victims. At its second conference in February 1906 the Kadet Party condemned the strikes, the Moscow uprising and the land seizures of the previous autumn. It then breathed a sigh of relief: its dishonest marriage with the revolution had at last been brought to an end.
This turning away from the masses was nowhere more marked than within the intelligentsia. The defeat of the 1905 Revolution and the threat of a new and more violent social revolution evoked a wide range of responses from the writers and publicists who had always championed the 'people's cause'. Many became disillusioned and gave up politics for comfortable careers in law and business. They settled down, grew fat and complacent, and looked back with embarrassment at their left-wing student days. Others abandoned political debate for aesthetic pursuits, Bohemian lifestyles, discussions about language and sexuality, or esoteric mystical philosophies. This was the heyday of exotic and pretentious intellectualism. The religious idealism of Vladimir Solovyov gained a particular hold over the Symbolist poets, such as Blok, Merezhkovsky and Belyi, as well as philosophers such as S. L. Frank, Sergei Bulgakov and Berdyaev, who rejected the materialism of the Marxist intelligentsia and sought to reassert the primacy of moral and spiritual values. Common to all of these trends was a deep sense of unease about the prospects for liberal progress in Russia.
There was a general feeling that Russian civilization was doomed. In Belyi's novel
the fear — and after 1917 by the terrible realization — that the 'people's revolution' for which he had struggled all his life would destroy Russian civilization.
Many of these themes came together in
